Stef Jansen

The streets of Beograd. Urban space and protest identities in Serbia

Abstract Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Serbia, this text explores spatial dimensions of the 1996–1997 protests against the Milosevic regime. It considers the significance of spatial practices of resistance embedded in the urban space of the capital city Beograd, and analyses the relationship between the formation of identities and symbolic practices of protest, by exploring the role of spatial metaphors such as ‘the City’ and ‘Europe’ in subversive discourses, gradually shifting the analytical focus from the urban locale, and tactics of territorialisation, to the spatial metaphors of ‘the City’ and ‘Europe’, and tactics of deterritorialisation.

The violence of memories: local narratives of the past after ethnic cleansing in Croatia

Based on research carried out in war affected villages in Croatia, this paper explores the work of memory in a setting which was experientially, demographically and architecturally structured by the consequences of the post-Yugoslav wars. Through vagueness, amnesia and selective remembering, villagers constructed conflicting memories in relation to different sets of events: key-moments in the violence of 1991-5, and in that of World War II, were inscribed in different versions of fortyfive years of Yugoslav co-existence and of the more distant past. This has led other studies to explain much of the recent wars in terms of the liberation of suppressed World War II trauma. Suggesting a sceptical and nuanced view of such explanations, by analysing conflicting local narratives of self, village, state, war and history I highlight the malleable nature of these memories, the importance of silences, and the role of agency in positionings with regard to nationalist discourses.

Victims, underdogs and rebels: Discursive practices of resistance in Serbian protest

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyses the discursive practices of resistance deployed in two recent waves of dissent in Serbia: the 1996–97 demonstrations against the Milosevic regime, and the 1999 anti-NATO protest. I explore three identity motifs running through both protests (‘victims’, ‘underdogs’, and ‘rebels’), and explain how they were differentially articulated into a discursive practice of defiance. In contemporary Serbia, they resonate with everyday mechanisms of coping and belonging, grounded in nationalist representations of what it means to be a Serb. By analysing the contradictory deployment and performance of these motifs in two very different outbursts of dissent, this article offers an understanding of the tactical polyvalence of discourses of resistance.

National numbers in context: Maps and stats in representations of the post-Yugoslav wars

This article critically examines and contextualises the role of nationality statistics and maps in representations of the post-Yugoslav wars. Approaching these wars, a conflict involving competing nationalisms centred upon modern technologies of power/knowledge, I deploy the term “national numbers” to refer to the discursive node where numerical data about the nationality of the population and territorial mappings converge. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork since 1996, this article explores how the reliance on national numbers and their territorialisation functions as the lynchpin of a dominant “mosaic” mode of representation of the post-Yugoslav wars. Examining their workings within local and international governance, in experiences of “ethnic cleansing” in the post-Yugoslav states and in discourses aiming to know, understand, explain, and represent the violence, it then makes a case for a healthy dose of critical distance with regard to the deployment of national numbers. In particular, we need to contextualise them in relation to the role of national categories and other lines of differentiation in Yugoslavia. Anthropologists and other social scientists, who take pride in providing strongly contextualised understandings of social phenomena, seem to be particularly well placed to do so. Work on this article was greatly helped by the supportive environment provided by colleagues at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Hull, U.K. from 1999 until 2004.

Hope For/Against the State: Gridding in a Besieged Sarajevo Suburb

Abstract Anthropological dealings with the state often convey hope by replicating the hope of their subjects against the state. This libertarian paradigm provides effective analytical tools to grasp peoples evasion of state grids, through cultural resilience-in-authenticity and/or autonomous self-organisation. Yet it cannot conceptualise their affective and practical investments in ordering statecraft, i.e. their hope for the state. Through a case study of self-organisation in the besieged outskirts of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, this article traces inhabitants’ yearnings for ‘normal lives’ and their efforts to allow the latter to unfold. I focus on schooling and its temporal calibration of routines, framed in the vertical encompassment of statecraft. Against the reduction of hope to hope against the state, the complementary analytical tool of ‘gridding’, I propose, allows an alternative form of replication, capturing peoples yearnings for the convergence of top-down and upward/outward organisation of predictability on different scales.

