The Importance of Being Patriotic: Enregistered Connections in Croatian Minority Activism

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a school in a village in Vojvodina, Serbia, where teaching in Croatian has been introduced, this article analyses relationships maintained between Croatian minority activists, the teaching staff at the school, and representatives from Croatian state institutions who visited. This minority context is especially sensitive as, following the wars that accompanied the break-up of the Socialist Yugoslav state into primarily nationally defined states, Serbo-Croatian split into two mutually intelligible standards, Serbian and Croatian. The article examines the contexts of such visits, with a focus on what was at stake in the encounters and how different participants in minority politics manage various connections (veze) with Croatian state institutions. In particular, it describes how a hegemonic register consisting of tropes, or ideologemes, relating to domoljublje (patriotism) and caring for/preserving Croatian national identity featured in these interactions. This article makes the ethnographic argument that some activists primarily used this patriotic register non-referentially, its use indexing the pursuit of connections with Croatian state institutions, whilst other activists used the patriotic register referentially. Nevertheless, it is argued that when disputes occurred, “pro-national” activists used the enregistered tropes referentially, in so doing disrupting the networks of activists who used them in a primarily non-referential sense. Finally, the consequences and wider implications of this are explored.