As she navigates the city, Fran Markowitz shares narratives of local citizenry played out against the larger dramas of nation and state building. She shows how Sarajevans' national identities have been forged in the crucible of power, culture, language, and politics. Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope acknowledges this Central European city's dramatic survival from the ravages of civil war as it advances into the present-day global arena.
As she navigates the city, Fran Markowitz shares narratives of local citizenry played out against the larger dramas of nation and state building. She shows how Sarajevans' national identities have been forged in the crucible of power, culture, language, and politics. Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope acknowledges this Central European city's dramatic survival from the ravages of civil war as it advances into the present-day global arena.
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Overview
As she navigates the city, Fran Markowitz shares narratives of local citizenry played out against the larger dramas of nation and state building. She shows how Sarajevans' national identities have been forged in the crucible of power, culture, language, and politics. Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope acknowledges this Central European city's dramatic survival from the ravages of civil war as it advances into the present-day global arena.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252077135 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2010 |
| Series: | Interp Culture New Millennium |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sarajevo
A Bosnian KaleidoscopeBy FRAN MARKOWITZ
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Fran MarkowitzAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03526-5
Chapter One
Meeting and Greeting the City
This book is about Sarajevo—its buildings, monuments, museums, and streets; its war scars, its histories, and its cultural legacies as narrated, categorized, and practiced by its people. This book is about the subjectivities of Sarajevans that have been formulated, adjusted, articulated, and squelched over centuries of political demands that transformed their country from an independent medieval kingdom to a westernmost province in the Ottoman Empire (1463-1878), to a territory of Habsburg Austria-Hungary (1878-1918), to part of two twentieth-century Yugoslavias, to the contemporary, ostensibly independent Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). The book examines how Sarajevans navigate, negotiate, reproduce, and amend who it is that they think they are from within the authoritative discourses of history, in their interactions with the government, through their encounters with the built environment, and in comparison with other peoples and persons with whom they share neighborhood, city, country, and continent.
As the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain fell, Yugoslavia, which had vaingloriously straddled Europe's two sides, split apart. From 1992 through 1995, Sarajevo was held under the longest siege in twentieth-century history while all of Bosnia-Herzegovina suffered through a devastating war. That war destroyed the country's political and economic infrastructure and, having made a mockery of Yugoslavia's central slogan of bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity), shattered an implicit trust in the goodwill of all people(s). Prior to the war, many Bosnians had hoped to continue the grand European narrative of progress into the twenty-first century by taking all that was good in nonaligned, socialist Yugoslavia and making it better in a smaller, more manageable, inherently pluralistic Bosnian state. But that has not as yet come to pass. The Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with its population divided into three constituent nations and its territory into two so-called entities, remains under the internationally mandated supervision of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and is at best a shaky state. The OHR's self-proclaimed mission is to work with the country's people and the international community to ensure that Bosnia-Herzegovina is a peaceful, viable state on course to European integration. And that could happen; BiH could solidify into a territorially sovereign, united yet pluralistic, democratic European state. But it could also remain a protectorate of the European Union (EU) for the long term; it could be partitioned and parceled out to its closest neighbors; or it could erupt into another war. All these potential scenarios are intimately related; each is embedded in the constantly in-motion actions, debates, hopes, and fears that combine to forge Bosnia's future.
Rather than adhere to the convention of representing Bosnia through images of bridges that link separate sides or as a mosaic comprised of many disparate pieces (see, e.g., Hayden 2007; Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings 2007b; Jansen 2005; cf. Andric [1945] 1961), I have chosen for this book the metaphor of a kaleidoscope to convey the fluid and dynamic variety of Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital (see Richardson 2008). With it I am suggesting that the city offers a multiplicity of ethnic, confessional, and philosophical trajectories that combine and separate, creating dozens of never-stable, always interrelated patterns. The hows and whys of Sarajevans' experiments with that diversity as they go about their daily lives is the focus of this book. It also analyzes the fact that while politicians, government bureaucrats, and social scientists use surveys, statistics, and history to determine who is who and what is what, these truth practices are open to contestation. It is in the kaleidoscopic alternation between constricted, monochromatic views and broader, multicolored configurations of power, culture, language, and polity that Sarajevo and its residents constitute, subjectify, and objectify themselves, their belongings, and (those of) others. It is also how they come to accept the certainty of some things while resisting and challenging other things.
Twisting a kaleidoscope reveals a plethora of patterns, but, like Sarajevo's offerings, they are not endless. They are constrained by the device and by the colors and quantity of the beads that it contains. Of course, all that can be altered by opening the tube to insert something new or to take something out. Nonetheless, the structure remains the same, and the old shapes and colors can linger palimpsest-like to inform and inspire the new components and their new configurations. In a sense, that is what happened in Bosnia during the last decades of the twentieth century and continues still, years after the millennium turned.
