tema OBZORJA STROKEGlasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 25
Strokovni Ëlanek/1.04 prof. dr. Joel Martin Halpern
Introduction
In this brief essay it is my intention to focus on how Yugoslav 
government policies affected my research. At the same time I 
wish to explore the much more important question as to the 
ways in which the Yugoslav variety of socialism, as developed 
in a centralized communist and ideologically bound state, 
affected the everyday lives of the people in that country. The 
time frame I am considering is some four decades beginning 
with the early 1950s. The events recounted here from memory 
are not intended as an established view of the past but rather 
as a compilation of selected reflections.
As I came to know it, the Yugoslav communist system was far 
from as brutal as in Albania, where there was, for example, an 
attempt to abolish religious institutions. Nor was it as dogmat-
ic as in Bulgaria, which had a dominant orientation, based on 
its unswerving allegiance to the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, 
the Yugoslav system was, in essence, based on a hierarchial 
organization of power and privilege using the Stalinist idea 
of democratic centralism. Thus, in my view, ultimate power 
always resided with the police and the army as directed by 
the Party. (Djilas, first publicly discussed these ideas in the 
early 1950s. This was first done in a series of articles and, 
subsequently, in his initial book, The New Class. His writings 
first appeared at the time of my initial fieldwork in 1953-54. 
His other books, both historical and biographical, followed. 
He had adequate time to create these during his multiple jail 
terms imposed by his former wartime leader and subsequent 
political colleague, Tito.
Yugoslav government policy as developed by the Communist 
Party was not always uniformly interpreted and implemented 
in this historically and ethnically diverse country. This diversi-
ty of manifestations of state policy impacted on my fieldwork 
from the beginning. 
There was also a variation in the ways in which I was treated 
by different government ministries such as Interior, on the one 
hand, and Foreign Affairs, on the other, with their contrasting 
mandates. Given that I was a doctoral student my primary, 
and most rewarding, contacts were with universities, research 
institutes and museums. One important aspect of Yugoslav 
socialist society was the significant state support provided to 
these institutions and organizations. Along with this support, 
however, came elaborate ideological controls. Since my ini-
tial focus was on village and small town society, perhaps the 
most difficult, were the local officials who lacked experience 
in dealing with a foreign researcher. Most often they were not 
welcoming, since my presence created another burden and one 
that could be potentially dangerous. Always looming in the 
background was the pervasive presence of the Cold War.
I was thus also immersed in the contrasting worlds of the pub-
lic face of the government on the national and local levels. 
It is also important to stress that this was also a time of dras-
tic internal change. The socialist government had ambitious 
plans for economic and social development. An aspect of this 
planned innovation was evident in the official world of Party 
leadership in constructing “new” political forms of political 
organization as in ongoing constitutional revisions and the 
formal experimenting with social policy as in Workers’ Self 
Management. But, on the other hand, in all the years that Tito 
and his associates were in power there never was anything 
resembling a free public opinion to say nothing of steps toward 
a truly democratic system where competing ideas, ideologies 
and programs were linked to a meaningful electoral process. 
As current developments in the Southeast Europe well indi-
cate this option does not necessarily engender easy solutions. 
But clearly it was an option that was not tried in the decades 
before the breakup of Yugoslavia. But there certainly was a 
form of constant diversity as official policies always had a 
strong regional variation. Thus while the formal political poli-
cies were essentially the same in Slovenia and Kosovo, their 
manifestations were vastly different.
Beginning with the End of Yugoslavia
One cannot escape the change in perspective in writing from 
North America in the year 2005, four years after the experi-
YUGOSLAV SOCIALISM AND ITS 
AFTERMATH AS VIEWED THROUGH 
THE LENS OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 
IN THE BALKANS, 1953-2004
OBZORJA STROKE tema Glasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 26
ences of 9/11 in New York City and Washington, D.C, the 
American invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the Madrid 
and London bombings the unrest in France ‡ it is not possible 
to be complacent and distanced in our analysis of the failures 
of Yugoslav socialism and the wars of the 1990s. In the United 
States there is a new governmental Department of Homeland 
Security, a direct result of 9/11, one cannot be moralistic and 
self-centered about differences between “West” and “East.” 
The idea of the Cold War, which so dominated the second 
half of the 20th century, is now an historical artifact. That said 
Western democracies cannot easily act in the same ways as 
totalitarian states. The status of radical Muslims and Muslim 
communities in Western Europe and in the U.S. after 9/11 and 
in Europe after the Madrid bombings does reflect a degree of 
restraint both institutional and individual toward a minority 
group. Even the public killing in the Netherlands has had a 
measured response Tragically; current U.S. restrictive and 
undemocratic policies with respect to detention of suspected 
terrorists have undermined this country’s goals. 
Focusing on Southeast Europe, the inadequacies and even bru-
talities of socialism in postwar Yugoslavia have been minor 
compared to the violent conflicts, large scale killings and 
widespread destruction that characterized the struggles of the 
1990s in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. But there can be little 
question that the Leninist “democratic centralism” of socialist 
Yugoslavia played a significant role in setting the stage for 
these tragedies. . This is so because, while ethnic-national con-
flicts were readily apparent, they were not the subject of open 
debate and potential solutions were not publicly considered. 
These were matters monopolized by the Party hierarchy. 
In the 1950s in Yugoslavia the security forces of the Interior 
Ministry, then know by their initials as UDBA, were omnipre-
sent in everyone’s lives even though their actions were usually 
less severe than in Stalin’s time in the Soviet Union. In Western 
Europe the shadow of the Nazi past was still much present in 
the new German state and inhibited their foreign policy. In the 
new Cold War atmosphere the U.S. had become involved in 
Communist witch hunts as exemplified by the security mania 
of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy whose influence reached 
into the U.S. diplomatic community in Yugoslavia when his 
assistants came looking for “Communist books” in the U.S. 
Information Service Library in Belgrade. Fortunately, their 
provinciality and stupidity confined their passions.
 Yugoslav socialism came into existence as a result of the vic-
torious Partisan struggle in World War II and the associated 
destruction of the pre-war Yugoslav state. For the Partisans 
their simultaneous defeat of the fascist German invaders and 
their destruction of the remnants of prewar Serbian based 
monarchial state provided the Communists with their charter 
of legitimacy for ruling Yugoslavia as a socialist, Communist 
state under the leadership of Tito, the wartime leader. This 
sense of legitimacy and their monopoly of power enabled them 
to endless memorialize the “truths” of their struggle, exclud-
ing all variant views. Including the unresolved nationality and 
ethnic issues, which had assumed new form in the postwar 
setting. These monuments to those who had fallen were exclu-
sively for the now martyred victors. The vanquished oppo-
nents in the civil war were banished from history. Their names 
were on no monuments, nor were their views given any voice 
in the torrent of publications and in the many special museums 
memorializing the NOB, the People’s Liberation War. 
It surely is an irony of history that when in he 1990s the Serbian 
army gunners surrounded Sarajevo and purposely targeted the 
National Library the priceless Ottoman era manuscripts were 
destroyed while somehow the literature of socialist Yugoslavia 
survived because of its location in the library. Ironically, also 
destroyed by the Serbian gunners was the museum of the revo-
lutionary Gavrilo Princip, erected by the socialist government 
to honor this assassin of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, 
a key event leading up to World War I. Here was the then 
established order erecting a museum to honor the perpetrator 
rather than the victim (oppressor?), a memorial tribute, in turn, 
destroyed by a “new” nationalist order yet linked to earlier 
Serbian struggles. Seeing these ruins among the destruction 
I witnessed in Sarajevo in 1996 gave me a perspective on the 
historical claims of the Socialist era sandwiched as it was 
between struggles against the Habsburg Empire, a nationalist 
monarchy and a more recently reconstituted nationalism.
Iconography of Tito, A Part of Yugoslav 
Socialism
Linked to our new learning about the existing Yugoslav social-
ism as of the 1950s was a whole related iconography of Tito 
in various media - in bronze busts, wood carvings, oil portraits 
and even, on occasion marzipan. On the title page of all school-
books there were portraits of Tito as the benevolent friend of 
children. In programmed portraits there was the fearless war-
rior for the military, the statesman for the foreign ministry, the 
earnest apprentice for the workers, the thoughtful leader as an 
inspiration for the intellectuals. Fittingly some of this imagery 
now resides on a humorous Web site. Writing about this now 
vanished world a half century later it is not possible for me to 
consider Yugoslav socialism as a modernizing ideology whose 
goals included enhancing ways of life and living standards 
without the accompanying imagery of the wartime Partisans 
and, especially, their leader. 
 To make the system work it was, of course, necessary; first, to 
suppress all potential political opposition that might threaten 
the system. In the consolidation phase this meant the execu-
tion of primary opponents and the imprisonment of others less 
threatening. Tito’s former close associate Milovan Djilas has 
given a useful insiders’ view of this process. Slogans such as 
“Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People,“ “Brotherhood and 
Unity,” continued to be officially used in bureaucratic ways 
long after they had lost their original meanings Continual sup-
pression of unresolved issues between national groups both 
actual and potential was one of the reasons that the system 
ultimately disintegrated so rapidly and so completely amidst 
the mass killings of the 1990s.