People and things in the ethnography of borders: materialising the division of Sarajevo

This article addresses the contrasting pull of two tendencies in anthropology: (a) calls to redress the purification of human from non-human actants and (b) calls to denaturalise notions of borders as things, foregrounding borderwork. The resulting dilemma – do we treat people and things as equivalent actants on a ‘flat’ plane or not?– is explored through an ethnographic exercise on the border that divides Sarajevo. This case study crystallises methodological possibilities, implications for critique and matters of accountability presented by either path. Ultimately, I argue, a focus on things is productive insofar as it functions within a focus on human practice.

Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropology

My immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak’s book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006). In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it was not really a surprise at all. The United Kingdom has had a tempestuous relationship with the European Economic Community (EEC) and then the European Union (EU), ever since it joined in 1973. The discussions against this huge European border experiment (one of the most radical border experiments I can think of) have been unceasing, and came from left and right (and of course from anarchists), from the centre and the peripheries, from populists and internationalists. Those in favour of whatever ‘Europe’ might mean were always much less newsworthy. Anthropologists were among many who lined up to critique everything about the politics, economics, ideology, structure and especially the bureaucracy of the EU (and some of them have contributed to this Forum). Yet once the referendum result was published, I realised that there is also much material in my field notes that shows that people did not really mean that the EU should cease to exist. Like the constant complaints against the habits of one’s closest kin, roiling against the EU is serious, but it does not really mean disavowal or divorce. Until, apparently, it does. This Forum represents the immediate reactions of 24 colleagues in anthropology about ‘Brexit’. The commentaries were all written within five days of the news coming out. Apart from having to trim the texts for space reasons, they have been left as they are, documents of immediate, often raw, reactions. In that sense, these texts are as much witness statements as they are observations; as much an echo chamber of all the endless discussion that came in the aftermath of the result as it is considered observation; as much an emotional reaction as it is analysis. I did ask all contributors to think about how to engage their knowledge of anthropology in addressing this issue. As their responses describe, there are many hugely serious and frankly alarming political, economic and ideological challenges facing both Europe and the world at the moment that have become entangled with Brexit. So this is not the time to sit back and say nothing. Others have been speaking out too, of course, including Felix Stein’s

On not moving well enough: Temporal reasoning in Sarajevo yearnings for "normal lives"

In this article I investigate ethnographically how people in the outskirts of Sarajevo attempted to reason their way through a widespread sense of persistent “pattering in place” in postwar, postsocialist, post-Yugoslav Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna i Hercegovina [BiH]). Concerns with household futures were explicitly contextualized within the everyday geopolitics of life in a semiprotectorate presumably on the “Road into Europe.” Rather than conceiving of their predicament in terms of “crisis,” my interlocutors diagnosed and criticized spatiotemporal entrapment through a politicizing understanding of the nesting of these different scales. Yet this politicization ultimately had depoliticizing effects, encouraging waiting rather than collective action. At this particular historical conjuncture, I have discerned an economy of temporal reasoning where yearnings for what were called “normal lives” evoked linear, forward movement as an imperative. Acknowledging that yearnings have their own histories, I investigate how a specific valuation of existential mobility along linear temporal templates shaped up at the intersection of, on the one hand, past futures—recalled from lives in Yugoslav socialist BiH and during the 1992–1995 war—and, on the other hand, futures projected as part of BiH’s ongoing “Road into Europe.”

Introduction: Hope over Time—Crisis, Immobility and Future-Making

ABSTRACT This introduction discusses the hope boom in anthropological studies, suggesting that it reflects two converging developments: a sense of increasing unpredictability and crisis, and a sense of lack of political and ideological direction in this situation. We further identify two overall trends in the anthropological literature gathered under the rubric of hope: an emphasis on hopefulness against all odds and one on specific formations of hope and temporal reasoning.

For a Relational, Historical Ethnography of Hope: Indeterminacy and Determination in the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Meantime

ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to the formulation of an analytically operational notion of hope best suited to its treatment as an object of ethnographic investigation. First, it dissects epistemological and political assumptions of recent writings on the burgeoning anthropology of “hope”. Then, reflecting on an ethnographic study of temporal reasonings in the “Meantime” in supervised, post-war, postsocialist, post-Yugoslav and presumably Europeanizing Bosnia and Herzegovina, it constructs a critical conversation between anthropological replications of hope that seek to valorize indeterminacy as a principle and studies in the political economy of hope that seek to understand determinations of hope (including people’s engagements with indeterminacy) in particular conditions. The article argues that the latter approach—conceiving of hope as a relational phenomenon in historical time—is better placed to capitalize on the specific strengths of ethnographic research.