ATROCITY, COMMODITY, and TRANSGRESSION in BOSNIA's WAR TOURS Helen M. Orr a Dissertation Submitted to T

SARAJEVO AND THE WAR: ATROCITY, COMMODITY, AND TRANSGRESSION IN BOSNIA’S WAR TOURS

Helen M. Orr

A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religious Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Chapel Hill 2019

Approved by:

Todd Ramón Ochoa

Lauren Leve

Randall Styers

Renée Alexander Craft

Della Pollock

ABSTRACT

Helen M. Orr: Sarajevo and the War: Atrocity, Commodity, and Transgression in Bosnia’s War Tours (Under the direction of Todd Ramón Ochoa)

This dissertation is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, and it examines

Sarajevo’s war tour industry as a social production embedded in the contemporary realities of post-conflict society. Bosnia’s war tours take international visitors to sites that commemorate the violence of the Bosnian war, including Sarajevo’s almost four-year long siege and urbicide.

The dissertation explores issues of religion and violence, the commoditization of suffering, and the global intersections of dark tourism, witnessing, and the political construction of sacred discourses. As such, the dissertation treats the tours as ritual performances important to the production of Bosnian counter-memory. The tours authorize Bosnian memories and narratives of the war in the midst of a post-conflict history that is narratively contested. They also resist broader Western narratives of the war, historically beholden to the project of Orientalism, which continue to produce the Balkans as a geopolitical entity beholden to violent, ethno-religious actors. The project further examines the epistemological and political links which tie Sarajevo’s war tour industry to the global phenomenon of dark tourism, in which sites of atrocity become open to touristic production and market-share. Drawing upon an assemblage framing, the war tours are treated as vital, material sites which both produce, and resist, their commoditization. The dissertation is attuned to the ways in which dark sites are produced as

“sacred spaces,” and examines how the scholarly labeling of these sites as “sacred” further obscures the commodification of Bosnian suffering. At the same time, the dissertation uses a theory of transgression to affirm the forces of excess and profound loss at play in these touristic

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spaces. The dissertation treats the tours as instrumental, political acts, and frames the intimacies of post-war Bosnian life through the tours, embedding them in the city life of Sarajevo.

For my parents, Dawson & Carol Orr, whose love and support made this journey possible.

ACKNOWLEDMENTS

This dissertation was made possible by the support of many, a few of whom I have the opportunity to name here. Lauren Leve, Randall Styers, Della Pollock, and Renée Alexander

Craft contributed to this project as mentors and wise interlocuters. I am especially thankful for my advisor, Todd Ramón Ochoa, whose affirmation, guidance, encouragement, time, and incisive feedback have enabled me to make the project one that I am proud of. I am further indebted to my former advisors, Sarah K. Pinnock and Michael D. Jackson, whose influence lingers in these pages. I also wish to thank the late Elie Wiesel, a mentor whose work and teaching inspired me. Pavithra Vasudevan, Batool Zaidi, and Aron Sandell are friends and writing partners; I’m grateful to have shared so much of the time spent writing this project with you. (And Pavi, we did it!). My thanks as well to the dear friends who have been such a tremendous part of my doctoral program years, and to the Religious Studies department at UNC.

I am also grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation, whose support enabled this dissertation, as well as to numerous friends met abroad in both Serbia and Bosnia, whose friendship has helped to make this offering possible. Special thank-you(s) to Dženana, Ines, and Jakov. Most importantly of all, I wish to thank my family for their love and encouragement: Dawson and

Carol Orr, Vanessa, Ricardo, and Judith Lozano, and Cedric and Rubi Lee Williams.

PREFACE

…the excesses of the Yugoslav civil war could not take place before certain necessary conditions had been fulfilled. … [and they] should therefore be studied, analysed [sic], and described in this light. Still, studies describing the enabling conditions cannot take away the tormenting sense of incomprehension concerning the scenes that took place in this war. The unease remains. Intelligible causal relationships remain elusive; the excesses are still irrational and all out of proportion.

--Mattijs van der Port1

For whoever listens to a witness, becomes a witness.

--Elie Wiesel

1 Mattijs van der Port, Gypsies, Wars, & Other Instances of the Wild: Civilisation and Its Discontents in a Serbian Town (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 13.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

AN INTRODUCTION: SCHOLARLY FRAMEWORKS ...... 1

War Tours and the Production of Counter-Memory ...... 2

Anthropological Locations and Dark Tourism ...... 6

Contemporary Rituals ...... 12

A SECOND INTRODUCTION: HAUNTINGS ...... 18

CHAPTER 1: BULLETS IN BAŠČARŠIJA: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF A POST-WAR COMMODITY ...... 20

CHAPTER 2: THE TUNNEL OF HOPE/THE TUNNEL OF SMUGGLERS: COUNTER-MEMORY AUTHORIZES THE PRODUCTION OF THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE ...... 49

Travel, Tourism and Theorizing Religion ...... 50

Booking a War Tour ...... 54

War Tours as Sites of Counter-Memory ...... 59

The “Tunnel of Smugglers” and Geographies of Siege Profiteering ...... 68

CHAPTER 3: TRANSGRESSION AND DARK HUMOR: ON THE EXCESSES OF VIOLECE, LAUGHTER, AND SPAM MEAT ...... 81

Laughter on a War Tour ...... 86

Laughter and Transgression ...... 91

Crni Humor ...... 94

Dark Humor and Transgression ...... 104

A Parting Joke ...... 110

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IN THE PUB ...... 113

CHAPTER 4: WAR CHILD/WAR GUIDE: POST-MEMORY, PERFORMANCE, & REPETITION ...... 115

At Sarajevo’s First War Hostel ...... 120

Tourists, Former UN soldiers, and Returned Refugees ...... 129

The Siege/Bunker Tour/Experience ...... 136

CHAPTER 5: THE ISLAM YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT TOUR: EUROPE, ORIENTALISM, AND THE TOURIST GAZE ...... 145

Double Consciousness & Gaze Work ...... 146

Context(s) of the Islam Tour ...... 151

Porous Transnational Categories and Global Tourist Encounters ...... 159

At the Mosque ...... 163

A RETURN TO HAUNTINGS ...... 182

CHAPTER 6: ON SUFFERING AND REPRESENTATION ...... 185

Sensational and Sensorial Suffering ...... 191

Sensorial Portraits ...... 196

Almina ...... 196

Ines ...... 201

Faruk ...... 207

A CONCLUSION ...... 221

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 226

ix AN INTRODUCTION: SCHOLARLY FRAMEWORKS

This is a book about war, memory, trauma, the political construction of discourses of the sacred and of the authentic, and the commodity form. This book is also about an emerging site embedded in the realities of post-conflict society, and the power configurations and historical entanglements that accompany its touristic production. It is an attempt to engage with scholarship that affirms representational modes informed by models of multiplicity, assemblage, performance, and accessibility.2

Most of all, this book is about the afterlife of atrocity, and the intimacies of those lives lived between the ghostly traces of genocide and the strange magic of the commodity form.3 The

2 Much of my work has treated ethnographic writing as a project of embracing and transgressing the genres of scholarship and storytelling. In this endeavor, I draw on a tradition of feminist anthropological scholarship. As Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon wrote of the post-modern turn in the field, and in response to the essays in James Clifford and George E. Marcus’ volume Writing Culture that became rather synonymous with it: “In an act of sanctioned ignorance, the category of the new ethnography failed to take into account that throughout the twentieth century women had crossed the border between anthropology and literature – but usually ‘illegally,’ as aliens who produced works that tended to be viewed in the profession as ‘confessional’ and ‘popular’ or, in the words of Virginia Woolf, as ‘little notes.’…Even the personal voice, undermined when used by women, was given a seal of approval in men’s ethnographic accounts, reclassified in more academically favorable terms as ‘reflexive’ and ‘experimental.’” See Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, eds., Women Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 4. The attempt to write narratively, as well as accessibly for readers beyond the academy has also been informed by my engagement with critical performance ethnography. As Dwight Conquergood wrote, “But de Certeau’s aphorism, ‘what the map cuts up, the story cuts across,’ also points to transgressive travel between two different domains of knowledge: one official, objective, and abstract - ‘the map’; the other one practical, embodied, and popular - ‘the story.’ This promiscuous traffic between different ways of knowing carries the most radical promise of performance studies research. Performance studies struggles to open the space between analysis and action, and to pull the pin on the binary opposition between theory and practice. This embrace of different ways of knowing is radical because it cuts to the root of how knowledge is organized in the academy.” Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions in Radical Research,” The Drama Review 46, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 145-146.

3 See Chapter 1, “The Commodity” in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 125-163. A commodity has both a use-value and an exchange-value. According to Marx, “He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labor admittedly creates use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values” (131). This social use-value, or the exchange-value of a product that comes into being through

ethnographic site of my study from which these themes emerge - Sarajevo’s war tour industry - is one of the more intriguing and perplexing responses to the Bosnian war. In the aftermath of this war, citizens of the former Yugoslavia found themselves immersed in a world devastated by violence and genocide, exacerbated by ever-rising nationalisms and a concomitant economic precarity.

War Tours and the Production of Counter-Memory

Twenty-years later, Bosnia’s war tours now take international visitors to vital sites which commemorate the violence of the war and primarily take place in two locales. The first is the city of Sarajevo, which from 1992 - 1995 suffered one of the longest sieges of a city in modern warfare. War tours also frequent the towns and graveyards of sites such as Srebrenica, whose male Muslim inhabitants were rounded up into camps and brutally massacred. The history of these sites, as well as of their larger framework, the Balkan wars of the 1990s, or alternatively the Yugoslav wars, is a contested one. Within the Balkans, histories of the war are controversial, and the atrocities inflicted upon Bosnia are routinely denied - making Bosnian war tours political acts of memory and a phenomenon which continues to divide post-war populations.4 Within a global register, Bosnian war tours are also a site of interaction between Bosnians and international tourists where memories of violence are co-constructed and authored through their ritual performance.

the commodity form, is one that possesses the power to mystify our understanding of the material conditions from which an object arose and, in fact, creates a new type of worth for an object in the very process of becoming social; Marx defines the commodity fetish within this process as such: “…the commodity form, and the value-relation of the products of labor within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (165). Another way of saying this is that “Labor and its products…assume a fantastic form different from their reality” (160).

4 See Lara J. Nettlefield and Sarah Wagner, Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik, Ethnic Conflict and War Crimes in the Balkans: The Narratives of Denial in Post-Conflict Serbia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013). Though inquiries into Croatia are outside the scope of this project, an excellent resource is Michaela Schauble, Narrating Victimhood: Gender, Religion, and the Making of Place in Post-War Croatia (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014).

That this co-construction takes place with international tourists who are largely from the

“West” has immense political significance, as there is both deep resentment in Bosnia toward the

West for its role during the war, as well as a post-war dependency upon the international community for continued financial aid and resources. By the use of the term “West” or

“Western” in this book, I consistently mean, though it may have broader constituent places and spaces, tourists who are primarily from Europe and the United States, as well as the

Enlightenment discourses of progress and rationality that these regions all too often invoke.

Western opinion regarding the conflicts and genocide of the 1990s also remains one of the only means that has had any political measure of success in combating Serbian denial about the events of the war.5 My research thus positions the instrumentality of Bosnian war tours not only locally, but as one significant space in which Bosnians are able to author their own histories of the war with Western audiences. In the fine grain I propose Bosnia’s war tours as a space of encounter between Bosnians and Western tourists that can be understood through the construct of the micropolitical, which acknowledges that macropolitical forces alone cannot account for the creation of political subjectivities. 6 My work approaches Bosnian war tours as ephemeral spaces through which individuals come to produce certain collective identities while they simultaneously produce belief, desire, emotion, and perception.

Sarajevo’s war tour industry is particularly interesting in this regard, given that its actors push back against the UN, Westerners, and the Western world just as much as they do the

Former Yugoslav army and Serbia, whose military might surrounded the city of Sarajevo in

1992, decimating and terrifying the civilian population for almost four full years in a hellish

5 Nettlefield and Wagner, Srebrenica in the Aftermath, 251-284.

6 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

urbicide. War tours in Sarajevo address this aspect of their history just as much as they emphasize the disastrous consequences of the UN’s humanitarian intervention, who were regarded, as Michael Ignatieff states, “as the administrator of the Serbian Siege of Sarajevo.”7

My work thus treats the tours and the encounters they create between Bosnia’s war guides and tourists as a source of Foucauldian counter-memory, in which practices of remembering and forgetting are understood through power relations, and memory is used to counter hegemonic and dominant narratives of the past.8

That past is longer than it seems. That memories of Sarajevo’s Siege are routinely co- performed with Western tourists is a particularly salient fact given that Western engagements with the Balkans have long had a problematic history as well as an Orientalist flavor.9 In the affluent West, much of the Balkan wars of the 1990s and their aftermath has been construed in ethnocidal terms. But “ethnic” representations of the Balkans are not merely a product of the

Balkan wars. The Balkans linger within our social imaginaries as the product of a violent tribalism, an inevitable break-down in civilization by peoples beholden to the forces of ethnicity and religion.10 Such conceptions of the Balkans as a highly volatile and inverted, developmentally-stagnated Europe have a long and entrenched historical legacy, dating from its

7 Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 103.

8 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

9 Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992), 1-15; Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); David Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth (London: Macmillan, 1999). 10 See, for example, Sergej Flere, who argues that in the Balkans identical processes of ethnic antagonism between the same ethnic groups recur endlessly. Sergej Flere. “Explaining Ethnic Antagonism in Yugoslavia,” European Sociological Review, Special Issue Eastern Europe 7, no. 3, (December 1991), 183-193. Also see Cathie Carmichael, who argues that ethnic cleansing in the Balkans over the past 200 years is best understood as a single phenomenon. Cathie Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2002).

rule by the Ottoman Empire. Maria Todorova has deemed reiterations of this historical discourse as a discourse of “Balkanism,” in which the Balkans are essentialized as a violent Europe not quite Europe where civilization has become barbaric and gone awry. 11

My own fieldwork in a twenty years post-conflict Sarajevo at a site where memories of the war and its violence are shared and performed attempts to move away from accounts of the

Balkans in which violence is portrayed as an inevitable by-product of suppressed nationalisms and symbolic imaginings.12 Rather, in an attempt to create a less essentializing and more complex ethnographic rendering of a post-war Balkans, my work situates the “ethnic” violence of the Balkans as a product of global perturbations into the local, in which the slippery nexus of ethno-nationalist/ethno-religious identities is produced through vast networks of institutions, media, and international actors.13 This position seems fitting for an ethnographic study of

Bosnia’s war tours, given that they are post-conflict and transnational sites produced through global flows and movements. In this sense, the tours are also a repercussion of and a lens into the Balkans as a Western geopolitical project, one in which Western imaginaries continue to intervene in a post-war Balkans. I emphasize the instrumentality of the tours here in resisting this aspect of their existence, generating counter-memory and counter-narratives of Sarajevo’s

11 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

12 I have drawn on several regional specialists throughout this book who have been paramount to the intellectual and political project of dismantling the alarming nexus of ethnicity, nationalism, religious identity, and violence commonly associated with the Balkans. Excellent scholarship in this regard also includes Robert M. Hayden, “Imagined Communities and Real Victims: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in Yugoslavia,” American Ethnologist 23, no. 4 (November 1996); Dubravka Zarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Andrej Grubacic characterizes the role of Western interventionism in constructing the Balkans as a “Balkans from above.” See Andrej Grubacic, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays After Yugoslavia (Oakland: PM Press, 2010).

13 This position is articulated by Appadurai as a counter to viewing ethnic violence primarily as the product of the manipulation of certain forms of knowledge or memory. Appadurai uses this position to build an argument as to why grotesque and intimate violence transpires between “previously social intimates or familiars;” I use it here as a position from which to approach “ethnic violence” in the Balkans in less essentializing terms. Arjun Appadurai, “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization,” Development and Change 29, no. 4 (October 1998): 905.

Siege to Western audiences. At the same time, I undertake to represent the ongoing legacies of

Western production of the Balkans as “the violent other of Europe” through an engagement with

Sarajevo’s first “Islam You Didn’t Know About Tour” - a tour created by Muslim guides as an apologetic for their religion. This newly minted tour, created in the year (2015) which I conducted fieldwork, was itself borne out of the war tours, and the pejorative and inappropriate questions that tourists often asked their war guides regarding their Muslim identities.

Anthropological Locations and Dark Tourism

War tours in Sarajevo are a complex transnational site, at once embedded in a contested and layered local as well as trafficked by and contingent upon the global flows and movements of international tourists.14 And yet, the particular global dimensions of Bosnia’s war tours become more proliferated and all the more complicated when one situates them, in the words of

Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, as an “anthropological location.”15 What this means is that

Bosnia’s war tours are as much the product of a local culture as they are a field site that must be re-envisioned through the “epistemological and political links” that “realign it with other locations.”16

In the case of Bosnia’s war tours, their transnational quality is further elided by the political and epistemological links that mark its inclusion as part of a larger phenomenon that

Lennon and Foley term “dark” tourism, in which sites of mass atrocity and or disaster are opened to tourists and become available for market-consumption.17 A quick google search will promptly

14 See Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

15 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology” in Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, eds. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Oakland: University of California Press, 1997), 1-46. 16 Ibid., 5.

17 Malcolm Foley and John Lennon, Dark Tourism: the Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Cengage Learning EMEA, 2000).

reveal websites and news articles confirming that “dark tourism” has also emerged within the zeitgeist as a popular culture term for the global phenomenon of touring sites such as post- conflict Sarajevo.18 In July of 2018, Netflix premiered a series called “Dark Tourist,” in which its host travels to far-ranging and diverse sites such as Tomioka, Japan, evacuated during the

Fukushima nuclear disaster, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to learn about the murders of Jeffrey

Dahmer. As an academic term; however, it has certain limitations.19

As such it is not surprising that other academics have attempted to create new terminology to wrestle with the “dark tourist” phenomenon. I myself investigated many of these terms in my search to situate Bosnia’s war tours, wondering if in the writing up of my fieldwork

I would find resonance in locating the project in relation to one of them. One of the first attempts to grapple with creating terminology for dark sites is by A.V. Seaton. Seaton introduces the term “thanatourism,” defined as “travel to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death, particularly, but not exclusively, violent death, which may, to a varying degree be activated by the person-specific features of those whose deaths are its focal objects.”20

In this model, the site of dark tourism has been moved away from a register of commodification – sites defined by their capitalist consumption and market share - into a register of motivation. But as an anthropologist of religion, I was already particularly wary of the desire to root theoretical frameworks in the register of motivation. Seaton’s travel-work also seemed

18 Alternatively known in its contested emergence in academic and popular parlance by names such as grief tourism, trauma tourism, tragic tourism, death tourism, and thanatourism. I discuss several of these above. For tragic tourism, see Lucy R. Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place (New York: The New Press, 1999).

19 These limitations include the broadness of the historically and culturally situated phenomena that it clumps together under one rubric, that it emerges out of British tourism schools attempting to manage such sites, and a theoretically vague apparatus that equates the rise of dark tourism with an anxiety over modernity. (Ibid., 12). 20 A.V. Seaton, “Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to ‘Thanatourism,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 240.

reminiscent of anthropological studies of pilgrimage and tourism that prioritize tourists’ motivations as an analytic ordering category. Here, building upon a Durkheim-Geertz model of religion, the claim has been put forth that pilgrimage has failed to be acknowledged as a proper analytic to supposedly secular sites of tourism which may induce or become pilgrimages because our conceptions of pilgrimage generally involve around knowing a pilgrim’s intentionality, and their motivations.21 But it seems to me that such studies are problematic precisely because their grounding point is, as is Seaton’s, rooted in tourists’ motivations, and moreover, that these motivations can be classified as “purer” or “pilgrimage” the closer they come toward being directed or aimed at some sort of transcendental real. In this sense, their theoretical framework is a reminder of Asad’s critique of Geertz’s universalizing quest for a definition of religion, in which we can examine religion across cultures if only we pay attention to the particular dispositions, moods, and motivations that distinguish themselves from other, “more worldly” or more secular motivations that might govern touristic practice.22

Currently, sites of tourism whose focus is past atrocities and disasters have been written about most comprehensively in an edited volume entitled “Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as

Recreational Landscape.”23 Brigitte Scion, the editor of the volume endorses “death tourism,” for it, “points to the main object of this particular form of tourism: victims of violent death; it is explicit and encompasses a larger number of sites.”24 However, at the same time as endorsing

21 Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman, eds., Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 2. 22 Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 27- 54.

23 The last essay in the volume contains a piece by Patrick Naef on war tourism in Bosnia. It provides a general overview and takes up the war tours in the context of discourses of Balkanism, asking “Is this ‘mythical’ or imagined Balkans present in the field of tourism?” (311). I have addressed this dimension of Bosnia’s war tours most thoroughly in Ch5. Patrick Naeff, “Welcome to Sarajevo! Touring The Powder Keg” in Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, ed. Brigitte Sion (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014).

24 Brigitte Sion, ed., Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014).

the term death tourism she also affirms another term, that of “trauma tourism,” a term that originates from one of the contributors to the volume, Laurie Beth Clark. In advocacy of Clark’s term “trauma tourism,” Scion writes:

“Clark’s definition is the most adequate and encompassing of the phenomenon; it goes beyond typologies, motivation-based or marketing-oriented descriptions, and resists post- modern limitations. Though a number of scholars, including I, prefer ‘death tourism’ because it juxtaposes antithetic terms explicitly, they embrace Clark’s definition.”25

Clark’s work does offer much here. It moves toward an account where meaning-making becomes a dialectic rather than motivation-centered, as it is “negotiation between the constructed environment and spectator behavior that determines meaning.”26 Clark’s apparatus is also different than a “dark tourist” lens in the sense that she considers the sites themselves to be fundamentally sites of trauma, or “Sites that are so marked by trauma that they cannot be fully recuperated for normal, quotidian uses.”27 Most importantly, her definition moves away from merely prioritizing tourists and accounts for other actors, such as trauma survivors who perform their stories. Perhaps this is what Scion means when she writes that Clark’s term “resists market-oriented descriptions.” I find myself open to this view, in the sense that Bosnia’s war tours are not a site I would want to be reduced simply to the vector of the commodity on which their existence is predicated. The forces of memory, witnessing, and trauma generated through the performance of the war tours also merit one’s attention, and “trauma tourism” is a term that creates value in opening up a site such as the war tour to possibilities other than the commodity.

At the same time, in order to do this Clark’s work leaves wanting another part of the picture - the

25 Ibid.

26 Laurie Beth Clark, “Coming to Terms with Trauma Tourism,” Performance Paradigm 5, no. 2 (October 2009):167

27 Ibid., 162.

persistence and presence of the commodity form in shaping the contours of such sites. I take up

Clark again further as an interlocutor in the project, discussing some of the ways that a model of trauma, insofar as it is applied to sites such as Bosnia’s war tours, is not a given. Rather, it itself has the potential to become commodified, as well as to transgress its potential commodification.

In fact, instead of subscribing to terms such as “dark” or “trauma” tourism, in the end, I have chosen to keep my own terminology in a more ethnographic vein, and I continually refer to the tours throughout the book as Bosnia’s war tours. Anthropologically, this move makes sense because what follows is an intimate and long-term fieldwork study of a particular site, Sarajevo’s war tour industry. But I also make this choice for other theoretical reasons, not wishing to reduce the site of the tours to either the vector of the commodity (as the term “dark tourism” seems to provoke within this scholarship) nor to trauma tourism (which privileges the forces of memory, trauma and witnessing over the complexities of the commodity form). Bosnia’s war tours, I believe, are better treated as an assemblage in which both the commodification of

Bosnian suffering and the possibility for forces such as witnessing and memory to rupture and transgress the commodity form are, in fact, both ever-present potentialities.28 In referring to

Bosnia’s war tours, then, I am also referring to an active and heterogeneous set of complex processes involving persons, things, places, and their emergent and ephemeral dynamics.

Bosnia’s war tours are messy entanglements of memory and commodity that resist binary categorizations which tend to analytically privilege either the commodity form through which the tours operate or the forces of memory and trauma that are performatively constituted as war guides share the horrific stories of Sarajevo’s Siege years with the tourists. Rather, I have tried to consistently refer to the tours as Bosnia’s war tours, and to motion toward the terms “dark

28 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3-25.

tourism” or “sites of memory” as nodes embedded in specific encounters that at times, become activated in the ephemeral and emergent assemblages that transpire as the tours take place.29 The complex twists and turns enabled by an assemblage framing are highlighted the most thoroughly in my use of memory and performance literature to affirm Sarajevo’s first war hostel, in which a family of survivors has given tourists a chance to vacation in their home turned hostel and experience staying in “Siege-like conditions.”

In fact, each chapter in this work can be approached as an attempt to highlight various nodes or intensities that I have found to be a meaningful part of representing Bosnia’s war tours as a multiplicity or assemblage. I introduce the reader to the complexities of memory and the commodity form through the sale of used bullet pieces, ask them to consider the globalized dimensions of war and capital that structure the practice of visiting dark tourism sites, and to empathize with Bosnian dark humor (crni humor) as a transgressive resource that does not conform to standard Western ordering categories of suffering. Through a discussion of post- memory, I introduce readers to Sarajevo’s “War Children,” many of whom are now Bosnia’s war guides. Readers are also asked to consider the historical dynamics of Orientalism that have shaped Bosnia and the Balkans at large in both tourist and Western imaginaries. The work concludes by commenting upon the enterprise of representation itself, its final note an attempt to think through how to ethically and ethnographically represent persons who continue to carry forth and live on in conditions of structural and intimate distress with dignity and respect.

Situating my terminology ethnographically and consistently referring to the sites of the tours as “Bosnia’s war tours” is also a written reflection of the methodology that I have employed in order to create this study, an approach consistent with long-term fieldwork and

29 Diana Taylor talks about the dark site in the register of a “memory site” in Diana Taylor, “Trauma as Durational Performance: A Return to Dark Sites” in Rites of Return: Diasporic Poetics and the Politics of Memory, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 269.

rooted in anthropological understandings of participant-observation. My fieldwork for this project was supported by the Wenner-Gren foundation, and it was conducted from the Summer of 2015 through the Summer of 2016, enabling me to bookend the beginning and end of my fieldwork ritual alongside the busiest time of year for Bosnia’s war tour industry. My work was based on the aforementioned participant-observation, including participating in the war tours, staying in various hostels, interviewing war guides, tourists, tour company owners and operators, and of course, participation in daily Sarajevan social life.

The fieldwork or ethnographic method is an embodied method; Sherry Ortner posits this rather well when she states that a minimal definition of ethnography might be something along the lines of “the attempt to understand another life world using the self – as much of the self as possible – as the instrument of knowing.”30 I’ve taken up the mantle of “as much of the self as possible” in my writing style, which is deeply affective and intensive. I find this methodological writing choice is one that allows for the “self that is fieldworker” to be portrayed not as an objective and rational knower, but rather as an embodied and affective actor who pursues the creation of ethnographic knowledge. Furthermore, I hope the writing style itself is one that conveys and creates a moral or ethical dimension to the text. In chronicling the lives, stories, and experiences of those who live and work in a twenty-years-post-war Sarajevo in a purposefully intensive and affective way, I have thus also written in a manner consistent with critical performance ethnography’s imperative to be a co-performative witness in the field.31

Contemporary Rituals

30 Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 42.

31 Conquergood, “Performance Studies.”

My methodological framing has also found a fellow traveler in the work of Edward

Bruner, and I build upon his work by engaging the performances that are produced at the site of the war tours as “contemporary rituals.”32 My use of the term “ritual performance” aims to follow the lineage of scholars such as Talal Asad and Catherine Bell, who are critical of the way in which the field of religious studies has relegated ritual to the realm of merely symbolic behavior.33 Situating Bosnian war tours as “ritual” through the lens of “performance” is an acknowledgment of such critiques of ritual studies as a field that has traditionally bifurcated thought and action, and categorized ritual as a universal and non-instrumental apparatus.34

Viewing ritual as a performance-based practice has further positioned me to ask vital material questions about war tours. My research thus, in the words of performance theorist Catherine

Bell, inquires how Bosnian war tourism “creates culture, authority, transcendence, and other forms of holistic ordering that are required for people to act in meaningful and effective ways.”35

I also build upon the work of Edward Bruner precisely because situating Bosnia’s war tours as instrumental, performative sites is a move that pushes against the notion that sites of tourism are merely sites of representation, or inauthenticity, or Baudrillard’s simulacra.36 Indeed to treat them otherwise would be infinitely problematic, built upon a presupposition that the

“real” they imitated existed at all in the first place. Another way of saying this, to paraphrase

32 As Bruner writes, “Performances for tourists have local histories, change over time, and are constructed specifically to be marketed and sold to an audience. My objective was to analyze them not as simulacra but as contemporary rituals offered in a particular political and touristic context.” Edward M. Bruner, Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4. 33 Talal Asad, “Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

34 Ibid. See also: Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988) and Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, (New York: Routledge, 2002).

35 Catherine Bell, “Performance,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 208.

36 Bruner, Culture on Tour, 4-5.

William James, is that it is “tourism” all the way down – there is no contained and monolithic

“post-war Bosnia” to imitate in touristic production; there are only post-conflict actors whose lives are embedded in the intimacies of the war tour industry. Thus, I treat Bosnia’s war tours throughout this study as instrumental sites filled with very real post-conflict actors, and I treat the tours themselves as one social response that emerges within the context of post-war spaces, as

“real” a reality of everyday life in a post-conflict society as any other.

As a scholar of religious studies, I also push back on labels of the “sacred” that permeate the literature of travel and tourism. Turner’s liminality is a popular choice here, but one whose liminal model of the sacred seems to apply rather exclusively to the experiences of tourists, suggesting that the privileged access to travel is automatically access to sacred transformation.37

Bosnia’s war tours are not the site of the liminal, after all, but of the ordinary for many social actors - some of the more obvious here being the war guides and tour company operators and owners, who have active investments in their own touristic production. Sites of tourism such as

Bosnia’s war tours, which perform and commemorate mass violence and trauma, are also prone to labels that denote their inherently (and thus essentialized) sacred quality. Clark’s often cited work on trauma tourism comes to the conclusion that our discomfort with such sites arises

37 Much of the scholarly literature that infuses sites traditionally demarcated as secular with the analytic of pilgrimage tends to follow either a Durkheim or Turner lineage. See for example Ian Reader and Tony Walters, ed., Pilgrimage in Popular Culture (London: Macmillan Press, 1993) as well as Badone and Roseman, Intersecting Journeys. Though these models differ, particularly in Durkheim’s emphasis on reinforcing the social order and Turner’s emphasis on the liminal state as one of anti-structure, generative precisely because its players must move beyond the normal constraints of society, I’ve found that within this literature, the use of Durkheim and or Turner shares a sort of pragmatic, overlapping usage in scholarly practice, if not totally in the nuances of theory. Within the study of travel, tourism, pilgrimage, and their intersecting contours, both models provide an efficient basis to contrast these phenomena with the profane realm, or the realm of ordinary time, the routineness of the day to day, and the pursuits of work. Both models also provide the ability to speak to the potential social bonding of groups involved in these sorts of travel pursuits with relative ease. For a comparison of Durkheim and Turner, See Tim Olaveson, “Collective Effervescence and Communitas: Processual Models of Ritual and Society in Emile Durkheim and Victor Turner,” Dialectical Anthropology 26 (2001): 89-124. Within the study of Christian pilgrimage, one of the first major critiques of Turner’s communitas model appears in Eade and Sallow’s Contesting the Sacred, in which pilgrimage sites are a type of blank slate and pilgrims contest the production of their meaning through conflicting discourses. See John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, eds., Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London: Routledge, 1991).

because of the juxtaposition of the forces of trauma and tourism – with trauma being a “sacred” matter and tourism being a “secular” one.38 Furthermore models that attempt to recoup dark or trauma tourism sites as that which contain a “sacred core” often engage antiquated work in the field of religious studies that presumes the sacred to be a fundamental and transcendental essence, the stuff of Mircea Eliade’s sacred, in which the sacred is the product of a non-produced human event.39

But of course, as Talal Asad’s work suggests, definitions of categories such as “religion” or the “sacred” can only become such readily applied universals when they are reduced to essences and reinstated in our academic work as the transcendental signified.40 Rather than this move, and in keeping with Asad’s framework, I have tried to represent access to the sacred as that which is always demarcated alongside and through the bustling world of the profane, rather than separate from it. In other words, the secular and the profane world are always circling one another. If there is a possibility for the sacred in Bosnia’s war tours, then it is one created through an infinite series of transgressions - delimited, marked, and created alongside the world of the profane that disciplines and conditions us for access to those experiences that we might label or construct as sacred.

38 Clark, “Coming to Terms,” 174. 39 Clark cites the work of Nancy Gates-Madsen in her formulation of the sacredness of trauma sites, who builds her inscription of the sacred upon Eliade. Nancy Gates-Madsen, quoted in Laurie Beth Clark, “Ethical Spaces: Ethics and Propriety in Trauma Tourism,” in Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, ed. Brigitte Sion (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014), 18. See also: Nancy Gates-Madsen “Marketing and Sacred Space: The Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires’ in Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh A. Payne eds., (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 157. Interestingly enough, Eliade is also taken up in the lineage of dark tourism in British management schools as a sacred power that reveals itself (19). See Stephanie Toussaint and Alain Decrop, “The Pere-Lachaise Cemetery: between dark tourism and heterotopic consumption,” in Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and interpreting dark places, eds., Leanne White and Elspeth Frew (London: Routledge, 2013), 16-17. The work of Mircea Eliade has been heavily critiqued, the most prominent of these in religious studies being: Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

40 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 49-50.

That remarkably complex process of creating discourses, boundaries, and limits that marks the world of the sacred as one, as Durkheim’s famous definition of the sacred would have it, “set apart” from the world of the profane, I have approached through a language of transgression. “Transgression,” locates my own work in a lineage that moves away from a functionalist Durkheimian framework in which the realms of sacred and profane are entrenched within a closed system that creates the sacred in order to regenerate a social community.41

Rather, in the words of Michael Taussig, those barriers which “set apart” the sacred erupt into being through transgression – as barriers “fearsomely erected only to be crossed.”42 Here, I build upon scholars such as Foucault, Taussig, and Bataille who view the forces of excess and profound loss as that which produces and generates sacred force.43 Hypothesizing Bosnian war tours as potential sites of transgression thus places them within a religious studies framework which speaks to the construction of the sacred through violence – itself a profound transgression.

For just as the sacred is framed by scholars as that which exceeds – violence, too, as E. Daniel

Valentine reminds us, “is an excess.”44 I locate moments of transgression throughout the strange and at times bewildering contours of Sarajevo’s war tour industry - in the darkly humorous jokes that Bosnians tell to laugh and remember the war, in the re-purposing of used shrapnel pieces for tourist souvenirs, and in the charged moments where the blurry borders of the touristic consumption of violent events and the call to witness become demarcated by transgressive moments that simultaneously create, define, and exceed limits and boundaries.

41 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995).

42 Michael Taussig, “Transgression” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 350.

43 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (Cambridge: Zone Books, 1992); Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice; Taussig, “Transgression.”

44 Daniel E. Valentine Charred Lullabies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 208.

In the case of Bosnia’s war tours, pushing back against essentialized framings of the sacred as is not just an academic or analytic undertaking, but also a political one. For to inscribe sites where tourists consume violent and traumatic events with a model of the sacred that emerges from non-produced human events, or that takes as its starting point the privilege of tourists, is also to obscure the human-produced political and historical action which provided the circumstances for such an industry to emerge in the first place.45 It further displaces the instrumentality of such sites. For be they in Rwanda, Cambodia, or the site of Bosnia’s war tours, what does transpire here is the performance and narration of past stories of atrocity, often aimed at combating forces of denial or dominant narratives of the past that marginalize - not unlike the shiny veneer of the negative sacred - the horrors of their past histories.

I return again to the point that Bosnia’s war tours are a site of multiplicity. That so many of these dynamics are troubling - violence, trauma, memory, and the commodification of these forces – is, I think, the reason that they resist characterization as either being exclusively a cynical engagement with the commodity form, or merely a site where trauma is performed and tourists become de facto witnesses, or reducible only to a geopolitical project in which the West consumes the commodification of Bosnian suffering. The pages that follow are in fact a mixture of Survivors, war profiteers, acts of witnessing and commodification, dark jokes, and transgressions at every turn that chart out the strange boundaries that are created and exceeded when atrocious events are performed in the company of seemingly endless flows of transnational tourists.

45 See also Noga Collins-Kreiner, “Dark Tourism as/is Pilgrimage” Current Issues in Tourism 19 no. 12 (September 2016): 1185-1189.

17 A SECOND INTRODUCTION: HAUNTINGS

I live in a ghost town. Not the prairie, not the Wild West...there are no tumbleweeds blown through dirt by wind. There are old Socialist apartment buildings, and a bustling center of town - filled with cafes where people visit and drink long coffees and chain smoke.

I live in a building that is haunted. Sometimes in this building I take the elevator up to the fifth floor and I visit with a young couple and their new baby. He wants the kid to learn about motorcycles and cars. She talks about the news she watches because she is a dedicated journalist, and right now she is home with the baby. Sometimes I take the stairs to the third floor and I visit with a woman who repairs bombed out buildings and dates a man who lives in the United Kingdom. I live with neighbors and I live with their ghosts.

I live in an apartment that is haunted. It is bright and remodeled. It has an American coffee maker. When I go to sleep at night, and when I wake up in the morning, I wonder what it used to look like. I wonder what state it was in that it had to be remodeled. I wonder what memories got wiped clean to make way for shiny surfaces. I wonder what memories shiny surfaces cannot erase.

There are bullet holes, or perhaps just blown off chunks that could not be repaired on the walls outside my apartment. My neighbors could probably tell me what specific weapons they came from. I’ve found that most people I encounter have an intimate knowledge of the scars on the ground and on the walls. They know if that one came from a bomb, this one from another bomb. To me they are all bombs, but they often know what specific type it was. Some of them use actual numbers and letters that identify weapons as if they were military folk instead of barbers and shopkeepers and university students. [I’m told that I wouldn’t be surprised by this if…?] You have to know those things if they are falling all around you - you have to know the sounds they make and how far away they are and if you are safe where you are standing. You have to know if you should run. No, that’s not a form of knowing. That’s your body screaming at you to RUN. Scars are on the buildings I walk past on my 40-minute trek out to the center for work, and when I return again. For a long time, I thought they didn’t preoccupy me. I would walk past them, and I would stare. My eyes would zero in - pinpoint their precise locations. My eyes would turn and look for them lovingly, for their familiarity. There they are; there they will always remain. I live too far out for the government to clean them up, and no one who lives or works in them has the money to fix them. And there are too many anyway. I told/tell myself all the time they don’t bother me. They are not real; they are just holes. I slowly come to the realization that they dominate me as I walk down streets, whatever I choose to tell myself about them.

For a long time, I did not know my building was haunted. No, that’s not true. I had read, I had seen films - my neighborhood, Grbavica...I knew terrible things had happened there. No, Here. I meant Here. There is a man who is no longer a man called “The Monster of

Grbavica.” He raped woman after woman in my neighborhood. I’ve seen old newspaper clippings of him during the war. He used to climb up the stairs to throw people off the tops of the buildings. I can’t remember anymore what the photo looked like. For some reason I think he was beating his chest.

For a long time, my building did not haunt me. And as I heard stories, I began to hear the ghosts. I heard them, and they were laughing. They were laughing at me for trying to pretend they weren’t there; I think. For trying to pretend that that space was my own.

For a long time, and you might find this strange... I did not notice the bullet holes in my own building. My favorite cluster was under my living room window. About the level of the couch I usually lie on. I think about that a lot, what it would be like to sit on a couch and never know if you were going to die or not. Sleeping on a couch and not the floor is a big deal, you know. If you are sleeping on a couch and there is an attack, the impact will cause you to fall off the couch so hard you will break something. Sometimes die. A lot of deaths in war are not glorious deaths. A friend of mine told me a story once about how when she was a little girl, she begged her mother for day after uneventful day to sleep on it instead of the hard floor. Her mother finally gave in. After the flash of light and the loud sound and being thrown to the ground, she couldn’t stand for 2 hours. Her mother thought she was paralyzed, but she was just in shock. Her mother tried to make her stand in the doorframe on her legs, and she fell to the ground. Her mother slapped her and screamed and pulled her up on her legs. She fell down. Her mother pulled her up, screaming and slapping. And finally, her daughter stands, and her mother sobbed.

I remember being shocked that they were on my building too. Those bullet holes. Those Scars. Not just the other buildings in my neighborhood, in Grbavica. I’m not sure how it is that I didn’t notice them before. I’m not sure how I could have this experience of seeing them everywhere else and yet feeling surprised that they peppered my own walls. More likely I did notice, and my brain somehow took them away again. Nor do I understand why the word “shock” fits so many different peoples’ experiences; how it is that I get to use the same word to describe this particular moment when I’ve heard others use it to describe realities so far removed from my own. It seems like the word should have more degrees to it.

Did you know that your brain can shut off even if the memories and ghosts you live with are not your own? I didn’t. The thought makes me laugh. A sound bursts out of me that I do not recognize…they are here. Yes, I can hear them now, even as I write. The sounds. The sounds have started again. Murmuring, bubbling up to the surface, within me and around me. A sound to follow you everywhere you go…

19 CHAPTER 1: BULLETS IN BAŠČARŠIJA: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF A POST-WAR COMMODITY

Tourists and locals alike swarm the streets of Stari Grad, or the “Old Town.” The Slavic marker “Stari Grad” can be found on maps of cities throughout countries that have been demarcated at one time or another as Eastern Europe, ranging from the Czech Republic to

Bosnia. Though here, in Sarajevo, the Old Town is known and referred to by a Turkish derivative that dates to Bosnia’s days under the Ottoman Empire. It is the oldest part of

Sarajevo. Surrounded by mountains dotted with mosques, the call to prayer permeates the streets of Baščaršija.

Baščaršija overflows with options for hanging out - restaurants, hookah bars, coffee shops. The restaurants prize themselves for ćevapi, small sausages, and pita, luscious breads filled with spinach and meat and cheese. Cafes overflow with patrons. Tourists have Bosnian coffee served in tiny cups with a side of Turkish delight, the Ottoman influence ever present over the scene. Though, should you call the coffee Turkish, as they do in Serbia, you will more likely than not receive a mini-lecture from a waiter or fellow patron on what distinguishes the Bosnian coffee service from Turks or Serbs. Bosnians also tend to sit at the tables longer, to linger over their Bosnian coffee or espresso and smoke. In fact, to drink coffee for hours is considered an important mode of being “Bosnian,” much as in Serbia it is considered fundamentally “Serbian,”

– a shared yet differentiated cultural sensibility throughout the rest of the former Yugoslavia.

