Temporality and Discontinuity as Aspects of Smallpox Outbreak in Yugoslavia Cover Image

Temporality and Discontinuity as Aspects of Smallpox Outbreak in Yugoslavia
Temporality and Discontinuity as Aspects of Smallpox Outbreak in Yugoslavia

Author(s): Vesna Trifunović
Subject(s): Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Health and medicine and law, Post-War period (1950 - 1989)
Published by: Етнографски институт САНУ
Keywords: culture; discontinuity; temporality; memory; smallpox; Yugoslavia;

Summary/Abstract: 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.

  • Issue Year: LXV/2017
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 127-145
  • Page Count: 19
  • Language: English