Volume 67, Issue 1

The author examines museums in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and their exhibitions dealing with the city’s most traumatic event in recent history—the 1992-1995 siege. She analyses how the interpretations and re-interpretations of history in these museums have been affected by social, political, cultural, and institutional contexts, and how various ‘memory entrepreneurs’ have played a role in building the public memory of the city’s siege. The analysis focuses on, but is not limited to, three museums: the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Tunnel Museum, and the War Childhood Museum. This discussion is supplemented by an analysis of other museums in Sarajevo that also demonstrate how the political deadlock in the country has affected the cultural sector. The author argues that the various museums to have opened in Sarajevo in recent years indeed have the potential to become crucial public spaces where authoritative notions of history, memory, and identity can be critically examined, negotiated, and contested.

From a perspective rooted in intellectual and cultural history, the author accounts for the profound disciplinary transformations undergone by ethnology as practised at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (IEF) in Zagreb, Croatia, during the early 1990s. In a context shaped by the Yugoslav breakup and the outbreak of war, and also as a result of theoretical transformations that had taken place in Croatian ethnology during the previous decade, many researchers at this institute undertook a new ethnological practice that involved among other things the questioning of the notion of objectivity and the redefinition of the political role of the ethnologist. The author analyses these changes in terms of converging factors, namely the theoretical influences coming from American, French, and German scholarship, the disciplinary crisis caused by a self-perception of social marginality, and the radical and violent sociopolitical transformations of the early 1990s.

This article analyses worker narratives of discontent in relation to a series of crises at the Uljanik Shipyard in Pula, Croatia, over the course of 2018. It draws on five months of fieldwork conducted in the period between two worker protests at the shipyard surrounding the late payment of wages, the second of which developed into a large-scale strike. The author describes the crises, provides historical details about the shipyard and about trade unions and other forms of worker organizing, and offers notes on the political context. He analyses the psychic landscape of the most recent crisis period, with a focus on how anxiety, fear and suspicion were manifest. Finally, he discusses rumours and the blaming strategies adopted by workers, relating them to the importance of personalized relations in the regional political economy.

Serbia has never been the chosen final destination for refugees from Iraq, Syria, and other beleaguered countries like Afghanistan who have embarked on the so-called Balkan route since 2015. But following the closure of this route in March 2016, between 3,500 and 4,500 migrants have found themselves living in Serbia. This article analyses the composition and changing size of the migrant population, looking at the legal status of individuals and migratory paths taken. It moves on to examine reactions to the migrants from the state authorities and the Serbian public, together with the institutional response manifested in legal measures and infrastructural facilities, and the political contexts in which decisions about these were taken. Specific attention is given to the situation of refugee children who attend state schools in Serbia. The analysis reveals a pragmatic and quite flexible administrative response to the refugees’ situation. However, the remarkable level of tolerance is largely related to awareness that the great majority of those stranded in Serbia are doing everything in their power to continue their journey into central and northern Europe—that is to leave Serbia.

The historian Branka Prpa was the director of the Historical Archives of Belgrade after Slobodan Milošević’s regime ended in 2000. Jacqueline Nießer spoke to Prpa about how she set about reforming Belgrade’s Historical Archives during Serbia’s democratic opening-up under Zoran Djindjić. Prpa has fostered preservation of the cultural history of socialist Yugoslavia, so the focus of the interview was cultural freedom in and after Yugoslavia. The historian elaborates on how culture both then and now has been in conflict with politics, her remarks leading on to a discussion about how a future may be imagined in the 21st century. The interview was conducted during the COURAGE project, which between 2016 and 2019 has researched the cultural heritage of dissent in the former state socialist countries of Eastern Europe.