Identities in War : Embodiments of Violence and Places of Belonging

Pov rwnovic , Maja 1 997: Identit i es in War. Em bodiments ofViolence and Places o f Be longi ng . Ethnologia Europaea 27: 15::!-162. The a rt ic le ::;eek::; to con tribute to th e eth nol og ica l debate on the rn ean i ngs of :;pace and pl ace by a n a ly:;inl{ the proce::;:;e:; of identity f(Jrmation i n the context o f v i olence . T h e person al narratives on t h e l i ved experience o f w a r in Croatia 1991 92 poi nt to the prevalent tendency of s ituati ng identity i n spatia l terms: the dwell i ng p l ace has been perceived as the basic identity category by civilians under s iege. Such a tendency is h igh ly liable to be used for nat iona l i :;t causes, but here it:; pre-political character i:; pointed out. The example:; of everyday interaction:; and com m u ni cations e ither rad ical ly red uced or newly introduced due to the siege anrl shell ing, outl ine a wartime politics of" iden tity based not on choice, but on abHence of choice, not on st rategies of n egot iati o n , but on strategies of surviva l .


Physical Spaces and Emotional Places
The irony of the prevalent (national and inter national) media image of Croatia as a country of nationalists should be pointed out: it is the discourse of nationalism that is constantly be ing voiced, unlike the lived experience of war in 1991-92. That experience is held in the memory of the "forgotten majority" -civilians who were exposed to war dangers and manifold depriva tions, uncertainties and fe ars, but neither be came refugees, nor suffered any irreparable losses. The monovocal and unique national nar rative on war makes use of the simplified and generalized experience of war victims -be it orphaned children, maimed soldiers or desper ate refugees. The variety of experiences and responses of the civilians who are not recog nized as victims tends to be fo rgotten in public discourse (ethnologists being the only ones try ing to voice it so fa r). In that regard, the nation al narrative and personal narratives on war show considerable differences; in some cases they are even hardly compatible. Also, there is a cleft within the unified complex of the narra tive about the nation as victim, since there are direct war victims and those who met the war only on television screens: some parts of Croatia were not physically endangered by war except fo r men who were called up and sent to the attacked parts of the country.
One of the elements of the ideal nation is a territory where physical space is turned into cultural space.As Liifgren (1996:162-163) points out, the normative strength of the national model of culture is easily detected in the recent processes of construction of new regional and local identities in Europe. The cultural gram mar of nationalism underlies the attempts to turn economic regions into cultural ones, or economic space into emotional place.
Introducing the example of Croatia in 1991-92, this article deals with the processes of turn ing physical spaces (of one's town, region and country) into emotional places, yet in a context radically different fr om the ones usually im plied in the ethnological discussion of the ways in which the local and the national constitute each other, as well as in the wide range of literature on how national identities are con structed in the realms of everyday life. It is the context of violence imposed on civilians who remained in their homes in the besieged towns and thus endured armed attackl:l jeopurd izing their lives.
Regarding the dominant political discourse in Croatia, the "grammar of nationalism" has defined the warti me identification processes at national level . However, this article aims to show that th ese processes should not be under stood as antecedent to the perceptions of phys ical spaces as extremely important emotional places, as they are formulated in the personal narratives about war. lam referring here to the narratives collected for the purpose of my dis sertation entitled "Culture and Fear: Wartime Everyday Life in Croatia 1991-92", but the same holds for the refugee children's autobio graphical essays quoted in Prica , as well as for the numerous autobio graphical accounts of war published in Croatia since 1992.1 I collected private letters written by people fr om Zagreb in late 1991, and inter viewed women and men of different age and of different social background (mostly Croats, but also Serbs) fr om Dubrovnik and the Dubrovnik region, Vukovar, Z upanja, Vinkovci surround ings, Osijek, Zadar, S ibenik and Zagreb in the period fr om 1991 to 1996. The ethnographic details presented in this article come mostly fr om the personal narratives on war by people fr om Dubrovnik collected in early 1996.

