Tanja Petrovic, "Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army" (Duke UP, 2024)

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network – Tanja Petrovic, "Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army" (Duke UP, 2024)
Host: Dragana Pravulovic | Guest: Tanja Petrovic | Date: September 21, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features anthropologist and linguist Tanja Petrovic discussing her book, Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army. The conversation explores the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) as a unique social and political project, its enduring emotional and cultural resonance in post-Yugoslav societies, and methodological insights from Petrovic’s extensive research. Key topics include the army’s utopian and inclusive aspects, its exclusions, the afterlives of collective experience following the Yugoslav wars, and the personal challenges of researching this history.

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Main Themes & Key Discussion Points

1. The Enduring Significance of the Yugoslav People's Army

[02:12–05:22]

• The JNA was more than a military force; it was a vital institution cementing a sense of Yugoslav community during socialism, despite the country's eventual fragmentation.
• Petrovic’s motivation: Her personal and academic exposure to ex-Yugoslav contexts highlighted the lasting importance of army experiences across vastly disparate social groups.
  • Quote:
    “It does not take a lot of anthropological skills to realize that this experience... is still important for so many men in former Yugoslavia and basically serves as a connecting tissue which still connects these people.” (Petrovic, 03:32)
• Her research asked why the army experience continued to resonate for such different people: academics, villagers, businessmen, and former soldiers.

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2. The Army as a Utopian Social and Educational Project

[05:22–08:54]

• The JNA’s roots lay in the socialist Partisan struggle of the Second World War and was imagined as a unifying, citizenship-building project.
  • Universal male conscription exposed young men to not just military training, but education (literacy, crafts, culture) and ideological formation.
• The army’s extraterritorial principle assigned recruits to mixed units, ensuring contact and camaraderie across ethnic and social divides.
  • Quote:
    “These men really lived intimately together and were radically different at the same time. But the uniform and all the routines... served as a great equalizer.” (Petrovic, 08:04)

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3. Individual Expression, Diversity, and Paradoxical Inclusion

[08:54–14:55]

• Despite military discipline, the JNA recognized, used, and encouraged the diverse skills of its conscripts; the institution respected individual talents, even among “dangerous” political elements or known troublemakers.
  • Example: Notable filmmakers, artists, or provocateurs were supported in creative endeavors during service.
  • The self-management ethos allowed soldiers to transcend class and background within the military context.
  • Quote:
    “Mobilizing different skills by different people was essentially important for the army... The army used resources by soldiers, but also respected their knowledge and would put that knowledge at the first place.” (Petrovic, 11:38)

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4. Exclusions: Limits to the Utopian Project

[14:55–23:01]

• Women and Minorities: The army was not fully inclusive—women’s integration was attempted only briefly, and linguistic diversity was sacrificed for unit cohesion.
  • LGBTQ individuals and those not speaking Serbo-Croatian faced challenges in belonging.
• The Albanian Experience: While facing surveillance and difficult conditions, some Albanians still valued military service as access to Yugoslav citizenship.
  • The JNA prioritized integration, resisting ethnic hierarchies seen in other socialist armies.
  • Quote:
    “I think it would be very incorrect to claim that any of the Yugoslav nations... would be privileged. The army was very, very keen to be extremely inclusive and not make hierarchies on ethnic terms among these men.” (Petrovic, 17:01)
• The utopian quality was experienced retrospectively—after the loss of Yugoslavia, possibilities for non-ethnic social existence diminished, giving former recruits a sense of what was lost.

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5. War, Catastrophe, and Afterlives

[25:03–29:39]

• Petrovic’s book is structured around a “before and after” framing: Yugoslav times, and post-Yugoslav aftermaths, with a personal interlude discussing the wars’ destruction.
• The aim is to show how catastrophic violence redefines self and society, but also how earlier collective experiences stubbornly persist and unsettle the present.
  • Quote:
    “I thought it’s very important to show how this destructive and horrendous process of violence and war alters forever all of us… not only my interlocutors.” (Petrovic, 25:37)
• She is critical of scholarship that treats the 1990s war as the only defining moment, and wants to give voice to the “ordinary” millions whose lives bridge the divide between heroics, activism, and everyday experience.

