‘Knocking on my neighbour’s door’: On metamorphoses of sociality in rural Bosnia

The predicaments of everyday life in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina

Since 2007 I have carried out extensive fieldwork in a historically significant Muslim region, and more specifically in several unmixed Muslim villages as my initial research focus was concerned with Islamic knowledge traditions in the margins of the post-socialist world. Nonetheless, during the first several weeks of conducting fieldwork, my research interests bifurcated as I realized that everyday economic hardship, the prolonged unemployment of many villagers, somewhat dysfunctional state support, or multiple tensions between villagers are as important as an individual’s questioning about what it means to live a Muslim life.

My fieldwork was principally based in rural highland areas around the municipality Olovo, situated about 30 miles north of the capital, Sarajevo. Historically the region played an important role in the mining and later in timber industries for its extremely rich forest resources. At the time of the early Yugoslav socialist period and rapid modernization of rural areas in the 1950s and 1960s a sawmill factory was build in the municipality. Until the dissolution of the SFRY and the war in the 1990s the state-run forest industry together with the factory were bread and butter for several thousands of workers from Olovo as well as the surrounding villages. The disintegration of the SFRY destroyed local economic production and living standards dropped considerably. Since the end of the war in 1995 the sawmill in Olovo has already been temporarily closed several times. Today, the factory employs fewer than 200 workers and is for sale. The story of the factory, and the crumbling industrial complex itself are iconic examples of the precarious everyday realities of post-Yugoslavia. Put in this way, the factory bears the memories of what once used to be a ‘Yugoslav dream’ and of a secure life; yet it refers to a ‘post-Yugoslav nightmare’ reminding everyone of a failed social(ist) experiment that brought uncertainty into people’s lives.

The demise of the forest industry and the overall post-war economic hardship became a constitutive part of the everyday economic struggle in the municipality. Hence, Olovo is also a magnifying glass revealing an ambiguous amalgam of post-war realities and ‘actually existing postsocialism’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Gilbert, 2006; Gilbert et al., 2008). As a reader of the local newspapers, or as an anthropologist travelling and carrying out research throughout the region I was constantly confronted by the realization that the years of my fieldwork, 2008 and 2009, were some of the worst and most difficult in the entire post-war period. While describing their feelings and experiences to me, people often blamed the new Bosnian state for failing to secure the sawmill. Furthermore, the state is also perceived as unable to protect workers’ rights, as well as being responsible for the disastrous post-1995 corrupt privatization of the state economy at large.

Many anthropologists who have been studying the collapses of state socialism throughout Eurasia have examined paradoxes, uncertainties and disenchantments with the post-1989 ‘altering states’ (Berdahl, 2000). The paths that have been taken by the newly emerged political entities are multiple. However, this is in sharp contrast to the vision of many politicians, development agencies as well as academics who portray those far-reaching changes solely as a triumphant transition from socialism and communism to economic neoliberalism and democracy (see Hann, 1994 for a critique of this perspective). As Akhil Gupta asserted a while ago, an ethnography of the state needs to examine on a local level the quotidian practices of the state that affect the lives of its citizens vis-à-vis the discourses through which the state is imagined; and one of the most fecund arenas of ethnographic enquiry is the discourse of corruption (Gupta, 1995).

Although this article is not concerned with the issues of corruption or the state per se, in the Olovo municipality similar narratives of discontent with the corrupted ‘altering state’ are often expressed. Hundreds of Bosnians publicly asserted their angst and worries via the many strikes which took place in the municipality during my fieldwork. One of the placards carried during the riots succinctly hyperbolized the post-war uncertainty for the villagers as ‘We survived Srebrenica, will we survive this government?’. In other words, in rural Bosnia the state’s failures and the loss of life-certainties form an important part of everyday discursive reflections of the post-war development in the country, and how the newly constituted state is imagined. The conversations I had with many former employees about the sawmill factory hence only epitomize those reflections. The majority of the male villagers from the municipality lost their jobs in the past two decades. Only a few of them have secured unstable jobs in small private sawmills, or succeeded to get a job elsewhere. However, the latter alternative entails either bribery in order to get a more secure job or migration from the municipality. As bribery usually requires a large sum of money, economically motivated outmigration from the municipality has arguably increased in recent years. In this article I shall illustrate the consequences of the recent development mainly from my fieldwork carried out in a Muslim village called Brdo (pseudonym), as well as in the surrounding villages stretched between the central Bosnian Zvijezda highlands and the Krivaja river.

Brdo is one of those villages that were seriously affected by the collapse of the municipal factory. The estimated size of the village population today is about 250 people but the figure has started to change due to outmigration. The socio-economic circumstances of the village mirror in many respects the overall situation of the transforming Bosnian economy. There are eight small sawmills in the village, though only three of them work for most of the year, and hence cannot really mitigate the lack of working opportunities. Thus, the majority of villagers are officially unemployed, and those who work in the sawmills usually do so illegally. Women, with the exception of three, are not employed at all. Wage labour is consensually conceived in the villages as a gendered matter. Women continue to be generally related to homemaking activities and men are associated with wage labour. This model developed particularly during Yugoslav state socialism, when male villagers were dragged out of their villages to work in the factories and many household tasks were feminized (see Verdery, 1996: 69–70, for a similar argument from a comparative perspective). However, after the collapse of the SFRY and the 1990s war there was the demise of the state economy and an increased rate of unemployment in the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in rural areas in particular. As a consequence male villagers have been ‘thrown back’, and become more intensely involved in subsistence farming production again due to their prolonged unemployment. In case of younger cohorts, many have migrated from the villages either individually or with entire families for good.

The metamorphoses of neighbourliness in the Bosnian mountains

The effects of post-war and post-socialist dynamics on the everyday lives of Bosnians are far-reaching, as the description of the municipality Olovo illustrates. From the very outset of my fieldwork it was intriguing how frequently the trope of ‘locked doors’ (zakljućana vrata) appeared in local conversations as a serious matter of everyday concern among the villagers. By using such a figuration in their narratives as well as casual chats villagers reflected upon changing sociality and intimacy in rural areas and, even more importantly, how the changes intimately recast their lifeworlds. Here the metaphor of ‘locked doors’ neatly entwines two larger issues. First, it mirrors the processes of depopulation of the mountain areas due to migration of entire families to the suburbs of big cities such as Sarajevo, Zenica or Tuzla with the hope and promise of a better life. Second, and often hand in hand with the former, the metaphor points to the weakening of face-to-face interactions and people’s commitment in village matters. This might be well illustrated by two ethnographic vignettes.

One November morning a message was spread in the village where I was staying that in a neighbouring village a dead male body was found in a stream. The body was decayed, which meant that the man had perhaps died a few weeks before. The reactions of the villagers were straightforward and characteristically similar to the following:

why had nobody been looking for him? Where was his komšiluk? Why did nobody help him? That village is not good, there are too many locked doors.

Whenever this event was mentioned in the following weeks, it always brought bitterness intertwined with embarrassment, fear and uncertainty. Later during my fieldwork an old woman from a neighbouring quarter (mahala) passed away, which brought grief to the village. Nonetheless, this event also opened debates and revealed discontents between villagers about an (in)appropriate orchestration of mourning, and this again eventually turned into debates about the changing character of neighbourliness. During a coffee visit a male villager, whom I call Safet, vigorously argued:

When someone dies in our quarter [mahala] then the whole neighbourhood [komšiluk] tries to help you and look after your family; people come to your house [kuća] and ask you what needs to be done, they give you support; there isn’t anything like that in the lower mahala. It is our custom [adet] that the body of the dead person stays in the house the night before the funeral [dženaza] and living persons sit next to the body through the night. I can tell you exactly who came to the house when my mother died: everyone from my komšiluk. Yesterday, the family from the lower quarter mahala couldn’t find anybody who would stay with the deceased body through the night. Can you imagine what the people from the mahala are like? Yesterday, there was nobody who would look after the deceased body.

Anthropologists have argued already for some time that figurations and transfigurations reconcile the vicissitudes of everyday life with clarity, expectations and certainty that people draw upon in keeping their lifeworlds coherent and tangible (e.g. Carrithers, 2009). Hence, the individual’s lifeworld cannot be separated from the metaphors by which she lives. Metaphors, narratives and stories, like any other rhetorical tropes, bear the power to allegorize abstract or weighty problems and issues as intersubjective, lived and embodied dramas of human existence (Jackson, 1998), as the trope of ‘locked doors’ succinctly expresses.

