Moral (Dis)order and Social Anomie: Concepts of Community and Society in Post-Socialist Serbia
Moral (Dis)order and Social Anomie: Concepts of Community and Society in Post-Socialist Serbia

Summary/Abstract: It is sometimes argued that post-socialist transformation in Europe brought so called “moral disintegration” of local communities. These ideas resonate well with the opinions of many people with whom I worked in Serbia during my fieldwork research in Novi Sad in the mid- 2000s and again in 2013-2014. My informants tend to evoke the Durkheimian idea that society was brought into existence by people’s moral beliefs and sense of obligation towards one another; if this became eroded, society begins to suffer from anomie. In this paper I investigate those widely shared beliefs and the ways they relate to and reveal the ideas about morality, community and society.

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