Tone Bringa

From Boundaries to Borders: Spatial Practices and State-making; the Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina

This chapter traces the gradual ethnic territorialization of space in Bosnia-Herzegovina since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. It discusses how competing state projects are expressed through political/administrative boundaries and the symbolic marking of territory, and how these direct people’s movements and form their orientations. It is argued that through a gradual process of spatial (re)socialization, social (ethnic) boundaries become territorial. It shows not only that this is a combination of politically driven behavior and the choices people make on the basis of ideas about familiarity and belonging, but also that such delineations are challenged. It is argued for the importance of longitudinal studies of this dynamics between the political and people’s spatial socialization to gain insight into how borders may develop and take hold.

From the War Zone to the Courtroom: The Anthropologist as Witness

This chapter argues for the importance of foregrounding epistomology in the discipline to ensure a viable publicly engaged anthropology. The discussion draws on the author’s experiences with engaged anthropology in three different cases related to Bosnia, highlighting both the ways anthropological insights may challenge prejudice and the dominant definitions of critical issues and the anthropologist’s role as witness anchored in the discipline’s methodology of participant observation. It argues that an effective public anthropology presuppose that the anthropologist is clear about the basis for her knowledge claims, and that the lifeworld she is talking about is recognizable on some level as part of a common humanity. This is achieved through implicit or excplicit comparisons and goes to the heart of the anthropological project.

Introduction: Eurasian Borderlands

This book examines changing and emerging borders in the post-Soviet spaces in the decades following their collapse. We argue that physical border-making and “border work” is not only about states’ physical marking of territory and claims to sovereignty but about people’s, particularly borderlanders’, spatial practices over time. In order to illustrate how borders come about, are maintained and contested, we look at border communities at both internal, open administrative borders and borders in the making, as well as at physically demarcated international and de facto state borders. We pay attention to both the spatial and temporal aspects of borders and the interplay between boundaries and borders over time, and identify some of the processes at play as space is territorialized in the aftermath of state collapse.