Indeed, in the Bosnian countryside the house (kuća) is a fecund imaginative pool that people draw upon in their reflections on life, well-being or relatedness (Bringa, 1995: 85–118). The category of the house is in many cultures taken for granted as a semantic grid through which people filter various everyday experiences, activities and processes of symbolization associated with the actions and notions of ‘living together’ (Carsten and Hugh-Jones, 1995). In rural Bosnia the house is central to the scaling of relatedness as well as the imagination of belonging. The house provides villagers with rich figurative expressions and metaphors that are used in everyday language; hence the use of the tropes of the ‘opened’ and ‘closed’ doors of the house.

The idea of opened and closed spaces as analogous to the public and private, likewise to gender idioms, has been widely recognized and discussed in the context of Mediterranean anthropology (cf. Du Boulay, 1974; Dubisch, 1986; Hirschon, 1978). However, in the case of rural Bosnia this metaphor is employed and enacted in two rather different ways. First, it captures relations and the processes of communal life and hospitality in the komšiluk. Here, ‘opened doors’ refer to the kind of neighbourhood where people often come spontaneously to visit or help each other. Second, ‘opened doors’ is the metaphor of commensality, relatedness, belonging and bonds of amity. Those people who share food from one cauldron (tepsija) have the doors to the house opened. As I was often told, living together (zajedno) is a matter of eating together, and living in proximity (u komšiluku) is a matter of mutuality between next-door neighbours. The sharing of food, drinking coffee together, or exchange of help and hospitality are inclusive and pervasive performances of social intimacy, which open the doors of the house. Furthermore, these are the key processes of inclusion into people’s lifeworlds and intimate spheres of relatedness. The trope of ‘locked doors’ so frequently used by many Bosnians irrespective of their age, then, simply reverses any form of ‘living together’ and reflects withdrawal from intimate sociality and outmigration. Furthermore, it shows the effects of changing sociality in the villages in the post-war years.

Komšiluk and the processes of living

In her recent work, Sorabji (2006, 2008) convincingly illuminates neighbourhood relations among Bosnian Muslims in the suburbs of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, in a longitudinal perspective, and shows how these changed profoundly in the post-war period. Nonetheless, her conclusions can be applied to the rural and mountain areas of central Bosnia only partially. In the mountains of central Bosnia both neighbourliness and the house multiply the spheres of intimacy in people’s lifeworlds as expressed in the trope of the ‘opened door’. Komšiluk consists of bonds, relations and imagination that are cultivated in the flows of everyday sociality.

The symbolic geographies of villages in the mountains of central Bosnia are usually portioned into many komšiluks, though these do not constitute administrative units (Bringa, 1995: 66–73). Although there is fluidity and the peripheral spheres of komšiluk might overlap, the symbolic locus and boundaries of respective neighbourhoods are conceived highly consensually by their co-residents, and emerge from the flow of mundane proximity-based relations, and face-to-face interactions which are the building blocks of the neighbourhood. Although it might be the case in some neighbourhoods that the majority of the next-door neighbours are close patrilineal kin clustered agnatically, this is not always so, and especially not in recent decades. Rather, it is residence, proximity and mutuality that constitute the primary modus operandi through which komšiluk is conceived and enacted.

The orchestration of seasonal rhythms, festivities and ritual relations forms an important dualism in the rhythms of everyday life in the mountains of central Bosnia, alternating between winter and summer periods. Summer time in the mountains is marked by hard work and semi-subsistence farming that considerably increased after the war. Hence, the orchestration of the summer working period has a profound impact on the character of social relations within the komšiluk. As male villagers usually put it ‘there is too much to do and the weather is so unpredictable’. However, this does not mean that villagers would only utilize komšiluk networks during the summer months. Instead, different seasons of the year, workloads and activities require and orchestrate different forms of engagement within komšiluk networks. Nonetheless, men and women both continue with affective interactions within the komšiluk, although to a lesser extent than is usual during the winter months. Male neighbours always find time to smoke a cigarette together, likewise next-door neighbours and families find an opportunity to drink coffee together.