Cigarettes, too, are ubiquitous in the Balkans, though here in Baščaršija cigarette packs produce cigarette butts and ashes alongside laughter and jokes over post-war absurdities. Each pack has the distinction of carrying the same warning label written identically three times in

Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, designed in theory to satisfy each of Bosnia’s ethnically defined populations. In Bosnian, the warning reads, “Cigarette smoke harms you and those around you.”

Immediately below, in Croatian, you will find the words, “Cigarette smoke harms you and those around you.” Finally, the Serbian states, “Cigarette smoke harms you and those around you.”

The Serbian, of course, is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, but Bosnians know this alphabet as well as its counterpart Latin script.46

Hours spent at cafes chain-smoking and drinking long coffees is not just a “Bosnian” trait but a shared cultural heritage of the broader Balkans, and it is historically influenced in Bosnia by the coffee culture and café life in Europe as well as the Ottoman Empire. In a contemporary and poorer Balkans, well-paced coffees are also less expensive to order than food and thus are more regularly affordable; cigarettes are just cheap. In the summertime streets of Baščaršija, coffee cups and cigarette packs make their way into the hands of the people who sit outside on benches and chairs clustered around tables in the shaded refuge of their chosen establishment.

Escaping the heat provides an extra incentive for lingering around tables which always remain crowded; that is, unless a lunar Ramadan has fallen upon the summer months. Then, Baščaršija in the afternoons is less bustling and the tourists stand out more.

46 I draw my ethnographic readers’ attention to the cigarette pack as a social object which contextualizes absurdities and hilarities encountered and remarked upon by Bosnians, Serbians, Montenegrins, and Croatians, given a shared understanding of language and culture that makes conversation for many from differing nation-states of the former Yugoslavia possible. At the same time, intimate familiars of Southeastern Europe will be aware of the politicized links between the Cyrillic script and Serb nationalism, as well as the contestations and negotiations over language as a marker of ethnic identity that are also a part of daily Balkan life. An excellent resource in this regard, as well as on the general political instrumentality of language and the construction of ethnic identities in the region, is Robert Greenberg’s Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its Disintegration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

And then there are the shops. Some of the stores sell beautiful items, Bosnian coffee sets of intricate copper or silver with adornment only or sometimes functional džezva coffee pots.

An easy way to distinguish a Bosnian from a tourist is if they flip the džezva over to see if it has been made well enough so that one can actually make coffee in it. Shop windows and stands overflow with necklaces, bracelets, earrings; Bosnia is known for its silver mines, and jewelry is a great attraction. Scarves also sell in abundance. Many of these are sold to female tourists who must cover their heads and shoulders if they wish to enter the courtyard of the Gazi Husrev-beg

Mosque, an impressive 16th century Ottoman mosque prominently located on Baščaršija’s main pedestrian street, Ferhadija. Bosnian women I drink coffee and smoke with comment upon how inappropriately dressed the female tourists are as we people-watch in Baščaršija.

Many of the stores draw one in with traditional kitsch. “I love Bosnia” coffee mugs and t-shirts. Faux license plates, that, like the license plates in Bosnia themselves, only use letters found both in the Cyrillic and Latin script of the alphabet. Or perhaps your eye is drawn to the decorative plates and carved wooden boxes stamped “Sarajevo,” and set in contrast to backgrounds of the majestic mountains or the Sebilj, a late 1800’s large, wooden, Ottoman- inspired, public drinking fountain located smack in the middle of Baščaršija’s main square. The fountain square is always covered with locals and tourists taking a swig from the tap, rinsing off their hands, or refilling their water bottles. The fountain square is also always covered with flocks of pigeons who congregate there to the point that locals are just as likely to call it “Sebilj” as “pigeon square.” The Sebilj plates and wooden carvings for sale expunge the pigeons and leave one with only a local, picturesque scene to tuck into a shopping bag.

There are Tito shot glasses and Tito magnets and Tito keychains. Though the socialist country of Yugoslavia no longer exists on a map, its former dictator’s face can still be found stamped upon all kinds of objects for purchase by tourists. Josip Broz Tito was the dictator of

the former Yugoslavia from approximately 1945 until 1980. His regime’s policy of “bratsvo i jedinstvo” (brotherhood and unity) was instrumental in crafting a Yugoslav identity and subordinating all forms of nationalism that might challenge the post-World War II newly formed

Yugoslav state.

Of course, the purchaser of a Tito shot glass might also be Yugo-nostalgic.47 Then the cashier wraps some paper around a shot glass not for a tourist, but rather a local, who could be any of Bosnia’s traditionally designated ethnicities - Bosniak (Muslim), Serb (Orthodox

Christian), or Croat (Catholic). The local who hands over Bosnian marks and exchanges pleasantries with the store-keeper might be of any age or gender. The shot-glass’s new owner will walk away contrasting memories they’ve made or memories they have inherited and made their own, memories of an economically prosperous and multi-cultural Yugoslavia with Bosnia as it is now, today. 48

Multiple miniature statuettes of a cartoon wolf named Vučko, the mascot from the

Sarajevo Olympic games in ’84, are also a popular kitsch item. This one wearing shades and a scarf; that one skiing, looking cool while going for the gold. Vučko, like Tito, is a remnant of a country that no longer exists. Originally a cartoon drawn by Nedeljko Dragić published in

Yugoslavian newspapers comic strips, he was the winner of an Olympic mascot contest that

47 See Breda Luther and Marusa Pusnik, eds., Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia (Washington DC: New Academic Publishing: 2010); Patrick Hyder Patterson, Bought & Sold: Living & Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Zala Volvic, “Yugo- Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 1 (March 2007): 257-274.

48 Such attachments, affects, and actions that comprise Yugonostalgia are in keeping with Michael Jackson’s “intersubjective logic of reversal,” in which when “things go amiss,” we find ourselves actively imagining that if we could “only return to a prior state then all would be well.” (38-39). Jackson asks us to consider phenomena such as the existential longing for return, the desire to retreat toward childhood innocence, the creation of golden ages in Edens (or Yugo-nostalgias), as those that speak to our intersubjective logics, experiences, and imaginings of the link between “the reversal of time and the inversion of an unjust social order” (40). See Chapter 3, “Violence and Intersubjective Reason” in Michael Jackson, Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005).

featured over 800 entries. Vučko’s grin makes it hard to imagine another winner, for as good- natured cartoon wolves tend to be, Vučko is infinitely likeable – a perfect mascot for international feats of sport where people from all nations come together to compete in the name of promoting peace and humanitarianism.

If you look a little closer, another object permeates artisan and kitsch-bearing stores alike.

Propped up on tables set up outside the entrance to a shop are often bowls filled with small, brass, dented objects. Look closer still and you will see they are not just for sale on their own; some of them, with their longer cylinder bases and pointed ends have been assembled and transformed into decorative objects. Worked together the bullets form shiny, militant figurines, such as tanks and helicopters. Others have been transformed into more functional objects for easy every-day use, such as pens or keychains. Some of them have been engraved with filigree flowers or patterns.

I ask Dragica, the shop owner who stands in her shop doorway smoking a cigarette, if I may pick up one out of the bowl. It is small, and golden, and dented; it fits in the palm of my hand. As I take hold of it, the sunlight catches on its brassy surface making a sheen. My fingers roll over this small, golden and brassy bullet shell. It is used. After it performed its function it was discarded and left lying on the ground. It sits small, and golden, and dented in the palm of my hand. It is now for sale.

I like to ask the various shop owners and keepers of Old Town Sarajevo about these discarded bullets, bullet casings and shells, and bullet figurines they sell. I try to track the flow of these objects: how they went from a weapon that destroyed lives, to rubbish littering the ground, to a re-purposed ware sold in a store, now ever-present reminders of Bosnia’s horrific past under a four-year Siege and a testament to the prolific nature of war tourism in Sarajevo today. I attempt to track what I find to be the surprising trajectories of these pieces of shrapnel,

their resting places – not propelled into human bodies now interred in the ground, nor embedded in buildings with gaping holes, but rather purchased and taken to far away homes, carefully packed and tucked away with Vučkos and shot glasses and carried across Bosnia’s borders to join personally curated souvenir collections.

I track the flow of where these used bullets might end up after being displayed in the shops of Sarajevo - sold now in the very same shops that were forced closed, or more often than not, destroyed, due to their very presence during Sarajevo’s wartime years. I ask the shop owners and tenders I meet about who purchases them in the shops and takes them home. I ask the tourists who buy them questions about their purchases, too, but am disheartened by the fact that they do not seem to find these purchases problematic, until prompted.

The routine and light-hearted “packing away” of bullets by the tourists that I encounter troubles me throughout my time in Sarajevo. Would tourists purchase bullets so readily if they connected them to the realities of a local person’s life, to the intimacy of the death of a beloved friend, or wife, or son? This question, which is also a question of seeing the other as oneself in other circumstances, is somehow obscured when the bullet becomes a commodity. Or rather, it is through the vector of the commodity that the bullet is transformed from a gruesome instrument of horror into a souvenir. It is less relatable to oneself as a used bullet because the souvenir- form obscures the bullet’s messiness - the messiness of life and death. The bullet tears through flesh. The bullet is bodies, and pieces of bodies, and bodies marked by missing pieces who walk the streets of Baščaršija twenty years later, and bodies with ruined flesh and vomit and soiling yourself with fear so alive that it physically cannot remain inside. For tourists to light-heartedly bring such things home with them, the commodity form as souvenir-form must work its magic on the bullet. It must transform the incomprehensible excesses of violence, and of the body, and death into a commodified object so that these excesses do not exceed our understanding or

ourselves. It must also work its magic on memory and history, so that the violence the spent casings index no longer clings to them. The result is that a souvenir is just a thing, simple and uncomplicated, over which we imagine we have full control. Is there any other object so readily available for incorporation into the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, so readily put on display as an object that testifies to our mastery of the world as the thing we mark as a

‘souvenir’? Yes, the bullet that reeks of death and oozes out guts and ghosts must become commoditized, it must become palatable, in order for it to be consumed. It must become a souvenir in order for its brute materiality, its history and its memories to be, quite literally, packed away.49

This is but a “singular trajectory” of the bullet, and it is my own, a philosophical response embedded within my own genealogical traditions and expressions, and a turn toward them as I explore the “puzzles and pressures that an ethnographic engagement with the world brings to light.” 50 But commodities, and things, have not only meanings but “social lives,” as Arjun

Appadurai reminds us, and the bullet can only be illuminated further by its “concrete historical

49 For readers of theory, I here pose the question, “How might the Hegelian spirit manifest itself in the commodity form?” I offer the used bullet which becomes a souvenir as an ethnographic object which easily lends itself to the operations of a Hegelian self that must master or subordinate a piece of the world to itself through the tools of negation and incorporation in order to perpetually reconstitute itself in mastery. See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111-119. Here, my commitments lie with scholars such as George Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Michael Taussig who note that the gross materiality of the self which is embodied, and the excesses of bodies, violence and war are forces which disturb and transgress the Hegelian self, and to my thinking, transgress and disturb the attempt to negate, or subordinate to oneself the bullet as a souvenir. See George Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy vol 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); and Michael Taussig, “Transgression” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Here we might further envision the possibility of the excesses of the bullet’s history transgressing its commoditized form by an application of Derrida and his frameworks of Hauntology. From this perspective, I suggest that the bullet when commoditized as souvenir is an object of Hegelian or bourgeois consciousness that is always already vanishing; it is always already not itself, violated, reduced. See Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006).

50 Veena Das, Michael Jackson et al., “Introduction: Experiments between Anthropology and Philosophy: Affinities and Antagonisms” in The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, eds. Veena Das et al (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 2.

circulation,” by its “forms, its uses, and its trajectories” – by its’ trajectories in the plural. 51 The bullet can only be illuminated, so to speak, by being followed. And so, I turn to where the bullets are sold, to the shops. An early question I ask the shop owners of Baščaršija is, “Who buys these,” referring to the bullets that have been gathered and re-purposed for sale. The answers tend to merge together.

A common response is “American.” “The majority of them are from America judging by their accents,” says Osman, a young man who wears a Sarajevo football jersey. “Brits and

Germans,” says Selma, a woman who works part-time at a store and part-time taking care of the elderly. Traditionally demarcated Western European countries often pepper the shop tenders of

Baščaršija’s answers. Sometimes “Turkish folks,” whose government has long had touristic relations with Bosnia, make the cut also, though many Bosnian shop tenders dislike interacting with them. “They want to bargain with you over the price like they do in Turkey, you always know when they are from this country,” says Senad, an older man who starts each day by having a Bosnian coffee and a sparkling water delivered to his shop. “Everyone,” says Zlata, Almira,

Elmir and Sejad. I am also told by a few of the female shop owners that the majority of those who purchase these bullets are men.

There are strange answers too. Answers that I don’t quite know how to follow up on or what to make of them. One of the women who tells me that most of her customers have

American accents also tells me that at one time the majority of her bullets were purchased by tourists, but they are now purchased by locals. I am intrigued by the notion, it seems at odds with my research and experiences in the field. When my research comes up in conversation, most of the Sarajevans I know laugh and say they have no need to purchase memories of the

51 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5.

wartime; the memories they have are enough already. Nonetheless, this prompts me to spend the week asking friends in Sarajevo if they, or anyone they know, has ever purchased any of the bullets that they sell in Baščaršija. My inquiry is met by expressions of disbelief and oftentimes, laughter. A couple of folks tell me that they have purchased a Srebrenica flower, white crocheted petals with a green center for remembrance of the mass genocide that occurred in this city located a couple of hours away from Sarajevo. At the time the genocide occurred, it was under the protection of the UN as a “safe area.”

It is hard for me to imagine an object that once covered the city…trash...remnants of loved ones struck down and lost...would now be purchased by those who live here, especially as you can still find such artillery pieces on the outskirts of the city. Though less and less as the years go by, and more and more in dangerous places un-cleared of land mines. So perhaps there are local Sarajevans who purchase them, but I cannot yet tell you.

There are also answers that take me to smaller stops along the way which broaden my own hunt for the lives of these discarded pieces of shrapnel, places un-interrogated in my mind.

Dragica wants less to talk about her wares and more about her ailing husband, her successful children, and the money stolen from her family by the mafia during the war. These things are far more pressing than the bullets she buys from shrapnel hunters and sells to tourists. I sit and have a coffee with her brought over from the café next door at a small table in her shop and listen. At the end of one of our visits, she says, “I’ve told you nothing for your project! Well maybe you can tell me something. I’ve always wondered, how do they [the tourists] get them home?! How do they take these pieces of weapon and bullets home in their luggage?” I laugh. She laughs too, and through tears says, “I just don’t understand how they get them home!”

Though I have often witnessed tourists purchase and pack them up, I have never truly considered airline regulations. Dragica reveals another small trajectory on my tour: the Bosnian

war bullets that end up in the confiscated bins of the TSA and other equivalent governmental agencies at the airport. There is perhaps a certain irony in the fate of these particular confiscated shrapnel pieces. Launched into the air in order to kill a population deemed to have forgotten they were Orthodox Serbs at heart. Slammed into Bosnians deemed to have betrayed their Slavic identity by converting to Islam under the Ottoman Empire long ago. Tossed into bins taken away by agents and regulations enacted to protect America from Muslims twenty years after they have accomplished their gruesome slaughter.

The idea that Bosnians have betrayed their Slavic identities by converting to Islam, and the corresponding notion that if one has become a Muslim then one can no longer truly be called a Slav, is an ideology that Michael Sells terms Christoslavism, which portrays Slavic ethnicity as inextricably bound to an Orthodox Christian identity.52 Sells outlines this racialized ideology as consisting of two parts. The first is the notion that “Conversion to another religion entails or presupposes a transformation or deformation of the Slavic race, the second that “all Muslims in

Yugoslavia (whether Slavs or Albanians) have transformed themselves into Turks…”53 I have yet to meet a Bosnian Muslim who considers themselves Turkish. Often enough, I meet

Bosniaks, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Serbs who have their own prejudices toward Turks, calling them dirty or smelly or cheap. These prejudices exist alongside a pride in the city’s multicultural heritage, historically once a part of the great Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, as well as the Kingdom and then the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Sarajevans tout their home as a place where “East meets West,” not unlike the mural of a compass painted on the ground of the city center’s main pedestrian street, Ferhadija. The North and South directions are

52 Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Oakland: University of California Press, 1998), xv. 53 Ibid.

pointedly missing; there is only an arrow pointing toward the East and the West, and printed letters running across which spell out, “Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures.”

As I have other interviews and other coffees, I am confronted by a uniform reality taught to me by the shop owners of Sarajevo: the left-over bullets are by far one of the most popular items they sell - they fly off the shelves and display tables. Almira, a woman who has run the tourist shop of an older, disabled woman for the last five years, tells me that the bullets are

“sought after” by tourists. She says, “They are very popular...I have no idea how or where they find out about these things. Some of them come here already informed, while others pick them up and go, ‘What exactly is this?’”

Whether they come informed and ready to buy a used bullet or pick up a writing utensil made of shrapnel and ask, “What is this?” ultimately the follow-up question that tourists ask, no matter where they might happen to be from, is the same, a resounding, disbelieving: “Is this real?” I’m told over and over again by the Sarajevans that run shops that this is the only other question that the tourists ask. When asked what tourists ask, a “What is this?” followed by a “Is this real?” becomes an ordinary answer in my interview questions. The authenticity of a bullet that was used during Sarajevo’s Siege seems to create some sort of aura around these small objects; the realness of the bullet is what seals the purchase.

Some shop owners I interview are less cynical than I am. When I confess to an interviewee that I find it strange that people purchase them, they say, “Perhaps they have a collection, or it’s just a souvenir.” Another tells me that they suspect tourists are simply coming to Sarajevo and learning about the war, and when they purchase the bullets and take them home they must say to themselves, “Oh look, I’ve bought this in Bosnia. Perhaps this very bullet had hit something important…” But the shop keeper who tells me this is the same one who tells me that she could never buy a wartime object for herself, that they are scary and that “there must just

be some kind of people out there who want to own something terrible like this.” My questions come to an end when she abruptly states, “For me, these things are scary. I don’t like stuff from wartime, I was here during the war…I don’t like it.”

“I will buy this because it must have hit something important.” Sometimes, I think each person who buys a bullet should receive a free with purchase picture of a person who it might have killed during the war.

I’m reminded of earlier in our conversation, when she told me that she sold one almost every day during the high tourist season.

When she told me how often she answered questions about them, wrapped them up, handed them to smiling tourists across the counter.

I hear other stories as well. The shop tenders of Baščaršija send my shrapnel-tracking in other directions. Ismet, a shop owner whom I interview, begins by telling me his origin stories of the shrapnel trade that still creates wares for sale in his shop today. “Here’s the deal,” he says,

“after the war, these were brought directly from the trenches. There were Chetniks all around

Sarajevo. And they are from the woods, pig-farmers with a pig farmer king! Not civilized.

They are savage people who left these things in the trenches behind them!”

The term Ismet uses, “Chetnik,” is a word often at play within the city of Sarajevo.

Historically, the term refers to a political grouping of Serb paramilitary royalists. Their aims and ideologies are often tied to the idea of creating a “Greater Serbia,” in which all peoples who identify ethnically as Serb, and the territories that they reside in, be they territories in Serbia, or

Croatia, or Bosnia, are finally ethnically clean and united under the nation-state of Serbia. This is their Greater Serbia. During World War II, Tito and his opposing group, the Partisans, who favored the idea of uniting all Southern Slavic ethnicities together under one nation-state, fought against the Nazis, the Chetniks, and the Ustashe, a Croatian nationalist group who opposed the

Chetniks with dreams both kindred and incommensurable as they strived to create their own

Greater Croatia. When Tito prevailed in 1945, Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs alike became a part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a new Yugoslavia, a word which combines

“jug” (South) and “Slaveni” (Slavs), a state for all Southern Slavs.54

Today, in a post-war Bosnia, the word “Chetnik” has been revitalized to denote any person of Serb ethnicity who fought against Bosnia during the war, be they Bosnian Serbs

(citizens of Bosnia who identify as Serb ethnically) or Serbians from Serbia. The term Chetnik has become useful, in a sense, for not grouping together all Serbs everywhere. At the same time,

Bosniak nationalists have also turned to history for the word “Chetnik.” For them the term

“Chetnik” has become a substitute for the word Serb – any Serb, be they Serbians from Serbia,

Bosnian Serbs who joined the former Yugoslav army, or Bosnian Serbs who stayed in Sarajevo and darted daily sniper fire on deadly streets during the Siege years.

I ask Ismet if he has ever collected shrapnel himself, but the conversation does not go there. He takes hold of the interview and moves from topic to topic seamlessly but not always intelligibly. He tells me other things instead, many of which repulse me. A sexually potent Bill

Clinton was the one great American president but even he must be vigilant for the Jewish lobby in America. Bill Clinton is a popular topic with Ismet, and he proudly tells me that a Captain in the American military once ordered a shell from him as a gift for the President. Other things he tells me about the years under urban warfare repulse me for different reasons, such as the pedophilia and organ trading that ran rampant in the city. Ismet’s shop, too, he tells me, was

54 Robert Hayden notes that the peoples of Yugoslavia lived peacefully intermingled for years, even if the Yugoslav identity was not always interpolated in the “brotherhood and unity” language of the Titoist state. As he writes, “Contrary to what common images of Balkan powder kegs or Balkan ghosts would lead one to expect, the peoples of the former Yugoslavia were “so accustomed to living together, and so aware of what not doing so would lead to, that it took very great effort to get them to start shooting at each other.” In fact, this “great effort” to dismantle the Yugoslav identity, Hayden notes, often came in the form of leading Serbian and Croatian political and cultural figures who revitalized the images, emblems, and slogans of the Chetnik and Ustasa facist parties of WWII to represent all Serbs or all Croats, respectively. Robert M. Hayden, From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans: Studies of a European Disunion, 1991-2011 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), xiii.

destroyed during the war. Twice in fact. He told me that after they destroyed it, they watched him fix the wall that was blown out before they blew it up again. That’s a pretty common type of Bosnian war story. The way they would sometimes just toy with you instead of shooting your guts out.

Ismet does not understand why no one talks about crimes he claims ran rampant in the city – pedophilia, organ stealing, rape - why they are hushed-hushed as if they never happened.

He does not like stories about war-time Sarajevo in which everyone lived in a basement. He finds it cowardly, though many of those who lived in basements were children. As he tells me the things he wants to tell me his tone often fluctuates between anger and humiliation. And he himself seems like he’s been tuned into a different frequency since the war that not everybody can hear. I don’t really know how I could ever convey this to you.

“These were brought to me,” he throws into the mix, waving his arm toward the bullets on trays by the window. “I would not go to the trenches, I was afraid of the landmines there. I have never gone personally to collect them. I was afraid. Even with the landmines, they went, they risked their lives because they cared about money!” It is then that Ismet tells me that it was the Chetniks who were the original shrapnel-hunters, that it was the Chetniks who sold shrapnel to the stores and stalls of Baščaršija. “For four years, nothing, no contact between these two groups! It’s interesting who were the ones who brought these and who were the ones that bought them. This trade between us was the most exciting thing, not the war!”

I try to follow up with Ismet on this, but it is clear that he finds it shameful. He will not tell me any more about buying and selling shrapnel for his shop. Instead he pushes back on me, seemingly offended. “If we had been cowards, we would have given our Sarajevo to them! We had nothing, yet we have defended Sarajevo. And on top of that, America put embargo on us!”

He scoffs. “America is righteous indeed. The Serbs had been accumulating weapons for 50 years, we didn’t have anything, yet they put the embargo on us.”

Ismet’s remarks lead me to other trajectories of these bullets that I’m chasing. His shame as he speaks about buying bullets from the Chetniks is turned outwards and bounces back on me, the one who has asked him this question of where the bullets come from. His accusations about

America remind me that there is an earlier stage in the transformation of these small, golden objects…before they were commodities for sale on the streets of Baščaršija, before they were waste littering the ground in and alongside bodies. When they were still the shining and new commodities of war, for Bosnians, they were not commodities, but a lack thereof, a deficiency, an absence. The army that surrounded the valley of Sarajevo with its tanks and guns in the mountains was, after all, the army of the country of the former Yugoslavia, and at the time one of the largest military powers in the world. When Bosnia seceded from the former Yugoslav, the army that turned on them was, in fact, the very one that was designed to protect them and the other former countries that comprised their once shared Yugoslavia. This is why Bosnians and scholars refer to the army that took the hills as the “Former Yugoslav Army.” The former

Yugoslav army, being an institutional entity, had all of the weapons. Most of the weapons the rag tag Bosnian army used to defend Sarajevo, especially in the early months of madness, as the

Bosnian government struggled to organize the army, came from segments of the population who had guns available to them: police officers, hunters, criminals. They banded together with men and sometimes women who had no weapons and trekked into the mountains to build bunkers under the fire of tanks and snipers to defend their families, and their homes.

Ismet’s comments on my own country’s culpability are also a historical reality. The

United States, before it changed its geopolitical stance to recognizing Bosnia’s systematic ethnic cleansing, stood alongside Western Europe and labeled the urbicide in Sarajevo as a product of

“Civil War.”55 In keeping with larger historical matrixes and discourses that Maria Todorova deems “Balkanism,” in which the peoples of the Western Balkans are labeled as perpetually ethnic, religious, and violent, the United States issued a weapons Embargo on Bosnia when the war broke out. 56 The direct consequence of this policy on the ground was simply a further inability to protect themselves. The perpetual slaughter alongside the weapons Embargo also bred a deep distrust of Western Europe and the United States. 57

My conversations with Ismet trace another bullet trajectory in Bosnia: from Lack, to

Commodity, to Waste, to Commodity. His comments about buying bullets from the Chetniks and his subsequent lashing out at my American-ness have also led me to another niche stop: the possibility that the Chetniks, in this case I suspect Bosnian Serbs who had joined the former

Yugoslav army and returned home after the war was over, were the initial shrapnel-hunters and sellers.

At the end of our talk, Ismet shows me the wall that was destroyed, and tells me about when he rebuilt it, and how they destroyed it again. He spends the rest of our time together talking about a pigeon he sees in the street, how it is a sacred animal. “It’s a living thing. All living things are supposed to be sacred according to the Qur’an,” he tells me. He talks about the pigeon for a long time.

55 David N. Gibbs’ volume First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009) documents the ways in which the United States’ political position was formulated away from this conflict as “Civil War” to that of “Serb Aggression” and “ethnic cleansing” in order to advance US Hegemony in Europe through the discourses and practices of humanitarian intervention.

56 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

57 Ivana Maček’s ethnography of Sarajevo during the Siege emphasizes that ethno-national and ethno-religious identities in Sarajevo were “emergent products of the war,” rather than simply “pre-existing” (124). It is also of note that the failure of Western intervention in Bosnia created the circumstances for many Bosnian Muslims to re-align their identities as primarily “Muslim” rather than “European,” as the West appeared to have little interest in resisting what came to be perceived as the Christian territorialization of Islamic Bosnia by Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia (123-135). Ivana Maček, Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

I cannot assert more about Ismet’s claim that the Chetniks sold the leftover shrapnel they used to kill people back to the Bosnians, though I would be more surprised if this was untrue than if it were true. (The more stories I collect as an ethnographer the more I come to think of

Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam war stories, in which the only things that are true about war are the things that sound untrue, the only thing you can rely on is absurdities).58 More often what I encounter is that it is former Bosnian soldiers and others disenfranchised by the war who return to the mountains to collect shrapnel. One of the shop owners who I interview is in fact a former soldier.

Azim lost everything in the war. For four years, he rotated between the front line, the

Tunnel of Hope, (the secret tunnel dug underneath the airport by the Bosnian army for much- needed supplies), and home. Being home perhaps sounds restful but in the realities of living under Sarajevo’s daily siege it meant scrambling the sniper-filled streets to provide food and water for his family. He shows me the scars in his arms from bullets…gnarly and hollow with stretched out and puckered skin over the top where things that go underneath it should be. There is something joyful about him. He tells me he would have gone crazy but for the fact that he does what he does now - beautifully engrave bullets with a 500-year old artisan technique known as cizeliranje. Azim tells me proudly that in order to perform this technique, you must undertake the difficulty of learning 5 to 6 different crafts and combining them all in one.

Cizeliranje is a complex engraving craft, that involves using different materials – precious ones, such as gold and silver. Azim uses a small metal tool to engrave lines onto the bullets. He engraves the names of his customers onto bullet pens – a custom job for tourists. He also performs his craft on larger pieces of artillery he has found in the mountains, some as large as a small child. He shows me a bullet he is working on; he cradles it lovingly in his hand and

58 Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1998).

deftly moves his tool further into the grooves of wavy lines he is engraving. After the initial engraving is complete, the lines are filled in with 24karat gold. Next a craftsman must make a special combination of tar and silver to cover the work for its protection. Azim tells me as he works, “It is hard and it is complicated because we are trying to make something the same way as people did it 500 years ago. To teach somebody to make this - but to make it good - you need at least 15 years.” He puts his tool and bullet down and turns to me. “It is a hard and complex job, but it is beautiful and permanent.”

Azim tells me that what he does now as opposed to what he did when he was a soldier for those four laborious years is so much better, more beautiful, more useful. He picks up pieces of his craftsmanship as he talks. He tells me that people think he is crazy, but he knows after those four long years he would suffer “the PTSD symptoms” if he did not make the work that he does. He tells me, as many shop owners have, that his shop was destroyed during the war:

“Shell hit this particular place. When I started working in 1996, in May, I had found here not anything, not a single piece. I spent all of my savings that I had in order to rebuild this shop. I started from zero. That was the period when I visited the mountains in order to find bullets. I brought in my hands around 20 pieces, designed them, sold them. Then I went on a second tour, back to the mountains.

There are many types of war tours. Azim told me of his military tours, and when he went back into the land-mine filled mountains on 2nd tours, and 3rd tours, and 4th tours...

Once I met a man who had spent four years in the military taking tours, day in and day out. He told me jovially that he had met an American colonel who had told him that “If

American soldiers had to do what you did every day for four years longer than 6 months, they would go crazy.” After those four years he returned to the nothingness, an empty bombed out plot. And he gathered the bullets that had rushed past him and that littered the ground. And

some of those bullets, some of them had probably “hit something important.” I don’t ask Azim if he thought to himself such things. In his hands, the bullet has gone from a violent commodity, to refuse, to a transgressive object which creates sanity.

He moves them through the palm of his hand, they are shining and intricate and the engravings glitter.

Azim is not the only man in Sarajevo who has looked to the mountains for shrapnel. In fact, it takes me some time before I realize that I myself actually do already know a local

Sarajevan who purchases shrapnel pieces, and what’s more, he is a tour guide. Dejan, a War

Child of Sarajevo and now a war tour guide, purchases old mortar shells, bullets, and various artillery pieces for his private collection from the shrapnel hunters in the mountains. When he takes his tour groups out the shrapnel hunters wave friendly waves to him.

I first met Dejan in 2012, when I took his “Sarajevo Total Siege Tour,” along with a middle-aged Brazilian couple - he was a history buff who had wanted to come and learn about the war in Sarajevo, and a couple of British teenagers, traveling through Europe before they started their first year at separate Universities. The tour, in keeping with the standard sites of war tourism practiced throughout the city, takes us into the mountains which surround Sarajevo.

I have been on enough war tours at this point that I am prepared for going into the mountains to see what is referred to in Sarajevo as “The Front Line” - the trenches and bunkers which Bosnian soldiers dug to protect their families, and to see the view of Sarajevo, a beautiful valley nestled in down below. I am prepared for Sarajevo’s sheer geography, the way you can actually feel how easy it would be to pick off the people down below from your mountainous god’s eye view.

I am prepared for the information that Dejan shares with us about the surrounding tanks that were once here, the turns that Chetniks took shooting at civilians. I am not prepared for the closing of his speech, in which he excitedly says to his tourists, painfully reminding me that this

is not just a tour through memory and war, but a sensational business that caters to tourists, “And you can still find the discarded shells and shrapnel in the mountains here today! Many of my tourists have found them here, in these very mountains! So look around, see what you can find, you may find one!” The tourists around me scatter as if a gun has gone off - not the guns of war, which left this debris in the mountains for us to find on our vacations, but the gun of a race starting, a firing shot that scatters people so that they comb the ground in different areas…

Like a gold rush, where the gold is a bullet shell.

Where the pieces of gold you sift for in the dirt are fired and discarded golden bullets.

When I interview Dejan after the tour, I ask him about leading his tour group to search for leftover artillery in the mountains. I make one of the many choices that ethnographers do and share with him my own concerns regarding the shells we searched for in the mountains.

“So today, on your war tour, we looked for bullets used during the war in the mountains.

Is that a common activity on your war tours?”

Dejan laughs. “We do it every time! The tourists are always satisfied with the search...and it is wonderful to see them get excited when they find something.”

I wonder if you ever find it strange that tourists want to collect bullets that were used to kill people during the war?

“No, why do you say that?”

I am open with Dejan about my misgivings. “I suppose a part of me finds it gruesome, that people would want to take home with them an object that might have killed someone they never knew in Sarajevo...it seems like a strange desire to me, to want to own a piece of that”

To want to own one of those cast off golden shells, to want to make it yours, your own.

Dejan has an expression on his face which conveys both comprehension and puzzlement.

“Huh,” he says. And with a sincere and light-hearted engagement, he says, “I never really

thought of it this way you say, this way of tourists searching for bullets that killed someone here.

When I was growing up during the war I was living in the basement with the other kids in my neighborhood. We lived in there, and our parents would go out in the day to the front line or to find us food and water. And my father, every time he came back, he would bring me these bullet shells and casings for me and the other children to play with. We would make-believe that we were in a war!” He smiles. “I know you may find this strange, since we were in a Real War” - he then laughs at the absurdity of this, a dark and absurdist moment, the very stuff/raw material of Balkan dark humor – “but we were just kids, and we had nothing to play with. We played war while a real war was going on! But it was the only thing to do you know, we were little kids, and we were trapped in the basement.”

He looks back in time: “I had a huge personal collection after the war. And I don’t know what happened to it. I lost it somehow. Or maybe after the war I didn’t think I needed it anymore because those pieces where everywhere!” He laughs.

Here’s another path: a bullet flies through the air and where it lands I do not know. A man’s hand closes around it and the bullet finds its way to a son who is twice-over delighted: he has a new toy. His father has come back. He lives in a basement with another little boy whose father did not.

A child cries out bam bam! bam bam! and a golden bullet whirls through the air. The other child catches it and pulls it into his stomach; he falls down. They both start laughing.

I leave the interview deeply humbled by his memories of discarded shells and bullets as the stuff of childhood fantasies and play.

Today, Dejan collects new shrapnel pieces from the war, for his started-over collection.

He knows the shrapnel hunters by name. Sometimes when I go on a war tour with him, we run into them and they call him over - they have found some particularly rare piece of artillery that

they know Dejan would like, and they put it aside for him out of the discarded war fragments that they gather to sell for smelting, and for the shop owners on the streets of Baščaršija.

Since the time that Dejan did this on his tour, I have seen it happen several more times on various war tours. I would not say it is frequent enough to be considered a standard practice, but it does happen enough for me to get used to it, and to no longer feel the shock I did the first time it happened on Dejan’s tour.

It is after one such tour in the mountains with Sarajevo’s War Hostel tour company, that I ask Jake, an American teenager if the history of Sarajevo he has learned makes him uncomfortable taking home his find: a shining golden bullet pulled from the grass and the dirt of the Sarajevo mountainside.

I should mention that I also have one. A used bullet. The one that sits now, small, gold, dented, in the palm of my hand. It has two little rings that curve around it. A former soldier in the Bosnian Army named Jasmin sent us looking for them on our war tour in the mountains. He found it and gave it to me, pressed it into my hand. I do not understand why he wanted me to have it. I don’t know why I kept it. I thought about throwing it away. But I also think of that fellow American tourist - and, I am nothing if not a glorified war tourist - who said, “but he wanted us to have it, didn’t he?”

Did he? Jasmin no longer gives war tours. After four long years fixing and operating the cable lines in the trenches so pockets of soldiers could communicate with one another, he now lives in the home he and his family have turned into a “War Hostel” for tourists. When he used to give war tours, he would take guests from the “war hostel,” where his family lives and works, and take us into the mountains, to see the places that he used to fight.

Jasmin drives us from the War Hostel up into the mountains in a van. As we get out of the car, he loads some heavy rocks in his hands. He warns us: the dogs out here are vicious, and

the rocks are to keep us safe. Some of the tourists look nervous. I am used to the wild dogs of

Sarajevo, the way they wander the streets, the way a pack of them can go from lying in a field between apartment buildings to charging you so fast you jump into oncoming traffic. It is common local knowledge throughout the Balkans that the best way to ward off wild dogs is to pretend to throw a rock at them - and then as a last result, actually throw a large stone their way.

Though many of the strays in Sarajevo are more like harmless, beloved neighborhood companions, who receive foods and pets from locals, there are also more dangerous strays in the city. I know a man twice my size who a small pack took down; he broke his arm. Many of the local, friendly strays meet sadder fates - occasionally in the city, you hear a gunshot - and one likely guess is that someone has shot down a local stray lounging in the shade with a lolling tongue. Those who shoot dogs are regarded as vicious creatures themselves, people who choose to shoot only the easy targets, known neighborhood dogs found lying in a pool of blood.

The wild dogs in the mountains are a part of the local scene scape of war tourism, though these dogs are not the beloved strays of neighborhoods, nor even comparable to the madder dogs on the streets. No, these are the dogs of the war, who roam wild in the mountains. When the tour with Jasmin is over and we take the van back to the hostel, they swarm the car and chase us ferociously as far as they can – creating clouds of dirt alongside the tires and leaving each of us grateful that we are inside a vehicle.

Jasmin walks in front of us, with a rock in his hand. With his other arm he pulls aside what looks like fallen tree branches and brush that blend into the landscape to reveal old Bosnian army bunkers. He points to down in the bunker from which he and his companions tried to defend their worlds from the onslaught on the hills: He crouches down, cramps himself up, and uses his free hand to mime holding a gun - “I am exactly so, like in war.” “For us in trench at

night -15 C and you must have gun in hand - so cold.” “We try to push back Chetnik front line.

We are civilians. We push them back, but only for 1 hour at any time.”

Jasmin learned his English on his own after the war from owning a hostel business and working and conversing with tourists. He continues, “Karadžić’s soldiers...here we protect

Sarajevo here from the people who would destroy it.” Jasmin knows where all the covered-up and discarded bunkers are in the mountains. He takes us to them one by one and tells us his own stories: “Here, 53 men in here, hole so steep and you climb up and try to look to the left or right.

But other side have cannon. Nobody don’t have survival of course, everybody go into a thousand pieces.”

Much of the rest of the war tour contains similar stories: “Here, in this bunker, my friend died” - matter of factly. This war tour is a far cry from the standard sites of war tourism in

Sarajevo today – the Tunnel of Hope, dug by the army underneath the airport for desperately needed supplies, Markale, the bombed-out market square said to have finally moved the Clintons into international action. Nor are there other things I’ve grown accustomed to - larger storylines explaining the history of the former Yugoslavia and its demise, or elaborate backstory on

Bosnia’s three traditionally defined ethnic populations – Bosniaks or Muslims, Croats, and

Serbs. The stories are short and brutal narrations of his daily war experiences. As we emerge into a large field with two huge cherry trees, Jasmin simply states: “Here, my friend and I climbed the trees to get cherries - we were starving - Chetniks shoot at us but miss and shoot down cherries...my friend fall down tree and I cry, ‘Are you hurt?’ He fall into shot-down cherries ready to eat and he laughs and laughs. That’s how the war was, some things funny, some things sad.”

Jasmin beckons us back to the van and we drive to the top of the Olympic bobsled track.

He will meet us at the bottom. Behind me walk two American teenagers, Jake and his sister. I

know from the time we have spent together that they are nervous travelers, often worried that someone will rip them off. They seemed to feel better when I taught them the numbers 1-10 in

Bosnian back at the war hostel. They are excited to be backpacking through Eastern Europe this year; they tell me that they find it a bit daring, a bit renegade. In ones and twos we all walk the curving, sloping downward Olympic bobsled track, a common war tour site. Once a proud piece of infrastructure marking Sarajevo’s honor of hosting the Olympic Games, it is now a ruined tunnel filled with graffiti from top to bottom. We walk along the track, our footsteps making hollow thuds, the sky open above us. Tourists turn to the left and right, snapping photos of graffiti pieces along the way that aesthetically appeal to them. A repulsive and enticing

Olympian urban sublime.59 Ahead of me two young and newly-wed Italians hold hands as they walk through the tunnel. The cartoon Vučko I bought for my step-daughter in the stalls of

Baščaršija feels infinitely far away.

As we move through the bobsled I contemplate our previous tour location - a spindly mark leftover from a landmine detonation that Jasmin showed us entrenched in the ground.

“This is ‘spiderweb.’ Mine like exactly some I showed you earlier, near the trees. With mine, everybody dies. Why put so many mines? Because mine is the best soldier...don’t sleep, don’t eat, can stay for a long time.”

The mine is the best soldier. A sleeping soldier, who does not know the war is over.

Embedded in the ground, buried deep like a memory, it lies in wait – its function destined for completion, no matter how many years pass by. They sleep in the mountains, their slumber aroused by the sounds of human footsteps that slowly walk toward their nightmare dreamscapes.

59 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also: Michael Taussig, Palma Africana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018),140. For a discussion of the use of the sublime in the enterprise of representing atrocity see Ch 1, “Sublimity, Redemption, Witness” in Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer, Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).

The sounds of the footsteps might belong to civilians, who search nearby woods for firewood.

They also will belong to the shrapnel hunters, many of them former soldiers in the Bosnian army, disenfranchised and forgotten by a Bosnian government known for its corruption and its politicians by their personal accounts filled with euros intended to facilitate Bosnia’s negotiations with the EU. Most of the shrapnel in cleared areas has been already been taken and transformed into these newer, post-war bullet economies such as touristic kitsch. In order to find shrapnel now, many of the hunters trek out into dangerous and un-cleared landmine territory. I make another stop on my bullet trajectory: though the war is over, once again these men experience sensations of the dearth, of the lack, of these golden, dented objects. As they search the mountains for the bullets that missed them, sometimes men who survived the Bosnian war stumble upon a sleeping soldier.

The landmines, too, are a part of the tourist landscape. Tourists are warned by tour guides not to go out into the mountains alone for skiing and hiking unless they are the mountains designated for touristic activity, meaning that touristic agencies can advertise excursions to

“there” because “there” is a place where there is no need for small signs like the ones Jasmin showed us hidden behind a couple of trees – no taller than your shins - with a skull and cross bones periodically marking the scene-scape. A few tour guides, including Jasmin, have told me about a tourist who parachuted into a landmine field and was blown up.

As we emerge at the bottom of a ruined bobsled track, we find Jasmin combing the ground with his eyes. He greets us, asks us how we found the bobsled – murmurs of very nice, a few general thank yous for taking us. Then he tells us, “I looking for shell for my collection.

