This panel investigates the role of history education and history schoolbooks in shaping cultural memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. We draw on historical, social psychological and ethnographic approaches to explore 1) the role of history education and textbooks in transmitting war memories as part of long-term historical narratives; 2) the ways in which youths encounter and adopt war memory and historical narratives, comparing the role of history education with that of other sources of shared memories such as families, public discourse or social media; and 3) how memories influence young people’s perception and expectations of their own and other groups in society, their country and neighbouring countries.
Cultural memories, understood as shared narratives and representations of a common past, are core elements of group identities and essential in the social fabric of modern societies. The role of history education in creating cultural memory is fundamental. History education and history textbooks are generally considered vital tools for states to ingrain a certain collective memory and to socialise future citizens. Yet, we know little about the actual impact of history education. This is especially relevant in post-conflict regions with a painful recent past, such as Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In such contexts, questions of what and how to remember are typically contested and contentious. The ways in which questions of memory are resolved have implications for relations between neighbouring countries, generations and groups in society.
We combine theoretical approaches from memory studies, ethnography, history and social psychology to explore not only how war memory is transmitted through historical education, and through memory mediation is the public sphere, but also how it is received and made sense of by generations growing up in the post-conflict setting.
• Ismar Dedović’s presentation will survey textbook presentations of Yugoslav history and the wars of the 1990s in particular, focusing on narrative logics, long-term narrative templates and connections between past present and future.
• Tea Sindbæk Andersen will discuss how wartime memory is mediated in the public spheres of Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, focusing on monuments and the recent waves of monumentalization and musealization, and how that correlate with textbook histories.
• Based on ethnographic fieldwork, Marija Krgović investigates how wartime history is taught and discussed in practice in high schools in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
• Drawing on a series of surveys with youths aged between 18 and 30, Thomas Morton investigates how generations schooled in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia since the 2000s remember the Yugoslav wars and how that relates to social identity and in-group and out-group attitudes.
Tea Sindbæk Andersen
Building public memory: the 1990s wars in the urban memoryscapes of Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Belgrade
The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1995 was characterized by war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Dayton peace agreement of 1995 still defines the political structure of Bosnia-Herzegovina, were war memory and the disputes surrounding it remain dominant parts of the public sphere. In Serbia, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s are perhaps less directly present, as the state still struggles with recognizing its role in the conflicts, while at the same time foregrounding Serbian victimization and suffering in that context.
The memory disputes and the very different public approaches to war memory are reflected in the urban landscapes of monuments and museums in the main cities of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. Since the end of the war, a number of new memory mediations in the forms of museums and monuments, both based on politically institutionalized initiatives and in more grass-root styles such as murals and private museums, have appeared in these cities. This process has been most intense in Sarajevo, Bosnia’-Herzegovina’s capital and the main city of the Bosniak-Croat dominated federation. But also in Banja Luka, the main city in the Serbian part of Bosnia, and in the Serbia’s capital Belgrade, the wars mark the urban memoryscapes, sometimes also through monuments and museums aimed to draw remembering in other directions.
Urban memoryscapes is one of the fields in which youth in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia encounter war memory. As narratives prominently promoted in the public sphere, museums and monuments constitute one source of shared memory, and a backdrop against which history education, but also media usage, discussions in families and informal conversations about memory take place. This presentation aims to uncover and compare the types of memory narratives promoted in the urban memoryscapes of Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Belgrade in order to survey the types of public memory that surround history education and war remembering among youths in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia.
Ismar Dedović
History schoolbooks and war memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia
School history textbooks – and school systems in general – are vital tools for states to disseminate certain interpretations of the past to their population. In these instances, textbooks may be viewed as the official consensus on a certain topic, and states, including Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina’s two entities, thus pour many resources into this memory medium. However, there is a seeming paradox in this field: While it is obvious what the state intends for students to learn, several surveys point to students not actually feeling that they know much about the wars of the 1990s: why they started, who fought, for what, when etc. They do, paradoxically, think they know how to interpret the wars in the context in which they now find themselves.