As an older male villager put it ‘winter has always been made for komšiluk’ (‘zima je bila uvijek za komšiluk stvorena’). Indeed, the winter period is marked by innumerable coffee visits. However, these are anything but random as they form a pattern of visits known as sijelo which display a high degree of regularity (see also Bringa, 1995: 92). The sijelo is a thoroughly orchestrated performance unwrapping the etiquette of hospitality–guesthood relations. It takes place at the hearth of the house. Such a visit is the moment when the doors of the house are opened. Strong associations between the house as a place of security and protection, and hospitality as a field of ritualized exchange of intimacy and respect, are common in many corners of the Mediterranean (cf. Herzfeld, 1985; Loizos and Papataxiarchis, 1991). Hospitality opens the door, and as Shryock (2004: 36) eloquently argues, it creates a moral space made of a transient overlap between the inner and outer domains of the house during which the guests are treated as (im)permanent members of the house.

The sijelo visits entail an ongoing flow of hospitality exchanged between neighbours. Performing hospitality and guesthood is always mutually implicated. The social poetics (see Herzfeld, 1985) associated with both the sijelo and neighbourhood interactions require the persons involved to be a good guest as much as a host. Hence, neighbours also think about who they will visit, and when, very carefully, and every sijelo visit is always expected to be returned. Such an ongoing balanced exchange of hospitality and guesthood neatly fits into the encompassing local moral imagination on mutually equal relations between persons, and thus outlines a particular social poetics and engagement within the komšiluk.

Ritual relations introduce other crucial moments in the flow of sociality between neighbours in the Bosnian countryside. While conducting fieldwork I lived in a village neighbourhood. After several months of research my co-neighbours had started to call me komšija (neighbour) on various occasions. One of these occasions was immediately after the Islamic annual feast of sacrifice (kurban bajram), often understood as a feast of the neighbourhood (Sorabji, 2008: 103). During the feast villagers ritually slaughter rams and the meat is exchanged between the households within the immediate neighbourhood (komšiluk) as well as the extended neighbourhood or quarter (mahala). An exchange of meat from the sacrifice during this ritual in the Bosnian mountains re-enacts the symbolic boundaries of the neighbourhood as a space of shared lifeworlds and ‘opened doors’. Sacrificed meat (kurban) embodies a substance, and its giving, sharing and eating regenerate the ways persons in the neighbourhood are related. ¹

However, the sijelo was also a time during my fieldwork when I could often hear narratives about particular war memories as intertwined with the metamorphoses of neighbourliness in the post-war years. The war memories that were recalled during the sijelo visits unpacked various layouts of intra-village tensions, animosities and sources of long-lasting bitterness, sometimes even between close neighbours (see Sorabji, 2006, with regard to post-war Sarajevo). It was argued by the villagers themselves that the 1990s war deeply revealed neighbours’ characters and qualities, as for some people it became more important at the time to save their own property rather than their neighbours (komšije). In these narratives villagers slowly revealed that there were some neighbours who had survived the war safely, and who took advantage of various post-war donation programmes in order to gain more livestock or machines, despite their cowardly behaviour during the war. On the other hand, there are villagers who lost children, brothers, or fathers and have not had any compensation. During one such conversation I was told for example:

and do you know what is the worst about the war? [silence] that human life is not even worth a pot of potatoes. I’ll tell you what, if another war broke out now, I would kill half of the village. This man got oil to get my ill father from the village but he moved his livestock instead.

Hence, complex entanglements of the sijelo visits with the memories that are transformed into the hierarchies and narratives of suffering hint at two broader issues concerning the metamorphosis of sociality in the post-war Bosnian countryside. First, the sijelo visits are the moments times when moral imaginations and cultural intimacies are creatively cultivated. However, at times it may turn out to be a moment when komšiluk as a particular sphere of intimacy is thoroughly questioned and social distances between co-neighbours are recast. Second, the social life of memories and narratives reveals that transgenerational transmission of traumatic experiences is neither linear (Antze and Lambek, 1996: xvi–xix; Loizos, 2008: 147), nor inevitably associated with ‘ethnic hatred’, because the 1990s war is remembered painfully differently even within an ‘unmixed’ community (see also Sorabji, 2006).

