Remembering Yugoslavia: Board Game Monopoly and Cultural Memory

Zala Pavšič's study examines the 1986 Yugoslav edition of Monopoly, published by Kocka, as a site of cultural memory, arguing that the meaning of a board game lies as much in how its players receive it as in its physical design. Drawing on interviews with Slovenian players who grew up during the 1980s and 1990s, the work contends that the game's significance shifts across generations and across the political upheavals that followed Yugoslavia's disintegration. Its central thesis is that objects communicate through the projections of their viewers, and that the Yugoslav Monopoly serves as a revealing case of this dynamic.

The most striking findings concern how younger players interpreted the board's geography. Claims that the game encoded Slovenian superiority proved to be largely retrospective projections of later nationalist stereotypes. The field ordering, which runs roughly south to north and ascends in value, reads as a neutral geographic and economic arrangement rather than an explicit political message. Many players knew the resort names only as abstract, sometimes fictional-sounding words, learning their real locations later through travel or school maps, with parents and relatives serving as the primary sources of geographic explanation.

The study also documents the game's afterlife in Slovenian public discourse, where Monopoly functions as a metaphor for property accumulation and national self-interest. Interviewees reported strong nostalgic attachment to the game, which the author reads as one of the few durable markers of a shared Yugoslav cultural habitus. That habitus, the author concludes, faded quickly within a single generation, leaving the board game as a lasting trace of a country that no longer existed in the minds of its children.

The scope is focused geographically on Slovenia and temporally on players who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, rather than on Yugoslavia as a whole. The analysis is qualitative and interpretive, grounded in interview material and material culture theory, and it advances its argument through reception studies rather than quantitative data.