On Not Moving Well Enough. Temporal Reasoning in Sarajevo Yearnings for "Normal Lives"
- Autores: Stef Jansen
- Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. Extra 9, 2014 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Crisis, value, and hope: rethinking the economy), págs. 74-84
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
In this article I investigate ethnographically how people in the outskirts of Sarajevo attempted to reason their way through a widespread sense of persistent �pattering in place� in postwar, postsocialist, post-Yugoslav Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna i Hercegovina [BiH]). Concerns with household futures were explicitly contextualized within the everyday geopolitics of life in a semiprotectorate presumably on the �Road into Europe.� Rather than conceiving of their predicament in terms of �crisis,� my interlocutors diagnosed and criticized spatiotemporal entrapment through a politicizing understanding of the nesting of these different scales. Yet this politicization ultimately had depoliticizing effects, encouraging waiting rather than collective action. At this particular historical conjuncture, I have discerned an economy of temporal reasoning where yearnings for what were called �normal lives� evoked linear, forward movement as an imperative. Acknowledging that yearnings have their own histories, I investigate how a specific valuation of existential mobility along linear temporal templates shaped up at the intersection of, on the one hand, past futures�recalled from lives in Yugoslav socialist BiH and during the 1992�1995 war�and, on the other hand, futures projected as part of BiH�s ongoing "Road into Europe."
