Dancing Memory. Heritage and the Post-War World-Making in Central Bosnia-Herzegovina

Taking examples of three differently and incommensurably framed folklore enactments in the post-war Central Bosnia-Herzegovina for its starting point, the paper will open up a broader exploration and discussion on perceptions of heritage in this particular post-socialist and post-industrial setting in relation to the underlying historical subjectivities emerging from experiences of the war-ridden past. These traces of the war-ridden past, as well as those of the pre-war socialist worlds of meaning,  are still present in the post-war ‘landscape’ of people’s endeavors to reconstruct their everyday routines and relations, by continuously interrupting and undermining their efforts to articulate coherent narratives about the past and their experiences of violence.

By looking at how these interruptions emerge and are negotiated and/or suppressed in three diverse folklore enactment settings, namely, local social-cultural activities groups in the municipality of Kakanj, the paper points to a much broader issue of the very notion of an overarching historical narrative in this post-war setting being at stake. The collapse of the pre-war socialist worlds of meaning seems to be triggering, on the one hand, the processes where personal recollections of the past are being framed and re-framed as heritage, while on the other hand, it remains largely unacknowledged in the post-war efforts in official discursive “historical organization of things” as heritage.