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6. Afterlife as Concept: Memory, Nostalgia, and Social Connection

[29:39–34:18]

• Petrovic distinguishes her approach from nostalgia studies, focusing instead on the lingering, often unspoken force of collective memory—“afterlives”—and the emotional forces that persist after catastrophe.
  • “I was interested in this tension… these afterlives as some affective emotional force that is capable of unsettling this givenness of the world in which we live in the aftermath of catastrophe.” (Petrovic, 33:40)
• Examples: Former soldiers think about reaching out to their army friends but hesitate, troubled by uncertainty about how those friendships survived the intervening wars and divisions.

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7. Methodology, Positionality, and Ethnographic Challenges

[34:18–41:12]

• Petrovic reflects on researching masculinity and military experience as a woman who did not serve in the army. She emphasizes co-construction of the narrative and respecting her interlocutors’ willingness to share.
  • She chooses not to anonymize her main subjects, working with men she often knew over the years and whose stories were deeply personal.
  • Focus was on what her subjects wanted to share, not stories beyond their comfort, even if this left some aspects (e.g., sexuality) less explored.

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8. Petrovic’s Ongoing Research

[41:20–43:15]

• She’s currently studying both the culture of comic books in socialist Yugoslavia (a male-dominated field) and the careers of female partisan doctors during WWII.
  • Quote:
    “Most of comic book authors were also men... My daughter is always critical of me and always asks, ‘why are you only writing on men?’” (Petrovic, 41:44)
  • The latter project aims to balance gender focus and illuminate women's unique war experiences and their later lives.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “[The JNA] serves as a connecting tissue which still connects these people.” (Petrovic, 03:32)
• “The uniform and all the routines... served as a great equalizer that made these men similar, equal, and able to make meaningful relationships.” (Petrovic, 08:04)
• “Those men who were good in what they were doing... had autonomy, which was not easily overwritten by institutions and the system itself.” (Petrovic, 12:36)
• “I think we need to consider that... the army had to sacrifice... linguistic plurality for efficiency and unity.” (Petrovic, 20:38)
• “This utopian character... emerges retrospectively... a lost political horizon of existence outside identity frames.” (Petrovic, 22:14)
• “I was interested in this tension... these afterlives as affective emotional force... unsettling the givenness of the world in which we live.” (Petrovic, 33:40)
• “I really wanted to share what people want to share... given who I am... I’m a woman, I’m a Serbian woman, I never served in the army, I live in Slovenia. All this mattered in kind of negotiation.” (Petrovic, 38:17)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:33] — Introduction and context for the Yugoslav People’s Army
• [02:12–05:22] — Petrovic on personal motivation and lingering impact of the JNA
• [05:22–08:54] — JNA as social project, structure, and unifying practices
• [08:54–14:55] — Tolerance of diversity, creativity, and “dangerous” elements in the ranks
• [14:55–23:01] — Exclusions: women, ethnic and linguistic minorities, the Albanian perspective
• [25:03–29:39] — Catastrophe of the 1990s and book’s split temporal structure
• [29:39–34:18] — Afterlife and affect: emotional, silent, and persistent legacies
• [34:18–41:12] — Ethnographic challenges, positionality, and methodological reflections
• [41:20–43:15] — Current and future projects

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Conclusion

This episode offers a rich exploration of the Yugoslav People’s Army as both a lived experience and an enduring emotional legacy. Petrovic’s nuanced ethnography attends to history’s complexity, highlighting the creation of cross-ethnic solidarity, the limits of socialist inclusion, and the unspoken afterlives of loss and catastrophe. Grounded in personal narrative and critical scholarship, the conversation illuminates why the JNA still resonates as a utopia lost—and how its memory unsettles the ethnically-organized present.

For more, read Tanja Petrovic’s Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army (Duke UP, 2024).

Transcript

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[Dragana Pravulovic]

Hello and welcome to New Books in Eastern European Studies, a channel of the New Books Network. My name is Dragana Pravulovic and today I'm talking with linguist and anthropologist Tanya Petrovic about her new book which came out in 2024 at Duke University Press. The title is Utopia of the Effective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army. So, Tanya, thank you for being on the today.

[Tanya Petrovic]

Thank you so much for inviting me.

[Dragana Pravulovic]

By way of introduction, I'd love if you could help situate listeners in the Yugoslav context and in doing so also tell us a little bit about yourself. What led you to do research on the yen?

