Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-14T23:01:21.626Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Discourses of trans-ethnic narod in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Azra Hromadžić
Azra Hromadžić*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University, New York, USA
*
∗Email: ahromadz@syr.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The processes of peace-building and democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) were instituted on 14 December 1995 by the Dayton Accords, which brought an end to the Bosnian War. While claiming their objectives to be reconciliation, democracy, and ethnic pluralism, the accords inscribed in law the ethnic partition between Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims by granting rights to “people” based on their identification as “ethnic collectivities.” This powerful tension at the heart of “democratization” efforts has been central to what has transpired over the past 16 years. My account uses ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis to document how the ethnic emphasis of the local nationalist projects and international integration policies is working in practice to flatten the multilayered discourses of nationhood in BiH. As a result of these processes, long-standing notions of trans-ethnic nationhood in BiH lost their political visibility and potency. In this article I explore how trans-ethnic narod or nation(hood) — as a space of popular politics, cultural interconnectedness, morality, political critique, and economic victimhood — still lingers in the memories and practices of ordinary Bosnians and Herzegovinians, thus powerfully informing their political subjectivities.

Keywords

narodtrans-ethnic nationhoodconsociational democracyMostarBosnia and Herzegovina
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , March 2013 , pp. 259 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arsenijević, Damir. 2007. “Protiv Oportunisticke Kritike”. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0208/arsenijevic/bhs Google Scholar
Bardos, Gordon. 2010. “Bosnian Lessons”. The National Interest. http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/bosnian-lessons-3674.Google Scholar
Bieber, Florian. 2006. Postwar Bosnia: Ethnic Structure, Inequality and Governance of the Public Sector. London: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Bougarel, Xavier. 1996. Bosnie: Anatomie d'un conflit. Paris: Editions La Découverte.Google Scholar
Bringa, Tone. 1993. “Nationality Categories, National Identification and Identity Formation in ‘Multinational’ Bosnia.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 11 (1 & 2): 9–76.Google Scholar
Brown, Wendy. 2008. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Buric, Fedja. 2011. “Becoming Mixed: The Mixed Marriages of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Creation of Ethnic Difference”. Diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar
Campbell, David. 1999. “Apartheid Cartography: The Political Anthropology and Spatial Effects of International Diplomacy in Bosnia.” Political Geography 18 (4): 395–435.Google Scholar
Chandler, David. 1999. Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton. London: Pluto.Google Scholar
Chattarjee, Partha. 1998. “Community in the East.” Economic and Political Weekly 33 (6): 277–282.Google Scholar
Ćurak, Nerzuk. 2004. Dejtonski Nacionalizam: Ogledi o Politickom. Sarajevo: Buybook.Google Scholar
Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: California University Press.Google Scholar
Drakulić, Slavenka. 1993. “Overcome by Nationhood.” In The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War, edited by Drakulić, Slavenka, 49–52. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Farrell, Samuel. 2001. An Investigation into the Experimental School Strategy in the Promotion of School Improvement and of Social Cohesion through Education, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Unpublished master's thesis, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland.Google Scholar
Gagnon, V. P. Jr. 2004. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gagnon, V. P. Jr. n.d. “Liberal Multiculturalism and Post-Dayton Bosnia: Solution or Problem?” Unpublished manuscript available with the author.Google Scholar
Gordy, Eric. 1999. Culture and Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Jessica. 2010. “There's Nothing Anyone Can Do About It': Participation, Apathy and ‘Successful’ Democratic Transition in Postsocialist Serbia.” Slavic Review 69 (1): 41–64.Google Scholar
Hajdarpašić, Edin. 2008. “Museums, Multiculturalism, and the Remaking of Postwar Sarajevo.” In (Re)Visualizing National History: Museums and National Identities in Europe in the New Millenium, edited by Ostow, Robin, 109–139. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Hayden, Robert M. 2007. “Moral Vision and Impaired Insight: The Imagining of Other Peoples’ Communities in Bosnia.” Current Anthropology 48 (1): 105–131.Google Scholar
Helms, Elissa. 2007. “Politics is a Whore: Women, Morality and Victimhood in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina.” In The New Bosnian Mosaic, edited by Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Duijzings, Ger, 235–353. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Helms, Elissa. 2010. “The Gender of Coffee: Women and Reconciliation Initiatives in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Focall 57 (16): 17–32.Google Scholar
Horowitz, David. L. 1985. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hromadžić, Azra. 2012. “Once We had a House: Invisible Citizens and Consocialtional Democracy in Postwar Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Social Analysis 56 (3): 30–48.Google Scholar
Jansen, Stef. 2005. “National Numbers in Context: Maps and Stats in Representations of the Post-Yugoslav Wars.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 12 (1): 45–68.Google Scholar
Jašarević, Larisa. n.d. “On the Queen's Couch, by the Wizard's Grave: Healing Surfaces and Political Dispositions in Postsocialist Bosnia.” Unpublished manuscript available with the author.Google Scholar
Klemenčić, Mladen. 1994. “Territorial Proposals for the Settlement of the War in Bosnia-Hercegovina.” Boundary and Territory Briefing, Vol. 1, No. 3. Durham, England: International Boundaries Research Unit.Google Scholar
Kolind, Torsten. 2007. “In Search of ‘Decent People': Resistance to the Ethnicization of Everyday life among the Muslims of Stolac.” In The New Bosnian Mosaic, edited by Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Duijzings, Ger, 123–138. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Kurtović, Larisa. 2011. “What is a Nationalist? Some Thoughts on the Question from Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Anthropology of Eastern Europe Review 29 (2): 242–253.Google Scholar
Lijphart, Arend. 1977. Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Lovrenović, Ivan. 2001. Bosnia: A Cultural History. London: Saqi Books.Google Scholar
Markowitz, Fran. 2007. “Census and Sensibilities in Sarajevo.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49: 40–73.Google Scholar
Markowitz, Fran. 2010. Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. 2001. “Spatial Governmentality and the New Social Order: Controlling Gender Violence through Law.” American Anthropologist 103 (1): 16–29.Google Scholar
Neofotistos, Vasiliki. 2012. The Risk of War: Everyday Sociality in the Republic of Macedonia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Palmer, Kenneth. 2005. “Power-Sharing Extended: Policing and Education Reforms in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Northern Ireland.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Google Scholar
Pickering, Pamela. 2009. Peace-building in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Ramet, Sabrina. 1992. Balkan Babel: Politics, Culture, and Religion in Yugoslavia. Boulder: Westview.Google Scholar
Sorabji, Cornelia. 1995. “A Very Modern War: Terror And Territory in Bosnia-Hercegovina.” In War: A Cruel Necessity? The Bases of Institutionalized Violence, edited by Hinde, Robert A. and Watson, Helen, 80–98. London: I.B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Torsti, Pilvi. 2003. Divergent Stories, Convergent Attitudes: Study on the Presence of History, History Textbooks, and the Thinking of Youth in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Denmark: Kustannus Oy Taifuuni.Google Scholar
Verdery, Katherine. 1994. “Ethnicity, Nationalism, and State-Making. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: Past and Future.” In The Anthropology of Ethnicity: Beyond Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, edited by Vermeulen, Hans and Govers, Cora, 33–58. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis.Google Scholar
Vetters, Larissa. 2007. “The Power of Administrative Categories: Emerging Notions of Citizenship in the Divided City of Mostar.” Ethnopolitics 6 (2): 187–209.Google Scholar
Bank, World and of Europe., Council 1999. Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Governance, Finance, and Administration. http://www.seerecon.org/bosnia/documents/education_report.pdf.Google Scholar
Woodward, Susan. 1995. The Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar