university of nova gorica graduate school contested spaces and ...

Chapter Two
CONTESTED HISTORIES
[…] the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected
processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to
reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like ‘nation’, ‘society’, and ‘culture’ name bits
and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles
of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were
abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of
understanding (Wolf 1997 [1982]: 3).
With these words, Eric Wolf comments how the “big concepts” have often been objectified
and than turned into separate entities (such as West, Christian Europe). These “bits” have then
been seen as homogeneous and fixed units by various scholars in social sciences and
humanities. In doing so, scholars differentiate them from other entities and constitute the
schemes of linear development where history often becomes a story of moral success of a
particular entity. They create the world as a model or as a “global pool hall” in which the
entities spin off each other like hard and round billiard balls (Wolf 1997: 5). Instead of
differences that are often put forth and explored by contemporary scholars, it would actually
be more revealing to explore the relations between cultures, societies, and histories. After all,
“we all inhabit ‘one’ world”, where the contacts, direct or indirect, are inevitable. Societies,
cultures and histories are not closed systems but “bundles of relationships”. They are
continuously constituted by, while they at the same time continuously constitute, multiple
networks of relations (see Wolf 1997: 19).
In the 19 th century, alongside the spread of nationalisms and the formation of nation-states,
the meaning of nation as a closed and homogeneous entity that conjoins people of the “same”
language, culture and habits arose in the social, political and scientific discourse in Europe.
With development of press various intellectuals – historians, folklorists, poets, writers,
politicians and economists – played a crucial role in the process of homogenisation of the
nation-states (see Anderson 1995: 54, cf. Kalčić 2006: 65-66). They have defined the nationstate
as if it would have existed “since ever”.
According to Hobsbawm (2002 [1983]: 7) the bases of the nation-state are grounded in the
reconstruction of the history and invention of tradition. History is part of the knowledge and
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