them to function in distressing situations. The problem for researchers such as myself is that key psychological defense mechanisms make us hear, observe, and remember only those phenomena we are capable of dealing with and consign the rest to silence and seeming oblivion (Nordstrom 1997:21–22). When she was immersed in fieldwork on witchcraft in the Bocage, Jeanne Favret-Saada noticed how difficult she found it to remember parts of conversations that touched on what she “did not want to hear,” even when transcribing her tapes afterward (1980:176–77, n. 1).
I encountered similar difficulties in recalling and processing conversations during my research. Two years after completing my fieldwork, I discovered many instances in which Sarajevans told me about their own breakdowns, or breakdowns that people close to them had experienced, during the war. I was astonished because by that time I had already read and analyzed the material several times. I recalled almost everything else these informants said, but not that they spoke about psychological breakdowns. I remembered one brief meeting with an elderly man in March 1995 who had obviously lost the will to live. I knew that one of my war friends had a physical breakdown, but I did not connect it with her story of how she suddenly became terribly afraid of getting hurt. I did not remember another war friend telling me that a friend of hers was taking sedatives in order to function; she worried because the sedatives were addictive, and no one knew how long the war was going to last. I had not recalled a young man telling me about his mother’s breakdown. Only after the war had ended, when I myself had experienced some psychological effects of immersion in the war, was I able to hear and take in these stories, and a completely new dimension of war emerged in front of me. No amount of observation can enable us to see and reflect upon phenomena we are unprepared for and unable to assimilate. Yet what we have ignored or pushed aside tends to reemerge when we are ready to deal with it. The field notes, tape-recorded interviews, and printed material I collected in Sarajevo were invaluable as I returned to analyze them again and again with new insights and questions.
A Stranger and a Friend
My fieldwork was shaped by the peculiar social position I occupied in Sarajevo. I was an outsider and an insider at one and the same time; to adopt Hortense Powdermaker’s expression, I was both “a stranger and a friend” (1966). I was not Sarajevan, and I did not know what life there was like before the siege. Yet I shared with Sarajevans a common Yugoslav sociocultural and political experience, with a common language and everything else that it implied. And I came to learn about the war by sharing it with them.
Still, most of the time I was treated like a guest. Ever hospitable, Sarajevans were willing to help me and take care of me when I needed it, which as a newcomer I often did. My presence was an interruption in their usual wartime existence—a very welcome one, I was assured—and I was never treated completely like one of them. However much I tried not to be special but to fall into their usual routines, life was never quite the same when I was around. I did not fully realize this until an incident in March 1995. I had said my goodbyes in the morning and left for the airport, but flights were canceled because of shooting, so I came back at lunchtime. My hosts welcomed me back, but they were slightly embarrassed by the very simple meal they had to offer me. I joked with one of their nephews that, as soon as I left, the food went back to the normal monotonous war diet, but inside I felt very naive. During that stay in Sarajevo I had the impression that I shared my hosts’ usual wartime fare.
The former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia had six constituent peoples8 (narodi)—Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Muslims, Montenegrins, and Macedonians (and, from 1974, Yugoslavs)—as well as several national minorities (narodnosti). The three constituent peoples of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina were Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. In 1995 the earlier label “Muslim” was replaced by “Bosniac” (Bošnjak) in the new constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This substitution caused a lot of international confusion, and local discontent by Serbs and Croats, as “Bosniac” sounds very much like “Bosnian” (Bosanac), which implies all the people of Bosnia, and often of Herzegovina, too.9 I chose to use the term Muslim rather than Bosniac because this is the term that my informants used. In Sarajevo, the two largest national groups before the war were Muslims and Serbs, while the Croats were less than 10 percent of the population.
At first I wanted to assume that my identity as a Croat would not matter to my fieldwork. After all, I was not a nationalist and did not come from a religiously observant family. Only after my work in Sarajevo was completed did I come to recognize how profoundly my views on ethnonationalism had been shaped by my grandparents. My maternal grandmother was a Croatian Serb, an atheist, and a communist sympathiser, and her views influenced my life and ideology. Her husband, my grandfather, was Croat but he, like her, was anti-nationalist and a communist sympathizer. He did his time in Jasenovac, a concentration camp,10 because of his illegal support of communists and Jews during World War II. He died when I was a child, so I have only early memories of him, but my grandmother passed on these ideas to me. During the war, however, I seldom told others about my Serbian roots, because I feared that all my anti-nationalistic arguments would have been dismissed as a simple reflection of the fact that I was of “mixed blood,” as was presumed by the ideology that was predominant during the war. I wanted to present myself as a “real” Croat and say that it did not matter all that much! My father’s family was entirely Croatian in background and especially the women were practicing Catholics in a low-key manner that was common during the socialist period.
My national identity influenced my fieldwork primarily, however, because it affected how others saw me. Amid the war that convulsed the former Yugoslavia, national identity became a life-and-death matter, and the ideas that people held about their own group and the others became highly salient in shaping interactions in Sarajevo. When the horrors of war were interpreted in nationalist idioms, most people looked at one another through national lenses. And they looked at me in the same way. I often expressed my support for the notion that nationality was not really important, and I made it clear that I had no allegiance to Croatian nationalist ideologies. Nonetheless, people related to me as a Croat from Croatia. It took a long time before I understood that, no matter how I felt and defined myself, I was still classified within the Sarajevan categories of “us” and “others.” Being a Croat placed me in different positions in regard to the various people I met and interviewed. Though I often thought this positioning was unnecessary and even unfortunate, it gave me firsthand experience of what nationality meant in Sarajevo during the war.
I was lucky because the couple who became my hosts was “mixed”; he came from a Muslim family, and she from a Serbian one. Characteristically, they had strong anti-nationalistic sentiments, a view that I shared. This commonality in difference created a secure and relaxed home atmosphere and rapidly generated mutual sympathies among us. We often joked about our ascribed national identities. For example, if in a debate I supported his wife’s position or she supported mine, my host would always declare: “udruži se krst sa križem” (the cross [krst] got united with the cross [križ]) against the Muslims, the first representing the Serbian variant and the second the Croatian variant for the Christian cross. Another running joke between us was my ignorance when it came to religious expressions, which were often synonymous with national ones. One day, during my first stay in 1994, my host asked me what the Catholic greeting was when someone entered a house. Muslims say “Merhaba” or “Selam alejkum,” and he wondered what Catholics said. I had no ready answer. I knew the greeting had a central figure such as Mary, Jesus, or God, and the first expression that came to my mind was “Pomoz Bog” (God help). But that was the Orthodox and Serbian greeting; the Catholic and Croatian one was “Hvaljen Isus” (Praised be Jesus). As soon as I said it, I realized that it must be wrong, but it was too late. They were already teasing me for not being a real Croat. Some years afterward my host told me that from that moment on he was sure that I was no nationalist.
My lack of nationalist views and religious observance made it somewhat easier for a Croatian from a family background that was presumed to be Catholic to get along in Sarajevo. At the same time, I initially did not see the national lenses through which the majority of Sarajevans redefined their relations with one
