How Doing Sport Became a Culture: Producing the Concept of Physical Cultivation of the Yugoslavs

This article deals with the concept of physical culture as a project used for formation of Yugoslav identity and creation of a new ‘Yugoslav body’. After the Second World War, the cultural politics of Yugoslavia entailed multifarious strategies for constructing the entity of Yugoslavs who were supposed to be united under the motto ‘Bratstvo i jedinstvo’ (Brotherhood and unity). Being one of the crucial ways for building such a collective, physical culture was defined as a legitimate right of the citizens, which brought to a development of specific ways of organization of free time in the socialist Yugoslavia. I will point out how doing sport became a proper ‘culture’ (in the affirmative sense of the term, as a synonymous with ‘cultivation’) that was considered to be one of the crucial parts of the project of making the Yugoslav people’s identity. I here draw on the recent views on socialism that suggest going beyond the Western/Eastern dichotomies and point to the multilayered qualities of the Yugoslav society. I argue that, although being constructed and manipulated by the regime, physical culture was a means for changing and enriching everyday lives of the Yugoslavs.