Abstract
Many participants in conflict have experienced it through mediations of meaning between languages, and whole categories of participants have even often gone unnoticed in the study of war because of the historic ‘invisibility’ of languages and translation. Where archival methods often fall short in researching their experiences, and observational methods are infeasible, interviewing may help researchers get as close as possible to such participants’ memories—yet produces new narratives which are co-constructed between interviewer and interviewee, rather than direct access to their experiences of conflict. This chapter explores these issues by reflecting on interviews about peacekeeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina conducted for the Languages at War project in 2008–2011, through themes of narrative and memory, interview methodology, and positionality, including the boundaries of ‘military’/‘civilian’ identities.
This chapter owes much to conversations with the Languages at War research team (Louise Askew, Hilary Footitt, Michael Kelly, Greg Tinker, Simona Tobia) in 2008–2012 and with fellow feminist researchers of war and the military since then such as Victoria Basham, Sarah Bulmer, Amanda Chisholm, Synne Dyvik, Harriet Gray, and Alexandra Hyde. I am particularly grateful to Rachel Woodward for bringing her research with Neil Jenkings on military memoirs to a life history and life writing conference at Sussex in 2010 and enabling us both to realise that an oral history and translation studies project could also speak to military sociology and geography.
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Notes
- 1.
The case study’s original focus was 1995–1998, matching the time frame of a parallel study on the Allied liberation and occupation of Western Europe (1944–1947)—but in practice extended backwards to the beginning of the war in 1992, and forwards into the 2000s, to incorporate the time frames in which our interviewees had experienced changes in language practice (Kelly and Baker 2013).
- 2.
The handbook by Lee Ann Fujii (2017) may be particularly helpful as the author was a specialist on mass violence and genocide in BiH, Rwanda, and the USA.
- 3.
In particular, there ended up being no interviews with locally recruited interpreters who had worked in another of the three Multinational Divisions of the NATO force, the French-led division headquartered in Mostar (one or two potential participants from Mostar contacted me, but were away when I was visiting Bosnia or did not respond).
- 4.
In fact, the over-representation of Banja Luka compared to Mostar had its advantages in that Mostar has been very heavily studied by peacebuilding researchers as an example of a post-war city that continues to be ethnically divided. There were fewer studies of Banja Luka (though see, e.g. Stefansson 2006), and fewer still that viewed the area through the lens of post-socialist and post-war socio-economic precarity which emerged through my interviews there and elsewhere as a major theme for understanding the experiences of locally recruited interpreters across Bosnia. Mostar’s high profile as a site for peacebuilding research might well have left residents there with greater ‘research fatigue’, making them less likely to want to take part in yet another project (on ‘local tactics of resistance’ to research where most knowledge production is primarily to the benefit of the outside researcher, see Kappler 2013).
- 5.
One article on conflict interpreting by Rebecca Tipton (2011) based on an interview with an Iraqi interpreter who worked for the US Army, for instance, does not provide any localising information beyond the type of unit the interpreter worked for (civil affairs) and the broad region (southern Iraq).
- 6.
The phrase ‘naš jezik’ (‘our language’) among speakers of the language(s) formerly called Serbo-Croat is an established convention to avoid having to fix one national or politicised name on to the language and potentially disrupt the community of ‘we’ in a conversation if the speaker’s choice of name turns out to harden a boundary between themselves and another. ‘My language or yours?’ is a much more flexible way for an Anglophone to negotiate language choice in former Yugoslavia than, for example, ‘English or Bosnian?’
- 7.
Beyond the financial benefits that working for a foreign military force which paid in hard currency had in a wartime economy, working as an interpreter and avoiding military service might have particularly appealed to men who were part of pacifist and alternative cultural circles, of mixed ethnic background, gay, or bisexual—all of whom could expect an ethnonational military force to be an unwelcome environment.
- 8.
Interviewers may even find they remember more of these connections, or talk more about them, as they get to know interviewees. I am quite sure that I referred to my grandfather’s wartime service as a Royal Air Force pilot in conversation with several British (ex-)military interviewees (and would have liked to have been able to remember more about his squadron, plane, and dates of service—the waymarkers that structure military narratives), though the positions I could speak from in conversations like those would have been very different if my grandfather had been, say, a Kenyan or Cypriot rebel who had fought against the British.
- 9.
For instance, my father is left-wing and was active in the labour movement in London in the early 1970s, when it has long been rumoured a right-wing faction in the British establishment was plotting a military coup: at one point during an interview with a man whose military career had passed through Army intelligence during the 1970s it occurred to me (and I had to struggle not to give away that something had interjected itself into my thoughts while I was supposed to be listening) that this man or someone like him might have faced my father across an interrogation table if such a coup had gone ahead.
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Baker, C. (2019). Interviewing for Research on Languages and War. In: Kelly, M., Footitt, H., Salama-Carr, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Languages and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04825-9_8
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