Making a home in Mostar: heritage and the temporalities of belonging

The Cultural Heritage as a Resource in Conflict Resolution – Possibilities and challenges

“…To grasp this in a balanced way, the local perspectives are essential (Viejo-Rose 2011b: 213). In the Balkans, statues of Hollywood movie stars like Rocky Balboa and Bruce Lee have been constructed, the last one in the city of Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Raspudic 2004;Makas 2007;Wollentz 2017a. This can be approached as an example of where people, quite contradictory, turn outside to find a shared identity because the history within the area is still torn by recently experienced conflict.…”

“…The issue of moving forward leads us to the way the heritage can be drawn upon in order to envision a different future, i.e. the future-assembling capacities of heritage (Harrison 2015;Harrison et al 2020;Wollentz 2017a). In fact, Svetlana Boym (Boym 2001) has emphasized how a certain form of nostalgia can form a basis for action and be used in order to shape new futures, contrasting against traditional understandings of nostalgia as connected to passivity and inaction.…”

“…Here, the post-war heritage of Socialist Yugoslavia is sometimes actively drawn upon in order to challenge the current ethno-national employment of heritage which enforces ethnic division. Instead, this employment of the socialist past attempts to carve out an alternative future of a belonging that moves beyond ethnic division (Wollentz 2017a;.…”

Maria Theresia Starzmann and John R. Roby , eds. Excavating Memory: Sites of Remembering and Forgetting (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016, xvii and 405pp., 26 b/w illustr., 4 maps, 3 tables, hbk, ISBN 978-0-8130-6160-3)

“…Heritage is directed towards the future in terms of desires, dreams, or even fears. It would therefore have been interesting to include the way forgetting—and remembering—practices on specific sites of memory may be linked to future aspirations and visions (see Wollentz, 2017).…”

‘Where the F… is Vuotso?’: heritage of Second World War forced movement and destruction in a Sámi reindeer herding community in Finnish Lapland

“…Besides providing important local perspectives on a traumatic recent past incident, Lapland life-narratives of evacuation, destruction and reconstruction can also highlight more widespread themes related to conflicts and forced and involuntary displacement. These mould in diverse ways people's perspectives on and attitudes towards their own cultural heritage (Palmberger 2013;Wollentz 2017), and how societies remember hurtful issues (Connerton 1989). In Lapland, these are closely intertwined with the area's colonial past and emergent postcolonial themes (Källén 2015;Spangen, Salmi, and Äikäs 2015).…”