In this presentation, I look at how contemporary high school textbooks in Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Belgrade deal with the troubled past of their countries. I focus both on the specific theme of the wars of the 1990s as well as the approach to Yugoslav and national history in general. Hereby I explore the long-term narrative templates that emerge in textbooks and which help shape the students’ perceptions of past and present and future. Issues like who is the “protagonist” of history (class, nation, state or others?), the relationship between “our” group and the “Others”, notions of victimhood etc. are all examples of narrative logics and templates that structure thinking on history in general and go beyond the framing and interpretation of a particular event or period. I propose that the narrative template and explanatory logics may dominate the textbooks’ mediation of the past, somehow reducing the students’ learning to poignant positions and phrases rather than factually based learning or an investigative approach to history as a subject.
Marija Krgović
Teaching wartime history in high schools in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina
This presentation investigates the history education practices surrounding the teaching of the 1990s wars in high schools in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as their reception among the high school students. The presentation is based on ethnographic observations of history classes in gymnasiums in Belgrade and Sarajevo which show that history learning occurs within the context of real-world, not just in isolated or abstract settings of the classroom. History education is a site where the mediation of cultural memory happens in the interplay between history textbooks, history teachers, their interpretation of the content, students with their family histories and social circles, as well as the broader social and educational dynamics in these two countries.
The literature shows that both societies propagate stereotypical historical narratives. In Serbia these narratives often function as a coping mechanism to avoid addressing the legacy of violence perpetrated by the state, political leaders, armed forces, and individuals. In contrast, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the narratives frequently emphasize the notion of victimhood. This further manifests itself in the contrasting educational approaches: Serbian gymnasiums dedicate a single class at the end of the 4th year to the 1990s wars, while gymnasiums in Sarajevo dedicate around eight lessons along with several visits to war-related memorials and museums.
What is surprising is that even though the 1990s wars still constantly provoke public debate in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and interpretations of the past are aggressively promoted (media, literature, sports, pop culture), many students do not seem to be interested in the details of these wars. They are internalizing the prevailing narratives within their social circles rather than critically addressing them.
Thomas Morton & Alma Jeftic
War memory, history education and intergroup relations among youth in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia
Social psychological research documents the group-based lenses through which individuals engage with collective histories and memory. Typically, harmful actions perpetrated by ingroups are “forgotten”, minimized, or otherwise disconnected from the wider collective narrative, whereas equivalent harms perpetrated against the ingroup may be memorialized, become central to collective self-understanding, and anchor relations with outgroups in the present. Through focusing primarily on group-based subjective interpretations of history, however, social psychological research rarely engages with questions of what people actually learn (e.g., through schoolbooks), what they know and from where this knowledge comes, and whether and how the wider informational environment facilitates or constrains biased interpretations of shared histories. In an attempt to integrate these different perspectives, the current project surveys individuals from two different generations (recent students aged 18-24 & former students aged 25-31) educated across three distinct ‘memory regimes’ in the former Yugoslavia: Serbs in Belgrade, Serbs in Banja Luka, and Bosniaks in Sarajevo. In addition to these two ethic groups (Serbs & Bosniaks) being on different sides of the 1990s wars, the latter two groups reside within a single – shared – nation state. In this context, different perspectives on the past, and what this means for mutual understandings is a lively issue that impacts on whether and how history is formally discussed within public institutions, including education, and something that has ongoing implications for social relations within Bosnia-Herzegovina and relations with neighboring Serbia. Against this backdrop, our survey includes measures probing basic knowledge about the 1990s wars, the sources of individual knowledge, and attributions of blame and responsibility to different actors, and orientations to different bases of contemporary identity, including ethnic and national identities. This talk will present preliminary findings from this survey work and discuss what it means for the role of history education in shaping collective memory across generations.
20240720T093020240720T1100America/LimaPOSTWAR MEMORY GENERATIONS: HISTORY EDUCATION AND WAR MEMORY IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA AND SERBIAA309, Building AMSA Conference Lima 2024conference@memorystudiesassociation.org