Encountering Vi olence
Identities do not exist prior to social practices and cultural patterns which negotiate and reg ulate them. This common ethnological point should be taken into consideration also in the context of ruptures of everyday regularities in a war-torn society. Indeed, they are reflected in radical social and cultural changes that bring out new dynamics of identification, very likely to be interpreted as of nationalist origin. Spaces in the grip of war are at the same time political spaces and actual locations of struggle. In this article, the lived experience of violence is recog nized as an -undesired, but almost inevitable -"essentializing" category which decisively defines identities in spatial terms. The ethno graphic accounts in the fo llowing chapters will offer some insights into the multilayered na-ture of space-bound identity formations in war. I shall try to highlight the complex dynamics of the "essentialized" sense of belonging to one's home town and home region.� It is important to stress here that the (ab)use of the lived experience of violence, as well as the possible direct engagement of war victims in nati onalist projects, happens only subsequent ly (and the latter does not happen necessarily). Although the war-induced rooting of identity in spatial categories was a remarkably present theme in their narratives, none of the inter viewed persons expressed nationalist essen tialism. Their narratives reveal a multiplicity, diversity and complexity of experience that challenge the uniqueness of the national narra tive. Their first-hand knowledge about the war sufferings is retained as bodily memories. It gives them a credit of authenticity that needs no media-phrases.
People fr om towns under direct and constant attack fa ced a dilemma of escaping or staying behind. In some towns in some phases of the war there was also an official ban on leaving, not only for men who could be called up, but also for women, except fo r the mothers of small children. Men could be legally prosecuted; wom en could lose their jobs. But for the majority of people such bans were not the reason fo r their decisions to stay behind -often it was possible to find an excuse (medical or other) legally good enough to leave. Most of the persons I inter viewed did stay in their towns during the entire war regardless of such bans. They fe lt that it would be absurd to leave their homes, unless they experienced a fe ar too strong to be dealt with.
"People have different capacity for suffer ing", a woman in her thirties said, summarizing the knowledge she acquired in war. None of the interviewed persons condemned those who fled for being unbearably afraid for their very lives, especially not if they knew them personally. "A fr iend of mine just saw a bus burning next to her house, and the other day she fled away", anoth er woman fr om Dubrovnik said with astonish ment, but in an understanding manner, al though she herself decided not to flee regard less of the fa ct that her house was damaged and her twin brother almost killed in it. The strik-ing fe atu re of all the narratives is tol erance towards human weakne:;H. Al though the m ajor ity of those who stayed behind did not break down, but endured, the interviewed people found it very important to talk about those whose strength and optimismespecially in the shel tershelped the others not to succumb to panic or to laming pessimism.
A modest, humble definition of bravery emerges Li·om their narratives, very distant fr om the concept of the bravery ofthe battlefield heroes shared on the basis of war films. The bravery that people recognized and admired in the context discussed here was defined in rela tion to wartime everyday life in which it was crucial to keep up as many peacetime routines as possible.All these routines were space-bound: the very act of remaining in the besieged towns, not going to the shelters, but staying at home during attacks, going to work regularly, expos ing oneself to danger in order to help the com munity, for example, by fe tching water or re pairing other people's damaged roofs. They were crucial not only as a means of resistance, but also as a means of linking the imposed (ab normal) identity of war victim to the identity aspects rooted in peaceful normality. In Du brovnik, literally everyone stressed that they had fr eshly baked bread every morning. "Hon our to the bakers!" "All thanks to them!" These phrases repeatedly revealed true admiration for the people who helped their fe llow citizens keep the material link to their prior life in peace -a link that incorporated the promise of the persistence of normality and the hope for a peaceful fu ture. A loaf of bread placed on an improvised "kitchen" table in the shelter be came an oasis of normality. The smell and the taste of warm bread (people risked their life to go outdoors to buy it) enabled the embodi ment of the (minimal) experience of normality which proved to be of extreme emotional impor tance.