 This comment, of course, begs the question as to why some 
former communist states like Czechoslovakia were able to 
peacefully split into national components without violence. 
A portion of that explanation certainly lies in the historic 
conflicts between Rome and Byzantium, Orthodoxy, as mani-
fested in churches linked to a national heritage, and the uni-
tema OBZORJA STROKEGlasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 27
versality of the Catholic Church. To this must, of course, be 
added the significance of the medieval Ottoman conquests and 
the subsequent presence of Islam in Europe, a question hardly 
resolved in Europe today in countries outside of the Balkans 
as in Western Europe.
The events of the 1990s and the subsequent breakup of Yugo-
slavia and the emergence of new states did, however, create a 
new linear time frame, which bracketed the existence of Yugo-
slav socialism. In all my experiences in what was Yugoslavia 
from the 1950s through the 1980s life courses of people of my 
generation were always bracketed by the temporal statement, 
“pre i poslje rata” (before and after the War, i.e. World War II). 
Now, of course, there are whole sets of new meanings attached 
to this expression the before and after now referencing the wars 
of the 1990s as the primary reference. Perhaps earlier wars had 
served similar functions for structuring memories.
An Abbreviated Memoir - The Beginnings
Initially I resided for approximately a year in the Serbian vil-
lage of Oraπac but also spent considerable time in Belgrade 
and also traveled widely in all of the then Republics. Subse-
quent stays in the succeeding decades varied from summers, 
to multiple residences of six months to a year or more. In the 
1990s and the first decade of the 21st century visits were of 
shorter duration but did involve travel in what were then war 
zones in Croatia and Bosnia.
It cannot be too strongly stressed that when we (my wife and 
I) first arrived in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1953 it was the 
height of the cold war. Given my age (I was born in 1929) 
I was then barely 24. Although I had had a bicycle tour of 
Western Europe in 1949 and had traveled extensively in North 
America, this was my first visit to a Communist country. Also 
I had no overt family ties to Europe as my ancestors had all 
migrated to America by the beginning of the 20th century. It 
is important to note that my experiences were much shaped by 
a rural focus and the community study mode then very much 
predominant in American anthropology. I have also noted the 
Cold War perspective linked to those aspects of my graduate 
education, which focused on the then Soviet Union. Further, 
while in Yugoslavia I was significantly influenced by local 
ethnologists, especially in Serbia. As a result I came to see 
socialist ideology as something imposed from above and not 
an integral part of the lives of rural folk. 
Education and the Cold War, the Early 
1950s
I began my education in anthropology as an undergraduate 
majoring in history at the University of Michigan, and had 
become interested in Eastern Europe and what was then the 
Soviet Union. As a graduate student while I was engaged in 
the Ph.D. program in anthropology at Columbia University I 
also took courses at the Russian Institute of Columbia. These 
courses dealt with Russia and the Soviet Union - its economy, 
legal system, history, and literature. I had a unique and cha-
llenging education in this self-selected mix of courses. In a 
given semester I would have courses in physical anthropology, 
and at the Russian Institute, Marxian economics. Similarly 
there was anthropological theory and the international rela-
tions of the Soviet Union or Russian literature and kinship 
systems. It is a wonder I survived with a coherent outlook and 
that my graduate career was not destroyed. Fortunately I had 
understanding and supportive professors.
The ideology of the Cold War was dominant. As noted, in the 
United States this was the period of rabid red baiting personi-
fied by Senator Joe McCarthy. He ultimately died in disgrace 
but not before he had inflicted much damage on American 
society. He also caused great difficulties for many Ameri-
cans who were loyal citizens. Some years ago I explored the 
Columbia University Archives and found evidence as to how 
this period affected my professors, who were among those 
most prominent in the study of Soviet and East European 
affairs in the United States. Some were engaged in extensive 
consultation with their personal lawyers should they ever be 
brought before a congressional committee of inquiry!
But there is another view. Columbia University was, after all, 
in New York City with its long history of political radicalism 
and the site of the headquarters of the American Communist 
Party. Several local anthropologists had links to the “Old Left,” 
of the 1930s.  I befriended an “older man,” an anthropologi-
cal linguist. He had been an instructor in anthropology at the 
nearby City College of N.Y. (now part of the City University 
of New York) I was not sophisticated enough to realize that our 
conversations on linguistics and related anthropological topics 
had for him an instrumental focus. One day we went for a long 
walk and he broached to me the idea that I might be interested 
in joining the C.P., USA. I knew that he had recently been 
dismissed from his untenured position at City College because 
of his Party affiliation. This was, of course, a daring invitation 
given the tenor of the times. I don’t remember being fearful 
of exploring this course of action but simply uninterested. (He 
subsequently resumed his career at the National University in 
Mexico City).
These events took place in 1952 and McCarthy’s downfall 
was then some years off. It should also be noted that another 
anthropologist who worked on an Eastern European project 
sponsored by one of my professors, Margaret Mead. He was 
brought to trial as a Soviet agent and convicted. More directly 
pertinent, one of my anthropology professors was dismissed 
from her teaching position Columbia. She had publicly 
charged that U.S. forces then fighting in Korean were using 
germ warfare as a tactical weapon, a claim then made by the 
North Koreans, Chinese and Soviets. Like the anthropologist 
who taught at City College, she also subsequently resumed her 
career, in her case, at a smaller and less well-known University 
in the New York area.
 Anthropology in the 1950s was then much oriented toward the 
notion of fieldwork in non-Western cultures as a way to vali-
date one’s professional status. But given the Soviet Union’s 
attitude toward foreigner researchers generally and Americans 
in particular there was no chance to undertake fieldwork in 
that country or, for that matter, elsewhere in Eastern Europe. 
But Yugoslavia was different for in 1948 there was an ideo-
logical break with the Soviet Union. 
OBZORJA STROKE tema Glasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 28
Resulting in the severing of communist 
party relations
Yugoslavia in 1953, A Setting for Fieldwork 
Although as of 1953 Yugoslavia was still an orthodox com-
munist state its break with the Soviet Union made it a desired 
setting for expanding relations by the U.S. Thus at the time of 
my initial visit in 1953-54 there were very extensive United 
States civilian and military assistance programs in Yugoslavia. 
Subsequently, by the time of my second extensive visit in the 
early 1960s the extent of American food and economic aid 
to Yugoslavia had greatly expanded. During that decade the 
accumulation of local currency by the American Embassy had 
become very extensive for all food aid as well as other aid 
was paid for in local currency. During that time an official at 
the American Embassy told me that their bank account held 
about 10% of the value of all Yugoslav currency in circulation, 
an obviously politically intolerable situation. A major part of 
these funds were expended for public works on projects like 
the Dalmatian costal highway. But there were also, relatively, 
large amounts of funds for academic research by U.S. and 
Yugoslav scholars working jointly as well as almost unlimited 
amounts for American libraries to buy copies of all books 
printed in Yugoslavia (this was the case even though funds 
set aside for this purpose were less than 1% of the total of 
all U.S. assistance.). But all these developments were in the 
1960s, then very much in the future. It should be noted that I 
have gone into all this detail because a significant portion of 
my researches in Yugoslavia in the early 1960s were supported 
by these funds.
Role of Philip Mosely 
My professor of international relations at Columbia, Philip 
Mosely, had been one of the founders of Soviet and East 
European Studies in the U.S., He also had been very much 
involved in U.S.-U.S S.R. negotiations and had been an advi-
sor at key conferences between the U.S., the U.K. and the 
U.S.S.R. Mosely had participated in the conferences of foreign 
ministers during the war in Moscow. In the immediate postwar 
period he had attended the Potsdam conference between Tru-
man, Stalin and Churchill, (then Atlee) as an advisor to the 
American delegation. In sum, he had extensive experience in 
negotiating with the Soviets during and prior to the period he 
was my professor at Columbia.
 With respect to Slovenia, Mosely had also been one the prin-
cipal U.S. representatives at the treaty negotiations, which 
eventually ended the Trieste dispute between Yugoslavia and 
Italy. This matter was finally concluded only in the 1950s 
when we were already in Yugoslavia. But from my personal 
point of view, most significant was the curious fact that in 
the immediate prewar period, in the late 1930s, he had been 
encouraged by an American research foundation, the Social 
Science Research Council (New York), to undertake field 
research in the Balkans. As a result Mosely engaged in exten-
sive field researches on the extended family unit, the Zadruga. 
He and Margaret Mead also my professor at Columbia had a 
long- term professional relationship. Mead subsequently was 
one of the major contributors to a book of essays dealing with 
Mosely’s career. 