Komšiluk and intersubjectivity

To understand the implications of the metamorphosis of sociality in post-war Bosnian neighbourhoods we need to unfold the immense propensity towards intersubjectivity associated with komšiluk. In the mountains of central Bosnia people often recount the proverb: ‘If my komšija [neighbour] is doing badly and I am doing well, I cannot be happy.’ In saying this and living accordingly villagers neither pose an essentialized base for a neighbourhood community, nor any rigid boundaries. The very fact that villagers continue to express in their moral narratives concerns for co-neighbours, and the ways they say and do so, creatively and continuously shape both komšiluk as a sphere of moral imagination and relatedness, and particular social poetics associated with being a neighbour. Unlike the ethnonational interpretations of the neighbourliness outlined above, komšiluk in rural Bosnia entails both moral imagination and social pragmatics of the everyday rhythms of life.

As Azmir-baba, a dervish sheikh and an amateur folklorist, put it during one of the countless conversations we had:

what relationship between religion and komšiluk? That’s nonsense, komšiluk has always been a matter of ordinary interpersonal relations (medjuljudski odnosi). The only everlasting poisoning problem for komšiluk has been envy between komšije [neighbours].

So here are several eloquent local definitions of komšiluk that are not dissimilar to the three ethnographic snippets introduced earlier in the article. All of them share common lines of moral reasoning and social pragmatics associated with the neighbourhood. These are mutuality, intersubjectivity and a play of a particular pronominalism as a persuasive force in social interactions between neighbours living in proximity. Here I mean by a play of pronominalism the rhetorical and pragmatic edges of social interaction (Carrithers, 2008; Fernandez, 2010), that involve shifting from ‘I’ towards ‘we’ pronouns, expressing an intersubjective ‘we-relationship’ towards the people with mutually shared lifeworlds within komšiluk. This was expressed explicitly or inchoately in the emphasis that villagers constantly put on the use of the plural pronouns (naš komšiluk – our neighbourhood) when addressing komšiluk matters in everyday conversations. Or, as the dervish sheikh Azmir-baba described neighbourliness, as a matter of ‘ordinary interpersonal relations’ (medjuljudski odnosi), and hence as a matter of consociality.

There are countless mundane events, moments and situations in the rhythms of everyday life which characterize komšiluk as a consociational neighborhood. Here, by using this conjunction, I draw upon the distinction made by phenomenologist Schutz (1967) between Nebenmenschen (contemporaries) and Mitmenschen (consociates). This distinction highlights different forms of intersubjectivity between people living in proximity. Contemporaries are ‘those we know as types, those whom we can recognize and treat appropriately just insofar as we properly recognize their type’ (Carrithers, 2008: 166). Consociates on the other hand, as Carrithers succinctly puts it, might be characterized as:

people we grow old with, whose lives we participate in, whom we know intimately and in their own terms. We are entwined with them; we are able to join in their absolutely individual life story, and to that extent, we see beyond any generic designation to particularities of attitude, experience, and reaction. We have, with consociates, a ‘thou-relationship’, an intimacy and mutual knowledge of one another face to face, and a ‘we-relationship’, in that we have experiences in common with them. (2008: 167)

Indeed, there is a fundamental semantic distinction made by Schutz between the two German prepositions neben and mit respectively. The former, associated with the category of contemporaries (Nebenmenschen), means ‘next to’ or ‘by’. The latter preposition, associated with the category of consociates (Mitmenschen), on the contrary, means ‘with’. Put in this way, komšiluk as a form and process of living together needs to be understood as a consociational neighbourhood, that is, as a social and moral space in which lifeworlds of neighbours living in proximity intersect. It is the space where people live with one another, rather than next to each other. Certainly, there were political tools used by the Ottomans such as the millet system, ² based on the logic of generic difference between religious communities (e.g. Brown, 1996), and its cultural continuities in the post-Ottoman territories need to be examined thoroughly (e.g. Grandits et al., 2011). However, komšiluk was not any Ottoman-period institution that would structure interactions between peoples as members of different ethnoreligous groups as some anthropologists argue (e.g. Hayden 2007). In other words komšiluk and millet have very different meanings and operate at very different scales that ought not to be analytically intermingled. Indeed, more than a half century ago Halpern, in his classic study on a Serbian village, made a similar observation concerning the intersubjective character of neighbourliness:

the komšiluk, or neighbourhood forms a definable geographic unit as is shown by the clusters of houses. Although members of a villager’s own clan group are usually treated more intimately, the komšija, or neighbour, is very highly regarded in Orašac. As one villager defined it: ‘If you are in trouble or need anything you go to your komšija.’… For the social life of both men and women is definitely centered in the komšiluk. As the villagers themselves say, komšija bliži od kušulje – a neighbour is closer than one’s shirt. (Halpern, 1958: 157–60)

