Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Semiperipheral Entanglements

For more than fifteen years Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has had a woeful reputation as an important field for research on war-affected, war-torn, and economically devastated societies, incapable of managing its ‘transition’ towards a sustainable, liberal, and multicultural future. Much of the research concerns already well-known issues. At the same time, these issues seem to suggest easily recognizable practical solutions: the socialist past should be left behind, ethnonational identification abandoned, and new habits adopted. Such a scenario is, however, well-known to those who are supposed to adopt to it, except for the character of the past that they should step out of.

‘The Dayton configuration itself’, as the editors underline in the introduction, ‘has set the paradigm, guiding researchers to ask particular normative questions, developed from a particular position and framed in particular manner […] often formulated outside of BiH’ (7-8). The ‘knowledge’ produced in this way is usually presented as neutral but is more often than not highly biased, hard of hearing what an ‘ordinary everyday life’ has to address. Moreover, the customarily patronizing tone of such studies blinds researchers to other insights. The volume Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina offers a different starting point. Its assertion that its contributors have been open to continuous recasting of their research questions is maybe somewhat pretentious, given that none of the authors were newcomers to BiH. They are self-reflective when writing their ethnographic texts, openly showing that their research results are inevitably partial.

The volume comes out of a workshop held at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz in October 2014, where the chapters were presented and thoroughly discussed. This has resulted in the authors’ reflections on their research results being coherent and complementary. The editors’ extensive introduction situates the volume within the corpus of humanities and social sciences’ research done so far, but also, and more importantly, in the ‘mature Dayton BiH’, where/when the research was conducted. Long-term, in-depth ethnographic research published in the volume picture an ‘ordinary BiH citizen’ who feels his/her daily life as if it is on hold, ‘permanently temporary’, except for only worse that is expected to come. Everyday socialities are reconfigured by ‘rising economic inequalities and new symbolic hierarchies between the “winners” and the “losers” of the post-war years’ (Henig, 52), the prewar ‘normal life’ (which remains a standard) (Čengić, 70) is irretrievably lost, a war experience validity is undermined, and ‘current precarity […] renders losses disputed and aspirations fraught’ to the extent that even war is referred to as bearing at least a certain sense of hope (Čengić, 70). To conceptualize such a context, the editors introduce four chronotopes: a round table, a waiting room, a swamp, and a labyrinth. The volume nevertheless ‘attempts to make another contribution beyond the classic one of cultural critique’ (23).

The volume’s chapters are organized into four sections, each of which is followed by a commentary written by experts on BiH whose primary interests lie in history, political science, political philosophy, and social policy. Together with an afterword by cultural anthropologist Michelle Obeid, an expert on transformations in livelihoods and political instability (in Lebanon), these commentaries allow for wider insights through their interdisciplinary interventions and cross-regional comparative ethnography.

The volume’s first section gathers three chapters under the title ‘Whose Voice? Post-War Articulations of Political Subjectivities.’ As Cécile Jouhanneau’s chapter shows, protagonists—in this case former camp detainees—can either be intentionally voiceless (refusing to participate in a transfer of their individual suffering into political goals) or cling to various avoidance practices that, in most cases, rely on claims that ‘politics is to blame’ (41) or that ‘no one cares about us’ (56). This, Jouhanneau argues, should be seen as an engaged answer ‘from below’, one that resists hegemonic politicizing discourse and practices, and, at the same time, provides evidence for the ‘commitment for harmonious everyday interactions and life together’ (40). On the other hand, as David Henig shows in his text which fills the space of an otherwise ‘almost non-existent ethnography of everyday life in post-war rural BiH’ (49), ‘[t]wenty years after signing the Dayton Agreement, hierarchies of suffering continue to be a subject of debates and a bitter memory about the moral qualities of individual villagers’ (52). To address this issue, Nejra Nuna Čengić focuses on ordinary citizens’ narrative positionings in relation to a series of ruptures in their ‘everydayness’ from the prewar period, through the war period, to the long-lasting postwar ‘precarity that renders losses disputed and aspirations fraught’ (70).

Three chapters in the second section discuss everyday practices that are ‘invented’ to deal with institutional disarray. Social protection issues—largely left to non-governmental actors, and to people’s resourcefulness and personal connections— are introduced through Azra Hromadžić’s chapter on a nursing home and Čarna Brković’s chapter on an NGO working with children with developmental difficulties. In both chapters, the present situation is weighed against the models in force during the socialist period and perceived as ‘grounded in struggles over positions and power, enabled by the marketization and privatization of welfare services across BiH’ (Brković, 107). Karla Koutková’s chapter on the ‘inner life’ of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe mission in BiH shows that ‘internationals’ employed here do not refrain from making use of their position, to the detriment of the often better educated and experienced ‘locals’.

The volume’s third section deals with voting practices—a topic much discussed— presenting a nuanced picture, one that is sometimes at odds with the ‘ethnonationalist key’ diagnosis and objections about young people’s passivity and disinterest. A person’s decision to vote is, as is shown, the result of multiple factors, including those related to minor, personal reasons that spring primarily from coping with social insecurity. Vanja Čelebćić’s and Larisa Kurtović’s chapters demonstrate yet another face of informality at work, underlining its productivity and showing the importance of studies in informality in providing a frame of reference that is more accurate than the overly simplified Dayton paradigm.

The two chapters in the last section further unveil the inaccuracy of the institutional and ideological narratives on BiH. Nebojša Šavija-Valha’s chapter on one of the ‘native’ concepts of gathering and perceiving one’s place in society is especially important. As Svjetlana Nedimović notes in her commentary, ‘by the standards of mainstream politics, raja is a political subject aborted’ (195), but it is nevertheless an important survival and pleasure-producing strategy that largely predates socialist Yugoslavia. Moreover, by enabling social conjunctions in otherwise disjunctive social situations, it fits to a considerable extent to the former concept of ‘brotherhood and unity’ but also, ironically, to hegemonic projections of a desirable future for the BiH’s society alike.

Commenting on the volume’s chapters, Armina Galijaš and Hrvoje Paić note, perhaps generalizing too abruptly, that most of them have in common ‘the (un)calculated critical pessimism as the cognitive starting point’ (75). On the other hand, a cultural anthropologist’s particular sensitivity, referred to also in the volume’s introduction (Jansen, Brković, and Čelebćić, 18, 22), is supposed to be able to detect research topics that are either typical of the society in question or are especially important. So, if ‘the analyses are tendentially focused on social actors often giving an impression of being locked in trauma, crisis and related social structures’ (Galijaš and Paić, 75), we should presume that this focus is justified. However, I do understand the concerns Galijaš and Paić put forward about ‘scientifically legitimising new negative stereotypes of “Balkan” societies’ and, consequently, reproducing ‘colonial knowledge with its power hierarchy between the “Balkans” and “Europe”’ (76). Although one should not confront such a possibility by inventing resistance where there is only resignation to be found, some chapters in this volume present actors with the capacity to bring forth alternative models of an ‘ordinary everydayness’, to challenge the prevailing ones.