Mosely and FilipoviÊ and Beginning My 
Yugoslav Research
During the course of his research in the Balkans in the late 
1930s Mosely met Milenko FilipoviÊ, who was to become one 
of the leading Yugoslav ethnologists, particularly with respect 
to the study of Macedonian, Bosnian and, especially, Serbian 
areas. In 1952, when I had completed my course work, I was 
ready to undertake field research for my doctorate. Mosely 
introduced me to Professor FilipoviÊ who was then in the 
United States under a Rockefeller Foundation grant. He had 
received a fellowship from this organization on the eve of 
World War II but did not accept it because he chose to remain 
in his homeland even though war was then clearly inevitable. 
After the war Mosely helped FilipoviÊ renew his grant. After 
an initial meeting with Filipovic my fate was then decided for 
here was the opportunity to do research in an exciting land. 
In a sense, I was following in Mosely’s footsteps, a pathway 
he had pursued less than a decade and a half before. I was to 
do my research in Serbia under FilipoviÊ’s sponsorship. It is 
important to add here that FilipoviÊ had been an advisor to the 
Chetniks (those supporting the royal government in W.W. II). 
Thus after the war he had been marginalized and not permi-
tted to teach at the University in Belgrade and had to assume 
a research position.
 
Departure for Yugoslavia
We took a Yugoslav freighter from New York and landed in 
Dubrovnik in June of 1953. Our first introduction to the sys-
tem was our contact with University students in Belgrade with 
whom we exchanged English for Serbian lessons. At that time 
visiting foreign students, especially those who wished
to undertake research in rural areas, were a rarity so we had 
to make our own way through the system. A series of small 
events set the stage for our initial understanding of part of the 
dynamics of Yugoslav socialist society.
I also detail all this background to illustrate the fact that my 
selection of Yugoslavia as a research area was very much 
embedded in the political context of the time. For my research 
I had to use my personal resources since no financial assist-
ance was forthcoming. Thus in this respect, despite the context 
of the times, my initial work in Yugoslavia was independent 
of any organizational impetus. In June 1953, when we first 
arrived in Yugoslavia, despite the large existing American aid 
program and the earlier break with Stalin, that country was still 
very much an orthodox communist state operating in a rela-
tively poor and marginal country with a significant part of its 
economy peasant based. The massive program of industrializa-
tion had not yet really begun and the large-scale migrations to 
the cities were still getting underway.
The significant achievements of Yugoslav socialism in build-
ing a modern industrial economy were in prospect but com-
munist state power was already consolidated. An aspect of 
the confirmation of state power entailed the techniques for 
the purposeful manipulation of public opinion to support the 
implementation of state policies. Such manipulation, which 
had its limitations, was played out in many ways. A local 
example of that purposeful manipulation took place in the 
early part of our initial stay.
tema OBZORJA STROKEGlasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 29
Viewed from an early 21st century perspective the long-lasting 
significance of the events described below can be seen as, at 
best, marginal to the historical record. However, from a per-
sonal perspective, they were overwhelmingly significant to me 
at the time and nearly ended my work in Yugoslavia just as I 
was getting started.
Initial Fieldwork and Trauma
By the fall of 1953 we had settled in the central Serbian vil-
lage or Oraπac, about sixty miles south of Belgrade. One day 
the village council president invited us to accompany him and 
some other local officials to a “meeting” (rally) in the nearby 
rail and market town of Mladenovac. It also then had a few 
nascent industries. Something presumably important had hap-
pened and we didn’t know quite what. Our household lacked a 
functioning radio and they didn’t get a daily newspaper.
 We left the village the next day at dawn to arrive in time for 
the rally. There were no private automobiles in the village then 
so we went by horse carriage (fiacre) of the kind I had seen 
only used in the village for weddings. The site of the gather-
ing was a huge open field adjoining the rail junction. As we 
approached the site I noticed long lines of boxcars, which I 
later learned had been used to transport peasants and work-
ers to the rally from various places in Serbia. While the rela-
tively short ride was a bit uncomfortable given the state of the 
springs of the carriage but the discomfort was less than on a 
crowded urban bus in Belgrade with windows closed. It wasn’t 
until a decade later that the Yugoslav economy had matured 
to the extent that buses came into widespread use throughout 
the country.
People were arriving in a large stream, pouring out of the 
boxcars and onto the open fields. We kept close to our village 
friends but I also had a camera and ventured a photo of some 
of the placards. At that point a police official came by and 
suggested that my wife and I accompany him to headquarters. 
There he asked for our passports and proceeded to enlighten us 
about the crisis and the reason for the rally. He began by inquir-
ing if I knew that the Americans were responsible for exclud-
ing Yugoslavia from their claimed territories in the region of 
Trieste? Our village friends had, of course, mentioned nothing 
about this only indicating that we would might enjoy a visit to 
a “meeting” which we naturally assumed would be combined 
with a large local market. It seemed apparent that the official 
was quoting from the most recent edition of the communist 
party newspaper (Borba), which was invariably found in good 
supply in all the official offices we visited.
I did recall that my Columbia professor had been the American 
representative on that boundary commission but, of course, I 
said nothing. Following the lecture he suggested that we would 
need protection from the genuine outrage of the workers and 
peasants who were attending the rally. I did not protest his 
decision but only expressed my appreciation. that neither 
my film nor camera was confiscated. We were assigned two 
officers who proceeded to follow us around for the rest of the 
afternoon. They were apparently good friends since they held 
hands, as men do in parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle 
East. They seemed self absorbed and the day passed without 
further incident. 
The planned part of the gathering commenced with the even-
tual arrival of the Interior Minister, RankoviÊ, who delivered 
a speech of “outrage” to programmed cheers. We had heard in 
Belgrade that he was famous for his tailored suits but we did 
not get close enough to check this out. On the way back our 
village hosts said nothing about our encounter with the police 
but since we were in the village under official auspices with 
a formal letter of introduction there was no outward evidence 
of their concern. After some fifty years this incident would 
seem to have merited little more than a mentioned as a small 
detail of our stay. But that did not turn out to be the case. It has 
often been remarked that youth is stupid and certainly young 
apprentice anthropologists are no exception to this rule. After 
this encounter I was determined to return to Belgrade imme-
diately. In retrospect my time would have been much better 
invested in pursuing my ongoing fieldwork. But there was no 
stopping me. The next morning we boarded the narrow gauge 
train in a neighboring village and then transferred to a standard 
gauge train at Mladenovac for our trip to Belgrade. We made 
the approximately 100 kilometer trip in just under six hours 
because we managed to catch an express train to Belgrade at 
our transfer point.
Although determinedly curious about the context of the rally 
about Trieste, once in Belgrade I was so self possessed and 
pleased to return to our urban apartment that it never occurred 
to me that there was any danger to my person and to vary 
my usual urban routes. Therefore I first visited some of my 
favorite bookstores to browse for research materials and 
then walked over to the U.S. Library anticipating getting the 
Embassy news bulletin and reading recent American papers 
to see what they were reporting of these events. Of course, I 
might have first checked the local press. The American Library 
was located in downtown Belgrade near the Serbian Academy 
of Sciences and the University. As I crossed the lot adjoining 
the Library (made vacant by German bombing during World 
War II) I suddenly felt a pinprick and then another and a mob 
surrounded me. I broke free and started to run. As I entered the 
main street fronting on the Student Square I noticed a woman 
being herded by a jeering mob. On her back was a sign in Ser-
bian, “One who takes the American Embassy Bulletin.” Just 
about that time a waiter called out to me from a nearby restau-
rant to get the sign off my back. I rounded the corner and in 
panic headed back to the U.S. Information Library collapsing 
at the feet of an American journalist. As I got up the journal-
ist, Helen Thomas, (who later was the senior correspondent 
at the White House becoming a fixture there for decades) 
proceeded to interview me. She explained that her story would 
be front-page news in the U.S. the following day but that my 
name would not be used. (Present readers will find this part of 
my story quaint, as there once was a time when an American 
student being beaten up by a “foreign mob” would have been 
a major news story.)
Turning Point for My Research in Yugoslavia
After the interview with Helen Thomas, two American dip-
lomats escorted me to my apartment. On our walk there they 
told me stories about the difficulties they had with organized 
mobs as they closed down the American consulate in Shanghai 
OBZORJA STROKE tema Glasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 30
in 1948, after the victory of the Chinese communists. Uninten-
tionally, they nicely set the stage for what was to follow. They 
left me at the door to my apartment house apparently unaware 
that we had been followed. As I stepped inside a group of 
Yugoslav police in plainclothes, masquerading as “outraged 
citizens” began to beat me. I first shouted to them in Serbian 
and then, as the beating intensified, I switched to English. I 
later learned that the instructions issued to the organized dem-
onstrators and widely disseminated were that foreigners were 
not to be harmed. Although they had clearly not finished their 
beatings the police then left apparently convinced that I was 
indeed a foreigner.