Many of the narratives explicitly reveal awareness of the meaning of people's lives be ing anchored in the spaces of their daily inter actions encompassing fa mily, friends and work. I met a woman who did not leave Dubrovnik after her flat became impossible to live in be cause of the damage caused by shelling, but only after her 15-month-old daughter devel oped dangerous diarrhoea and an ear inflam mation by staying in one ofthe fo rtresses which served as a public shelter. Arriving at her friend's home in Italy, she couldn't recognize herself in the mirror: for fe ar, tension, and lack of sleep, she lost a fifth ofher normal weight. The shrink ing of safe space in her town was reflected in the shrinking of her body.
On the one hand, culture was an efficient means of coping with deprivation, fe ar and anxiety in war. On the other hand, it proved to be a means not strong enough to encounter lethal violence.
Preserving the minimal normality -and not joining some rhetoric -became the main objec tive of people under threat. While the efforts to keep their world "everyday" had worn most of them down physically and emotionally, the breeding ground for nationalism seems to have remained distanced fr om the everyday suffer ing. Many of the interviewed persons claimed that "the greatest" or "the loudest" Croats (mean ing nationalists) were the ones to flee first when their towns became endangered by the approach ing war. Accordingly, the fact that they stayed behind was seen as a sufficient proof of their love and support for Croatia. All the inter viewed persons even seemed to be inclined to diminish their own suffering (which the pro moters of nationalist rhetoric would very likely make use of in the contest-like discourse on "who did more for Croatia"). However, that might also be due to the tragedies of the inhab itants of Vukovar, Sarajevo and several other places in Bosnia, which in the meantime set new standards for "real" suffering.

Attachment and Isolation
For the people encountering military attacks, their towns and home regions were not political spaces negotiable in war, but primarily sites of traumatic experience which became places of isolation fr om the outer world. The everyday was reduced to a minimum. Physical isolation was accompanied by informational isolation: no newspapers could arrive in the towns under heavy attacks, people could not watch televi sion due to lack of electricity. "Radio was our saviour, it was our link to the world!" However, the ballerie:; were scarce: all the head:; in the shel ter were pre:;sed together above one tran sistor at the Lime, which was :;w itched of'fimme diately alter the news was over. Te lephon e lines, if working at all, could not be used in most shellers. After major allacks it happened regu larly that there was a system breakdown when too many people tried to call at the same time, eager to find out what had happened to their fri ends and relatives.
Afterwards, the experience of isolation was reflected in the incapability -perceived as the impossibility -of communicating experience in narration : "I cannot describe th at situation"; "it can't be told"; "it cannot be felt by anyone else but those who lived through it". Sometimes it was intensified by a bitter remembrance of th e initial fr ustration caused by isolation: "Our own misfortune seemed to be so great that we believed we would become the centre of the world at that very instant. However, most peo ple out ofVukovar could not even presume, and definitely could not know what was happening to us" (Mirkovic 1997:119).
Some people "carried the isolation with them" when leaving the attacked towns, turning the space of isolation into a place longed for. A young woman who left Dubrovnik to help her sister, who was about to give birth in Germany, spent two weeks in Hannover in January 1992 and could not wait to come home. She was returning to a town without water and electri city, endangered by repeated shelling. Her sis ter returned with her, with a newly born baby and a son of two. "I came fr om horror into Physical distance did not mean emotional absence or exclusion. The same woman had a wonderful time in Barcelona some years earlier and planned to visit it again on the occasion of the Olympic Games in 1992. However, such an idea became absurd due to the war (" ... because 1 could imagine how beautiful it would be there"). She knew she would not be able to be really present in another place, not to mention the impossibility of enjoying some sports com peti tion. The rupture between physical presence and emotional distance would be hardly beara ble fo r her, as it was for many people who became refugees in order to keep their children out of danger, but left their fr iends and fa milies behind.
A man fr om C ilipi, a village close to Du brovnik, took his two 80-year-old aunts to Du brovnik in the first days of the occupation of Dubrovnik region. They remained in exile just for one day: "Our love for the house and for the animals dragged us back. We couldn't stay there, we returned." The interviews with the inhabitants of Du brovnik offered many examples of the simulta neous perceptions of the town as symbolic space and as the place where their fr iends and fa mily lived. Both were (and are) invested with strong fe elings. Some people claimed that they are in love with the town; all of them were sincerely concerned for the monuments in war.