You can look too, there are not as many, but there will be some here and maybe you find to take home with you.” We scatter and search. Jasmin finds bullets, but they are those he already

has…he gives one to Jake, the young American teenager; he looks like a delighted little boy for a moment - perhaps how Dejan might have looked as a child upon receiving a new artillery toy.

Later, I ask my fellow tourist what he thinks about taking home this piece of shell that may have killed someone…that may have played its part in the very stories from his life as a soldier that Jasmin has shared with us today. He, and the other tourists I am with, know that I am a researcher writing a book on war tourism in Sarajevo. He looks at me plaintively, guiltily, his eyes seeking permission, his tone defiant, and says, “But he wanted us to have it, didn’t he?”

I should mention that I have one. A used bullet. The one that sits now, small, gold, dented, in the palm of my hand. Jasmin found it and gave it to me, pressed it into my hand. I do not understand why he wanted me to have it. I don’t know why I kept it. I thought about throwing it away. But I also think of that fellow tourist - and, I am nothing if not a glorified war tourist - who said, “but he wanted us to have it, didn’t he?”

And perhaps he did want me to have it. These bullet shells and artillery pieces, which he collects for himself, and for a giant collection that is part of an impromptu museum that lives in a recreated bunker that is a part of his war hostel, and his home. A few months later, I am driving in the car with Jasmin’s son, Arijan. Arijan is giving me a sneak peak of his newest war tour experience, “Scars of Sarajevo,” where we go into the city and examine the craters left on streets and sidewalks and buildings from the war. I ask about his parents. His family have become dear friends to me during my time in Sarajevo.

Arijan tells me, “He’s doing okay. He isn’t giving his bunker war tour anymore. He broke down sobbing on one and couldn’t finish. Now I’m giving all the war tours that the hostel offers daily by myself. And it’s hard on me, man, sometimes when its busy 5 tours a day, from morning to night - but, I can’t do that to my Dad…I just can’t let him do it anymore.”

After the war tour with Jasmin is over I ask him about his motivations for giving tours, and for handing out bullets...or in his case, a walk-through bunkers and land mines and cherry trees where now lie the ash of comrades blown into a million pieces, and the discarded shells and mines that litter their unmarked graves. He says: “First bunker tour than this [the war hostel] to me it is like…and he pantomimes the motion of himself retching, of throwing up. I tell you; I show you my experience. I have no idea when I do it if it’s interesting or not for you. Story is more personal.”

It sits, small and golden, in the palm of my hand.

Perhaps he gave it to me because unlike bunkers covered with branches, and the traces of those detonated landmines that glisten on the ground - those spiderwebs - it can come with me, a tangible reminder of the memories that he has shared.

It sits, small and golden, and heavy, so much heavier than it should be, in the palm of my hand. When I look at it I see tourists scattered like the wind combing the mountains for little deaths. I see shrapnel art, tanks and helicopters and pens sold to tourists who do a bit of shopping after lunch or a coffee break. When I look at it I see Dejan as a small child, and the delight in his eyes that his father has returned, eagerly holding up his prize to the other boys who never leave the refuge of a dim and monotonous basement. Azim is there too, transforming the shells that left scars on his body into laboriously and lovingly crafted works of art. And I see

Jasmin wandering the mountains to give a war tour - surrounded by gunshots and screams that only he can hear, as ghosts of the men he once knew emerge out of bunkers and spiderwebs and cherry trees. I imagine him sobbing surrounded by dead men and bewildered tourists.

It sits, small and golden, and dented in the palm of my hand. And yes, I believe he wanted me to have it, just as he did for the many war tourists who came before me.

I did keep it.

There are times…there are times I long to throw my little bullet piece away; to chuck it and its terrible history and the memories that pulsate outward from this still, inert-seeming thing straight into the trash alongside the banana peels and plastic wrappers and the leftovers we never got around to eating. But the person who throws that bullet away would be a very different person than I am now, a self, like Sartre said, “to await in the future.”60 Yet the person that I am now and moves toward a future that awaits cannot. I have too many memories of it that are my own, though they are memories of others’ memories. It is heavy, much heavier than it should be.

But I will not throw away Jasmin’s bullet.

I have heard too many stories of what giving that bullet to me cost him.

60 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 73.

48 CHAPTER 2: THE TUNNEL OF HOPE/THE TUNNEL OF SMUGGLERS: COUNTER- MEMORY AUTHORIZES THE PRODUCTION OF THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

In the center of Baščaršija lies the Official Information Tourist Bureau, an institution of the Bosnian government whose purpose is to promote its tourism industry. In the lives of tour companies, it is a government platform meant to advertise their businesses and promote their growth. In the lives of tourists, it is an information center for directions, maps, and questions.

With its prominent and friendly green sign and bright white lettering promising information to tourists wandering the streets unsure of what to do, or where a museum is located, the Official

Info Tourist Bureau beckons foreigners in with its promise of help for those lost or wanting to make the most of their vacation itineraries. Travel advisors such as Lonely Planet echo the warnings issued to tourists by the Official Info Tourist Bureau to be on the look-out for other tour companies that have taken to copy-catting the friendly green and white tourist info sign in the hopes of luring in travelers. Over the course of my fieldwork, I came to regard these cautionary advisements with a grim amusement.

Along the outside of the Official Information Tourist Bureau is a long wooden bench that sits a little lower than the bottom of a spacious, open window through which you can see a wall to wall counter inside. The window provides a semblance of transparency for this government institution, as well as the ability for tourists to catch a glimpse of a welcoming space for their queries and foreign frustrations. At times Sarajevans sit outside on the bench and enjoy a break in the shade with a smoke while they rest their backs against the glass. Quite possibly one of the

49 persons sitting on the bench producing a small swirl of white clouds is a tour guide employed by the Official Tourist Bureau who is relishing a work-break.

I, myself, often parked on this bench and observed and queried the tour guides and travelers entering and exiting the Official Tourist Bureau, and I will admit to, as, Erica T. Lehrer does in her ethnography of Jewish travelers visiting Kazimierz, the historically Jewish quarter of

Krakow, Poland, “stalking tourists at times.”61 I find this “stalking” mitigated by the ephemeral sociality of tourism, the desire for fluidity and encounter that permeates so many of us when we become tourists who find ourselves traveling and traversing. A certain openness induced by the liminality of proscribed tourist spaces to meeting other travelers (or war tour ethnographers) and discussing one’s travel plans, or a desire to debrief the darkness of a war tour, has often aided my ability to conduct ethnographic research.

Travel, Tourism and Theorizing Religion

That liminal feel induced by touristic spaces has been picked up by other scholars as an opening to invest travel with the properties of the sacred.62 Here the traveler leaves behind the world of their everyday routine and becomes a sacred subject thrust into the world of Turner’s betwixt and between as they embark upon their vacation adventures. Turner’s model of the sacred is neatly mapped upon the romantic notion that travel always entails transformation, and the traveler returns home transformed – a sacred remainder – ready to once again be integrated into the quotidian rhythms of life under the banner of a newly discovered communitas.63

61 Erica T. Lehrer, Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 37.

62 Much of this position can be linked to the work of Victor and Edith Turner, who in their quest to construct pilgrimage as a universal mode of liminality, put forth the notion that tourism and pilgrimage are far from conceptual opposites, rather, “a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist.” Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 20. See also: Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman, eds., Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Elizabeth Fine and Jean Haskell, “Tour Guide Performance as Sight Sacralization,” Annals of Tourism Research 12 (1985):73-95. 63 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Routledge, 2017).

In a similar construction to this Turner-mapped model, Nelson Graburn constructs supposedly secular sites of tourism as a “sacred journey.”64 Graburn builds upon the work of

Durkheim, suggesting that tourism is sacred because travel disrupts the profane calendar and connects travelers with an experiential reality that only the sacred can provide – a transcendence of everyday life.65 And yet, these models share a similar problematic. In either, sacred travel seems ethnocentric and highly classed, in which only the privileged have access to the “sacred.”

Access, I venture, is less a question of the “sacred” here, but rather a question of the geography of access. Edward Bruner describes our extraordinary ability to utilize tourist practices to create paradoxes out of positionality and politics as follows:

“The Other in our geography is a source of disgust; the Other in their geography is a source of pleasure. In our place the Other is romantic, beautiful, and exotic. In our geography the Western elite pay not to see the Other; in their geography, the Western elite pay for the privilege of viewing and photographing. There is a racialization at home and a primitivization over there in exotica.”66

As a scholar of religious studies, I find that Bruner’s words lend particular insight into the way in which the labeling of persons, places, events, temporalities and things as sacred within tourist practice can, in fact, serve to obscure the very real economic and political inequalities, or, as in the case of dark tourism, the very real historical and political atrocities, upon which sites such as the war tourism industry in Bosnia rely. Whether as scholars or as tourists, it seems we would do well to be wary of our participation in the production of ethics and academics that label such

64 Nelson H.H. Graburn, “Tourism: The Sacred Journey” in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, ed. Valene L. Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 21-36.

65 Ibid., 24. See also: Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995).

66 Edward M. Bruner, Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 194.

sites as “sacred” in registers which universalize slivers of experience that belong to, as Bruner terms it, the “Western elite.”

Moreover, the scholarly practice of inscribing sacred discourse into the travel landscape while simultaneously predicating the creation of this “sacred” upon its divorce from the forms of power that permeate its material realities is a scholarly practice that has an uncanny, if inadvertent, overture to Asad’s famous critique of Clifford Geertz’s oft-cited theory of religion.67

Here, Asad makes the observation that universal definitions of religion are, in a sense, only possible through the production of a politics of obfuscation. Asad’s work emphasizes that

“universal” definitions of religion are hardly universals, as the boundaries charted around what is or is not religious can only be produced through and within the contingencies of diverse and socially constituted realms of human experience such as culture, history, economics, and politics.68 These particulars of human life are historically and culturally situated as well as infinitely varied. Their ever-fluid role in the process of defining and delineating what does or does not constitute religion must be occluded in order to comprise a definition of religion large enough – universal enough – to contain the multiple possibilities for religious life that exist in a complicated world writ large. This will be the case whether one examines transcendental and transcultural definitions of religion within which lurk Protestant leanings or sacred spaces insulated betwixt and between the comings and goings of those who can afford rides to far-off destinations on planes, trains, and automobiles.69

67 Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 27- 54.

68 As Asad writes, “…There cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.” (Ibid., 29). 69 “Thus what appears…today to be self-evident, namely that religion is essentially a matter of symbolic meanings linked to ideas of general order…and that it must not be confused with any of its particular historical or cultural forms, is in fact a view that has a specific Christian history. From being a concrete set of practical rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge, religion has come to be abstracted and universalized.” (Ibid., 42).

I’ve come to find that Bosnia’s war tours are a particular, and pertinent ethnographic site from which to explore theoretical renderings of the “sacred” insofar as it is applied to literatures of travel and in particular, to the complicated political realities of visiting dark tourism sites.

This is in large part because war tours in Sarajevo tend to engage tourists through the performance of a type of Foucauldian counter-memory, one that pushes back against dominant and hegemonic narratives of the war that further tout the superiority of the Western world.70

Within this chapter, I have used the most popular war tour destination in Sarajevo, known as the

Tunnel of Hope or the Tunnel of Salvation museum, as a means to ethnographically render

Bosnia’s war tours as a significant source of the production of this counter-memory. The tours both share stories of Sarajevo’s horrific Siege years as well as utilize them as a means to critique the West’s complicity in the Bosnian war. I further extend the spirit of this chapter’s analytic - one of counter-memory and Western critique - in order to consider further the globalized and transnational processes that tie the practice of war to the production of capital, contextualizing this through a discussion of some of the ongoing ramifications of war profiteering in Sarajevo for its tourism industry today.

That war tourists in Bosnia themselves (as well as war tour ethnographers) participate in ongoing, layered, and interwoven globalized cycles of capital and war is taken as a given in this chapter. A vantage point that assumes the interconnectedness of these events leaves little methodological room for theoretical renderings of the sacred that would be molded out of

Turner’s liminal, nor even for those Durkheimian building blocks in which the world of the

70 The Foucauldian concept of counter-memory puts practices of remembering and forgetting within the context of power relations, whereby which counter-memory becomes a form of resistance that can challenge dominant narratives of the past. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

profane is ritually severed from the world of the sacred.71 Rather, here I theorize the construction of the sacred through the lens of Asad, noting the ways in which the profane and sacred realms are profoundly interconnected; it is the profane world – for all of its materiality, messiness, and brutality - that authorizes and conditions the possibilities for what J.Z. Smith might call religious life as a mode of human creativity.72 I conclude the chapter by augmenting this position with a turn to Roger Caillois’s work regarding the transformative and transgressive possibilities of human sacred play.73

Booking a War Tour

Travelers with access to those goods that enable their leisurely mobility, such as a citizenship conducive to crossing borders or the economic means to travel, and who have made their way to Sarajevo might find themselves stepping inside the Official Info Tourist Bureau to see a small, inviting sitting area with chairs to the right of the large counter. Above the seats are security cameras, another reminder that this is an official government building. The wall to wall counter which separates those who come in from the employees who work behind it contains pamphlets for various tour agencies in the city that advertise their tour agency’s physical

71 My concern here is not with the idea that human ritual play has the power to construct persons, objects, places, memories, and experiences as “set apart” from the ordinary or profane world. However, that ritual performance is not “set apart” from the historical, political, economic, and cultural conditions that led to its very enactment, and if it is treated as such in scholarship then the bifurcation of the sacred and the profane becomes little more than the staging of agonistic essentialisms predicated upon their divorce. In other words, the flip side of considering ritual practice as instrumental, rather than symbolic behavior is surely the consideration of the profane world not as a precursor of, or an opposition to, but rather that series of historical, political, and cultural complexities that authorizes the very conditions for the emergence of religious possibility. See also Asad’s observation that defining religion in terms of belief was itself a demarcation that burst into being alongside the bustling world of the profane, or the historical contingencies of the wars of religion and the discourses of the Enlightenment that coextensively marked both the religious and the secular sphere through the register of belief. Asad, Geneaologies of Religion, 40- 42.

72 “Religion is a distinctive mode of human creativity, a creativity which both discovers limits and creates limits for humane existence. What we study when we study religion is the variety of attempts to map, construct, and inhabit such positions of power through the use of myths, rituals, and experiences of transformation.” Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 291.

73 Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

location, as well as a brief summary of the touring experiences that they offer - one of the more obvious ways in which the government supports its touristic industry. Often customers come in to peruse these, or, as you might expect, to request directions. The employees of the Official

Info Tourist Bureau always offer the tourists a helpful explanation on the way to their intended destination. Often when a tourist is lost, or looking to get somewhere, the employees behind the counter pull out a complimentary map from the shelves that are built into the service counter, along with a palm-sized magazine called “Sarajevo Navigator” filled with tourist attractions. On the back wall of the office behind the counter there are also shelves, though these are stacked not with tourism brochures, but rather historical books about Bosnia and the city of Sarajevo, and of course, the war.

A German tourist wanders in looking for a war tour. He is bicycling through Europe and has come to Bosnia to learn about its war; to hear the stories of its war-torn sites. As he peruses the pamphlets for various tour companies, the employee behind the counter - a middle-aged woman with a commanding demeanor, asks him questions about what he is looking to experience and then offers him some helpful advice. The woman, who is demonstrably in charge of the situation, points to the pamphlets displayed most prominently on the counter, and in the most supply, almost four of these flyers for every one of an advertisement for another touristic company. She says, “You want the Business Tour; the Business Tour war tour experience is the ultimate war experience of Sarajevo.”

The office is busy today. The summer months, as they are for many touristic economies in many places, are the high season for those who work in the tourism industry in the country of

Bosnia. Another couple of tourists stride in, this time, an Italian mother and her young daughter, who has recently graduated from high school. They are in Bosnia for an educational summer experience and have already taken one tour in order to learn about the Bosnian war. They tell

the woman behind the counter with the commanding presence that they have seen the Tunnel of

Hope, a museum which now lies above a secret tunnel the Bosnian army once built underneath the UN-controlled airport for access to desperately-needed supplies during the war. They explain to the woman working behind the counter that now they wish to take a tour on the

Sarajevo Roses, the mortar shelled spots along the streets of Sarajevo that have been filled in with red resin to symbolize the blood of those murdered. They are here because their Tunnel of

Hope tour guide informed them that he believes another tour company gives a specific tour on the Sarajevo Roses.

The Italian women seem excited to tell the Bosnian woman behind the counter that they have already taken one war tour and yet still want to learn more. The woman behind the counter dismissively says, “If you want to learn about the war, you don’t need a Rose tour, the Roses are everywhere in the city; you will already see them anyway just as you walk around. You should really take this tour, the Business Tour war experience, if you want to learn about the war in

Sarajevo. It will tell you everything you need to know.” The Italian mother politely explains,

“We have already seen a tour about the war and to the Tunnel, we are looking here for the

Sarajevo Discovery Tours building. We were told they maybe have a “Roses Tour” that we would like to be on. Can you tell us how we get there?” “Unfortunately,” the woman working behind the counter says, “I believe Sarajevo Discovery tours has been shut down for a few years now; they are not taking in business anymore.”

“Oh,” the Italian woman says. She turns to her daughter and they exchange a few words in Italian. “Thank you, but now we will go and get espresso,” she says politely. The woman presses a flyer for Business Tour into her hands. “If you change your mind, the Business Tour is the best war tour experience in the city of Sarajevo.” The Italian women wave goodbye, perhaps grateful that they will not have to spend a wasted day looking for a tour company that is no

longer open, perhaps disappointed that they will not be able to learn more about Sarajevo’s wartime years on the “Roses Tour” that they had been recommended with Sarajevo Discovery tours.

An American couple in their late ‘50s come into the office with a purposeful stride. They have visited the Tourist Info Bureau just this morning, and in the mean-time have decided that they wish to join the government Information Bureau’s officially recommended Business Tour war experience at 2 pm. The man opens his wallet as they reach the counter. “Oh no, no, you do not pay here,” the Woman in Charge behind the counter states. This is simply the Tourist

Information Bureau. You will pay your money to your war tour guide from Business

Tour.” She looks at the credit card he has started to pull from his wallet. “We only take euros.” “Oh, yes, you told me this morning, getting forgetful in my old age, eh, dear?” he says to his wife. She smiles at him. The man pulls out 50 euros from his wallet, twenty-five a piece for the tour, and asks the Woman in Charge behind the counter when the tour will start. “The tour does not start here at the Info Bureau, you must meet your Business Tour guide here, at this place,” she says while whipping out a map from under the counter – “very easy, just turn behind and walk straight until you are at the first street for cars and not pedestrians.”

It is almost two in the afternoon anyway, time for the tour to start. As the tourists nervously look over the map, the woman behind the counter offers her customers a helpful suggestion. “Danin!” she calls.74 A young man silently emerges from a desk nestled in a side- office to the right only visible as you stand at the counter. “Danin will be your war tour guide today,” she says, “You can walk with him to the van in a moment.” The American woman smiles, beaming, at the young man, her soon to be war tour guide. “Well isn’t that perfect timing, honey,” she says to her husband. The Americans turn to Danin. The man tries to pay his

74 The majority of names in this chapter are pseudonyms, as are some of the tour company names.

tour guide as instructed with the same Euros he tried to pay The Woman just mere moments ago. Danin states, “No, no, when we get in the van and the tour begins, please, then you can pay for the tour.” Danin has started this sentence by looking at the Woman in Charge behind the counter, who nods, but by the end of the sentence his eyes have locked with the tourists, who radiate the comportment of good-natured travelers who know they will make minor faux pas abroad as they pursue their holiday adventures. “Of course, when we get to the tour van,” the

American man states politely. They grab a seat to wait comfortably until Danin begins the afternoon war tour.

Tour guides too, come to the government’s Official Information Bureau. Nejra, a tour guide who has started her own tour company this year, and who, incidentally, used to work as a war guide at the Official Info Tourist Bureau, stops by the office to drop off her first designed pamphlet for Sunset Travel tour company. Her brochures have been a later step in the endless process of realizing her personal dream - becoming her own boss and starting her own touristic agency after many years of working as a war guide, a job she loves. She is excited about having her own company and the ability to work more in the slower moving off-season, both for her own desire to work purposefully throughout the year and her dream of starting her own family. The brochures have been lovingly crafted and finalized after three weeks of design and text edits and re-edits. The formidable Woman behind the counter asks her how things are going. “They are going well,” Nejra states cheerfully, “We do not have many tourists coming in from the street, but I have some former tourists who have done tours with me before who have stayed in contact and returned.” The Woman behind the counter congratulates her with a tight smile and accepts the brochures for display on the counter, parting two separate piles of a

Business Tour flier and making space for Nejra’s fledgling Sunset Travel tour company. Nejra wishes her a pleasant day on the way out - “Prijatan dan,” - and walks out the door. The Woman

in Charge behind the counter lingers for a few moments, and then her hands and the pieces of paper along the counter merge together in a flurry of shuffling. She tucks the brochures advertising Sunset Travel’s tours into a shelf built into the tourist reception counter, away from the eyes of tourists who might choose it instead of the much-touted Business Tour.

Another tour guide walks in the Office. Emir is a young man in his twenties who works for

Sarajevo Groovy Tours. He is wearing their company t-shirt, yellow with cursive black lettering on the front and a small bold print of the name above the pocket at the front of the t- shirt. “Dobar Dan,” he says to the forceful Woman standing behind the counter - a more traditional and potentially slightly more formal afternoon greeting. “My boss has sent me to pick up a couple of maps.” The maps highlighting the Old Town of Sarajevo, as well as the palm- sized magazine “Sarajevo Navigator,” are in fact, not just promotional materials designed for tourists. The Tourist Information Bureau, in its official government capacity, also prints these materials for the benefit of its tour company owners and operators. At any given time, tour guides and company representatives are allotted two of each to take back to their own agencies for the benefit of the tourists who come to take excursions with them. This time, The Woman

Behind the Counter does not reach for a map on the shelves hidden behind the counter. She looks at Emir and says, “We are all out of maps. Try again next month, maybe.” Emir leaves the office, but he exchanges an almost unnoticeable look with Danin, the young man behind the counter who stays silent, before he goes.

War Tours as Sites of Counter-Memory

I’m in the car with Danin on the Business Tour. Alongside me are three other passengers, the American couple, Doug and Sharon, and a British man named Adam who good- naturedly, yet persistently, likes to refer to us as Yankees. Even in the van ride, it seems, the reverberations of wars now passed linger. The other tourists have tried to give Danin the money

for the tour on our short walk to the van from the Information Bureau, but he puts us off with a

“when we get to the van, when we get to the van.” The other tourists have not taken the

Business Tour before - but I have taken it enough times to know that the Business Tour war guides, all of whom seem to work in the Official Tourist Info Bureau, refuse to let money change hands in the government office with its watchful security cameras, or in the streets in front of the potentially watchful eyes of Baščaršija’s daytime passerby’s. When we are loaded up in the hot car we start the process of buckling our seatbelts and pulling out our wallets to hand Danin our euros. As we drove through the city to the Tunnel of Hope Danin utilized the time to point out pieces of wartime history to us. “This street (Meša Selimovic Boulevard) was known as “Sniper

Alley” during the war, you can see why snipers chose it to shoot from because of the many tall buildings,” he said. Another time he pointed and said, “Here is the Holiday Inn building, this yellow one, where the foreign journalists who covered the Siege stayed during the war.”

Foreign journalists who covered the war are treated with respect in Sarajevo, and perhaps this is not surprising given that the gruesome images they circulated affectively mobilized international populist concern over the state of Bosnia in the 1990s and applied a steady pressure on Western governments and the United Nations to deal with the war crisis in a more timely, effective, and humanitarian manner. At the same time, as Arthur and Joan Kleinman note,

“images of trauma are a part of our political economy,” in which “papers are sold, television programs gain audience share, careers are advanced, jobs are created, and prizes awarded through the appropriation of images of suffering.”75 It is in this sense that snapshots of

Sarajevan life during the war - of people frantically running down Sniper Alley - exist within a multi-layered context. There is the horrific context of the war in which the circumstances for

75 Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, “The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times” in Social Suffering, eds., Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret M. Lock (Oakland: University of California Press, 1997), 8.

such a photo come to exist, and then there is the context which enables the photo itself to be taken - a globalized and “disordered capitalism” in which these images of suffering become available for market-share.76

Our shared destination, the Tunnel of Hope, lies on the outskirts of Sarajevo, in the neighborhood of Dobrinja. Dobrinja is a neighborhood on the outskirts of Sarajevo, closer to those all-encompassing mountains, and heavily hit by the war. We will only drive to the Tunnel, but there are other places in this neighborhood where the people of Sarajevo live their daily lives

- a walk to work, a stop at the grocery store, a bus ride home, amongst places that are not a museum, but that are filled to the brim with bullet holes and thatched-up houses and history and memories that burn through the brain and blend together with the material vestiges of war.

The Tunnel itself is the most popular war-tour site in Sarajevo, quite possibly in Bosnia. Almost any war tour you take in the city, regardless of what company you take it with, will incorporate driving its tourists to see what is known alternatively as the Tunnel of Hope or the Tunnel of

Salvation. During the war, it was exactly what the name suggests – an underground tunnel, dug secretly underneath Sarajevo’s airport by the Bosnian army in order to bring desperately needed supplies into the besieged city. From the outside, the Tunnel of Hope museum looks like a bullet-ridden house surrounded by a small fence. In this way, it still resembles the other houses in Dobrinja. There is a sign on it that reads, “Tunnel Spasa, Kuca Kolara” which in English translates to “The Tunnel of Salvation, the Kolar House.” Though it is now a museum, during the war, it was also the home of the Kolar family, and it was underneath their house that

Sarajevo’s Tunnel of Hope began to be dug.

76 Ibid., 19. The Kleinmans term this contextual juncture as one that functions through the “appeal of experience” and the “dismay of images.” They write, “The appeal of experience is when we see on television a wounded Haitian, surrounded by a threatening crowd, protesting accusations that he is a member of a murderous paramilitary organization. The dismay of images is when we are shown that the man and the crowd are themselves surrounded by photographers, whose participation helps determine the direction the event will take.” (9).

The museum’s primary attractions are a small, twenty-meter section of the once 250- meter-long Tunnel that has remained open for tourists to walk through – a chance for tourists to experience traveling through the famous Tunnel of Hope themselves, and a large outdoor viewing pavilion that shows wartime video footage of Sarajevo during the Siege. Within the

Kolar family’s small and perhaps once cozy former living quarters there are now a few exhibits - walls filled with international newspaper clippings and photos, leftover artillery and shrapnel pieces on display, former military uniforms, a mining cart along the wall covered with blankets like the ones once used by Bosnian soldiers to haul supplies under the ground. A steep downstairs leads to a small bunker room; a screen inside shows the same footage of the war and the Tunnel’s construction as does the much larger outdoor video pavilion. Much of the museum space is simply the great outdoors surrounding the small family home the tunnel was constructed underneath. And here, too, there are shop-keepers who sell tourist kitsch and among it, the used bullet and shrapnel figurines that are also found in the streets of Baščaršija. A friendly stray mutt often weaves in and out of the museum’s outdoor space, wagging its tail and receiving welcome attention and pets from tunnel tourists and guides.

When our tour group arrived at the Tunnel, Danin paid the man who worked at the ticket booth our entrance fees. They are already accounted for by tour companies within the cost of the war tour itself. The Tunnel museum only accepts BAM, or Bosnian national currency. It is in the interest of tour companies to be paid in Euros simply because they are a more valuable currency, but many tour companies are willing to be paid by tourists in either Euros or BAM.

The Business Tour does not provide tourists with this option. After Danin paid for our entrance fees he shepherded us to the large outdoor space surrounding the Tunnel museum in order to get a closer look at the maps that are posted outside; they are a bit like a Cliff’s Notes visual of the wartime forces and their locations that accompanies war guides’ explanations of why Sarajevo’s

survival so desperately depended on this secretly dug tunnel. The top of the map is marked

“Sarajevo,” in bright red letters, and to the right of it are two quick city characterizations. The first reads “-Olympic City 1984,” and just below this pointedly marked memory of cosmopolitan

Olympic glory are the words “Surrounded City 1992-1995.” Beneath these highlights of

Sarajevo’s past in bold red letters are smaller letters typed in black, “Almost 4 years under siege

– over 11,000 people killed.”

The map itself shows the city of Sarajevo surrounded by mountains that have been shaded red and stamped with the words, “SERBIAN FORCES.” The city is surrounded, but still holding out; it is marked on the map as “Bosnian territory” in hopeful green letters. The mountains surrounding Sarajevo (as well as the neighborhood of Grbavica within the city) are shaded red to denote Serb territory – the red shading ends in a dominant red line that edges toward Sarajevo as it strives to become a circle, slithering and struggling to complete itself, to enclose, to transform itself into a tightly woven noose. To the northeast, a smaller sliver of the map has escaped the dominant red shading. The airport, and the neighborhood of Butmir which lies beyond it are highlighted in green as “FREE BOSNIAN TERRITORY,” but seemingly impossible to get to with the bright red “SERBIAN FORCES” encompassing all sides of the city.

The map almost makes you itch to get under the earth so you can get out.

It is significant that the Tunnel of Hope was dug underneath the Sarajevo airport. In the early months of the war’s outbreak and subsequent madness the airport was controlled by the

JNA, (the former Yugoslav Army), and those who tried to fly across the runways to safety under the cover of night found themselves no longer persons but moving targets. The United Nations, in an attempt to prevent the mass bloodshed of a “Civil War,” and with its own interest in strategically containing this violence and keeping it from spilling over into Western Europe, created a highly prominent and televise-able humanitarian relief effort to aid besieged Sarajevo

and to navigate the conflict. On June 5, 1992, the UN brokered an agreement with Serb forces laying siege to the city and officially took over the airport, (a UN territory, if you will) in order to fly in relief aid to Sarajevo’s civilian population.

Some tourists come to the Tunnel expecting to hear stories of the UN’s role in the conflict that resonates with their own memories of the Bosnian War. In the 1990s,

“infotainment” pervaded news channels and hooked viewers as they followed the drama of stories such as the OJ Simpson trial, the Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan Olympic attack and scandal, and, of course, the footage shot by those foreign journalists who stayed in the Holiday

Inn (the only functional hotel during the war) of a Besieged Sarajevo, accompanied by reports of the UN’s humanitarian relief efforts, a symbol of the best that humanity has to offer – our ability to reach out and care for others who suffer in distant places. These tourists will hear stories of the UN’s humanitarian role, but they will not be the stories they are expecting.

But the stories they expect are also, in many ways, what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls a part of the “industry of memory.”77 By this he does not mean simply the price to enter a museum dedicated to memories of a city’s Siege, or the kitsch one might purchase there. The industry of memory is born not after but alongside the shots of war, evidenced in part by the sheer ability of superpowers to airlift journalists into dangerous war zones and airlift them out again in order to export their own narratives of war, to wrap violence in its own storylines to send off to far-flung destinations. Or, as Nguyen writes, “A superpowerful industry of memory makes it easy for people to access its products, delivered to their doors, their televisions, their screens, their shelves, their newspapers, even when they do not want these memories or seek them out.

77 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 157.

Memory does not work this way for the weaker industrial power, which must turn itself into a tourist destination to lure the unsuspecting tourist…”78

Here, at the Tunnel of Hope museum, tourists will also learn, as Viet Thanh Nguyen so poignantly states, “That all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, and the second time in memory.”79

As befits a “Civil War” the UN provided aid and relief to both sides of this “civil” conflict – the starving Sarajevans being shot to hell and the Chetniks in the mountains who drank rakija and grilled barbeque while they took turns drunkenly snipering – extra points if you hit a child.80 Portions of relief aid diverted from Bosnia’s besieged citizens and doled out to the

Chetnik forces shooting at them was not the only benefit Serb forces received from the UN’s negotiation for control of the airport. Just as the UN benefited from its ability to fly in humanitarian aid in a “highly visible manner,” so too did Serb forces benefit from what this airport agreement did not speak to, nor negotiate - their ability “to continue to besiege the rest of

Sarajevo unimpeded.”81 The UN further placated the former Yugoslav army and finalized their ability to control the airport to bring in aid to each side – the snipers and those who darted daily sniper fire - by promising the JNA forces that they would not let anyone from Sarajevo leave via the airport. Another way to look at this - and the way that many Bosnians do, is that the UN handed the airport over to the Serbs and banned them from escaping while their homes and families and bodies were shot full of holes.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid., 4. 80 The technical agreement was for 1/4th of all aid to go to the Serbian army.

81 Peter Andreas, Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 34.

People would try to cross anyway. When they did the Serbs in the former Yugoslav army would shoot them down. Some people have told me that the UN soldiers also fired upon them, in order to fulfill their larger mission and their military obligations to both sides. I find this ghastly report harder to believe – but veracity is only one type of truth, and it is telling that there are

Sarajevans who believe this story, this circulating rumor which so effortlessly connects to the bitterness that accompanies Bosnian memories of the role humanitarian intervention played during the war. Or maybe people just say it because the UNPROFOR patrols who kept Bosnians from escaping Sarajevo via the airport did so by using their searchlights to scan for runaways, and that sometimes, when they hit you; they illuminated you up as easy sniper targets for the waiting Serbs. A more common story is that Bosnians would try to cross the airport, and if they were not shot down, the UN soldiers would return them to their original destination.

Crossing the airport was one of the only viable routes out of the city before the Tunnel was constructed (beginning March of 1993, a year into the Siege, and finished July of 1993). In the early months of the UN airport takeover, many Bosnians escaped the war by telling the UN soldiers that caught them trying to get out from under the Siege that they were originally from

Butmir in the Bosnian free territory across the mountains and desperately trying to get into

Sarajevo to see Sieged family members. Then the UN soldiers would return them to their

“original destination,” or escort them to safety. I’ve heard these stories told with pride by several

Sarajevans, who admire their fellow citizens war-time savvy-ness. I’m also told that eventually this strategy was “caught on” by the UN, that they started dragging people back into the mess that was Sarajevo anyway.

Just as the UN regulates the airport and keeps it from being a viable escape venue on behalf of the Serbs in the former Yugoslav army, it navigates its “Civil War” intervention on behalf of Bosnia as well. For Sarajevans during the war, the UN is a source of food rations

doled out to various Bosnian citizens for distribution and relief. It is also true that UN soldiers would take their armored vehicles into the streets, and escort citizens on their deathly daily runs throughout the city for food and water and medical supplies. An armored car can provide a lot of protection from snipers, especially if walking alongside it are soldiers, even if they are soldiers who cannot go on the offensive, even if they are mandated to only shoot if they, their person, is directly shot at.

The rations that the UN distributed were not enough to sustain the people of

Bosnia. Even if they had been enough to begin with, many of the men that they gave ration distributions to became war profiteers who marked up scarce and demanded goods (primarily food) and sold them to their fellow Sarajevans for profit at inflated prices. Jasmin, a participant who runs a war tour business, pointed out a hotel to me in Baščaršija – fat cat real-estate - owned by a man who Jasmin remembers for jacking up the price of UN rations in order to sell them to his fellow Sarajevans. He pointed it out casually. “He sold UN rations to me during war, and now he owns this!” he says, throwing out his arms wide as if they could encompass the hotel.

Can you believe it?”

Danin led us into the interior part of the museum to look at artillery pieces and shells stacked in a row of various sizes. A few hang from the ceiling; they look like a collection of helium blimps in miniature. He is talking about the weapons embargo. “These are examples of the arsenal the former Yugoslav army had to use against Bosnia. They had all of the weapons that were to be used to defend all of us from when Yugoslavia was one country. The United

Nations created a weapons embargo for Bosnia, so we could not get any weapons to defend ourselves. This is one of the reasons the Tunnel was necessary, to bring in weapons from the outside.”

The United Nations Security Council’s weapons embargo was meant to prevent the conflict of the former Yugoslavia’s “Civil War” from escalating. Of course, as Danin tells our tour group, the JNA army which spent four years hanging out in the mountains and picking starving people off one by one in the city already had all of the former Yugoslavia’s military resources, and soon they will have extra relief aid from the UN. Another way to look at this – and the way many Bosnians do – is that the UN used a rhetoric of “civil war” to damn them to four long years in a hell-hole with no way to defend themselves and no way to escape.82

Politically, the museum’s highlighting of the role played by the Tunnel of Hope creates a tribute to the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the Bosnian people. The Tunnel functions as a repository of counter-memory; its very existence a criticism of Western humanitarian aid, of the United

Nations and the International Community’s active role in aiding not the Bosnian people, but their systematic slaughter.

“We call them the UN,” Danin says with a smile: “United for Nothing.”

The Tunnel of Hope was built by the Bosnian army underneath the UN-controlled airport to the outlying town of Butmir in the mountains. It is only wide and high enough for one person to walk through at a time, hunched over. Through the tunnel soldiers and civilians could exit out into the Bosnian free territory for much-needed supplies. Without the Tunnel, the city never would have survived. Thus the name, the Tunnel of Hope, which it very much was.

The “Tunnel of Smugglers” and Geographies of Siege Profiteering

82 The emphasis placed on this point at the site of Bosnia’s War Tours, and the bitterness with which many Sarajevans regard the UN and the International Community is further augmented in these words by Andreas. He writes, “But as the airlift helped to keep the city from starving, it also made the siege tolerable and therefore internationally acceptable – reducing the likelihood of it being lifted. Humanitarian action became, in effect, a new form of containment. It provided a mode of managing the situation without having to resort to direct military force. It also avoided the specter of hundreds of thousands of refugees exiting the city: delivering aid would help to deter a further mass exodus of Bosnian refugees.” (Ibid., 39).

After that day when Jasmin started pointing out hotels to me owned by men he remembered from his soldier days as war profiteers, I started the practice of regularly asking my war guide friends if they were aware of any other known war profiteers from the Siege days who are now in the tourist industry business. Many of the tour guides laugh at my question’s blatant obviousness. One participant chuckles and then says, “Probably the woman who owns my building; I see her photo in the paper all of the time with politicians.” I ask him, “But, does that necessarily mean that they were a war profiteer?” He laughs at my response and says,

“Politicians, war profiteers, they are all the same here.” And many of them are “all the same.”

Or, at least, in bed with one another. Bosnia’s extra-legal and clandestine political economy is well documented, and as Christopher A. Corpora notes in his article, “The Untouchables: Former

Yugoslavia’s Clandestine Political Economy,” it is also “further complicated by the fact that corrupt politicians often become directly involved in the clandestine political economy, either as primary owners or decision-makers…However, much of this co-operation appears to have been born out of or enabled by the regional armed conflicts, especially through the institutionalization of embargo-busting activities.”83

The weapons embargo on Bosnia has other effects, less present in the narrations of war tour guides, who emphasize that without the Tunnel dug underneath the airport by the Bosnian

Army, Sarajevo would never have had enough food or weapons coming into the city to survive the Siege. That is true. It is also true that the food that comes in from the Tunnel affects the war profiteering of those who take ration distributions from the UN.84 As bribes are made to the

83 Christopher A. Corpora, “The Untouchables: Former Yugoslavia’s Clandestine Political Economy,” Problems of Post Communism, 51, no. 3 (May/June 2004): 64.

84 In fact, the Tunnel’s completion disrupts not only this but also other forms of smuggling that operate through the UN-controlled airport, including deliveries of arms, ammunition, medical supplies, alcohol, and tobacco. UN personnel are at large reported to have participated in these activities, at times unknowingly, at times purposefully in the attempt to aid Sarajevans, and at times paid handsomely for their troubles. See Chapter 3, “Sustaining the Siege” in Andreas, Blue Helmets Black Markets, 43-89.

Bosnian Army tunnel guards by civilians and profits are distributed amongst businessmen who at times have access to the Tunnel, enough food now comes in to make these prices fall throughout the city and sustain the people of Sarajevo. The Tunnel changes the game for Sarajevans, not just by providing food, or even hope, as its name suggests. The Tunnel brings in much-needed supplies, and it is able to do so because it also changes, as Peter Andreas states so well, “the geography of Siege profiteering.”85

The tunnel dug by the Bosnian army secretly underneath the UN-controlled airport, to bring in weapons and food, sustains the people of Sarajevo through the long years of the Siege.

But where do these weapons and supplies come from? One easy answer is Butmir, the Bosnian free territory where the Tunnel emerges on the other side, or Hrasnica, a city that became an informal trading ground. But if we were to expand our scope of inquiry and ask about the shadows and non-formal economies in our transnational and globalized world that make such things possible, we might find ourselves trying to look at places on a map that lie much further away than free territory in Bosnia during the Siege.86 Carolyn Nordstrom asks questions such as these, questions which suggest that our understanding of war should include the “transnational cultures of militarization and economic gain” that constitute its existence just as much as we consider its chaotic screams, or torn limbs, or battle cries.87 These questions arose from her

85 Andreas, Blue Helmets Black Markets, 60.

86 “Shadows, as I define them, refer to the complex sets of cross-state economic and political linkages that move outside formally recognized state-based channels. I use the term shadows (rather than “criminal” or “illegal”) because the transactions defining these networks aren’t confined solely to criminal, illicit, or illegal activities, but cross various divides between legal, quasi-legal, and downright illegal activities. This isn’t a study of individual people operating in the shadows, but of the vast networks of people who move goods and services worldwide— networks that broker power comparable to, and in many cases greater than, the power of some of the world’s states. I have come to this area of research through the study of warzones, where non-state actors and transactions are perhaps most visible.” Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 106-107.

87 Ibid., 10.

ethnographic work in various war zones, and yet, across these war zones, she often encountered the same set of characters:

“My inquiry into these issues began with the basic question: How do governments and rebel groups alike obtain extremely expensive weapons, communications, and security systems and the entire range of supplies necessary to wage war when they don’t have a sufficient tax base to cover these purchases, many of which are sanctioned? Furthermore, how do these war-related systems move from the industries of the cosmopolitan centers of the world across all known forms of il/legality into the hands of soldiers, and how do the precious resources that pay for these goods move back across all these equally complex lines of il/licitness? How is business, both local and international, configured in these equations? Why are illegal drugs, precious gems, weapons, and basic foods simultaneously moving along entangled routes, and why can one see the same international cast of businesspeople, profiteers, and black-marketeers transporting these war-related supplies across the warzones of the globe?”88

The supplies that come out of the Tunnel of Hope are not free. They are purchased at outrageously inflated prices in Butmir. They are purchased at outrageously inflated prices because supplies for a Sieged city are desperately needed for survival. Another way one might phrase this, in economic principles far more familiar to us: supplies (supply) in Sarajevo became a scarce resource in high demand, and thus the value of these goods (Is there any higher value that can be placed upon material goods than their ability to sustain human life?) exponentially skyrockets. War profiteering may sound sensational, but in many ways, war profiteering also follows economic principles that we often consider quite mundane.

