Kultura, jedinstvo i sukob „različja“
Culture, Unity and the Conflict of “Differences”

Summary/Abstract: The term culture is usually mentioned in the context of a refined spirit, which is its basic meaning – separating it from the cruel nature and beyonsense. However, the way to that “pure” substract, selected human experience and wit is full of contradictions. The past of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been marked by a variety of continuities and discontinuities, as well as by a long tradition of contradictions, ranging from idyllic neighbor-loving coexistence and unity, which had its peak in a form of “brotherhood”, cultural tolerance and interviewing; to cultural and political animosities, disdain and open cultural, ideological and armed conflicts, violence and brutality, initiated by the long-planned “final conflicts” implemented by genocide and culturcide; conflicts with the intention of “eliminating (the other)”. Writings of some authors are absurd and irritating in a way (simply because they are not true), because they state that civilizations and cultures only touch and intertwine, communicate and articulate, as if the conflict between them was non-existent, the same way it is absurd to claim that human societies, peoples, nations, ethnic groups and others are governed in their interaction only by friendly, humane, neighbor-loving ideals, as if living in an idyllic harmony.Different feelings prevail in a man, different systems of values, order, passion, interests, love, hate, contradictions and fierce conflicts. All that is transferred to the micro-plan, to the society, to a more complex organism. All those contradictions are not, in the essence and in a wide spectrum of cultures, a sole characteristic of Bosnia and Herzegovina; although, keeping in mind the country’s geographical position, Bosnia and Herzegovina is a multicultural specificum – a place where the dominant and other cultures meet. However, throughout its 1000-year-long life, that cultural mosaic has been formed in a peaceful coexistence and harmony of cultures, as well as through many sufferings, conflicts, bloody battles, epopees; as well as through the horrors of genocide and urbicide and a desperate fight for survival, all of which we felt on our own skin recently.

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