the same pseudonyms are used consistently for the same persons, allowing the reader (at least to some degree) to get to know the different informants. On a few occasions, however, I have used two different pseudonyms for the same person, simply in order to prevent a potential identification. Only rarely do I offer individual characterisations of or personal information about my informants. I know it is detrimental to my presentation; however, the anonymity of my informants takes first priority.
My study has one great bias. Only on a few occasions did I talk to or otherwise interact with Croat citizens of Stolac. Some of my informants encouraged me to do so; however, I did not feel I could entertain credibility among either the Muslims or the Croats by pursuing such a strategy, and I did not have sufficient time to divide up my fieldwork. As a result, my analysis deals with the point of view of the Muslims of Stolac alone.
In addition to my fieldwork in Stolac, I also did research among Bosnians living in Denmark. I carried out ten unstructured interviews with Bosnians who had been granted residence permits. And for three months I visited Bosnians living in a camp for asylum applicants on a regular basis. I have not worked systematically with the data collected through my research in Denmark. But the research did function as important background knowledge for my later fieldwork in Stolac. It meant that I was already familiar with relevant cultural categories, personal stories about loss, strategies of resistance, repression and acceptance of ethnic thinking. And perhaps most importantly, the research in Denmark put my Stolac data into perspective, enabling me to see how fierce and unambiguous ethnic denunciation thrives best in exile, probably because people then do not have to live with the consequences of their own actions in quite the same way. In addition, socialising with Bosnian asylum applicants gave me a chance to practise my Serbo-Croatian.
1 Bougarel et al. (2007), Jansen (2000a), Maček (2000a), Povrzanovic (1997) and Feldman et al. (1993) are important in this respect.
Chapter 1
Anthropological perspectives on war and war-related violence
In this chapter, I identify important perspectives in contemporary studies of war and war-related violence, and place my own research in relation to these. The perspectives used, which I have labelled instrumentality/structure, expression and experience/narrative, have developed in relation to and at times as critiques of each other; they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but reflect focuses on different phases of war and war-related violence. The first perspective attempts to explain the outbreak of war and violent acts; the second centres on the cultural meaning of violent events; and the last represents experiences with and narratives of violence, focusing on the effects of violence. The perspectives also reflect different analytical levels, falling from a macro to a micro level, which, some would claim, relates to the possibility of empirical comparison (Schröder and Schmidt 2001), an argument reminiscent of the ‘verstehen’ – ‘erklären’ contrast.
Instrumentality/structure
The anthropological literature on war and violence reflects broader developments in anthropological theory, in which the critique of evolutionistic and functionalistic theories has given way to theories focusing on the relation between structure and strategy. Functional explanations of war (Gluckman 1955; Turner 1956; Ferguson 1984; Vayda and Rappaport 1968) have been abandoned, and though evolutionary theories of violence are still present in contemporary anthropology (Keegan 1994; Carneiro 1996; Reyna 1994; Abbink 2001), many explanations favour at least some degree of agency/structure.
Instrumentality
In relation to the first part of the instrumentality/structure pair, the central argument is that violence does not occur randomly but is intended. Competition over scarce resources or competition for power does not automatically result in violence; rather violence is conceived as a deliberate outcome of conscious actors’ strategic considerations. Violence is an instrument or a source of social power; it is action taken in order to reach certain goals (Hardin 1995; Turton 1997; Schmidt and Schröder 2001; Jabri 1996) – a thought echoing Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is politics by other means. When explaining the break up of Yugoslavia, for instance, such analyses have often highlighted the erosions of political power centres (both national and global) and explained violence as strategic action intended to cement or defend economic and political positions (Schierup 1991; Cohen 1993; Simić 1993; Malcom 1994; Nagengast 1994; Bennett 1995; Shoup 1995; Sofus 1996; Glenny 1996; Gallagher 1997; Gow 1997; Turton 1997; Brubaker 1998; Sunic 1998; Oberschall 2000).1
When discussing violence as a source of power, legitimacy becomes a central issue. Riches (1986) has argued that one reason why violence is a universal social and cultural resource is that “performance of violence is inherently liable to be contested on the question of legitimacy” (ibid. 11). Violent clashes in modern states – defined by their ‘legitimate’ monopolisation of violence (Giddens 1985) – could therefore be theorised as fights for or contestations of this legitimacy, as seen by the fact that often the very definition of the status of a conflict is strategically contested. For example, are we dealing with war, civil war, terror, defence or humanitarian intervention? The use of violence to contest legitimacy is usually accompanied by propaganda. In modern conflicts, the mass media have increasingly helped to create the demonic Other, on whom violence then turns (Allen 1999; Naughton 1994; Malešič 1993; Sofus 1999). Such propaganda often tends to produce a strictly polarised structure of ‘us-them’ that no-one can escape, that leaves no room for ambiguity, and where ‘our’ side is understood as morally superior (Löfving and Maček 2000; Schmidt and Schröder 2001). Discussing such propaganda, advocates of the instrumentalist perspective have often invoked it as an explicit critique of the so-called primordial perspective,2 though the primordial perspective is seldom clear-cut (in relation to the Balkans, however, see Mojzes 1994; Kaplan 1993).
The instrumentalist approach to violence sometimes fails to notice that even though violence is a possible power strategy for local elites, strategic action is affected by broader global systemic processes. Mass communication and mass immigration have made local identification problematic; and along with growth in the global weapons industry and the rise in long-distance nationalism, this has increased the very potential for conflict (Anderson 1992; Turton 1997). Another dimension that fits into the instrumentalist perspective but which is also often neglected is that wars, even if they are the outcome of strategic considerations, often create their own complex dynamic, inasmuch as war tends to develop into a kind of mental framework in which physical violence occurs. Bax (2000a; 2000b), for instance, describes how in Herzegovina already existing local conflicts escalate, change, and form their own dynamic in a war situation, because local leaders perceive the war as a framework for solving existing conflict by new means. War then comes to serve the different purposes of many actors, which may in turn account for the difficulties of putting an end to wars.
Structure
The instrumentalist approach, which focuses on the strategic use of violence, conflicts with structural theories; however, I have grouped them together because they both attempt to explain the origin of war and violence. Structurally inspired anthropological analyses of war and war-related violence have primarily focused on the inherent potential of violence and war to create identities. In a condensed form, the line of reasoning goes like this: Identity is built on difference, and when differences become too small, identity becomes threatened and violence then recreates or reinforces differences. This is Blok’s (2000) argument, for instance: following Freud, he calls violent practices aimed at destroying similarities and thereby creating the Other, the: “narcissism of minor differences.” As he writes in respect to the