Supplies in Butmir, or bribes to pay the Bosnian army soldiers who run the tunnel in order to get oneself there, might be paid for with the currency of Bosnia’s wartime - cigarettes and German Deutsche marks. Civilians can also pass through the Tunnel, but only if they have the right paperwork; otherwise, it is deemed illegal by the Bosnian army. This can be circumvented, or even if it is not, even if one has the proper paperwork, access to the Tunnel is a good in and of itself, and often, it must be traded for. And if it cannot be traded for with

88 Ibid., 92-93.

cigarettes, or Deutch marks, or eggs or grain or alcohol, it can be gained by parting with family heirlooms. The Tunnel of Hope itself is not free. Though it is touted in Bosnia as the Tunnel of

Hope or the Tunnel of Salvation, it is also known informally amongst its citizens as the “Tunnel of Smugglers.” As one woman told me, “To get through the tunnel, you have to give the guard on duty a bribe. I gave him the earrings my mother-in-law gave me when I got married - the one

I was to give to my own daughter someday. That was not enough. When I returned, I gave him some of the eggs and salt I had bought with my mother-in-law’s necklace. Once I saw him on the street and demanded he let me buy them back, and he laughed at me, told me I was probably alive thanks to the food I got by using the Tunnel.”

Danin leads our group back outside, to a large covered space with an entrance that is simply a wall-less side - easy for tour groups to stroll in and out of as the approximately 20- minute museum video plays on an endless loop, with long benches and giant mounted TVs which can accommodate far more tourists than a small bunker room. I too, have now seen this video many times - the footage of men in the Bosnian army digging the tunnel with the only supplies they could muster - shovels and hands and a few wheelbarrows for tools, the footage of an old woman who waits outside the entrance to the tunnel and gives them water - the gendered work of war. The old woman reminds me of other war stories of old women I have heard from the war years. Jasmin has just told me that he recently ran into an elderly woman who used to give him and the other soldiers rotating out to the front-line bread whenever she could. After the war, when they run into each other for the first time, she will tell him, “You got fat” and he will smile. There are other stories of old women during the war that are less kind, stories of Serbs who stayed in the city but who set themselves apart from their Sieged comrades - women who walked around in Serbian Orthodox religious garments in the streets of Sarajevo so as not to be shot.

But I no longer spend my time on these war tunnel tours watching the video, I spend it outside with the tour guides from various companies who use the time as a break to chat with one another over cigarettes. Danin wordlessly offers me a cigarette, but I shake my head no and pull out my own - Luckys with three warning signs in “three different languages” that all say the same thing. Nejra, who used to work at the government info office, is here today with new tourists taking a war tour with her fledgling company. Nejra stops shaking her head and turns to me as I join the conversation. “I just found out that the Woman in Charge hid my brochures underneath her counter!” she says. She laughs. She sounds less angry than I would suppose, and not at all surprised. “See, I told you things like this always happen there!” Danin nods and turns to Emir, the guide from Groovy tours who tried to pick up local maps for his company saying,

“Try and come back Thursday around 1 or 2, the Woman in Charge will not be there until 3.”

Who is the Woman in Charge? She is the wife of a man with ties high up in the government, who started her own tour company, the Business Tour, out of the Official

Government Info Bureau. Legally, the Tourist Information Bureau is not supposed to give tours at all – simply to provide information to tourists and to promote Bosnia’s tour companies. The

Woman in Charge will deny that any tour guides work there; the Woman in Charge will not allow money to be handed over by tourists in the office with its security cameras, nor will she allow her tour guides to take money in the streets. I’m told by the Government Information

Bureau’s employees both present and former that she fears not penalties or imprisonment – but other government high-ups with their wealth and power and personal bank accounts filled with euros designated to transition Bosnia into the EU who might find out that she has started her own for personal profit illegal war tour company. Then the Woman in Charge’s money becomes fair game.

The war tour guides of Sarajevo know the Woman in Charge. Many of them are afraid to speak about her. In 2012, the year the Woman in Charge took over and changed the Official Info

Bureau from a place to give out information and funnel tourists to companies into her own personal war tour money-maker, local tour guides and operators tried to organize and get the

Official Info Bureau to shut-down. In large part, this is because the always highly recommended

Business Tour, “the best war tour in Bosnia,” eats away at the profits of agencies who are supposed to receive tourist traffic from the Official Info Bureau to their doorsteps. Some of the war tour guides, I know, like a woman named Sara, are less concerned about the money and far more incensed by the tour guides who work at the government’s Official Information Bureau office – not all of which, but many, know very little about the war itself. They get dates wrong, the years the war lasted wrong, the events leading up to Sarajevo’s Siege wrong. In fact, Sara and some of the other tour guides make a request of me that I decline. They want me to go on the Business tour and spy for them, report back the information the Official Info guides share about the war that is at best, incorrect and at worst, egregiously misleading.

In the here and now, as I chat over cigarettes with Emir, Nejra, and Danin, I mention this story of when the Official Info Office was first taken over by wealthy government higher-ups a few years ago and the time I was asked to transition from ethnographer to spy. Nejra laughs again and says, “Good thing you did not take a tour with me then! I was one of those tour guides who did not know anything; the first few times I gave tour I got everything wrong! The Woman in Charge told me it didn’t matter, that ‘the tourists will only come for one war tour ever and leave; they will never know if what you say is wrong. But after that first tour, I was so ashamed,

I started reading all of those books on our history on the back shelves.” Nejra’s claim that she knew “nothing” about the war contains a certain epistemological irony. She is a war child of

Sarajevo who remembers the blasts of bombs and the day her father finally came home from the

war after his arm was blown off in the fighting. But epistemological irony or no, it was at the

Official Info Bureau that Nejra discovered her love of being a war tour guide, and through her work there that she began to supplement her education about her own war-time history with the books that line the back shelves of the Official Info Bureau about Bosnia’s wartime years,

YouTube videos, and anything else she could get her hands on. Now her pamphlets for Sunset travel lie buried behind a counter so as not to disrupt the Woman in Charge’s smattering of

Business Tour flyers across its shiny green surface.

The shuffling of papers hidden underneath shiny green counters presented to the outside world also speaks to an institutional infrastructure within Bosnia today which makes it difficult to know information about tourism in Bosnia; despite the promises of shiny green Tourist

Information signs or the tourism statistics the government officially reports. It is difficult, for instance, to know how many war tour companies exist in Sarajevo. Sarajevo Discovery tours, whatever the Woman in Charge may tell you, is very much alive and well, still offers its

Sarajevo Roses tour, and has never remotely been out of business at all. Some tour company owners tell me that they simply register their businesses as NGOs, as it is one of the more manageable ways to navigate the shadow realm of doing business in Bosnia. It is also difficult to find reliable statistics about how much money tour companies make or how many tourists pass through Sarajevo.

It is also difficult to know how many war tour guides, exactly, there are. I hear different numbers thrown out for the number of officially registered tour guides in Bosnia, meaning those who have finished a tourism degree and an exam in order to earn an official tour guide license.

The guestimates of how many officially registered guides there are in Bosnia tend to be paltry, ranging from seven to ten or so. Whatever the number, no doubt it is small: there is little incentive to officially register as a tour guide as the entity you will officially register with, is, of

course, the government, and they will require you to pay taxes on your official license. And whether a guide is “officially registered” or not, any employee of any business in Bosnia is an instant seventy-percent tax due to the government on behalf of your employer. I will say that one more time. If you hire someone to work for you and give them a much-needed source of income, then seventy percent of the salary that you pay per employee must be paid to the government in taxes. Many business owners simply cannot afford the government’s taxation of their employees. Tourism companies, like many businesses in Bosnia, tend to have one official employee that receives government benefits and whose salary is taxed; the rest of the war tour guides will work under the table. The majority of war tour guides in Sarajevo, whatever the government might tell you, are not officially registered tour guides, but rather, illegal workers.

We close our break with Danin’s last comment for the day upon the Woman in Charge,

“She told us we could not accept tips anymore, that our tips are a part of the tour and need to go directly back to the office as well as the payments,” – groans all around and some laugher, but little surprise - and head back to the Pavilion to join our respective tour groups.

Who is the Woman in Charge? She is a product of history, and in many ways that history is the history of the UN’s involvement in the Bosnian War. For as Peter Andreas notes in his book, Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo:

“International intervention…[can] also create an economic opportunity structure for illicit trade that helps to criminalize the political economy of the targeted area. This strengthens the hands of criminal actors…and encourages closer ties between political leaders and the criminal underworld that can become entrenched and persist long after sanctions are lifted, and the conflict is over.”89

89 Andreas, Blue Helmets Black Markets, 164.

The war may be over, but it is not gone. War profiteering, and its engenderment through the

UN’s humanitarian policies, has also catalyzed illicit networks that still exist today, and those networks and actors are deeply entrenched with the political elites that run a post-war Bosnia.

War tourism is a booming business in economically stagnant Bosnia, and it would be naïve to think that every actor one encounters as a tourist (a guide, a company owner, a hotel owner, the woman who runs the Official Info Tourist Bureau) is simply a “Survivor” and whatever telling images the category of “Survivor” may conjure – be they of wartime heroics and altruism, perseverance and resilience in the face of overwhelming and unfathomable circumstances, or victimization. (Though of course, war is a multivalent set of processes and actors, and these things exist as well). But war tourism in Bosnia is also a business, and in this sense the Business Tour is, as the Woman in Charge might say, the “ultimate” war tour of

Sarajevo.

Oftentimes tourists that I have interviewed have expressed a sentiment similar to that of a woman from Louisiana named Cay, who tells me, “One of the best things about going on a war tour is that you know that you are doing something that creates jobs for people who really need them; these people have been through so much, and they need a way to make money.” Such comments are also reflected in some of my interviews with Sarajevans who are not involved with the war tour industry. My former landlord, Sejad, for example, tells me that, “I think the war tourism industry is great for Bosnia! You in America have places like Alcatraz, and we should be the same, able to get businesses like that here.” I have no qualm with this particular idea, but rather, the vacuum that it can at times reside in - history-less times, contextual-less spaces, set apart from the material realities of the world in which we move both through and against.

For in places such as Bosnia where dark tourism industries emerge, it would do well to remind ourselves that those very industries are not, as Durkheim’s famous definition of the

sacred would have it, “set apart,” from the world of the profane, nor from the local context in which they are embedded. It is easy to take for granted the premise that atrocities and disasters are the very conditions upon which dark tourist industries depend. But places devastated by forces such as war and genocide also experience the concomitant problems that arise alongside such atrocities. Such problems are far more long-term, and often include fragile post-war states, politically corrupt actors, and globalized illicit networks that not only engender activities such as war profiteering during a given conflict but continue to exist and influence post-conflict scenes long after the mayhem itself is deemed to be officially over.

This is not to suggest that these industries are not purposeful spaces where meaningful stories are shared and performed, nor to suggest that they are not filled with many of the actors we may well expect them to be – survivors, those who wish to share their story with the world, or those who ask us to imagine ourselves as the Other in other circumstances. But war tours in

Bosnia, as dark tourism sites more generally, also exist because they have the power to generate wealth in places rendered vulnerable by violence. And it would be foolish of us to assume that these industries are not vulnerable to those who gained wealth and power not just during, but because of the very conflicts and devastation that have created the possibility for a dark tourism site to exist.

Of course, those who gain wealth and power from sites such as war zones, as Carolyn

Nordstrom reminds us, extend far beyond our reifications of a bounded locality and move through networks of il/legality all the way to the cosmopolitan centers of the world. And from those cosmopolitan centers also oftentimes emerges the traveler, ready to embark upon glorious or rejuvenating adventures and leave, if only temporarily, the profanity of their daily world behind.

But the traveler has not left behind the world of the profane at all, though she may pay with colorful Euro bills and clinking Euro coins to construct her Bosnian war tour with the shiny tinged veneer of a negative sacred. The world we move through as tourists, is, after all, a world globally interconnected through vast and at times nebulous networks of power, political forces, moving populations, cultural appropriations and their subsequent re-appropriations, entertaining hegemonic exportations, interwoven through and through with histories echoing from years past that they refuse to be left behind. And yet that profane landscape, for all of its brutality, is the material of our shared world.

There is no clean-cut and stable line that separates the world of the profane from the realm of the sacred. Rather it is the world of the profane that conditions us for the very possibilities of the sacred; it is the world of profane, for all of its ordinariness, that authorizes and permeates the production of religious life. That which is deemed sacred cannot be set apart from the forms of power that condition the possibilities for religion’s emergence as a “constituting activity in the world,” even if our own post-Enlightenment and post-Reformation histories lead us on wild goose chases in which we try to insulate the sacred realm from forms of power such as the modern state or capitalist production.90

If there is an opening for the sacred in Bosnia’s war tours – a point of access, a potentiality for transformation – then it is in the possibility of considering that one has not left the profane world behind at all but rather encountered it and one’s relation to Others within it anew. It there is an opening for the sacred in Bosnia’s war tours, it is only through an engagement with the politics of the war tour’s performance and its emphasis upon the shared historical, structural, and global realities that have led to its existence as an industry in the first

90 See Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 47, 28, 39.

place. If there is a sacred to be generated in the ephemeral, co-performed rituals that transpire between war guides and tourists, then I’d like to think its definition is less rooted in the work of

Turner or Durkheim, and a little bit closer to Caillois’s theoretical rendering.91

Here, the creative endeavors of human play induce the sacred in order to redress the things in our lives that have become rigid and immobile; generating the sacred has the power to shake off our sedentary ossifications and classifications and create, instead, momentum. The sacred, in other words, is where things that tend to get stuck, like essentialized others who suffer elsewhere, erasures of transnational and interconnected histories, and reifications of things called by the names “war,” or “capital,” can begin the work of becoming unstuck. The sacred is in the potentiality of that human-produced generative force whereby things that are static can become dynamic, whereby things that are stuck can begin to move.

91 Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 33-59.

80 CHAPTER 3: TRANSGRESSION AND DARK HUMOR: ON THE EXCESSES OF VIOLECE, LAUGHTER, AND SPAM MEAT

As it is the most frequented stop at the site of Bosnia’s war tours, I have been to the

Tunnel of Hope many times. One of my earliest trips was in the summer of 2012, with Sara, a tour guide who now owns her own company, but who then was a tour guide for a company called INSIDER that promised tourists a whirl through Sarajevo’s “Times of Misfortune.” When

I showed up at the Insider building to book the war tour and to introduce myself as a researcher,

Sara pointedly told me that “I speak like I am from Belgrade,” (the capital of Serbia), a loaded comment. Speaking like someone from Belgrade denotes not only a sort of “Serbian-ness,” but a

“Belgrade-ness,” - a language hierarchy touted by Serbs inside and outside of the city in which to speak as if one is from Belgrade denotes some sort of proper way to speak the shared language of

Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. Despite this, I will make the mistake of asking her if she would ever travel to Serbia, to which I receive an even more hostile, “NO! Never! I will never go there.” Given Sara’s own war story, this is not surprising.

A few days later, Sara gathered together a group of twelve waiting war tourists assembled at INSIDER tours and led us outside into the sunny and sweltering June afternoon to begin the tour. Directly across the street from Insider is a museum dedicated to the assassination of heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire Franz Ferdinand; adjacent is the Latin Bridge (Latinska Cuprija).

The Latin Bridge is utilized at times by tour guides as a story spot to mark his assassination by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip, and the forthcoming onslaught of World War

81 I. In fact, Franz Ferdinand’s very famous assassination is the reason the Balkans, or Bosnia, or

Sarajevo (there is often slippage in this metaphor) was nicknamed “the powder keg of Europe,” a moniker which tapped into the idea that all the terrible woes of The Great War might have been prevented were it not for the sparks set a-flying by these insignificant nations mired in their backwardness and violence. Though, as colonial histories tend to do, this grand narration of historical events often misplaces the fact that this century-ago assassination attempt was also an attempt to end the Austro-Hungarian empire’s colonial rule in order to create a Yugoslav Slavic state.92

Sara led us to the Latin Bridge to begin the war tour and said, “Three things make

Sarajevo known to the rest of the world. One, Franz Ferdinand. Two, Olympics. Three, WAR.

The second one, thank god, is positive. The third one to live through is the worst thing. We’re still waiting for the fourth, which is to be positive if we follow the logic. The war…the war is one part of our history that I would erase.”

“I have some more history for you now so that I don’t just throw you into wartimes,”

Sara continued. We, the tourists, stood in a ring around her and she asked, “Does anyone know the countries that composed the former Yugoslavia?” One young man replied, “Well, Bosnia” with a grin and another tourist fractures their breath with a little laugh. Sara does not, and the crowd goes silent; it is not (yet) the time for laughter.93 An older German woman, Katharina,

92 Princip, a Bosnian Serb whose own nationalism was in keeping with pan-Southern Slav or pro-Yugoslav sentiments, has become a far more polarizing figure in the wake of Yugoslavia’s destruction and the conflicts of the 1990s. Some Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats have come to see him as an emblem of “Greater Serbia,” or Serbian expansionist politics, responsible for the horrors of yet another devastating war in yet another historical time. Conversely, Princip has also been mobilized both in Serbia and among Bosnian Serbs as a national hero. See Tim Butcher, The Trigger: The Hunt for Gavrilo Princip: The Assassin Who Brought the World to War (London: Vintage, 2015). Memory is fraught, contested, and complex, and I mention the circulation of Princip as an object of memory above within the context of what Andrej Grubacic characterizes as the role of Western interventionism in constructing the Balkans as a “Balkans from above.” See Andrej Grubacic, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays After Yugoslavia (Oakland: PM Press, 2010). 93 Laughter has traditionally been an undertheorized topic in academia. Some of the origins of that undertheorizing date back to Plato, whose philosophical work emphasized the undesirability of humor, given its ability to exceed a fetishized rational. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns

tentatively suggested, “Kosovo?” to which Sara said, “Good, but, it is an autonomous province.”

I generally remained quiet when tour guides asked these kinds of questions, but Sara had no interest in that. Sara already knows that I am a researcher who has been on multiple tours, and she made a point of actively quizzing me throughout her war tour. She used this moment to turn to me and say, “And you, war tour girl who goes on all the tours, what are the countries?”

“Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Macedonia, the autonomous provinces of

Vojvodina and Kosovo ‘within Serbia,’ respectively,” I answered. Sara was invested in her work; she wants to know that her tourists hear – no, listen – to the stories of Bosnia’s war that she takes upon herself to share with them. Answering correctly gave me a sense of relief from

Sara’s penetrating gaze.

As Sara told us, the wars over the break-up of the former Yugoslavia began after the Tito era, as the communist party lost power amidst Yugoslavia’s growing economic precarity and the surge of nationalist politicians that took advantage of it to popularly mobilize rigid us-them binaries and divisive ethno-religious imaginaries. The culmination of this process in the countries that comprised the former Yugoslavia was an impetus toward autonomy that became a

Yugoslav secessionist movement of the 1990s. “First was Slovenia and Croatia, who seceded on

June 25, 1991,” Sara said. “Now Slovenia, their war, if you can call it that, lasted only ten days

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). The work of Plato, which often emphasizes laughter as a tool of ridicule or mockery, is generally parsed into the Superiority Theory, one of three major frameworks in Western historical thought which have often shaped the scholarly theorization of laughter. Thomas Hobbes is a notable and often cited proponent of this school, and he argues that laughter arises in moments when we feel ourselves superior to others, or even to former versions of ourselves. See Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (London: Cass, 1969). A second prominent school of thought is categorized under the banner Relief Theory, whose most famous proponent is surely Freud. Here, laughter is a release of nervous or surplus energy – for example, in Freud’s work, the joke often provides a socially sanctioned way to expend one’s energy regarding the taboo. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (London: Penguin, 2002). Finally, Incongruity Theory is an ironically straight-forward name, and it is a term generally applied to theorists who suggest that laughter arises when we are presented with conditions of incongruity. Kant is often cited here. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (New York: Hafner, 1951).

– a ten-day war!” and then she laughs aloud as if she had been struck funny. “Our Siege lasted for too long, if I may say so, 1,425 days.”

Slovenia’s war was succinct in part due to the fact that Slovenians themselves occupied most of the posts operated by the Former Yugoslav Army (JNA) within the borders of what would become the Slovenian nation-state. The subsequent war between Croatia and Serbia over

Croatia’s secession, though it did not formally conclude until Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia’s peace negotiations of the November 21,1995 Dayton agreement, was mitigated for a time by an armistice signed under UN supervision in January of 1992. This armistice, signed by the infamous nationalist leaders of Croatia and Serbia, Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosevic, was fostered less by international intervention than by the opportunity it provided for Tudjman and

Milosevic to meet and create their own back-door deal to partition Bosnia between themselves.

This behind the scenes partitioning was surprisingly amicable, aimed at creating a “Greater

Croatia,” and a “Greater Serbia.” The structure of these “Greater” nationalist imaginaries dismissed the realities of Bosnia’s highly mixed ethnic populations (the most highly mixed of any of the former Yugoslav nations) and largely multi-cultural history, opting instead to annex

Bosnian territories that had large numbers of Bosnian Croats or Bosnian Serbs back into the countries where they “rightfully belonged.” When Bosnia seceded from the former Yugoslavia on March 3, 1992, it found itself torn between two enemies who, but a short time ago, had been fellow compatriots. The Bosnian War and the Siege of Sarajevo began less than a month later, on April 6, 1992.

After Sara provided our group with some of the broader context of the war, she loaded our group onto a large tour bus. Along the way to the Tunnel museum she pointed out war tour sites in Sarajevo that I have come to think of as standard, such as the former Holiday Inn hotel, where international journalists set up shop during the war. Sara also pointed out the locations of

a couple of graveyards along the way, making sure we take a look at them through the bus windows. (When the war tour is over, on our bus ride back to Insider tour company, one of the tourists will ask, “Is this the graveyard we passed before?” and Sara will say, “No, but there are many of them here”).

When we arrived at the Tunnel, Sara paid the man who works at the entrance our museum fees and once everyone on our tour group was accounted for, she ushered us into the interior of the museum, where Sara’s war tour will begin. Sara first took us along the walls of the museum to examine the framed photographs. When she reaches the photo of the Olympic

Stadium, she says that “this one is very sad for me” and she seems to sink into herself a little bit. The photo, she tells us, is no longer really of an Olympic stadium, during the war it became a burial ground for Bosnian soldiers, many of them unknown. Something about her comportment in front of this small, framed picture mounted on the Tunnel Museum’s wall sticks with me. “Sticky” seems the right word for moments like this, the very stuff of affect theory, where some atmospheric resonance is temporarily produced by the interplay of objects and persons bound together, (stuck together), through the praxis of the war tour.94 The force of that affect punctures this moment for me, swirling through an ephemeral moment of becoming and

94 I find that Affect theory provides a useful resource for ethnographically rendering/writing the tours as assemblages, as each tour itself is a production in difference, each is itself comprised of different actors and objects, as well as that trans- or circulatory momentum often couched by affect theorists in terms of the production of “stickiness.” Sara Ahmed suggests that her use of affect theory “explores how emotions can move through the movement or circulation of objects. Such objects become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension.” Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 2004), 11. Gregg and Seigworth also lay some nice groundwork for thinking through affect as a theoretical resource. I offer some of their comments that inform my work here: “Affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement…that can likewise suspend us.” Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1.

creating some kind of unwieldy slippage as I stare at a photo of an Olympic stadium that is now a graveyard.

Laughter on a War Tour

Here is a war story Sara laughed her way through telling our tour group at the Tunnel, and it is one that if you travel to Sarajevo, you too might hear at the Tunnel from a war guide, or quite possibly speaking with a local. A woman tries to get from Butmir back to Sarajevo with much-needed food supplies for her family – a cow, that will provide them with milk and cheese and possibly meat if it comes to that. She arrives at the Tunnel of Hope, but the cow cannot fit in the Tunnel. It is only large enough for a single person to walk through hunched down and often flooded with water. She can go above ground across the airport with the cow – and get killed along with the cow. Chetniks will try to determine which of their bodies has more holes in it.

She can turn around – desert her family and leave them to starve or scramble to buy grass to eat at the market. Instead, she finds some blue paint and covers each side of the cow with 2 large blue letters – UN. She leads the cow across the runway, and the Serbs laugh so hard at her open mockery of the ineffective United Nations that they let her and her United Nations cow pass through. No matter what side of the war people were on; Bosnians love this story. Serbs and

Croatians who have come for war tours love it too. That’s the funny thing about the Balkans – across the lines that divide people there remains a shared love of dark and absurdist humor…and a shared contempt for the UN.

Sara’s story has prepared us to enter the Tunnel’s primary tourist attraction – the small, walkable segment of the war-time built Tunnel of Hope, or Salvation, or Smuggling - depending on who you talk to. She is right, a cow would not fit inside. All the while she will say things like, “Imagine being a soldier in here, hunched over, and the tunnel is flooded with water to your knees.” But she does not participate in the Tunnel’s other main attraction - a small viewing room

in a war bunker-outfitted room where a TV provides documentary footage of the Tunnel being built interspersed with footage of an ablazed and bombed Sarajevo. Sara says that she has seen it many times, and today is not a day to watch for her – “Sometimes I watch it, but some days it is hard for me.” Knowing Sara, as well as the ways that the practice of remembering the war with groups of international tourists in tow – the demands of the job - can weigh heavy at times on

Sarajevo’s war guides, I don’t doubt that there are days when it becomes harder for her to watch war documentary footage than others, or that there are days when she just cannot. Years later, I will also wonder if she was having a much-needed cigarette break while talking shop and life with her fellow war guides outside.

Sara returned but a second before the video ended (how could she not, when the video is on a timed loop and she has done this so many times before?), and then she led us straight to an exhibit in the museum’s interior. She knelt down and told us to gather closer in around her.

“Now these, these are the ration packs given to us Bosnians during the war to help us from the

International Community.” She points to a kit that has a familiarity to me in a sea of foreign- ness: “For you Americans, these came from your country to aid us during the war.” Her tone is a little wry; I don’t know what’s coming, but it’s something. “They are your left-over ration packs from the Vietnam war.” And she laughs.

“And this one,” Sara continued, “This is from our Arab neighbors and Medhamet,” (an organization she describes as akin to the Red Cross). “You were only supposed to get these if you had lost someone; they would have extra rations in them, but when you opened them up whatever the most expensive items were would be missing.” Yet another layer of war profiteering that pervades the Tunnel of Hope. There is something else happening here too; something intimate about the way that Sara says this – and the way she looked at that Stadium

photo – and the way she accused me of speaking as if I was from Belgrade - this is the moment that I intuitively know that Sara lost someone in the war.

“Intuition,” too, is the stuff of affect theory, with its charged moments of becoming that arise, as Seigworth and Gregg write, through “forces of encounter.”95 In this sense, intuition is not a claim to interiority, but rather a “gradient of bodily capacity…that rises and falls not only along various rhythms and modalities of encounter but also through the troughs and sieves of sensation and sensibility, an incrementalism that coincides with belonging to comportments of matter of virtually any and every sort.”96 The force of “Intuition,” or even “affect,” is not at all immaterial or interior but rather constituted through the materiality of our world. It is found in bodies kneeling around a leftover ration pack from another war, listening to Sara’s voice, watching her hold it almost intimately, as if she had many times before. Affect, as it “moves through sieves of sensation and sensibility,” does so, to borrow from Robert Orsi’s phrasing on the materiality of religious life, because it is “mired in matter.”97

“And this,” Sara says, “this is something special.” She has moved on from the ration packs and is holding up a tin can – innocuous looking and with a hint of silver still gleaming under the tarnish. “This is Ikar.” Ikar is a canned meat product, in consistency much like spam.

“This food” – she almost spits on the word as she says it - “was so inedible that people would put it on the ground for the cats and dogs and not even they would touch it.” Perhaps this is true, and perhaps it is not; I do not know what starving people do and do not eat during wartime. I can only tell you this: Sara is but one of many Sarajevans who has told me this same tale regarding

Ikar. And the wording is always the same. “Not even the dogs and cats would touch it.”

95 Ibid, 2.

96 Ibid. 97 Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion” in Lived Religion: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 6.

Sara will end her Times of Misfortune tour in the neighborhood of Grbavica, outside a large and locally popular café called Tito’s. But a few meters away from the outdoor seating is a monument built by the Bosnian people to thank the International community for all they did for them during the war, for the lengths they went to in order to provide Bosnia with humanitarian relief and come to her people’s aid in their hour of need.98 The monument is a large can of Ikar, which reads “Monument to the International Community, from the Grateful Citizens of

Sarajevo.” The sides of the can contain the words, “Canned Beef” in English, as well as the emblem of the EU flag. The Ikar monument is a site of material culture that embodies the force of counter-memory, its very existence a counter to Western interpretations that continue to inscribe Bosnia’s past, as well as a testament to a dark humor that pervades Bosnia.99

Upon seeing the Spam Can, some of the tourists remain solemn, keeping up the respectful comportment that we tourists have participated in throughout the tour as we listened to stories sad, dark, and grim. But some tourists bust into grins and chortles, and as I too begin to laugh, I become keenly aware of feeling eyes on us; they are Sara’s. She gives us a small smile. She has another one for an Australian man who guffaws and instantly pulls out his phone to take a picture. Sometimes laughter communicates understanding. Laughter is also buoyancy, and it is contagious…other tourists in the group allow themselves to chuckle, to break into mouth-busting grins, and to take photos. Sara is smiling and laughing too. I remember this most of all, her smiling laughter – a laughter she molded “with us,” rather than “at us,” as the popular English expression would have it.

98 The Ikar monument, or “Spam Can,” was erected in April 2007 by artist Nebojsa Seric Soba, in accordance with the Sarajevo Centre for Contemporary Art.

99 The Foucauldian concept of counter-memory puts practices of remembering and forgetting within the context of power relations, whereby which counter-memory becomes a form of resistance that can challenge dominant narratives of the past. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

Sara does not say much about the monument, her one last war-tour-stop for today’s tourists. But in a way she does not need to, she has been using her war tour to prepare us to come here without our ever knowing it. The context of the monument is not her lack of narration, but the invitations she has extended to us to laugh along the way at the Tunnel museum. Those invitations to laugh have been extended by a can of Ikar so unfit for human consumption that “not even the cats and dogs” would touch it during a war where people starved, to laugh at the absurdity of Vietnam leftover ration packs, to laugh with pitch-perfect Bosnian at dark humor stories of UN blue painted cows from Sarajevo’s wartime years.

The Ikar monument which captivates such laughter is itself a captivating object, and it has been written about at length by Anna Sheftel, in a piece entitled: “Monument to the

International community, from the grateful citizens of Sarajevo: Dark humour as counter- memory in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina.”100 Sheftel argues that the Ikar monument is an example of the way that dark humor (crni humor) functions as a form of counter-memory in

Bosnia. Building upon Foucault’s argument that counter-memory, or “memory [that] can be used to speak truth to power, or challenge dominant interpretations of the past that seek to oppress or repress,” she suggests that Bosnian dark humor is in itself a “political force.”101 And herein she notes that though “the details of the cruelest or most absurd joke” is often a “favorite topic of conversation” among academics and NGO workers in the region, it is frequently dismissed, swept under the rug if you will, despite the fact that its subject matter often directly speaks to (laughs to?) the research and aims that so many of these outsiders strive to pursue,

100 Anna Sheftel, “Monument to the international community, from the grateful citizens of Sarajevo: Dark humor as counter-memory in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Memory Studies 5, no. 2 (April 2012): 145-164.

101 Ibid., 147.

ameliorate, and explicate: “the former Yugoslavia’s recent violence, and how narratives of that violence are affecting the region’s present.”102

Laughter and Transgression

I would add to Sheftel’s thesis, which I think is a good one, a Foucauldian language of transgression to speak to (laugh to?) Bosnian dark humor alongside and in affirmation of a language of counter-memory.103 Semantically, we often think of transgression with a connotation of violation; transgressions defy or violate established laws, morality, social norms and social orders. Perhaps, such as in the case of the Ikar monument, this is not always a bad thing. More importantly, inherent in our common-place use of the word “transgression” is the idea that something is already there to be transgressed, that a limit or boundary that governs our lives and our sentiments simply exists. The transgression disturbs our sensibilities because it has, like a “below the belt” comment in an argument, crossed a reified line – an abstraction made real - that we presuppose was already there.

But the line, or the limit was not there to begin with. It was created in the same moment as the transgression itself was created, as it burst into being and crossed a border it constituted only in order to exceed it. I return again to the idea of a heated argument between persons: the below the belt comment that has wounded and ruptured one’s sensibilities or person. Something has been transgressed, yes, but that transgression itself revealed the limit. Or better yet, given that we know from the work of Austin that words are not a reflection of reality, but rather words are actions themselves which actively create and shape our world (words DO things); that transgression itself formed a boundary or limit that could not be crossed in the very moment that it also exceeded it.104

102 Ibid., 146.

103 Ibid. 104 J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1962)

What might this piece of post-war Bosnian material culture, this can made of spam, transgress? In order to ask this question, we must first ask, I think, what is the limit (or limitation) that the Ikar monument’s transgression brings into being? Another way we might pose this question of transgressions and limits is, “What is at stake?” What is at stake, I believe, is the very logic of what Didier Fassin deems, “humanitarian reason,” and the violence which its language and practice of sympathy, compassion, and solidarity for those who suffer puts under erasure:

It is not the condescension on the part of the persons giving aid or the intention of their act of assistance that are at stake, but the very conditions of the social relation between the two parties, which, whatever the goodwill of the agents, make compassion a moral sentiment with no possible reciprocity. It can of course be pointed out that the apparently disinterested gift assumes a counter gift in the form of an obligation linking the receiver to the benefactor—for example, the obligation on the receivers sometimes to tell their story, frequently to mend their ways, and always to show their gratitude. But it is clear that in these conditions the exchange remains profoundly unequal. And what is more, those at the receiving end of humanitarian attention know quite well that they are expected to show the humility of the beholden rather than express demands for rights.105

Fassin further suggests that humanitarian reason is “embedded in a Western sociodicy,” both historically and genealogically.106 Historically, because the history of humanitarian reason

“belongs to the history of Europe and North America,” and “genealogically because the ethos from which it proceeds has its source in the Christian world – in terms of both the sacralization of life and the valorization of suffering.”107 In this sense, Fassin concludes, humanitarian reason is a religious project, a contemporary “victory of religion” to be found “in its lasting presence at the heart of our democratic secular values.”108

105 Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, trans. Rachel Gomme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 3-4.

106 Ibid., 248.

107 Ibid.

108 Ibid., 249.

But here again transgression will not be denied; transgression becomes all the more suited as a resource with which to respond to the forces of Fassin’s sociodicy lurking within the discursive practices of humanitarian reason, for it, too, is a language of the possibilities of religious life. Transgression as a thematic within the field of religious studies is also a language of how humans construct the sacred through the forces of profound excess and lost.109 In this model, objects, persons, and places are made sacred not by prohibition or being set apart, or by non-human produced spaces or events, but rather by something more akin to an eruption, by transgressive acts that themselves create the very limits or boundaries they exceed in their moment of outburst.110 In the words of Michael Taussig, who writes on “Transgression” as a critical term for religious studies, the very barriers that set apart the sacred from the profane erupt into being through transgression, and such barriers are “fearsomely erected only to be crossed.”111 Bosnian dark humor (crni humor) with its boundary erupting belly laughs and its excesses of the grotesque – its seemingly untouchable topics of violence and horror, and its subsequent excesses of laughter that greet and affirm the excesses of violence itself, is a transgressive force - though it may, as sacred things tend to do, leave us uncomfortable and unnerved. But that discomfort itself is also a hallmark of transgression, for the sacred-making power of transgression lies in its very ability to disturb, or, as Michael Taussig so well states,

109 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (Cambridge: Zone Books, 1992); Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Michael Taussig, “Transgression” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Also see Foucault, Language, Countermemory, Practice, 1980.

110 “Transgression” locates my own work within a lineage that moves away from a functionalist Durkheimian framework in which the realms of sacred and profane are entrenched within a closed system that creates the sacred in order to regenerate a social community. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995). My terminology further excludes authors such as Eliade and Otto, who conceptualize the sacred as an a priori phenomenon which allows human beings to access a distinctly ineffable or numinous experience. See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987); Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).

111 Taussig, “Transgression,” 350.

transgression’s significance for that thing which we call “sacred” lies, in fact, in its

“quintessential emotional and intellectual uncertainty.”112

Crni Humor

Dark jokes (crni humor), not simply in Bosnia, but throughout the Balkans, are dark and disturbing indeed. I remember sharply the first dark joke I was told, by a man named Dzoni who worked in a hostel in Belgrade in 2010. It goes something like this: A little boy asks his mother,

“Mama, what color are my sister’s eyes?” “Blue,” she says. A little bit later in the day he asks her again, “Mama, what color are my sister’s eyes?” “Blue,” she states, a little less patiently.

Evening rolls around and the little boy asks his mother again, “Mama, what color are my sister’s eyes?” “Blue!” she yells. “No, they’re not,” he says, “They are RED!” When Dzoni told me the punchline of this joke, he held out his hands in front of him, his palms facing upward, and each hand curled as if he were holding something. I looked at him, confused. He says the punchline once more, “They are RED, Helen!” and he thrusts his forearms outward, emphasizing the motion and making sure I understand that his cupped hands are miming the action of holding something. “I don’t get it,” I say, apologetically. “They are Red,” Dzoni says, disappointed in me, “because he has plucked her eyes out and his holding them up to his mother.” “Oh,” I say…when I manage to recover my dropped jaw. But then again, the year is only 2010, and I haven’t yet spent enough time in the Balkans to find such things funny.

Many dark jokes in the Balkans, both in Bosnia and other Balkan nation-states that comprise the former Yugoslavia, revolve around two beloved characters, the Bosnians Suljo and

Mujo. They are two strangely shrewd fools as endearing as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Ivana Maček, in her monograph on life during Sarajevo during the Siege, recounts a joke she heard told about Suljo and Mujo during the wartime years:

112 Ibid., 349.

“Mujo and Suljo are in the trenches….

“Where Mujo killed Suljo with his sniper rifle.

The astonished people asked, ‘Mujo! Why on earth did you kill your brother [in the

Muslim faith], Suljo?’

‘Well, you never know these days,’ answered Mujo.

‘I saw Suljo and when I looked through the sniperscope I saw a big cross on his forehead.

So, I fired.”

The cross, of course, was a product of the rifle sight.113

Unsurprisingly, jokes about Suljo and Mujo also often involve smoking cigarettes. When

I interviewed a man named Faruk in 2016, a former soldier who has started his own PTSD organization to help others in Sarajevo who suffer from PTSD symptoms and the long-lasting repercussions of trauma, he tells me this one:

H: One thing I was also researching in Bosnia is "crni humor", because I've noticed...

F: (interrupts): Let me tell you a joke. Two soldiers, Suljo and Mujo are in the trench. A

sniper hits one of the soldiers, Mujo, in his ear and blows it off. So he starts running

around screaming "Aaahh the sniper ripped off my ear!" Suljo asks him, "Are you

looking for your ear?" and Mujo goes, "My ear? No! I'm looking for the cigarette that

was behind it!!!"114

Faruk laughed heartily. “It’s simply humor,” Faruk said, “but there are dark times from the war in that humor. In fact, real humor is when you can laugh at yourself. That kind of humor speaks about your open-mindedness and greatness. I think we are well known for that. Take our

113 Ivana Maček, Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 54.

114 This joke I have heard told at times featuring Suljo and Mujo, at other times the two characters are simply Bosnian soldiers.

Suljo and Mujo jokes; the two most stupid guys in the world, we made them Bosnian. In Serbia or Croatia they don't have such concept of making fun of themselves. But here in Bosnia we do.

They might look down on us as ‘stupid Bosnians,’ but this humor is actually a reflection of our intelligence!115 You have probably noticed that even in Hollywood the hardest thing is to make a good comedy. A good sense of humor is a sign of high intelligence, and it's not my personal opinion, the science says so. A stupid man can't crack jokes.”

I have long been interested and attenuated to the possibilities for the emergence and erasure of Bosnian dark humor in Bosnia’s war tour scene. When I first began my research into

Bosnia’s war tours, one question I had was, “Do Bosnian jokes of dark humor make it into the ritual performances that are Bosnian war tours?” Generally speaking, I must say the answer to this is “not often.” In fact, war tours that I have been a participant in that have included dark humor jokes have often done so due to my express interest in it, a product of my questioning tour guides about the presence of dark humor in their lives and in war tours. For example, Eman, who runs a tour company called Sarajevo Walking Tours, altered one of his city walking tours after our interviews, and took our tour group to the Sarajevo main Post Office. He marked my presence on the tour by saying, “Helen, you especially will like this, since you have asked about dark jokes during the wartime. Here, during the war, someone broke in and graffitied the words,

115 In fact, Suljo and Mujo are popular characters throughout the former Yugoslavia. (In Serbia, more commonly Mujo and Hasso). But as Faruk notes, in other places, such as Serbia and Croatia, Suljo and Mujo are just as often portrayed as the butt of the joke, rather than characters who can laugh to the absurdities of life. Much of this portrayal of Suljo and Mujo outside of Bosnia arises out of commonly joked about Balkans stereotypes. Throughout the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Bosnians are joked about as “stupid,” Montenegrins are joked about as “lazy,” humor directed toward Serbia and Croatia often portrays them as inherently aggressive, as well as pokes fun at some of their historical and political ties to nations outside of the former Yugoslavia (Jokes in this manner align Croatia with Germany and the European Union, Serbians are more commonly laughed at for the nation’s ties with Russia). At the same time, it would be remiss to suggest such stereotypical jokes are always and everywhere the product of forces such as malice or attempts at inducing superiority. For example, such stereotypical jokes can also be regaled within many “mixed” families, including mixed families with social relations that spread across the borders of the former Yugoslav nations.

“Ovo je Srbija” (This is Serbia), and later, someone else broke in and graffitied underneath it the words, “Budalo, ovo je posta” (Fool, this is a post office).

This is not to say that instantiations of crni humor do not ever make it into the tours. But when the dark joke does make it into the ritual performance of a war tour the dark joke also tends to be a bit on the tamer, more translatable to outsiders, splice of the spectrum of Bosnian dark humor. More likely to be shared is a dark joke of resistance embedded in the material culture of wartime, such as the graffiti story told by Eman. Far less likely to be shared with tourists is a dark post-war joke such as this:

Q: “What do you call a child sitting on a swing?”

A: “Target practice.”

Or this:

This Chetnik is out cleansing a Bosniak village when he stumbles over a frightened little boy. “What are you frightened of, little one?” he asks. The kid is too terrified to answer. “Is it my long beard?” he asks. The kid shakes his head no. “Is it my gun?” he asks. The kid shakes his head no. “Well, what are you afraid of then?” he asks. The kid points to the very long knife hanging from the Chetnik’s belt. “Oh that,” the Chetnik says. “No need to be afraid of that little one, I have a smaller one for you.”

This joke also has another variant:

This Chetnik is out cleansing a Bosniak village when he stumbles across a frightened little girl leaning back against a tree. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” he asks. “My family has been murdered, my father, my brothers, my mother.” The Chetnik unbuckles his pants and says,

“Well today is not your lucky day.”

