834707840

co Dubravka Stojanović

and were completed long ago. Hence, such consciousness changes not only our lives as individuals, but it has the power to change the past which was-believed to be just as it once happened. MutUating the history, authoritarian. consciousness draws from it anythińg that strengthens it, deliberately ne-glecting the elements that might ąuestion or relativize this consciousness. Particularly alarming is that this attitude prepares for our relation toward the futurę.

The main motive mentioned for introduction of the new history text-Looks in Serbia is the need to present history without the former communist ideological implications, and at the same time to devote morę attention to the national history. It is true that dogmatic Marxist-inspired simplifica-tion of history is largely replaced with historie interpretation, but one may still find examples of ideologically biased presentation of history. This brief report leaves no room for ąuotation of charactetistic examples. Yet, what is important to notę is that in addition to these superficial instances of ideological simplification, the new Serbian textbooks seem to perpetuate deeply ingrained class, Marxist determinism. It is no longer explicit, nor given as. a theoretical lecture book, and it might even be unconscious. Perhaps without the authors' intention, one may still get impression that the motivation oF history and at the same time its most significant determinant is the struggle between social classes. That impression is particularly emphasized by sępa— ratę lessons which describe position and struggle of the working class, both irv Serbia and in the world, without even the briefest description of any other social class. In this way, the working class is isolated from the rest of society and treated as the opponent rather than its constituent element. History is-thus reduced only to one dimension which determines it.

In hasty change of textbooks dictated by rapid tum of events on the Yugeslav soil, a new historie power — people, morę precisely Serbian people — was mechanically added to such a pattem of historie presentation. As al-ready mentioned, this new element is treated as a collective will, uniąue, ab-stract entity. It is determined by something very similar to the "spirit of pecple", which is best illustrated by characteristics and stereotypes which make it uniąue. It is described as good, honest, historically principled, flaw-less and morał, righteous historically victimized, warrior, victorius,somewhat misunderstood. Most of these attributes are recognizable in a multitude of examples frem the rich Serbian epic poetry, literaturę and overall value system. Identical with the predominant propaganda images in Serbia, these manifestations of the collective consciousness shape into a system, whose power is confirmed in practice, but with still unforeseeable conseąuences.

Ethnocentrism of the Serbian history books is already apparent from: their quantitative analysis. Since morę attention to the national history was-mentioned as the main reason for their change, in the new textbooks the ra-tio between the lessons devoted to the national and to the generał, world history is considerably altered. In the old textbooks that proportion was well balanced, while the latest ones devote as much as 73 per cent of the materiał to national history. This disproportion and inadeąuate distribution of the subject-matter alone create ethnocentric stereotypes, because in this way the national history becomes morę isolated than integrated into the generał framework. From such relationship one may easily draw the conclusion that the Balkans, and in particular the Serbian people there, is the "navel of the