Violence and Culture

Abstract

Violence is expressed in various forms in daily social life; the perpetrators may be both individuals and groups. It is present in most social spheres, politics, communication, culture, economy, etc. The goal of this paper is to view the phenomenon of violence in a continuity of cultural changes which have been developing in Serbia in the last twenty years. The initial assumption is that there is a constant shift of prevailing cultural patterns in which violence persists in various ways as an expressed phenomenon. Constant interpenetration of culture and violence is linked with the rise of the subculture of violence, which emerged within the framework of retraditionalization processes of the 1990s, as well as the progression to a culture of violence that emerged within the total criminalisation of the society of the time. In the post-transitional period, a large influence has been identified of a culture which has provisionally been named the violent culture, whose properties are ascribed to the following order of neoliberal and corporative capitalism. Violence, which is hailed by mass culture, the entertainment industry and material criteria of social success, is a mandatory satellite of establishing a new cultural paradigm. Education, new pedagogic approaches which develop rational and critical opinion and the development of an autonomous public sphere, are a part of the strategy in the struggle against the high rate of violence which is present in Serbian society nowadays.