Finally, people realize through their own experiences of war that these explanations do not hold and shift to a third standpoint that I call the “deserter” mode.4 Abandoning the neat divisions between citizens and armies, friends and foes that mark the civilian and soldier modes, people give up allegiances to any opposing side and take responsibility for their own actions. This stance does not constitute treason or betrayal but expresses profound skepticism about the high ideals that justify vicious acts and an effort to recover some small measure of humanity in a world gone berserk.
These modes of feeling and thinking are not necessarily sequential or mutually exclusive; often people hold them simultaneously or shift back and forth between them as their situation changes. Everyone caught up in a war, or dealing with war as a journalist, diplomat, or researcher, employs all three of these perspectives. The inconsistencies in perceptions of war that are characteristic of those who are subjected to it involuntarily arise not only from war’s chaotic character but also from the best efforts to come to terms with it.
Imitation of Normal Life
As I focused on the experience of violence, I listened closely to what preoccupied my informants and how they spoke about everyday concerns. I noticed that people in Sarajevo often used the concept of normality to describe some situation, person, or way of life. The concept carried a moral charge, a positive sense of what was good, right, or desirable: a “normal life” was a description of how people wanted to live; a “normal person” thought and did things that were regarded as acceptable. The term pertained not only to the way of life people felt they had lost but also to a moral framework that might guide their actions. Normality not only communicated the social norms held by the person using it but also indicated her or his ideological position. The preoccupation with normality reflected Sarajevans’ utmost fear and their utmost shame: that in coping with the inhumane conditions of war, they had also become dehumanized and that they might be surviving only by means they would previously have rejected as immoral. Had they become psychologically, socially, and culturally unfit to live among decent people?
Figure 1. In 1995 graffiti appeared saying: “Nobody here is normal” (“Ovdje niko nije normalan”). Sarajevo, spring 1996. Photo by author.
Social norms are always in flux. Each person continuously defines and redefines his or her norms of conduct and perceptions of society in accordance with his or her daily experiences. In the context of war, the wholesale destruction of people’s homes, the intensity of chaotic feelings, and the constant demand to respond to unprecedented conditions make the pace and scope of change so dramatic that it is more easily noticed than in peacetime. I found it useful to follow the process of change in perceptions of normality in order to understand and explain people’s experiences of war in Sarajevo.
Schematically, change can be described as a process that occurs again and again:
• A norm exists.
• Violence disrupts normality; the norm does not hold anymore.
• Chaos reigns—a vacuum of meaning, disorientation, and normlessness.
• New truths compete to fill this vacuum: political ideologies, media interpretations, social contacts, rumors, and individuals’ own experiences.
• A new norm emerges, but it too is disrupted as the cycle continues.
Massive political violence disrupts the way we know the world works in peacetime and makes it worthless for orienting ourselves in a war zone. We feel plunged into a state of chaos, yet we are forced to take action in response to constant emergencies. What we previously found meaningful has been shattered, vanished, or become impossible, even inconceivable. As we struggle to make some sense of our situation, we seek desperately to fill this vacuum with new meanings. At this point, differing interpretations of the conflict compete for our allegiance. These contesting truths are promulgated by politicomilitary organizations and power elites; they are manufactured or propagated by the media, whether politically controlled or independent; they arise and circulate within our social circles, often in the form of rumors; and they come from our own desperate efforts to make sense of our disparate personal experiences. Amid a dizzying variety of interpretations, we settle on whatever seems to us the most useful guide to action and a notion of the world we can live with. On this basis, we join with like-minded and similarly situated others to develop a new norm, however provisional. But the cycle is repeated as new experiences fracture whatever tentative certainty and fragile consensus has been attained. The process continues on all levels of our lives, from the most existential through the material to the ideological.
Two examples illuminate this process. The first highlights how perceptions of normality changed on the most basic material level. A young woman, a doctor of medicine who became a friend, told me a story from the first months of war, when most Sarajevans were still reasoning within their peacetime standards. She and a friend of hers were going to a party one Saturday evening. As parties were very rare at that time, they fixed themselves up the best they could. Her friend even put on nylon stockings, which were already a scarce commodity. As they walked, the shelling started, and the explosions were very near. My acquaintance threw herself into the nearest ditch and shouted at her friend, who was still standing in the street, to do the same. The bewildered girl shouted that she could not because her nylon stockings would get torn. “To hell with your nylon stockings,” replied my acquaintance, “It is your head that will get blown off if you don’t get down immediately.”
The second example illustrates the changes in the relations between neighbors who belonged to different ethnoreligious and national groups and in the moral values attached to these relations. It was told to me by my host, a middle-aged man and an avowed anti-nationalist from a Muslim family background. At the height of the war, now and then he helped an old lady in the neighborhood by fetching water for her. It started one day when he saw her at her window and offered his help. After that she would sometimes wait for him with her canisters. One day a man in the street, presumably a neighbor who knew the old lady, commented, “Oh, you Serbs always stick together.” My host froze and told him his name, which was Muslim. “I think the man was ashamed,” he commented when he told me the story. As my host saw the situation, he was doing his neighborly duty. The man misinterpreted this solidarity in ethnoreligious terms, because the meanings of neighborliness and national identity were being renegotiated in the new atmosphere of rumors and media reporting of betrayal, or at least the lack of neighborly protection across national lines.
In peacetime, most people perceive normality as a stable, taken-for-granted state. Indeed, an essentialist conviction that this is how things really are seems central to our feeling of security, and discovering that nothing can be trusted anymore is almost as unsettling as the immediate dangers of living in a war zone. Political actors can exploit people’s need for security to promote their own versions of reality, and consequently those with more power have more to say about what normality is. However, even in wartime people do not automatically accept new explanations, ideas, and norms. It is more accurate to say that the redefinition of normality takes place in a political space where the power to define the truth is highly contested.
Characteristically, during the siege of Sarajevo, as in other situations of war, occupation, and captivity, powerful feelings of shame followed each breach and fall of a cherished social norm, while feelings of pride were associated with every solution to a predicament or resolution of a dilemma that created a new meaning in daily life. Yet even resourcefulness and resilience did not break the cycle. There were ways of escaping it, either by disconnecting psychologically or by fleeing. The local term for the emotional numbness and irrationality that followed an excess of pain was prolupati.5 People I saw who simply stood in open places during the shelling as if nothing was going on, or an elderly man with a distant look who was not interested
