9: Dismembering community

Question 1

Overview of film:

Answer 1

• Bosniaks. These are people you have Muslim heritage.
• Second big group in Bosnia are Serbs – Christian Orthodox heritage
• Croats – Catholic heritage.

Way to distinguish between these groups is by family heritage in terms of religion.

Question 2

Few exceptions:

Answer 2

• Some people do look a little bit different. Women in film was wearing headscarf in a particular way that indicates she was of Muslim heritage.
• Many of the Croatian wear headscarf’s also, but in different way.
• Some people belong to various/multiple/other ethno groups.

Question 3

All people that live in Bosnia are…

Answer 3

BOSNIANS.

All citizens of Bosnia and Herz included those who do not feel of belonging to “bosniaks” “serbs” or “Croats”

Question 4

When war ended there was a peace agreement that…

Answer 4

divided up the country more or less in terms of these ethnonational groups. 1995 war ended.

Now more or less most Bosniaks live in one part, most Serbs live in another part, and most Croats live in another part.

To get to this situation a lot of violence was necessary.

Question 5

Ethnic cleansing

Answer 5

• including genocide. Neatly organised separation of ethnic national groups, in way in which people have their own mini states – they function more or less as mini state. To get there, people have to go through ethnic cleansing.
They had to be separated if they wanted a national state. And only way they could be separated was through violence. 100,000 died. 2m became refugees (half of the population).

• An extreme case of starting with a national model – that everyone should have their own state/territory, - and you try to apply it to a place where people are actually very mixed with each other, this is the result that you get.

Question 6

Bosnaks, serbs and croats are:

Answer 6

nations. All three of them are imagined communities.

Question 7

It exists as a social construct:

Answer 7

As a consequence of people feeling a sense of belonging. Sense of belonging is materialized in many ways, flags, football teams etc. Also Institutionalized = UN. It is also flagged daily.

Question 8

Nationalism

Answer 8

• Nationalism is a discourse – a way of talking and representing in the world. Starts from the idea that the world is divided up in nations. That all of us belong to a particular nation. It’s a primordial view (its always been like that). Idea is that ideally every nation should have its own state. That’s becaseu the people of a nation are seen to share a certain culture, and it would be best off if they spent it with other people who also shared their culture.

Question 9

All large scale communities are….

Answer 9

imagined, social constructs. Always imagined because you will never meet all these other people.

Question 10

Nationalist discourse is a system of..

Answer 10

classification of people.

( a discourse that says everyone belongs to a nation, and has a state)

• That means culture is being reified, being made into a thing, treated as if it is a thing. E.g. in village: creation culture is only ours, therefore we have to separate from others and have our own state.
• According to this view it is the most important thing to belong to a group.

Question 11

Nationalist discourse relies on…

Answer 11

cultural relativism but problematically reifies national ‘cultures’, insisting on discrete boundaries between them
- this discourse enjoys large degree of hegemony today: part of common sense for many; framework that sets the ‘terms of debate’ (e.g. UN)

Question 12

Problems for nationalists:

Answer 12

e.g. mixed marriages. The problem is not that there exist other people that belong to other ethno nations. The problem is that there are people that are not clearly classifiable and don’t fit nearly in a national grid of classification. They are anomalies. They are the main problem for nationalist thinking. E.g. Husband was a croat, and wife as a serb etc.

Question 13

This discourse of nationalism should be not be seen as something that…

Answer 13

belongs to the 3rd world.

This is a very European idea, western idea. At the heart of western civilisation. As people in Bosnia like to point out very often, became infamous in 1990 s because of ethic cleansing and genocide. They are often keen to point out that until 1990 people in Bosnia lived very mixed in terms of ethno national belonging and that there weren’t many places left in Europe were this was the case. Because the other places had already had their ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Question 14

Malkki: Mosaic model

Answer 14

•clear idea where boundaries lie.

(A classification of human beings that is very attractive order, but that is also not in sync with experience of being human. It would be impossible to classify humans in this way)

Question 15

But mosaic view also is largely….

Answer 15

hegemonic in the world today.

Without all those states that claim to be states of nations. Without all the sports and competitions, cultural events, political summits, that tend to represent themselves as based in that classification. As people are competitors representing these nations.

• This classification of people into nation is a major legitimisation and organisational factor in the world today. Therefore it has become a big part of the common frame work that people share today. Thus it has become in a large extent hegemonic.

