A program of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, with the generous support of the Carolina Seminars

Multiculturalism and the Culture of Confessionalism:
Remaking Museums in Post-War Sarajevo

Date: September 23, 2005
Speaker: Edin Hajdarpasic

Attendance: About 25 faculty and students, including CCSMEMC members Banu Gokariksel, Carl Ernst, and Charlie Kurzman.

In the territorial partitioning of Bosnia following the war, the institutions of census and map have been used to envision and construct nations. Museums, as an archetypal cultural institution of the modern state, also serve those functions. An extremely significant post-war phenomenon in Bosnia has been the spread of discourse about multiculturalism, which was not used much to describe life in the province before the 1990s. In media representations, Sarajevo has become a symbol of resistance to the pattern of ethnic cleansing--a tolerant, multicultural haven.

The National Museum of Sarajevo has been an important site for deploying multiculturalist discourse. In 1894, the Museum obtained the Sarajevo Haggadah, a 14th-century manuscript which has become the museum’s most prominent holding. But the Haggadah came to be framed as the museum’s most precious holding only during the 1990s; before that, it was never even displayed. The Haggadah’s recent prominence is a consequence of the Haggadah’s being claimed as a paradigm of the endurance of religious multiculturalism in the face of war. The story that has been constructed around the Haggadah is a story of people of different faiths risking their lives to safeguard a Jewish book.

Following the war, international organizations have found the Haggadah a useful symbol of multiculturalism, multiple ethnicities, and religious tolerance. The Haggadah is well suited for this symbolic work because Jews were not one of the religious groups represented as waging war (unlike Muslims, Serbian Orthodox, and Catholics), and thus a celebration of the Haggadah does not appear to confer favor on one party in Bosnia’s religious-political conflicts. In 2002, the UN mission to Bosnia launched an exhibit at the National Museum dedicated solely to the Haggadah, which provided an occasion for speeches about Sarajevo’s “multicultural” history, the cooperation of people of all faiths, etc.

The Haggadah exhibit exemplifies what Hajdarpasic regards as superficial rebuilding efforts on the part of international organizations, focused on symbols of multiculturalism. Badly damaged during the war, the National Museum’s outer façade was rebuilt with funding from international organizations; however, the museum still has no heating, which makes exhibits unworkable in the winter, and apart from the Haggadah exhibit, the rest of the building remains dilapidated. As a result, the museum was closed to the public in 2004. The Haggadah--the symbol of multiculturalism--can no longer be seen.

The symbolic use of the Haggadah demonstrates how a story of religious multiculturalism has been embedded in a nationalist story in which religious difference is fundamental. According to its dominant interpretation, multiculturalism in Bosnia equates with multiconfessionalism: By sanctioning partition along ethnic-religious lines, the Dayton framework precludes undoing the segregation produced by the war and enshrines essentialist assumptions about ethno-confessionalist nationalist identity. Reconstruction projects focused on religious objects--mosques, churches, the Sarajevo Haggadah--celebrate, rather than undermine, nationalist divisions. This approach to reconstruction appears to reflect (a) an assumption that in non-Western cultures, religion is a major motivation for political action, and (b) an entrenched view of culture as so deeply spiritual and ancient that members of a community can only perpetuate traditions.

An alternative way to understand culture is represented by another Bosnian museum: the Ars Aeri Museum of Contemporary Art. The Ars Aeri project was proposed during the war as a call to contemporary artists to show the superiority of art and culture over the forces of destruction. The project enjoyed the support of various European art institutions, though, lacking a permanent home, it rotated between spaces, including the former Museum of Revolution, now the Museum of History, in Sarajevo. At one point, the art’s exhibits, critical commentaries on war and injustice, had to be displayed in tents: like war refugees, the museum carried on its life in a temporary space. Recently, in order to obtain UNESCO assistance, Ars Aeri has begun to use multiculturalist discourse--for example, replicating the now standard rhetoric about Sarajevo being a multicultural capital. However, even as Ars Aeri buys into the four-religions model of Bosnian culture to attract funding, Ars Aeri’s exhibits question whether religion is a primarily good thing. Ars Aeri thus stands in contrast to the Haggadah exhibit, for which religion is an unquestioned good and our highest achievement is for religions to live together peacefully.

Stories told about heroic multiculturalism stand in stark contrast to realities of everday life, Hajdarpasic concluded. The pressing problem faced by Bosnians is not multiculturalism but inept, corrupt rule. Bosnia must break with the Dayton political structures, Hajdarpasic insisted, if Sarajevo is to be a truly open society.