 
We Will Give Our Lives But Not Trieste 
I do not remember great pain and my injuries were not serious 
but they had significantly bloodied me. I was quickly given 
refuge in the nearby apartment of a friend from the American 
Embassy. While trying to relax in the safety of their apartment 
I could hear the organized demonstrators on nearby Marshal 
Tito Street shouting the by now familiar refrain - “We will 
give our lives but not Trieste.” Later, when I made a visit to 
the Embassy, I was told by our diplomats that they would pro-
test on my behalf concerning the beating. They also told me 
that this would probably be the end of my work in Yugoslavia. 
I chose not to complain. Later, at a cocktail party, I met an 
American colonel with the U.S. Military Assistance Group to 
Yugoslavia; they had a large building in the center of Belgrade. 
He told me that prior to the demonstrations a colleague on the 
Yugoslav army’s general staff told him that there would be no 
demonstrations in front of the building housing the U.S. mili-
tary assistance program. There were none. This was in contrast 
to the American Library, which had its windows smashed.
Certainly this tale of minor events long ago has few surpris-
ing aspects. Neither the duplicity of the Yugoslav state, or for 
that matter, the many faces of the American government are 
surprising. Nor, it should be added, was the relative indiffer-
ence of the Belgrade population to events in far away Slovenia 
unexpected. Finally, it should be noted that despite the cries of 
the organized demonstrators then marching through downtown 
Belgrade, the whole matter was subsequently settled relatively 
quietly through diplomatic negotiation. As a result Yugoslavia 
gave up claims to certain areas near Trieste. The fate of the city 
itself had, however, never been in question, it always remained 
under Italian jurisdiction.
But there is another factor involved and that is and was the 
extreme national and historical divisions within the territories 
that composed the Yugoslav state. Slovenes were and are, of 
course, concerned about their borders with Italy and their other 
neighboring states and the people of Slovene nationality who 
live there. Clearly, these concerns were not shared with peo-
ple in Serbia. Just as, more recently, Slovenes early on, and 
not without some initial casualties, uninvolved themselves 
in the wars accompanying the disintegration of Yugoslavia. 
Significantly, the Serbs did not persist in trying to dominate 
Slovenia, critically, there were no significant resident Serbian 
communities.
Aspects of Life in a Communist State
My bloody head massage was clearly minor but I wondered 
about the fate of the poor woman whom I had seen being 
paraded before the organized mob. Clearly, she had no place to 
hide and the international press wasn’t interested in reporting 
her situation. The brutality to which she was subjected relates, 
in my mind, to a visit I paid to the police station in Arandjelo-
vac, the market town for the village in which I was working. 
I had come there to see about the renewal of my visa, then 
granted for only a few months at a time. Mistakenly I opened 
the wrong door and briefly saw an older peasant being beaten. 
It is not easy to put the pieces of the puzzle together. For from 
the moment we landed in Yugoslavia there seemed to be an 
enforced passivity of the population. As our taxi pulled away 
from the freighter our car hit a stevedore in the stomach and 
he came up over the hood. We were delayed a bit but no crowd 
gathered. As a New Yorker accustomed to seeing the results of 
critical accidents it wasn’t the injury that seemed significant 
but rather the lack of public protest. 
No Questioning in the Village
But there was no doubt that at this time individual actions, 
which in any way questioned government authority, were 
severely repressed. This “fact of life” was made clear to us 
from the first day of our arrival in the village. On this occasion 
my wife and I were seated in the village café awaiting arrange-
ments about our housing. A local woman had heard about our 
arrival. She came to the café, in itself then an unusual act, and 
told us about her brother in Chicago. She demanded of us as to 
why, when there were so many nice places in Yugoslavia, had 
we come to this poor and backward village, which she soon 
hoped to leave. Subsequently, we learned that she was absent
from the village for some months. When she returned, we 
never had the opportunity to speak to her again, nor for her 
sake were we anxious to do so. This incident must, of course, 
be seen in a broader reality. Some years later we learned that 
her brother had been killed in a robbery of his Chicago restau-
rant, putting perspective on one aspect of the realties of life 
in America should one seek to make a contrast. Much more 
important to our research atmosphere was an incident associ-
ated with the local village elementary school. I had thought 
that it would be nice to sponsor an essay contest in which the 
children could write about the village and their aspirations for 
the future. I even offered some modest prizes. The director of 
the school and the teachers cooperated and I received a sig-
nificant number of essays. Very fortunately neither the school 
principal nor the teachers made any effort to read the pupils’ 
work prior to turning over the papers to me. I took the school 
essays to Belgrade and went over them carefully. Most of the 
student essays were about the glories of Serbian history, the 
modernization of the village, and Partisan heroes. Some of 
their writings were obviously based on the school textbooks 
but a few were clearly original and described the realities of 
village life. Some of the drawings even showed the patched 
clothes of those working in the fields. One essay was unique 
in this respect. In the words of the pupil the Partisans weren’t 
liberators but destroyers for they had burned part of the vil-
lage neighborhood in which he lived. Memories of the com-
bined civil war and struggle with the Germans that was World 
tema OBZORJA STROKEGlasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 31
War II were still fresh for our fieldwork began less than a 
decade after the war.
I determined to leave this essay out of my ethnographic 
account. The pupil described how her family’s home had been 
burned and she provided a crayon drawing of the event. What 
to do with this material? It seemed obvious to me that if vil-
lage officials saw this picture it could cause significant trouble 
for the parents as well as for the child. The incident might also 
have made life difficult for the teachers and school principal 
who had helped me. I destroyed the essay and drawing. To this 
day I remember burning the drawing and essay and flushing 
the ashes down the toilet. It was right to protect the student but 
I was also ashamed of my self-censorship. I had accommo-
dated myself to the system. From a broader perspective, I must 
now admit that I used this same self-censorship in my disserta-
tion and subsequent publications, which, in general, have been 
positive about, post World War II developments in Yugoslavia. 
Probably my present style of writing about socialism in Yugo-
slavia and my reluctance to sufficiently acknowledge Yugoslav 
socialism’s positive aspects, which as noted do indeed exist, 
may reflect my strong internal desire to “balance accounts,” 
since I feel my earlier publications reflect too little of the role 
of the state in imposing passivity and suffering.
The Yugoslav Communist System, A Broader Perspective - 
Ideology and Actualities
What indeed was the system to which people were accom-
modating? In this essay I cannot do more than offer a few 
brief comments. First, it is important to observe that enormous 
changes were underway throughout Eastern and Southern 
Europe during the second half of the 20th century, quite apart 
from the dominant ideological system in a particular country. 
Overall there were the ongoing processes of industrialization 
and urbanization and with it technological modernization. This 
was taking place at a rapid rate not only in Yugoslavia but also 
in all the non-Communist countries that bordered on Yugosla-
via such as Italy and Greece.
In my initial work the early 1950s provided a kind of baseline 
against which to measure subsequent change. Communism, of 
course, put something of a special face on these changes but 
the long-term transformations made that centralist based ideol-
ogy increasingly irrelevant. A small but significant indicator of 
the changes were the transformations in the types of garbage 
that the society produced.We observed in the village. in the 
early 1950s how virtually nothing was thrown away includ-
ing used tin cans. These were turned into receptacles and even 
cooking utensils of various kinds.
The Old War - Frugality and Poverty 
This frugality was also a reflection of the real poverty of 
this period. People were accustomed to wearing patched old 
clothes, especially in the villages, as well as reusing most eve-
rything possible. I well recall the minimum tableware we had 
then in the village. There were badly made aluminum forks 
and spoons that broke and bent easily. These contrasted with 
the sturdy homemade wooden spoons of the pre-industrial 
local craft era, which we also used. These latter items were 
reminiscent of the time when there was a greater degree of 
isolation and self-sufficiency in the village economy. By con-
trast the household in which we lived also had the remnants of 
a German soldier’s mess kit with its stainless steel knife, fork 
and spoon. I recall asking myself as to how it was possible for 
a people who couldn’t even produce useable basic household 
items such as cutlery and who had used wooden spoons to 
have defeated such a technologically superior foe. We were 
reminded of this every evening at dinnertime when mixed in 
with the poor quality aluminum tableware were these remnants 
of the German soldier’s field kit. Therein lies the primary justi-
fication for, and the primary legitimization of the regime, their 
defeat of the technologically superior Nazi invaders.
The other justification for the regime was that its socialist form 
of government would bring an equitable form of moderniza-
tion. But these initial changes resulting from these processes 
of change, although widely shared, also brought with them 
a hierarchical, entrenched bureaucracy with a monopoly on 
the methods of innovation which were always imposed from 
above. From the outset people were primarily not inspired 
but coerced. This happened despite the enthusiasm of some 
youthful cadre who contributed unskilled labor to road and 
railroad construction. There was also the constant drumbeat 
of propaganda about social ownership, and worker participa-
tion in a so-called shared self-management system along with 
every few years a new constitution touting these and other 
new forms of political participation. But then new forms of 
individually based consumerism began  which produced the 
new forms of garbage; non-biodegradable plastic was a chief 
component.
