INVITATION
Lecture presented by Professor Tanja Petrović (Ljubljana)
FISH CANNING INDUSTRY AND ITS LEGACIES IN THE ADRIATIC
From labor history to post-socialist heritage-making
Time: Tuesday 29 October, 15:30 - 17:00 (drinks after)
Place: Meertens Instituut, Amsterdam
Spinhuis room 218
Please register with irene.stengs@meertens.knaw.nl
The lecture discusses various aspects and consequences of the presence of the fish canning industry on the Yugoslav Adriatic coast and addresses complexities of the relationship between the local scale modernization and industrialization and global flows of canned fish. Drawing upon ethnographic work and interviews with former workers employed in fish-canning factories, it seeks to highlight the ways in which these memories complicate and challenge prevalent views of fish-canning industry as “primitive”, unwanted, “stinky”, marginal, and strongly un-preferred in comparison with another source of income – tourism.
Looking at both personal memories and public memorizations of labor in the fish canning factories, I argue that these factories did not only provide workers with an income, but created a framework for a meaningful social and community life. I look at the ways the memories and narratives of work in the fish-canning industry, as well as practices of memorization and heritage-making related to this industry engage with the current social and economic conditions, in which tourism is privileged over any other economic activity, and the maritime industry is globalized and detached from the ecosystem in which humans, the fish and the sea are closely interconnected.
Tanja Petrović is research advisor at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU and professor at the ZRC SAZU Graduate school in Ljubljana. Her research interests lie at the intersection of linguistic, social, and cultural phenomena in socialist Yugoslavia and its successor states. She is the author and editor of several books and a number of essays on linguistic and cultural identities and processes in former Yugoslav societies. Amongst them are Mirroring Europe: Ideas of Europe in Europeanization in Balkan Societies (Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2014) Serbia and its South: Southern Dialects between Language, Culture and Politics (in Serbian, Belgrade 2015), Political Parody and the Politics of Ambivalence (Annual Review of Anthropology 47, 2018).