Suchergebnisse

In many armed conflicts, forced disappearances and hiding the bodies of victims of mass atrocities are used strategically. This article argues that disappearances are powerful weapons, as their consequences reach from the most intimate relations to the formation of political communities. Consequently, political projects of forced disappearances leave difficult legacies for post-conflict reconciliation, and they give rise to a need to address individuals' and families' needs as well as relations between national and political groups implicated in the conflict. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this articles explores the question of missing persons in post-1992 Bosnia. The processes of identification and practices of remembering and commemorating the missing are analyzed through the concept of liminality. The article argues that the future-oriented temporality of liminality gives rise to numerous practices of encountering the enigma of the missing, while the political atmosphere of postwar Bosnia restricts possibilities of communitas-type relationality across ethnonational differences.

International audience ; This article examines the meanings of 'home' in the lives of Bosnian refugees living in diaspora after the extremely destructive war in Bosnia. Through careful reading of life stories written by two refugees living in Finland, it highlights the dynamic process of negotiating belonging in diasporic situations. It pays special attention to the ambivalent role of ethnicity in the memories of these writers and their understanding of 'good homes'. The reading does not support the popular 'ancient hatred' explanation of war in Bosnia; the violence of the war does not grow organically from the lives of ethnically mixed communities. Rather, it is brought to the communities by politicized discourses interpreting the language of ethnicity in extremely violent and exclusive ways. This article's orientation is towards 'hesitant diasporas' because of refugees' hesitation between their country of origin and their new country of settlement as their 'homes' in a changing situation.

This article examines the meanings of 'home' in the lives of Bosnian refugees living in diaspora after the extremely destructive war in Bosnia. Through careful reading of life stories written by two refugees living in Finland, it highlights the dynamic process of negotiating belonging in diasporic situations. It pays special attention to the ambivalent role of ethnicity in the memories of these writers and their understanding of 'good homes'. The reading does not support the popular 'ancient hatred' explanation of war in Bosnia; the violence of the war does not grow organically from the lives of ethnically mixed communities. Rather, it is brought to the communities by politicized discourses interpreting the language of ethnicity in extremely violent and exclusive ways. This article's orientation is towards 'hesitant diasporas' because of refugees' hesitation between their country of origin and their new country of settlement as their 'homes' in a changing situation.

"All over the world, people disappear from their families, communities and the state's bureaucratic gaze, as victims of oppressive regimes or while migrating along clandestine routes. This volume brings together scholars who engage ethnographically with such disappearances in various cultural, social and political contexts. It takes an anthropological perspective on questions about human life and death, absence and presence, rituals and mourning, liminality and structures, citizenship and personhood as well as agency and power. The chapters explore the political dimension of disappearances and address methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of researching disappearances and the disappeared"--

Anthropology lies at the heart of the human sciences, tackling questions having to do with the foundations, ethics, and deployment of the knowledge crucial to human lives. The Ethics of Knowledge Creation focuses on how knowledge is relationally created, how local knowledge can be transmuted into 'universal knowledge', and how the transaction and consumption of knowledge also monitors its subsequent production. This volume examines the ethical implications of various kinds of relations that are created in the process of 'transacting knowledge' and investigates how these transactions are also situated according to broader contradictions or synergies between ethical, epistemological, and political concerns