Original scientific paper
VERBAL VIOLENCE AND (DE)CONSTRUCTION OF COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES IN THE ACCOUNTS OF WAR AND POLITICAL PRISONERS (1945-1995)
Renata Jambrešić Kirin
; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Reseach, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how recent public interest in testimonies of war
prisoners after WWII and political prisoners of the former Yugoslav Republic of Croatia
reveals the salient politicization of public memory as adjustable to the concurrent socio-
-ideological values. On one level, I emphasize how individual selective processes of
memorizing and forgetting are guided by the strategy of alternation which is defined by
Berger and Luckmann as the "reinterpretation of past biography in toto, following the
formula 'Then I thought..., now I know...' ". On another level, I indicate how the positive
attempt to "reconcile" all members of the Croatian socio-political body at the beginning
of the 1991 war — by turning the popular Christian imaginary of national victimization
into the imaginary of a long and legitimate struggle for independence — was infiltrated by
the right wing's restraints on historical knowledge.
However, my first sociolinguistic and ethnological aim was to clarify the frequent
use of the same offensive names for the opponents in the recent war, the same examples of
verbal violence as a means of identity destruction, the similar methods of torture recounted
by recent war prisoners as those depicted in memoirs of political prisoners in former
Yugoslav "camps for rehabilitation". The same repertoire of hate speech is revealed in
reminiscences of non-partisan Croatian combatants and civilians who were part of
communist rulers' ritual humiliation and punishment through "death marches" called the
"Crucifixion path" in 1945. They were primarily designed to humiliate prisoners — using
shared imaginary and traditional symbolic values — and to clearly "exhibit the crime" on
their suffering bodies so that the torturers, together with the witnesses, could "justify the
fairness of punishment" (Foucault) as well as the official needs for confinement and
permanent surveillance of "state enemies".
Keywords
political violence; verbal violence; testimonies of torture (1945-1948, 1991- -1995); deconstruction of identity
Hrčak ID:
33397
URI
Publication date:
4.12.2000.
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