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esearch, but also the experience of its process; the before and after of the
interviews, from the students interactions with institutions and associations
to their relationships with friends and colleagues, and everything that
occupied, at the time, the public and private realms of their daily lives.
Beyond the war, across the community
The interviews proceeded along the lines of a framework, but these guidelines
were designed to be a trail of subjects that would ideally be explored
in conversation, not a rigid list of questions that had to be asked directly.
This framework reflected the extent of our research beyond the specific
event of the war, into both the chronology of what had happened, and the
topics of our analysis. On one level the periods before the outbreak of war
were considered for study, along with the subjects’ perspectives on the
present and future, while on another level, we attempted to draw forth the
complexity of the Kosovar experience. Our guidelines for the interviews
thus included different issues such as the role of the individual within a
family context; the gap between the normalizing public discourse and the
intensity of the popular experience of war, displacement and return; coping
strategies and the emergence of suffering in the individual; the familiar,
generational, gender-related and community-oriented dimensions of
life; the narratives and discourse of suffering and healing; the interrelation
of coping strategies past and current with discourses of identity; the people’s
own accounts of the Kosovars’ current situation, and their perspectives,
dreams, desires and projects for a future Kosovar society.
In the following analysis of the collected materials, the term “conflict
experiences” refer not only to the event of the war, but also to the social,
economic and political context created in its aftermath. The processes by
which memory is constructed, though read in relation to specific experiences
and the cultural backgrounds in which these have occurred, will be
analysed across the boundaries of different communities.
Forgetting as healing
Tales of present and past suffering
Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
As has already been discussed, the interviews collected by the students
focused on the experience of war, while specific research was aimed at
extending the conversation to include a wider range of topics. In most of
the interviews held within the Kosovar-Albanian community, however, the
interviewees made the war the centre of their conversation, and in some
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