Tanja Petrović
On Natural and Unnatural in Language (and Beyond)
This talk aims to scrutinize the nature and meanings of the ongoing debates on language in Serbian society by juxtaposing the ways the notion of un/naturalness is employed in these debates. I particularly focus on debates concerning two current issues: gender sensitive language use, on the one hand, and the language politics in Serbia (specifically, the relationship between Serbian standard idiom and other languages derived from once common Serbo-Croatian, as well as the relationship between the Serbian standard and dialects), on the other. I point to the discrepancy between the seemingly disinterested and »objective« nature of the the arguments that draw on un/naturalness (of language, its use, its patterns, and its speakers), and gendered, economic and social relations these arguments both depend on and produce, arguing that the un/naturalness in language is never an »objective« and universal category, but must always be observed through an intersectional lens.
About the Plenary Speaker
Tanja Petrović is a principal research associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU and professor of the ZRC SAZU Graduate School. She is interested in the uses and meanings of socialist and Yugoslav legacies in post-Yugoslav societies, as well as in linguistic, cultural, political, and social processes that shape the reality of these societies. She is the author and editor of several books and a number of articles and essays in the fields of linguistic anthropology, anthropology of post-socialism, memory studies, masculinity, gender history, heritage studies, and labor history. Amongst them are Yuropa: Yugoslav Legacy and Politics of Future in Post-Yugoslav Societies (Fabrika knjiga 2012), an edited volume Mirroring Europe: Ideas of Europe in Europeanization in Balkan Societies (Brill Publishing 2014), Serbia and its South: “Southern Dialects” between language, culture and politics (Fabrika knjiga 2015), as well as Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army (forthcoming with Duke University Press).