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Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare. Managing Ambiguity follows how neoliberal insistence on local community, flexibility, and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back, and how this fostered a specific mode of power

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 article ethnographically follows the everyday life of a homo sacer—a young Roma woman who has lived her whole life in a camp for displaced persons. The camp has been built for Roma, Ashkalias, and Balkan Egyptians who in 1999 fled from the violence in Kosovo to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. The key aim of the article is to see what happens with the concepts of 'homo sacer' and 'bare life' when ethnographically engaged in the context of Southeastern Europe. The article argues that ethnographic fieldwork in urban settings reveals in what way a homo sacer has an everyday life and a complex sociopolitical existence, and that camps are urban formations that can be related to very different sociohistorical and political projects.

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 management 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. ; Ovaj rad propituje kako je granica između humanitarnosti i politike bila reproducirana u svakodnevnom životu jednoga grada u BiH. Rad istražuje kako su tijekom humanitarnih akcija korištene (post)jugoslavenske ideje o ljudskosti kao apolitičkoj jezgri koja je omotana slojevima društveno-političkih identiteta. U radu se sugerira da je depolitiziranje humanitarnih akcija omogućavalo da se osoba distancira od hegemonijskog razumijevanja politike kao upravljanja etno-nacionalnim grupama motiviranog prije svega osobnim interesima, a da istodobno artikulira svoje zahtjeve i potrebe. Ljudi kojima je bila potrebna humanitarna pomoć koristili su depolitizirajuće diskurse o ljudskosti kako bi izrazili svoje (političko) pravo na preživljavanje i blagostanje u kontekstu obilježenom dominantnošću etno-nacionalističke retorike.

Notes on contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- New ethnographic perspectives on mature dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina / Stef Jansen, Carna Brkovic, Vanja Celebicic -- Whose voice? : post-war articulations of political subjectivities -- The discretion of witnesses : war camp memories between politicisation and civility / Cécile Jouhanneau -- Fragments of village life and the rough ground of the political in post-war Bih / David Henig -- Integrating "during the war" in "after the war" : narrative positionings in post-war Sarajevo / Nejra Nuna Cengic -- Commentary / Armina Galija and Hrvoje Paic -- Whose flexibility? : informality in practice -- Affective labour : work, love and care for the elderly in Bihac / Azra Hromadic -- Flexibility of vezetele : negotiating social protection in Bijeljina / Carna Brkovic -- "The king is naked" : internationality, informality and ko fol state-building / Karla Koutková -- Commentary / Paul Stubbs -- Whose vote? : engagements with representative democracy -- Beyond to vote or not to vote: how youth engage with politics / Vanja Celebicic -- Future conditional : precarious lives, strange loyalties and ambivalent subjects of Dayton Bih / Larisa Kurtovic -- Commentary / Florian Bieber -- Who are "we" in the first place? -- Raja : the ironic subject of everyday life in Sarajevo / Neboja Savija-Valha -- Excavating the common ground : Bosnian pyramids and post-national communities / Larisa Jacarevic -- Commentary / Svjetlana Nedimovic -- Afterword -- Afterwards: beyond regionally-based theoretical metonyms / Michelle Obeid -- Works cited -- Index

Diese Studie befasst sich an der Schnittstelle zwischen Wissenschaft und rassismuskritischer Bewegung aus einer kritischen ›weißen‹ Perspektive mit der Frage, wie es dazu kommt, dass Menschen anfangen, sich rassismuskritisch zu engagieren und wie diese Politisierungsprozesse methodisch-methodologisch angemessen erfasst werden können. Dafür wurde auf der Grundlage neomaterialistischer, rassismuskritischer, postkolonialer, und queer-feministischer Theorien eine eigene Methodologie entwickelt. Sie wurde sowohl auf das Erhebungsinstrument des narrationsgenerierenden Expert_inneninterview als au...

Diese Studie befasst sich an der Schnittstelle zwischen Wissenschaft und rassismuskritischer Bewegung aus einer kritischen ›weißen‹ Perspektive mit der Frage, wie es dazu kommt, dass Menschen anfangen, sich rassismuskritisch zu engagieren und wie diese Politisierungsprozesse methodisch-methodologisch angemessen erfasst werden können. Dafür wurde auf der Grundlage neomaterialistischer, rassismuskritischer, postkolonialer, und queer-feministischer Theorien eine eigene Methodologie entwickelt. Sie wurde sowohl auf das Erhebungsinstrument des narrationsgenerierenden Expert_inneninterview als au...