ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the dual meaning of urban exile. The sociocultural cleavage between locals and various groups of newcomers is related to the wider Bosnian assumption of a ranking among cultural mentalities, placing urban and rural, as well as cultured and non-cultured behaviour at opposite ends of a normative hierarchy. In the popular imagination, relative wealth, high levels of education, cosmopolitanism, Europeanises and low levels of religiosity characterize the refined urban, high culture of Sarajevo. The Communist party, which came to power in the aftermath of World War II, turned rapid economic progress that is urbanization and industrialization, into the centrepiece of its political project. In a less benign way, the newcomers are considered to nurture fundamentalist religious, ethnic and political attitudes which threaten the fine and complicated, even fragile, cultural pluralism of Sarajevo. Newcomers are not treated by Sarajlije as a homogeneous, equally detestable group, but are placed within a hierarchy of culturedness, most often corresponding to regional origins.