Old Ideologies and New Forms of Garbage 
Focusing, for a moment, on this new garbage, and the earlier 
the lack of it in the immediate postwar period it is indeed pos-
sible to see this as a marker in the complex process of mod-
ernization. Both peasant villagers and urban workers began to 
experience the throw away culture of plastic beginning in the 
1960s. It is certainly true that life did improve in a material 
way for most everyone. But this achievement did not bring 
lasting satisfaction. This despite the fact that Tito successfully 
transitioned from wartime leader to acceptable father figure. In 
the fifties there were then no plastic items to speak of. Just as 
newspaper was used more often than the less available toilet 
paper and acceptable hand soap was not easily obtainable. It 
was a time when women on boarding a bus would carefully 
arrange their skirts before sitting down so as not to put much 
stress on the fabric. Burlap sacks and crude paper bags were 
used to carry home the  items purchased from the limited 
inventory in the state stores.  Within a decade, however, the 
throwaway plastic culture began in earnest. The 1960s saw the 
cautious beginning of this mass consumption culture along with 
the innovation of the supermarket and TV. advertising which 
may also be termed garbage promotion media, referring to the 
packaging, not the aesthetic content.  Now there was a mass of 
cheap items on the market designed for immediate use and not 
for long-term retention. How did the increasing availability of 
consumer goods, the innovation of mass marketing and the 
overall rise in living standards relate to other transitions? The 
political culture was also concerned with novelty, innovation 
and mass appeal. Yesterday’s versions of both were certainly 
OBZORJA STROKE tema Glasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 32
discarded rather than recycled in the decades to come. But, of 
course, the communist party continued to monopolize power 
even if many of its ways had changed.
These matters can more easily be observed in the villages, the 
countryside, than in the towns. For in the latter there was trash 
collection, which, of course, was unknown in the villages (my 
specific point of reference here is Serbia and not Slovenia). 
Thus village homes began to accumulate less perishable detri-
tus in their surroundings. Rotten vegetables, spoiled meat, old 
wooden implements could all be counted on to slowly return 
to the soil but not plastic or metal as combined in an auto 
carcass. 
Remittances and Autos, the Countryside Transformed
The appearance of the private automobile in the socialist state 
was a transforming force. With its increasing use came greater 
individually focused mobility not only within Yugoslavia but 
also across international borders. The Tito regime did little to 
restrict free movement. It was in the sixties that there began 
the mass migrations of Yugoslav workers to a then labor short 
Western Europe. The workers’ remittances were certainly eco-
nomically useful to the regime. Just as the family had been 
useful to the state in allowing it not to be too concerned about 
social support services when these could be, at least partially, 
taken care of by multi-generational agriculturally based house-
holds in which there was also cash income.
Certainly, the triumphant return of the new urban workers 
to their villages became a regular part of rural life. I was 
impressed when I saw for the first time in the 1960s a Mer-
cedes with a German license plate in a remote Macedonian 
village, a community I had reached with a jeep. The link here 
to new forms of garbage is also direct. When I returned to this 
village in the 1980s automobile carcasses dotted the country-
side. Yesterday’s triumph became today’s discard. There also 
was no audience to whom to display an urban triumph. The 
village was now largely deserted the inhabitants having left 
for the towns. In both rural and urban households where both 
parents worked in state enterprises, a relative, often a grandma 
(baba), could be counted on to provide for the necessary 
childcare. Folk sayings were coined to celebrate the fact that 
parents had to make sure about the presence of a baba before 
they had a child. 
Party Ideology and Private Investment
In retrospect the frozen ideology of the Party prevented the 
growth of a vibrant domestic economy. Thus the massive 
remittances of those who worked abroad were not invested 
in the domestic economy but rather in private household con-
struction, which strengthened family ties and regional affilia-
tions, a process that has continued into the 21st century. From 
the 1960s to the 1980s the housing stock of rural Yugoslavia 
was transformed. A uniformity of reinforced concrete, stucco, 
tile and brick replaced the historically nurtured regional 
styles attuned to local resources. The new structures were of 
enormous symbolic significance to the individuals and their 
families but their economic was questionable. For often the 
worker, and frequently his family as well, remained abroad for 
much of the year, returning only for vacations, and much of 
this newly constructed housing was under used. By the begin-
ning of the 21st century many isolated villages had begun to 
be abandoned. And the significance of investments made in 
decades past?
For those who stayed behind from the 1960s on there were 
massive and symbolic government investments made in an 
attempt to appease growing national regional interests. Thus 
to parallel the private sector’s overly robust housing stock in 
rural areas, which were based on exporting part of their work 
force, there was the felt political need for every republic to 
have its very own uneconomical major industrial enterprise 
such as a steel mill or auto plant. Meanwhile the quality of 
locally manufactured items such as autos an international joke. 
This was notably the case with the Yugoslav licensed Fiat pro-
duced at what had been an historic armaments plant in central 
Serbia. *Its shoddy construction hastened its achievement of 
junk status both on the international market and domestically.
 
New Car Owners and Junk 
By the late 1970s, early 1980s, the remains of worn out cars 
from the first generations of car owners were beginning to 
clutter up not only rural byways but also appeared on the 
verges of highways. This at the same time that the first gen-
eration of manufactured wood and electric stoves, TVs and 
small refrigerators also began to wear out. At least in central 
Serbia, no effective recycling system functioned so behind 
individual homesteads the piles of discarded stoves, TVs, 
and refrigerators began to pile up. This development raises 
interesting questions for the ecologically oriented concerning 
rural water supplies e.g. does the freon and other chemicals 
as in the florescent tubes get into the ground water. As a fur-
ther example, how is the used crankcase fluid from cars, and 
tractors disposed of? The pride of a Yugoslav worker driving 
his new Mercedes to his home village for the first time was a 
frequent sight in the 1970s and 1980s and individually owned 
rural repair shops began to appear to service these cars.
These problems are in no way unique to the former Yugoslavia. 
Countries such as the United States are well advanced in the 
ways in which its industries have created numerous examples 
of widespread pollution of water supplies. But, of course, it is 
necessary to view this matter in some perspective. Ecological 
devastation in Yugoslavia and its health consequences seem 
to pale in comparison to places like the former Soviet Union 
and the massive transformation of landscapes in areas such as 
Central Asia.
The “Impartial” Observer Anthropologist as Spy, TV “Per-
sonality” and Peasant Icon ‡ A Personal Journey
Lest this all seem too distant, too objectifying it seems appro-
priate to describe how my personal image came front and cent-
er, briefly, and in a not so minor way, first in the public press, 
then on Serbian TV and, finally, in a popular magazine. On 
several occasions, beginning in the 1960’s, I was denounced 
as a CIA agent in the public press in both Belgrade and Sara-
jevo. Other American researchers were also identified in this 
way. But since I had done fieldwork in Yugoslavia for a longer 
time, and researched most intensively in rural areas, I became 
an inviting target. This was because the security authorities, 
even in their more relaxed phases, wanted to control access 
to those areas that they could not as easily supervise as urban 
tema OBZORJA STROKEGlasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 33
places. After each article appeared I made a point of writing 
to the Yugoslav Ambassador in Washington that the charges 
were untrue and libelous. In the fullness of time I received a 
reply saying that I would be welcome to return to Yugoslavia 
to continue my researches.
It was quite clear that the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry 
of the Interior had somewhat different goals, a not unfamiliar 
situation in the U.S. Then in 1986, through the good offices 
of a colleague at Belgrade University, I was introduced to a 
Serbian TV personality. He made a specialty on his weekly 
program of discovering odd things in remote places. Clearly, 
my long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a Serbian village 
qualified. His TV program had a folksy ambiance; even its title 
was people friendly, “By the Way (Uzgred budi reÊeno).” In no 
time at all we (my wife and I plus a film crew) were ensconced 
in “our” village. They remained on site for several weeks and 
the production of an hour-long film resulted. Unlike American 
TV there were not many outtakes. That summer my wife and 
I lived out Andy Warhol’s (the American pop artist’s) dictum 
that everyone can be famous for 15 minutes. The program was 
broadcast not only in Serbia but nation-wide throughout what 
was then Yugoslavia. Thus when we left the village that sum-
mer after the filming we were recognized most everywhere 
even as we tried to vacation in Dalmatia. There were “serious” 
consequences ‡ thus waiters would recognize us in a restaurant 
and insist on feeding us “real peasant food.” At that time we 
were more than middle aged and our diet tended to be strong 
in vegetables and occasional chicken and fish. But here our 
plates were being piled high with greasy, roasted meat! But 
it was quite a different persona than that in which I had been 
portrayed in at least one article, which commented, about my 
appearance and “disappearance” in Yugoslavia that I had “
vanished in a fog.”
