that I took in 1994, when her parents took me to see this celebrated view.
It was through family connections between Bosnian refugees and Sarajevans living through the siege that I found a home in the war. At the beginning of 1994, although I knew that I wanted to conduct fieldwork in Bosnia, I had still not found a place to do it. I decided to discuss doing fieldwork in Sarajevo with a native of the city, a female acquaintance about my age and from a similar social background who left Sarajevo during the first summer of the war but whose parents were still there. She showed me some of their letters describing the situation. When I asked what she thought about my doing fieldwork in Sarajevo, she not only endorsed the idea but suggested that I stay with her parents, who had an apartment in the center of the city. Some years later we laughed about this conversation when it became clear that we had both seen a chance to make use of each other. I gained an initial contact in Sarajevo, a place to stay, and local residents to show me around. What I did not know then was that her parents would become my war family, offering me a home that meant much more to me than the information they provided. She, in her turn, saw a way of sending letters, money, and food to her parents, which was her main preoccupation during those years in exile. Over time, this initial mutual interest has grown into a strong bond. Relationships forged in wartime on the basis of shared concerns and mutual trust are difficult to explain in civilian terms of friendship or family, but strong ties, formed quite quickly under trying circumstances, are characteristic of the social and emotional relationships that emerged in Sarajevo under siege.
Sarajevo
Ivo Andrić (2005 [1946]) opens his marvelous short story “Letter from the Year 1920” by describing a young man who has just returned to his native Sarajevo from abroad. Lying awake at night, the young man listens to bells ringing out of sync from a Catholic cathedral, an Orthodox church, and a tower clock on Bey’s Mosque (Begova Džamija), and he dwells on the absence of a chime from the synagogue, which has no clock. It wakes intense contradictory feelings of both love and hatred for his hometown, and he agonizes over his decision to return. The story could have easily been written today. To outsiders, as well as on local television, Sarajevans pointed out proudly that from a single spot you could see the buildings of the city’s four dominant religions: the central mosque (Begova Džamija), the Catholic cathedral, the Orthodox cathedral, and the synagogue. During my first stay in Sarajevo, one of my new acquaintances took me to Bembaša hill in order to see this view. For Sarajevans, this scene was the physical embodiment of the blend of religious traditions that found their place in the unique concoction of culture, customs, beliefs, social skills, and dispositions that they experienced as characteristically Sarajevan
The capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina and an urban conglomeration with every important feature of a city, Sarajevo still felt like a town because of its social mixing and informality. It lies in a valley of the river Miljacka. Following the valley from its amphitheatric east to the plain in the west, the history of the city unfolds. Sarajevo was formed as a town around 1461, during Turkish times, and by 1660 it had become the largest city in the Balkans. All towns in the Ottoman Empire were structured by division into quarters, mahale (pl.), or distinct districts. Each mahala (sing.) belonged to a different religious congregation, with its characteristic place of worship. The larger religious groups had a larger number of mahale. Sarajevan mahale occupy the eastern, amphitheatric part of the city; the view shows a striking concentration of minarets and church towers. After the Hapsburg Empire annexed Bosnia in 1878, Austro-Hungarian architects began building to the west of the older Ottoman center. This phase of its growth makes downtown Sarajevo resemble any Central European city center from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. After World War II, expansion to the west continued. Yugoslav socialist architecture characterizes such buildings as the Parliament, the Holiday Inn, the UNIS twin skyscrapers (before the war popularly called “Momo” and “Uzeir” after Serb and Muslim characters in a humorous television series), the PTT (Post, Telegram, and Telephone) building, and the TV building. The modern suburbs of Grbavica, Hrasno, Čengić Vila, Alipašino polje, Neđarići, and Dobrinja grew here from 1960s on, as in other Yugoslavian and European cities. Different sorts of developments occurred on the slopes around the valley. In Velešići, Buča Potok, and Boljakov Potok, for example, villagers from Eastern Bosnia and Sandžak in Serbia moved in during the 1980s, giving the outskirts of the city a more rural look. In the west, where the valley merges with the plain, is the international airport—my point of entry into Sarajevo.
Map 1. Sarajevo under siege.
I had never been to Sarajevo before, and I had met only a few Sarajevans. I was familiar with the images of Bosnians that circulated in the former Yugoslavia. I had learned about Bosnian history and read Bosnian literature by such renowned novelists as Ivo Andrić and Meša Selimović. I loved to sing Bosnian melancholic songs despite their patriarchal tone. I enormously enjoyed the popular prewar satirical program Top lista nadrealista (Top of the Surrealists) by a group of young Sarajevan men.12 I laughed at, and retold, jokes about Suljo, Mujo, and Fata, the stereotypical Muslim characters who figure in much of Bosnians’ self-deprecating humor.13
History and fiction taught me about the appalling brutality of the Ottoman occupiers toward the population. Boys were kidnapped to be trained as Ottoman soldiers, janjičari, a practice called danak u krvi, a tribute in blood. The history of Western Europe from the Middle Ages through the Inquisition and the European conquest of the rest of the world was no less bloody. Yet from the liberation of Sarajevo from the fascists by the partisans in 1945 until the dissolution of Yugoslavia, history was a horrific story firmly located in the past, bygone and never to return. When Franjo Tudjman, during his term as president of Croatia, said, “We live in historical times,” he was widely mocked not only for his pomposity but for his ignorance: while he was thinking of the heroic nature of Croatian nation-building, people were thinking of the misery that the nationalistic war had brought upon them. They would have been glad not to live in “historical times”!
The distinctive characteristic of Bosnians in general and Sarajevans in particular seems to have been—and still is—the shockingly lucid humor that flourished in the 1980s and continued throughout the war. No one who has seen it can forget a prewar sketch by the “Surrealists” in which Björn Borg comes as a refugee to Sarajevo because Sweden is at war with the penguins. Although no one recognizes him, people feel compassionate toward someone so far from home and try to help him the best they can. They find him a job in a coffee shop run by a Kosovo Albanian. His height, long blond hair, and incomprehensible speech make him look very stupid and out of place among the darker, shorter, and more alert Bosnians. At one point the kids in the street are playing tennis, and it turns out that Björn Borg is good at it. Everyone is happy for him and encourages him to keep it up! We all laughed at the absurdity of this upside-down situation, and no one could even dream that only a few years later forty thousand Bosnians would be seeking exile in Björn Borg’s native Sweden. In another prewar sketch, two stupid-looking street cleaners throw rubbish over a wall onto each other—a wall that was built in Sarajevo in order to separate the two warring sides and maintain the peace! At that moment, the Berlin Wall was falling and Europe was uniting. All these unimaginable reversals were true in the dream logic of night-mares—and soon became true in the “historical times” into which Sarajevans were unwillingly plunged.
The “Arrival Story”
Although war-torn Sarajevo was hardly a conventional anthropological field site, I could not help noticing certain resemblances—at least on the surface—to the fieldwork situation described in many a classical monograph (Pratt 1986). There was the “primitive other” whom we in the West did not understand, although in the case of Bosnia the “others” looked like us, were literate, and even spoke our languages. The colonial bureaucracy was present in the form of the UN. Life conditions were “primitive”: water was scarce and dirty, food was strange and difficult to get. Visitors were well advised to take their own provisions. There was no electricity.
