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148 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 clothing. The boy is dressed in a school/cadet uniform and holds a cap. The traditionally 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 inventing 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 belongingness 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 Oriental 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 population, 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 ordinary Orthodox Christians were simply tax-paying lower classes with little differentiation among them.