This last joke was told to me by a young man named Hussein who remembers being a young teen in Sarajevo during the war. He laughed with relish when he finished it and said,

“Don’t feel bad that you didn’t laugh, I told you our humor was dark! But, I did not laugh at this joke the first time it was told either. Some refugees came from the Foca and Gorazde villages

(villages in the East of Bosnia that experienced ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Serbs during the war) after the war and I first heard it from them. It was too much for me then, but it became the funniest joke as time passed, absolutely brutal!”

“They came as refugees to Sarajevo?” I ask.

“Hahahahaha…We can say that is the first joke of the story,” laughed Hussein.

Hussein’s commentary on his joke is also a reminder that humor, even “absolutely brutal,” dark humor, is never simply a locatable funny bone within a monolithic culture; jokes are not always funny to all persons in Bosnia any more than they are elsewhere. In this sense, humor to, is a category that must be approached in a consistently intersectional manner.116 At the same time, the study of laughter and crni humor in a post-conflict Bosnia is, much as is the suffering and pain that these jokes often take on for their topic, the study of fundamentally social experiences, whereby which collective modalities and cultural sensibilities shape and render our individual experiences, and our social representations of them.117 Laughter is further written about as a social phenomenon rather poetically by Henri Bergson, who says, “Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound…prolonged by reverberating from one to another…our laughter is…the laughter of a

116 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139-168; Patricia H. Collins, “Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas,” Annual Review of Sociology 41 (August 2015): 1-20.

117 This is a well-documented phenomenon in medical anthropology, as well as in the social suffering anthropological literature. See Sarah Coakley and Kay Kaufman Shelemay eds., Pain and Its Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Mary-Jo Delvechhio Good et al., eds., Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Veena Das, et al., eds., Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering and Recovery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

group.”118 A more contemporary rendering of this idea is found in the work of Sara Ahmed, who suggests that laughter is transpersonal, rather than the product of individual, subject-constituting bodies.119

Bergson, of course, also rather famously wrote that the difference between a comedy and a tragedy lies not in their essential natures, but rather in the degree of distance that we feel toward the event presented to us.120 For Bergson the comic only emerges if one is removed enough from an event, “indifferent” enough to it, to find a way to disinterestedly let-go and laugh; tragedy is found in our proximity to an event, in our inability to remove ourselves from it.

And yet, in a post-war Sarajevo…

Here I will turn again to Ivana Maček’s ethnography of Sarajevan life during the Siege, who comments on the particularness of Bosnian post-conflict dark humor, the way its gruesome jokes and the ability to laugh at them also arise out of the broader context of the war:

“Many of the jokes were impossible to tell outside the town because of their macabre humor. People who did not have the same sort of experience, who judged situations by peacetime standards, had no way to appreciate such jokes. Instead, they tended to find them disturbing and morbid, as was the case with the joke that went: ‘What is the difference between Sarajevo and Auschwitz? There is no gas in Sarajevo.’121

My own experiences of fieldwork at the site of Bosnia’s war tours reflect this observation of Maček’s, of how difficult it can be to share jokes with the population of global tourists who are privileged enough in their various circumstances to travel, and whose experiences are of

“peacetime standards” and lie beyond the boundaries of dark humor. When I ask the war tour

118 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (London: Macmillan, 1911), 4-6.

119 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 2004).

120 Bergson, Laughter, 4-6, 165.

121 Ibid., 52-53.

guides I interview if they ever share Bosnian “crni humor” on their tours, the most common response is:

Dzenana: “They wouldn’t get our humor.”

Mohamed: “You can’t tell jokes like that to tourists, they wouldn’t understand.”

Harun: “You want a dark joke; I’ll tell you a dark joke! My grandfather is now re- building the same destroyed house that he rebuilt after it burnt down in World War II!” And

Harun laughed.

These comments from interviews are overly familiar to me, as they have often been directed toward myself. When I ask Bosnians in my interviews, or sometimes simply in the spaces of daily social conversation if they know any dark jokes, I have often heard the same response, “No, no, our humor here is very dark, you would not find our jokes funny.” Often, I have had to coax or wheedle a joke through performing one first, by demonstrating my ability to participate in dark humor myself, by telling one good-naturedly and relishing the joke as I told it.

Dark jokes in Bosnia are dark indeed, and it seems fair to tell readers that I was not always able to perform a Bosnian dark joke with gusto. But the more stories I collected from the war, the more Bosnian dark humor transgressed my own social norms and discursive practice of humor, and the more my own sense of humor – of what one can find funny – transformed…

But there are moments where dark humor transgresses the ritual performance of the war tour. Here, as in posing the question of the Ikar monument, the Spam Can, or the Canned Beef

Memorial as a site of material culture and crni humor that transgresses what Fassin deems

“humanitarian reason,” I find it useful to ask, “What might a dark joke encountered on a Bosnian war tour transgress?” “And what is at stake in such a transgression?”

I would argue that the dark joke transgresses the very ritual performance of the Bosnian war tour itself, with its emphasis on comporting oneself solemnly, respectfully, as if one was

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visiting a sacrosanct place. Victor and Edith once famously wrote, “A tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist.”122 But in the case of Bosnia’s war tours, or in the sites of dark tourism where spaces of atrocity and disaster are opened to tourists and become available for market-consumption that it is epistemologically and politically linked to, it might be better to ask, “Is a dark tourist half a witness, if a witness is half a dark tourist?”

Laurie Beth Clark, in her essay, “Ethical Spaces,” does a comparative study of dark, or what she calls, “trauma tourism” sites.123 She proposes that these dark spaces, and our behavioral comportment at them, are regulated through norms of etiquette and propriety.124 She further suggests, in her comparison of the social norms that govern sites such as Choeung Ek (the

Killing Fields) in Cambodia and the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe:

“What we have here is a mix of rules so universal that it is surprising that they need to be specified (no weapons or drug use), rules that seem to respond to specific past infractions (don’t open the door, don’t climb the stele), rules that try to teach local cultural practices (take off your shoes) and rules that are aimed at producing an appropriately somber environment (don’t laugh, run, play, etc).”125

122 Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 20.

123 Laurie Beth Clark, “Ethical Spaces: Ethics and Propriety in Trauma Tourism,” in Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, ed. Brigitte Sion (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014), 9-35. Clark’s term “trauma tourism” is often used in order to theorize the excesses of such sites beyond the narrow lens of dark tourism, and is, in fact, endorsed by the editor of this volume in the introduction. In “Coming to Terms with Trauma Tourism,” Performance Paradigm 5, no. 2 (October 2009):162-184, Clark suggests that she has become “convinced” that her term has an “internal tension” which is but a reflection of the inherent tension “between a sense that trauma is sacred while tourism is considered profane” (174). But these remarks are problematic, both because of an uncritical equating of trauma with sacredness and also because this seems to be the creation of an a priori sacred, insulated and removed from the material and political conditions of these sites. This declaration also resolves some of the tensions present in her earlier use of the term “trauma tourism,” which I prefer, as it aimed to affirm the “contradictions inherent in the practice of visiting memory sites” (Ibid).

124 Ibid., 11.

125 Ibid., 12.

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Whatever you do at a dark tourism site, don’t laugh.126 I’d like to question this construct of universality a bit further through the use of a thought experiment. Imagine that you are on a

Bosnian War tour:

You have been walking around the city, seen bullet holes in walls and heard stories of walls that have been re-constructed. You are at the Tunnel of Hope museum, and you have heard the stories of how the men in the Bosnian Army built a secret tunnel in order to bring in enough supplies to keep a people starving to death still going while snipers continue to pick them off one by one. Your tour guide, Sara, has knelt down and picked up to show you the outdated ration packs that were sent as humanitarian aid. She decides to illustrate the brutality of

Sarajevo’s day to day conditions further with a popular post-war joke. She looks up and out at her solemn and respectful audience and says:

“A group of Sarajevan children are outside playing in their neighborhood. They are playing a game of hide and seek. The seeker looks for the other children and then finally spots one. He calls out, “Hey you, come out from behind that broomstick. And you other three behind there, come out as well!” And then she laughs.

Do you laugh? Or are you too horrified that a group of children are so emaciated that they can all fit behind a broomstick? Or do you wonder how Sara herself could laugh at such a thing? Do you question her sanity, or question her reverence for the pain of others in the brutality of wartime?

126 But in fact, Clark does note in other research that these may not be “universal” norms of propriety. She writes on this same conclusion elsewhere: “In Cambodia, there is a larger-than-life, almost cartoonish, outline drawing of a smiling face with a red ‘Do Not’ circle and line through it. Given that in Cambodia laughter is a common cultural response to uncomfortable situations, it is questionable by whom this admonition was suggested.” Ibid., 173. This leads us back to Asad’s assertion that the only way to create universals is to create reifications divorced from the domain of the materiality of our shared world, and the power relations that pervade it. Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

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Imagine now that you are at the Tunnel of Hope with Danin, and he has been telling you stories of the UN’s failures, how Bosnians who would try to cross the airport might find their deaths at the hands of a searchlight from a UN who promised the Serbian forces that they would not let anyone escape the city via the airport. The UN keeps this promise at night, when most people try to cross under the cover of darkness. You are running for your life, and a UN searchlight illuminates you up, and the snipers can now see you and your death is like the end of a stage-play tragedy, with the spotlight on you close and center. But when the curtain falls no one gets up. Danin then tells you other stories of UN forces in other places, such as Srebrenica, where UNPROFOR soldiers are reported to have also raped women and children put into camps, alongside and under the cover of the Chetnik’s ethnic cleansing forces. How do you feel now?

Do you feel a sense of sadness, of emptiness? Danin senses this and fills the growing silence of the tour group with a joke:

“We have these characters, Suljo and Mujo, who are very famous wise fools in Bosnia.

This is a joke where Mujo is the star. One day he comes upon a UNPROFOR soldier doing push-ups. Mujo circles around the soldier, observing him carefully from all angles. He kneels down and looks underneath the man and says, “I swear it seems like she ran away from you.”

Do you laugh? Do you think about laughing, but swallow the chortle in your throat? Do you know firmly, resolutely, from your own cultural context that rape is no laughing matter?

Can you even hear the joke, or are you are too caught up thinking about the possibility that the

“good guys,” might have raped women and children in a town they were supposed to protect – the UN Safe Area of Srebrenica? Do you find yourself thinking along gendered lines drawn in the sand, “It is sick for any man to make jokes about rape, a woman wouldn’t do that.” Perhaps you don’t know what to make of it at all, so what do you do? Do you decide your best option is to stick to your script – a look to comport some semblance of understanding and a head nod, all

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the while hoping that Danin doesn’t say anything else on this tour that makes you uncomfortable.

Maybe he’ll go back to saying the sort of things you expect him to say so you can comport yourself in the solemn and receptive way you expected to? Even if what else he has to say is about how many people were blown to pieces in the streets of Sarajevo, even if what else he has to say should leave you just as unnerved.

Dark Humor and Transgression

What would be transgressed by the dark joke in these encounters with Bosnian war guides who share, remember, and co-perform the Bosnian war with global tourists, is certainly propriety, but I also suspect, far more than that. War tours are, after all, events co-constituted by the participation of local guides and international tourists, and it is from this position that we might reflexively ask ourselves: Does the commodity form demand that Bosnia’s war guides perform their experiences in a manner that conforms to Western norms of how one should suffer and strive to live with that suffering? This question is also an ethical one, for as Arthur and Joan

Kleinman note, “The globalization of suffering is one of the more troubling signs of the cultural transformations of the current era: troubling because experience is being used as a commodity, and through this cultural representation of suffering, experience is being remade, thinned out, and distorted.”127

Suffering, in so far as it is co-created and performed by war guides and tourists at the site of Bosnia’s war tours, is a multiplicity of things. One of these being a commodity, suffering also partakes of a series of cultural transformations and appropriations through which it is re-made, as it must be re-made for the consumption of tourists. I suggest here that such cultural transformations at the site of the war tours are writ large with Western models, genealogies, and

127 Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, “The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times” in Social Suffering, eds. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret M. Lock (Oakland: University of California Press, 1997), 2.

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modes of comportment that exist for understanding the pain and suffering of others. (Whatever you do at a dark tourism site, don’t laugh). These scripts, as Clark herself motions to in her terminology of “trauma tourism,” are in large part those of trauma, which is arguably the most dominant Western category of ordering suffering. By trauma, I both mean here trauma as a type of performance, which often privileges the mechanism of narration in the dialogic company of a witness.128 I also use “trauma” here in an anthropological sense, as a construct that, through this very performance, brings certain political subjectivities into being.129 In the ethnographic case of

Bosnia’s war tours, these two uses of trauma may well be blurry, as the tour itself positions dark tourists as witnesses and war guides as those witnessed to, thus bringing into being certain political subjectivities, and the performances that these subjectivities entail, together. The performance of the dark joke, where children on swings are sniper targets or hide in emaciated groups behind a broom for a game of hide and seek, and the ensuing laughter that, in Bosnia, often follows, I’d like to suggest here, struggles to be interpolated into such performances of trauma. It doesn’t play into it, so to speak, without the danger of putting the tour guide or tourists’ reactions as somehow off-putting, as somehow “in the wrong.”

The demands of working with both issues and persons affected by trauma and tremendous violence compel me to elaborate upon this point. I am not of the mind that trauma, and the experiences for persons which it entails, is merely reducible to a Western hegemonic export. Nor is this an attempt to say that a witnessing model, and the comportments through which it is recognized, is an untenable or inauthentic possibility within the context of the war tour industry, nor that witnessing as it is understood in the literature as an intersubjective, ethical

128 See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

129 See Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

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relation cannot emerge in the ritual performance of Bosnia’s war tours. I address this point further below. My concern here is rather is to create a space in which post-conflict Bosnian humor becomes a means to question the ways in which a trauma model itself might be commodified in the spaces of dark tourism. In this sense my concern is both specific in scope and ethnographically contextual - messy in its multiplicity, as perplexed and layered as the forces of commodification and witnessing that permeate the war tour itself.

It is in thinking through this concern that I put forth the following. Though we may well question dark tourism industries cynically or question ourselves and our own political culpability in the world at large after touring one, or leave with a sense that we too, have now become a witness, very seldom do we consider the possibility that the tour we have partaken of may well have shaped its form to our own needs in ritually performing stories of atrocity and their aftermath through Western ordering categories of spectacle and suffering. But perhaps we should be less surprised by this than it would at first seem, as such Western ordering categories are, in fact, necessary to the very survival of an industry such as Bosnia’s war tours, which depends on the commodification of Bosnian suffering, and tourists’ ability to participate in this commodification with ease.

At the same time, it must be said that war guides themselves also expect and at times enforce tourists’ comportment of themselves in keeping with Western models of understanding the suffering of others and how to respectfully comprise oneself in relation to it. In fact, to my way of thinking Sara does this herself from the very inception of the war tour, when she offers to share with us Bosnia’s wartime history and silently chastises the tour group for chuckling at the tourist who answers her question as to the former countries that comprise Yugoslavia with,

“Umm, Bosnia?” For this laughter is…distant, like Bergson’s, not yet coaxed and conditioned

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by the war tour. Her grilling me on Bosnian history to make sure I remember information that other war tour guides have shared seems much in the same vein.

And what of affect? Of that sticky affective residual atmospheric quality that transpires in a certain moment, out of the Deleuze-like assemblage of an old ration pack, squatting on the ground, the dim lighting, the tenor of a human voice, and that leftover bodily feel of walking through an underground tunnel like an old man, with your back humped and knees awkwardly bent and your neck jutting forward.130 That affective transmission is a particularly forceful element that can transpire at the site of Bosnia’s war tours, and one that has long been associated with a witnessing literature and with trauma as an analytic category. Seigworth and Gregg note this intersection of trauma and affect theory when they write, “Affect is in many ways synonymous with force or forces of encounter…affect need not be especially forceful (although sometimes, as in the psychoanalytic study of trauma, it is).”131

That affective shift is particularly forceful for me on Sara’s war tour. And so, after we leave the “Spam Can,” as many a local will refer to it - the tour concluded - and I interview Sara,

I bring myself to ask her: “I’d like to ask you a question, and of course, as always, please feel free not to answer if you do not want to. But from your comments on our tour, may I ask…did you lose someone?”

130 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). In particular I draw upon the use of the rhizome, which emphasizes diverse and emergent constituents that embody a “multiplicity,” rather than a “whole.” The assemblage is further characterized by fluidity and a lack of interiority or hierarchy – constituent elements are not subordinated to the whole, but rather are their own intensities that operate through mobile processes of territorialization and deterritorialization. For my own purposes, the assemblage model allows me to focus upon the way that the forces of memory, trauma, and witnessing are commodified at the site of Bosnia’s war tours, as well as the ways in which these forces can exceed their very commodification. It is the assemblage model that allows for the war tours to be a multiplicity of material possibilities, and it is from this theoretical vantage point that I generate my own questions regarding the tension that circulates among sites that deal heavily in both trauma and the commodity form. To my own way of thinking, this is preferable to models which would resolve this tension through the creation of an a priori, insulated sacred or a universal guiding principle, and I elaborate upon this point in both the Introduction and in Ch2. 131 Ibid., 2

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Sara looks at me long and replies, “I never share my story with tourists – I did once, with a medical doctor from France…but he was here doing relief during the war. He was shot in the arm. We talked about the wartime experiences and I told him. He was holding me or I was holding him…we held one another, and we both cried the entirety of the time.” She pauses. “I will share it with you, and you can share my story for your book, tour girl. My father joined the army when I was a little girl and early he went missing. For one year, two years, three years, we did not know where he was. For a long time, I would dream he was buried in the Olympic

Stadium. After the war, when they could identify bodies more, they found him – not there, but in another unmarked graveyard for soldiers. I was lucky in this way; there are still many graveyards filled with unknown soldiers here.”

I remember, in this moment, interspersed splices of feeling as if a part of me were far away, as if I had drifted outside of myself and was watching what appeared to be a giant monument to a can of spam meat. I could see Sara among war tourists, laughing, with eyes that glinted delighted that the laughter was shared, the culmination of her war tour a rounding success.

No doubt there are readers that will find the sharing of this moment an odd choice for this chapter, one that doubly affirms a witnessing relation, enfolding one story of the possibilities for witnessing within another. Does this moment disrupt the argument I have put forth here to question the vector of the commodity and its role in constructing performances of trauma at the site of Bosnia’s war tours? I hope so. For in a Deleuze-inspired manner, I am not of the mind that an argument’s “remainder” should be swept away under the rug; rather it should be affirmed.

Like work that grounds itself in “transgression” – it too, a force that exceeds and disturbs – to posit a Deleuzian remainder is to affirm that which exceeds a constructed problem, argument, or

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reification.132 The affirmation of excess in scholarship is one that acknowledges that the lifeworlds we encounter in the field are no more tidied up all nice and neat then the fluctuations that govern our own lives. It is only the desire to render worlds whole, and complete, as if they were emulations of Nietzsche’s lingering shadows of god, that closes them off and tames their messiness and multiplicity.133 For it would be an injustice to a site as perplexing as Bosnia’s war tours to suggest that witnessing, insofar as it is understood as a relation constructed through the dialogic performance of trauma, does not have the potentiality to exceed its own commodification. And so too would it be an injustice to suggest that the potentiality for its commodification at sites of dark tourism did not exist, as if witnessing were a vaccination with which to inoculate oneself against the magic of the commodity form.

Sara’s choice to show her tourists’ the Ikar monument I find transgressive itself. A moment in which tourists are invited and authorized by her to transgress the form of a war tour that is molded by the constructs of witnessing and trauma insofar as they are commodified, and to transgress this form through laughter. Like Suljo and Mujo, tourists are also asked to make fun of themselves, to laugh to the absurdity of humanitarian reason and its complicity in the

Bosnian war. Perhaps most importantly of all, at the Ikar monument tourists participate in the transgressive laughter of Bosnian crni humor….and whether they know it or not, they have been asked to understand and remember the war in a way far more in keeping with how many

Bosnians understand and remember the war among themselves. That is the power of laughter’s transgressive force, it ruptures the trauma and witnessing model that exists in the commodified

132 Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: The Columbia University Press, 1968). Much of this emphasis on affirming an argument’s remainder is put forth counter to Hegel’s dialectic. At the same time, Deleuze is careful to defy Hegel’s apparatus without negating his work – negation itself takes on a rhizomatic quality, becoming a constituent tool in processes of both negation and affirmation. Deleuze writes: “The eternal return denounces every use of ends, identities, resemblances, and negations: even – and especially – negation, which it employs in the service of simulacra in the most radical manner – namely, to deny everything which denies multiple and different affirmation, in order to double what it affirms” (302).

133 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 167-187.

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spaces of the war tour, and as it does so it both reveals their presence and creates new potentialities for witnessing as an ethical relation, even if we tourists don’t always recognize them as such.

For how else to theorize the dark jokes that Bosnians may tell to one another about searching for cigarettes on blown off ears or emaciated children playing hide and seek but through a language of transgression? Here it is worth turning to Michael Taussig’s assertion that transgression is an analytic often undertheorized due to bourgeoise constraints of taste and morality.134 But if transgression is a model in the way humans produce sacred objects, persons, places, and things through the profound forces of excess and loss, then perhaps there is no better place to locate transgressive force than in Bosnian dark humor, where the excesses of violence are responded to through the excesses of laughter. For as E. Daniel Valentine reminds us,

“Violence, too, is an excess.”135

A Parting Joke

There is one last post-war, dark joke about Suljo and Mujo that you should know:

It was a strangely warm day for November, when the valley of Sarajevo is already cold and windy. Kerim and his wife Amila, who work at a local hospital, have invited friends over to share an evening meal in their home in the Sarajevan neighborhood of Grbavica. Hussein and his wife Emina are there; he too works at the hospital as an administrator; she is an elementary school teacher. Adi, who works a shift at a neighborhood café, Adna, a childhood friend of

Amila’s, and myself round up the crowd. They are mostly in their late twenties; when the war came they were children growing up in Sarajevo, just like Sara. As we delved into dessert, a luscious cake that Kerim’s mother brought over just a few days ago, Amila brings up that I am

134 Taussig, “Transgression,” 351.

135 Daniel E. Valentine, Charred Lullabies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 208.

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researching Bosnian dark humor as part of my research project; everyone is delighted. “Do you know Suljo and Mujo yet?” asks Hussein. “Of course,” I smile back. This prompted a round of

Suljo and Mujo jokes from the crowd.

Jokes about Suljo and Mujo signal their arrival with a traditional opening line: Bili su

Suljo i Mujo. “Once, there were Suljo and Mujo,” a subjunctive evocation that lets you know

Suljo and Mujo are here, like the fairytale announcing its introduction with “Once upon a time.”

Emina, “because I work with the tourists,” told one that goes like this:

“Bili su Suljo i Mujo…they were walking around Sarajevo when a tour group passed by.

One of the men in the tour group is wearing alligator boots, and Mujo decides he simply must have some. “Where did you get those boots?” he cries. ‘Florida,’ says the tourist. Mujo takes off for Florida the next day, intent on finding a pair. Weeks go by and Suljo becomes worried about his friend. He flies to Florida to find him and starts searching everywhere he can think of.

Suljo finally finds him in the swamp, surrounded by dead and bloated alligators, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He is holding a big club in his hand, gazing intently over the water. ‘Mujo!’

Suljo cries, ‘You’re alright!’ ‘Shhh, Suljo, not now, I am very busy.’ And then Mujo smacks his club down as hard as he can on an alligator’s head and pulls him out of the water. ‘Damnit!’

Mujo cried. ‘This one is not wearing boots either!’

And there is laughter.

“Bili su Suljo i Mujo…” said Kerim, riding the last joke’s ensuing laughter. “The war is over and Suljo and Mujo are celebrating and getting drunk before they make the walk back home to their village. Along the way back they spot something on the road, and Mujo cries, ‘Suljo! I think that is a human head!’ Suljo replies, ‘Nah, are you sure?’ Mujo picks up the head and holds it up to the moonlight, ‘Suljo, it is a human head, and it is Ibro’s, our neighbor! Oh, poor

Ibro.’ Suljo looks at the head and says, ‘Nah, it’s not Ibro, he wasn’t that tall.’”

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And there is raucous laughter.

Hussein takes a turn. “Bili su Suljo i Mujo…” he said. And then he stopped; looking at me. I’m assuming it’s a dramatic pause until that atmospheric intensity of affect resonates with me, and I realize that the others are looking at me with gazes of anticipation and amusement.

“Cekam te…?” I ventured. (I’m waiting for you).

A chortling sound bursts from Hussein’s throat. “Bili. su. Suljo. i. Mujo…” he said, enunciating the traditional opening line of the Suljo I Mujo joke.

Amused by my puzzlement, Hussein laughed out loud and enthusiastically explained, “To je to…That’s it/That’s the way it is/That’s all the joke there is; they don’t exist anymore because of the war!”

And the crowd burst into laughter, and I am laughing too, both at the joke itself (which is clever in the way it transgresses its very form) and at the way I’ve been set-up for it, a joke in and of itself.

The joke, you see, goes like this:

Once, there were Suljo and Mujo.

That’s it.

That’s all the joke that there is. The opening line does different work now, you see.

Once Suljo and Mujo were, and now, they are not. Implied, but never stated, lingering in the undercurrent of acerbic wit, is the realization that they were killed, as so many Bosnians were killed, like Sara’s father was killed, in a meaningless war.

And the crowd roars with effervescent laughter.

It’s a funny joke. You have to try and imagine someone telling it at just the right time.

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IN THE PUB

Bosnian humor – dark, excruciating. Topics I would never dream to laugh about in the States, topics I would stop cold if I heard someone making a joke about – ethnicity, murder, rape, torture, genocide – I’ve chortled aloud to and heard myself cry out, “Jos jednu! Jos jednu!” (Tell another, tell another!”)

It’s amidst this backdrop of cruel-seeming shenanigans that I find myself in Sarajevo, at the only British pub in town. I’m there with a group of undergraduate students from UNC, celebrating the 4th of July, no less. The director of their summer study abroad program, Leo, has been friends with the owner, Amar, for years, and he’s covered the bar with American flags so that we might celebrate our Independence Day with gusto. There are American cheeseburgers cooking on the grill – no burek or kobanica sausages today – and the air is filled with the sounds of undergraduate intoxication – shrill laughter, displays of bravado, lively conversation.

Their excitement at being abroad is contagious, and I laugh at their jokes and answer their questions about Bosnia and Serbia as best I can before politely excusing myself to go sit where I know I’m expected - with the professors, and the owner of the joint, Amar. We talk of Bosnian coffee and Bosnian politics, and slowly the youthful ambiance of the pub fades away as few by few, the young twenty-somethings file out to enjoy their night on the town. But youth isn’t the only age that dictates partings, and soon enough Leo and Elizabeth are headed back to their hotel rooms to grade papers and sleep. I, however, am not quite ready to go, so I stay and accept Amar’s invitation to have another round of beers “on the house.” He smiles to himself as he invites me for a drink in a way that makes me think he must like this particular linguistic expression. And as we talk I begin to suspect that much like this turn of phrase, I must be a strange delight for Amar; he’s used to foreigners, married to a British woman in fact – but an American living in the Balkans who doesn’t do non-profit or government work – well, there have never been that many of us. The combination of that and my ability to speak some of the language gets him talking about Serbs, (he tells me they’re like an affectionate big brother during the day who gets wasted and runs after you with a hammer screaming at night) and then, all of a sudden, he’s regaling me with a joke about the massacre at Srebrenica.

You know the massacre at Srebrenica, there were so many bodies lying around everywhere, mutilated, in pieces – tatters - and no one could identify all the victims, or even the parts of them flying around - least of all all of these fucking humanitarian organizations.

His face lights up, inviting me in, letting me know he’s about to get to the good part. So you know what they did to identify the victims? They called in Marija, the local hooker. She’d done it with everybody, forwards, backwards, sideways. So they call her in and she walks up to the first corpse and slowly unbuckles his pants, and she says, “Oh, that’s Omar, from the barber shop, I’d recognize that lump on his dick anywhere.” And then they take her to a second body – you can barely even tell it’s a human being, but Marija’s so good she just lifts up his shirt and says “Oh, that’s Jusuf, I’d recognize that curve to the left anywhere.” Then they take her to a

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third body, and she slowly pulls off his pants, looks him over, shakes her head and says, “Oh, this man is NOT from Srebrenica.”

The massacre that took place at Srebrenica is one of those topics I told you about earlier, a realm of atrocity that lies beyond the boundaries of my own cultural norms of humor. My own upbringing tells me that laughing at Srebrenica is something like laughing to the punchline of “How many Jews can you stick in an oven?” Over 4,000 Bosniak Muslims systematically rounded up, stripped of their possessions, methodically killed. Women and children forcibly removed from their homes and shipped on buses to go “elsewhere,” hoping to return someday and never-knowing that the only homes they’d return to would be missing their fathers and brothers and burnt to the ground. And those were the “lucky” women. The ones that remained were often the victims of rape and torture. If they were women at all that is. One of the testimonials by a victim of Srebrenica, Kada Hotic, reads “I then heard another woman beg: “Leave her, she is only nine years old.” The screaming suddenly stopped. I was so in shock that I could scarcely move...”

If I were in the States, perhaps this joke would invoke my inner rage, or my knee-jerk liberal reaction…perhaps I’d think this was a “teachable moment” for my proud story-teller, a time for me to get some good karma or possibly just self-satisfaction out of playing educator and patiently explaining what constitutes good humor. But despite the half-eaten medium rare cheeseburger and fries lying in front of me, or the American flags proudly strewn on the walls, I’m not in the place where I learned what’s funny and what isn’t at all: I’m in Sarajevo.

And I know now, from my time here, how mirth can be tinged with tears, and how the sounds our bodies make when we lose ourselves in laughter are eerily akin to the sounds we make when we cry uncontrollably. And so as Amar anticipates I will, or maybe needs me too, I throw my head back and laugh so heartily my body shakes. With delighted abandonment he chimes in, and we laugh together so forcefully that the sound resonates off the pub walls and our echoes join in the merry-making, as if a second version of ourselves was laughing alongside us. It’s a furious laughter, full of itself, alive enough to keep our bodies in its very grip, so that even as it dies out it leaves us ravaged like the aftermath of an unexpected sorrow: gasping for air, unable to breathe.

114 CHAPTER 4: WAR CHILD/WAR GUIDE: POST-MEMORY, PERFORMANCE, & REPETITION

“Learning to live, is to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, conversation, the company, or companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts.” -Derrida, Spectres of Marx, xviii.

Characterizations of the Bosnian war, and of conflict in the Balkans at large, have long been portrayed both in popular and academic discourse by what is known as the “ancient hatreds” thesis – this is the idea that conflict in the Balkans is perpetually renewed by essentialized ethno-religious actors who are violent and nationalist.136 Essentialisms such as these are particularly addressed and refuted within the context of the war tours, as the city of

Sarajevo was largely comprised of a religiously mixed and plural population. This landscape of a multiplicity of religious life both endures and yet, in a post-war Sarajevo, has also become more fractured and contested. In my own fieldwork I found that identity in a post-conflict

Sarajevo often aggregates less along ethno-religious lines and far more within registers deeply embedded in, and affected by, both the concrete and existential realities of violence. This chapter explores one of the most prolific of these collective categories, that of the War Child of

Sarajevo. Furthermore, this chapter is a continuation of the larger project, one that methodologically engages the tours as vital, material encounters. Here, I do so by drawing upon

136 The ancient hatreds thesis, in which inherited and renewable antagonisms play a vital role in the formation of “ethnic conflict,” has certainly been applied questionably to many places, not just the Balkans. I discuss some of the ongoing consequences of constructing others through such essentialisms in more depth in Ch5. Here, I will note that Clifford Geertz’s “primordialist theory,” in which natural connections to one’s kinship ties coalesce through the process of repeated conflicts over time and ultimately come to interfere with the possibilities for civil society, is often cited as a related and/or early articulation of this idea. See Clifford Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (New York: Free Press, 1963).

115 literatures of trauma, memory, and performance studies. It is with these frameworks in mind that

I turn to the story of Nula Jedan, a twenty-something war guide in Sarajevo.

When Nula Jedan was three years old, he asked his father, “Daddy, what’s a sniper?” As a kid, he didn’t always understand what the adults were talking about.

Nula Jedan remembers sitting in a room, listening to a story about what happened to an uncle. He was three years old. He asked his father, “Daddy, what does ‘blown up’ mean?” The men would sit, and talk, in a cigarette hazed, smoke-filled room. Perhaps a pack or two of cigarettes is lying on the table. Smoking cigarettes is integral enough to social fabric of everyday life that it merits its own etiquette, and a pack placed on the table often symbolizes communal property, an invitation to grab one from the pack without asking its rightful owner.

Jasmin, Nula Jedan’s father, smoked back then. They would talk as they smoked. Many of the men, like Jasmin, are soldiers. Perhaps the cigarettes are a part of their salary; cigarettes are used to pay the Bosnian army; cigarettes are a hot commodity during the war. The men would talk, and smoke, and tell stories. Jasmin lights a cigarette and says, “The sniper was shooting at us.”

Nula Jedan asks his father, “Daddy, what’s a sniper?” An older Nula Jedan, a war guide now in his early twenties, tells me, “Twenty-plus years is a long time to hear stories; you are just soaking it in like a sponge. We didn’t think we could actually live off of that, live off of telling people what’s going on, telling them what has happened here.”

Today, Nula Jedan is a young man who, like many grown children in the city, identifies as a “War Child of Sarajevo.” For those who were young, even little during the Siege, these words have become a collective identity that marks the experience of growing up in the wartime years. Often the experiences and memories of Sarajevo’s war children have overlapping contours. They remember their schools being closed. They remember living without heat or electricity; they remember being hungry. They lived with the daily fear that their family

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members would be killed; sometimes those fears were augmented by seeing people shot or blown up in front of them. Many of them spent years living in a place deemed “safer” from the shelling. War children of Sarajevo might have found themselves living or, when it was possible, going to school in a neighborhood basement. Or, in turn, they might have found themselves living with multiple families in a small, smelly, and crowded apartment – whatever apartment was the most insulated in their building from the daily Siege fire. War children of Sarajevo remember their parents and relatives going outside to brave the city’s daily sniper fire and shelling for much-needed supplies, like food and water and medicine, to bring back to a basement or an over-crowded apartment. They might also remember their parents and relatives fighting in the Bosnian army to defend Sarajevo. Some of them still have these parents and relatives in their lives. Some of them still have them in their lives, but the adults returned to them after the war were not the same adults they once knew. And some of those parents and relatives, whether they were fighting in the Bosnian army or braving the city’s besieged streets for supplies, did not ever return.

The memories of those who were children during the Siege of Sarajevo are the memories of childhoods lived and forged in a terrible war. And yet their memories of the war are also the stuff of Nula Jedan’s “stories soaked up like sponges” from parents, relatives, and the other significant adults in their lives. These memories, experienced palpably and powerfully, and yet not technically their own, are what Marianne Hirsch calls post-memory, in which trauma is also an intergenerational structure of transmission.137 In this sense, war children of Sarajevo remember the experiences of their parents, and they remember them as “stories and images with

137 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

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which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right.”138

The “post” in the term “post-memory,” for Hirsch, invokes its basis in the memories of others’; the term is meant to convey “its displacement, its belatedness.”139 This seems fitting for an intergenerational structure of trauma, one in keeping with the performative dimensions of trauma itself. Trauma is performative in the sense that it comes into being not through an originary event, but through the infinite deferrals of its repetitions – be they flashbacks, unbidden feelings or memories, sudden sensory perceptions. Cathy Caruth highlights this performative dimension of trauma when she writes, “Trauma is an event whose impact lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time…events are traumatic, assume their force precisely in their temporal delay.”140 In other words, trauma explodes temporal boundaries by emerging through its very repetitions – repetitions that are the stuff of Deleuze’s riff on Nietzsche’s eternal return, repetitions that instantiate an element of difference in each occurrence.141

To speak of trauma as that which emerges through performative repetition is to make an epistemological claim upon the structure of traumatic experiences. “Repetition” is not the return of the self-same, or the endless string of the relation of identical to identical; nor is it a futile quest for “authenticity,” which presupposes each repetition to be but a pale imitation of trauma as an originary, meaning-granting event. Repetition is that which can be played out, kept

138 Marianne Hirsch, “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 1998), 8.

139 Ibid.

140 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 9. Italics added.

141 Giles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomilinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

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moving, reckoned in different directions. That reckoning of difference to difference, and the belatedness that accompanies it is too, an epistemological claim – one that notes the possibilities within performative repetitions of trauma are possibilities of temporal disjuncture.

War guides like Nula Jedan, many of whom identify as a “War Child of Sarajevo,” participate in war tour performances that are themselves an interwoven and dizzying array of performative repetitions. For the war guides, the tours themselves are repetitive enterprises, performances engaged time and time again during the working week. Sometimes the very repetitions of the war tour performances wear down and weigh heavy upon the guides. Nula

Jedan has nights where he cannot sleep; Nula Jedan has nights when he breaks down. Nula

Jedan has days in which he tells me that he knows the tours are exhausting him, draining him.

These repetitions, in which the “‘never for the first time’ of performance mirrors/enacts the

‘never for the first time’ of trauma” is what Diana Taylor speaks of when she speaks of returning to dark tourism sites as “durational performances” of trauma.142

War tours, and their performances of Sarajevo’s traumatic years under the Siege, create other repetitions – each tour itself a repetition, a potentiality of conditions that invites and coaxes

Deleuze’s eternal return comprised of the relationship of different to different, each performance of the war co-constituted and co-performed by a war guide and a different batch of tourists and an ever newly-arising ephemeral dynamic.143 This time around a different gesture, a different question a tourist asked, a different war story shared, that somehow emerged in the in- betweenness of all these things, told on this tour and not the last…

142 Diana Taylor, “Trauma as Durational Performance: A Return to Dark Sites” in Rites of Return: Diasporic Poetics and the Politics of Memory, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 275.

143 Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press), 299-300.

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At Sarajevo’s First War Hostel

On Hrvatin street, a linguistic form of the word “Hrvatska,” which means “Croatia,” in

English, lives a family of survivors who has transformed their home into a hostel. Or rather, a family who has transformed their home into a hostel for the second time. The family’s first hostel business was built to entice travelers with comforts away from home, with soft beds and well-lit spaces and cheery artwork to come “home” to after a day of sight-seeing and shopping in

Sarajevo. But this hostel did not make enough money for the family of Survivors, Jasmin, a former soldier on the Front Line, Liljana, a school teacher of blind children, and Nula Jedan, their son, who now calls himself a “War Child of Sarajevo,” to survive.

When you arrive at the hostel on Hrvatin street and ring the doorbell, a young man with dark hair and dark eyes answers the door. He is wearing a full military uniform, camo fatigues and a blue beret reminiscent of the ones worn by UN peace-keeping forces present during

Sarajevo’s Siege. Tourists arrive flushed from the travails of travel, tourists arrive eager to have finally reached their temporary beds and a bathroom, tourists arrive excited and ready to hit the town. The young man wearing his military uniform greets each of them with a somber welcome which tempers the buoyancy or the exasperation of the journeys they have made on planes or trains or buses, and he invites them into his home.

As is customary when visiting someone’s home throughout the Balkans, tourists are asked to take off their shoes at the door. They shuffle around their luggage or backpacks, so they can successfully maneuver taking off their hiking boots, sneakers, and flip flops. They turn to their left in order to follow Nula Jedan up a flight of brown carpeted stairs flanked on either side by gray walls. As tourists ascend the brown carpeted steps their eyes are drawn to painted black letters which mark the gray wall on the left, spelling out the words, “Welcome to Sarajevo.” As tourists ascend the brown carpeted stairs, their eyes linger a bit longer on the gray wall to the

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right, first upon a picture of a large black skull and crossbones, and then upon another set of welcoming words in black paint which read “Welcome to Hell!” As tourists trudge up the steps with their bags to enter the hostel, their eyes swivel back and forth and their heads follow the travels of their eyes as they read these parallel messages, designed to transition tourists for their entry into the War Hostel, founded twenty years after the war, the first of its kind in Sarajevo.

The War Hostel advertises itself as an educational experience, one that according to its website, offers its guests the opportunity to experience “warlike conditions,” and to catch a

“glimpse what life was like for people during the Siege.” The spray paint on the stairs, welcoming its guests into present day Sarajevo, and backwards through time into Hell, is but one specifically chosen means through which to give guests this experience. The painted words and pictures on the wall are not random. They are replicas of graffiti and found throughout the city during the war.

The stairway emerges onto a long hall, with four bedrooms and a shared common bathroom along it. At the end of the hall is a steep stairway which leads to the upstairs common room (a couple of couches, a kitchen station for guests to make tea and coffee) and the reception area. Guests follow Nula Jedan down a hallway filled with replicas of graffiti found on

Sarajevo’s wartime streets, replicas of posters created by graphic artists during the war, and copies of newspaper articles written by the wartime journalists who braved Sarajevo’s Siege years.

Nula Jedan has designed each bedroom to maximize the war hostel’s participants’ educational opportunity, and this is reflected in the War Hostel’s “decor.” The walls of each room have a few carefully manufactured gashes and gaping holes in order to replicate the feel of

Sarajevo’s shot to shred wartime buildings. Next to the gashes are photos from the Siege years of actual gashes and blown out holes in the walls of homes. The War Hostel’s deliberately

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removed wall pieces, and their placement, are designed to perfectly mirror the holes guests stare at in the photo. War hostel guests sleep on mattresses on the floor with army-issue blankets - dense and rough. If you are sitting on the bed, you will find carefully curated at eye level re- printed newspaper clippings covering Sarajevo’s wartime years. These, too, are often accompanied by photographs that Nula Jedan has collected from the war. A newspaper article entitled, “Children of War,” which reports on the number of children killed, crippled, and injured by routine sniper fire and bombs is stationed next to a photograph of injured children lying in cots, with bandages wrapped around their heads. A boy with a haunted look in his eyes stares back at a war tourist twenty years later.

What is this strange, performative space? Is the War Hostel a puzzle to be figured out?

Is it Baudrillard’s world of simulacra, an “all-war-all-the-time” themed Disneyfication?144

Dizzying time play? What year is it meant to be as we walk up those stairs? Are its cut-outs of newspapers and photographs the domain of Marita Sturken’s kitsch, in which we become

“tourists of history,” unable to grapple or deal with the past in any productive way, relegated to managing “the weight, burdens, and meanings of history” through touristic consumption?145

As Nula Jedan visits and checks in with his guests, he asks them if they have read the stories he has placed next to their beds. Insofar as I’ve witnessed, most of the time the answer is,

“no.” Many of the tourists seem surprised, even a little affronted that he has asked - awkwardly stuttering, eyes like saucers, suddenly comporting themselves as if the dog has eaten their homework. These moments are disruptive - transgressive acts that exceed and reveal the complications of vacation guest etiquette within the war hostel. At times the guests and Nula

Jedan’s expectations do not align in this complicated space. The war hostel demands that its

144 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

145 Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 12.

