Yearnings in the Meantime: Normal Lives and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex

263 Pages·2015·1.77 MB·English

by  Stef Jansen

Yearnings in the Meantime
DISLOCATIONS
General Editors: August Carbonella, Memorial University of Newfoundland,
Don Kalb, University of Utrecht & Central European University, Linda Green,
University of Arizona
The immense dislocations and sufering caused by neoliberal globalization, the
retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the
heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-frst century have raised
urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through
stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks that
refect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides
a forum for politically engaged, ethnographically informed, and theoretically
incisive responses.
Volume 1 Volume 6 Volume 11
Where Have All the Biopolitics, Militarism, and Elusive Promises: Planning
Homeless Gone? The Development: Eritrea in the in the Contemporary World
Making and Unmaking of Twenty-First Century Edited by Simone Abram
a Crisis Edited by David O’Kane and Gisa Weszkalnys
Anthony Marcus and Tricia Redeker
Volume 12
Hepner
Volume 2 Intellectuals and (Counter-)
Blood and Oranges: Volume 7 Politics: Essays in
European Markets and When Women Held the Historical Realism
Immigrant Labor in Rural Dragon’s Tongue and Gavin Smith
Greece Other Essays in Historical
Volume 13
Christopher M. Lawrence Anthropology
Blood and Fire: Toward
Hermann Rebel
Volume 3 a Global Anthropology of
Struggles for Home: Volume 8 Labor
Violence, Hope and the Class, Contention, and a Edited by Sharryn Kasmir
Movement of People World in Motion and August Carbonella
Edited by Stef Jansen and Edited by Winnie Lem
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The Neoliberal Landscape
Barber
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Behrends, Stephen P.
Volume 5 Volume 15
Reyna, and Günther
Made in Shefeld: An Yearnings in the Meantime:
Schlee
Ethnography of Industrial ‘Normal Lives’ and the State
Work and Politics Volume 10 in a Sarajevo Apartment
Massimiliano Mollona Communities of Complicity: Complex
Everyday Ethics in Rural Stef Jansen
China
Hans Steinmüller
Yearnings in the Meantime
‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a
Sarajevo Apartment Complex
_
Stef Jansen
b erghahn
N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D
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First published in 2015 by
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© 2015 Stef Jansen
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jansen, Stef.
Yearnings in the meantime: ‘normal lives’ and the state in a Sarajevo
apartment complex / Stef Jansen. -- First Edition.
pages cm. -- (Dislocations; Volume 15)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-78238-650-6 (hardback: alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-651-3
(ebook)
1. Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina)--Social conditions--21st century.
2. Ethnology--Bosnia and Herzegovina--Sarajevo. 3. Yugoslav War,
1991-1995--Bosnia and Herzegovina--Sarajevo. I. Title.
HN639.S37J36 2015
306.0949742--dc23
2015003140
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78238-650-6 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-78238-651-3 (ebook)
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgements x
I n 1 t r o d u c t i o n  [ o r , T o w a r d s a n A n t h r o p o l o g y o f S h a r e d C o n c e r n s ]
P a r t I : F i g u r i n g ‘ N o r m a l L i v e s ’
C ‘ h N 3 a o 3 p r t m e a r l 1 L i v e s ’
[ o r , T o w a r d s a n A n t h r o p o l o g y o f Y e a r n i n g ]
C W h a 5 a i 9 p t t i e n r g 2 f o r a B u s
[ o r , T o w a r d s a n A n t h r o p o l o g y o f G r i d d i n g ]
C W h a 8 a r 7 p t t i e m r e 3 G r i d d i n g f o r ‘ N o r m a l L i v e s ’
[ o r , T o w a r d s a n A n t h r o p o l o g y o f H o p e f o r
t h e S t a t e ]
P a r t I I : D i a g n o s i n g D a y t o n i t i s
C F h i 1 a r 2 p s 3 t t e S r y 4 m p t o m : ‘ T h e r e I s N o S y s t e m ’
[ o r , T o w a r d s a n A n t h r o p o l o g y o f a n E l u s i v e
S t a t e E f e c t ]
C S h e 1 a c 5 p o 7 t n e d r S 5 y m p t o m : ‘ W e A r e P a t e r i n g i n P l a c e ’
[ o r , T o w a r d s a n A n t h r o p o l o g y o f S p a t i o t e m p o r a l
E n t r a p m e n t ]
vi | Contents
Part III: Living With Daytonitis
Chapter 6 C onviviality in the Meantime 189
[or, Towards a Critique of Dayton Non-politics]
Epilogue Shovelling and Numbering for ‘Normal Lives’ 221
References 233
Index 243
IllustratIons
0.1 The logo of the 1984 Olympic Winter Games on a central 3
Dobrinja apartment block
0.2 A Dobrinja building several years after reconstruction 4
0.3 A central street in Dobrinja, a key site for shops, 15
services and the korzo [evening stroll]
0.4 The small stream Dobrinja, which runs through the 15
middle of the setlement, another favourite for a stroll
2.1 Map of Dobrinja and a part of Istočno Sarajevo 60
2.2 The okretaljka in Dobrinja 62
2.3 A trolleybus waiting at the okretaljka 62
3.1 The mosque in Dobrinja and the Serbian Orthodox 88
church at the far edge of Dobrinja, just inside Istočno
Sarajevo
3.2 One of Dobrinja’s primary schools, reconstructed after 89
the war
3.3 The entry to the main premises of Gimnazija Dobrinja, 90
in former storage and commercial spaces on the ground
foor of an apartment building, in use until late 2010
3.4 Building works for the new Gimnazija premises in 117
Dobrinja
4.1 One of Dobrinja’s local commune (MZ) secretariats, 124
on the ground foor of an apartment block
– vii –
viii | Illustrations
4.2 Organigram of Dayton BiH government institutions 140
4.3 One of Dobrinja’s boilers for collective heating 142
5.1 Country sticker, in the blue-yellow EU colours: 176
‘I too would like [to move] into Europe’
PrefaCe
I never see the dawn, said Marco, his voice ratling in his throat, that I don’t
say to myself perhaps… perhaps today.
—John Dos Passos, Manhatan Transfer
While I am revising this manuscript for publication in the winter of
2014, something special is happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
A sudden revolt has rocked a series of towns and its reverberations
continue in protests and citizen plenums. Key demands concern
social justice. Most of the fury is directed at the inequality between
‘politicians’ and ‘ordinary people’, the privileges enjoyed by a cor-
rupt, criminal ruling caste organised through political parties and the
privatisation process that has cemented these. Many of the demands
revolve around the need to establish a fair and functional ‘system’
that will fnally allow people in Bosnia and Herzegovina to ‘move
forward from the dead point’ and live ‘normal lives’. This is the frst
time since the early 1990s that the country sees such atempts to for-
mulate the beginnings – however fedgling – of a more or less univer-
salist political agenda on redistribution – one that does not focus on
constitutional and territorial issues of recognition and representation
through an identitarian prism. Within hours of the frst demonstra-
tions, friends were telling me I would need to add a third part to the
epilogue in this book.
I have not writen this epilogue, partly because I am too busy on
the street protests and in the plenum in Sarajevo. Priorities... In this
preface I therefore merely fag the possibility that this entire book on
‘normal lives’ and ‘the state’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina has itself,
totally unexpectedly, become a preface. Hindsight will show if this
is indeed the case and if the Meantime may be reaching its long-
yearned-for end.
– ix –