Although this book is not about the 1992-95 war, the negotiations that led to the Dayton Peace Accords, or the governmental structure of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, all these events and processes are present, if only in the scars that they have left on Sarajevo's sidewalks, on the bodies of its citizens, and in people's autobiographies. They are present, sometimes spectrally, sometimes in full body throughout the book; they intrude and cannot be ignored. Long gone are those rapturous days when anthropologists could put aside questions of politics, the brutalities of war, and the impact of government to concentrate on "culture." Today it is impossible to discuss culture—as categories, cognitive schemes, ways of going about in the world, belongings, rituals, languages, homes—except in connection with how it responds to, cracks, and reassembles in its confrontations with the political. How people see themselves, their children, their parents, the buildings that they pass every day, their across-the-hall neighbors, their country's leaders, the textbooks they once read and those that pupils are now reading are all part of the dynamic of culture that is articulated through the words, deeds, and works of people. And it changes, and it can change, sometimes through its own momentum, sometimes as the result of violence.
Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope is my take on how Sarajevans are negotiating their lives in conjunction with the larger dramas of nation and state building. It reacts against earlier portrayals of Bosnia's capital as an out-of-place Turkish or Muslim city in Europe, as a utopian site that defied the countryside around it, or as the sad result of a kind of historical determinism that produced representations of not yet modernized Serbs, Croats, and Bosniacs frozen in brutal Balkan acts. A critical, engaged urban anthropological analysis of contemporary Sarajevo, this ethnography refuses a singular trope. Envisioning Sarajevo as a Bosnian kaleidoscope situates the city in its cultural legacies and shows how its people resist and comply with an urbanism that provides the conditions for blurring boundaries and forging overlapping belongings, while also enabling the entrenchment of state practices that demand unequivocal national distinctions and unwavering loyalties.
Mirth and Melancholy in Sarajevo
Sarajevo makes me laugh. In its refusal to buckle down and knock out contradictory and competing ways to be, it elicits glee—from me.
I love walking across the bridges that link the banks of the Miljacka River: the ancient Goat Bridge, where caravans once trod en route to and from Istanbul; the Latin Bridge, where Gavrilo Princip took aim that fateful day in 1914 and shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and the Euro-modern metal structures that some say were inspired by the Eiffel Tower.
I love standing on the steps under the rosette window decorating the Catholic Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, watching the passersby as I wait for my friend Klara. Once seated in a cafi on the adjacent square, we are whisked out of noisy traffic into a bubble of Central European civility as white-shirted waiters with tea towels folded over their arms come to take our order. As we talk, the minarets of Ottoman-built stone mosques and the cupolas of the nineteenth-century Orthodox cathedral across the park flit into and out of our view. Just down the main thoroughfare named for Marshal Tito, an eternal flame burns brightly to commemorate all those Serb, Croat, Muslim, Roma, Jewish, Albanian, Montenegrin, Macedonian, Slovene, Yugoslav men, women, and children who fell as Partisans fighting against the Nazi occupation.
Not far from the double spires of the Catholic cathedral stands the pale yellow market hall, also built in the late nineteenth century. I love strolling its aisles as the vendors hawk their wares—yogurt, butter, eggs, cheese, meat, and the regional specialty kajmak, a pungent dairy product that is not quite sour cream and not quite cream cheese but a unique blend of its own—which I can sample and then purchase, or not. Or if I'm not in the mood for close contact, I can hop on a tram and rattle past the ultramodern glass and steel UNIS twin towers and the daffodil-colored Holiday Inn to shop in the antiseptically bright Merkator supermarket without having to talk to a soul.
I love that the arches and domes of Turkish stone buildings, the ornate facades commissioned by Austrian capitalists, and mega-sized concrete structures of socialist modernism stand side-by-side; that the sacred and profane transgress into each other's space; that government-produced apartment blocks, private places of purchase, houses of worship, and people's homes rub up against each other. I relish the variety of Sarajevo's built environment that provokes the imagination with a long list of possibilities for being in the world. The churches, mosques, and synagogues speak to the Abrahamic faiths, each to its own although they share a progenitor as well as urban space. Sarajevo's shops and markets represent diverse modes of production, interaction, and consumption; the government buildings, emerald green parks, museums, theaters, factories, garages, galleries, restaurants, and cafis all conjure a range of belongings and identities, and their alternatives.
These styles of the city, carved in stone, and painted or printed on canvases and billboards, signs and menus, postcards and currency, speak to multiple histories and inspire imaginaries of possible futures in the present continuous of Sarajevo's motile public culture. Each structure instigates a slew of ideas about self and other and of faith and nation whether it was built on the socialist principles of worker self-management or in praise of a higher power; to accommodate bureaucrats or banknotes; or to display and deal in the whims of fashion or the pleasures of grilled meat and baked spinach pie. There are enough goods and gods to go around and enough space for all to be displayed, adored, feared, or ignored. There is even a statue that declares, Ecce Homo—Here is Man—a lasting leftover from the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, which Sarajevo and the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia so proudly hosted, a piece of urban sculpture that decorates a rose garden where men play chess, children chase pigeons, and Gypsies ply their wares.