[Tanya Petrovic]

So right now in the former Yugoslav lands, people living politically in quite some eight practically, I think separate national states and this situation is kind of naturalized and ethnic identities became the main organizing principle. The region itself became very well known by the wars of the 90s, and these wars still mark the reality of post Yugoslav societies. But there is a prehistory of that. And prehistory was an important political a project that united all these people in socialist Yugoslavia. And that country also had a military that was based on universal drafts. So all men who would turn 18 or graduate from the university would serve. It does not take much or a lot of anthropological skills to realize that this experience of year or year and a half or two years of serving in the Yugoslav army, still important for so many men in former Yugoslavia and basically serves as a connecting tissue which still connects these people. And many of these people were actually fighting against each other in the wars in the 90s. I'm a Ljubljana based anthropologist. I was born in Serbia. I moved to Ljubljana in the year 2000 for my PhD. So somehow, academically and personally, I remained in the region of former Yugoslavia. So I could really many times experience this importance of army stories and experience from the Yugoslavia army. And that was also something that led me to this research. I simply wanted to find an answer to the question why this experience is so important for so many different people. Those who graduated from the university and have academic careers, then some peasants I know, my relatives in Serbian villages, to those who really had went through the 90s in a very traumatic ways. And those who are today very successful businessmen, university teachers and so on. So really, really disparate destinies and life trajectories. But somehow what still unites these men is that they find this experience important and meaningful. I'm not suggesting that they would go back to the army. And sometimes this importance is not easy to articulate and usually even remains unarticulated verbally, but it's there and it's clearly recognizable. So I wanted to know why. And searching for that question is actually resulted in the research which then, many years later, after a lot of thinking and writing and going back to these people, resulted in a book that was published last year.

[Dragana Pravulovic]

Thank you for that. So military service in socialist context is not just about soldiering, as you wrote, but also an exercise in the construction of a utopia. Was it about the history? What is it about the history of the institution and the way it is structured that functions as an effective vehicle for the transmission of Yugoslav values. And can you tell the listeners more about that?

[Tanya Petrovic]

So, Yugoslav People's army, that's how this army was called for the most of its history during peacetime, emerged from the Second World War and from this partisan liberation struggle and units, they were transformed immediately, even when immediately before the Second World War, but definitely in the years after it into peaceful army based on mandatory draft for all men. So in that sense it's a revolutionary. It's based on the revolutionary army of the Second World War. And as most of socialist armies of similar genealogy, it's pretty syncretic in the sense that it was never only about, you know, learning young men to kill and learning them to efficiently collectively act as soldiers. It was always much more. It was a basically citizenship oriented project, social project in the sense that education was very important aspect of serving of the army. Not only in ideological sense of like teaching young men socialism and socialist values and socialist ideology, but also some much more basic skills like writing and reading. Many of them got education for certain crafts and professions, many got driving license and also, of course, cultural education in the sense that many of these men would not only watch maybe the movie in cinema for the first time, but many of them would in the army, create poems, participate in cultural activities and so on. We need to keep in mind that Yugoslav army insisted from the practically beginning to the very end on something they called extraterritorial principle, which means that they really wanted different men to serve together. And that was the way to really experience Gustavism, Yugoslav ideology, Yugoslav identity in practice, which was much less accessible in everyday lives of Yugoslav citizens. So in that sense, these men really lived intimately together and were radically different at the same time. But the uniform and all the routines I'm writing about in the book made kind of a common ground and served as a great equalizer that made these men similar, equal, and able not only to function officially in terms of fulfilling tasks and orders, but also could recognize each other, make friends, hang out together and make meaningful relationships. That obviously mattered in the years, many, many years after that experience.

[Dragana Pravulovic]

Yes, thank you. I found it really interesting that the Vienna, as you wrote aloud, or at least tolerated various activities that had to do with the individual interests of the soldiers. Can you tell our listeners more about why Yina' a would take such an approach even when it came to individuals perceived by the state as dangerous political elements?

