Remembrance, History, and Justice. Coming to Terms with Traumatic Pasts in Democratic Societies

The two chapters in the last section further unveil the inaccuracy of the institutional and ideological narratives on BiH. Nebojša Šavija-Valha’s chapter on one of the ‘native’ concepts of gathering and perceiving one’s place in society is especially important. As Svjetlana Nedimović notes in her commentary, ‘by the standards of mainstream politics, raja is a political subject aborted’ (195), but it is nevertheless an important survival and pleasure-producing strategy that largely predates socialist Yugoslavia. Moreover, by enabling social conjunctions in otherwise disjunctive social situations, it fits to a considerable extent to the former concept of ‘brotherhood and unity’ but also, ironically, to hegemonic projections of a desirable future for the BiH’s society alike. Commenting on the volume’s chapters, Armina Galijaš and Hrvoje Paić note, perhaps generalizing too abruptly, that most of them have in common ‘the (un)calculated critical pessimism as the cognitive starting point’ (75). On the other hand, a cultural anthropologist’s particular sensitivity, referred to also in the volume’s introduction (Jansen, Brković, and Čelebčić, 18, 22), is supposed to be able to detect research topics that are either typical of the society in question or are especially important. So, if ‘the analyses are tendentially focused on social actors often giving an impression of being locked in trauma, crisis and related social structures’ (Galijaš and Paić, 75), we should presume that this focus is justified. However, I do understand the concerns Galijaš and Paić put forward about ‘scientifically legitimising new negative stereotypes of “Balkan” societies’ and, consequently, reproducing ‘colonial knowledge with its power hierarchy between the “Balkans” and “Europe”’ (76). Although one should not confront such a possibility by inventing resistance where there is only resignation to be found, some chapters in this volume present actors with the capacity to bring forth alternative models of an ‘ordinary everydayness’, to challenge the prevailing ones.