Abstract
When I undertook an oral history project for the first time, during my doctoral studies in history, it was for many of the usual idealistic reasons. My research examined the construction and evolution of individual and local memories of twentieth-century violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina and how the state’s frequent manipulation of its official histories impacted them. I wanted to not only learn how history is experienced on the ground, but also understand how peoples’ experiences and memories affect the dynamics of postconflict societies. I therefore loved the disciplinary literature’s focus on speaking truth to power and giving voice to the voiceless.2 Once I found myself in the field trying to put these lofty ideas into practice, however, I discovered that giving voice to the voiceless was more difficult and ambiguous than I had realized. I struggled to find willing interviewees. At the time, as a doctoral student desperate to get her research done, this was a source of stress and shame. Now that I am able to reflect on the process, I view my refusals as part of an important reality: people have far more complex relationships to remembering and speaking about the past than we often acknowledge. My recruitment challenges therefore got to the heart of the mnemonic phenomena that I was interested in studying.
All of them have their own stories, I mean they watch from their own point of view, and there are three different histories, and that is one of the reasons why I don’t fancy history very much, because the winners always write the history.
—Elvir1
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Notes
See, e.g., Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York, 1990);
Luisa Passerini, ed., Memory and Totalitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina Federal Statistics Office, Population of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1996–2006 (Sarajevo: Federal Office of Statistics, May 2008).
I have only found two English-language academic studies that looked at war in the region: Azra Hromadzic, “Challenging the Discourse of the Bosnian War Rapes,” in Living Gender after Communism, eds. J. E. Johnson and J. C. Robinson (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2007), 169–84;
Max Bergholz, “The Strange Silence: Explaining the Absence of Monuments for Muslim Civilians Killed in Bosnia during the Second World War,” Eastern European Politics & Societies 24, 3 (2010): 408–34.
M. Vukmanović et al., Bihać u Novijoj Istoriji (1918–1945): Zbornik radova sa Naučnog skupa održanog u Bihaću 9. i 10. oxtobra 1986. godine, Tom I (Banja Luka: Institut za istoriju, 1987);
G. Jokić, Bihać: grad prvog zasjedanja AVNOJ-a (Bihać and Belgrade: Turističko društvo, 1977).
This period is most extensively immortalized in a two-volume collection published by the local AVNOJ museum, which contains thousands of documents related to those ten months: M. Krivokapić et al., eds., Bihaćka Republika, Prva Knjiga: Zbornik Članaka (Bihać: Izdanje Muzeja Avnoja i Pounja, 1965);
M. Krivokapić et al., eds., Bihaćka Republika, Druga Knjiga: Zbornik Članaka (Bihać: Izdanje Muzeja Avnoja i Pounja, 1965).
For an overview of World War II in the region, see Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1994);
Walter R. Roberts, Tito, Mihailovic and the Allies, 1941–1945 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973);
Richard West, Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1994).
Wayne S. Vucinich, “Postwar Yugoslav Historiography,” The Journal of Modern History 23 (1951): 41–57.
These included, e.g., soon-to-be Croatian president Franjo Tudjman’s doctoral thesis, which questioned Croatian guilt in World War II, to a revised biography of Tito by Vladimir Dedijer, who had once been Tito’s official biographer. See Franjo Tudjman, Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy, revised edition, trans. Katarina Mijatovic (New York: M. Evans, 1996);
Vladimir Dedijer, Novi Prilozi za biografiju Josipa Broza Tita (Zagreb: Mladnost, 1980).
On the Croat issue, see Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin, “The Monument in the Main City Square: Constructing and Erasing Memory in Contemporary Croatia,” in Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory, ed. Maria Todorova (London: Hurst and Company, 2004), 180–96.
On the Serb issue, see Bette Denich, “Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of Genocide,” American Ethnologist 21 (1994): 367–90.
D. Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica: Europe’s Worst Massacre since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997).
P. Andreas, “The Clandestine Political Economy of War and Peace in Bosnia,” International Studies Quarterly 48 (2004): 29–51;
M. Pugh, “Post-War Political Economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Spoils of Peace,” Global Governance 8 (2002): 467–82;
T. Donais, “The Political Economy of Stalemate: Organised Crime, Corruption and Economic Deformation in Post-Dayton Bosnia,” Conflict, Security and Development 3, 3 (December 2003): 359–82.
