ABSTRACT
In the case of post-Yugoslav Croatia, sport has proved to be a highly politicized form of national expression, functioning as a salient social field in which Croatia’s national habitus codes are most intensively articulated, debated and contested. This chapter expends these arguments by exploring the role of sport in the (re-)production of memory narratives. It thereby illuminates how the social field of sport produces and reproduces narratives of Croatian national identity, particularly in reference to the Homeland War. It identifies Croatian athletes, sport officials and fans as agents of remembrance and ascribes them a significant role in the process of shaping and constructing social memory. By focusing on the social field of sport, the chapter aims to scrutinize debates in the Croatian public sphere dealing with questions of history and national identity and provide an insight into its complex and multilayered nature. The chapter uses both ethnographic and newspaper material. The contribution ultimately aims to illustrate that Croatian sport has to be understood as a social field in which social memory is prominently constructed, heatedly articulated and powerfully disseminated, thereby offering an additional layer to existing studies of social memory and remembrance in post-Yugoslav societies.
