Socialist Pilgrimage as a Form of Reenactment
The aggressive secularization of Yugoslavia’s public sphere at the beginning of the socialist period entailed the marginalization of religious pilgrimages, restricting them to conservative groups who were politically sidelined and often pejoratively connoted in the official discourse.
In the new historical context, it was precisely the partisan-themed mobilities that took the social role of religious pilgrimages as their secular and ideologically more fitting equivalent. Therefore, a closer look at some of the conceptual discussions in pilgrimage studies can help to better understand the cultural meanings that underpinned these collective practices. Eade and Sallnow define pilgrimage as the field of mutually competing secular and religious discourses that, depending on the context, could reaffirm or dissolve the existing social order (Coleman and Eade, 2004; Eade and Sallnow, 1991). Beyond its importance for individual meaning-making, pilgrimage is seen as bearing implications for community-building. The interaction between the individual and the group comes to the fore in pilgrimage by transforming individual incentive, such as the need for change in one’s life or a search for the sacred, into collective goods through mass mobilization embodied in joint walking (Pace, 1989). Consequently, many scholars have stretched the concept to include explicitly secular practices, including “any journey undertaken as an act of homage, or as a quest, to a place such as a battlefield or a tomb that is of moral significance to the person making it” (Pazos, 2012, p. 1). Furthermore, in the past two centuries, the sacralization of politics has facilitated new forms of pilgrimage, as numerous nationalist groups and state-building projects have created their own set of national “shrines,” the attendance of which is explicitly referred to as “pilgrimage” by both participants and researchers (Eade and Katie, 2018; Guth, 1995; Mink and Neumayer, 2013; Rinschede and Bhardwaj, 1990).One of the factors that makes a certain place or route “sacred” and thus facilitates the emergence of pilgrimage is the notion of its having been visited or traversed by a person or supernatural entity that bears cultural significance for a certain group.
In that sense, pilgrimage often entails an explicit reference to the past mobility of venerated historical individuals or collectives by repeating the same mobility, and often also the specific acts performed during the original movement. In that sense, they can become part of the hegemonic cultural script that fosters the impression of historical continuity by blurring the temporal delineation between past and present (Baraniecka-Olszewska, 2020, p. 175). This makes pilgrimage related to reenactment, the practice understood as aiming “to advance historical understanding through an authentic simulation of past objects, events, practices, and experiences” (Agnew and Tomann, 2020, p. 20). However, this claim of authenticity, despite being essential to reenactment’s legitimacy as historical representation, calls for critical scrutiny of actors who claim the power to assign the label of authenticity (including the power dynamics that hide behind such claims), as well as of criteria that make a certain act or object capable of being labeled “authentic.” The fact that the cultural significance of the march destinations revolved around the reconstruction of the often gruesome events of World War II makes partisan marches akin to dark tourism (Agnew, 2020) in the sense that it engaged young people with the experience of death and dying. However, the narrative that was embodied through these scripted reenactments was that of active resistance against the fascists, almost completely sidelining the experience of “passive” victimhood of hundreds of thousands of inmates in concentration camps. This disbalance in portraying the character of the collective wartime experience derived from the general memory politics of Yugoslav authorities, which tried to subtly sideline commemoration of civilian suffering, instead emphasizing the celebration of the collective military prowess of Yugoslav citizens (Karge, 2010, pp. 139-140).The collective performance of specially designed commemorative acts in locations loaded with historical meaning was deemed to be as much a nod to the past as an action in service of the future.
In this sense, partisan marches were given a similar social function as religious pilgrimages in other historical contexts since one of the suppositions of religious pilgrimages was that pilgrims should experience physically embodied foundations of their faith in order to incorporate them into their activities and narratives upon returning home (Swatos, 2006). Similarly, marchers along the revolutionary tracks were expected by the authorities to internalize the patterns of behavior that made up “good” Yugoslavs, such as the adherence to the narrative of brotherhood and unity of Yugoslav nations and to the officially sanctioned interpretation of the People’s Liberation Struggle, applying them in their everyday settings. Thus, the Hosteling League of Yugoslavia declared in its founding principles that visiting the historical landmarks connected to the revolution “would fill them [young people] with love towards their fatherland and pride of belonging to it, [whereas] the bonding between youth from different regions and encounters between members of all nations of our country would develop awareness of the united brotherly community of our peoples, and their efforts would open new perspectives for their future civic duties as well as encourage its present efforts at preparing for those duties.”1 The trails, their destinations, and their gathering points were regarded in the official discourse not only as loaded with historical importance but as possessing the potential to improve the individuals and groups traversing them as they followed in the footsteps of ideological role models (known and unknown, individual and collective). With religious pilgrimages marginalized in a strictly secularized public sphere, the system of partisan marches offered an alternative path to personal transformation and improvement (notwithstanding its potential as a medium for the political elite to espouse its ideological tenets).On account of the similarities analyzed above, this research argues that Yugoslav partisan marches can be considered not only as a socialist versionRetracing the Revolution 111 of secular pilgrimage but also as a form of reenactment (or “reconstruction,” in the jargon of the time) of past events and acts of historically significant persons.
With time, the institutional actors involved in the organizational apparatus developed a whole set of authenticity criteria, combining actual historical research with the discursive labeling of desirable social practices as “partisan.” As will be shown, one of the most frequent arguments the organizers of marches used to promote their events as authentically recreating the partisan past was that they brought marchers to the authentic paths of wartime units, these paths being previously corroborated by living witnesses and historical accounts. However, there were also other aspects of World War II history that could be reenacted with a lesser or greater degree of historical verisimilitude. Thus, on the one pole, partisan marches entailed reenactments of battles and undercover operations that aimed to faithfully reproduce the course of past events, and on the other, they could loosely refer to a vaguely defined partisan lifestyle unrelated to concrete historical episodes.
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