Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market. Intimate Debt

What are the connections between health and wealth, between medicine and the market? This is just one of the questions that Larisa Jašarević poses in her book Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market. Intimate Debt. Jašarević investigates the entanglements between the economy, the living body and the notion of the good life in postsocialist and post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her ethnography is based on extensive field-work in the Bosnian city of Tuzla and is a great contribution to the scholarship on former Yugoslavia as well as to medical anthropology and political economy more broadly.

Jašarević’s work fits well with other recent ethnographies of contemporary Bosnia, such as those by Azra Hromadžić, Stef Jansen, Elissa Helms, and Čarna Brković, that move beyond studies of ethnicity, nationalism and politics with a capital P. ^[1] Jašarević steers away from presenting Bosnia-Herzegovina and the wider region as perpetually trapped in the tropes of balkanisation, backwardness, and transition. The book with its focus on alternative forms of health, spiritual and bodily healing could have easily slipped into orientalising and balkanising tropes. However, Jašarević masterfully evades such tropes by focusing on the embodied and entangled nature of health and wealth, on the body and the economy. Drawing on the work of philosopher Jean Luc Nancy, she is interested in exploring more than just the particularities of the Bosnian context but the human condition overall.

The book is a compilation of detours, entanglements, and indebtedness. Jašarević does not focus on either medical institutions nor formal market institutions. Rather, as she points out, her approach is more sideways (20). She seeks out the connections between health and wealth not in the clinics and hospitals but in the open-air markets, people’s homes and in public transportation. Jašarević spends time in Tuzla’s open-air markets, public squares and trains eavesdropping on conversations where she shows that the bodily entangles with the economic. She focuses on the entanglement of biomedical, herbalist, magical and religious healing that are all present in the everyday practices and pursuits of health by the citizens of Tuzla.

The subtitle of the book Intimate Debt is well suited. Debt is more than an economic term, it is a state of being, a bodily experience. Intimate debts are never to be fully repaid because this state of informal debt shapes one’s subjectivity and sense of being part of a collective. Informal debts also keep small entrepreneurship afloat in Bosnia as most people are struggling to make ends meet. Most market traders and shopkeepers give goods ‘on pencils’ (na olovku), with the assurance that their customers will repay them when they can. This type of indebted economy causes anxiety and stress for both the sellers and the buyers—that is the market causes bodily ailments. People worry themselves sick (sikirancija) over their jobs and their debts, but most of all they worry about and on the behalf of others. For being without debt means being outside the social collective in Bosnia. Rather than being seen as bad for the market economy, informal loans and intimate debts are the pillars of sociality that is crucial for the expansion of the market economy. One of the main takeaways of Jašarević’s book is that the market is more closely entangled with health than just paying for medication and visiting the doctor’s office for a check-up. For example, when Jašarević asks her informants at the open-air market how their business is going, the answers they give are almost always about the state of their health. Health and wealth are entangled to the point where one is inextricably linked to the other.

Health is the greatest wealth. Jašarević, through her well-written ethnography, describes how people navigate precarity and how this neoliberal precarity is both embodied and managed. In this sense, her work resonates well with the work of Čarna Brković, who looks at formal social and welfare institutions and the informal economy to understand how people manage ambiguity. Jašarević’s work is complementary as it looks at how health and wellbeing are being managed and understood under the new economic precarity of neoliberalism.

This book is a great contribution, not only to postsocialist anthropology and anthropology of Eastern Europe. While reading Jašarević’s work, I was left with the question of how debt and precarity are experienced phenomenologically in other settings as well. Can we trace similar entanglements between the health practices of American college students who are burdened with student loan debts? Jašarević’s work provides fresh and distinct insight into the connections between medical anthropology and political economy, and thus is a necessary read and a great inspiration for all scholars looking to approach their own research from a sideways approach.