By Patrick Hyder Patterson

Yugoslavia was once distinctive one of the communist international locations of the chilly conflict period in its openness to blending cultural components from either socialism and capitalism. not like their opposite numbers within the international locations of the Soviet Bloc, usual Yugoslavs loved entry to a variety of buyer items and providers, from outfits and home equipment to shuttle corporations and discotheques. From the mid-1950s onward the political weather in Yugoslavia authorized, and later every now and then inspired, a consumerist way of life of purchasing, spending, buying, and having fun with that engaged the general public on a day by day foundation via glossy ads and revenues recommendations. In Bought and Sold, Patrick Hyder Patterson unearths the level to which socialist Yugoslavia embraced a client tradition often linked to capitalism and explores the function of consumerism within the federation's cave in into civil warfare in 1991.

Based on outstanding examine and that includes outstanding examples of Yugoslav print ads and mass tradition, this booklet reconstructs in usually dramatic element the increase of a tradition during which consumers' wishes trumped real human wishes. Yugoslavia, Patterson argues, grew to become a land the place the symbolic, cultural worth of patron items was once a main consider person and team identification. He indicates how a brand new, competitive enterprise institution promoted consumerist trends that normal electorate eagerly followed, whereas the Communist management alternately inspired and restricted the patron orientation.

Abundance translated into civic contentment and appeared to turn out that the regime may provide items and prone equivalent to these of the capitalist West, yet many Yugoslavs, either inside and out the circles of authentic strength, fearful in regards to the contradiction among the population's include of intake and the dictates of Marxist ideology. the outcome used to be a heated public debate over creeping consumerist values, with the recent lifestyle discovering fierce critics and, unusually for a communist kingdom, many passionate and vocal defenders. Patterson argues that consumerism used to be one of many serious components that held the multiethnic society jointly throughout the years of the Yugoslav "Good lifestyles" of the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies. With the industrial downturn of the Eighties, even though, the reliance on increasing consumerism eventually resulted in sour disillusionment, stripping the original Yugoslav version of its legitimacy and priming the population for mutual resentment, ethnic clash, and war.