The societies of the former Yugoslavia are only a quarter-century removed from extensive warfare, yet collectively represent one of the fastest-growing tourism destinations in the world. This dissertation employs a global and relational lens to examine how contested narratives of recent conflict history are marketed, performed, and narrativized in settings of touristic interaction. The data for this project comes from a variety of qualitative data collected in five cities located in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. These include content analysis of 262 tourism marketing webpages, 89 interviews with tourism providers, and ethnographic observation of 86 guided tours alongside other commemorative sites. These data reveal the complexity of historical representations performed by private actors in a diffuse, global marketplace. While prior scholarship suggests that tourism providers would avoid controversial historical representations, private organizations and subnational institutions almost universally engage with contested memories of war, socialism, and regime change in their touristic offerings. Tour agencies and officials market their destinations to tourist audiences by relying on cultural tropes and stereotypes associated with the liminal regional location of the Yugoslav region in the global cultural imagination. What appear at first glance to be banal geographic signifiers are larded with essentialist associations with conflict. On tour, guides draw on various performative stances to engage with war to different ends for international audiences. While performances differ across ethno-national and ideological lines, guides across the spectrum strive to appear “objective” in order to gain the trust and credibility of their international audiences. Tour experiences are enhanced by visits to sites of commemorative sedimentation, narrativizing complicated historical trajectories by means of places associated with multiple events or layers of memory. These findings have significant implications for understanding how collective memory and national reputation travel in the global marketplace. Taken together, they confirm the crucial roles of institutional context and intended audience in shaping depictions of the past. In so doing, this study demonstrates how global and transnational forms of memory necessarily differ from even their most complex domestic counterparts.

Creator

• Levin, Jeremy Kuperberg

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-adfb-mf91

Subject

• Sociology

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16511
• etdadmin_upload_983431

Keyword

• Collective memory
• Tourism
• National reputation
• Cultural performance
• Yugoslavia

Date created

• 2023-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright