doiSerbia

Temporality and discontinuity as aspects of smallpox outbreak in Yugoslavia

Trifunović Vesna (Institute of Ethnography SASA, Belgrade)

The paper demonstrates interconnection and role of certain social, political and cultural factors in 1972 Yugoslavian smallpox outbreak. It focuses on a cultural concept of time, denoted as temporal distance, and discontinuity between pre-socialist and socialist period in Yugoslavian history, as determinants that shaped the understanding of smallpox, risk perception and behavior with regard to the disease. The argument is that those two factors caused forgetting and disregarding of smallpox and thereby contributed to its abrupt distribution in the beginning of the outbreak. In the end are considered contemporary epidemiological implications of the reasoning that relies on the cultural notions of temporal distance and discontinuity.

Keywords: culture, discontinuity, temporality, memory, smallpox, Yugoslavia

Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 177026: Cultural heritage and identity