But our “fame” was to last for more than 15 minutes in a dif-
ferent context. The American Embassy’s glossy propaganda 
magazine, intended primarily for the intelligentsia, featured a 
long article about our film with many color photos from our 
time in Serbia. Among the photos was one of the two of us 
taken in Oraπac in 1954 explicitly captioned as “the Halperns 
in peasant dress.”
The idea to pose this way had not been ours but derived from 
another American couple that had visited us in the village and 
wanted to be photographed in peasant costume. We decided 
to follow their example. Our hosts were most cooperative 
even if some of the costumes were no longer worn, especially 
women’s folk dress which was often saved for burial. It should 
be added that back then our village family was most curious 
about our clothes and had tried them on when we had been 
away. For this reason we viewed dressing in their clothes a 
fair exchange. The photos were then put away for more than 
30 years and only surfaced again in their use in the film. At 
the time we thought to introduce an element of humor that 
was in consonance with the theme of the production. In any 
case, the editors of the Embassy magazine gave this photo 
very prominent play in their article and combined it with a 
long caption about our personal history including our research 
work in Serbia.
 
Further Media Adventures 
Surprise! Four years later we revisited Serbia in 1990 and one 
of our Belgrade friends showed us a copy of an article that had 
recently appeared in a Serbian weekly. It was all about spying 
in Yugoslavia and was actually an article about a book writ-
ten by a British Embassy, press attaché in the late 1940s, who 
subsequently became a well-known British novelist. It had 
the symbolically catching title, “White Eagle Over Serbia.” 
The theme of the novel was a tale of rural based espionage in 
Macedonia. But no matter, photos from Serbia would give it 
just the right peasant flavor. At least this is what the journalist 
involved subsequently told a colleague of ours when he saw 
the photos in the American Embassy magazine. They seemed 
appropriate and he used them without permission or payment 
of royalties. He did, however, list me as the photographer of 
myself, certainly a technical possibility. There were also sev-
eral of my other photos from the Serbian village of Oraπac. 
The photo spread also included other pictures. They were of 
a well-known art photographer, German by origin, recently 
deceased, a Hollywood publicist named Helmut Newton. His 
most famous work, I later learned, was a massive actual coffee 
table sized volume entitled, “The Nude and the Refrigerator.”
In captioning my photos the journalist spared no inspiration. 
Our photo in peasant dress was captioned: “True Serbian 
peasants a barrier against communism.” Alongside were other 
of my photos that had appeared in the Embassy magazine. 
These were of a poor but picturesque old couple posing in 
front of their house, bunches of grapes hanging from the raft-
ers. Another one was of teen-age twins, who were making 
decorations for light fixtures to celebrate the introduction of 
electricity to their home. Helmut Newton’s photos focused on 
the activities of “British Agents in Belgrade,” no refrigerators 
here just “congenial” soft porn. One “agent” was” investigat-
ing” the crotch of a large bare breasted model. Another shot 
featured an obviously dissolute but curious intellectual looking 
up from his book at the bare bottom of a local lady, if that is 
quite the appropriate term. It surely is a comment on the transi-
tory nature of media that only a few years after the documen-
tary film which prominently used the same photo, and after its 
appearance in the widely circulated American Embassy maga-
zine that it could be used again in a totally different setting in 
a popular magazine.
I guess it would have been too much to expect the caption; 
“ex-CIA agent and former American anthropologist becomes 
‘true’ Serbian peasant.” Earlier I had spoken of the introduc-
tion of plastic discards as contributing to the altering nature of 
garbage production changed in a modernizing society. Oraπac 
in 1953-54 had been a setting with a still vibrant oral tradition 
in which elder males would perform epic poetry and women 
would create individualized mourning chants to memorialize 
the deceased. But contemporary Serbian TV with its massive 
programming features an almost infinity of little remembered 
moments and our 15 minutes of fame had long since expired. 
As noted the journalist who stole the photos from the American 
Embassy magazine must have assumed that his readers would 
not remember the TV film about, “The Halperns in Oraπac,” 
and even less the photo of them posing in peasant dress. It is 
fitting that now at 76 I can look back on a truly “memorable” 
career, one in which I “evolved” from a youthful and ignorant 
OBZORJA STROKE tema Glasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 34
stranger, to a CIA agent, to my final apotheosis as a “true” 
Serbian peasant. boldly preserving Serbian society from the 
contamination of communism. Perhaps that had been my goal 
from the beginning? How appropriate for an anthropologist 
to be concerned with preserving the “soul” of a nation. More 
to the point, the impression 1 have from the third party with 
whom I communicated about the matter was that the “journal-
ist” was simply “earning” his living by consciously creating a 
scene of momentary sexual interest with overtones of nation-
alism and espionage - a potent brew for the moment but the 
text is clearly suitable to line one’s garbage can the following 
morning. Perhaps the best that can be said for such matters is 
that there was no tragedy or deadly violence overtly involved 
in this media charade.
After Yugoslav Socialism - the Destruction and Some 
Questions
It is certainly true that a modern state in terms of infrastruc-
ture and economy, however flawed and incomplete, was 
created under the years of socialism in Yugoslavia. (I have 
documented parts of the processes involved in many of my 
publications.) But it was a hollow structure that its inhabitants 
were only too ready and even eager to rip apart even if this had 
to be done in a very bloody way. There are images in my mind 
and in the photos I took of the drastic consequences of war in 
Yugoslavia that I saw on my visits in the 1990s, especially, to 
Bosnia and Croatia. 
The massive destruction of urban areas was all too visible, 
particularly in Bosnia’s major cities well as in smaller towns 
in Croatia. There was also the devastation of the countryside. 
Particularly vivid was my winter 1996 visit including trips to 
Sarajevo and Mostar. Fighting was just ending and the scars 
of war were very recent. But it was not only the destroyed 
factories, the blown up villages and the burned out blocks of 
modern apartment houses that caught my attention - it was the 
new graveyards that I focused on, They were then everywhere 
- in Sarajevo’s Olympic soccer field, in the city’s parks, in 
the small gardens in front of the surviving apartment houses 
- most were not the graves of young soldiers but of old men, 
women and children.
Even in this, the first decade of the 21st century, the potential 
for future conflict has not been eliminated from what was 
once Yugoslavia, especially in Kosovo but also in Macedonia. 
In the spring of 2004 I visited communities, that I had previ-
ously studied in southern Macedonia in 1962, both Muslim 
Albanian and Orthodox. The words that I heard were not those 
of peaceful coexistence. Although I do think that the current 
Macedonian leadership of both groups are anxious to find an 
equitable solution but perceived injustices still fester. Trust to 
build a fully viable society is lacking.
 
Complex Matters Broadly Defined 
Complex matters have been painted with a brood brush in this 
essay. Yugoslav socialism was not a fascist state built on death 
camps and ethnic hatred, nor was the ideology of socialism 
built on conquest and inequality.
Did Yugoslav Socialism Lead to Ethnic Inspired 
Destruction?
It seems possible to infer that by its authoritarian rule which 
helped to shape the nature of Yugoslav socialism the regime 
helped to facilitate much of what followed its demise. Cer-
tainly, the lack of provision for an orderly succession One can-
not say that Yugoslav socialism was only a hollow structure 
although the deceptions of the state were abundantly evident.
Further, it is not possible to assert that a regime that lasted 
almost a half-century, or something over two generations, did 
not enjoy a degree of legitimacy and popular support. After 
all there was the crucial role the Partisans played in defeat-
ing the German invaders and there was the reality of many 
aspects of modernization accomplished without drastic and 
crushing class inequalities. One has to now only look at the 
modernization process in much of the developing world today 
to see the consequences of unrestrained, socially irresponsible, 
capitalism. Some have noted that the Yugoslav state did enjoy 
at least a degree of support, not only because of modernization 
but also because many people subscribed to the basic ideologi-
cal tenets of socialism. Certainly the state was able to insert at 
least some of its ideological tropes into the life-courses of its 
citizens. But was there ever a real commitment on the part of 
rural peoples, who were initially the majority of the popula-
tion, to worker participation and socialist development? 
Or, conversely, did the peasants and the new groupings of 
peasant-workers have only a very instrumental relationship 
toward this socialist/Yugoslav state? Or did they just enjoy the 
growing material achievements during the 1960’s and 1970’s 
and when the economy turned sour and could not satisfy the 
growing consumer demand in the 1980s were they then most 
ready to part with the Yugoslav state? What role did consum-
erism have in de-legitimizing the socialist state? Was there, in 
fact, a generational gap in the attitudes towards the Yugoslav 
state? Was the older generation which had experienced pov-
erty, world war and the consequences of active ethnic hatreds 
more committed to support of socialist norms? In terms of the 
younger generation, did they increasingly see the Yugoslav 
state and its socialist framework as obstacles to their wish 
to make full use of their abilities? Certainly the lack of free 
elections and the monopolization of state power by the Party 
prevented these questions from ever being raised effectively 
in a public forum.
