Census and Sensibilities in Sarajevo

Abstract

During the latter part of the twentieth century, there was a country called Yugoslavia. Built on the ruins of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the post-World War II Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia was an ethnically diverse state comprised of six republics, which, by the 1960s, was committed to a foreign policy of non-alignment and to the domestic programs of worker self–management and “brotherhood and unity” among its peoples (see, e.g., Banac 1984; P. Ramet 1985; Shoup 1968; Zimmerman 1987). Like most other European states, the decennial census became a defining feature of Yugoslavia's sovereignty and modernity (Kertzer and Arel 2002: 7).