[Tanya Petrovic]

Yeah. With this kind of citizenship oriented approach, in which also cultural activities, education, ideological education, after all, really mattered, it made sense. Yugoslav army, surprisingly, maybe for many, comes close to principles and practices of Yugoslav self management, which was basically not only the way how to transform the very ownership of socialist enterprises and factories and make workers managers of these enterprises, but basically the essence was making different individuals and different collectives, in the sense that people, through self management, got the possibility and space to transcend their class, class based positions within society. And this ability to transcend something which is given by your education, your origin, place of life or the language you speak, is, I would say, essential for Yugoslav socialism and was also essential for its military. Although of course, militaries are not intuitively related to self management. And of Course, this institution couldn't allow any self management. By definition, the army is based on very top down logic of giving orders and fulfilling them, but exactly because it saw itself and was seen by society as an important actor in building Yugoslav citizenship. Mobilizing different skills by different people was essentially important for the army. So although this army of course did what armies usually do, which is called mortification in sociology, after of course, this important study of Erving Goffman in the case of Yugoslav army, what this luggage social capital and knowledge and skills these people were bringing to the military's bases when they would come to serve their service really mattered and was not neglected and was not ignored. So those who knew how to make movies would get a chance to do it. Those who knew how to paint and were painters in their life before the army would get equipment and space to make paintings in the second part of the service, after, they would all go, of course, for this mandatory training, which was performed by everyone and not only do what they could do, but also transfer their knowledge and work with their other army bodies coming from different settings and having different kind of education or no education after all. So in that sense the army used resources by soldiers, but also respected their knowledge and would put that knowledge at the first place and not, I think it's something very emblematic for Yugoslav socialism, socialism in general, in the sense that those men who were good in what they were doing, and women of course, and all citizens had autonomy, which was not easily overwritten by institutions and the system itself. So of course many men I have in my book stories by Carpo Godino or Zheli Miljnik. And although when they went to serve the army, they were already seen as men who could be potentially troublemakers. They had this history, but they absolutely were not prevented. They were even encouraged to do what they knew how to do. And that's making, making films. A kind of. A parallel can be drawn with this infamous poster affair from 1987, when there was a call for, like for a poster for celebrating day of Youth, 25th of May, and it was Slovenia had this year a role of providing this poster, another iconography for the celebration. And there was a committee in which many different people were sitting, including a general of the Yugoslava army. And the poster made by this Neue Slovenia Kunst Collective was chosen. Although of course they were already known as being big provocateurs and troublemakers. But it did not prevent this committee to give them like the first award. Of course, then it was the huge scandal after all, because they used some Nazi poster and reworked it a bit. But still, I think that tells a lot about that socialism, much more than these presumed ideas of its totalitarian nature.

[Dragana Pravulovic]

Yeah, I was very surprised to learn a lot of this when I was reading your book. As a scholar of the minority experience, I was also fascinated by your second chapter entitled A Barbed Wire Utopia, where you discussed the ways in which the Yina' a was not necessarily an inclusive space for women, LGBTQ minorities, or those who did not speak Serbo Croatian. Can you tell us more about the experiences of those left out by this utopian project, including particularly Albanians in the Yina'?

[Tanya Petrovic]

