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A Lifetime of Crisis. The Story of a Dalmatian Peasant in the Mid-20th Century
Journal
Ethnologia Balkanica
Volume
19
Pages / Article-Number
291-308
Keywords
Migration, violence, memory, Yugoslavia, 20th century, historical anthropology
Abstract
This paper explores a Serbian-Orthodox peasant’s traumatic experiences and his strategies to cope with them, as related in his autobiography. He wrote it down at the early age of thirty, in the years after World War II. The critical events in his life had various causes: poverty, family conflicts, migration, political convictions, communal unrest, deportation and war. Their density make a whole lifetime and are closely entangled with the history of Yugoslavia. Carefully contextualized and combined with further written and oral information about his family, Stevo’s lifestory constitutes an excellent case for a historical-anthropological lifeworld study, demonstrating how macrohistory influences microhistory and vice versa.
