Deana Jovanović, "Staging the Promises: Everyday Future-Making in a Serbian Industrial Town" (Cornell UP, 2025)

May 12, 2025

Deana Jovanović, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, delves into the lives of residents in Bor, Serbia, a town caught between past prosperity and current decline. She explores how local authorities stage promises of a brighter future amidst economic instability. Jovanović highlights the ambivalence of hope and despair, reflecting on how these theatrical projections influence the community's aspirations. Through ethnographic insights, she reveals the complexities of navigating survival and change in a post-socialist landscape, where distant futures feel increasingly out of reach.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Drawn to Bor's Revival Performance

Deana Jovanović was drawn to the Serbian industrial town Bor due to its mining landscape and forgotten industrial history.
She observed how once-declining Bor was theatrically staged as a symbol of economic revival and hope for the future.

INSIGHT

Future Staging as Political Tool

Staging and performing promises of future acts as a political tool that shapes the present and governs people.
These staged futures in Bor echo past socialist heritage to induce hope alongside power dynamics.

INSIGHT

Promises Blur Reality and Fiction

Promises of better futures are staged through repeated performances blending fact and fiction to create reality effects.
People actively participate, becoming actors in these performances that entangle power and hope.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Built on the shifting grounds of post-Yugoslav transformation, Staging the Promises examines how the residents of Bor — a Serbian copper-mining town marked by both socialist prosperity and post-socialist decline — became spectators to the staged enactments of promised futures. Deana Jovanović traces how local authorities and the copper-processing company theatrically projected visions of economic, infrastructural, environmental, urban, and post-industrial renewal. The book asks: What impact did the staging of promises have on the residents? What temporal, material, and political effects did these performances generate? How did they shape the citizens' futures and their present?

Jovanović offers many ethnographic examples of ambivalence in people's orientation to their futures, while residents balanced hope with despair, disillusionment, and dismay. Staging the Promises highlights how the performances shaped the present, and how, in a Gramscian twist, they sustained hope alongside power dynamics that residents often criticized.

Staging the Promises: Everyday Future-Making in a Serbian Industrial Town (Cornell UP, 2025) assesses the performative ways through which contemporary capitalist futures are remade. For Jovanović, Bor represents a site that reflects a current global trend: staging the promises of enhanced futures today play a significant role in contemporary populist politics. Through them, she argues, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people's horizons.

Deana Jovanović is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. She ethnographically studies how people in late-industrial and post-socialist environments shape futures, interact with pipes and cables, and live with risks and airborne particles. She has published widely on these topics in internationally recognized journals.

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, development studies, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology