Auf der Grundlage von Ethnografien, die in Post-Genozid-Gemeinschaften in Bosnien und Herzegowina, in der bosnischen Flüchtlingsdiaspora in Australien, Europa und den USA sowie bei Feldforschungen ...auf der Insel Tanna (Vanuatu) durchgeführt wurden, erörtere ich die Herausforderungen für Forschende und Beforschte bei der Verhandlung des Raums zwischen wahrgenommener kultureller Innerlichkeit und professioneller Außenseiter*innenschaft. Zunächst umreiße ich das Konzept der akademischen Verwandtschaft, der intellektuellen und sozialen Verbindungen und Netzwerke, die die Parameter für die Wirklichkeitskonstruktion der Forschenden festlegen. Aufbauend auf der Idee von Verwandtschaft und Wahlverwandtschaft diskutiere ich dann Beispiele aus der Feldforschung und der Literatur, die sich auf die "doubly-engaged ethnography" (PACHECO-VEGA & PARIZEAU 2018, S.1) beziehen, die sowohl emische als auch etische Perspektiven umfasst. Zudem betrachte ich Ethik und Politik dieses Forschungsansatzes. Ich schließe mit einer ethnografischen Vignette aus meiner Feldforschung auf einer Pazifikinsel, um zu verdeutlichen, wie die gegenseitige Verpflichtung zu Wahlverwandtschaft und die Einbeziehung sowohl emischer als auch etischer Perspektiven einen dynamischen Forschungskontext schaffen. Verschiedene Engagements im Feld eröffnen einen konzeptionellen Raum, wo sich das Lokale und das Globale überschneiden und in dem die Rollen von Forschenden und Beforschten, Insidern und Outsidern ausgehandelt und (neu) definiert werden.
For displaced persons, memory and identity is performed, (re)constructed and (re)negotiated daily. Forced displacement radically reshapes identity, with results ranging from successful hybridization ...to feelings of permanent misplacement. This compelling and intimate description of places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as of survivors' places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful illustration of the complex interplay between place, memory and identity. It is even more the case when those places have been vandalized, divided up, brutalized and scarred. However, as the author shows, these places of humiliation and suffering are also places of desire, with displaced survivors emulating their former homes in the far corners of the globe where they have resettled.
This paper discusses the meanings and practices of multiculturalism among young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds in one of Australia's most multicultural cities. It is based on a ...three-year ethnographic study exploring refugee and migrant youth engaged in sports and arts in the suburbs of Melbourne known as "migrant", "ethnic" and "multicultural" areas. The result of the study indicates that multiculturalism from below can happen differently from the "place making" strategy or "ethnic enclave" idea in which ethnic minorities are viewed as creating their own ethnic colonies in isolation from the mainstream society.
Ovaj rad rezultat je antropološke studije o utjecaju prisilnog raseljavanja, genocida i nestalih osoba na društvene identitete preživjelih žena, njihovih obitelji i lokalnih zajednica. U prvom dijelu ...rada iznesene su statističke i historiografske činjenice vezane uz nedavna ratna stradanja u Bosni i Hercegovini (BiH) te se upozorava na nedostatke kvantitativnoga istraživačkog pristupa u donošenju zaključaka o biti, karakteru i posljedicama ratnih događanja na različite demografske i rodne grupacije u BiH. U drugom dijelu – kroz etnografski opis života jedne od ratnih udovica i majke koja je izgubila dva sina, a koja danas živi u dijaspori – autor opisuje teškoće koje prate ratne udovice, kako na psihološkoj tako i na sociokulturnoj razini, kao i razloge zbog kojih su se mnoge od njih odlučile na migraciju u treće zemlje. Rad potom opisuje kako je medicinska i forenzička DNK-biotehnologija pomogla u rehumaniziranju nestalih i ubijenih, dok je poslijeratna birokracija u BiH, dobrim dijelom, imala drugačiji, dehumanizirajući učinak na ratne udovice i preživjele, što je nerijetko bio jedan od razloga njihove emigracije. U zaključku se autor zalaže za aktivistički pristup druš¬tveno-humanističkih istraživanja vezanih uz problematiku koja prati ratne udovice, a s ciljem zaštite i promicanja njihovih ljudskih prava i dostojanstva.
Abstract
This article analyses the international migrations and statuses of people who left Syria after the outbreak of the civil war. In addition to exploring the dynamics of Syrian refugee ...migrations since 2011, we also discuss future prospects and possibilities of return. The ambition of the article is twofold. First, we aim to develop and nuance the typology of migrations of Syrians. Secondly, the article seeks to explore useful lessons from former large-scale refugee migrations; that is, knowledge which may hopefully contribute to preparing the relevant institutions and organisations for Syrian migrations in the eventual post-war period. Based on experiences from other post-conflict situations, several possible future scenarios of Syrian migrations are discussed. The proposed typologies of migrants and repatriation regimes may help us understand the nuances, the dynamic of status change and the complexity of the forced migrations. It is maintained that migration trends, reception, and repatriation conditions and policies are highly interconnected. Refugees’ responses to reception and repatriation regimes result in transitions in their legal statuses in receiving countries and changing motivations for migration and repatriation.
This paper discusses a number of stories about loss, grief and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the attempts by the survivors to construct intimate archives about their shattered lives. In addition ...to the loss of human lives, the deliberate destruction of documents, photographs, books and official records has been deeply felt by the genocide survivors and other victims of ‘memoricide’ in Bosnia as a very personal loss, an aggravated trauma and a metaphor for annihilation of their personal, family and communal existence. Subsequently, for them, the recreation of personal records and communal archives ultimately becomes an attempt to reclaim their own past and, in the process, to reaffirm their identities and recreate and sustain a sense of continuity in a post-genocide context. Using a series of ethnographic vignettes from Bosnia and the Bosnian refugee diaspora, the paper highlights the importance of the survivors’ emotional (and embodied) attachment to various forms of records and archival material. It also demonstrates the potential for research in memory and archival studies to actively engage in the creation of historical narratives about violations of human rights, thus contributing to truth-finding, social healing and reconciliation processes in post-conflict and post-genocide communities.
In this paper, based on conventional and digital ethnography, I first identify three dominant research areas relating to the issues of destruction, use and abuse of archives and records in post-war ...Bosnia, and discuss their legal, political and ethical dimensions. I then go on to present two ethnographies describing how survivors of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide in Bosnia and in the Bosnian refugee diaspora perceive, experience and deal with missing personal records and material evidence of their histories, as well as how they (re)create their own archives and memories, and in the process reassert their ‘erased’ identities in both real and cyber space. This paper also describes how contemporary technologies—including biomedical technology and information and communication technology—impact the reconstruction of individual and collective identities in shattered Bosnian families and communities in the aftermath of genocide. The ethnographies described point to the novel contribution that these technologies have made to
re
-humanising both those who perished and the survivors of the war in Bosnia.
Bosnia remains a divided country both politically, and in the representation and memorialisation of the past. This paper is based on fieldwork in Sarajevo at the hundredth anniversary of the Sarajevo ...assassination widely seen as the catalyst for the First World War. The antithetical, competing commemorations of this historical event tell us a great deal about the political fractures of Bosnia and the region. They also offer insights into the significance of historical memory in the stubborn reiteration of contemporary identities.
This paper is based on an anthropological study investigating the impact of forced displacement, genocide, and missing persons on the social identities of surviving women, their families and local ...communities in Bosnia Herzegovina and the Bosnian diaspora. By the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, more than 100,000 had been killed and close to 40,000 individuals reported missing – some 7,000 of whom have still not been found or identified. No knowing where the body of one’s loved one is, makes the grieving process of many surviving families much harder than it would be if they had been able to bury the victims. The issues surrounding the missing and their exhumation, identification and burial are some of the lasting legacies of genocide and war in Bosnia, that still affect many individuals, especially war widows and their families, as well as the respective local communities. The gaps, absences, and open-ended temporality the missing persons left behind also impact on politics, culture and reconciliation within the broader Bosnian society and the diaspora.More than two decades after the war, in many respects, Bosnia can still be seen as an exemplar of a post-conflict society, where the progress towards achieving a just and lasting peace has been halted by unresolved issues from the past, including the issue of the missing. In regard to the missing (presumably dead), what is often depicted as an “unresolved past” is in fact an unresolved present, spread through global connections across time and space and having significant affects and effects even on those who now live at great geographic distances from the original violence.The issue of the missing in Bosnia is predominantly, but not exclusively, affecting