Izvorni znanstveni članak
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol57no107
Fear, Humanity and Managing the Heritage of War: Two Narratives from Western Slavonia
Renata Jambrešić Kirin
; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb
Sažetak
Using the concepts of affective community (Ahmed 2015; Hutchison 2016) and affective management of “war heritage” (Logan and Reeves 2009; Gegner and Ziino 2012; Lončar 2014; Stublić 2019), the article examines how social subjects in Western Slavonia – a microlocation with many places of memory and a dense accumulation of historical traumas within them – are constructed as resisting and/or conforming to the dominant hegemonic policy of remembering the Homeland War as the “cornerstone of reasoning” in Croatia (Blanuša 2017). The examples analysed range from the activities of a local “memory agent” and the founder of a digital archive of local history to the reception of a book of testimonies and a documentary on the humanity of Pakrac’s medics in the war (Lessons on Humanity, 2017 and 2019). Based on these examples, I identified different strategies of cultural, pedagogical and ideological re-presentation and re-animation of local war heritage in the social and digital environment. These strategies are different responses to the fear that the feeling of social connection to war events and veterans as symbols of national unity and pride has been ebbing away. However, there has also been a noticeable shift on the Croatian (semi-)periphery from a ceremonial commemorative culture to a digital culture of memory of war, fostered by affective communities which transcend local, ethnic and generational boundaries. The second shift is semantic – the tendency to replace victimological and triumphalist war narratives with those of “humanitarian heroism” and positive war stories about humanity, about helping and rescuing people from the “enemy side”. In conclusion, even though the Croatian “social framework of memory” (Halbwachs 2013) offers different models for transforming fear, pain, violence and the trauma of war into “cultural heritage”, only individuals remember and feel, and very few among them become memory agents and activists of “mnemonic resistance” (Molden 2016) with a significant role in the struggles over the meaning of the past.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
239347
URI
Datum izdavanja:
19.6.2020.
Posjeta: 1.292 *