Abstract What does transnational humanitarianism look like when considered from the perspective of a “Global East”? Ethnographically studying the disappointment and awkwardness generated by two ...transnational humanitarian projects illuminates a sense of suspended agency among Montenegrin citizens that was developed after the end of the Cold War. Montenegrins are often simultaneously included in the racialized and class-based humanitarian discourses of the Global North and excluded from actual participation in transnational humanitarian projects due to structural constraints. The article suggests that suspended agency emerges when there is both a sense of belonging to a certain humanitarian endeavor that should enable particular kinds of action (e.g., transnational humanitarianism) and a lack of infrastructure capable of sustaining such a sense.
This article opens a conversation between anthropological studies of the Mediterranean and of postsocialism in order to propose the notion of a “scalar gaze” as an analytical approach useful for ...capturing veering practices in their social complexity. The article argues that favors (
veze/štela,
, lit. relations, connections) in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina were a practice through which people fulfilled the demands of capitalist economy to be active, rather than a pre-capitalist excess that prevented “proper” development of the country into a neoliberal democracy. Zooming in and out and looking sideways between moral reasoning, internationally supervised structural changes of the job markets, and electoral politics, this article explores how the relational labor of favors reproduced moral selves, as well as hierarchy and inequality.
Following the invitation of the PoLAR editors, Georgina Ramsay and Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, in November-December 2021, Jennifer Curtis and I invited anthropologists based in different countries to ...reflect upon how scholarly approaches to peer review might change if we see it as an ethical practice premised upon certain forms of relationality, as much as a mechanism of quality control. We asked the contributors: What structural conditions are needed to encourage peer reviewers to take the time and to try to “think with” an author? What organizational set-up could foster peer reviewers to imagine an author as a person worthy of having a conversation with them? How do our existing personal experiences as authors, peer reviewers, or editors speak to this set of questions? What normative ideal of peer review can be developed for the future?
I propose an alternative conception of freedom in an actually existing liberal order by focusing on how gay men in Podgorica, Montenegro maintain love and kinship relations. For theorists of late ...liberalism, the demands of liberal freedom and those of social relatedness have been seen as opposed. By contrast, in Podgorica we can trace a notion of non‐autological freedom understood as an ability to engage in a certain practice while thinking through its conditions and constraints from multiple perspectives and in a way that my interlocutors saw as respectful of others. Linking anthropological discussions of freedom with a focus on ordinary ethics, I offer an understanding of freedom as a relational category practised through an open and shared deliberation and imaginative identification, which echoes Polanyi’s notion of social freedom. Gay men who pursued love and sexual fulfilment as well as stringent family expectations did not enact freedom as always‐already individualised subjects who made autonomous choices; they came into being as particular socio‐moral persons by deliberating either collectively, through an actual conversation, or by engaging in imaginative identification with others. By placing both relationality and deliberation at the heart of freedom, this article contributes to anthropological discussions about this concept.
Sexualités minoritaires, parenté et liberté non‐autologique au Monténégro
Je propose une conception alternative de la liberté dans un ordre libéral existant en me concentrant sur la manière dont les hommes homosexuels de Podgorica, au Monténégro, entretiennent des relations amoureuses et de parenté. Pour les théoriciens du libéralisme tardif, les exigences de la liberté libérale et celles de la parenté sociale ont été considérées comme opposées. En revanche, à Podgorica, nous pouvons trouver la trace d'une notion de liberté non‐autologique. Celle‐ci est comprise comme une capacité à s'engager dans une certaine pratique tout en réfléchissant à ses conditions et contraintes à partir de perspectives multiples, et d'une manière que mes interlocuteurs considèrent comme respectueuse des autres. En reliant les discussions anthropologiques sur la liberté à l'éthique ordinaire, je propose une compréhension de la liberté comme une catégorie relationnelle pratiquée à travers une délibération ouverte et partagée, et d’une identification imaginative, ce qui fait écho à la notion de liberté sociale de Polanyi. Les hommes gays qui recherchaient l'amour et l'épanouissement sexuel tout en répondant aux attentes strictes de leur famille ne pratiquaient pas la liberté comme des sujets toujours déjà individualisés qui faisaient des choix autonomes; ils sont devenus des personnes socio‐morales particulières en délibérant soit collectivement, par une conversation réelle, soit en s'engageant dans une identification imaginative avec les autres. En plaçant la relationnalité et la délibération au coeur de la liberté, cet article contribute aux discussions anthropologiques sur ce concept.
In 2012 international organizations warned that Montenegro is one of the world’s leaders in sex-selective abortion, with as a result significantly fewer births of babies recognized as girls.1 ...Initially, that piece of data seemed to attract little attention, but that changed after a few years. NGOs working on women’s rights organized campaigns advocating against the practice of sex-selective abortion; German journalists came to Montenegro and reported on them; the Montenegrin national newspaper Pobjeda stopped publishing information on the genders of new-born children and began reporting births gender-neutrally instead. In dominant media and NGO discourses, sexselective abortion was interpreted as the result of the patriarchal backwardness of the country, where sons were more valued and, therefore, more wanted than daughters. The collection of articles in front of you explores how to look beyond the balkanist discourse to understand abortion and other gendered practices in Montenegro.