M. Hanson, “Warnings from Bosnia: The Dayton Agreement and the Implementation of Human Rights,” The International Journal of Human Right 4, 3–4 (Autumn 2000): 86–104;
M. Weller and S. Wolff, “Bosnia and Herzegovina Ten Years after Dayton: Lessons for Internationalized State Building,” Ethnopolitics 5, 1 (March 2006): 1–13;
F. N. Aolain, “The Fractured Soul of the Dayton Peace Agreement: A Legal Analysis,” in Reconstructing Multiethnic Societies: The Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, eds. D. Sokolovic and F. Bieber (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 63–94.
My approach to interviewing was influenced by the work of people like Alessandro Portelli, who argues that oral history is about searching for meaning; Ronald Grele, who sees interviews as negotiating the dialectical tension of history and myth in people’s minds; and Henry Greenspan, whose methodology brings academic interpretation into the interview space, as an important part of it, rather than as a result of it. See Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991);
Grele, “Movement Without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History,” in The Oral History Reader, first edition, eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 1998), 38–52;
Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony, second edition (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2010).
See, e.g., Malcolm, Bosnia; John B. Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
See, e.g., Stevan M. Weine, When History Is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999).
On rebuilding, see G. Hovey, “The Rehabilitation of Homes and Return of Minorities to Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Forced Migration Review 7 (2000): 8–11.
For critiques of the international community’s involvement in various aspects of the conflict, see, e.g., David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995);
Pierre Hazan, Justice in a Time of War: The True Story behind the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2004);
Isabelle Delpla, “In the Midst of Injustice: The ICTY from the Perspective of Some Victim Associations,” in The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-war Society, eds. X. Bougarel, E. Helms, and G. Duijzings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 211–34.
Luisa Passerini, “Memories between Silence and Oblivion,” in Memory and Totalitarianism, ed. Luisa Passerini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 196.
On a similar note, Stacey Zembrzycki and I wrote a piece reflecting on our work with Holocaust survivors, which argued that the places survivors would not go in their recounting were instructive to understanding their identities as survivors. See Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, “Only Human: A Reflection on the Ethical and Methodological Challenges of Working with ‘Difficult’ Stories,” Oral History Review 37, 2 (2010): 191–214.
See Lenore Layman, “Reticence in Oral History Interviews,” Oral History Review 36, 2 (Summer/Fall 2009): 207–30.
David Campbell, “MetaBosnia: Narratives of the Bosnian War,” Review of International Studies 24 (1998): 261–328;
Ivo Banac, “The Dissolution of Yugoslav Historiography” in Beyond Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics, and Culture in a Shattered Community, eds. S. P. Ramet and L. S. Adamovich (Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview, 1995), 39–65;
Sabrina Ramet, Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
On a similar note, Susan Sontag argued that the mere representation of violence and atrocity, such as through war photography, was not in and of itself necessarily a condemnation of violence, and that it is a mistake to assume otherwise. See Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Picador, 2004).
Robert M. Hayden, “Moral Vision and Impaired Insight: The Imagining of Other Peoples’ Communities in Bosnia,” Current Anthropology 48, 1 (2007): 105–31.
See, e.g., Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996).
See Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Dutton, 1979);
Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996);
Lisa M. Tillmann-Healy, “Friendship as Method,” Qualitative Inquiry 9, 5 (2003): 729–49.
Wulf Kansteiner makes a similar argument in his critique of Memory Studies: “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory 41, 2 (2002): 179–97.
For examples of communications and rhetoric-based analyses of difficult memory, see Stephanie Houston Grey, “Wounds Not Easily Healed: Exploring Traumas in Communication Studies,” in Communication Yearbook 31, ed. C. S. Beck (New York and Abingdon: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007), 174–223;
Marouf Hasian, “Authenticity, Public Memories, and the Problematics of Post-Holocaust Remembrances: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Wilkomirski Affair,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, 3 (2005): 231–63.
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© 2013 Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki
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Sheftel, A. (2013). “I don’t fancy history very much”: Reflections on Interviewee Recruitment and Refusal in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In: Sheftel, A., Zembrzycki, S. (eds) Oral History Off the Record. PALGRAVE Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339652_15
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