"In war, everyone is ours", an old woman told me. Another, much younger, woman fr om Du brovnik, confirmed the aforementioned state ment about fe eling like a fa mily with all the people inhabiting not only her home town, but also the whole region: "You want to protect yourself, your fa mily, mother, fa ther, sister, brothers, close fri ends, distant fri ends, acquaint ances ... [ ... ] It is not a matter of you staying alive. Because, if everyone is to die, and you should stay alive -what kind oflife would that be? Terrible, terrible. And then you think: if I only had some power, I would build a glass cupola -so the sun could enter, but no shell. All the shells would be warded off and no one would be hurt, but not only in Dubrovnik -in the whole region fr om Konavle to Ston. That was the baW e field line, wasn't it? La ter I under stood th a t 1 was not the only one to think like that."

Danger and Destruction
In peace, home is the site of our individuality, the space ofthe everyday, the place of intimacy, the symbol of safety. In war, home is easily transformed (de-formed!) into a place of danger. The fo rmer space of personal control and pleas ure is de-fa miliarized into a place of anxiety and deprivation.
Home was turned into the place of utmost fe ar fo r the woman fr om the occupied C ilipi who was hiding in a small cellar with her sister and a neighbour -all in their eighties, ceasing to breath and hoping that the soldiers who en tered her house would not discover them.
It was a place of fe ar fo r a young woman in Zagreb during her first blackout: " ... you fe el like a tinned fish, totally isolated fr om the outer world, you try to suppress the first symptoms of claustrophobia which are intensified when you hear the planes again. Dead silence after wards ... " However, for some people, home was the place where they "felt safest" regardless of real danger. At the same time, it was the site of their silent resistance and the last resort of their dignity: they never went to the shelters and were proud of it afterwards.
As if trying to embody the very liminality between the place of resistance and the place of victimization, an old man fr om Dubrovnik re fu sed to go to the shelter: he persisted in sitting in the armchair he constantly sat in throughout his old years. "It was crazy -we all could have got killed for not wanting to leave him alone, but he wouldn't move", his grandson said. For that old man, his home -the space he stubborn ly refused to abandon to the attackers -was reduced to a single armchair. (He finally left it after a shell hit the roof and damaged the living room, although not hurting anyone. He died soon afterwards, just a week after his wife passed away. "He decided to die", his grandson said. "He didn't care any more.") For numerous people their own homes be came the sites of first-hand encounters with violence. "A part of my house was set on fire. Then i t was hit by three shells, so that the whole roof, the whole ceiling was knocked down. It was all soaked by rain afterwards ... Winds, rain, everything ... " "A shell flew over our blockhouse and landed two hundred metres away. A day before it flew into the neighbour's flat, some ten metres from our kitchen table. Well, the table jumped up some ten centimetres from the floor and then we fled to the shelter, of course. We fo rced th e neighbour into the shelter first, and then we went, too. He was in his kitchen with the child -he hid the child under a chair. He was totally lost, he didn't know where he was ... It burst into the sleeping room, three or fo ur metres fr om them. But the next day, almost at the same time, round three p.m., another shell burst through the roof. I was down there at the entrance. There were at least twenty of them, fa lling in a radius of thirty metres. [ . . . ] They could not flee into the cellar where we were hiding -it's rather deep and the walls are thick, too -but it was very dangerous, I can't say it wasn't. The neighbour in the blockhouse next to ours had a bullet shot into his flat while he was at home. From some sniper: they were just three kilometres away [the attackers holding the hill behind Dubrovnik] ." In Dubrovnik,just as in many other war-torn towns, people mentioned shells demolishing the rooms they had left only half a minute earlier. But deadly dangers have been met by so many on so many occasions that the people I interviewed hesitated to talk about it at length. We are alive, we did not even get injured -so what is there to tell about? "Everyone has a story like that." However, I had the fe eling that what really made them fe el uneasy when asked about the details of their close escapes, was the humiliation implied in the passive position of civilians exposed to danger they could not do anything about, but try to hide fr om. (They were well-aware of the fact that most of theimprovised -shelters could save them only fr om shrapnel, but not fr om direct hits.) An old couple was unaware of an unexploded shell in their garden: it was their two-year-old grand son who pointed it out many days after the shelling. So many "impossible" th ings have been hap pening in the war, that people understood that, just as they stayed alive by chance -they could ea�;ily have been killed by chance, too. They fe lt embarrassed about the possibility of such a death with no reason, no meaning, no dignity.

