Uncanny Landscapes of Memory: “Bosnian Pyramids” and the Contemporary World-Making in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

In the past two decades, the debate on the role of religion and (in)tolerance in contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian society has not moved beyond the “top down” approach, both in the academic production of knowledge and in the public discourse. Focusing almost exclusively on religion as a collective phenomenon, correlated with historical processes of ethnic and national group identity and heritage formations, framed debate thus omits the critical “from below” view of the everyday experiences and beliefs, grounded and lived in specific immediate surroundings. Based on ethnographic research in central Bosnia, this chapter gives an anthropological account of a contemporary transitional and post-war landscape that is simultaneously the material world of people’s present everyday lives, the world of their efforts to make sense of experiences of the violent past, and the world in which they seek a meaningful future. It argues for the urgency of taking such grounded world-making and its subjectivities into consideration not only within the scholarly production of knowledge about Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also within discourses of reconciliation and (in)tolerance in the country.