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

Abstract

This paper addresses the feeling of being at home in time and in place through fieldwork carried out in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2015–2016. Such feelings are needed after a war resulting in geographical displacement as occurred during the breakup of Yugoslavia. This paper argues for the need to see beyond only spatial factors for the ‘making of home’, and therefore considers temporal factors through the role of the heritage in forming narratives, which combine temporal and spatial relations. Alternative narratives to those of ethnic separation are taken into consideration, and it is argued that a sole focus on division may further enforce it rather than lead to its reduction. A sense of disassociation to the current city of Mostar and its narratives has led to the construction of narratives of home within a different time-period (pre-war Mostar). In turn, this may cause nostalgia, passivity, and an ‘othering’ of the newcomers to Mostar. However, there are also cases of employing such a narrative actively in order to envision an alternative future beyond ethnic separation. So far, the institutions working with the heritage of Mostar have not addressed these issues, thus possible ways forward are suggested.

Keywords:

• Heritage studies
• memory studies
• Mostar
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• difficult heritage

Acknowledgement

First thanks go to my colleagues Marko Barišić and Damir Ugljen for exciting discussions before, during and after the fieldwork and for their help as translators in many of the interviews. Furthermore, I would like to thank Cornelius Holtorf and Artur Ribeiro for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Variations of this paper have been presented on conferences and I very much appreciate the feedback received from Paola Filippucci. Another thank you goes to Johannes Müller, Antonia Davidovic, Vedrana Tutiš, Tatjana Mićević-Đurić and all the anonymous interview partners. Finally, I want to thank the two reviewers, who helped me to sharpen the arguments, Eileen Kuecuekkaraca for proofreading the paper and the Graduate School ‘Human Development in Landscapes’ for their constant support.

Notes

1. Some of the results of the interviews can be found in Tables 1 and 2 in order to present the results with as much clarity as possible. However, it is important to underline that the results are of qualitative character based on a statistically small sample size. The tables should therefore only be understood within the overall context outlined in the paper.