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guests become witnesses; the war hostel’s continued existence is predicated upon offering itself as a commodity for guests’ enjoyable consumption.

Nula Jedan dresses daily for war hostel host duty in his military fatigues, gives war hostel guests of all ages and nationalities a firm look, and encourages them to read the newspaper clippings covering Sarajevo’s war-time years that now cover their temporary bedtime walls. I am grateful that next to my bed is a story about Sarajevo’s wartime Romeo and Juliet. Admira

Ismic, 25, and Bosko Birkic, 24, have become a legendary symbol of a love that transcends

Sarajevo’s ethno-religious lines. She was a Bosnian Muslim; he was a Bosnian Serb and an

Orthodox Christian. They tried to escape Sarajevo together. Witnesses say that when they were shot full of holes and their bodies hit the ground, that Admira managed to drag her body over to

Bosko and wrap her arms around him. The photo by my bed is of their dead bodies locked in an embrace. A newspaper reporter was able to take it because it was too dangerous to remove the bodies for another six days.

Sometimes their bodies are reported as being locked in that final embrace for four days, sometimes five days, sometimes its seven. The number of days emerges in the story’s repetition, in the different instantiations of Bosko and Admira’s death found in the context of the war hostel’s newspaper clippings, or in the context of Sarajevo’s multiple war tours, or in the discrepancies among the international newspapers that documented their story. Sometimes the story goes that Admira crawled over and held him for fifteen minutes before she died.

Sometimes I’ve heard 20 minutes, sometimes 10 minutes. But what, exactly, would it accomplish to know the precise date that their bodies were removed, the number of minutes that passed away while Admira bled, her breath growing shallow, her arms wrapped around a man whose body was still warm to the touch? Would it provide some semblance of truth, of meaning, a stabilizing hat stand on which to hang one’s hat? It is in this regard that Amira and Bosko’s

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story enters the realm of the copy, the double, the imitation – a story that, like trauma itself, comes into being through endless reiterations. Once, I heard a version where they were running holding hands…their story is different in each telling, one that lives in variations of belatedness and displacement. It is in this sense, when there can be no stabilizing truth to an event, that we might turn to what the copy has to offer, or as Rebecca Schneider writes, what the “mistake” has the ability to “correct,” – the ability to “take seriously the theatricality of event in tandem with the theatricality of any historical interpretation of event.”146 As Schneider writes:

But, is error necessarily failure? When is difference failure, and by what (geohistorical, chronopolitical standard?) And when, in the tracks of live acts, is a misquote or paraphrase a kind of revenant – getting it not so much wrong as getting it “live” in a complex crosshatch of cross-affiliation?”147

“Getting it live,” is the modus operandi of the war hostel, each newspaper clipping and photo, each imperfect copy of the past affirmed as its own potential revenant, a call to engage with the dead.148 Amira and Bosko’s story leaves me with sadness, but I’d rather be in my bed than the one that’s next to an article from the Tribune titled, “Hidden Dangers Kill in Sarajevo.” I keep meaning to read it, but I get too distracted. Above the article is a photo of a small boy - he looks about five years old - in a hospital bed, looking into the camera. Half of his face has been burned off.

I wonder who that boy is, and where he is now. I wonder what he would think if he knew that somewhere else, another War Child of Sarajevo has hung his photo up in a guestroom of

146 Rebecca Schneider Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical ReEnactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 17.

147 Ibid., 40. 148 Here I draw upon an engagement with Derrida’s hauntology, in the sense that it provides a theoretical apparatus for engagement with the dead (both literally and figuratively), and in the sense that Derrida’s revenant, or the ghost, is a figure that cannot be reduced to an essentialized being or non-being. In this sense, hauntology offers possibilities for temporal disjuncture alongside a practice of openly engaging with the ghost - a figure to be embraced for its irreducibility and indeterminacy, rather than approached from a position of closure. See Jacques Derrida Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006), 4-9.

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Sarajevo’s first war hostel. I wonder if Nula Jedan sees himself when he looks into the burned boy’s eyes.

If the boy is even alive.

Sarajevo’s visual culture of wartime is also replicated on the hostel’s walls and doors. The first time I skyped my partner from the war hostel, when I stayed there in October of

2015, he answers the call and states, “Where are you right now?!” His eyes are looking at the wall behind me, where in giant white letters have been painted the words, “Pazi Snajper.” A white line has been painted around the words to box them in and make them look like a street sign, which is essentially what they are/were. In the Before, as Sarajevans call the time they lived in before the war years, Sarajevans drove cars down streets with stop and yield signs. During the war years, “Beware of Sniper,” is painted on buildings to warn others that this street is particularly sniper ridden. Next to the grafitti replica Nula Jedan has again placed two photos. One is of a man running down a street, the Pazi Snajper sign is in the background. The other photo Nula Jedan has chosen is of a young boy, posing underneath the large white Pazi

Snajper sign. He stands tall, deliberately posed, his hands are in his pockets. Eyes straight at the camera. It looks like it could be a vacation photo, a snapshot posed in front of a spot deemed far- away from home and important.

Graffiti is not the only replica of Sarajevo’s wartime visual culture that the War Hostel has embraced in its mission to simulate war conditions and educate tourists. The doors are covered with posters produced by the famous Sarajevo graphic design team known as Design

TRIO. One door contains the movie logo for Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, a terrifying T-Rex against a red backdrop, transformed to read: Sarajevo Park. Another contains a woman next to the words, “Don’t Cry For Me Sarajevo.” The TRIO is known for attempting to interject

Sarajevo’s crisis into images from Western popular culture. Another poster pushes the viewer

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into the slippage of the war years and another Sarajevo that once existed, that might have continued to exist, that one wonders if will exist again. The poster reads, “WELCOME TO

OLYMPIC GAMES” and “SARAJEVO 1984-1994.” It features the emblem of the Olympics five interlocking rings; they are made of barbed wire.

Design TRIO, is fueled by the husband and wife team Dada and Bojan

Hadzihaliovic. During the Siege they managed to produce the images that now occupy the War

Hostel’s posters on a number of postcards. On the back of each printed postcard produced were the words, “This document has been printed in war circumstances: no paper, no ink, no electricity, no water. Just Good Will.” TRIO are beloved in Sarajevo, both for their political art, and because they had the means and the opportunity to leave their city yet remained in Sarajevo during the war.

Tourists, no matter which of the bedrooms they have paid to stay in, share a communal bathroom with three toilet stalls, three sinks, and a shower. Next to the sinks are large liter bottles filled with water. They are in reserve for guest usage should they need the bathroom in the late-night hours, when the water is shut off. Sometimes guests think that the reserved water bottles, too, are simulations of Siege conditions, but the water shuts off throughout parts of the city of Sarajevo after midnight.

The reception desk where tourists check in and pay is a blue board set on top of six stacked, large white sandbags. Like Nula Jedan’s blue beret, the colors of the United Nations, white and blue, make another carefully chosen appearance here. To the untrained eye, the sandbags have a general yet vague military feel. If guests of the war hostel ask Nula Jedan about them, he will share with them their wartime purposes in Sarajevo. “They are used to reinforce trenches and bunkers on the Front Line. And we would use them in our homes, a sandbag can help protect you from shattered glass when bombs blow out the window and shards fly into your

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home.” Behind the sandbagged and UN homage make-shift desk is the blue United Nations flag, plastered against the wall. Nula Jedan has pasted patches of the UN member states’ flags around the olive branches (such an old human symbol for peace, found in the Olympic games) that encapsulate the United Nations’ cartography of the world, an equidistant projection of continents from the North Pole. Perfectly spaced above the flag, in letters formed out of barb wire read the words, “WAR HOSTEL.” A second UN flag has been hung as a curtain behind the desk on the left-hand side. This leads to the family’s private quarters where they carry out the private aspects of their daily lives.

Nula Jedan checks in guests and calls their attention to a chalkboard behind the couch, where they can find the wifi password. Tourists access the internet for the email and skype on their computers by typing in “1992-1995,” Sarajevo’s urbicide years. The board also lists the times and prices for the daily war tours that the hostel offers. Tourists have the choice to participate in “The Frontline Tour,” which explores abandoned army trenches and bunkers in the mountains, while Nula Jedan narrates stories from the war passed down to him from his father. Another daily offering is “The City War Scars,” a tour in which Nula Jedan drives his guests out from the city center into other parts of the city, where tourists tend not to go. City

War Scars, too, is in keeping with the War Hostel’s desire for its guests to experience a war-torn

Sarajevo. The tour is simply a walk through the tall gray buildings of old socialist apartment blocks and city streets in the neighborhood of Grbavica, the only part of Sarajevo occupied by the Serbian/former Yugoslav army during the war. A number of the apartment blocks and city streets are still devastated - bombed out and riddled with gunfire and blasted out chunks along the walls, along the sidewalk, along anywhere your eyes or feet might wander looking for a patch of solid ground. You will find none.

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“Here,” says Nula Jedan, “here is what the part of town you are staying in now looked like when the war ended.”

The War Hostel’s third routinely offered tour, and its most popular one, is called “The

Siege/Bunker Tour/Experience.” It is not exactly a tour in the traditional sense. Once, in my many visits with the War Hostel family, I remarked to Nula Jedan that the Siege Bunker Tour

Experience was more like a lecture than a tour, and he laughed and said that he would start using that word to describe it. The appeal of the “tour” is its location. The apartment next to the War

Hostel, which used to belong to Nula Jedan’s aunt, has been transformed into a replica of the sort of bunker the Bosnian army would camp out in during the war. The bunker replica is used for activities by the War Hostel regularly. On the weekends, there is a “Calm Bunker Party” for guests. Nula Jedan asks the guests who attend the bunker party to bring a snack to share with the group, and he provides a few liquors, (of course there is rakija), and colas for the group. Guests drink and swap stories from the places they hail from and the travels they have undertaken. The party is purposefully labeled as a “Calm,” one; the War Hostel, with its carefully constructed bunker replica, is not the space for obnoxious drunken tourists and their mayhem. Is it strange that tourists from places elsewhere and varied all come together to sip Bosnian liquor and chat in a reconstructed war bunker? Perhaps.

Besides the weekend calm bunker parties and Nula Jedan’s experience tour, during which he lectures on the history of the war in Sarajevo, a movie showing about life during the Siege is offered every night in the bunker. The films in rotation are voted on by whatever guests turn up; the majority rules. Some are films proper, such as “Welcome to Sarajevo,” a British flick based on war correspondent Michael Nicholson, who returned home to the UK with a Bosnian little girl whom he adopted. Some are documentaries. The documentaries range in topic. There is one, for instance, about the creation of Sarajevo’s now famous and celebrity studded film

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festival. During the war the film festival was simply starving folks who risked getting a bullet in the head to come together and watch movies; a couple of hours to have fun, and forget, and to experience a routine pleasure that belonged to the Before. They would pay one mark to see the movie, a symbolic payment. There is another about the United Nations, a documentary that follows Canadian UN soldiers with footage during the Siege and footage when they return home. They return home broken and suicidal and unsure how the orders they followed could have been not to fire unless their person was directly fired upon when the starving little girl they were just throwing candy bars to from the window was standing right there and then she was

GONE, a smoking crater and burned nothingness is all that remains. War has obvious victims, and not so obvious ones.

Nula Jedan encourages his guests to come to the documentaries. Some might even say he pressures them. If they do not come watch the films in the bunker with him in the evenings, he is at times disappointed, at times angry. Once he says to me, “Is that not the reason they are supposed to be here?”

Tourists, Former UN soldiers, and Returned Refugees

Nula Jedan has a deep empathy for former soldiers of the United Nations. Nula Jedan has an affinity for those who served in the war here. To him, both he and the soldiers are bound by a type of authenticity; they share the burden of having lived through Sarajevo’s Siege; they share a solidarity made possible through the embodied experiences of having been present for the hellish years of Sarajevo’s history. One evening, after viewing the documentary he has chosen on UN soldiers for film night in the bunker he tells me, “It’s very hard to find people here who experienced the war. I am the Real Sarajevo…I survived the war. I know these UN soldiers personally; they love that I speak about them.”

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This “authentic” stance of presence which Nula Jedan uses to create an affinity between himself and those who served as the military forces of humanitarian intervention exists counter to the mark of “absence,” of having not lived through Sarajevo’s hellish Siege years, of not being personally marked by them. The absent other which enables this hierarchy of those who were present during the Siege and those who were absent is not the tourist. The absent other is the refugee.149 This quality of valuing those who stayed in Bosnia for the duration of the war is a part of a post-conflict dynamic that I term “Hierarchies of Presence and Absence,” in which the

“authenticity” of one’s suffering is linked to having been physically present during the war years.

Hierarchies of presence and absence abound in Sarajevo, throughout the population. Amongst

Sarajevo’s war tour guides, such hierarchies are sometimes used to discount the authenticity of another tour guide or company, “you don’t want to take a tour with someone who wasn’t even here.” Such statements are further politically charged by the fact that Bosnian refugees who have returned to Bosnia make for highly profitable war guides. Time spent in places elsewhere through no choice of one’s own, such as Germany or Mexico, has led to the returned Bosnian refugee’s ability to offer war tours in German or Spanish. The fact that the Official Government

Tourist Bureau tends to hire refugees doesn’t hurt any, either. In post-war Sarajevo, a politics of presence, absence, and authenticity clusters and a hierarchy of suffering is replicated, internalized, and produced: the thousands of refugees who fled and now live abroad did not

149 Anders Stefansson has written extensively about the contested dynamics that accompany the figure of the refugee in a post-war Sarajevo. In an attempt to consider post-conflict identity tensions that move beyond the construct of “ethnicity,” Stefansson notes that “when they evoke their experience of suffering, (potential) returnees appear in a much less favourable light, as people who ‘betrayed’ Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. They are also referred to as pobjeglice, or cowards, who not only lacked the courage and moral integrity it took to stay, but who also left for economic considerations.” See Anders Stefansson, “Urban Exile: Locals, Newcomers, and the Cultural Transformation of Sarajevo,” in The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society, eds. Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 71, as well as Stef Jansen, “Remembering with a Difference: Clashing memories of Bosnian Conflict in Everyday Life,” in The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society, eds. Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007).

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experience the real Sarajevo, or Sarajevo during war-time. This hierarchy of presence and absence is further exacerbated by the thousands of refugees who fled and then returned home when the war was over.150

There are no hierarchies of absence and presence without an event or experience, (such as staying in Sarajevo for the entire duration of the almost four-year-long Siege), that can become socially constructed as an absolute given, a space deemed authentic from which one can stamp out the inauthentic and denigrate it as but a copy – its very existence rooted in lack. This inherently unequal relation is the danger that lurks in our desire for authenticity. For a desire to own and access “the real” is often mired in intersubjective relations of violence, which lend themselves to the construction of others as Others. Admira and Bosko might have been seen in an altogether different light by many of their fellow Sarajevans if they had successfully escaped

Sarajevo, or if they had escaped and eventually returned home after the war. But that possibility too, is but a revenant, the haunting possibility of a future that will not come to pass. We will never have the opportunity to know, and they are Sarajevo’s Romeo and Juliet.

Nula Jedan’s deployment of this hierarchy of cultural capital, those who are Survivors vs. those who are Refugees, is a common sentiment in Bosnia. The members of Design TRIO are not just beloved for the political art they produced during the war; they are beloved because they produced this art in Sarajevo, their work authenticated because they stayed during the Siege. His favoring of the politics of presence to former soldiers of the UN who served in Sarajevo is far less so. In fact, one might say that the political sentiments of Bosnians toward former UN soldiers is more in keeping with the memorialization that surrounds Sarajevo’s War Tunnel museum, in which the UN is portrayed at best as buffoons and at worst as complicit murderers,

150 See Anders Stefansson, “Sarajevo Suffering: Homecoming and the Hierarchy of Homeland Hardship,” in Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return, eds. Fran Markowitz and Anders H. Steffanson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books: 2004), 54-75.

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than with Nula Jedan’s War Hostel experience. Here, tourists are greeted at a UN themed reception desk by a boy in military fatigues and a blue beret.

Local stories of attempting to navigate the perils of day to day life during Sarajevo’s

Siege tend to feature UN soldiers in two capacities. During the war, UN soldiers would escort civilians as they navigated the streets searching for food, water, or medicine by armored car.

Civilians would crowd behind an armored vehicle that would offer them protection from snipers as it slowly drove down the streets, blockading citizens from gunfire. The second variety of stories features UN soldiers as inefficient and apathetic bystanders, who watch and do nothing as civilians are blown to pieces.

As peace-keepers in Sarajevo, the United Nations soldiers who were present during the

Siege had direct orders not to fire unless their person was directly fired upon. Many of them did stand by and watch atrocity after atrocity, feeling helpless, returning home as shells of the men and women they once were, often sending themselves into the abyss. Is their own sense of helplessness in the face of brutality augmented by the deep resentment that Bosnians feel toward them for their role in the conflict? Whether it is or not, it is uncommon for Bosnians to feel a sense of gratitude or affinity for the UN soldiers whose presence is a part of the story of

Sarajevo’s Siege. It is even more uncommon to seek out former UN soldiers and to thank them for their service, to say to them, “I may well be alive today because of you.”

Nula Jedan actively does this, and this seems to be why Nula Jedan has met so many former United Nations folks, why so many of them have passed through the doors of his hostel.

Many of the former UN soldiers he meets through the internet. His most common source for connecting with the soldiers who served in Sarajevo is a chat room that was originally restricted to only UN soldiers who had been in Sarajevo’s Siege. But as Nula Jedan told me, “the problem was that they had other people who wanted to reach out and talk to them, and then this guy

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created a new page for people who survived it…I really recommend that people from former

Yugoslavia join this page. I go on there and they are surprised that I know things like what regiment they are from. And I thank them and they thank me and then I thank them again….and then they thank me just for thanking them because no one else has ever thanked them. And I show them stuff still going on…I upload photos of how I put down flowers on graves for the anniversary of the Siege.”

Many of the soldiers continue to follow-up with Nula Jedan. Often, after getting in touch with them via chat room he exchanges information and continues to connect with them over skype. Nula Jedan has a general script that he follows for making contact with the former UN soldiers. First, he makes a point of thanking them:

“Hello, sir…I just want to thank you for your service, if it wasn’t for guys like you we wouldn’t be alive.”

Then, he invites them to return to Sarajevo:

“Maybe you should come here and see the good side of Sarajevo and not just the war.”

He tells me, “obviously we’ll just talk about the war but it’s what you say, you know,” and then he laughs a hearty and resounding laugh.

Former UN soldiers connect with Nula Jedan, and they come to the war hostel. Nula

Jedan shares with me snapshots of their visits. “One guy checked in from Norway and I said to him,

‘You were here?’

Yeah, I was here with the international force.’

“That’s after the war and he himself didn’t see any action and I know he knows it but his buddy has problem…really horrible things that happened to him and he just lost it.

Nula Jedan smiles to himself.

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“Met another guy from Norway on an oil rig…nothing to do with it…but his buddy was a

UN soldier in Sarajevo, and recently, just a couple of weeks ago…he went totally insane and blew his head off with a shotgun. He is the second guy I know of who has done that.”

Former UN soldiers, and those who have lost former UN soldiers to suicide or living shells of themselves, connect with Nula Jedan and come to the War Hostel. In fact, before Nula

Jedan’s family’s hostel was the war hostel, even before the family’s first attempt at a hostel business that simply provided a warm spot with cozy beds for tourists to tuck in after experiencing a day in Sarajevo, they used to come. In fact, some of Nula Jedan’s earliest war tours were with former UN personnel, who came back to Sarajevo and wanted to learn more about the war. “One of the first tours I ever did was with two nurses who were in Tuzla and they had heard about Sarajevo. And I explained to them. At the time I didn’t know as much as I do now but I knew way more than they did…and I had this proto war tour and I did it with them and they loved it. It was a lot like my bunker tour now except that it was not four and a half hours, just an hour! They talked about the place where they were nurses, and all that remains is a memorial and some locals they knew that were still alive that shook their hands.”

Like many war tourists today, former UN personnel come from Western countries.

Unlike many war tourists today, they have memories of being present in Sarajevo’s Siege.

Many of them come to Bosnia for answers, though there are no satisfactory answers to questions such as, “how could I have had a weapon and watch people all around me get slaughtered and do nothing?” Many of them come to Bosnia remembering the numb resentment that Sarajevo’s citizens felt, the eyes that accusingly stared at them asking, “how can you be stationed here to keep the peace, when all you do is stand around with your undrawn weapon and watch us get slaughtered?”

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Many of the war guides have reiterated to me that some of the earliest tourists of

Sarajevo’s war tour scene are former UN personnel and foreign aid workers. One war guide,

Sara, shares with me a story about a French medic who came to Sarajevo. He was shot in the arm. It’s never been the same since. After the war tour he takes with Sara he approaches her and they sit and talk for hours and share stories from the war. They share stories of loss, and by the end, they are holding each other crying. War tours in Bosnia are many things, and one strange possibility for them is this: a space which can be activated as a site of memory for Sarajevo’s war children and former UN personnel to encounter one another and create connections over a war gone by and yet a war that remains for them, present.151 It is in this sense that Peggy Phelan, when she writes of the ontology of performance as one of disappearance, absence, and ambiguity speaks of memory as that which “seeks to find connection only in that which is no longer there.”152

Nula Jedan tells me, “I met a grunt once from the French Foreign Legion, one of the strongest and toughest armies in the world. You can recognize the French legionnaire because they have these spider tattoos on their elbows. They all look mean and tough. There was this one; he was ripped and skinny…Zilov…his name was something chewy like that. He was a really mean looking guy and I would get nervous watching him talk with my dad. You have to remember that at the time that we didn’t even own this hostel; this was at the beginning of owning our old one. And he looks so tough; my dad and I would talk and we thought he looked

151 Diana Taylor suggests that scholars pursue the study of memory not simply through the archive and archival memory, or “documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, film, CDs, all those items supposedly resistant to change,” (19), but also through the “repertoire,” which is envisioned as the ephemeral and embodied practices that transmit memory. Taylor writes, “Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory and a sense of identity through reiterated…’twice-based behavior’ (3). Performance here is found in such practices as dance, theatre, song, ritual, witnessing, healing practices, memory paths, and the many other forms of repeatable behaviors as something “that cannot be housed or contained in the archive” (36-37). Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

152 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1996), 149.

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like the junkies here who spend all of their time doing drugs…we were presuming, we didn’t know.

And then one day he says to us, ‘Oh yeah, I was here fighting.’ And he just changed. He changed from a tough guy and grabbed my father and hugged him so tight and started sobbing convulsively on his shoulder. I couldn’t believe it! I was only 16 at the time, just a kid, and I couldn’t believe this grown man. He went ballistic, crying so hard for two hours, sobbing out,

‘My friend got killed here…and you are the ones. I know everything that you suffered, and we couldn’t help you. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” My father, he held him.

The Siege/Bunker Tour/Experience

Former UN personnel are not the only proto war tourists that Nula Jedan meets as he strives to break into the tourist industry. In their original hostel, before the family’s successful war hostel business, guests would come to stay (the family would rent out hostel rooms through an agency) and inevitably, as they checked in, ask Nula Jedan, “what tours do you give?” Unlike the war hostel with its structured thematic options for guests to take a potential five tours a day, the family’s original hostel did not offer set tours. Nula Jedan simply found himself saying to a guest one day, “well, I can show you around and you can pay me something, if you like.”

“And is that when you started giving war tours?” I asked Nula Jedan.

“Not quite at first. But the people on the tours had something in common. At some point, people pop the question: ‘Were you in the war?’ And I tell people stuff and it seemed to be the most interesting. But see, only I, myself, did the tours at the time, not my dad. And after some time, some English people arrive and a couple of days before they are scheduled to come I talk to my Dad and say, ‘People are interested in the war. You’ve been there, you know. Why don’t you show them the Frontline where you fought?”

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Jasmin, Nula Jedan’s father, replies: “No one would be interested in that. I hated it there.

Who would be interested in that?” But Nula Jedan talks his father into showing them. At the time, Jasmin does not speak a word of English. He takes them in his car and shows them things, mimics the actions of war from bunker to bunker.

Nula Jedan tells me, reflecting on his father’s first bunker tour, “They turned out to be amazed by it. And they paid him quite a lot because it turned out to be quite emotional. We thought they would just pay something symbolic. And he got better and better and what you see today is the refined diamond. He could do even better if he wanted.”

The tourists were always interested in the bunkers. But the bunkers are not just a tourist attraction. They are the historical remnants of war. Sometimes you can’t access them in the rain. Sometimes they collapse. Sometimes they are in ruins. So, one day, Nula Jedan decided that they should simply build their own bunker. As I sit in the war hostel communal living space with Nula Jedan he tells me, “I just said to my dad one day, “You built bunkers, right? Why don’t you build one here? Take one room build a bunker here. And we built the first version…it was here in the dorm. And two and a half years ago, it started as a special tour in the old hostel.

And then we shut down the old hostel and only the special tour remained. Then we transported it here…the bunker is in the apartment next door, my aunt’s old place. And we took it even further, we built a trench!”

Jasmin is in the room with us, smiling a broad smile. He has been beaming since Nula

Jedan started talking about asking him to build a bunker. He is very proud of his son. He takes another moment to reiterate to me that everything at the War Hostel was his son’s idea. He thought the whole thing would never work out. “I thought he was absolutely crazy! Who would want to come here to spend time in a bunker?! Who would want to come here and experience the war?!” Jasmin laughs and beams at his son.

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When Nula Jedan was in his twenties, he asked his father, “Dad, could you build a bunker in our home?”

The bunker tour begins with Nula Jedan filing the guests in. We sit on benches built into a wall created out of wooden logs with army blankets on them for padding. At the front of the bunker is a table; behind it resides the audio-visual set up used for the Bunker’s movie nights.

Nula Jedan settles us in and says that he will return in a moment. When he shuts the door there is no light, except for a small object that burns like a candle on the table – a miniscule prick of light that only highlights the incredible darkness. As we sit in the dark, an audio track starts. It is a recording of the city sounds of Sarajevo during the Siege, a daily soundtrack of shells and shots fired and explosions. We sit in the darkness, listening to gunfire. After what seems like a long time, but in fact, is a little less than a minute, we hear Nula Jedan outside the door. It sounds like he is talking to someone. He is speaking in Bosnian. “Dobro, Dobro,” he says, a pause, and then, “U redu.” (Good, very good, okay). The sound of a phone slamming.

He bursts in the bunker door. He has exchanged his military uniform for his bunker tour uniform – a white tshirt with fake red blood stains and a white bandage wrapped around his left arm. He looks shocked to see us in the bunker. He starts up, pauses, and speaks. “Ko ste vi? Vi ste izgubili?” He is addressing us in Bosnian. The tourists do not know what he is saying, but he is asking us, “Who are you? Are you lost?”

“Stranci?” he repeats emploringly. (Foreigners?”)

“You speak English?”

“Kako se kaze, kako se kaze…. RAT” (how do you say, how do you say…WAR.”)

“I’ll teach you about the war.”

“This is the introduction.”

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It is still dark; the artillery is still firing. Nula Jedan transitions out of his character and states, “Outside would be the trench. Soldiers would be guarding outside and when the telephone rings they rush inside to try and answer it. This telephone connects other bunkers just like these through cable – it’s a direct connection; it’s not radio – so the enemy can’t listen to what you are talking about. Someone calls, and you get the news – sometimes good, sometimes bad, it all just depends.”

Nula Jedan’s father, Jasmin, operated the cable lines, fixed them when they were broken, running and dodging enemy fire from bunker to bunker.

Nula Jedan proudly states to his captivated tourists, “This, what you are seeing here, is the only trench bunker replica in the world!”

The bunker we sit in is straight-forwardly “real,” as such, six feet deep, each and every surface of the walls and roof appears made out of logs. In fact, it is a layer of logs, followed by a layer of nylons (women’s hosiery, with its ability to provide insulation from rain and humidity, became a great commodity during the war. Sometimes on old ruins you can still see pieces of women’s stocking awkwardly hung, swinging in the wind like a flag, as if a tornado had tauntingly deposited in tact bits of your former life amongst its debris). The nylons are packed in tight with a layer of earth, followed by a layer of stone. This sequence – logs, nylon, earth, stone, repeats three or four times to withstand being hit. When Nula Jedan describes its craftsmanship on the bunker tour, he says, “You are now six feet deep; it’s almost like a grave.”

Nula Jedan wants his tourists to have a feel for how terrible the place must have been, to transmit the stories he has absorbed about bunker life to his tourists. “Imagine: it’s hard to breathe in here, right? That’s because there’s a lack of air. There’s a lack of air, and people sweat inside, and smoke inside, people take their shoes off before they go to sleep and it smells horrible. The oven is on for cooking, in winter it is on for heat as well; it is too hot, and the oven

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makes the stench even worse. People cook with the oven and they share a single plate that they eat off of. Sometimes they share their food with the rats that come and nestle in the bunker.

There are injured bodies in here. Sometimes corpses, people who have died on the frontline and the other soldiers have managed to drag their bodies back. People who were injured and died in the bunker. And what if you close the door?”

Nula Jedan shuts the bunker door and the black descends again. “You’d be lucky if you had just one light.” He walks to the tiny prick of light sitting on the front table. It is a replica of the types of light sources soldiers used in the war years. It is also a replica of the type of light source Sarajevan civilians would use in the everyday, in their city without electricity and running water. The light is made out of cooking oil (you would get the cooking oil from UN rations).

You put the cooking oil inside of a glass, as well as a shoelace to burn. Sometimes, if you were exceptionally lucky, you might have a spring or a metallic tube to put in your makeshift candle that keeps it from falling down, that keeps the light from going out.

Nula Jedan tells his tourists, “But you would be extremely lucky if you had a spring or metallic tube. 95% of people don’t even have the cooking oil, or a light at all.” He snuffs the

Siege conditions candle out. It is pitch black. The artillery soundtrack is still playing; it has become the stuff of elevator music, playing on in the background, overshadowed by Nula

Jedan’s bunker tour lecture. Now there is only the sound of weapons being fired, and utter darkness. We can feel him moving in the dark. He sits down on the bunker seat. He waits a pregnant pause. Suddenly there is a click, and a flash of light. Click, flash of light. “95% of the time, the only light you would see is this.” Click, and a flash of light. Nula Jedan holds a cigarette lighter in his hands. In the tiny moment that the flame erupts, I can see Nula Jedan’s face, and the darkly outlined faces of the tourists sitting next to him in a row on the bunker.

“Sometimes, there would be light. If somebody would sit down and light a cigarette. And then

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you would be able to see the people around. You would see the people, and they would be scared to death, shivering, gazing into the darkness exhausted.” Wait. Click. Flash of Light.

Shadowed Faces. Darkness, the sounds of artillery raining down on a broken city. Silence.

Click – a flash of light. Shadowed Faces.

Nula Jedan doesn’t explicitly say it, but he knows that this is how his father lived for four long years, fixing cable from bunker to bunker.

Nula Jedan opens the bunker door, re-lights the cooking oil impromptu candle. “Now imagine spending four years of your life inside these conditions.”

Nula Jedan’s subsequent three or sometimes four-hour lecture known as the “Bunker

Tour” shares with tourists the quotidian realities of surviving under Siege conditions. Just as a cooking oil candle provides a source of light, burning the pages of household books provides much needed kindling for fires and warmth. How do people get water? Nula Jedan places on his shoulders some straps from which hang giant plastic jugs filled with water, two hanging from his back and two hanging from his front. He picks up another three in his hands. He asks the bunker tourists to imagine running through sniper fire with the burden of much-needed water weighing you down. He asks the tourists if anyone would try to care and lift it. A couple of the young men stand up and volunteer. One manages to pick them all up for a few seconds, his eyes and muscles straining.

As a part of the lecture Nula Jedan shows a video. The video is of himself as a three- year-old child playing outside with his mother. You can barely hear his questions with the sounds of the artillery piercing the air. He explains that his father, Jasmin, took this video in case he died in the war and there was no trace of the child that he had had. It was a risk to go outside, yes, but so many houses were bombed and destroyed on a regular basis that “safe” became relative. This is the first image that he has of himself as a child. Nula Jedan stands

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before us, the recording of a future war child playing in the background. It is less an image of the past then it is the stuff of the “not yet,” a strand from a possible future that did not come to pass. Each bunker tour he plays it - each performative repetition marks the video’s potential to become the last trace of his existence should Nula Jedan have died in the war, each recorded moment precious - captured by a father who had already lost enough to the war to know that sometimes, the reiterations of memory are the only thing that is left.

What does it mean to be a “War Child of Sarajevo?” I think, in many ways, it means to carry with you, whether you have a video recording of it or not, an image of yourself as a child who grew up during a war. A child who is no longer present but whose hand you hold, a child to cradle in your arms and protect, a child in a photograph whose eyes burn into the eyes of the child within that looks back.

What does it mean to encounter a war child of Sarajevo to the tourists? As I went on war tours and interviewed tourists, I learned something that I wish I had not: amongst themselves, when the tour is over, many of them will bemoan the fact that they could not have met a real survivor, or that their tour guide was too young to know anything. Tourists routinely ask questions of their guides such as, “How exactly old where you during the war?” or “But you were so young, how do you remember anything?” Bosnia’s war guides feel the aftershocks of such questions. When I asked a guide named Eman about the skepticism some tourists exhibited over his ability to “really” remember the war because he was “too young” at the time, he began to cry. After a long moment he said, “It actually hurts when they say you are a child so you could not really remember anything. But I Do Remember; I remember what it was like to live in the basement day after day. Even all of the sounds, the smells…I remember everything about that time, everything about the war.”

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Within these tourists’ queries and comments, I heard an ungracious longing for contact with the “real,” a quest for authenticity that struck me as a version of logocentrism, enthralled to the originary presence of meaning that Nula Jedan’s performances at the war hostel effaced.

Such skepticism on the behalf of tourists appears to be mediated not by their war guides, but rather by an engagement with the figure of the child, itself posited as an origin, a tabula rasa, a blank slate that is only a potential site for the “real” of adult- and personhood.153 But, on the contrary, this is where the war lives, in the very real second life of trauma, in its performative repetitions, in its belatedness and displacement, in what Marianne Hirsch calls post-memory.

The “real” of the war by tourists need not be sought; it is, like Derrida’s spectre, always yet to come and yet always already arrived. This is where the war lives its very real second life, in the war tour industry of Bosnia, and in the lives of its now grown war children, many of whom are

Sarajevo’s war guides.

When Arijan, a War Child of Sarajevo, grew up and became a young man, he changed his name from his birth name, “Arijan,” to Nula Jedan. “Nula Jedan,” which translates in

Bosnian to the numbers zero and one, was his father, Jasmin’s, code name during the war. Nula

Jedan tells me that his name contains a second significance in that it is but numbers, a name without distinction that serves as a reminder that we are all, first and foremost, humans. For war tourists, his new name is in keeping with the universalizing farewell messages of Nula Jedan’s bunker tour: we are all people, and if we let the divisions of categories like race, or ethnicity, or religion divide us, we too, may find ourselves living in perilous and violent conditions.

153 Krisjon Rae Olson suggests that scholarship struggles still today to work through the primary problematic of such binary conceptions of the child and the adult. She writes, “Childhood is most often considered as the past life of an adult person, something recalled but not present.” Krisjon Rae Olson, “Children in the Grey Spaces Between War and Peace: The Uncertain Truth of Memory Acts,” in Children and Youth on the Front Line: Ethnography, Armed Conflict, and Displacement, eds. Jo Boyden and Joanna de Berry (New York: Berghahan Books, 2005), 146.

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Outside of the war hostel’s recreated bunker, when one steps out onto the street and into the cultural context of the Balkans, where names are insta-identifiers of one’s ethno-religious identity, introducing himself as “Nula Jedan” leaves other Sarajevans flummoxed, quickly hiding a flash of surprise in the eyes or working a moment of inquiry about his name into the conversation.

When the lecture part of the Bunker Tour/Siege Experience is over, tourists are escorted to a room just beyond it. Though we passed the room outside the bunker door entrance for the tour, Nula Jedan keeps it covered with curtains until we re-emerge, prepared for its contents by our three hours of Siege Condition lessons. The room is filled with artillery pieces, shells and mortar that Jasmin and Nula Jedan have collected and turned into a museum. One wall is covered by a tack board; tourists are encouraged to write a post-it note about their experience and post it on the board if they so desire. Katie, from the UK, moved by Nula Jedan’s parting message, writes, “I hope you manage to spread the belief and way of life that we are all human first. Peace.” Older posts from former tourists cover the board. Jani, from Finland, has written,

“Thank you for an eye-opening experience! As a peacekeeper myself I can’t understand what these people and UN peacekeepers have gone through.” Jessica is honored to have met the War

Hostel family; the tour gives her hope for a better world. She signs her note, “Proud daughter of a UN soldier.” Another woman, Amra, writes about her experience teaching refugee children from Afghanistan. “I have never quite been able to empathize with them and understand what they have been through. You have really helped me to be closer to these pupils. God bless you.”

Intersections of experience, ripples from a bunker door opening back out into the world.

144 CHAPTER 5: THE ISLAM YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT TOUR: EUROPE, ORIENTALISM, AND THE TOURIST GAZE

In 2015, twenty years after the end of the Bosnian war, a new tour debuted at Insider

Tour company in Sarajevo. Alongside their most popular tours, “Times of Misfortune” and the

“Tunnel Tour,” instructed to educate tourists about the Siege of Sarajevo and the Bosnian war,

Insider now offers tourists a chance to experience the “Islam You Did Not Know About” tour.

The tour description on the company web page reads, “The recent global events had unfortunately portrait the people of the Muslim faith in a very wrong image. Discover the true meaning of Islam, and the culture and history of tolerance and understanding and the respect

Muslims were known for throughout history.” The webpage features a photo of the Gazi

Husrev-beg Mosque, the largest mosque in Sarajevo, located in Baščaršija, the oldest part of town, and known simply as “beys” to locals.

My own interest in the “Islam You Did Not Know About” tour peaked through my interviews with Bosnia’s war tour guides, many of whom are Muslim. In interviews, a common thread has emerged – the many tourists who come, often from countries deemed “Western,” to take a Bosnian war tour and have taken it upon themselves to comment upon or ask questions about their tour guides’ Muslim identities. One participant, Adem, who works for a company called Info Tours, tells me that the thing he likes least about his job is the “disrespectful things people say to you because you are a Muslim.” When I follow up with him about what kind of things he says, “Ignorant things. I don’t want to say more, because it is my job as a tour guide to educate them, you know?"

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The tour guides who run the “Islam You Didn’t Know About” tour echo the comments of

Adem and other war tour guides I have interviewed in Sarajevo.154 By the Islam tours’ guides own admission, the tour itself was created out of the routineness of these micropolitical interactions and tensions between the local war guides and global tourists. As Mohammed, who leads both war tours and the Islam tour at Insider tells me, “Tourists will say things like, ‘You are a Muslim, but you are so normal, like we would be friends if we lived in the same country.’

This tour is to help people understand that yes, Muslims are normal people too.” He says this a little wryly. When I ask Almir, another tour guide for the Islam tour, “How did you [the guides at Insider] decide that the Islam tour was something you wanted to do, and what was the process of that like,” he responds, “I don’t want to speak for the team. But the experiences we had on the war tours was, the people are telling you, “But you’re not looking like you are a Muslim, how is it that you are a Muslim? Or they’re calling you worse things, like, ‘Bloody Muslim.’ So, we decided to create something that will be totally different for people to learn about it and to maybe change the picture of the people who have a wrong picture of Islam or just don’t have a picture.”

Double Consciousness & Gaze Work

Educational tours which strive to correct tourists’ “wrong images of Muslims” are in keeping with what Phaedra C. Pezzulo calls, “advocacy tours,” and she suggests that such tours

“offer the possibility to both guides and tourists of an often too rare indulgence: a sense of agency.”155 Pezzulo’s framework further situates “advocacy tours” as those in which guides

“present a particular vision of their community to their visitors so that these ‘tourists’ might be moved to do something to transform the tragic scenes they are presented.”156 In the case of the

154 Henceforth, the Islam tour.

155 Phaedra Carmen Pezzulo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 47. 156 Ibid.

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Islam tour, the “tragic scene” to be changed is a “tragic scene” within a “scene” –the context of war tours where tourists, as they learn about the Bosnian war, including the systematic attempts by Serbia to ethnically cleanse Bosnia of its Muslim population, are in fact, routinely surprised to learn that their tour guides are often Muslim.

I conceive of the organization of the Islam tour’s possibilities for agency to be further contextualized by, as well as operating through, what I call “gaze work.” By “gaze work,” I mean that the Islam tour is an attempt to re-appropriate the way that primarily Western tourists construct local Bosnian Muslim war guides as Other. Foucault turns our attention to gazing as a discursive practice, one in which onlookers bring their own positionalities and subsequent renderings of the world to an act that we often think of as simply revealing, rather than actively constructing, the world at large: seeing an object with our own eyes.157 But the gaze itself, and the discursive practice of looking, is an embodied action which constitutes not the reveal, but rather, the creation of the object of our analysis, and often involves rendering something as an object to be acted upon or subordinated to oneself. Pezzulo captures this particular dynamic of the gaze eloquently when she writes, “‘The gaze’ implies that in our looking we come no closer to whom or what we are looking at and, in fact, that we may move further away affectively as a result of our look.”158

If the gaze is not simply seeing, but an active way of discursively ordering the world, then what might the tourist gaze entail when it is brought to bear on Insider’s Islam tour? The most thorough treatment of the concept of the particularity of the “tourist gaze” itself is put forth by John Urry. In The Tourist Gaze 3.0 he writes:

“There is no single tourist gaze as such. It varies by society, by social group and by historical period. Such gazes are constructed through difference…this is in part because tourist gazes are structured according to class, gender, ethnicity, and age. Moreover, the

157 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

158 Pezzulo, Toxic Tourism, 27.

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gaze in any historical period is constructed in relationship to its opposite, to non-tourist forms of social experience and consciousness. What makes a particular tourist gaze depends on what it is contrasted with; what the forms of non-tourist experience happen to be. The gaze therefore presupposes a system of social activities and signs which locate the particular tourist practices, not in terms of some intrinsic characteristics, but through the contrasts implied with non-tourist social practices, particularly those based within home and paid work.”159 These non-tourist forms of experience for Urry are always of the world of the profane and the ordinary, connected to the minutia of work and the routines of everyday life. Like Durkheim’s distinction between the world of the profane and the sacred world that is ritually distinguished by being set apart from it, the tourist gaze is produced through the performed practices of tourism itself. The tourist gaze is the product of contrast. This contrast is ritually enabled through the tourist’s act of “departure,” cast as a moment of “limited breaking” through the lens of Turner’s liminality model.160 It enables us to step out of the gaze work we do on autopilot constructing objects as ordinary in our everyday lives and to exchange this for a world of extra-ordinary objects made available to us through the luxury of the tourist’s gaze.

