Wrapping It All Up

Abstract

Before we recapitulate the results, let us go back for a moment to our initial motivation. Living in B&H, we daily encounter a specific social context in which ethnicity and politics intertwine to the extent that we can no longer clearly identify the boundaries of the two and account for their full complexities. Signs of ethnicity and nationality are everywhere, more or less subtly incorporated into our daily lives. Sometimes they are pretty obvious; for instance, when you watch the central news on local TV stations or read the press, you instantly notice the main theme: ethnicity-based politics. Also, we have been so inculcated with the daily dosage of this theme that we do not even notice everyday displays of ethnic-nationalism, such as flags, churches, mosques, language and even colors, that are used to mark boundaries of the territories or social identifications. Attitudes towards political issues quickly disclose one’s ethnic background in daily conversation (Billig, 1995) but we are not alone in this; there are other societies which experience similar problems to ours. As people living in such a society, we have been inspired by the intricate workings of ethnic nationalism in everyday political affairs, and, at family dinners and on outings with friends, we have had endless discussions about ethnicity and interpersonal relations shaped by the ethnic and the political. B&H, which was once known as a multi-cultural oasis, in the past 20 years has become a place permanently haunted by the specter of Yugoslavia, multi-ethnicity and socialist memories, when ‘we all lived peacefully together,’ juxtaposed against the brutality of the 1990s war and its consequences.