Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici
the construction of a monolithic national identity. Those on the other side
are not unified, but appear fragmented along socio-cultural, gender and
generational divisions. Finally, the essay will analyse these different narratives,
observing how their fragmentations follow fractures and continuities
produced and/or reinforced by the experience of conflict, and by the
construction of memories within the Kosovar communities, at both an
individual and collective level.
Student fieldwork
Environment and methodology
The material collected in Kosovo for the Archives of Memory was partly
produced within the framework of training exercises for psychosocial
counsellors, partly through specific research activities. In discussing the
material that was gathered in the training course, I will refer mainly to the
documents compiled in the first stage, devoted to the relationship between
memory and psychosocial activities. The students were thus provided with
interviewing skills, and divided into small groups. During their fieldwork,
they gathered 15 interviews, partly in Pristina 3 and partly in the villages
located near the region’s capital or in neighbouring municipalities. All of
the interviews were held within the Kosovar-Albanian community, to
which the students belong. A variety of subjects were interviewed (children,
adolescents, adults and the elderly of both sexes), and the conversations
usually took place in a family context, thus allowing other members
of the family to take part in the conversation. Exceptions to this procedure
were interviews addressed to specific groups of people (a classroom of
children and students in a female dormitory, for instance). Most of the
people interviewed had experienced one or more instances of bereavement.
The students had previously identified some of them as “cases”
where psychological support was needed. In a few interviews, a prearranged
questioning format was used, though not strictly followed.
The interviews focused on the experience of the war, exile and return, and
were conceived as the first step in the establishment of a relationship with
potential patients. In many cases, however, these interviews also became a
first phase of treatment, since the sharing of these memories helped build
a foundation of trust and confidence between the two participants in the
conversation. This last result was achieved primarily because the interviewers
not only spoke the same language and belonged to the same cultural
context as the interviewees, but had also experienced the war.
Moreover, the students themselves tended to lend special meaning to inter-
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