Maja Petrović-Šteger

Dr Maja Petrović-Šteger

Independent Scholar Fellow 2014-15

Coming to Terms: Mental Hygiene in Contemporary Serbia

The proposed project is an ethnographic study of specific strategies of confronting the past and securing ‘peace of mind’ in contemporary Serbia. After the 1990s wars, Serbs have been called to reconcile themselves to their misdeeds; some of them are, however, increasingly coming to understand the postconflict period not as healing but as shameful and wearing. My research ethnographically addresses the conjunction between the political imperative for Serbs to reassess their recent history and what my informants in Belgrade call, in a more medicalised register, their ‘mental hygiene’. More particularly, I will examine a range of material practices and rhetorical strategies concerned with the militarisation of Serbian psychological security.

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Areas of interest

Anthropology Eastern Europe Tasmania Switzerland Former Yugoslavia Bodies Psychology Mental Health Mental Hygiene Serbia Time Imagination

Cohort

ISF1

Biography

Dr Maja Petrović-Šteger is a Social Anthropologist who has carried out research over a long term in the former Yugoslavia, Tasmania and Switzerland. Her particular interests lie in the anthropology of the body, anthropology of conflict and anthropology of mind. For twenty years, Maja's scholarship has attended to a variety of contexts in which bodies – living, dead, or in the form of medically usable remains – have attracted political, legal, scientific or artistic attention. With a corollary interest in how anthropology can illuminate our understanding of the mind, she has further examined psychological and military concerns with mental health, mental hygiene and neuro- security in Serbia. Her latest projects consider how is time (the past, the present and the future) imagined and dealt with in situations crying out for radical restitution or healing. She is focusing on visionary people and imaginal practices in Serbia, who, in a climate of hopelessness, intend radical social transformation premised on some notion of the common good. The research inquires into how individuals and groups understand their mediation of sociohistorical change.

Biographical details correct as of 11.02.25