The oral history of SFRY and virtual memories of youth work actions

Abstract

The object of the paper is the contemporary way in which the phenomenon of youth work actions in SFRY is imagined and represented, and not its history or historical reconstruction in the strict sense. This is about individual and group or generational memory of the people who took part in the actions and who “spoke” publicly for the first time after decades of silence, on the Internet and in other media, about their experiences. Their memories appear in different kinds of texts: as posts on thematic forums on the internet, or as personal narratives gathered through ethnographic interviews. They are framed by the popular discourse of yugoslavism and drenched in sentimental nostalgia. On the other hand, so called new work actions by veterans and volunteers, imagined as ways to renew earlier traditions of youth voluntary labor, necessarily conform to new political and economic goals in current social practice. In some cases this results in certain paradoxes which indicate the existence of contradictory and hybrid markers of the post Yugoslav situation and social transformation i the new states.