History Culture and Banal Nationalism in post-War Bosnia

This article analyses post-war history culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina using the concept of banal nationalism. Through a description of Bosnia’s post-war history culture – that part of public culture where people face the past in their daily lives, i.e. books, films, monuments, museums, buildings, pictures, photographs, plays and so forth – the article demonstrates the division of Bosnian history culture into three variants and analyzes the main characteristics of each variant. The analysis shows that contrary to classical, more selfconscious forms of historical presentation such as museum exhibits, the past exists in post-war Bosnian society in a banal way. The article concludes that such a banal presence of history can have a strong impact on the identity and historical consciousness of Bosnians