Also, the attempt to align komšiluk as a lived practice of neighbourliness with the low level of inter-ethnic marriages is problematic. As Herzfeld (1997) argued, cultural intimacy is multi-faceted, and the capacity of intimacy to relate people goes far beyond marriage or kinship. Hence komšiluk can neither be narrowed down to inter-ethnic marriages nor viewed as a mechanism regulating distance or intimacy. For example, in the Muslim village where I was based during my fieldwork, and which has never been ‘ethnically mixed’, I found that the number of intra-village marriages was extremely low (245 of 250 marriages in the previous 80 years were outside of the village), and at the komšiluk level was non-existent. Instead, the practice of marriage exogamy at the level of the komšiluk as well as at the village level has been influenced historically by inheritance patterns as a means to minimize partition of the land, on which people in rural areas largely relied in the past. Contrarily, in the case of less isolated villages with historically higher levels of migration and social mobility, marriage and inheritance practices were significantly different. Moreover, Lockwood already observed several decades ago the non-kin but residential character of komšiluk, and has pointed out that:

[o]ne unexpected feature of these neighborhood groupings is that they display a tendency toward exogamy. It is said that close neighbors should never marry. (1975: 65, italics added)

These ethnographic findings from rural Bosnia contrast greatly with ethnicized interpretations of the komšiluk as a mechanism which would have structured and/or completely prohibited intermarriages within a neighbourhood and maintained the boundaries between neighbours as members of different ethnoreligious groups. Of course the level of inter-ethnic marriages has varied considerably between rural and urban areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as during different historical periods. However, the cause–effect correlation between the low numbers of such marriages and the ethnicization of komšiluk seems to be somehow inappropriate, and also mixes different scales of social relations and complexity. To address these issues we need more grassroots ethnographic data combined with historical research to shed light on the variability and consequences of those patterns, rather than simply ascribing causalities to intrinsic antagonisms rooted in the imagined collective psyche of ethnic groups.

Conclusion

In this article I discussed how the processes of the post-Yugoslav socio-economic changes and post-war predicaments have led people in rural Bosnia to deeply reassess their notions of komšiluk as a mode of ‘sociality within proximity’. The traditional duality of sociality with regard to kinship and residence in mountain villages is melting away. For those villagers who are locking the doors of their houses, withdrawing from the villages and migrating to the cities, various kin-oriented forms of relatedness have begun to prevail over those that are oriented towards the morality of living in proximity that is characterized by ‘opened doors’. Hence, this process involves a shift from concrete and localized intersubjectively shared lifeworlds towards more abstract and unbounded ways of belonging, that Herzfeld (2007) poignantly entitled ‘globalized kinship’, in which individual virtue intersects with the values and global hierarchies of neoliberal governmentality and national states.

I showed here how the rhythms of everyday life and sociality in rural Bosnia are inextricably associated with the house, where the metaphor of ‘opened doors’ neatly captures relations and the processes of communal life in the komšiluk, rather than constituting a mechanism regulating inter-ethnic relations. I also argued that, in the context of thorough socio-economic post-war as well as post-socialist transformations, intimate local conversations with Bosnian villagers reveal the trope of ‘locked doors’ as a significant non-nationalist rhetorical reflection of recent turbulent local-level transformations and change (cf. Jansen, 2005b). In doing so, this article illustrated how our understanding of the predicaments of everyday life in Bosnia-Herzegovina can benefit from the ethnographic examination of local social pragmatics and rhetoric. Indeed, one widely shared proverb in the mountains of central Bosnia is ‘first search for your neighbour and only then build a house’ (prvo traži komšiju pa izbij kuću). In so saying, any Bosnian neighbourhood without opened doors would not be conceived of as worth living in.