FOUR AND A HALF DECADES OF “CONFUSED SILENCE”

Text topic: Changes

Text author: Владимир Пауновић

The purpose of this paper is a search for verified non-ideological significance and an analysis of the reasons for public neglect of the event called “Congress of Cultural Action in SR Serbia”, held in Kragujevac at the end of 1971. The paper starts from the fact that the Congress was the biggest relevant event in the field of redefinition of national cultural policy in Serbia in the 20th century, whose content should be viewed outside of the ideological framework. The first special hypothesis is that the main reason for the institutional neglect of this event was related to the opposite political views; the other hypothesis is that the so-called “marginal events” were autochthonous and were not directly connected with the Congress; and the third one implies that the most appropriate type of oblivion of this event is what we could call “forgetting as a confusing silence.” The aim of the research is to determine the real picture of the events preceding, during and after the Congress of Cultural Action, its significance and the reasons for forgetting such an event. We relied primarily on the method of “oral history”, with an analysis of the content of secondary sources. The paper strives for recommendations that would define the importance of abstracting ideological assumptions in a study of content that has scientific potential.