engleski

The Politics of Ethnic Identity in Everyday life at the Local Level in Croatia

The starting point in this thesis is a reconsideration of the genre of literature on the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that seeks to explain the causes of conflicts. The point made is that this search for causality not only results in accounts that are ‘ethnographically thin’, but also constructing an account that focuses on only one moment in the everyday lives of persons in Croatia. Applying a concept of the everyday that allows for moments of conflict – as opposed to considering conflict as something separate – the argument this thesis makes is that there is the presence of an apparently repeated movement to the way objects of shared interest divide and come together. By employing concept of ‘scale’ [Strathern 1991] this thesis draws out ethnographically the movement surrounding objects of shared interest, through an account of the work that persons do on their family houses, as well as their work on documents, and gravestones. The point this ethnographic account makes is that these objects of shared interest gain this appearance of movement as a result of the debates that surround them. It also draws out how these objects of shared interest are not passive objects, but how they take on the role of actants [Latour 1997] by shaping the form that these debates take. It is only after having drawn out this movement that this thesis then turns to consider the concept of narodnost [ethnicity]. The argument made here is that there is a similar movement to the debates surrounding narodnost as there are to the movement of the debates that surround inherited family houses and documents. In addition, the actant quality of the concept of narodnost becomes visible. Having done this, this thesis then compares the movement surrounding to the debates surrounding anthropological objects of shared interest, and the movement to the debates surrounding objects of interest for persons in Rijeka, Croatia. The point made here is that although there are a number of similarities, there is a notable difference in the way that persons in Croatia approach the concepts of certainty/uncertainty.

houses; ethnicity

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