Geographies of Symbols
"Because of all those detonations I was con stantly dropping the fo od -eggs, spinach, rab bit-livers. Eventually, [ wasn't taking my meals with much appetite. The unbearable noise also broke many of my flower-pots, the thin glasses and some other delicate things that simply could not stand the violent attacks. At the time of disappearing of Logoriste, my kitchen floor turned into a scale model of a battlefield" (Luk sic 1992: 17).
The spaces of war are multiple symbolic spaces, but they are primarily perceived as safe or dangerous, fr ee or occupied, our or their spaces. Our spaces are not only sites of actual resistance; they can become crystallization points of cultural identity. Tn the case of Du brovnik, it is not only the fa ct of it being the prominent element of national heritage and thus a symbol invested with much pride. There is also the insiders' symbolization: the 1bwn is a prestigious symbol of local identity not only for its inhabitants but also for the people fr om the whole Dubrovnik region. (Among all Croatian towns, only the historical core of Du brovnik is called the Town with a capital T -not only locally, but nationwide.) In the war, i.e. because of the war, new local geographies of symbols have been outlined, too. New mean ings are ascribed to some fo rmerly a-cultural spaces in the surrounding nature: to a wood or a rock where a decisive defence has been per fo rmed, or where someone's son or friend has been killed. (I was told about "the Calvary" of the fa ther who repeatedly visited a wood above Dubrovnik in search for the material remain ders of his son -a jacket, a bag and a necklace. Due to the dangerous minefields, he was al lowed to do so only three months after his son's death.) Not the grave, but the place of death of the young Dubrovnik photographer Pavo Ur ban, who "believed that a good photograph is worth dy ing f<.>r", ha�; become a place of remem brance of the war for many of his fri end�;. "This whole space fe els that bad energy. In Du brovnik it seems that nothing has been terribly de stroyed , but in faci at every metre you have a certain trace of ihat. His present in the air. Yo u can't ... People quickly get used to everything, but for me ... Still, when I pass where Pavo was killed -you have to think about it every time, do you understand?" During the war, the regular evening walk on the main street was not only an effective adap tation strategy of keeping the minimal every day routines (people were walking on the "safe" north side of Stradun -the central street of the historical core; when it became too dangerous, they used one ofthe parallel streets). It was also a way of maintaining its symbolic value as an element of Mediterranean urban life. The town was perceived as home not only in a symbolic, but also in a physical sense. People in Dalmatia spend a considerable part of day on the street: they did their best to keep that fe ature of their way of life in spite of the war. Clinging to the space they used to inhabit at least made them culturally visible: it was at the same time a symbolic and a practical effort against victimi zation.
Keeping up such everyday routines is thus also to be interpreted as not consenting to the violence-imposed transformation oftheir home town into a "common" place of destruction. For it has (naively?) been perceived as "protected" by numerous UNESCO flags denoting the world's cultural heritage -which in fact served as precise demarcations for the attackers. When crying the day after 6 December 1991 ("every one was crying in the streets, men, women, old people, kids ... "), Dubrovnik people realized that the historical city walls guarantee no protec tion fr om a Vu kovar-like destiny. "The day after it was ghastly. We all went out the day after, we all wept at Stradun. It really seemed as if the Town was turned into ruins." However, their tears (together with the tears of people throughout Croatia) were not so much expressing the fe ar of ultimate destruction, as the collective shock of the lost illusion that their place could be excluded from war on the basis of being either a town with no military signifi-cance, or the internationally recogn ized site of cultund heri tag-e. 'l'hey were liH·ced to under stand that no symbols can stop the war: culture cannot overpower violence.
