CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Grabuschnig, Ralf |
|---|---|
| Title | More than one Serbia? The nationalisation of cultural space on the example of the Guca trumpet festival |
| Summary | This thesis investigates the prominence of the Guča festival, an assembly of trumpet players and biggest music festival in South-Eastern Europe, in Serbian public discourse. It gives an answer to why so many people in Serbia strongly connect this festival with Serbian nationalism. Using qualitative research methods, I investigate the issue from two perspectives: top-down and bottom-up. The first part presents discourse analyses of newspaper articles and forum posts to isolate the discursive concept of ‘Two Serbias’, the division of the country into a ‘First’, traditional-nationalist and a ‘Second’, modern-European part (representing two visions of what Serbia means as a state and nation), which has taken place in Serbian public discussions over the past two decades. I will show how self-explaining this concept is, and how it is routinely applied to the trumpet festival in Guča, attaching to the event national connotations based on perceptions of the ‘First Serbia’. In the second part of this thesis, these findings are then contrasted with the experience of the festival’s visitors, to see in how far these notions resonate in their accounts. The results point at a taken-for-granted nationalist reputation of the festival. Besides showing the influence of the discourse, this national colouring has additional potential implications in the sense that the event is also a place where national belonging and ‘Serbness’ get reinterpreted and possibly reinforced. |
| Supervisor | Pelinka, Anton; Bieber, Florian |
| Department | Nationalism Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/grabuschnig_ralf.pdf |
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