×


 x 

Shopping cart
Patrick Hyder Patterson - Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia - 9780801450044 - V9780801450044
Stock image for illustration purposes only - book cover, edition or condition may vary.

Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia

€ 60.91
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia Hardback. Num Pages: 388 pages, 20, tables. BIC Classification: 1DVWY; 3JH; HBJD; HBLW. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 241 x 164 x 29. Weight in Grams: 720.

Yugoslavia was unique among the communist countries of the Cold War era in its openness to mixing cultural elements from both socialism and capitalism. Unlike their counterparts in the nations of the Soviet bloc, ordinary Yugoslavs enjoyed access to a wide range of consumer goods and services, from clothes and appliances to travel agencies and discotheques. From the mid-1950s onward the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted, and at times encouraged, a consumerist lifestyle of shopping, spending, acquiring, and enjoying that engaged the public on a day-to-day basis through modern advertising and sales techniques. In Bought and Sold, Patrick Hyder Patterson ... Read more

Based on extraordinary research and featuring remarkable examples of Yugoslav print advertising and mass culture, this book reconstructs in often dramatic detail the rise of a culture in which shoppers’ desires trumped genuine human needs. Yugoslavia, Patterson argues, became a land where the symbolic, cultural value of consumer goods was a primary factor in individual and group identity. He shows how a new, aggressive business establishment promoted consumerist tendencies that ordinary citizens eagerly adopted, while the Communist leadership alternately encouraged and constrained the consumer orientation. Abundance translated into civic contentment and seemed to prove that the regime could provide goods and services equal to those of the capitalist West, but many Yugoslavs, both inside and outside the circles of official power, worried about the contradiction between the population’s embrace of consumption and the dictates of Marxist ideology. The result was a heated public debate over creeping consumerist values, with the new way of life finding fierce critics and, surprisingly for a communist country, many passionate and vocal defenders. Patterson argues that consumerism was one of the critical factors that held the multiethnic society together during the years of the Yugoslav "Good Life" of the 1960s and 1970s. With the economic downturn of the 1980s, however, the reliance on expanding consumerism ultimately led to bitter disillusionment, stripping the unique Yugoslav model of its legitimacy and priming the populace for mutual resentment, ethnic conflict, and war.

Show Less

Product Details

Publisher
Cornell University Press United States
Number of pages
388
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2012
Condition
New
Number of Pages
272
Place of Publication
Ithaca, United States
ISBN
9780801450044
SKU
V9780801450044
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Patrick Hyder Patterson
Patrick Hyder Patterson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.

Reviews for Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia
Bought and Sold is a splendid historical achievement that uncovers the lost realities of a lost country, and makes clearly visible a large part of what Yugoslavia was. Beautifully written and produced expertly by Cornell University Press, the book is bound to radically change and improve not just our understanding of the former Yugoslavia's consumer culture, but also our appreciation ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia


Subscribe to our newsletter

News on special offers, signed editions & more!