Mt er the "pi l grimage" on the Stradun street fu ll of broken glass, cracked stone and smells of burning, a young woman washed and wiped her fa ce: th e towel was all grey fr om the ashes covering her fa ce, her hair, her clothes. The body and the town melted into a single physical experience of war.

Becoming the Place
Trying to reach a distant neighbour's house in order to Iced the deserted animals she fe lt pity fo r, the eighty-year-old woman fr om the occu pied C ilipi had to spend the night in a wood that wasn't any more: she and her sister planned to hide in it, but it was burnt down. So, when the soldiers were passing by, they were lying on the ground and covering each other with ashes (" ... on our heads, everywhere -to look like the nature around us, so th at they wouldn't kill us"). They blended into the place. Clearly, it was not the "national soil" the old woman was tell ing me about, but the soil that saved her life enabling mimicry in the moonlight.
The fa ct of embodiment of experience can be a vantage-point fo r rethinking the human exis tential situation. It definitely should be consid ered crucial in the analysis of the cultural outcomes of the lived encounters with violence. In the context of shelling, bombing, injuring and killing, the body indeed "appears as a threatened vehicle ofhuman being and dignity" (Csordas 1994:4) -the physical aspects of body are prior to the social ones. Violence constitutes a new reality, making people desperately fo cus on the here and now. Such a here-and-now presence secludes the persons encountering the same deprivations and fe ars fr om those from the outer world who do not share their war experience. At the same time, it creates a space recognized as authentic, providing a sense of communitas . Although not offering a possibility of action in terms offighting the attackers back, it is empowering individual dignity and giving meaning to resistance in the fo rm of collective persistence, stubbornness and defiance.
The direct encounters with war destruction and dangers made people perceive their homes and towns as emotional places "where a truer truth prevails, located outside habitual defini tions" (Frykman 1997:16). The personal narra tives on the war in Croatia 1991-92 reveal that identity fo rmations of people who encountered violence did not depend on public (media-pro moted) ideological input, but on the situated practice of saving and preserving one's own body and the immediate material surroundings of one's home.'1 Although discussing an issue which in com parison with the kinds of bodily experiences people are exposed to in a war situation achieves almost utopian qualities -namely, self-inflicted torment through intense training -Frykman (1997) offers an interpretation that helps to shed more light also on the processes of identity fo rmation in war, which have significant phys ical demarcations. Understanding the body not as a passive object embodying ideas, but as the very centre of human experience, he points out that "a new bodily awareness cannot be slimmed down to interpretations about other areas of that person's life" (Frykman 1997:14). Here, most importantly, these "other areas" are all kinds of public space in which the individual is exposed to nationalist discourse. The "new bod ily experience" acquired in war is the experi ence of siege, radically restricted mobility, shriv elling in shelters, coldness, bodily smells due to the lack of water, constant tension due to man ifold fe ars, as well as the tiny pieces of shrapnel carried around in civilians' and soldiers' bod ies.4 The new identification processes started at the intersection of the bodily experience of vio lence and the people's reflection on that experi ence. The fo rmer Yugoslav ideology of"brother hood and unity" which insisted on South Slavic "kinship" among its six nations, has succumbed to an overnight deconstruction when the mem bers of one nation started to kill the members of the other.5 Well-known spaces became invested with new meanings. In an essentializing man ner totally bound to space, people were at tacked on the basis of their mere physical pres ence in a certain town. So, paradoxically, the first civilian killed in Dubrovnik, by a shell that flew into hi�; own flat, was u D u brovnik poet who happened to be a Serb. At the same time, the attackers were aiming at their victims' ethn ic affiliation: in the occupied parts of Croatia, people have been killed or expell ed simply fo r being Croats. Nevertheless, even the "real" war victims do not necessarily adopt the national ist discourse. Many orthem hesitate to usc the dichotomizing models of interpretation ofthcir war experience, the ones that point to the "evil otherness" ofthe entire Serbian nation (cr. Prica .