But the world of the profane that we occupy contains far more than just the stuff of our everyday routines, far more than our sites of work, labor, and productivity to be so seamlessly contrasted with sites of tourism where the realm of the extraordinary is made accessible to us through the practice of leisure. The site of the everyday itself, in all of its profanity, is fraught with tensions, discourses, practices, and social imaginaries permeated with power relations and identity negotiations. In this sense, we might proliferate the contents of Urry’s tourist gaze in order to ask, “What other types of non-tourist forms of social experience and consciousness might inform the construction of the Western tourists’ gaze at the site of Bosnia’s war tours?

And why does this gaze lend itself to the Othering of Bosnia’s war guides to the point that the

159 John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 2-3. Italics added.

160 Ibid., 3. Urry further suggests that a liminality model pushes back against theoretical models which inscribe tourism as a quest for authenticity, as it is the contrast of the practices of the everyday with the practices of tourism that engenders “distinct kinds of liminal zones.” (12-13).

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Islam tour has been created as an educational response?” These questions, which belong to the world of the profane, cannot be theoretically side-stepped nor their politics ignored. Nor should they be relegated to the trappings of a classed and contained sacred, engendered by a liminal departure neatly nestled betwixt and between the disruption of work by leisure.161

In this chapter, I suggest that Western tourists’ in Sarajevo construct their tourist gaze in relation to larger global and transnational discourses of orientalism, in which places deemed as the “Orient” or even simply, “of the East” or “more Eastern” are produced as Other.162 The invention of this Other exists in relation to a socially imagined superior and civilized West.

Orientalism is a project of invention that operates in multiple registers on the Islam tour. Gazes are porous; they are permeated with multiplicities and soak up transnational perturbations. For tourists, the contents of the porous gaze construct the Muslim as the Manichean Other of an imaginary Western civilization, as well as in relation to discourses and practices more particular to the Balkans as a geo-political imaginary that contains the internal other of Europe. I further situate these problematic imaginaries through a discussion of the figure of the “Wahabi” as it is portrayed on the Islam tour, examining both the lens of Orientalism and the broader context of some of the transnational flows and movements that have situated contested Islams in a post- conflict Sarajevo.

The dynamics of orientalism that pervade the Islam tour are further complicated by discourses of what Bakic-Hayden calls “nesting orientalisms” that permeate the Balkans itself.163

Here, claims to a more authentic European-ness are used to create internal hierarchies in which

161 This use of liminality is also narrowly funneled in the sense that the site of the tours is, of course, a site of routine labor and everydayness for those who work in Sarajevo’s tourism industry.

162 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 163 Milica Bakic-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of the Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 917-931.

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Bosnian Muslims, due to their historical conversion to Islam under former Ottoman rule, are often viewed as somehow less European than other peoples who populate the former Yugoslavia.

At the same time, many Muslims in Bosnia further distinguish their own practice of Islam from the practices of Muslims elsewhere by citing its decidedly European flavor, and thus reproduce these practices of orientalism in turning their own eyes eastward.164 In Bosnia, these legacies and reverberations of Orientalisms old and new exist alongside and are further complicated by its own particular history, including its years as a colonial subject of the Ottoman empire.165 The disruptive force of the war years has further affected the relationship of Sarajevan Muslims toward their own imagined “West” and “Muslim world.”

In plotting the Islam tour as a site of “gaze work,” I also employ a rendering of the gaze on the part of its tour guides in keeping with Dubois’s theory of double consciousness, in which one’s subjectivity is crafted in relation to forms of oppression which lend themselves to “the sense of looking at oneself through the eyes of others.”166 In this I draw on the work of Renee

Alexander-Craft, who has written on the role of double consciousness within tourist performances of the Congo tradition in Portobelo, Panama.167 In asking how the Congo tradition is performed differently for the community than when it is performed as a product for primarily

White tourists from the United States, she notes that commodified versions of the tradition rely

164 Ibid., 922.

165 This chapter emphasizes the Western construction of “Muslim” as a category in Bosnia through the lens of the “gaze,” considering historical legacies of Orientalism and the impact of transnational flows and movements in Sarajevo. However, to provide the reader with some context of the term Muslim in Bosnia, I note here that the term “Musliman,” has been used for Slavic speaking Muslims since the end of the 19th century. In 1968, the League of Communists made this term an official designation regarding Muslim Slavs, with “musilman” (with a lowercase “m”) denoting all other followers of Islam. In September of 1993, the term Bosniak was introduced, which applies to people in Bosnia of the Muslim cultural tradition. The term “Muslim” is still commonly used in everyday parlance and conversation amongst many Bosnian Muslim (Bosniaks), Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Serbs. 166 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8.

167 Renee Alexander-Craft, When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth- Century Panama (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015).

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upon “strategies of double-consciousness to combat any pre-conceived notions that outside spectators have about the dance as ‘erotic,’ ‘raunchy,’ or ‘obscene,’ class – and racially laden criticisms that caused earlier generations of Congos to keep the tradition hidden and which haunt

Black vernacular performance traditions throughout the Black Diaspora.”168 Of course, what

Alexander-Craft’s work further highlights is the way in which touristic performances are vital, material encounters – better treated as rituals which reveal and situate significant ongoing historical and political realities than as theoretical quests for the holy grails of authenticity or liminality.

Building upon the lens of double consciousness, I posit the Islam tour as political practice in which Muslim, Sarajevan tour guides have created the Islam tour in order to have a sense of agency to combat micropolitical aggressions and to educate tourists about their understanding of

Sarajevan Islam. I examine the ways a type of Sarajevan Islam is constructed on the tour, as well as the legacies of Orientalism that historically inform the tour’s creation. I further consider these historical legacies impact on the construction of the Balkans as a social imaginary. Here, I examine the specific ways in which a Sarajevan Muslim identity is translated and performed by tour guides into categories that are aimed to reach Europeans as well as to reaffirm the guides’

European Muslim identities. A part of this performance on behalf of the guides also involves countering a portrayal of Islamic life in Bosnia to other forms of Islam, and I speak to this phenomenon further through Bakic-Hayden’s concept of “nesting orientalisms.”

Context(s) of the Islam Tour

It is not surprising that the discourses and practices of tourism are being utilized by the

Islam tour guides to reach Western tourists and respond to a perceived political problem. By the term “West,” or “Western” though it may have broader constituent places, I almost always mean

168 Ibid., 150.

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countries traditionally demarcated as Western Europe and the United States. Secondly, I use this term to encapsulate the discourse of progress, Enlightenment, and civilization that these countries all too often invoke. In Sarajevo, the well-established and extremely popular war tourism industry which has given rise to the Islam tour also has claim to geopolitical stakes in reaching its primary audience - Western tourists.

That war tours take place with international tourists who are largely from the “West” has immense political significance, as there is both deep resentment in Bosnia toward the West for its role during the war, as well as a post-war dependency upon the international community for continued financial aid and resources. Within the Balkans, histories of the war are controversial, and the atrocities inflicted by Bosnia are routinely denied by both Serbia and Croatia. Western opinion regarding the conflicts and genocide of the 1990s also remains one of the only means that has had any political measure of success in combating Serbian denial about the events of the war.169

But Western opinion has had other historical ramifications for Bosnia and the emergence of its war tour industry. In the affluent West, much of the Balkan wars of the 1990s and their aftermath has been construed in ethnocidal terms. The Balkans is produced as an imaginary in which ancient ethnic groups violently renew their antagonisms/nationalisms, and its history has been enfolded into this story with contours both teleological and trans-historical. One salient example of this is Sarajevo’s reputation for being the “powder keg of Europe,” a strange essentialism which suggests that the Bosnian war arose out of the same tensions that ignited

World War I when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in

1914. Such trans-historical notions are predicated on essentialized notions of ethno-religious

169 See Chapter 8, “Pushing Back: Denial” in Lara J. Nettlefield and Sarah Wagner, Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 251-284.

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actors who are primitive, backwards, and violent - always simmering. But “ethnic” representations of the Balkans are not merely a by-product of the Balkan wars of the 1990s; they are also historically inherited entanglements with the project of orientalism.

These historical entanglements over “who counts as ‘ethnic’ and who counts as

‘European,’” and the orientalisms that they operate through, also inform and complicate the political context of Bosnia’s war tours, in which Bosnians share, remember, and perform stories and memories from Bosnia’s wartimes years with primarily Western tourists. Many scholars have attempted to carve out a specific framework for the Balkans as it exists in the social imaginaries of the West, in which the Balkans are essentialized as a violent Europe not quite

Europe where civilization has gone awry. Maria Todorova has deemed historical reiterations of this discourse “Balkanism,” which denotes conceptions of the Balkans as a highly volatile and inverted, developmentally-stagnated Europe which have a long and entrenched historical legacy, dating from its rule by the Ottoman Empire.170 Another way of saying this is that Balkanism is a way of mapping the social imaginary of a West that constructs itself as civilized in relation to a violent, ethno-religious Balkans as an internal other of Europe. Similarly, Larry Wolf documents how the project of mapping is itself a project of gazing, demonstrating how the “invention of

Eastern Europe,” itself began as an Enlightenment project of “subordinating geography to its own philosophical values.”171 Here, Wolff posits Western Europe’s project of constructing a

170 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Todorova suggests that Balkanism itself can be distinguished as its own paradigm independent of Orientalism. For Todorova, the Balkans are a product of discourses of European ambiguity, whereas Orientalism is a discourse constructed through opposition (17). Though Balkanism does represent a compelling apparatus for theorizing the historical and cultural construction of the Balkans as a particular geographic social imaginary, I am more of the mind that the historical and conceptual contours of categories such as “Balkans,” “Communist Europe,” or “Eastern Europe” are interwoven with the ongoing Western production of Orientalist entanglement. Bakic-Hayden and Hayden also take this position in an oft cited paper in the field of Slavic studies. See Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 1-15.

171 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1994), 6.

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barbaric Eastern Europe as a project of “demi-Orientalization” that produces Western Europe as a bastion of civilization.172 Orientalism is an operation in a process that produces the Other to produce itself, but it can also carve itself up if it needs to.

Sarajevo’s orientalist entanglement in the geographic-social imaginary of Westerners as the “powder keg of Europe” becomes all the more problematic when one considers its instrumental political impact on Bosnia before the war, during the war, and long after. In fact,

Susan Woodward suggests that much of the political instability that lead to Yugoslavia’s collapse was due to the attempt to westernize it economically and integrate it into the global order.173 At times the gaze of the West has constructed what was once Yugoslavia as an Other not through ethno-religious imaginaries, but rather, through the specter of communism. This anxiety of the West over Yugoslavia’s lack of a commitment to an ideology of capitalism was also an element that exacerbated the conditions for the war, as nationalist leader Slobodan

Milosevic’s election in Serbia was endorsed by Western banks and governments, and departments of the US government. As Woodward notes, “It was common at the time (indeed into the 1990s) for Westerners and banks to choose ‘commitment to economic reform’ as their prime criterion for supporting East European and Soviet leaders (as well as in many developing countries) and to ignore the consequences that their idea of economic reform might have on democratic development.”174

Bosnia, and the Yugoslavia it was once a part of, have always been interconnected with, embedded in, and affected by the perturbations of transnational processes. And yet such

172 Ibid., 7.

173 Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War (Washington D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1995). 174 Ibid., 106-107.

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transnational perturbations, including Western political action and its role in the conflict is easily put under erasure when another story is available. This story is the story of primordial ethnic hatreds, and primitive ethno-religious nationalisms. One of the most troubling of these layers of

Orientalist thought is that the representations of the Balkan wars it generated also directly affected international intervention (or lack of) during the infamous Siege of Sarajevo and the

Bosnian genocide. One salient example of the long-lasting impact of this story of Bosnia in the

Western imagination can be found in the widely reported fact that Bill Clinton, and his administration’s subsequent brokering of the Dayton Agreement, is said to have been influenced by Robert Kaplan’s rendering of the Balkans as a place violently beholden to ethno-nationalisms in his book “Balkan Ghosts.”175

The ramifications of the international community’s production of Bosnia as beholden to violent ethno-nationalist identities is nowhere more apparent than the Dayton Agreement, the consequences of which still polarize life in Bosnia today. For the Dayton Agreement brokered under Clinton that formally ended the Bosnian war did so by administrating Bosnia’s previously mixed ethnic populations and reifying Bosnian identities into two ethnically distinct entities

(Republika Srpska for the Bosnian Serbs) and The Federation (for Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats).

This internationally imposed solution to the war is regarded bitterly by many Bosnians of all ethno-religious identities, who feel that their years of pluralistic public life were dismissed in order to reward Bosnian Serbs who joined the former Yugoslav army in the Siege of Sarajevo.

In other words, for many Sarajevans, those who turned on and slaughtered their neighbors were given exactly what they wanted by the international community– their own distinct political and spatial instantiation.

175 See Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: Picador, 2005).

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War tourism in Sarajevo, co-constituted by Bosnian war guides and largely Western tourists, is deeply embedded in these legacies. The most concerning of these is the fact that the war tours can be posited as an ongoing Western geopolitical project which continues to participate in constructing the Balkans as a “violent” and “uncivilized” entity through the commodification of Bosnian suffering. At the same time, war tours in Sarajevo push back on representations of Bosnia as they are portrayed in Western imaginaries. This “pushing back” often takes two distinct forms. At times the tours reiterate their own discourses of Bosnia’s proper European-ness, and at other times they highlight the dimension of the Bosnian war that is most likely to be erased – its construction in relation to the larger Western community. As I have strived to show in Chapter 2, Sarajevo’s war tours utilize the Tunnel of Hope museum to present counter-memories of the city’s infamous Siege that are just as biting and indicting in their treatment of the United Nations and the lack of adequate Western intervention during the war as they are of actors such as the former Yugoslav army which surrounded and massacred the city. The Tunnel is used by war guides to place chinks in the armor of tales of Sarajevo’s doomed ethno-religious actors, emphasizing instead the failure and hypocrisy of the Western world and the way its attempts to handle the crisis through international intervention often only augmented Sarajevo’s instability.

Other geopolitical messages that “push back” find a context for their dispersal in

Bosnia’s war tours. One of the more popular messages propagated on the tours tends to be “This was not a civil war.” In the words of Mehmed, a war guide who framed the scene as we tourists looked at a map of a surrounded Sarajevo during the Siege years at the Tunnel of Hope museum,

“A civil war is two sides fighting. A civil war is not slaughtering a civilian population who has no arms.” Another war guide expanded upon this position for tourists on a tour by way of introduction, saying, “You might have heard the story that this war was a civil war. This is a

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popular story, but it was not a civil war. A civil war implies an equal war between two sides who are fighting each other with their armies. But the army that they used to surround Sarajevo was our own army!” and then he laughed aloud at the absurdity.

These anti-civil-war counter-memories prioritize the atrocities Bosnian civilians endured during the war in order to push back against characterizations of the war by the political actors who were directly complicit in instrumenting such atrocities, such as Serbia and the Bosnian

Serbs who joined their army. But they also push back on the European community, who placed a weapons embargo on Bosnia while Sarajevo’s civilian population endured a hellish siege and many of Bosnia’s villages were ethnically cleansed. Such a refusal to aid Bosnia was deeply tied to a characterization of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia as a civil war and an internal matter, in which Europe’s main investment and policies were aimed at containing the conflict and keeping it (“it” being violence, criminal networks, and refugees) from spilling over into

Europe proper. They further push back on broader narratives and characterizations of the war rendered by academics.176

As opposed to pushing back on European characterizations of the Bosnian war, a second type of thematic emphasized on the tours is that the story of Bosnia was a distinctly European tragedy. In interviews with Bosnia’s war guides, a common interview question I ask is, “What is the most important message for tourists to take away from the war tour?” A popular response is encapsulated in the words “I want the tourists to know that something like this can happen even in Europe.” It’s the “even in” Europe that piques my ears, the implication that atrocities and violence can happen elsewhere, in places that may be more barbaric, but that what happened in

176 eg Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Civil Wars: From L.A. To Bosnia (New York: The New Press, 1995). Mattijs van der Port, whose reflections on the relationship between excess, violence, and the enterprise of creating knowledge are quoted at the opening of the project, also uses the nomenclature “Yugoslav Civil War,” in Gypsies, Wars, & Other Instances of the Wild: Civilisation and Its Discontents in a Serbian Town (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 13.

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Bosnia is an example of a break-down in civilization in the place where it is the least likely to happen, the most civilized place on Earth, Europe. It is difficult to stabilize the meaning of such a comparison; it has too many layers – layers of feeling that one has been betrayed by Europe, layers of nesting orientalisms that posit the origins of societal break-downs and violent atrocities as the realm of other peoples who lie even further away from Europe’s centers.

Europe is appealed to in other forms. At Insider tours where the Islam tour takes place, I pay the couple of Euros to take a look at Insider’s small museum, dedicated to the Siege of

Sarajevo. Tourists can pay a couple of extra Euros after their tour to go inside, or tourists can skip the tour and pay a few Euros to check out the one-room tour company museum offering. In interviews of tourists, I’ve found that the war tour makes a difference. Tourists who just pop-in tend to feel like the museum is a rip off; tourists who go on the tours tend to feel glad that they paid the extra couple of euros; the museum is the final stamp of their Sarajevo war tour experience. The museum is only a small room, in the tour company’s building, and it is a dimly lit space where a video plays on repeat, with imagery from the Siege. There is a lone bench to sit on for the convenience of watching the full video. Other than this, the room simply contains framed photographs on the walls of decimated buildings and frightened and ragged people navigating the sniper-filled city streets. One, of a bombed maternity ward building, where pregnant women, new mothers, and new babies were instantly killed, catches my eye. The caption Insider has provided reads:

“As soon as the siege started, on the May 26th 1992, the Serbian aggressor bombed the maternity hospital. Even the Nazis in the 2nd World War did not aim for maternity hospitals.”

This linkage to the Holocaust, in desolate images with inaccurate captions, makes a certain sense to me, despite the fact that it is historically untrue. After all, it too, happened,

“even” in Europe. The Holocaust is the other great European genocide of history, and its history

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is not the stuff of war tours; the Holocaust is, however problematically laden its representation, institutionalized, recognized.177 And, in many ways, the desire for one’s fellow Europeans to think of Sarajevo’s story as a European tragedy is still real, and unfulfilled. What better way to legitimate one’s own story of urbicide and genocide as a European problem than to associate it with the Holocaust?

Porous Transnational Categories and Global Tourist Encounters

In April of 2016, I gathered with a group of tourists - three fellow Americans, an Italian woman and her daughter, at Insider Tours. We lounged around in a reception area and waited for the tour to commence, coffee and tea were offered; American pop music played softly in the background. Two tour guides were deep in conversation about scheduling logistics behind the counter. They finished their conversation and Almir, our guide, stepped forward to address the group, “We can start the tour to show you what Islam meant to Sarajevo, and more than that, what Islam really is, the images you have seen on TV, what you see is violence on the TV, and that’s not true. I’m a Muslim, I’m coming from a Muslim family.”

Almir, our 22-year-old guide, opened his introduction to the Islam tour with a message in keeping with the Islam tour’s webpage promise that we tourists would be presented with an authentic picture of Islam from Sarajevo. He stamped his introduction with a personal touch,

“I’m Almir, your guide. My friends call me Imam, because I went to a Muslim school and wanted to be one...then I discovered I loved alcohol and girls.” We, the tourists, chuckle good- heartedly. “So, you know about me, I’m a Muslim, I’m coming from the crazy years in your twenties when you just want to celebrate life. And I want to present to you this Islam, that we cherish here.”

177 An excellent resource in this regard is James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

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Almir continued, “We are going to the Beys Mosque, and the women here will need a head scarf to enter. No need to worry; it is provided; they will give you one at the Mosque.

Almir then addressed us, the women, specifically. “It is not that you need a scarf because Islam needs like some advancement. It’s more like there are factions that most notably come from

Saudi Arabia that have a different viewpoint of Islam, which is called Wahhabi Islam. The Islam there, the Sharia Law, has been transformed from something really nice, really respectful of the women etc, to today’s when women don’t have the right to drive, the right to vote, if they see you holding hands, they will cut off your hands. But they present this to the whole world to be

Islam, and it’s not.” A small silence descends on the group, perhaps it is the graphic image of one’s hands being cut off that stills us. In the silence, the radio makes itself more present, a rousing chorus of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” fills the quiet.

It seems worth noting that Almir’s introduction reinforced the tour web site description’s insistence that “global events” have portrayed Muslims in the “wrong image.” Almir posited from the get-go his tourists’ positionalities as those already having been exposed to, even possibly mislead by, violent images of Muslims on TV. He also marked the way he would perform his own Muslim identity, as well as the Islam that “we cherish here” as the embodied example of an ordinary, everyday type of Muslim existence, and just as importantly, as counter to whatever lurking presuppositions tourists may have brought with them on their trips. There is a sense among the Islam tour’s guides that the image of the Muslim as Other that they are fighting is larger than themselves.

This sensibility is in keeping with the work of Arjun Appadurai, who in his piece, “Dead

Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization,” suggests that in the contingent and multifarious world we reside in, we face a growing “uncertainty” about the “peoples,” “norms,” and “cosmologies” available to us today, so much so that the “ethnic body” becomes a vehicle

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“for the engagement of [this] uncertainty,” an uncertainty that is produced by “the special circumstances of globalization.”178 In part, Appadurai suggests, this happens because, “given the increasingly porous borders between nation-states in matters of arms, refugees, trade, and mass media, ethnic names and terms become highly susceptible to transnational perturbation.”179 The site of the Islam tour, already itself a product of the transnational flows of tourists, is a site that can bring into relief the multiple ways that identity categories such as “Muslim” are constructed in relation to globalized processes. In fact, broader political and transnational forces appear to be one of the main sources to which Almir and the other Islam tour guides attribute the Othering they experience by Western tourists. In considering the way that “porous” borders between nation-states affect the porousness of terms that can become rigid in their aggregation of mass scale identities, we must consider the way that transnational processes affect the porousness of not just our terms, but the gazes we use them to construct. Another way of saying this is that

Muslim as a category in Sarajevo is open to the perturbation of what it means to be Muslim in other times and places. One apt example of this is the Syrian refugee crisis, and the way the term

“Muslim” is becoming mobilized in Europe by new types of xenophobias. Emran Qureshi and

Michael A. Sells further offer for consideration larger global forces that may permeate the term

“Muslim” as an ethnic or religious category. They suggest that much of the current political polemic permeating Western states renders Islam as an inherently violent religion, and that essentializing its practitioners as those who want nothing more than to destroy Western values and Western ways of life merits a “New Crusades.”180

178 Arjun Appadurai, “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization,” Development and Change 29, no. 4 (October 1998): 906.

179 Ibid. 180 Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells, “Introduction: Constructing the Muslim Enemy” in The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy eds. Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003),1-47.

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At the same time, the figure of the Wahabi Muslim is also singled out on the Islam tour as a source of “Muslim wrong images,” and further catalyzed by a discourse of orientalism for tourists, though here it is an orientalism that both tourists and guides can gaze at together. A solidarity of European-ness is a prerequisite for the staging of the tour. In this sense, the Islam tour pushes back on an Orientalist discourse by reinforcing it and replacing the object of the presumed Orientalist gaze – the European Muslim – with the figure of the Wahabi Muslim. This dynamic is itself a part of a paradigm that pervades the Balkans, one that Bakic-Hayden suggests operates through a model of nesting orientalisms:

“Thus, while Europe as a whole has disparaged not only the orient ‘proper’ but also the parts of Europe that were under oriental Ottoman rule, Yugoslavs who reside in areas that were formerly the Habsburg monarchy distinguish themselves from those in areas that were formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire, hence, ‘improper.’ Within the latter area, eastern Orthodox peoples perceive themselves as more European than those who assumed identities of European Muslims and who further distinguish themselves from the ultimate orientals, non-Europeans.”181

Such nesting hierarchies can be particularly complex for Bosnian Muslims, often forced to contend with a gaze that renders the category of European Muslims as “less European” both within the Balkans and Europe at large. These larger social imaginaries can become more laden and more visible in the interactions between those who work in Bosnia’s tourism industry and foreign tourists. For example, when I asked Dzemo, who runs a small hostel business out of the home he shares with his mother, about encounters with tourists he disliked, he told me a story involving some French tourists who stayed in their hostel-transformed home. “Recently these tourists – a couple – came from France and we were having a coffee,” Dzemo said. “Anyway…I told them that I did not believe a man and another man should be together, and they treated me like I was some backwards peasant. Later, they came back to me again to recommend a

181 Bakic-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms,” 922.

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documentary I should watch about LGBT movement, can you believe? And I said to them,

“Your documentary, God’s word in the Quran. The worst was that when they recommended it to me they acted as if I would violently kill some homosexual. Do they not know that we had a war here?! I know better than they ever will the consequences of killing people because they are different than you.”

At the Mosque

Let us begin, come, come,” Almir said – he says, “come, come” in the same intonation as its direct translation from Bosnian “Dodji, Dodji,” a common Bosnian utterance - the way my neighbors in Grbavica call to their pets and small children. It is only a three-minute walk or so from Insider Tour company, located near the Franz Ferdinand bridge, to the Beys Mosque. I made conversation with my fellow Americans, Almir chatted with the Italian women. We entered its giant courtyard. Tourists instantly pull out cameras and join the other tourists in the courtyard taking photos. The space is Ottoman in its structure, with rounded domes resting on pendentives (an architectural innovation to hold up the rounded domes, curved and sturdy and connecting the domed roofs to their rectangular floors); and topped with a singular and impressively sized minaret. Close to the minaret, not quite a part of the mosque complex but certainly part of its skyline is a large, free-standing clock tower. Almir turned our attention to the large clock tower. “Is there anything unusual you notice about this clock?” he asks. Ah, a trick question for tourists.

“The time is wrong,” says one of the Americans. But he looks at Almir and waits, perhaps suspecting this is a set-up. Almir says, “It is not wrong; it is on lunar time. Islam follows the lunar calendar, and this is the calendar we use for our holy days and also for knowing the correct time for the daily call to prayer.” The clock is beautiful, old, black with gold gilded

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numbers and gold gilded hands. The tower that it nestles in is also old, dating back to the 17th century, like the mosque courtyard we stand in to stare at it. A visible part of Old Town

Sarajevo’s complex, I often hear tourists’ laugh and wonder about it, this grand, historic structure that cannot keep the right time. I also often hear tour guides laugh about the tourists who do not know the type of time it marks. Everyone in the group snaps a photo or two.

Seldom making it into the photos of tourists is a large black screen mounted on the courtyard wall with bright red digital clock letters that run across it like the stock market ticker. It is too “modern,” too obviously not of the 16th century to make the cut for many a tourist’s photographs. But it is a part of daily practitioners’ life, nonetheless, with its bright red letters running across the screen. A visual aid for practitioners’ daily call to prayer, the ticker scrolls through the names of the call to prayer in Bosnian: Sabah, Podne, Ikindija, Aksam, and

Jacija. Behind each term, in what many of the tourists will think of as military time, runs the proper time for each prayer according to the lunar calendar.

The courtyard itself is expansive and filled with both tourists and locals. Entrance is free to the public, and the courtyard itself (as opposed to entering the mosque proper) does not require women to don a head covering. Many linger or snap pictures around the courtyard’s focal point, a large drinking fountain, enclosed in a structure that to the construction of my own tourist gaze becomes reminiscent of a wooden gazebo, but far more ornate, and topped with its own small Ottoman-style dome. A small, iron, filigree fence surrounds the white fountain; below the fence, there are spickets that flow from each of the stone panels that support the slightly upraised structure.

Here, locals and tourists alike drink from the water; Almir made a point to tell us that each person who quenches their thirst contributes to the spiritual merit of the mosque’s founder,

Gazi Husrev-beg, an Ottoman soldier and governor of Bosnia from roughly 1521-1542. Both the

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fountain, as well as the mosque itself, were constructed as a portion of Gazi Husrev-beg’s vakuf

(endowment), works meant to provide for generations to come, while he was governor. Tours come through the mosque throughout the morning and afternoon; the tour guides routinely tell tourists to take a drink from the fountain; there is a legend that whoever drinks the water is destined to return to Sarajevo. Courtyard fountains, too, can be intersections of religious and touristic practices. At other times, if one wanders into the courtyard closer to a time for prayer, you can see the fountain being used by practitioners in a ritual of ablution, performing wudu, in which the hands, mouth, nostrils, arms, head, and feet, are washed for ritual purity before prayer.

The mosque is a tourist site, yes, but it is not a memorialization - it is active, alive - a place of worship.

I draw your attention to these things because I wish to address the fact that the mosque itself has its own particular Ottoman history, as well as a contemporary and thriving lifeworld of religious actors, practices, and politics that are outside the scope of this chapter. In some ways, they are outside the scope of this chapter simply because they are outside the scope of Insider’s

“The Islam You Did Not Know About Tour.” This tour, as its mission statement suggests (It is a tour description, but I have rather come to think of it as a mission statement), is about three things: “the recent global events that have portrayed the Muslim faith in a wrong image,” “the true meaning of Islam,” and the “culture and history of tolerance and understanding Muslims were known for throughout history.” But the mosque itself, though not the object of the tour, permeates the Islam You Didn’t Know About tour in important ways. Its function is living embodiment - to showcase a beautiful and peaceful place where everyday people worship, as

Almir, and his fellow guides who initiated the Islam tour, perform apologetics for Islam as a religion. The mosque, in this sense, is a well-chosen site, given that the purpose of these tours is primarily to educate tourists that Muslims are ordinary people too.

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“Let’s start with the basics,” Almir said. “In a way, Islam begins with Adam and Eve, same as all the religions here. In a way, you can say that Catholic, and Orthodox, and Islam have the same origins. Islam is founded with the Prophet, Mohammed. He is receiving the holy word. In Islam that means, ‘a law in the name of God.’ Those are the foundations of Islam, and the Islam you have in Sarajevo. A Sufi Islam. Sufi is….to get knowledge. To get mysticism, sitting in the dark room, trying to connect with something. It is figuring out how the world around you is going, and how you should implement a religion that you know is right. In Islam, traditionally, you have two flavors, Sunni and Shia. But here, in Sarajevo, we have all flavors...not like in, for example, Saudi Arabia, where they only have Sunni, only one type of

Muslim. Almir played off the women gathered in the courtyard and the women we can see strolling alongside it in the streets to further the Islam tour, stating, “So, in Sarajevo for example you have you can see covered women under the veil and in the next row a completely beautiful girl in the club in a skirt, and they are walking together on the street, and in Saudi Arabia not, so that is the real Islam, right beside you.”

Much of Almir’s performance of Sarajevo’s “true” or “real” Islamic identity, as well as the layering of this discourse with the veiling practices of women in Sarajevo, is contrasted to what he perceives to be Wahabi Islam, or at times by extension, to Islam as he perceives it to exist in Saudi Arabia. In this sense Almir attributes the “global events” that have portrayed Islam in the “wrong image” and shaped the preconceptions of Western tourists to images of Islam that come from Saudi Arabia. There are scholars who agree with Almir’s view propagated on the

Islam tour. For example, Qureshi and Sells write:

“For many Muslims it is a bitter irony that the dominant stereotype of Islam is based upon the Saudi model of police-state repression, religious intolerance, oppression of women, moral hypocrisy among the male elite, and an aggressive and highly funded

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export of militant anti-Western ideology – and that the Saudi monarchy is kept in power by the very Western nations that display fear and loathing at that stereotype.”182

As the Islam tour guides emphasize, a Manichean engagement that stages the West in relation to images of Saudi Islam which then serve as a stand-in for the figure of the Muslim is one factor that contributes to the porousness of “Muslim” as a mass-scale identity in a globalized world. But it is also the case that in a post-conflict Sarajevo, a more recent history of transnational actors and processes related to the war years has contributed to internal Bosnian

Muslim contestations and negotiations over the nexus of an identity that is both European and

Muslim. Ivana Maček writes about this in her ethnography of Sarajevo during the war years, where she notes that the lack of Western powers meaningful intervention in the Bosnian war created the conditions for many Bosnian Muslims to shift their own intersubjective understandings of their identities. She writes, “Eventually disappointment in the West soured into a form of contempt, and Sarajevan Muslims in particular were often eager to state their cultural superiority to Western countries.”183 Such superiority shifts were formed by privileging

Islam as a historical and cultural force that separated Bosnian life from a Europe that extoled its own virtues of civilization, democracy, and progress while allowing European Muslims to be slaughtered by European Christians in Serbia and Croatia, and marking this difference through

“Sarajevo’s distinguished European Muslim past.”184

But such shifts in the register of identity were not the only shifts experienced in Sarajevo during the war. With a lack of adequate Western aid and intervention also came the political

182 Emran Qureshi and Michael Sells, “Introduction: Constructing the Muslim Enemy,” in The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy as Other, eds. Emran Qureshi and Michael Sells (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 17. 183 Ivana Maček. Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 133.

184 Ibid.

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need to turn to other Muslim countries and organizations that would provide the needed relief and arms to sustain Bosnia through the war years. But such aid often came with strings attached, and with other transnational religious actors who were uncomfortable with the local practices of

Bosnia’s European Muslim population. Xavier Bougarel notes the presence of Islamic NGOs and foreign mujahidin during the war years, as well as the way that their presence made many

Bosnian Muslims uncomfortable with what they perceived to be intrusions into their own distinctly European form of Islam. Foreign aid and missionary work out of organizations such as the Saudi Arabia-based International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), Islamic Relief (based in the United Kingdom), and al-Haramain among others were often accused of “resorting to coercion, by giving humanitarian aid only to women wearing a headscarf or to parents who sent their children to religious classes.”185 Here, it must be pointed out that other academics have also documented that Western aid organizations were not above attaching strings to the aid they provided to Bosnians.186

Foreign mujahdin were also a notable transnational Islamic presence in Bosnia during the war years. According to Bougarel, between 1992 and 1995 several thousand mujahidin from

Afghanistan, the Gulf countries, North Africa, and Western Europe arrived in Bosnia.187

Bougarel also documents their marginal role in fighting off Serb and Croat forces, as opposed to their far more pervasive influence intruding upon local religious life. “However, in the regions where they were stationed, the mujahidin attacked cafes selling alcohol and harassed couples holding hands. They also had violent disagreements with the combatants of the 7th Muslim

185 Xavier Bougarel, Islam and Nation-hood in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Surviving Empires (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 180.

186 See Elissa Helms, “The Nation-ing of Gender? Donor Policies, Islam, and Women’s NGOs in Post-war Bosnia- Herzegovina,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 21, no. 2 (2003): 85-93.

187 Bougarel, Islam and Nation-hood, 181.

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Brigade due to the latter’s Sufi practices. In central Bosnia, they were guilty of serious war crimes and became a major threat to public order.”188 Bougarel further notes that this chaos resulted in the creation of the foreign mujuadin’s own unit, which enabled them to organize and begin to recruit young Bosniaks to classes organized for their neo-Salafist religious re- education.189 The importation of foreign religious practices to Bosnia and the re-organization of local forms of religious life was one that many Sarajevans found disturbing. Ivana Maček notes that many Sarajevan Muslims during the war came to fear that a Christian West’s indifference was pushing them closer to becoming an Islamic state. 190

These are other transnational processes that complicate and inform local understandings of forms of Islam associated with markers such as “Saudi,” “Wahabi,” or “Salafist” in Sarajevo today.191 Post-war Bosnia is complicated by the presence of these transnational networks, comprised of foreign forms of Islam that arrived alongside relief and arms during the war, though these dynamics are not showcased in the Islam tour nor war tours as such. In many ways this is not surprising, given that the tours showcase performances of European-Muslim-ness and

Sarajevan Islam as distinctly European; the post-war presence of non-European forms of Islam that many Sarajevan Muslims find intrusive has little place in crafting such an image. Here I emphasize again that this does not make the Islam tour a “false” or “inauthentic” performance, but rather a performance constructed for Western audiences who routinely Other their Muslim

188 Ibid. 189 Ibid.

190 Maček, Sarajevo Under Siege, 133-135.

191 Khaled Abou El Fadl uses the term “Salafabists,” historically tracing the way in which the movements of Wahabism and Salafism became increasingly intertwined and by the 1970s, “virtually indistinguishable.” (57). Throughout the text, I have deferred to the specific terminology used by my ethnographic participants and academic interlocutors. See Khaled Abou El Fadl, “The Ugly Modern and the Modern Ugly: Reclaiming the Beautiful in Islam,” in Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003).

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war tour guides, deeply embedded in the legacies of historical orientalism and further affectively charged by the presence of transnational actors and networks. In considering these, it worth noting that a lack of adequate Western aid and intervention, itself deeply entrenched in legacies of constructing the Balkans as an internal and primitive other and deeply anxious in its reconciling of the figure of the European Muslim, has directly contributed to a more pronounced presence of other forms of Islam in Sarajevo today. It is in this sense that contestations over

Islam in a post-conflict Sarajevo have been buffeted by the transnational winds of the Western and Muslim world, and neither has been a disinterested party.192

“Western” as Religious Discourse Almir next lead us to grab scarves from an office located in a smaller domed building inside the courtyard. He handed them over to the women and continued the Islam tour as he did so, saying, “Sometimes Islam can appear like a very strict religion. But all religions are strict.

The Christian world, it has been more liberalized, so women don’t have to wear scarves. But throughout the world, women still wear scarves. In Southern Italy (his eyes fall on the Italian women in our ephemeral, two-hour group) women still wear scarves when they go to church.

It’s a sign of respect; it’s traditional.” Cameras are busted out as soon as the head scarfs are tied, the Italian women have Almir take their photo. A husband snaps a photo of his wife wearing a head scarf.

In the context of post-war Sarajevo, veiling as a religious practice has also taken on new cultural dimensions and contestations. As Andrea Mesaric notes in her piece, “Wearing Hijab in

Sarajevo,” veiling has become a “crucial means” of constructing differences between an

192 In the interest of establishing this point, but not establishing it monolithically, it is worth noting that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (comprised of Serbia and Montenegro after the Yugoslav secessions) was also supported by Muslim nations, such as Indonesia, Iraq, and Libya, who viewed it as the true successor of the former Yugoslavia. Montenegro officially declared its independence in 2006.

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“imagined Bosnian and foreign Islam.”193 This constructed and embodied form of producing difference, too, has been charged by the dynamics of transnational actors and institutions that have been imported alongside aid and arms to survive the war, and the interpretation of these actors as being decidedly anti-European. As Mesaric writes, “Dress serves as an important means of constructing this concept of ‘traditional’ or ‘Bosnian’ Islam, which is conceived as a tolerant, benevolent, European-friendly Islam, compatible with Western values, and championed as a bastion against radical, extremist, fundamentalist Islam imported from the Arab Middle

East.”194 It is important to note here, as Mesaric does, that the intersections of a post-war

Sarajevo and the performance of a European Islam are complex; many women in Sarajevo also locate their tradition of veiling as an equally indigenous Bosnian and European practice that was ousted not by the importation of Salafist groups during the war, but by the communist state of

Yugoslavia, which promoted the unveiling of women as a project of modernity.195

Within the context of the Islam tour, the modernity of veiling, and conveying this modernity to tourists, seems to be one of the questions at stake in translating Sarajevan Islam to tourists. My interest here lies not in claims to an authentic modernity, but in noting that Almir performs this translation of veiling into a modern practice that can be understood as compatible with Western values for the tourists in a few significant registers. At times, he states almost explicitly that veiling is a modern practice, as when he tells the women in the group, “It is not like you need a scarf because Islam needs like some advancement.” These appeals to European understandings of enlightened progress and the project of modernity are further heightened by his comparisons to veiling practices of Christianity practiced in Europe today, in places such as

193 Andreja Mesaric, “Wearing Hijab in Sarajevo: Dress Practices and the Islamic Revival in Post-war Bosnia- Herzegovina,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22, no 2. (2013): 29. 194 Ibid., 23.

195 Ibid., 19-20.

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Southern Italy. And perhaps most importantly, he draws upon the women living out their daily lives in the courtyard, the ones who are veiled and the ones who are not, to represent Islam and

Sarajevo as a part of a religiously diverse, plural, and tolerant Sarajevo, - a European Sarajevo.

With our scarves donned (Almir volunteered to help the young Italian woman with her scarf, as he told us at the beginning of the tour, he is at the age where he loves booze and girls), we head into the mosque proper. The inside of the mosque is fairly bare, with white walls. This is more important than it appears, but this fact will not make it into the tour. There is an ornate prayer rug; the most ornate thing is the quibla wall, which as Almir will tell us, orients those praying toward Mecca, and thus orients practitioners in the proper direction in which they should pray throughout the day. He tells us that praying is something you should do five times a day, that it is part of the Sharia law; that it is something that Mohammed did and part of the “terms,” or the “Five Pillars of Islam” that he left his people. Much of Almir’s information is an attempt not merely to explain, but to like the old anthropological maxim, make the strange familiar.

Almir’s touristic performance has been crafted and considered; he makes sure that he does not just tell us about Muslim practices but translate them into terms that are relatable. The bulk of his tour time he spends in this way, such as when he explains the practice of praying toward

Mecca. “Once a tourist asked me if praying five times a day was a lot. Praying five times a day can seem very strict to people, but each prayer is like setting time aside in the day to orient yourself in the world, to discovering where you are at in a moment and what you need to set right. These are the terms you need to enable to lead a good life.”

Almir does not talk about the ways in which the war is present is the Gazi Husrev-beg mosque itself. As the largest mosque in Sarajevo, a space-making presence in the oldest part of town, Baščaršija, it was a heavy target during the war. Much of the mosque was destroyed in the war, so much so that it needed funding to be rebuilt. Today, much of the aid that continues to

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come to Bosnia comes from other Muslim states, as the “stunning indifference of the West” during the Bosnian war engendered the Bosnian government to become more inclined toward them.196 The Gazi Husrev-beg mosque itself was rebuilt by funding from Saudi Arabia. Michael

Sells argues that the architectural restoration of the mosque, in which the mosque’s ornate interior of rich frescoes was replaced with white plaster walls is itself a product of Saudi style and a form of domination.197 This fact becomes all the more disturbing when one notes that many of Bosnia’s mosques as they once were, during the Before - as Sarajevans call the time before the war - have been destroyed. During the Bosnian War, both Croatian and Serbian forces systematically destroyed mosques throughout Bosnia wherever they could. These mosques were

“destroyable,” you see, because genocide is about erasing a people’s existence, as much as it is about exterminating them. And when they were rebuilt with Saudi aid and vested with the trapping of Wahabi style, they were done so because the mosques that had been there “Before” were thought to already be denigrations of a pure Islam; they were already the wrong kind of space in which to worship. Within this larger context, the white walls of the mosque do start to seem, as Sells describes them, like “a soulless interior of hospital white plaster.”198

And yet...