the Muslim (Bosniak) community. Mourning the dead in Islam typically takes place in the private domain and those who died in conflict or as innocent victims are regarded as šehidi, martyrs who will be rewarded in the afterlife. However, in the case of the missing, there are no adequate religious rituals offering closure or recognising a missing person as šehid able to “resettle” (preseli) in afterlife. Instead of referring to the missing as those who now rest in peace, or literally those who “resettled ” (preselili) in the afterlife (ahiret), the common reference for the Srebrenica genocide victims in 1995 is “those who did not get across” (nisu prešli), also symbolically sug¬gesting the inability of the missing to resettle (presele), thus remaining in a state of post-mortem liminality.While coping with their own trauma, loss and displacement, many Bosnian survivors, especially women, have taken up the crucial role in identifying the remains of relatives uncovered from mass graves spread across the country. They have often literally been the embodiment of the search for and identification of the missing in more than one way. They have preserved a link between those who perished and those who survived both through their narrated and documented memories of the missing and though their bodies. In Bosnia, DNA has served as a crucial piece of information required to establish identities of the missing. DNA matching technolo¬gies have equally challenged and reinforced the importance of blood relations and blood as the “shared essence” through which kinship is defined and relations between individuals are imagined, linking not only parents and siblings in a direct blood relation, but also husbands and wives and subsequently leading to identification of other missing “non-blood” relatives. However, as anthropologist Sarah Wagner has witnessed and described, DNA evidence does not exist in a vacuum; rather, its success depends on other manifestations of individual lives, social ties, and everyday practice: family members holding a piece of cloth, touching its fabric, whose pattern and stitching are indelibly etched into their memory, use their own recollections to help retrieve their missing relatives’ remains.In the first part of the paper, statistical and historiographical facts related to the 1992- 95 war casualties in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) are presented and the shortcomings of the quantitative research approaches in drawing conclusions about the es¬sence, character and consequences of the war events on different demographic and gender groups in BiH are pointed out.In the second part—through an ethnographic description of the life of one of the war widows and a mother who lost two sons and who now lives in the diaspora—the author describes the difficulties that accompany the war widows, both at the psychological and socio-cultural levels, as well as the reasons for many women to choose to migrate to third countries. The paper then describes how medical and forensic DNA biotechnology has helped to rehumanize the missing and killed, while the post-war bureaucracy in BiH has largely had a different, dehumanising effect on the war widows and survivors, which was often one of the reasons for their emigration.For mothers who lost children and war widows who lost husbands, it is expected that, for the rest of their lives, they will continue to perform the roles, adjusting their lives and embodying eternal grief for their loved ones. Across south-eastern Europe and the Balkans this aspect of patriarchal tradition has survived in many communities—among Christians and Muslims alike. Many women, once they lose their loved ones, spend the rest of their lives in mourning dress code. They also tend to become more religious and to perform regular rituals to honour and remember their dead. Even their everyday lives are readjusted so there are constant reminders of those they lost. Their public identities become those of mourning women. Often, they remain so for years, sometimes for the rest of their lives. These have been the unwritten rules and expectations of the women’s own communities that have been reconstructed after the war. In conclusion, the author advocates for an activist approach to socio-humanistic research related to the issues that accompany war widows, with the aim of protecting and promoting their human rights and dignity.
Today, Bosnians represent one of the newly emerging and the most widely dispersed diasporic communities from the Balkans. There are large communities of Bosnians living in almost every European ...country, as well as throughout North America and Australia. Most were displaced during the 1992–1995 Bosnian war, in which 2.2 million people were forced to leave their homes, 1.6 million of whom looked for refuge abroad. In contrast with, and in response to, the enforced displacement, many members of the Bosnian diaspora have retained strong family and other “informal” social ties with both Bosnians in other countries and those still living in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH, or Bosnia). Such ties – focused on preservation of cultural memory and performance of distinct local identities – form the basis of the global network of the Bosnian diaspora and its link with the original home (land). In this paper, I briefly outline the links and networks that constitute diaspora, and then go on to explore the extent to which recent scholarly literature is able to “capture” the uniqueness and complexity of the Bosnian diasporic communities in Australia, the United States (U.S.) and Europe. Finally, I attempt to define the concept of “trans‐localism” and how it is (per)formed, and suggest that the predominantly “transnational” conceptual framework within the migration studies needs to be expanded to include “trans‐local” diasporic identity formation among displaced Bosnians and similar diaspora groups.
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