A? Yeah, I mean, you know, many, many Albanians I was talking to would actually not agree with you about being left from this utopian project. They would say that they were generally left and they had a very ambiguous relationship with the army because it was not always an easy experience for them. Many of them didn't know the language. Many of them were kind of watched closely, especially in the 80s and after some really unfortunate events in which. Which kind of stigmatized Albanians towards the end of Yugoslavia. But generally, the narrative goes that this going to the army was for them also a moment they were proud of and were looking forward because that was one of the really rare spaces in which they could really practice and participate in the Yugoslav citizenship project. And the army itself was very, very careful not to discriminate in that sense. Compared to the other socialist army, Yugoslavl People's army was kind of an exception in the sense that there was. I think it would be very incorrect to claim that any of the Yugoslav nations, typically people would single out Serbs as being kind of dominating or privileged. But essentially the army was very, very keen to be extremely inclusive and not make hierarchies on ethnic terms among these men. So everyone would serve together. There was no. For instance, if you look at Bulgarian Socialist Army. Bulgarians were like minority. People in Bulgarian army were usually sent to very special units, like Muslims, Pomaks and others, to the units that were called construction units. And they would mostly do some construction and usually would not have access to weapons. So there was a clear hierarchy in citizenship categories based of ethnicity. And of course, in Soviet army, Russians always had kind of a privileged position in the Yugoslav army. I don't think until the very last years such claim would hold. It was really tabooed. And also, I would say I really tried also to make kind of. To talk about that with people as much as I could. But also hazing. Another. These practices that are typical for all male communities, such as military There was much less of hazing. And it definitely was not based on ethnic divisions or following ethnic logic. So in that sense, I think we need to consider that. Nevertheless, the army, of course, had to make some choices. It also didn't find very easy. Very often one of such choices was having only one in practice, always having only one language as a language of official communication. They simply did not find another model that will make. Make these units still efficient, able to function without breaking or abandoning this very important extraterritorial principle. So you could have other languages, but that would mean making ethnically or linguistically homogeneous units. And the Yugoslav army absolutely didn't want that. So they had to sacrifice in the sense, this other principle of plurality, and that is linguistic plurality. Also including women was kind of a huge challenge. They tried in the 80s. It lasted for a while. There were women serving as volunteers for a couple of years, and students of defense. They had to serve for half a year. But somehow it didn't work. For many reasons, probably. And it was already also until towards the end of Yugoslavia as such. So in a way, to be able to be this kind of an utopian space, Yugoslav army had also to be heterotopian in a way that it really was based on some principles that are in conflict with the main idea of the institution. But that was also the only way for these ideas to somehow. To get close to them. Maybe. Also, this is a moment for me to say that I speak a lot of utopia in this book. It's also in the title. It was not easy for me to put it in the title, actually. By no means it's meant that the very experience of serving in the army is an utopian experience. I think none of my interlocutors would never agree with that. It was, you know, pretty oppressive, mandatory, isolated experience, a bit dull, characterized, but a lot of, you know, pressure, a lot of, you know, things these men had to do and very often didn't have clear idea what's the point of all these actions they had to perform. So they basically all would count days until the end of the service and be very happy to go home. But this utopian character of the Yugoslav army emerges basically retrospectively. Because with the 90s and the end of Yugoslavia and this transformation of Yugoslavia into all these separate national states, the possibility of existence in universal terms and possibility of living in communities and in societies in which who you are ethnically is not the most important and defining principle of organization got pretty much reduced or basically lost. And I think that's also kind of an answer to the question which kind of motivated me to write this book and do this research over many years. I think what people really point to when they insist on importance of this service is exactly this political dimension of that experience that it enabled these men to exist, to be recognized, to recognize their other men as they would say, not as Serbs, not as Croats, Muslims, Albanians, not as rich or poor, well educated or illiterate, but as good men or the opposite. And that was what mattered. And I think that's this utopian character. And pointing to it and insisting on importance basically points to a lost political horizon of existence outside identity frames.

[Dragana Pravulovic]

Thank you for clarifying that. That was all very important.

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[Dragana Pravulovic]

Apply and this is a good transition. For the next question, I really like the way you chose to write about the catastrophe so the war of the 1990s by integrating your own experiences of the war, privileging the perspectives of young Amen and highlighting war crimes and acts of genocide. So can you elaborate on your decision to divide the book into two temporal sections and what this approach allows you to bring to the attention of your readers?

[Tanya Petrovic]

Yes, this very small but emotional, I would say impersonal to Middle Interlude serves as a bridge between. Between this Yugoslav times and post Yugoslav times. And I found somehow I felt it's very important to have it and to simply provide a glimpse into the process of destruction which sometimes is naturalized today and kind of taken for granted that we live in the world as it is. But I thought it's very important to show how this very destructive and this destructive and horrendous processes of violence and war alter forever all of us, not only my interlocutors, but the nature, the places we live and us as individuals. So the book is divided in like before and after that catastrophe. But I wouldn't say this division is absolute because the second part basically more shows how what was lived and experienced in the army emerges and lives this in the kind of stubbornly in the post Yugoslav time, in the aftermath of Yugoslavia, and in which way these experiences unsettled, this giveness and stillness of the present, which is somehow perceived as the only possible present we could have. In that sense, I thought this catastrophe must be there. And I cannot exclude myself because this book also, I have to say, was written also as a result of a bit of frustration I felt with the ways in which the knowledge of former Yugoslavia and Yugoslav socialism and post Yugoslav present after all, is generated. I found this generation of knowledge rather normative, very much caught in something my colleague Nancy can't cause. Event, aftermath straight jacket in the sense that this violence of the 90s defines everything what was before, making it just an introduction or something inevitably leading to the violence and everything we have after it as something inevitably and straightforward is standing out of that violence. I wanted to provide a different picture and I also wanted to write about people and give voice in a way to this category of people we usually call ordinary people. But even not a lot of it, of course, was written about Yugoslav conflicts and dissolution. Everything, almost everything that was written about Yugoslav army actually concerns the role of that army in the process of dissolution and especially in relation to masculinity, people dealt extensively with those who would fit into the model of national heroes today. So people who fought in different ways, different sides in the war, or those who were on the other Pole, who were on the other margin, and those are anti war, anti war activists, LGBT activists and others, while all these millions who were somewhere in between are largely ignored. And I somehow wanted to see what we get if we don't ignore what they have to say.

