Abstract
The chapter introduces my ethnographic and sociolinguistic work and shows that the study may well facilitate an understanding of cultural minorities in Europe, and of the delicate interplay that occurs in their lives between language and ethnic and/or religious identification. This chapter moreover clarifies my methodological choices. I have chosen a qualitative approach anchored in the method of participant observation to be able to grasp more fully a wide spectrum of identity conceptions among my subjects. The core of the book thus consists of my empirical findings from interviews with Sephardim in Sarajevo. I combine these empirical findings with the theoretic framework developed in Chap. 2.
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- 1.
A challenge with narratives of the past and present, that is, oral history, is the possibility that the researcher influences the narrative in a certain direction (cf. Niethammer 1994: 209). Nevertheless, the method offers a contribution to the relationship between individual and collective memory, to the process of remembrance and to identity constructions through historic storytelling.
- 2.
The reason why I made a film with the interviews was to get a more comprehensive experience and understanding of the interviewees themselves (e.g., capturing the interviewees’ body language). Moreover, I wanted to impact audiences beyond the academia. The film has been screened in academic as well as nonacademic settings, for example, at Goldsmiths, University of London (7.12.2017); at Bajit, the house for Jewish culture in Stockholm (1.2.2018); and at Centro Sefarad Israel in Madrid (5.3.2018). It was moreover part of the BH Film Program at Sarajevo Film Festival (August 10–17, 2018). Linda Jiménez, at the English corner of Radio Sefarad, made an interview with me about the film: http://www.radiosefarad.com/jewish-history-in-sarajevo-with-director-jonna-rock/. On 6 February 2019 the film was shown at the Wiener Library, London.
- 3.
- 4.
The Last of the Sarajevo Ladinos (2018) is my 04:21-minute-long documentary with English subtitles: https://vimeo.com/286967723. In this short film Erna Kaveson Debevec and Jakob Finci are having a conversation in Judeo-Spanish, reflecting upon an ending of their lives.
- 5.
Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, as well as Montenegrin are based on the same Neoštokavian dialect (Ekavian and Ijekavian). These languages are structurally identical and inter-comprehensible to 95%. The situation with the Scandinavian languages is different even if the languages partly are inter-comprehensible. Swedes understand almost everything in Bokmål (which is one of the standard Norwegian languages) but they have difficulties to understand Nynorsk (which is the other Norwegian standard). Bokmål is similar to ‘clearly pronounced Danish.’ Swedes living in the south of Sweden, in Skåne, can better understand Danish than Swedes from other parts of the country. Usually, however, Swedes understand Danish only if they are in contact with Danish speakers. This is surprising, since Danish and Swedish are both East Nordic languages whereas Nynorsk is a West Nordic language.
- 6.
Hotel Evropa was the central motif of Danis Tanović’s award-winning film Death in Sarajevo (2016).
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Rock, J. (2019). Introduction and Methodology. In: Intergenerational Memory and Language of the Sarajevo Sephardim. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14046-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14046-5_1
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