History, memory, and identity: Remembering the homeland in exile

This dissertation investigated how constructions of a group’s history affect members’ attitudes toward and relationships with outgroup members. Incorporating Halbwach’s (1950) concept of collective memory—defined as a shared sense of history—to Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), I conceptualized collective memories as the content of collective identities. I suggested that outgroup attitudes are determined not only by the strength or importance of a group identity but also by the cultural narratives that construct the history of intergroup relations and on which these group identities are grounded. Bosnian refugees and immigrants who left their country during or after the 1992-1995 war and who resettled in the U.S. were participants in the study. Following Weine (1999), I identified two versions of the history of intergroup relations (collective memory narratives) in the Bosnian context through a literature review and preliminary interviews. One version that I called narratives of coexistence emphasized harmonious multiethnic living (deriving from the official ideology of “Yugoslavian brotherhood and unity”); the other, narratives of threat, revived the memory of previous ethnic conflicts during the two World Wars (used by nationalist leaders). It was hypothesized that the endorsement of narratives interacts with the degree of ethnic identification to predict outgroup attitudes. In addition, it was expected that group members would remember the Bosnian war in ways that would favor the ingroup (i.e., attributing more responsibility to outgroups for starting the war and committing war crimes). Life story interviews with 8 Bosnian immigrants and refugees and a quantitative survey of 94 Bosnians (mostly Bosnian Muslims) in the United States were conducted to gather data in addition to observations and informal conversations in community organizations. The results showed that collective memory (specifically, narratives of coexistence) moderated the relationship between ethnoreligious identification and attitudes toward one of the outgroups for Bosnian Muslims, the Croats, as expected. However, collective memory (attributions for war) mediated the relationship between ethnoreligious identification and attitudes toward the other outgroup, Serbs. Further, the ethnic makeup of the immigrant communities (homogenous vs. multiethnic) had an impact on how the past was remembered and how members of outgroups were evaluated. Still, the effect of collective memory narratives remained limited due to the fact that many participants had both narratives available to interpret their experiences as shown by shifts between narratives in life story interviews and a lack of correlation between the endorsement of the two narratives. The findings were discussed in relation to literatures on transnational political participation and reconciliation.