It is uncertain whether these vital questions have definitive 
answers, and certainly they cannot be answered in a brief intro-
spective essay. But perhaps some very general reflections are 
a place to begin. It certainly needs to be strongly state that the 
failure of socialist Yugoslavia is a double one that is all of the 
new states that have emerged have definitively rejected social-
ism and communism as the dominant ideology much as they 
have also absolutely rejected the idea of a multinational state. 
Even in inherently multiethnic areas whether within Croatia, 
in Bosnia and in Macedonia many people appear to have voted 
with their feet i.e. mixed ethnic areas have, to a significant 
degree, been replaced by ethnically homogeneous ones within 
a state that officially multi-ethnic. Bosnia provides an exce-
llent illustration of this process. In keeping with the spirit of 
this essay, I would like to cite some personal reflections 31 
years apart. Both of these reflections center on Bosnia. 
tema OBZORJA STROKEGlasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 35
Bosnian Research in 1964
In 1964 I did research in the multiethnic town of Maglaj and 
its surrounding rural area. In this region Moslems, Serbs and 
Catholics then lived in close proximity both in the town of 
Maglaj and in the surrounding villages. In a walk though the 
marketplace one could see these groups actively trading with 
one another while in Maglaj factories they worked in the same 
enterprise. How did this seemingly established co-existence 
turn into warfare and massive destruction? Platitudes about 
ancient hatreds don’t suffice to explain the evidence of death 
and destruction I saw in Sarajevo and, even more directly, in 
Mostar and its surrounding area in 1995. I emphasize the lat-
ter city because, unlike Sarajevo, the Serbs were not directly 
involved in the final fatal years. While places like Srebrenica 
and Sarajevo demonstrate the brutality of Serb forces, in 
Mostar the fight was between Croats and Moslems militaries. 
The Serbs had been eliminated from the region earlier in the 
fighting.
What conclusions can one draw? It is clear to me that it would 
have been nice not to have followed the then academic norm 
and been so wrapped up in the illusions of modernization and 
urbanization as some kind of fixed point of achievement in the 
human condition in the Balkans and elsewhere. Moderniza-
tion was, in this sense, a profound illusion and post-modern a 
fantasy. Neither will see us into the future. Contemplating the 
ruins of Mostar in 1995 can one say that this was Tito’s herit-
age? Perhaps, because a political entity, which has a president 
for life, has, by definition, no future, no way of effectively 
resolving conflicts as exemplified by a favorite slogan of 
his time. Brotherhood and Unity. Pairing that with Socialist 
Yugoslavia one can easily see how this linking was implicitly 
programmed to mutually self-destruct. One can even imagina-
tively diagram the process.
Background to Selective Destruction
 As any visitor to parts of former Yugoslavia today can testify 
- the whole country wasn’t blown up in the internal wars, only 
in selected places as in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, some of 
these sites of recent destruction have now been repaired. In 
most of the country, especially in the rural areas, the country-
side was transformed by massive building of private homes.
This new housing was, in effect, both a monument to a fading 
familism by those who lived abroad or in cities as well as a 
promise to those left behind that their village had a future. Yet 
this housing absorbed resources, which were never invested in 
productive activities. Unfortunately this process continues in 
what were some the poorest areas of Yugoslavia as in Macedo-
nia.  This use of personal funds, almost exclusively, for private 
purposes represents a profound aversion to public needs. New 
research questions need to be asked that involve individual 
motivations and how institutional structures than can adjudi-
cate conflict can come into being. Another question the cries 
out for some considered reflection has to do with the ability of 
human societies to destroy, for ideological reasons, that which 
they had so painfully built. The ruins of villages and towns 
in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo and the mass loss of civilian 
life in the 1990s, overlapping into the 21st century, were not 
created by foreign invaders but by the inhabitants who had 
formerly lived peacefully together. The uninhibited, and even 
enthusiastic, destruction of private and public structures along 
with large-scale murder of the defenseless cannot be attributed 
only to the Serbs. Decades of construction were obliterated 
and the mutual destruction of historical monuments involved 
all of the dominant ethnic groups. Why? 
We need to examine carefully motivations for destruction and 
killing at the same time as we consider how construction was 
accomplished and reconstruction is planned and implemented. 
Reconstruction to have a viable future must be proceeded by 
an understanding of why and how destruction came about. 
The International Criminal Court in The Hague is addressing 
an aspect of this question on the individual level. Knowledge 
obtained from these trial proceedings can hopefully be inte-
grated into future institution building. Can this be more than 
a pious hope?
Role of Research in Slovenia 
At the end of this essay I wish to try to explain my motivations 
and reflections about research in Slovenia. First it needs to 
be stated that my initial research in Slovenia in 1961-62 was 
initially part of my “grand plan” in 1961 for replicating my 
Serbian study in the diverse ethnic areas that then comprised 
Yugoslavia. For this purpose I selected a number of research 
sites. These included in addition to ©enËur and Gradenc in 
Slovenia; Lekenik and Bobovac in Croatia, as well as Slano in 
Dalmatia; in Serbia the town of Indjia as well as further study 
of Oraπac and its surrounding area; ÆupÊa in Bosnia, later, 
in 1964, supplemented by Maglaj; Bukovica in Montenegro 
and Veleπte and Labuniπte in Macedonia. Unfortunately, and 
largely for reasons of political difficulty, no villages in the 
Kosovo area were selected. This area was closed to me by the 
authorities in Belgrade with whom I had to work as part of an 
international exchange agreement.
Successes and Failures 
I made an application to the American National Science Foun-
dation and was awarded a grant and thus came to Yugoslavia 
for 18 months beginning in the summer of 1961. While in 
Yugoslavia I was also able to secure U.S. Department of State 
counterpart agricultural funds (explained above) to supple-
ment my grant monies. With these funds I was able to work 
with Universities and research institutes in Bosnia, Croatia, 
Macedonia and, especially Serbia, including parallel work in 
Slovenia. Under arrangements, which were set up, I was able 
to employ research teams of students to implement investi-
gations through questionnaires that I had drawn up with the 
assistance of Professors in the Department of Sociology at the 
University of Belgrade. Students from both the departments of 
sociology and ethnology were employed. Organizationally the 
research prospered best in Slovenia with the assistance of the 
late Professor Joæe GoriËar and particularly the help of Profes-
sor Zdravko Mlinar in sociology. In ethnology the initial help 
of Professor Vilko Novak was most useful and I also had the 
valuable assistance of Professor Slavko Kremenπek. As part 
of my overall program I conscientiously deposited copies of 
all my field materials in the pertinent university departments. 
However, regrettably when I attempted to find these docu-
ments some 40 years later I was not successful. 
My research also included the gathering of archival materials, 
OBZORJA STROKE tema Glasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 36
local vital records and original nominally specific household 
census records. The latter was made possible by the coopera-
tion of the Federal Statistical Office in Belgrade then led by 
the demographer Dr. Miloπ Macura Under a later National Sci-
ence Foundation research grant the original census recorded 
for 1948, 1953 (in some cases) and 1961 were computerized. 
Although I may be mistaken, I think that my records may be 
the only instance where these original records have been pre-
served. It was possible to do this computerization because I 
took copies of all of these records back with me to the United 
States when I left Yugoslavia at the end of 1962. Thousands 
of photographs were also taken. In each Republic I formally 
cooperated with a faculty member or researcher at an institute. 
The project was a great success in terms of material gathered 
and the overall results amounted to some tens of thousands of 
pages of typed field notes. From another perspective the project 
was a total failure in that this research data was not then used 
in any long-term collaboration There was some publication on 
my part but no joint reports. There were also other problems. 
In Bosnia one of the students, then at the law faculty, decided 
soon after the work was over to join the police. I later learned 
that he took all the papers from the Bosnia project that I had 
deposited at the Law Faculty of the University of Sarajevo 
with Professor Ante Fiamengo. When he joined the police he 
turned these paper over to the security services. As a result I 
was publicly denounced as a CIA agent in the Sarajevo paper 
Oslobodjenje. One question that they took particular interest 
in was in the part of the questionnaire concerning contacts 
outside the village community I had inserted the questions as 
to where men had served in the army. Immediately this was 
interpreted by the journalist who wrote the article as a matter 
of great strategic importance. When I learned of this article, 
which appeared in 1964, I immediately protested to the Yugo-
slav Embassy in the U.S. and, after much correspondence, 
was told, again, officially that I was welcome to continue to 
my researches in Yugoslavia. In the light of the horrors that 
accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s such 
a matter now seems most trivial. This student, whose name 
appeared on the transcription of the interviews, which he con-
ducted, obviously saw this as an opportunity to begin a career. 
The question itself had been placed in the questionnaire at the 
suggestion of a professor of sociology at the University of Bel-
grade with whose help the document had been originally con-
structed. This was the beginning of the decade when empirical 
sociological investigations were beginning in Yugoslavia. This 
survey was one of many that were conducted at this time in 
Yugoslavia both with and without international cooperation. 
