I really enjoyed our recent opportunity to visit Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina as a group. It provided me an opportunity to experience and engage with a reality that we had been introduced to, since we were in the region, but that I ultimately didn’t fully understand until the lectures presented to us in these countries and my own personal experience with their salience. The importance of religious identities in perceptions of self and national identities. Something that has been center stage as we’ve spent time learning and exploring the region has been the high number of conflicts and clashes of religiously opposed civilizations, with Christianity in the West ‘proper,’ and Islam to the East. A part of that education was understanding the strong role of religion in the identification of people particularly in regards to conversion, especially that of Christianity to Islam.
It was, and is, considered the ultimate betrayal, and the ultimate surrender of personal identity, to the point that such realities still hold shame for descendants of those who made such decisions as an avenue of survival. Despite such visceral descriptions of the strength of religious identities in this region. I do not believe I was able to truly understand its true importance in personal identification before our visit to Serbia and Bosnia. I believe that in many ways the salience of such identities in Romania, and particularly Bucharest and larger cities in the nation might be more covert. While yes there is an overwhelming presence and oversaturation of churches in the nation, and incredibly large ones at that, I do not believe that the role of religion has ever been as incredibly present as it was in my experience during this trip outside of the country, but nonetheless still within the region.
During our trip, multiple lecturers identified religion as a strong aspect of identity in the region; with it being a strong aspect of national identity amongst Serbs, with Serbs perceiving Kosovo as a religious holy-ground of sorts and being unwilling to allow Kosovo independence as a result, with people being more open to solutions granting Kosovo levels of independence in the Kosovo-Serbia separation discourse as long as the religious access of Serbs was guaranteed. Additionally, lecturers in our trip to Bosnia discussed an overall division in societal engagement on the bases of religious identities with people identifying those of their religion as an “us” and others as a “them.” One of our lecturers noted that people will attempt to make religious classification judgements on the bases of visible appearance, name, and then if those two fail, will directly ask as one of the very first questions in an interaction. A common phrasing being “are you one of us, or one of them?”
The explicitness of such phrasing was incredibly enlightening to me in a way that’s quite difficult to explain. It really drove home the strength of religion in the personal identification of the local peoples, by how otherized the wrong answer would immediately make someone to the questioning person, and how it would immediately erase any other similarities you may otherwise share as people by instantaneously placing you as a “them.” My own experience being asked my religion within the first three questions of an interaction with someone really drove that home. Especially in contrast to the US where I’ve never been explicitly asked such a question, as if the default was that I be religious, with people just asking me if I’m at all religious many interactions into a relationship, if ever at all. This difference in experiences really highlighted the role of religion as an intrinsic part of identities, or at least in the consideration of them, in the region; with a clearly strong value, and an expectation, being held towards adherence to some religion.