PoSoCoMeS Seminar #25. Memory Politics and the Serbian Orthodox Church: K. Hofmeister & Z. Bogumił

At this PoSoCoMeS seminar, Karin Roginer Hofmeister discusses her book entitled “Remembering Suffering and Resistance Memory Politics and the Serbian Orthodox Church” (CEU Press, 2023) with Zuzanna Bogumił.
About the book
Assessing issues related to the Orthodox Church from an academic, secular point of view is a sensitive matter. However, by tracing and interpreting the engagement of the Serbian Church with the memory of Serbian heroic victimhood in World War II through a kind of “methodological agnosticism,” this volume has managed to tackle the subtle topic in a very delicate and value-neutral way. Arguing that the search for a collective memory is particularly urgent in the face of societal uncertainty and that religious institutions often use their memory potential to reaffirm their public relevance, the book examines the motivations, forms, strategies, and outcomes of a wide range of mnemonic activities the Serbian Orthodox Church engaged in following the upheavals caused by the collapse of Yugoslav socialism, the violent dissolution of the country, and the fall of the Milošević regime. These activities, taking place within the memory fields framed by the post-socialist, post-conflict, and post-secular horizons, took liturgical and non-liturgical forms, often involving a hybrid fusion of the two. As a result of this mnemonic endeavor, the author argues, the Church was successful in reasserting its power and legitimacy in the public sphere of post-2000 Serbia.
Author
Karin Roginer Hofmeister is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer in Holocaust Studies at the Institute of International Studies at Charles University in Prague, and coordinator of the Malach Centre for Visual History. She holds Ph.D. in Area Studies from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. She also studied at the SSEES, UCL, and the University in Belgrade. Her research focuses on contemporary history in Southeast Europe, especially on religious institutions and their engagement in re-constructing collective memory and identity.
Discussant
Zuzanna Bogumił works at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology University of Warsaw. She specializes in memory studies with a special focus on memory of Soviet repressions and the entanglements between memory and region in Central and Eastern Europe. Her recent published book is More than Alive: The Dead, Orthodoxy and Remembrance in Post-Soviet Russia (with T. Voronina, Peter Lang, 2023). Currently she is the Principal Investigator of the project “Memory of Soviet Repressions in post-multi colonial post-soviet spaces” funded by the National Science Centre in Poland.