Imposed Identities
Although being sites or "multiple disjunctions in need ofpoliticization", identities, after all, at the same time are "unities that enable life" (Connolly 1991, quoted in Daniel 1996. Re thinking the usual analytical contempt for es sentialism could help to understand that the war-induced essentialism discussed here is a part of an imposed identity fo rmation process. The strong sense of belonging to one's town, region and nation as revealed in the personal narratives on war, is a "constructed essential ism" based on a cluster of responses to war violence. It does not primarily emerge fr om the concepts of nation, history and heritage, but out ofthe violent destruction of concrete life-worlds of the highest emotional, but also practical, material importance as places of people's daily interactions. 6 Also, the endeavour of eagerly denouncing nationalism has made some scholars hasten to conclusions about the role of insider ethnolo gists recognized as "compilers of (the others') testimonies for an ethnography of war and exile (not to say another memorial marathon of oth ers' suffering) ... in favor of the nation state" (Greverus 1996:282). They seem to be "guilty by affiliation" regardless of the meaning their work may have in confronting nationalism in their country.7 Sharing the general interest in how na tiona! identities are constructed in the realms of eve ryday life, this article is based on such an ethnography of suffering, offering examples of everyday interactions and communications ei ther radically reduced or newly introduced due to the siege and shelling. It outlines a wart ime politic. � of" irlenlily based not on choice, but on absence of choice, not on strategies of negotia tion, but primarily on strategies nf physical survival.
The war has relativized the totality or peo ple's lives -it made them highly aware ur the relativity, constructedness and frailty or their life-worlds. Therefore, the lived experience of fear, loss and destruction in war may be seen as an unintended, yet extremely eflicient ki nd of "transformation experience" (cf. Cohen & Tay lor 1992) -a crucial, basic, overwhelming expe rience which results in reorientation in space and reevaluation of social bonds and routines. The individuals' conceptions of identity arc re vised due to (imposed) discontinuity. Subse quent interpretations -in personal narratives on the one hand and in public discourse on the other -interfere with the authenticity (or the questioned "purity") of war experiences. Re searchers are thus confronting manifold episte mological problems. However, such problems should not deter us fr om recognizing different coexisting and interrelated field realities as appropriate courts for understanding the vari ous levels of power and struggle (cf. Nordstrom & Martin 1992:14). Only detailed, ethnogra phy-based answers to the questions about the connections between national identity and iden tity categories changed through the quandaries of war experience can help to understand local ambivalences associated with the nation state as a generator of conflict, anxiety and discon tent (cf. Povrzanovic & Jambresic Kirin 1996). The narrative topos of the native place or the dwelling place should not be "elegantly" dis missed by analytically nailing it into the fr ame of national mythologies: it does not necessarily point to the identity based in the "sacred na tional soil" (cf. Prica . In this context, the definition of segregated identity produced "when we identify ourselves and affirm our difference without this being recognized by the others" (Melucci 1996:34) helps to highlight the example of Dubrovnik in 1991-92. People who remained under siege recognized themselves as different fr om their fe llow-citizens who left the town, but it was the latter who became "the voice of Dubrovnik" in the ou ter world. In the international media, they ca l i ed fi1r he! p filr the mon u mentR. 1 n the national media, they helped to promote the image of OJ "hero tow n", very much in accordance with Dubrovnik being one of th e key sy mbols of Croatian national identity." The space-related identity imposed on peo ple who f�1ccd the attacks on D u brovni k th us became double-segregated in an inversion of the aforementioned definition. They were ei ther fo rgotten in th e shadow ofhi storical build ings, or turned into mute "heroes" i n h abitin g the space saturated with symbols, which served as a tru mp card in pol iti cal negotiations. In deed, the international shock provoked by the heavy bom bardin g ofthc historical core of Du brovnik on 6 December 1991 proved to be a decisive gain in Croatia's struggle for recogni tion. Tho people I interviewed were well aware of that, but at the same time very bitter about the "heroi zation" that almost enti rely deprived them of the chance to voice their encounters with violence, fe ar and gri ef (even in the local media). It fo rced them to step directly into history, their personal war experiences disap pearing in symbols.