Question 16

FILM:

Answer 16

• Film shows how very subtly the atmosphere in the village changes. Increasingly people starting to stay with own people (‘co-nationals’) because they are scared. Increasingly they play the part of the culture that divides them, which is religious heritage.

Increasingly they are going to the mosque and church in catholic case. Then totally separated.

They now live with their own where they can be safe.

People come to villiages that belong to croats that have been expelled from their old village which was bosniaks.

• Being in the right palce, and having the right national belonging, became a matter of life or death.
• How can you make sense of this violence? National belonging in political violence? Hayden tries to address this issue.

Question 17

Hayden 1996

Answer 17

• how political processes may favour the imagination of one community (here: ethnonational ones: Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak/Muslim, etc) over that of another (Yugoslav)
• not ‘ancient hatreds’ but a modern process: the discourse of the ethnically defined nation-state provided ‘the inducement for mass violence’
• the only way to make the actual situation resemble that of the national mosaic model was through violence: murder and expulsion (‘ethnic cleansing’)
• He says communities can be imagined, but if thats the case he says, that large scale communities can also be unimagined. This is what happened with Uslavia. People felt a belonging to this bigger state. Still felt belonging to smaller senses of belonging.. But one of them was bigger. This sense of belonging was unimagined. (before 1990).
• Instead they after started feeling a sense of THE belonging to these smaller places soniaks/serbs/croats
• There is a logic there that can be traced. It’s the necessity of violence in order to get from a totally mixed pattern of habitation to a separate pattern of habitation.
• This happened after the first multiparty elections is Bosnia – when this process was set in motion.

Question 18

Great Hayden quote:

Answer 18

‘The disintegration of Yugoslavia into its warring components in 1991-2 marked the failure of the imagination of a Yugoslav community. This failure of the imagination, however, had real and tragic consequences: the Yugoslav community that could not be maintained, and thus has become unimaginable, had actually existed in many parts of the county. Indeed, it is my argument that the spatial patterning of the war and its terrible ferocity are due to the fat that in some regions the various Yugoslav peoples were not only coexisting but also becoming increasingly intermingled. In a political situation premised on the incompatibility of its components, these mixed territories were both anomalous and threatening since they served as living disproof of the nationalist ideologies. For this reason, the mixed regions could not be permitted to survive as such, and their populations, which were mixing voluntarily, had to be separated militarily.’ (Hayden 1996: 768)

Question 19

Haydens quote explained:

Answer 19

• The idea that these people could not live together in one political unit/slate. Even though they had always lived together. Now this was a bad idea etc. If that was the case he said, these mixed territories were anomalous. They could not be categorised properly. They couldn’t be located properly in a system of classification. IF that was the case they were therefore threatening this nationalist order. They therefore had to be undone, this is why so much violence was invested.
• Points out some important paradoxes: conflicts between communities, cased in primordial terms.

Question 20

Appadurai 1998

Answer 20

• addresses the issues of classification and nationalism
• Links with questions of globalisation
• Many people thought nationalism would become less important as globalization was increasing, and more connection between people, more travel, more trade etc. People expected it to become less important.
• He says even though people are thinking it is becoming less important, we are confronted with all these outbursts of nationalism.
• He says there is a paradox, we are supposed to be becoming a global village, in which differences are meant to be coming less important, but we actually see a rise in nationalist and violence

Question 21

Appadurai (1998) wants to focus on why it is so…

Answer 21

violent.

• He says much of that violence is focused on bodys. There is a system to this madness and logic underlying this madness.
• Again he says this has to do with classification.
• He turns to structuralist thinking Mary Douglas. If every nation should have its own territorial state, then we get violence targeted at those bodies who are transgressing those boundaries. Either out of place (dirt) matter out of place, and that body would be removed. Other bodies, the ones that are not easily categorizes, because they don’t feel a sense of ethnocentric belonging, they are anomalous, and they also need to be eliminated. These bodies pose a problem for nationalist logic.
• In other words, what globalisation does, it makes us meet much more different people. People who we are not entirely sure how to classify, because we do not have the tool to do that, world becoming more complicated. Classification becomes a challenged.
• But whole model relies on classification. In these situations of radical uncertainty, nationalism becomes violent, to make this form of certainty when this is uncertainty. TO impose classification as logical and a thing that makes sense in a situation where there is actually a lot of uncertainty.