Through an ethnographic focus on humanitarne akcije in Bosnia and Herzegovina - a local form of raising monetary donations to people who need medical treatments abroad - this paper explores ...humanitarianism and its understandings of life. Ethnographically tracking the course of a humanitarna akcija organised in one Bosnian town, this paper makes two related points. First, it ethnographically demonstrates that lives of the 'helpers' and 'helped' in humanitarne akcije were understood as immersed in the intense talk and gossip of the town and as exposed to the sociopolitical environment troubled in the same way. Comparing this understanding of life with the international humanitarianism, this paper suggests that the notion of 'bare life' in international humanitarian projects in emergencies may be the product of the separation of infrastructures, which enable and manage lives of the 'savers' and 'saved'. Second, those who needed help through humanitarne akcije strongly criticised the lack of organised health care and social security in Bosnia and Herzegovina that pushed them to initiate humanitarne akcije. They criticised less how other people perceived them (the terms of their sociocultural recognition) and more the shrinking public health-care insurance, unavailability of medical treatments, unequal allocation of medicines, tissues and organs, and so forth (the unjust redistribution of resources). Their dissatisfactions imply that humanitarianism as an industry of aid can be criticised for failing to intervene in the global regimes of unequal redistribution of resources in a transformative way.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article's concern is epistemological in that it seeks understanding of the nature of ethnographic knowledge production. Its background assumption is that decolonization of anthropology requires ...decolonization of anthropological epistemology. The article argues that anthropology is not so much a study of the ‘Other’, but an effort to acquire knowledge by translating across some sort of socio-historically established difference. Anthropologists do not acquire knowledge necessarily by translating between modern, Western European, and non-modern, ‘Other’ conceptual arrangements. Instead, the anthropological production of knowledge requires an effort to figure out the relevant differences and similarities between an anthropologist, their interlocutors, and their audiences, as well as a translation across these differences and similarities. In order to demonstrate this point, the article focuses on 19th- and 20th-century ethnographic discussions of rural joint families called zadruga in the Balkans. Through a critical reading of two works on zadruga, it demonstrates that anthropologists in the Balkans were epistemologically eclectic, in that they could make use of strategies of both ‘anthropology abroad’ and ‘auto-anthropology’, or combine and reverse them. While this instance of epistemological eclecticism is the result of widespread uncertainties concerning the status of the ‘modern’ and the ‘non-modern’ as organizational categories in the Balkans, it has direct implications for the production of anthropological knowledge generally.
This article ethnographically outlines how one woman politician in a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina used favours to help ‘get things done’, becoming perceived as a ‘goddess’ who ‘spent herself’ for ...the sake of others. The article suggests that such people managed to gather power through the paradox of keeping‐while‐giving (Weiner, . Inalienable possessions. The paradox of keeping‐while‐giving. Berkeley: California UP). People able to grant numerous favours in multiple public and private arenas kept aside the position of the person able to manage ambiguity, which was part of the new ad hoc, flexible forms of governance, exercised by both the international and the local actors in the country.
La gestion de l'ambiguïté: faveurs et flexibilité en Bosnie‐Herzégovine
Cet article décrit ethnographiquement comment une femme politique dans une ville en Bosnie‐Herzégovine a utilisé des faveurs pour « faire avancer les choses », devenant perçu comme une « déesse » qui « s'est épuisée » pour le bien des autres. L'article suggère que ces personnes parviennent à rassembler pouvoir par le paradoxe de donner tout en gardant (Weiner, . Inalienable possessions. The paradox of keeping‐while‐giving. Berkeley: California UP). Les gens en mesure d'accorder de nombreux faveurs dans de multiples domaines public et privé mettent de côté la position de la personne en mesure de gérer l'ambiguïté, ce qui fait partie de la nouvelle forme flexible de gouvernance ad hoc, exercés aussi bien dans le pays par les acteurs internationaux et locaux.
Under what conditions does European anthropology emerge today as an intellectual project? European anthropology takes shape only provisionally, as a fractured, heterogeneous and uneven field, for the ...duration of time-limited research projects and meetings with Europe-wide participation. In the currently dominant socio-economic conditions of academic life, European anthropology as an intellectual project has little chance to develop, except as an accident. And yet, with more institutional stability for researchers and their conversations, European anthropology could be turned into a more inspiring intellectual endeavour that challenges the classic Anglo-Saxon way of understanding anthropology as a conceptual translation between ‘our’ modern and ‘Other’ worlds; it could also help us to reimagine the world anthropologies framework through the postsocialist and postcolonial lens as something other than a ‘family of nations’.
This paper explores how the boundary between humanitarianism and politics was reproduced in the everyday life in a Bosnia and Herzegovina town. It addresses the use of (post)Yugoslav ideas about ...humaneness as an apolitical core surrounded by layers of socio-political identities in the course of humanitarian actions. The paper suggests that the depoliticization of humanitarian actions allowed people to distance themselves from the hegemonic understanding of politics as interest-oriented man- agement of ethno-national groups. Those who needed humanitarian help relied on depoliticizing discourses of humaneness to assert their (political) claims to survival and wellbeing in the context marked by the dominance of ethno-nationalist rhetoric.
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