CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Pantovic, Ljiljana |
|---|---|
| Title | Eugenics and the "Nation" in the Writings of a Turn-of-the-Century Serbian Physician: The case of Milan Jovanovic Batut |
| Summary | Eugenics discourses focus on providing medical and biological explanations for political and socio-cultural process of nation building. This means that the nation building project can be read as biopolitical project making every question related to the nation, be it political, social, economic, a question of medicine. Most of the studies that tackle the question of eugenics and nation building have been focused on the cases and examples from larger, imperialist nations in Western Europe and North America. How the eugenic discourse functioned in other parts of Europe is rather less studied. The central question that is addressed in this thesis is how did eugenics as a biopolitical project of nation building play out in emergence of “small nation states” (Eley and Suny 1996), such as turn of the century Serbia. I examine how the Serbian nation state, in its initial phase of nation building, was envisioned as organic entity. How it’s citizens where constructed as medical subject and what was the role of medicine as a science and the medical practitioner in this project? Through a close reading of the writings of the leading Serbian physician at the time, Milan Jovanović Batut, I show that because of the specific political, economic and cultural context of Serbia eugenic nation-building project played out differently than in already studied eugenics movements in Europe. Unlike eugenic movements in Western nations, the vast majority of the Serbian population at the time was rural so both the desired body of citizens was not the middle class but the rural population. |
| Supervisor | Anna Loutfi |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/pantovic_ljiljana.pdf |
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