Later such efforts were the subject of public denunciation as 
when one survey was not confined to villagers or urban work-
ers but focused on officials at the policy making level. 
The University of Graz Archive
Relatively complete records of these researches now exist in 
the Archive of the Southeast European Institute at the Univer-
sity of Graz where Professor Karl Kaser has established a col-
lection. Further, two students at the University of Graz have 
written their doctoral dissertations dealing with these materi-
als. One by Hannes Grandits deals with data primarily from 
Lekenik but also considers Bobovac. A revised version of his 
dissertation has been published in Vienna. Sigfried Gruber has 
also completed a dissertation on the village of Oraπac. In addi-
tion, Kaser and Grandits have edited a volume, also published 
in Vienna dealing with autobiographical materials collected, in 
the villages surveyed. I detail these events here because it is 
my strong position that the results of scholarly investigations 
be open and available to qualified researchers. 
Thanks to the efforts of Professor Joæe Hudales a complete 
file of ©enËur data has been reconstituted in Ljubljana. In 
this respect I am particularly delighted that the hundred of 
photos taken by the young Slovene ethnologist, Andrej Triler 
will now find their proper place in this archival collection. of 
Slovene ethnology and sociology. Unfortunately, Triller was 
tragically killed in a highway accident not long after the initial 
work in ©enËur had been completed in 1962.  But the material 
gathered can serve as a base line for future investigations. 
Value of a Community Study Approach
From a present-day point of view it is clear that in Western 
European and American social ‡ cultural anthropology the 
prominence of community studies no longer exists. Indeed it 
would be remarkable and a sure sign of stagnation if research 
objectives remained constant. However, in an recent issue of 
the journal Anthropology of East Europe Review the Czech 
anthropologist Petr Skalnik has suggested that the value of 
these studies still remains clear for those working from an East 
European perspective, that is within the culture concerned. 
The viewpoint being the study of one’s own society rather 
than the focus being on the “other.” Even in the U.S, restudies 
of communities have resulted in a number of publications. 
Role of Slovene Researchers
A unique value of the ©enËur study derives from this “insid-
ers” Slovene society has been characterized both as relatively 
stabile and of comparatively small scale with an overall high 
standard. When I visited Ljubljana in 2003 a reception was 
held to commemorate the original research I was amazed to 
discover that among those present and carefully noted were 
a significant number of the original student researchers from 
1962. Although younger than I, a number of these former stu-
dent researchers had already retired after full careers. Thus, 
if there is sufficient means and interest, it is now possible to 
reconstruct an oral history of the project including the specif-
ics of the research. Their recollections given at the reception 
were the highlight of that event. One of the points that was 
made concerned the then existing profound regional differ-
ences between relatively prosperous ©enËur and less well off 
Gradenc. I had originally selected Gradenc, with the help of 
my Slovene advisors, because of this economic contrast. It is 
most pertinent that the challenges of fieldwork to students 
from Ljublajana were dramatically apparent in their vivid 
recollections.
One key point in assembling such recollections would be to 
try to reconstruct the settings in which those interviews took 
place. These recollections, although now reaching across 
approximately two generations, should be revealing not only 
for reconstructing the experiences of fieldwork at that time but 
overall providing some, new, perspectives on Slovene social 
history but also on the nature of survey research itself. For 
tema OBZORJA STROKEGlasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 37
here we have both the questionnaire with its instructions and 
the way the research objectives were implemented. . Perhaps 
other such histories of research projects have already been 
done. My knowledge of the pertinent scholarly literature is 
too limited for me to be able to comment directly but even 
if such histories of research projects exist the experiences of 
those connected with the ©enËur investigation would, at the 
very least, provide a needed comparative perspective. 
Such an investigation would highlight not only the results of 
the research but how, in fact, the data was collected. Given 
the enormous corpus of published data on Slovene rural (and 
urban) life already published from anthropological, ethno-
logical and sociological perspectives. It hardly needs to be 
stressed that in 1962 I was 33 so that those informants who 
were over the age of 50 at that time, if, remarkably, some will 
still be alive, they would now be well into their nineties. Given 
my knowledge of my age mates in their mid to late seventies 
the question, of course, would also be even if they have sur-
vived to that age how many are able to well articulate their 
past experiences.
As I write these words a concurrent experience of a later date 
comes to mind. As earlier noted in a different context, in 1987 
Belgrade TV made an hour long documentary about the work 
of my wife and myself in the Serbian village of Oraπac. Our 
researches there began in 1953. At the time the film was being 
made I took many photographs which document how the work 
was done. In examining these pictures and reviewing the film 
footage I am now impressed, although it should come as no 
surprise, that many of the then vigorous participants in that 
film are no longer around.
Obviously, to an even greater degree, this applies to the pho-
tographs of ©enËur and Gradenc that were taken in 1962. Cer-
tainly a significant part of any restudy of ©enËur would neces-
sarily be to place these photographs in some historic context. 
In addition to the evident aim to identify the people and define 
the setting in the photographs as much as possible, an equally 
important matter would be to ascertain the value, or better put, 
the significance that these photos have, if any, for the contem-
porary inhabitants. These values would necessarily be not only 
for those who had some kin ties to those in the photographs 
or some personal knowledge of the people and specific scenes 
depicted but overall for those who now live in the same place 
in which the photos were taken is there a cultural continuity? 
How is it constituted?
These preliminary comments about the setting of the research 
and the ways in which the research was conducted raise more 
general questions. Overall these questions have to do with 
time and space and, most specifically, with people inhabiting 
a defined space over time. In thinking about these matters it 
might be useful to try to apply temporal categories as analyti-
cal frameworks. In this respect we can conceive of time (for 
the purposes of our analysis) as composed of three dimensions 
- cyclical, linear and liminal. The nature of these categories 
can be precisely defined and the socio-cultural specifics input-
ted into these frameworks. But it is not the specifics of the 
description which should be the end point of our analysis but 
rather they ways in which these frameworks interact which 
can give us, it is hoped, some partial insight into the ways in 
which change takes place.
JUGOSLOVANSKI SOCIALIZEM IN NJEGOVE PO-
SLEDICE SKOZI OBJEKTIV OSEBNIH IZKUŠENJ NA 
BALKANU 1953‡2004
Kratek povzetek osebne intelektualne zgodovine J. Halperna 
obsega tudi izËrpne podatke o podiplomskem usposabljanju 
na Univerzi Kolumbija v New York Cityju. Poleg tega, da 
je opravil specializacijo za sociokulturnega antropologa na 
Oddelku za antropologijo, je obiskoval predavanja na Ruskem 
inštitutu. Omenjeni so podatki o Ëlanih univerze, s katerimi 
je delal. Posebej zanimive so študije, ki jih je naredil skupaj s 
Philipom Moselyjem. V poznih tridesetih letih 20. stoletja je 
Mosely preživel leto dni na Balkanu, veËinoma v Jugoslaviji, 
kjer je prouËeval zadrugo. Tam je spoznal srbskega etnologa 
Milenka FilipoviÊa, ki je leta 1952 dobil štipendijo in prišel 
v Združene države Amerike. Halpern ga je tam spoznal prek 
Moselyja. Halpern je tako prviË prišel v Jugoslavijo leta 
1953 in 1954, da bi v Srbiji raziskoval za svojo doktorsko 
disertacijo. Pokojni Conrad Aarensberg, ki je, poleg svojega 
dela v drugih disciplinah, znan po svojih pionirskih študijah 
irskih kmetov, skupnosti in proevropski antropologiji, je bil 
njegov mentor pri predmetu antropologije.
 
V zakljuËku eseja avtor opisuje, kako je leta 1962 zaËel 
prouËevati vas ŠenËur in nadaljevanje svojega dela vse 
do sedanjih dni, ko dela skupaj s profesorjem Jožetom 
Hudalesom. Naj omenimo tudi to, da je Halpern poklonil 
kopije svoje obširne zbirke fotografij Slovenije arhivu 
Oddelka za etnologijo in kulturno antropologijo na Univerzi 
v Ljubljani. Omenjeni instituciji je poklonil tudi obširno 
zbirko knjig. V zbirki fotografij so tudi fotografije mladega 
etnologa Andreja Trilerja iz leta 1962, ki se je kmalu po 
zaËetku svojega sodelovanja s Halpernom smrtno ponesreËil 
v avtomobilski nesreËi.
 
Nenazadnje naj omenimo, da je Halpern poleg raziskav v 
Jugovzhodni Evropi, terensko raziskoval tudi v Jugovzhodni 
Aziji, zlasti v Laosu in na Aljaski, kanadski Arktiki kot 
tudi etniËne skupine v Združenih državah Amerike. Med 
slovenskimi raziskovalci, ki so pomagali Halpernu, naj 
omenimo zlasti Slavka Kremenška in Zdravka Mlinarja.
Datum prejema prispevka v uredniπtvo: 15. 12. 2005