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, most people—ordinary citizens, not just anthropologists—have psychological defenses that enable 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