Between Camp and Cross: Ambiguity, Memory, and Commemoration in Trnopolje

Abstract

This article examines how historical narratives, collective memory, and embodied personal experience shape postwar nation-making and border-making in Bosnia-Herzegovina, through an ethnographic analysis of commemorative landscapes in the north-western municipality of Prijedor. Based on personal narratives, everyday practices, and situated encounters with sites such as the former Trnopolje detention camp, the Trnopolje Cross, the Kozarac memorial, and the Prijedor Cross, the article explores how ethno-national modes of commemoration produce and sustain contested 'deathscapes'. It argues that, despite profound ethno-national and religious divisions between Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) living in Republika Srpska, the dead are publicly acknowledged and ritually commemorated in comparable ways, so long as remembrance remains anchored within nationalistic frameworks of 'us' versus 'them'. Drawing on anthropological theories of collective memory (Halbwachs 1980), nationalism and nation-making (Gellner 1987; Smith 1991), and the political lives of the dead (Verdery 1999), the article demonstrates how routine, everyday engagements with monuments and commemorative practices reproduce ethno-national belonging and sediment post-conflict divisions in Prijedor.