[Dragana Pravulovic]

Thank you. Can you elaborate on the concept of afterlife and why you found it useful to engage with in this book? What kind of sociabilities did the afterlife of catastrophe make possible for your interlocutors?

[Tanya Petrovic]

Yeah, I wrote a lot on generally. I have quite some publications dealing with Hugo nostalgia, and I'm one of the academics who really defends its political meaning and meaningfulness and productivity of thinking through emotions and effects when Yugoslav past is related. But with this book I somehow opted for another concept because I found it tricky. It's not easy. Basically, it's not easy to write a book which tell. Tries to tell some story or stories of millions of men. I could. I made many interviews, I used a lot of materials. But of course my. What I have to say cannot. Cannot be generalized to all these men easily. And that was not my intention as well. But speaking of men and masculinity, especially in relation to violence and military, very often makes academic narratives kind of simplified in the sense we feel as researchers, we really know how these people acted and why they acted that way. So I couldn't avoid masculinity. My like protagonists of this book and soldiers of the Yugoslav army were men, but I didn't want to write about them from this perspective of masculinity as some homogeneous solid large term. And nostalgia would not help me because it's then it what we usually have in these discourses of nostalgia usually add to this understanding, this very solid homogeneous understanding of men. I was not really interested in men as such or masculinity as such, but my question was basically, and what I wanted to kind of transfer with the narrative of my book was this like to answer the question or to show what does it mean and how. How it looks like to live in the aftermath of the catastrophe, how this life goes on, where we see the remnants or ruins or like these afterlives, not only of the catastrophe. For me, even more important was the afterlife of the Peri army service, how it emerges. I told you in the beginning that very often these men don't speak Explicitly, positively, or don't have very articulate statements of why and how it matters to them, or how it matters generally. But there are so many situations and glimpses and signals that it matters. And very often it's about absence and silence and hesitation, much more than presence and articulation and the narrative. So what makes tensions are these impossibilities. Impossibilities. To contact again your friend from the army, although you still think practically every day of this man and from any man. I heard exactly this. Like, I have this friend from the army. I think so much of contacting him, or each time I go to the coast, I think of going and ringing the bell, but I never dare to do that because I don't know what happened with him, whether he's alive or dead, or what kind of person he became during the wars and everything that followed. So I was interested in this tension. And there I see these afterlives as some. As some effective emotional force that is capable of unsettling this givenness of the world in which we live in the aftermath of catastrophe, in which is. It is natural, normal, and understood as the only possible actually way to live within ethnically, linguistically, and also in other ways, identity based frame.

[Dragana Pravulovic]

Thank you. And that's very, very moving. So, as an ethnographer, I think it's really important that you start your book by considering your own positionality as it relates to your interlocutors. Can you tell us more about methodological challenges of conducting research on this topic, including your negotiation of access as a woman and working with interlocutors who are often really well known?