Ethnographies based on personal narratives of war may therefore prove to be crucial in the process of understanding that identities based on experience, situation and resistance are pri marily defined by changed political landscapes and lived encounters of violence. Such identities are not only more persistent than those created and enhanced by nationalist rhetoric, but also, under close ethnological scrutiny, do not offer any good reason fo r being reduced to national(ist) kitsch. In the context of war destruction, the physical space in which peaceful everyday life has been situated becomes emotionally even more important: it is precisely where the strug gle to preserve the minimum of normality cru cial for physical, psychological and cultural survival is taking place. Notes 1.. An especially important (and so far most i ns igh t fu l fr om the ethnological point of view) nutobio graphical account on the war in Croatia is Alenka MirkoviC's book (1997) on pre-war situation, the siege and the fall of Vukovar. 2. Thom as J. Csordas points to the theoretical recog nition of location, that is, "non-equivalent posi ti ons in a substantive web of connections. The emphasis on location accepts the interpretative consequences of relatedness, partial grasp of any situation, and imperfectcommunication" (1994:2). Alth ough l ocati on is considered prima ri ly as a spatial category in this article, it goes without saying that the interpretative consequences of relatedness, partiality and hindered communica tion are implied in any discussion of war experi ences . 3. It is therefore not surprising that many of the interviewed persons were very critical about the roles played by local and national political elites who used their lived experience in political nego tiations, not to mention the disgust caused by some experience-detached media presentations of their life in war, especially by "see-and-run" jour nalists. (At the public presentation ofAlenka Mirk oviC's book (1997), the author made a joke when explaining her choice ofthejournalist who was one of the presenters. She said that she wanted to find a journalist who spent more than four hours in Vukovar in late 1991.) Regarding the rather touchy political implications, together with the still not fo rgotten lesson fr om the communist period that it is dangerous to criticize the regime, their state ments could be considered very brave. However, people who met ultimate life dangers and did so because they believed that staying behind is a fo rm of efficient resistance to the war enemy, are not only morally entitled to criticize the (ab)use of their efforts, but also cannot really fe ar the dan gers that seem to be trivial compared to the ones they met in war. 4. The parents of an eleven-year-old girl who got some shrapnel under her eye took her to Zagreb and to Vienna, only to have the Dubrovnik sur geons' opinion confirmed: it had to be left there. 5. For a short outline of pre-war situation in Croatia, as well as ofthe major political and cultural traits ofthe fo rmer Yugoslavia, see the chapter on histo ry, ideology and symbols in Povrzanovic 1997. For ethnographic accounts on wartime everyday life see Cale Feldman, Senjkovic, Prica (eds) 1993. 6. The antiessentialism advocated by ethnologists and anthropologists should not be directed "at what is essentially human -a debatable and refinable list that should include, besides lan guage, a sense of dignity, a need to love and be loved, the capacity to reason, the ability to laugh and to cry, be sad and be happy" (Daniel 1996: 198). 7. An admirably eloquent and complex insight into the bu rd t:nH dea lt wit h in the endeavour ofwrit.ing an <'Lhnogra phy (or "a nt hropography") of violence hu:; recently been offered by V: tlenLine E. Daniel, who re minds UH that "it iH ofL en fi>rgoLt.en th at. even ordinary lifi: iH not trunHparenL to theory. Violence juHL bringH this poi nt horne" (D:micl 1996:6). 8. Since autumn 1991 , the identity of suffering ha:s, fiu· well -known r·eaHons, been "reserved" fo r Vu ko var. Dubrovnik, also occupyinl{ the central posi tion in the nntional narrative, is aRcribed tho identity of pride and rccogniwcl m; /.he site of rcHi:stance, although the sn mc pride, endurance and resist.nnce were met. in many other Croatian townH, Lon.