engleski

Ethnopolitics and conspiracy theories: Dominant narratives, contingency of experience, and circulation of affects

The goal of this presentation, based on a concrete ethnogaphic fieldwork in the Croatian region of Lika, is to look into affective responses to dominant narratives of the genesis, course and consequences of the conflict of the 1990s in Croatia, which co- exist with personal narratives that bear witness to contingency of experiences. Namely, this conflict, as any other, did not take place only on the mythical frontline, only looking down the barrel of a gun ; on the background of the “big” war, in the fragile tension of the everyday on both sides of the frontline and of ethnic boundaries, different real and symbolic micro-wars took place. The mentioned narratives are embedded in the post-conflict everyday of the returned exiles. Our goal is to approach the narratives of conflict, displacements and returns not as a series of historical events in the tradition of oral history, but as an affective response to the lived experience, the dominant narrative and the gap between them. We will analyze the circulation of emotions and affects not only as triggers of events, but also as powerful triggers and formative agents of personal and less personal narratives. In this respect, we will analyze the formation of different personal narratives dominated by motifs of home, exile, (not) belonging, and narratives close to the folklore genre of conspiracy theories inscribed into personal narratives. Conspiracy theories can be viewed as an attempt to understand personal experience of conflict beyond “ethnic simplification”, as a possible resolution of the quandary arising at the intersection of the personal and the collective, the cognitive and the emotional, of ethnic (majority and minority) identity and citizenship, the wanted and the unwanted, home and abandonment, perpetrator and victim.

ethnopolitics, conspiracy theories, belonging, not-belonging

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