THE SACRED, SACRILEGE, AND SYMBOLIC BOUNDATIES IN POSTSECULAR, POSTSOCIALIST SERBIA

Abstract

This paper will strive to address the novel manifestations and roles that sacrilege plays
in the postsecular world, and especially how it figuresin the symbolic battles waged in Serbia after
October 5, 2000 over which current has the indisputable right to form its postsocialist collective
identity – ethnic, ethical, ideological, religious.The focus will be on concrete incidents in Serbian
public space involving accusations of blasphemy and the ensuing debates, which have arguably
helpedestablish and maintain the symbolic boundaries in a society. The sample includes cases
which are mentioned in news portals available online and this corpus of empirical material consisting
of media content will be contextualized and subjected to discourse analysis. Of special interest
will be the ways in which both accusations of blasphemy and defenses against these accusations
can serve to draw lines around respective collective identities in symbolic divisions usually
closely corresponding with geopolitical ones. The sociocultural problems that will hopefully be
further illuminated are the modalities of the secular status of the state, freedom of religion and
freedom of speech, collective identities (most pertinently ethnic nationalism, especially when combined
with Eastern Orthodoxy in a postsocialist country), geopolitical influences, and postsecular
hybrids (especially establishing which are permissible in a community, and which are perceived as
impure mixing and as such sacrilegious).