In all these ways, Sarajevo is ludic, even extravagantly so, because it defies demands for consistency and any sense of Euro-modern national boundedness (Boon 1999). Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish, Bosnian, Yugoslav, Austrian, Turkish, socialist, and humanistic sites—and those who pass through, worship, socialize, purchase, consume, and just live there—touch one another, inducing intermingling and inviting improvisation (Amin and Thrift 2002, 10). By displaying their symbols and sending their messages, each structure contributes to the "multiplicity of histories that is spatial" (Massey 2000, 231): They are public reminders of Ottoman rule and of annexation into the Central European Habsburg Empire. They represent the spread of Islam, Serbian Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Sephardic Jewry. They are manifestations of two twentieth-century Yugoslav projects, as well as the idea that Yugoslavia was, and now Bosnia-Herzegovina is, comprised of rights-vested constituent nations. Certainly each structure can be plotted on a time line in terms of its completion date and classified as the product of a specific tradition (see, e.g., Neidhardt 2004; also Donia 2006), but in the city of today all buildings, and the faiths and nations that they represent, are contemporaries. Nestled together they embody the competing, coexisting, and intertwined results of convoluted pasts; they produce a copresence of difference that encourages Sarajevans to fashion and refashion their city as an exemplar of diversity and cosmopolitanism. That is why Sarajevo makes me laugh.
Nothing, however, is fixed, and everyone knows that things can change, that things have changed. The same stately nineteenth-century buildings that sheltered first the Austro-Hungarian imperial governors, followed by officials of the two Yugoslavias—with Nazi occupiers in between—now fly the flag of Bosnia-Herzegovina. No longer an Ottoman province, an Austrian crown territory, or a Yugoslav socialist republic, BiH has been recognized as independent since April 1992. But achieving state sovereignty and maintaining Bosnia's territorial integrity were won at great cost. The war of 1992-95, fought for and against the principle of ethnic cleansing, devastated the country and changed its landscape. More than one million people fled; thousands more were maimed and murdered. Cultural landmarks and the economic infrastructure were destroyed. Not until the highest elected representatives of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina agreed in Dayton, Ohio, to distribute territory, resources, governing power, and rights among the country's three designated constituent nations—the nations of the Bosniacs, the Croats, and the Serbs—was a consensus reached on how to end the war (see Holbrooke 1999; Chandler 2000, 43).
While maintaining BiH's prewar boundaries, Presidents Miloševic, Tudjman, and Izetbegovic internally divided the country into two ethnically dominated entities—the Bosniac-Croat Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (the Federation, or FBiH, 51 percent of the territory, further divided into ten cantons), and the Republika Srpska (Serbian Republic, or RS, 49 percent of the territory)—and endowed these with more governing power than the unitary state. Further entrenching the idea that this state is a compromise wrested from the leaders of three incommensurable rights-vested groups, they established a trinational, three-person state presidency. Also, only Bosniacs, Croats, and Serbs are eligible to hold major government offices, leaving little if any room for mixed-ethnics, minorities, or those who consider themselves Bosnians with no ethnic affiliation. Although the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina exists formally as a unitary state, it operates more like a wary coalition of three statelets. In this confusing, overly bureaucratic, and often dysfunctional arrangement (see F. Friedman 2004; Moore with Buechenschuetz 2004; Gilbert 2006) Sarajevo serves as the capital of the Federation and of the entire country.
But that is not the end of it. The signing of the Dayton Accords both affirmed BiH's independence and made the country a protectorate of the international community by establishing a supragovernmental apparatus to ensure that the peace would hold. NATO-led international troops were deployed throughout the country first to assure implementation of the accords (Implementation Force, IFOR) and then to supervise stabilization (Stabilization Force, SFOR), while the Office of the High Representative was charged with overseeing the rule of law and guiding BiH on the path toward European integration. SFOR was disbanded exactly ten years after the cessation of hostilities, but as of this writing in 2009, the sixth high representative, Valentin Inzko, continues to hold absolute power to overturn election results and parliamentary decisions should they fail to meet the demands of democracy as set forth in the Dayton Accords. And so, as the wide array of humanitarian organizations that provided sorely needed resources to the city steadily decreases, the OHR remains ensconced in Sarajevo, where it supervises the reconstruction, if not the reconciliation, of a country ravaged by a hideous war.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sarajevo by FRAN MARKOWITZ Copyright © 2010 by Fran Markowitz . Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations....................ixAcknowledgments....................xi
Pronunciation Guide....................xiii
1. Meeting and Greeting the City....................3
2. Practices of Place: Living in and Enlivening Sarajevo....................26
3. National Legibility: Lines of History, Surges of Ethnicity....................51
4. Census and Sensibility: Confirming the Constitution....................77
5. Where Have All the Yugoslavs, Slovenes, and Gypsies Gone?....................93
6. Sarajevo's Jews: One Community among the Others....................112
7. Insisting on Bosnia-Herzegovina: Bosnian Hybridity....................144
8. After Yugoslavia, after War, after All: Sarajevo's Cultural Legacies....................175
Glossary....................187
Notes....................189
References....................199
Index....................215