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Ana Djordjevié
one of the men is wearing a rather “modern-style” male town costume with a bow
tie, jacket, and waistcoat, while the other one is dressed in traditional male cloth¬
ing. The boy is dressed in a school/cadet uniform and holds a cap. The tradition¬
ally dressed man is wearing wide pants called turace or poturlije (Turkish pants),
tied with a belt around the waist, and holding a fes (hat) in his hand. On his upper
body he is wearing a long-sleeved, short vest, similar to the /ibade worn by women.
What this small sample of the “traditional town attire” shows is an attempt at in¬
venting something genuinely Serbian, even though there was nothing genuine about
those clothes. The nation-building processes and the visual defining of belonging
was—at least in the case of women—well underway until the outbreak of World
War I. It would be rewarding to further elaborate whether this showing off of be¬
longingness in times when other attire was worn by the mainstream occurred more
often in times of threat or in times of peace. Another important question, which
cannot be touched upon in this essay, is why it is so that women continued to wear
this “nationally loaded,” “invented tradition” sort of attire (Hobsbawm and Ranger
2003). Is it an analogy of woman and nation? Or is it rather a form of appropriating
town women for big ideas about the nation and for an invented tradition that was
mostly threatened, exactly by them since they were the persons for whom the roles
changed most? Was the self-othering, the drawing of boundaries against the Ori¬
ental heritage and against the modern West, only present during a short period of
nation-building and stratification of society, and was it overcome by the reinforcing
of those boundaries and the consolidation of the elites?
Romantic View of Rural Life
Urbanization and modernization processes deeply altered Serbian society. As
it was not very much differentiated and allowed for social mobility, the newly
established upper classes!
at the turn of the twentieth century. Many state officials, industrialists, workers,
traders, and intellectuals themselves had moved from the countryside into towns
not long ago, or their parents or grandparents had done so. Yet in the vein of
romanticism, this memory became transfigured into something imagined to be
the opposite of urban life. At the same time, townsmen and townswomen and
their lifestyles, in many respects, came under criticism from both the rural popu¬
lation, who were reluctant to move to towns, which were regarded as provoking
a morally loose lifestyle, and among their own ranks from the self-proclaimed
national reformers and critics, such as author, philosopher, and first minister of
education, Dositej Obradovi¢; playwright Branislav NuSi¢; and lesser known
mostly had a vivid memory of life in the countryside
caricaturists such as Brana Cvetkovi¢, Milivoje Maukovi¢, and Jovan PeSié (see
Garié 2010). Established generational and gender hierarchies were challenged,
5 There was no local aristocracy. Under Ottoman rule only the clergy had a special status; the ordi¬
nary Orthodox Christians were simply tax-paying lower classes with little differentiation among them.