Schooling the Bosnian way : the maintenance of social and cultural belonging through the field of Bosnian education system

Abstract

This thesis is grounded in a five and a half month anthropological fieldwork conducted in two secondary educational schools in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Through material gathered through participant observation, numerous conversations, semi-structural interviews and written and audio sources accessible in the public sphere, the purpose of this thesis is to explore the research question of how does education contribute to the maintenance of social and cultural belonging.

As stated the fieldwork was conducted in two high schools in Sarajevo, more precisely an elite school and a vocational high school. The thesis argues that when analysing an elite school in comparison to a vocational school it is fruitful to apply Bourdieuian theory. The initial part of my fieldwork started by asking the following questions: How do young adults in Bosnia and Hercegovina experience being a part of the society, and how do they reason about their past and future? Does education contribute to the maintenance of social and cultural belonging among young people in Sarajevo, and if so, how? During the fieldwork experience as new knowledge was presented to me, new questions became relevant: How is the habitus of the young Bosnians changing and how is knowledge distributed in the society through high school education? My intention is to point to changes in the habitus by looking at what knowledge is seen as important in the education of the future generation. Also I seek to analyse schooling from a comparative perspective which results in exploration of the terms cultural, economic and symbolic capital. The latter is seen in relation to the students’ social position. In addition the last part of the thesis focuses on the political socialisation of young adults. The latter part seeks to explore certain implications on how and why the young generation reasons about the political life in Bosnia and Hercegovina.