TattooYU: Tattooed Souvenirs from the Yugoslav People’s Army and Regimes of Memory of the Body Inscribed with Socialism

Abstract

The paper focuses on the first mass imprints on the body in the entire region of the former Yugoslavia, which eternally marked members of its armed forces. Through bodies permanently imprinted with socialist history and narrations of tattooed solders from the Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA), I install tattoos from YPA in-between the subversion of power and the incorporation of the dominant ideology, in the antithesis between uniformity and subjectivity. Above all, tattoos from YPA function as a mnemotechnical practice of recollection of the cultural memory, which awakens narrations and the regimes of memory as well as the regimes of memorization of the YPA, socialism and the period of (post) transition. Whereas the collected ethnographical material will sustain the claims made above, the situations in which the ethnography was impossible will be discussed further. Rejection, reflex silence or refusals of collaboration are all peculiar modes through which the paper emphasises the importance of the “ethnography of absent” (Telban). In this vein, they represent a fertile springboard to discuss notions of productive oblivion (Kuljić), forgetting (Ricoeur) and the “eloquent reticence”. The recollection of negative sentiments (as a way of activating the past) did not only materialize in tattooees’ non-responses. Tattoos from YPA also triggered practices of extreme permanent tattoo concealment (e.g. cicatrisation, cauterization) that do not fit into the classical anthropological milieu as practices of embellishment, rites of passage, strengthening the pain-tolerance threshold, etc. Instead, I see these practices as a preliminary phase of oblivion and as ways of “deideologization”. Furthermore, the paper supplements Connerton's “habitual memory” preserved in the body and conserving the past in the memory, with its material constitutional side on the body – the tattoo.