Stef Jansen

Yearnings in the meantime

October 14, 2015

Normal lives and the state in a Sarajevo apartment complex

Yearnings in the Meantime is a volume of the Dislocations series published by Berghahn
Books. The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neo-liberal globalization, the

retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the
heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-rst century have raised urgent
questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating
critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks, which reect recent
innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically
engaged, ethnographically informed, and theoretically incisive responses.
Gdje to ima!? [Where does that
exist!?] In contemporary Bosnia
and Herzegovina (BiH), this
common exclamation is a
rhetorical question: whatever
that is, it is thought to exist
nowhere else. Such selfproclaimed exceptionalism runs
parallel to outside dismissals of
BiH as a basket case, and I
consider it unhelpful as a
framework for analysis. It is,
however, of interest as an object
of analysis. My recently
published book Yearnings in the
Meantime therefore tries to put
this exceptionalism in its place
and in its time. It asks, what is
the specic when and where
in which Bosnians come to feel
that their predicament is
exceptional? What are the
conditions of possibility for their
exasperated yearnings for
normal lives?

My ethnographic study of everyday dynamics in an outlying apartment complex of

Sarajevo (20082010) found that my interlocutors themselvesadults with continuity of
residence before, during, and after the 19921995 warreasoned about the where and
when of their predicament. In turn, I frame their political reasonings in the
spatiotemporal conguration called Dayton BiH after the United States airbase where
the 1995 peace agreement was signed. My interlocutors had lived through vast changes,
including sharp losses during the Serbian nationalist siege and dispossession at the
hands of elites tucked up in war-facilitated local and global alliances. Through predatory
privatization and party-political clientelism, the latter captured what remained of assets
from the Yugoslav socialist era and channeled the incorporation of BiH into
neoliberalizing globalization in a not-quite neoliberal manner. Yet for all this turmoil, a
decade and a half into foreign-supervised Dayton BiH, the country was permeated by an
affect centered on a sense of non-change, of being suspended between a war that had
not really ended and a Road into Europe that was continually deferred. Entrapped in
the European semi-periphery, people felt stuck in a seemingly endless Meantime.
My reconstruction of broadly shared concerns in this Dayton BiH Meantimea particular
constellation of when and whereresulted in a book that is haunted by many
paradoxical slippages, just as the phenomena it describes. Here I comment on four of
them.
First, this is a book about normal lives that arent. Conceived of as secure, ordered,
modern, Fordist lives, with realistic aspirations for forward movement, they always
remained out of reach. Continuously evoked but unobservable because no one believed
they were actually there, normal lives appear as a central gure in my analysis because
they draw in experiences from previous lives governed by (actually existing) Yugoslav
socialist self-management and normative future projections shaping up in a world
marked by neoliberalizing capitalist processes. In that way it is the gure of normal lives
that drives my exercise of historicization.
Second, this is a book about a state that isnt. Despite a vast, if dispersed, governmental
apparatus, including in-country foreign supervision, my interlocutors lamented that
there was no system in Dayton BiH. And without a normal state, they reasoned,
normal lives could not unfold. Rather than detecting and denouncing state oppression
and surveillance, so common in anthropological studies of statecraft, I thus trace
peoples sense of abandonment and their exasperated desires to become legible, to be
interpellated and governed. This is a story of an elusive state effect.
Third, this is a book about hope that isnt. While I framed my research questions in terms
of hope, more than a decade into the Dayton Meantime, my interlocutors did not really
hope for normal lives. I argue that they yearned for them, longing to nally move on
from the dead point at which they felt stuck. My turn to yearning is an attempt to

contribute to the anthropology of hope by rening the terminology used to formulate

our answers to its questions.
Fourth, this is a book about politics that isnt. Despite my interlocutors pervasive critical
commentary on the shortcomings of supervised BiHs geopolitics and on dispossession
by corrupt elites (largely organized in three parallel ethnonationalist pillars), such
political reasoning mostly ended up being anti-political. For most Bosnians there is no
politics outside of politikathe immoral play of crooked, kleptocratic party politicians.
Going beyond my interlocutors diagnoses, the book therefore includes an attempt to
mobilize a dynamic, materialist notion of hegemony to explain the longevity of despised
yet repeatedly re-elected ruling elites.
With the later 2014 Winter Revolt in mind, I hope readers will nd that the Dayton BiH
Meantime allows us to crystallize a looming global challenge of our time: how to think
oppositional politics beyond anti-politics and, particularly, how to mobilize popular
moralizing resentment into projects that address questions of redistribution directly
rather than through the categories of identitarian recognition that often seem to serve as
its ventriloquist dummy. From a postsocialist, postwar vantage point in the European
semi-periphery, this book thus seeks to contribute to conversations on how to
understand the when and the where of political reasoning, asking how our past and
current (geo)political location and conjuncture conditions our hopes and fears.
Stef Jansen is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.
He is also the co-editor of Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of
People (Berghahn 2008, with S. Lfving) and has conducted ethnographic research in
Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1996.

Cite as: Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the meantime: Normal lives and the state in a
Sarajevo apartment complex. FocaalBlog. 14 October. www.focaalblog.com/10/14/stefjansen-yearnings-in-the-meantime.
Tags: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dislocations, hope, normal lives, Stef Jansen, the state,
yearning