Death and Funeral in Serbia at the Beginning of Third Millennia
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ISBN 978-86-7587-079-1 Aleksandra Pavićević From Mystery to Spectacle Essays on Death in Serbia from the 19th-21st Century СрпСка академија наука и уметноСти етнографСки инСтитут посебна издања књига 83 Александра Павићевић Од мистерије до спектакла Есеји о смрти у Србији од 19–21. века уредник драгана радојичић Београд 2015. SERBIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND ARTS INSTITUTE OF ETHNOGRAPHY SPECIAL EDITIONS Volume 83 Aleksandra Pavićević From Mystery to Spectacle Essays on Death in Serbia from the 19th–21st Century Editor Dragana Radojičić BelgRADe 2015. Издавач: етнографСки инСтитут Сану кнез михајлова 36/4, Београд, тел.2636 804 За издавача: драгана рaдојичић Рецензенти: др коста николић др ивица тодоровић др Лада Стевановић Секретар редакције: марија Ђокић Преводи и лектура: олга кидишевић, нил мек доналд (Neil Mac Donald), маша матијашевић, Ђурђина Шијаковић ма, др александра павићевић Корице и техничка припрема: Бранислав пантовић и атеље Штампа: Чигоја Тираж: 500 примерака Штампање публикације финансирано је из средстава министарства просвете, науке и технолошког развоја републике Србије. публикација је резултат рада на пројектима 177028 и 47016 Contents About this book ....................................................................................7 In or out of Cultural and Historical Matrix? Researching Death in Serbian ethnology during the Second Half of the 20th Century .............9 Death and Funeral in Serbia at the Beginning of third Millennia. Attitudes and Rituals of Common People ..........................................23 Historical Overview of the Development of Cremation in Serbia. From ecology to Ideology ...........................................................................50 Is Death “ethnic” enough? Dying in emigration ..............................66 Two earthquakes. Ideological Influences on Media Reporting of Natural Disasters ................................................................................84 “Dead Man Walking”. exhumation and Reburial of Famous Deceased in Serbia .............................................................................................93 Creating Heroes – Death, Religion and Politics ...............................116 Josip Broz Tito – Pharaoh of Yugoslav Socialism ....................121 Zoran Đinđić – Martyr and National Hero ..............................123 Slobodan Milošević – Grave under the Linden ........................126 Patriarch Pavle – “Soul made of dandelion” ..........................130 Bibliography ....................................................................................141 о овој књизи ...................................................................................157 About this book It has been ten years since I have stepped in the field of thanatological researches. Primarily incited by certain events in my personal life and then by classical thanatological studies, I have started to leaf through pages about death which were written by history of civilization. Immense and endless “book of death” obliged me to make my own system, to summarize my own experience, to tame and reconcile my own feelings of limited duration and perceptible eternity. However, in order to avoid creating a book of autobiographical and confessional notes, or at least to avoid reducing this manuscript solely to that, I tried to let my intellectual and emotional experience through the sieve of the culture to which I belong. This is, after all, a task of a researcher, particularly obvious in topics which concern essential questions of human existence. Death and dying are certainly such topics. Furthermore, these topics inevitably and explicitly turn researcher into interpreter whose goal is to establish balance between personal and general/common, individual and collective, historical and meta-historical levels of interpretation. Obviously, the title of this book was inspired by title of Philippe Aries influential study:”essays on History of Death at the West” (“essais sur l`histoire de la mort en Occident”). Approaches applied in this book encouraged me to design my study as a collection of more or less independent texts which were created during last decade and in which my attempt was to summarize what was the most important about death and dying in Serbian culture. Therefore, this book could be conditionally divided into two thematic parts: research results about ritual behaviors and attitudes towards death of common people, and analyses of different historical and cultural circumstances which influenced these comprehension and praxes. The other group of essays brings analyses of manifestations of death phenomenon in public spaces. These investigations revealed strong influences of cultural, political and religious ideas and ideologies on shaping public, collective image of death. However, they also point at the reverse 7 Aleksandra Pavićević From Mystery to Spectacle process – how thesaurus of symbols contained in “eternal mystery” determines content and messages of political praxes. The basic texture of this manuscript rests on the fundamental hypotheses of classical thanato-anthropological researches, i.e. on ambivalent, synchronic and diachronic models which can be found there. One model represents modern societies as ones in which facts of suppressing speech on death in private sphere on one side and invasion of death and dying images in public space on the other are confronted. The other model is based on the idea that understanding of death follows fairly one-way evolutionary path between tradition and modernity. However, a careful reader will notice that interpretative level of results constantly escapes compact structuring: silence about death in modern and neo-modern (term suggested by Walter) society is not an absolute category, while relation between tradition and modernity appears as multivalent, multi-way and full of deep mutual overlapping. Interviews that were conducted during the research, acquaintances, conversations and familiarity with colleges which I met at conferences on thanatology, as well as ever-growing pile of death studies literature, inspired me to write essays in relatively “free style”, which seemed to me to be the best way for making my own cognitions readable and accessible to a wider readership. Nevertheless, readers have in their hands a book about death and dying. leafing through it, they can travel from rural to urban spaces, from traditional to contemporary ritual forms and ideological frames, from private to public discourses, from everyday life to political spheres, from mystery to spectacle and vice versa. This book will not help us solve the mystery of death, but it may improve our understanding of some forms it takes in contemporary society. 8 In or out of Cultural and Historical Matrix? Researching Death in Serbian Ethnology during the Second Half of the 20th Century Main impulse for analytical intersection conducted in this article has been the question, if and in which way anthropological themes during the last fifty years reflected social and cultural reality, i.e. was the anthropological discourse about death only an immediate reflection of the cultural climate, or did anthropologists succeed in analyzing it from scientific distance? Aware that this question is very complex, I do not have any illusion that some definite answers can be offered at this moment. However, I hope that this analysis will be at least modest contribution to the further syntheses and evaluations of achievements in the frame of Serbian ethnology/anthropology, but also in the frames of developing thanatology as separate discipline. It is well known and elaborated fact that the modern time brought the attitude towards death, which differs a lot from the one of the former epochs. From the phenomenon that in traditional society used to go “hand in hand” with its antipode – life, representing thus inseparable part of its all crucial and everyday manifestations, death in industrial era has become more and more suppressed towards the margins of reality, in the sphere of private, tacit, uncontrolled and unrecognized. Professionalization of the work related to death and the dead, propagating and popularization of cremation, building fences and hiding graveyards, as well as moving ill people and those who are dying far from the eyes of world, represent just details of the process, which, it is possible to say, has culminated during the second half of the 20th century (Thomas 1980; Čolović 1983; Marjanović-Dušanić 2004). Anticipated by Aldous Huxley’s visionary book Brave new world, persecution of death in this “cosmic era” turned into prohibition of its mentioning, even into prohibition of public mourning the dead. Trends in Serbia, at least when it goes about dead, did not differ a lot from the global ones. However, it is important to notice that the cults 9 Aleksandra Pavićević From Mystery to Spectacle related to death – if we compare this to the other customs from the life cycle – went through the least changes, at least formally. Reasons for this should be searched for in the complex phenomenon of death as eternal secret and inexhaustible inspiration of religious and magic way of thinking. Beside this, if we take a look in specific historical context of Socialistic Yugoslavia, there is the fact that atheistic ideology, as part of state politics after Second World War, used to be primary anti- Christian and anti-Church, while the rituals of pagan character were not perceived as ideologically too dangerous. This was beneficial