of coastal Croatia, might have escaped the exhausting circle of constantly reestablishing some sort of normality, but the price was the loss of all meaning. They lost contact with their feelings, including the fear necessary for physical survival and the need for closeness necessary for emotional survival. They were the zombies of the war. Refugees who escaped from the physical perils of war found very quickly that escape did not free them from a need to come to terms with the politics of national belonging, the violence they had witnessed and evaded, and their decision to leave while others remained, with all that that meant materially, socially, and morally.
Each and every turning in this spiral of shattered and re-created norms was marked by a movement between some semblance of normality and the eruption of chaos. People who could easily give me a sophisticated political analysis one day would the very next day express bewilderment and ask me to explain to them why all this was happening. Something that had made sense could suddenly become meaningless; what had momentarily seemed normal could crumble into nothingness. Taussig has described this oscillation as a “doubleness of social being, in which one moves in bursts between somehow accepting the situation as normal, only to be thrown into a panic or shocked into disorientation by an event, a rumour, a sight, something said, or not said—something that even while it requires the normal in order to make its impact, destroys it” (1992:18).
What people meant by “normality” swung back and forth between two points of reference, peacetime and wartime. When Sarajevans spoke of normal life, they meant the prewar way of life and social norms that had been lost amid the violent circumstances of the siege. They saw the way of living that they had been forced to adopt during the siege as abnormal, yet it became strangely normal during wartime. Taussig calls this incomplete shift of mental stance the “normality of the abnormal” (1992:17–18). Sarajevans coined the expression “imitation of life” to mark this coping strategy. They patched together a semblance of existence, living from day to day on terms they could neither finally accept nor directly alter. This stance enabled Sarajevans to conduct themselves according to wartime norms while remembering their prewar norms and enshrining them as the ideal of how life should be. It did not, however, resolve the ethical dilemmas that arose amid their daily struggles: What is an acceptable everyday normality? What is a decent human life? Sarajevans were caught in a constant pendulum swing between the two sets of norms. Should they resist the impulse to run before the sniper? Should they cling to the cosmopolitanism that, like their city, lay in ruins, or should they judge others on the basis of national belonging?
Almost every detail of everyday life was subject to constant evaluation and revaluation. The most intensely charged and deeply disputed domain was that of ethnonational identification. Sarajevans had to reconcile their own lived experiences as members of ethnocultural groups in a multicultural city with the mutually exclusive, even hostile constructions of ethnonational identity that political leaders formulated and the war increasingly forced upon them. Whatever position they chose, it was both existentially unstable and morally charged.
Finding a Method for an Anthropology of War
Most authors who have tried to understand individuals’ lived experience of violence and transform it into words that others can comprehend encounter serious difficulties. The experience of traumatic violence is profoundly personal; it penetrates to the very core of our being. How do we translate existential fear and bodily pain into terms that those who have not shared this psychological and somatic violation of the self can understand? For all who lived through it, the siege of Sarajevo was a “limit situation,”6 plunging them into life circumstances that were on the border of what is humanly possible to understand, conceptualize, and describe in words. Listening to the silences and noticing the gaps in people’s stories that often betray an inassimilable experience is only the beginning; we must also observe and convey the full range of people’s responses to appalling events. Even when people undergo common experiences, each person comes to terms with them—or fails to come to terms with them—in her or his own way. This existential loneliness in the process of making meaning in war exacerbates the erosion of trust between people, but at the same time it strengthens the need to find others with whom to feel a sense of belonging.
Wars are politically sensitive situations where lives are at stake and truth is hotly contested. When words are an integral part of a culture that has been so thoroughly jeopardized by political violence, it is important to be aware of whose words we use to describe these experiences. At the same time that trauma generates silence, language is manipulated and corrupted by the political culture of armed conflict. As producers of knowledge about war, anthropologists are in a sensitive position because our representations of war, though less powerful than those of the politicians, create a sort of truth about it that circulates internationally. That is why I found it essential to depict the situation from a multiplicity of different perspectives. I chose people belonging to various groups—defined by national identity, ethnoreligious background, place of residence, age, gender, and family position—and from different networks I established in Sarajevo. I also present as accurately as possible the contexts in which people constructed their interpretations of the situation and acted upon them.
Tape-recording Sarajevans’ own words and integrating them into the text allows people whose voices and viewpoints could not be heard amid the competing truths about the war to be presented in their own language for describing their encounter with limit situations during the siege and to share their reflections on the nationalist politics that gave rise to and sustained such massive violence. I conducted over a hundred hours of interviews with approximately fifty different people. About ten of them I considered war friends, who generously shared scarce resources with me, taught me how to cope with conditions in the city, and recounted their experiences and perspectives on the war. Each interview was rich and covered most of the subjects I sought to explore: how people responded to existential dangers and managed amid material deprivation; changes that occurred within families and in relationships with friends and neighbors; shifts in the level of religiosity and the strength of national identifications. While the situations I describe and the responses I analyze here were common among informants, I illustrate these experiences and reflections with those voices that convey them most accurately and eloquently. I also quote informants whose positions and perspectives differed from those of the majority, since I am interested in sociocultural variations in people’s responses to the war.
I draw on my own experiences and reflections as well as on Sarajevans’ accounts in order to comprehend and communicate this shockingly concrete, yet subtle and elusive knowledge of war. Living in the besieged city alongside Sarajevans, I too had to employ all of my faculties—my intuition and cognition, my senses and emotions—in order to manage from day to day, as well as record what they and I were undergoing. In some instances, I found my own experiences helpful in understanding what Sarajevans were telling me.7 For example, I recount my own responses to being shot at—sudden depression as my sense of purpose evaporated, and then a process of reaffirming my reasons for being in Sarajevo—because, even though my informants told me similar stories, my own experience was the one I could describe the best. I do not, however, include anything personal that does not bear directly on the central questions that animated my fieldwork—just as I include nothing about my informants’ private lives that has no bearing on their wartime experiences.
“Giving myself over to the phenomenon,” rather than constructing what Taussig calls “an account from the outside and above” (1992:10), seemed to be the only way of gaining relevant knowledge and representing it to others. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut once characterized anthropology as “poetry which pretends to be scientific” (1974:176). Having a poet’s approach to fieldwork, as well as to writing, can yield valuable insights and suggest innovative forms of presentation for an anthropology of war. A disciplined subjectivity becomes not a flaw or obstacle but a crucial element for creating meaningful knowledge.
Doing fieldwork in war conditions may be hazardous to the project as well as the participant-observer because he or she might experience events that he or she has no way of dealing with and become so distressed as to be unable to continue the work. However,