[Tanya Petrovic]

Yes, thank you for this question. I mean, yeah. One of the reasons why it took me really long to write this book is that I was searching for a perspective not only to be able to speak about so many so different men in a single book, but also to negotiate where I stand in this story. And I felt from the very beginning that I cannot be out of this story for the big to start with. And also I cannot do things in the way I'm used to, and we are all used to as ethnographers. For me, the important moment, and I think also an important, important epistemological moment to read this book happened in the moment when I understood that I cannot anonymize these men I need for. With some of them I worked many years, and for all of them I felt. Although of course, the very experience of serving in the army is pretty similar. And I did many interviews, but after, I don't know 30, 40 interviews. Basically, you learn that there's no big variety in the sense what people experience, because these experiences are designed to be same for everyone. Of course, the level of reflection can be different. The level of filtering, like the way of filtering this experience through the events that came after, can also differ. But very experience of serving in the army pretty much resourced to this limited number of narratives. But nevertheless, in spite of it, for each of these men, this experience was also unique. And I wanted. I couldn't kind of relativize or neglect that uniqueness. I had to speak of very concrete people with their own names. As a woman, it was not always easy. Sometimes I would encounter kind of uneasy situation, not only because I'm a woman, but simply because I don't have an experience of serving in the army. And that's a different setting from those which are typical. And that these are like men exchanging stories, anecdotes, jokes from the army among each other. In such situation, it would be much easier if I would talk simultaneously with two or more men. Then very quickly they would turn to each other and do what are used to do. And that's this exchange of army stories that usually happens. But essentially, I never wanted also to essentialize these differences and these challenges. Because at the end of the day, this book is, of course, about the army, but it's also, as I already said, about the life in the aftermath of catastrophe, the life we all live and the possibilities of all of us to recognize each other's experiences and each other's positions and kind of make bridges in spite of differences and different experiences. So in that sense, I never saw myself as being inferior or being someone who cannot really go there. There is this wonderful book which I also cite in parts of my book, where I study, speak about photographs and representational strategies and like how these photographs also, in a way, kind of incorporate these utopian visions through kind of repetitive patterns. The book by Corinne Kratz, which is called the Ones that Are Wanted, it's about photographs and exhibiting strategies in Kenya. And for me also with this book, important. I really wanted to share what people want to share and what they wanted to share with me, given who I am. I'm a woman, I'm a Serbian woman. I never served in the army, I live in Slovenia. So all this mattered in kind of negotiation. I worked with some of these men for many years. We became friends. Some of them I already knew before. But I really wanted to write about things that emerged in our interaction and not about things they wouldn't Share with me because I'm a woman. We couldn't or they didn't want to speak about some of the practices we know. This book maybe lacks a bit of story about sexuality, homosociality, masturbation, but I really stick to those aspects these people want to share with me, not not only with me as a random researchers who approached them once and spoke with them for one hour, but with someone with whom they also shared their archives. They trusted me, their photographs. They asked me very often to contact their army friends on their behalf. So this economy went much deeper than just a, you know, classical ethnographic situation in which I meet someone, make an interview and go. Go away and never see this person again. So in that sense, I know it's not always maybe the not very neat and typical methodology, but somehow I didn't want to escape, like the fact that we all live in the aftermath of catastrophe, including me and my family and my children and my relatives and my former schoolmates. And I couldn't be some, you know, someone who retains interpretational control of the narrative.

[Dragana Pravulovic]

Well, we've taken up a lot of your time, so I'd like to ask you a final question, which is, what are you working on now?

[Tanya Petrovic]

Right now I have two parallel projects. The one is on this really massive production, circulation and consumption of comic books in socialist Yugoslavia, which is kind of a popular culture story, but I would say very instrumental for understanding the cultural policy in Yugoslavia and also the ways people engage with the public sphere through printed media. And I really very much enjoy it. And most of comic book authors were also men. Most of them are now in their elderly age, but still very enthusiastic and very engaged of this story. My daughter is always critical of me and always ask, why are you only writing on men? So I had to make kind of balance. So my other project right now is about female partisan Yugoslav doctors who young women who went to the woods, worked in partisan hospitals, or were following partisan units helping wounded and sick fighters. And I'm also interested in their biographies in the after war period and how these. This really unique and distinct experience of life during the Second World War, which is also very liminal, how it relates what they did, believed, how they remembered in their later life after the war was over. I'm kidding about my daughter. She says it, but it's not why I'm working on these women. It's a really fascinating story and tells also a lot about Yugoslav socialism.

[Dragana Pravulovic]

That's very exciting, and I look forward to reading your future work. So thank you so much for being on the show today.

[Tanya Petrovic]

Thank you so much, Dragana.

[Dragana Pravulovic]

So that was Tanya Petrovic talking to us about her new book out from Duke University Press, 2024, Utopia of the Effective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army.

[Tanya Petrovic]

Thank you for listening.