Today, in a twenty-years post-war Bosnia, Almir’s performance of Sarajevan Islam, co- constituted with a group of tourists, takes place at the Gazi Husrev-bey mosque. It’s a performance caught in the midst of a longer and more complex history of Orientalisms, and some

196 As Maček notes, “The Bosnian government may have become more inclined toward other Muslim states than it would otherwise have been because of the stunning indifference that the West showed toward the Bosnian war. Many Bosnians were deeply and continually shocked that Westerners, with whom they identified strongly, did not respond to the many-sided, expanding conflict in the former Yugoslavia as they expected and hoped they would.” (Ibid., 129).

197 Michael A. Sells, “The Construction of Islam in Serbian Religious Mythology and Its Consequences,” in Islam in Bosnia: Conflict Resolution in Multi-Ethnic States, ed. Maya Shatzmiller (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002), 72.

198 Ibid., 84.

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of those forms of Orientalism are Bakic-Hayden’s - Orientalisms nesting and present within our group’s gaze work as we socially construct the figure of the “Wahabi.” And no, it’s not a performative that marks the definitive or true version of Islam, or of all Muslims everywhere, or

Saudi Muslims, or Sufi Muslims, or Muslims in Bosnia, or even Muslims in Sarajevo - the tour cannot be what does not exist. But the tour is Sarajevan Islam performed, made and re-made here, today, in this space, at a mosque that Sarajevans long thought was their own, and then twice discovered that it was not - once as it was bombarded alongside loved ones lost and lives destroyed, and once when it was rebuilt with the help of transnational movements and flows attached to the strings and renegotiated promises of foreign aid. Within this context, perhaps it means something that amidst all of these things, the mosque has become something else too.

The mosque is now also a site where the Islam tour itself becomes a new form amongst the many forms of Sarajevan Islam. At the Gazi Husrev-beg mosque, a new form of Sarajevan religious life has burst into being, one found in the echo of an echo of a war, in an Islam tour cast somewhere between trauma and the commodity form.

We stepped outside the mosque and back into its courtyard, and listened to Almir, and his parting lesson for his tourists: “In Islam, and in the Islam that we cherish here, in Sarajevo, you should cherish your neighborship. Our Islam is really nice; it is not Christian, like other religions here. But all the religions here are a peaceful order: Jewish, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy are also all religions that are related to the Q’uran, the same way like before I told you we are all related to Adam and Eve. Sarajevo has everybody.”

A tourist is prompted by Almir’s words to ask a question, “Are people in Sarajevo influenced by the customs of other people’s religions?”

Almir says, “My aunt, who is a Muslim, she doesn’t push the Christians away; she says,

‘We will take what we wish from the orthodoxy.’ And that was unique about Sarajevo, how

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much cultural difference can influence another religion, differences can influence one another.

You all, for example, you have the 40 days, it is not Islam. (Amir addresses the tourists collectively, with a “you all” that interpolates the group in this presumed understanding of

Christianity). We do fasting, as I told you, at Ramadan. You have a lunch or something, so we started doing that as well. A lunch. Here we are not having the problems of understanding between the religions.”

Almir’s parting message to tourists about religious life in Sarajevo is a further emphasis on the city’s history of religious pluralism. “When you leave here, you will see there is a synagogue virtually next door and an Orthodox Cathedral around the street. Here there are multiple cases of churches and mosques together, they have exactly the same customs, just when they enter the mosque or church it is different - so that is the story of Sarajevo. Thank you for coming on the tour and I hope you have learned something about what Islam really is.”

In many ways, Almir’s parting message in which religious pluralism and peaceful co- existence are possible is predicated upon the idea that mosques and churches are similar sacred spaces with similarly inclined religious practitioners who come together regardless of their religious backgrounds in the public sphere. This parting message also reflects what Ivana

Maček, who conducted ethnography in Sarajevo during the Siege, deems the “pre-war secular society of Sarajevo,” in which religion is primarily located in the traditions of the family.199 Almir’s own life experiences, and stories of his family, are interpolated into this narrative about the nature of religious division and religious life in his city.

When I interviewed Almir after the tour, I asked him, “During your tour, you talked about religious diversity in Sarajevo, about people of different religions getting along. Do you think this ‘getting along’ has been affected by the war?” Almir said, “There are always some

199 Maček, Sarajevo Under Siege, 124.

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people, especially some of the older people, who do not feel this way. But many people, especially younger people like me, are like this way I told you about on the tour. I am a Muslim, and I have friends who are Catholic and Orthodox…we have different places we worship, but we all go out together, have coffee together. And why shouldn’t we? This is really what it is to belong to Sarajevo.”

Almir’s sentiments on a religiously plural Sarajevo echo the stories created about this once-besieged city – “Europe’s Jerusalem,” - on Bosnia’s War tours. Other places in Bosnia tell stories about the war in other ways. Mostar is a story about Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats,

Bosnians and Croatians, fighting one another. Srebrenica is a story about the genocide of its

Muslim population. But in Sarajevo, an urban capital with a heavily mixed civilian population, the story of the war that is told tends to go something like this:

“The Chetniks surrounded the city of Sarajevo with tanks. We would go into the mountains and ask them, “Why have you surrounded the city?” And they said, “We are doing this for your protection.’ ‘If you are doing this for our protection, then why are you facing the city?’ we asked. Then, one day, the Bosnian Serbs in Sarajevo all disappeared. They were told what would happen to Sarajevo and given the choice to stay or leave. Many of them left. Many of them went into the mountains and became Chetniks. They were not all of them bad. Some of the Bosnian Serbs stayed. In fact, one of our greatest generals in the Bosnian army was Serb!

The Serbs who stayed were true Sarajevans. The Chetniks fired on all of us in the city, Muslims,

Croats, and Serbs.”

Sarajevans have long been proud of their historically mixed population. In fact, outside of the context of war tours, a popular joke in Sarajevo goes something like this:

Q) “How many peoples live in Bosnia?”

A) “Four: Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, and Sarajevans.”

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These stories of religious pluralism, diversity, or tolerance resonate with Western understandings of the place of religion encased in the trappings of liberal, secular thought.200 My point here is not to say that these stories are authentic or inauthentic. My point is rather that the stories that Sarajevans tell themselves about their mixed population on the tours are also messages that distinguish religious life in Sarajevo as distinctly Western, and Sarajevan Muslims as distinctly European Muslims. These forms of religious life, in which Orthodox Christians,

Catholics, and Muslims peacefully interact and affirm one another’s’ religious practice are also stories that present for Western tourists the decidedly European quality of Sarajevan religious life and reinforce the European tone of the Islam presented on the Islam You Didn’t Know About

Tour. In a post-war Sarajevo, this landscape still exists, but it has become further complicated, contested, and fractured by the war and by its lingering consequences, one of these being the importation of foreign forms of Islam associated with the Arab world. These post-war contestations in local religious life are not the stuff of the Islam tour, perhaps in part because their existence presents its own complications in negotiating and performing a religious identity that is distinctly European. And yet, it is largely due to the West’s utter abandonment of Bosnia that they exist in the first place.

For to present their existence would be to present forms of Islam that are coded Other by

Bosnian Muslims who are themselves coded Other by the Western tourists that come to learn

200 For example, Wendy Brown’s work notes how discourses of liberalism and colonialism have the power to enshrine the co-existence of a multiplicity of religious actors within an imperialist agenda. Brown’s work documents the way that “tolerance” has been used within a modern, liberal framework to divide peoples into the realms of the civilized and the barbaric, with the civilized world invading and bringing the virtue of “tolerance,” to people’s deemed uncivilized. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). William Cavanaugh’s work is also useful here, in which he analyzes the emergence of the modern, liberal state as a creation myth, one whose origin story arises from the need to respond to unwieldy religious conflict and deeply invested in essentialized understandings of “religious violence.” Cavanaugh’s understanding of what is at stake in his project shares overtones with Brown’s concerns over ideological justifications for imperialist action. He writes, “This myth is omnipresent in the cultural West…this ideology allows us to make decisions under the justification that we are quelling dangerous, Muslim, religiously- justified violence, and a less-evolved, religious backwardness.” William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.

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about the Bosnian war. And yet, these contestations in local religious life do not exist in a vacuum. They are the result, in part, of transnational processes by Western actors and institutions that failed Bosnia during the war. These processes of determining international intervention and in many ways, lack thereof in the ethnic cleansing, urbicide, genocide, and rape camps that Bosnia’s citizens endured during the war, as well as the diplomatic “triumph” of the

Dayton Agreement and its reification of Bosnia’s population into ethno-religious actors, were deeply tied to the global construction of entities such as “Balkan” or “Muslim” that still today manifest in a Sarajevan local. You can find them in the micropolitical interactions between tourists and war guides where Muslim identity is performed, and contested, in relation to the image of the Bosnian Muslim that tourists, perhaps unknowingly, bring with them on their vacations, like a sock or a toiletry accidentally left in one’s suitcase from a previous trip.

Yes, tourists come from the West to learn about the Bosnian War, about the systematic destruction of a people who came to feel that Westerners deemed them more “Muslim” than

“European,” and yet, when they do, many of them are surprised to learn that their war tour guide, is, in fact, a Muslim. As Almir reiterated for me in our interview, “How is it that you are a

Muslim?” is a popular question. It is strange to me, and yet it is not, given our propensity to internalize and contribute to the social imaginaries through which we constitute Others in relation to ourselves, that so many tourists come to Bosnia to take a war tour and learn about the attempt to systematically destroy Bosnia’s Muslim population, and yet are surprised to learn that their war tour guide, is, in fact, a Muslim. Or, as happened once to Almir, come to a war tour and keep talking about “bloody Muslims” and “oil prices” until Almir finally has to take him aside.

After the Islam tour is over, I share some of the contours of my bewilderment with Almir in my interview. “As we’ve talked about before, for my work, I go on many tours and interview

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tour guides, and something I’ve been struck by, that I wasn’t even two years ago, is the amount of questions that tour guides have been asked about their Muslim identity. And I am trying to think about how to write about that, because it is a big shift that is happening here where all of a sudden tour guides in Sarajevo find themselves in this position of having to represent Islam or explain their religion in some way.”

Almir said, “It’s a big influence. You are right. The picture of them, as you describe, is them interacting with the picture of Islam as you have right now. And you feel like…Immediately as a Muslim you are feeling yourself like a person of a second class, because you are like…because you know that probably one person at any time...or plenty of persons…they curse you somewhere. They will say like those…you know…Muslims. You immediately feel like you are trapped in a mechanism where you are just trying to live and caught in a mechanism where you have to know what to say before to explain…as if you need to start explaining before they start asking the questions…where you can’t react. Tourists were asking me, am I uh…’do I feel like a part of Europe, do I feel like a part of the European Union?

Do I feel like a European guy?’ I was explaining [these questions to tourists] and I had more knowledge than some people like the UK guy or the France guy and…I don’t know who is the biggest European? I know their English language and they don’t know mine, and that is a problem. And I know their religion and they don’t mine. And that’s a problem. And it’s a problem even in the tours because ...we are living in a time, when you represent the culture of the city...by let’s say by the religion.” And yet, Sarajevo has been represented by its religion for a long time. Rather than its own history, which is the history of a city in which diverse forms of religious life co-existed and intermingled, Sarajevo has long been bombarded by a West that has reduced its population to primordial ethno-religious actors, irrationally bound to nationalist sentiments ever brimming under the surface.

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Almir is very hopeful for the future of the Islam You Didn’t Know About tour. At the end of our interview, I ask him a few questions about the similarities and differences between being a guide for the war tours and now the Islam tour. “Do you think that either of these tours have the possibility to change people’s lives?” I asked Almir.

“The war tours…not so much. They come and they think our pain is the easiest way how to connect with the Bosnian people, and it’s the hardest way to connect because you cannot know what we suffered through. The easiest way to connect to the people is through the culture and the customs. Not through pain and suffering. That’s why I have hope for the Islam tour; it’s more broach-able. But the war tours…maybe it’s the easiest way for them to feel emotions, the type of emotions…that really hit you, and they want that emotion. Maybe they just want to feel themselves more alive. But also, they just want to see YOU. Let’s say there’s a guy coming through a tour, and we have the same age. But my house was bombarded and his wasn’t, and when he leaves, he feels more grateful for life. I’m not saying it’s selfish or anything like that that they come…but I think they come on the war tours because it makes them feel more alive to find these emotions in themselves.”

As Almir says, one of the reasons people come is because they “just want to see YOU.”

His comment reminds me of many an interview with a war guide, many a joke told on a tour guide break, a statement I have heard so often in so many varied tones – matter of fact, bitter, laughing, earnest, grave – “All anyone really wants is to come to Sarajevo and meet a Survivor.”

In many ways, the Islam You Didn’t Know About tour is a story of globalization. For just as global flows and transnational processes continue to permeate the layered, multiple, and contested local that is the city of Sarajevo, it is not surprising that here, where Bosnian Muslim tour guides are already constantly performing one identity – that of the Survivor – they would begin to perform another identity, that of the European Muslim. In this sense, the Islam You

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Didn’t Know About tour’s existence is a logical extension of Sarajevo’s war tours. And the

Islam tour affords its guides who interact with Western tourists, as Pezzulo reiterates, a rare luxury in our day and age – a form of agency. But the contours of this agency, and the needs from which it arose, as Saba Mahmood said when she addressed Western, liberal thought inquired and directed at the practice of veiling, “may actually be a form of agency—but one that can be understood only from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment.”201

Perhaps tourists do go on war tours to connect with Bosnian pain, to feel emotions vicariously within themselves that make them feel more alive. Perhaps Bosnia’s war tours do drive the type of emotions that, as Almir said, “really hit you” because they attempt, as best they can, to encapsulate and recount a type of “sensational suffering” – stories of war with such brutal excesses that one can only stand still, and watch, and listen, from a place of shock and awe.

Perhaps, as Luc Boltanski suggests, (and so does Almir) stories of others’ pain make us feel like we are emotionally connected to other human beings, and this connection reinforces our sense of what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive.202 In this way we gain from the suffering of others, whether we transform this into lives lived differently, or political action, or nothing at all.

201 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 14-15. 202 Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics, trans. Graham D. Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

181 A RETURN TO HAUNTINGS

Biljana is my neighbor on the 3rd floor. She’s Croatian and Serbian - the product of a Croatian mother and a Serbian father. Her full name codes as Serb. She converted to Catholicism, which codes as Croat. She finds these identity markers technical in nature. She’s in her late 40s, an age where she can still remember a Yugoslav childhood, an age where her parents told tales of a Yugoslav Golden Age.

Biljana’s mother was an early victim of the war, one of many lost to routine sniper shootings on streets where once people walked to get groceries, or for the pleasure of walking itself. When she goes out for her job to repair bombed out buildings and knocks on someone’s door and tells the person her name (Names in the Balkans are like fetishized skin color in the States, they instantly sort you out into categories that don’t all together fit: Muslim, Croat, Serb) sometimes people scream at her and tell her how her people killed their whole families. She explains that she was here during the war (thus marking her a “Good Serb”), and that her mother was shot.203 Then they usually relent and apologize. All but once or twice.

She stopped doing that though. It got too tiring. She told me with a somber face and a strange lightness of tone that there’s nothing you can do when people have hate in their eyes.

Biljana’s husband was a soldier during the War. A Bosnian Serb that fought for Sarajevo, on the Bosnian side. He had friends who fought on the other side, the Bosnian Serb side. Sometimes called the Chetnik or the Former Yugoslav army side. They all knew each other growing up. Sometimes, instead of having stand-offs, they would just play soccer together. Or drink together in the grass, amidst weapons strewn on the ground.

I’ve heard this story before, but in a different way. It comes up often from war tour guides. They watch videos on YouTube of the Bosnian Army and the Chetniks of the Former Yugoslav Army taking a break from the explosions that are a part of their lives day after shattered day. There they are, immortalized on YouTube drinking together and playing cards. More than one guide has told me that they find this unforgivable. It makes sense to me, the anguish and the outrage that this inspires from them. How can such a thing be happening, when you are so desperately in need of protection from the shells and bombs and bullets that are whizzing and whirling in the air? How can there be play amongst these soldiers, amidst the uncertainty that their own soldier parents would return from their rotation in a make-shift army keeping men with tanks and far superior artillery from taking Sarajevo?

203 Ivana Maček, Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 123.

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So I’m a little incredulous when Biljana tells me this story. I’ve only heard it one way before you see.204 Right now it’s still a little dangerous, a fortified tale that I can only see from my one oppositional angle. She laughs a joyous laugh and says, “But of course! They were all friends, you see?” Now I see something more than just the single story I’ve collected. I see something different, and something beautiful: regular people who grew up together caught in forces beyond their control doing what they would have done if the weapons weren’t there. I no longer see weapons strewn on the ground; I see weapons cast aside.

I try not to get carried away by my own flashes of idealism and their hopeful tone, because both versions of this story contain truths. [like Tim O Briens Vietnam stories in the things they carried, where the only stories that are true about war are the ones that sound untrue; the only thing you can rely on is absurdities]. Biljana’s story doesn’t go down especially well with other people I know, be they war tour guides or other Bosnians. War tour guides and former soldiers and civilians alike often make a point of saying that there were Serbs in the Bosnian Army, and Serbs and Croats and Muslims all being Sieged together in Sarajevo…but the light Biljana casts on these events they don’t seem to care too for much. There’s a general acknowledgement that you can find thugs everywhere, on all sides of things, and then the story is - put down, set aside. No, wait, was that this story? Yes, it was, but it was also another story. [I try to stay present but the well is bottomless…]

Here’s another story Biljana told me from the War: There was a time when the Bosnian Serbs captured a group of Bosnian soldiers. And some of these prisoners happened to be the brother and friends of a leader of a Bosnian army regiment. And this man, he was determined to get his brother and friends back. So he went into Sarajevo and he rounded up as many Bosnian Serbs as there were soldiers captured. He put their names on a list. He sent it to the commander of the Bosnian Serb army in the surrounding mountains. He said if you don’t release them, I will kill every one of your people. That is how Biljana and her elderly father found themselves in a line with their legs spread and their arms pressed up against a wall, with a group of soldiers standing behind them with guns. (Her mother was already dead, killed by those men in the Mountains).

Biljana, out of the corner of her eye, sees one of the soldiers is a young Muslim man she used to know. In the “Before,” (and in Sarajevo, when people use only the word “Before,” it is always understood to mean “Before the War”), she used to have a coffee with this man from time to time; he was a social acquaintance. She catches his eye. They are looking at each other. She tells me….

“I don’t know how I knew. I could see in his eyes that he recognized me, that we remembered each other from the Before! There was this little voice inside of me. I knew that I had to go to this man. That I had to leave the line. That he would help me. I just knew. I don’t know how. I told him to go and get my husband, that my husband is a soldier in the Bosnian Army too, and he will be worried about me when I am missing.”

The soldier finds Biljana’s husband. Her husband goes to their neighbor, a Muslim woman with a husband who has a higher official place in the current military government structure. She calls her husband immediately. These are their next-door neighbors. They’ve already lost a family

204 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, “The Danger of a Single Story.” Filmed July 2009 at TEDxGlobal. Video, 18:43. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.

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member. This man sends an order to another man, a man who is eager to slaughter an old man and his daughter while they stand next to each other in a line. The shooting is called off.

Stories like this don’t make it into the war tours of Sarajevo. Many tour guides will acknowledge that Bosnians may have done wrong in other places, where other parts of the war had different stories than the history of their own city, but this is a story about the Siege of Sarajevo. And in Sarajevo, the battle lines are clear. There are the civilians living in an urbicide - a mix of Muslims and Croats and Serbs who are all together true Sarajevans; there are the Chetnik Bosnian Serbs who were once their own people. They became Chetniks when they betrayed themselves and their city, when they left for the mountains to join the former Yugoslav army and shoot at their neighbors. And then there is the Bosnian Army - their fathers and brothers and sons, who protected them as best they could with whatever they had.

It’s a single story, but to be fair, it’s largely true. And I cannot begrudge anyone in this city for not sharing my own desire to complicate a war story or two when so much of Sarajevo’s brutal history is surrounded by denial. I’ve found that most people in Serbia have only to hear the words “Sarajevo” or “Srebrenica” to launch into a tirade of how no one ever talks about the Serbs who were killed in Krajina [during WWII]. Both Serbia and Croatia inflate the numbers of their own victims year after year while simultaneously under reporting victims in Bosnia. They under report; Bosnians find skulls and burned bodies in pits in the ground. The Urbicide and Genocide which shape intimate stories of their own lives are routinely denied by both of these countries. The international community does little to amend its complicity. Universities and journalists and books and something that is becoming history throw around the word “Civil War,” a term difficult for civilians trapped in a hell hole for four years to grapple with. And last but not least, Bosnian Serbs in Republika Srpska live in houses with photos of their idolized heroes, who are also convicted war criminals, hanging on their walls.

One more thing I learned that you won’t hear on a war tour. You will hear stories of the aggressors - those Bosnian Serbs who one day, when one of the most powerful armies in the world surrounded Sarajevo with tanks, found themselves in the mountains killing their neighbors. You will hear terrible stories on your war tour, and the stories that you hear will be true. Perhaps you will hear how one day they vanished from their homes like ghosts in the night. How they emerged again in the surrounding mountains as strange apparitions hellbent on shooting to pieces their former lives. Some of those pieces were starving people who became goldfish in a little glass bowl...

This is yet another story for those soldiers, just one more story. This is a story about the soldiers I told you about before…. the soldiers that you’ve tried to forget, or perhaps already forgotten. The ones you pushed deep down inside of you - as far down as you could - as soon as you heard about the men in the Bosnian and the former Yugoslav armies laying down their weapons to play soccer. This is a story about the ones who did kill each other. This is what happened to the men who fought other men with whom they might have once, in the “Before,” played soccer, or cards, or drank rakija. Those other soldiers, the former Bosnian Serb soldiers that is, have the highest suicide rate in Sarajevo.

184 CHAPTER 6: ON SUFFERING AND REPRESENTATION

There was lots of laughter, and lots of meat, platters filled with sausages and barbeque. There was animated conversation, a constant stream that flowed alongside the cigarettes that were smoked and the sounds of appreciation invoked by the steaming platters. The chatter was typical of convivial family reunions, (What has one been up to since we have seen you last? How is such and such member of the family)? Perhaps the conversation remained constant, in part, because such a profound stretch of time had passed since these family members were physically able to see each other the last. Perhaps the conversation remained constant, in part, because between this joyful family meeting and the last lies the separation of distances traversed and far-flung places they never expected to call home. It has been twenty years since the Memic and Delic families, all of them former Bosnian refugees, were all together in the same room, able to share conversation and a meal at a family reunion. Senad and his son,

Amir, have flown to Sarajevo, Bosnia from Austin, Texas, where Senad and his family were granted asylum and resettled during the war. Almina, and her parents and siblings, who have returned home to live in Sarajevo, escaped the sieged city through transport to Croatia and spent the bulk of the war years living as refugees in Germany.

The stretch of time...and yet throughout its passing the capacity for such shared experience. Has it really been 20 years since the war in Bosnia? Has it really been 20 years since this family, all of them former Bosnian refugees, was able to be all together? That night at dinner, Senad said, “I don’t understand the way people in the States talk about religion here.

185 They act as if you are religious, that you are somehow violent.” There is talk of the refugees in

Syria. Almina, who was once a little girl who fled with her family to Germany, said, “I look at those children on the news. And I know exactly how they feel. They are cold and tired and hungry and have no shoes. They don’t understand exactly what is going on and all they want is a piece of chocolate.” A buddy of Amir’s shows up late; everyone is delighted. He regales us with tales of his visit to Amir in the States, when he spent an evening in the club fruitlessly hitting on married women because he didn’t realize that Americans wear their wedding rings on their left hand, not their right, as they do in Bosnia. We roared with laughter and drank more rakija.

A stranger at this most intimate of family gatherings, I found myself at this dinner at the invitation of Senad, and his son Amir. We were all staying at the Pansion hostel. Amir and

Senad have settled in Austin, Texas (my home-state) and the three of us have laughed and made jokes in a mixture of Bosnian and English about our Texas and Bosnia connections. Amir was thrilled that I am writing a book about post-war Bosnia; he wanted to be in it. He told me, “My wife, Mina, is also a Bosnian refugee, and there is an academic in the States who is writing a book about her and her family! I want to be in one too,” he laughed.

That night, after dinner, Amir drove Senad and I back to the hostel. Senad manages to tell me something for my book too. As they escorted me to my room, Senad, who walks with a limp since his time in a Bosnian camp, pushed his arm from his son - Amir helped his father everywhere they went, up and down stairs, in and out of cars, getting into chairs - and moved toward me, grabbing my arm. His face is wild, haunted, far away. The effort he uses to speak is only magnified by the shuffling effort it took for him to walk forward and grab me. “My friend,” he said, “…he walked over to a pit and when he looked into it…….it was filled with bodies.

With bodies.” I looked into his eyes and nodded as if I had the capacity to understand. And then

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suddenly Amir was there, and he gently removed Senad’s hand gripped so tightly around my arm. I thank them for dinner and all that they have shared with me.

Strange, how at times, the parts of ourselves we extend to others in human connection, these attempts to share our memories with one another across the gulf of experiences, times, and places can reveal, in their sharing, the vast expanses that exist between us. These expanses, spaces, and gaps brought into being through the interplay of the force of memory and the ambiguity of intersubjective exchange become all the more heightened by situations in which there exists what, in her formulation of a Holocaust performative, Vivian M. Patraka, calls a sense of “goneness.”205 Goneness, (in part), is what I use to analytically frame the gaps that exist in this moment between Senad and I, and as such a definition of it seems worth quoting here:

“Goneness reflects the definitiveness, the starkness, and the magnitude of this particular genocide by dictating the scope of what and who has been violently lost, including succeeding generations that cannot be. Murder and cruelty on a mass scale are what distinguish this goneness from the historian’s problem of documentation and recovery. Goneness is inconceivable but its effects are palpable, particularly the inevitable desire to articulate, negotiate, mark, and define.”206

I have never asked Senad, nor Amir, which concentration camp he was in; ethnographic work with those who have experienced trauma is itself a transgressive endeavor, one that can forefront the radical limits of empirical inquiry. Rather, in pursuing questions of suffering and representation, I find myself evoking “goneness” in this encounter with Senad in part because I

205 Vivian M. Patraka, Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Patraka articulates several reasons that a Holocaust performative can be used to speak about other atrocities in an affirmative way. Among these is that “Connecting the Holocaust with other struggles and other points of oppression may make it less possible to view it as an isolated and therefore nonrepeatable event” (4), as well as the fact a “narrative space for producing knowledge of the Holocaust…that would construct its consumers as actively engaged in producing meanings – might be a powerful means to prolonging remembrance” (3). For an overview of discourse regarding the Holocaust as a unique event in human history, See Michael Berenbaum and John K. Roth, “What If the Holocaust Is Unique?” in Holocaust: Religious & Philosophical Implications, eds. Michael Berenbaum and John K. Roth (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1989), 1-8. I have also addressed some of the particular geopolitical dynamics involved in invoking the Holocaust as a point of comparison at the site of the war tours in Ch5.

206 Ibid., 4.

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have been a participant of Bosnia’s war tours, and the complexities of this ethnographic site have taught me about some of the experiences that Senad may have endured. The tours, too, are what

I use to “fill in the gaps.” Their performative repetitions have disciplined me, put me in spaces where representations of goneness have started to seem less heady and more heavy.

Many tour companies in Sarajevo regularly offer an excursion to Srebrenica, a town a mere couple of hours away that was designated as a UN safe area during the war. This designation did not end up mattering all that much. Despite the presence of the UN soldiers, it was overrun by Bosnian Serb and Serbian forces under the command of Ratko Mladic; the aftermath of that event is known as the Srebrenica Genocide. Today, war tourists in Sarajevo are offered excursions to the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the

1995 Genocide. These war tours move away from the stories of Sarajevo’s Siege and attempt to fill in the gaps of goneness that surround the Srebrenica Genocide and the surrounding concentration camps that Bosnian Muslim men were rounded up in. They have names like

Omarska, Keraterm, Trnopolje, and Manjaca. Terrible things happened there; fathers and sons brutally murdered and tortured in front of one another. Terrible things happened to the women too, for women and girls these camps often functioned as systematic rape camps. These acts, and these gendered lines, were not as binary as they seem. Violence compounds as a man watches his daughter be taken away, as a mother watches her son shot.

I have learned other stories about the camps in other ways, and as one might expect from an ethnographer, many of these are also from academic sources. Stories of the camps and the war at large contain other erasures - what atrocities do not? One of these is that rape itself in the

Bosnian war is not conducted solely along the gendered image of male on female bodies. This particular erasure is deeply tied to entrenched patriarchal gender norms, and Dubravka Zarkov documents the way the “victimized body” of the male rape victim in the war is denied alongside

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denying men the possibility of this “vulnerability,” just as the female body that has been raped is represented as the quintessential victim through denying her the possibilities of “subjectivity and agency.”207

Accountings such as these are not likely to be encountered among Bosnia’s post-war population, nor are they likely to be found on a war tour. Many of these men’s stories are unknown, and they have little incentive to make them known in a society that merges their stories with societal discomfort and pejorative discourses of homosexuality. Hypothetically, even if the stories of these men were well-known by Bosnia’s war tour guides, the intersecting complications of gender and rape may have little place in the political investments of war guides attempting to redress tourists that come from Western nations. Such political investments on the part of war guides are already complicated given the history of denial that surrounds the atrocities Bosnia endured during the war years, making the war tour but a few preciously allotted hours to let tourists know “what happened here,” and to advance and keep alive the project of producing Bosnian counter-memory of the wartime years. Hypothetically speaking once again, intersecting complications of gender may have little place in the world of the war tour attempting to redress tourists that come from Western nations; the war tour is already too preoccupied with dispelling a long-standing Orientalist project that has produced them and their war as totalized ethno-religious actors compelled by unruly nationalisms.208

207 In particular see Chapter 9, “Troubles with the Victim” in Dubravka Zarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-Up of Yugoslavia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 170-187.

208 Of course, here my comments are also in debt to Zarkov’s work, which destabilizes the concept of “ethnicity” by marking how its construction is produced through norms of gender and sexuality. A second, and related corollary of this idea that informs my work here is the notion that scholarship must move beyond representing violence as “inherently masculine” and consider, instead, both “who and what is privileged in the production of violence” and “who and what is privileged in our own analyses of it.” Ibid., 231. See also: Cockburn, Cynthia and Dubravka Zarkov eds., The PostWar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities, and International Peacekeeping Bosnia and the Netherlands (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2002).

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But I find useful mentioning here Zarkov’s work on the intersections of gender, rape, and trauma during the war because it is one concrete way to document the fact that Bosnia’s war tours, like trauma itself, deal in incompleteness. By this I do not mean that the tours are incomplete in the register of being simulacra or a representation of some authentic bounded culture that is “Bosnia.” Rather, they are incomplete, or partial, in multiple material ways. I locate aspects of this multi-faceted partiality that accompanies representations of suffering on the tours within the phenomenon of goneness, because they perform stories that mark the overwhelming absence of what once was, of people and places who met violent ends and are no longer with us. Other partialities, as I hope Zarkov’s work helps to illustrate, come into being at a site that is locally embedded and shaped by cultural norms. In this particular example, the partiality that accompanies representations of suffering infuses a landscape of traumatic experiences with the micro-disciplining violence of what is “normal,” and thus relegates persons who have experienced sexual violence to the realm of subjugated knowledges and subaltern persons. I note this here and note at the same time that in this way, Bosnia is not particularly different from other places and certainly not “Western” ones. If atrocity entails erasure, then a part of that multifarious set of processes is also performed in the simple act of locating the site of atrocity as that which only happens/has happened “elsewhere.”

But Bosnia’s war tours are, at the same time that they are a locally embedded reality of post-conflict life, also a transnational site predicated upon their ability to offer international tourists representations of Bosnian suffering for human consumption. And it is within this register of the war tours, where Bosnian suffering is also a commodity, that I find myself particularly drawn to thinking through questions of the partialness that ever accompanies representations of suffering. After all, do Bosnia’s war tours, or local and international media, or academic texts create, stabilize, allow us to understand this thing called the Bosnian camps? The

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Siege of Sarajevo? And yet through the course of my fieldwork, and the many persons along the way that I found myself connecting with, I have come to wonder all the more about a topic that war tours, insofar as they are also an industry where tourists pay to hear stories of the devastating war years, are less inclined to address. In the aftermath of atrocity, violence, and devastation, how is it that so many persons – and often persons debilitated to some degree by these various events - continue to struggle, endure, build relationships, live on and carry forth with dignity in conditions of intimate and structural distress?

In truth, I come by this question (in part) due to a tourist from the States I interviewed after a Sarajevo war tour. As we talked, I found myself reflecting upon the fact that there are excesses that the war tour itself cannot contain - lingering excesses - the low-level steady aftermath drip buzz of suffering - that continues long after the more sensational events of the war itself have come and gone. Quite conversationally, and with genuine curiosity, the tourist then said to me, “But why should I learn about those things? I came here to learn the story of the war.” I have come to learn over time that a part of what informs this chapter is a response to this tourist interview, a response I did not know how to put in words at the time.

Sensational and Sensorial Suffering

Incompleteness is never a totalized whole that exists in opposition to that which is fully realized; it is always multi-faceted in its partiality. I will suggest here, that in part, this incompleteness also exists because Bosnian war tours perform stories and memories of what I call “sensational suffering.” In so far as the project of producing terms is the project of indulging oneself in a world of make-believe where language contains fixed referents, I have chosen this term for two reasons. The first is that sensational suffering is the stuff of the senses; sensational suffering is visceral. Sensational suffering is maddening. It has no need to resist a constructed

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mind-body duality; it will laughingly strip away this bifurcation just as easily as it will break- down understanding and relegate the realm of human emotion to numbness.

At the same time, “sensational suffering” has the connotation of purposefully producing a

“startling effect, strong reaction, or intense interest.” I have chosen this connotation purposefully in order to address the fact that the sensational suffering performed in Bosnia’s war tours is, at the same time, subjected to the process of commodification. This is not, nor should it be confused with a pronouncement that sensational suffering is inauthentic, nor that it is in and of itself simply a commodity. But it is to say that the fantastic excesses of sensational suffering, in spaces such as the Bosnian war tour, are predicated upon their ability to be transformed into a product for human consumption.

On a war tour, you may hear a tale of the Bosnian camps, and the violence of this thing may be overwhelming sensational. You might hear a story of a Bosnian Muslim man whose genitals are chopped off in a camp, of a mother who struggles to keep her young daughter from being pulled out of her arms by a man who has decided to rape her. And why should you not?

The Bosnian war tour experience must pull out every stop to let you know that these things did happen; that these things were/are real. But you will not hear or see a young man named Amir who helps his father everywhere, or the slow-paced tenderness and constancy that emerges in the space between bodily broken reminder and bodily care.

These lingering and intimate post-war relations are another partiality that lies outside the realm of the war tour. They too, exude the excesses of violence, and these are the excesses that a narrative of a war locatable in time – that has come and gone - cannot contain. These excesses I locate in the conditions of intimate and structural distress that produce what I call sensorial suffering. In making this distinction, between suffering that is sensational and suffering that is sensorial, I build upon ethnographies of collective suffering that speak to violence as a force

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which disrupts one’s previously known lifeworld, and that transforms and leaves marked relationships, bodies, memories, and places.209 By employing the words sensorial suffering, I also mean to invoke further this connotation of the senses; the embodied and affective dimensions that accompany the intimate and mundane ways in which debilitated persons continue, long after the war is over, to collectively endure.

At stake in the distinction between sensational suffering and sensorial suffering is a question of temporality.210 A focus on sensational suffering, or a fascination with its excesses, can lend itself to a sense of closure, to finality. The Siege of Sarajevo is over; the Bosnian camps are no more; the Bosnian war belongs to a reification we now call history. But these things are not final, nor complete, and they linger in the everyday experiences and social lives of

Sarajevo’s post-conflict society. Sensorial suffering is also the story of the war, as much embedded in the post-conflict realties of Sarajevan life as the war tour itself.

209 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Veena Das, et al. eds., Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

210 Many authors whose work I respect and build upon here introduce a temporal dimension to the exploration of violence, suffering, and the question of the enterprise of representation. Veena Das’s ethnographic work makes a distinction between violence that is extraordinary and violence that is ordinary. It is in the act of locating the excesses of violence in the “recesses of the ordinary” that she urges scholars to examine the traces of violence beyond direct, verbal accountings of traumatic experiences – scholars must also focus on the multiple and embodied modes through which we as humans communicate suffering, rather than fetishize the verbal. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2006). Asma Abbas’s project is also concerned with the means through which suffering becomes known, represented, and valued within the context of political economy, and her work explores how suffering is relegated to relations of labor and value within a liberal, political tradition that renders suffering visible only through categories such as injury or harm, which in turn, produce utility by producing capitalist subjects. Abbas introduces a dimension of temporality through a Marxist materialist reading of suffering, elaborating upon Marx’s connection between the category of “sensuousness” and suffering. She writes, “Sensuousness can thus be seen as encompassing the active elements of the ‘passive’ process of perception to which sensuousness and, not surprisingly, suffering, has often been relegated. Suffering, it follows, includes the processes of undergoing and enduring, and of relishing and embracing, both individual and collective sensuousness. Sensuousness fits into the category of things of which there is coming into being – things that cannot be without coming to be. This introduces a temporal context in two ways: to see the activities of sensing, suffering, and representing without an end that is external to them, and also to see them as varying over time” (117). See Asma Abbas, Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

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Sensorial suffering, and its emphasis on temporality, is also a representative choice made with aims of complicating discourses of victimhood. Stories of what befell the people of Bosnia such as the Srebrenica Genocide and the Siege of Sarajevo can lend themselves to stories of victimization, rendering them devastated and destroyed by events whose magnitude is so sensational that there can be little left but victims in its wake. But in turning to sensorial suffering as a theoretical concept, I also turn to stories that pick up where the war tour quite literally ends, to stories of persons who are victims of atrocity, but more importantly - this is not all they are. Sensorial suffering, and its focus on temporality, is also a story of suffering that continues on as persons carry on, of a suffering that is always in the process of becoming and being remade.

A distinction between sensational suffering and sensorial suffering is further complicated by the fact that war tours can create spaces where the vector of the commodity that I have woven into this distinction is transgressed in unexpected ways. By way of illustration, I offer another ethnographic rendering of a family’s first post-war reunion. A Serbian friend of mine from the time I lived in Belgrade, Irena, and our friend Maja, came to Sarajevo in June of

2016 to visit with Irena’s family in Sarajevo, the Tripkovic family. Irena makes a point of telling her war tour ethnographer friend that she knows from other relatives that her family endured terrible things in the war that they cannot bring themselves to talk about. We huddled in their family apartment and watched old family videos on a VCR, punctuated by magic card tricks performed by the children to impress their new aunt. Irena is new to their two small children; she has not been able to visit with her family since before the war. Her cousin gives us a ride in her car back to my apartment in Grbavica, and along the way she tells us a story about one of

Irena’s other relatives:

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Once there was a woman who had been a mother. She saw her daughter who had been shot in the leg - scary, but not fatal, not even losing lots of blood, picked up quickly by emergency services for the Bosnian side. She said they murdered her daughter and dissected her for her organs. She paid someone to get the body back though.211

The very next day Irena and Maja came on a war tour with me for my research. With our tour guide, Elmir, the son of a former Bosnian soldier, we drove to the mountains that surround

Sarajevo and looked into the valley below. We were asked by Elmir to imagine snipers planted where now we stand shooting the people below. We went to the Tunnel museum and watched video footage of bombs and explosions in the video pavilion. Maja will later say that the thing that moves her most about the experience is watching this actual footage. In a departure from many other war tours I’ve been on – one might say this tour is a local one, where Balkan social norms can come into play a bit more than on those with tourists from other countries and other spaces – we take a long, two-hour break in the middle of the war tour and pop into a café to drink coffees and talk. Maja asked about the Bosna river that flows through Sarajevo. She wanted to

211 I presented ethnographic data on accountings that I had heard from participants regarding the presence of organ trafficking during Sarajevo’s Siege years at a Forum on South East Europe working group iat the University of North Carolina in April of 2018. One prominent scholar adamantly responded to my work with the refrain, “I am saying that what they told you didn’t happen/I don’t believe that happened.” Another regional specialist responded to her feedback by citing reports that had surfaced, via war journalists and UN memos, regarding the presence of organ trafficking rings in Kosovo during Kosovo’s own war of secession from the former Yugoslavia (at this time, comprised of Serbia and Montenegro) in the late 1990s, and rumored to be in connection with the KLA, or Kosovo Liberation Army, thus resulting in the call for a new war crimes court. Though particulars regarding Kosovo, as well as the myriad resulting political contestations over this report are outside the scope of this chapter, I bring up this point here to note, as Carolyn Nordstrom does, that the “complex relationships of truth, untruth, and silencing” that are produced around our conceptions of war are also produced through our own, perhaps all too human, response to encountering the excesses of violence (25). In fact, I found an interlocutor in Nordstrom’s reports that she assumed erroneous information about the nature of war would change should more accurate information become available, however; upon presenting her work publicly she discovered that, “People from the audience stood up, incensed, to challenge my data. ‘How can you say that priests were involved in violence?’ For others, I was being offensive by saying some youths participated in the violence, or that trusted members of the community harmed children…The list of offenses went on. It did not matter that I had witnessed these events personally, talked to the people involved. The offense was speaking of these things” (30-31). See Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

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know if it was like a friend of hers from Sarajevo told her, if it was really true that you could see bodies and pieces of bodies floating down the river. “It’s true,” said Elmir.

After the tour my friends are kind enough to let me interview them for my project. When asked what they thought was most important/significant about their war tour experience, Irena told me, “I’m glad I went, because my family had these brutal experiences, and I can’t ask them about it. I wouldn’t know how to begin to talk to them about it and I don’t know if they are even able to talk about it. Going on the war tour was a way to learn about some of the experiences that they must have had.” The war tour can be a space to encounter “goneness,” one that transgresses the sensational suffering that it commodifies, that can create a space for Irena to learn about unspeakable things that she cannot bring herself to ask her family members about. I think of Senad and empathize with Irena’s view; the war tour is also a space where I learn stories that I cannot always, in good conscience, ask others to tell me.

Sensorial Portraits

Almina

After I met her at the Delic/Memic family reunion dinner, and during the course of my time in Sarajevo, Almina became a dear friend. Almina often shared her experiences of being a refugee. When she and her brother were little, her father’s boss in Croatia had helped them obtain passage to the country, from Zagreb they went to Germany where they lived for a number of years as refugees.

Almina was a little kid, and she was tired, and they could only pack so many things. She remembers that her brother kept giving away his things on the journey to the other refugee children they encountered along the way. Why did he do that, she wondered. She remembers seeing her father’s boss when they got to Croatia and thinking to herself that he had always sent

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them Christmas presents. Perhaps it’s of note that Almina’s family is Muslim and her father’s boss is Catholic and used to send them Christmas presents, but such things still happen in the former Yugoslavia, and there was a time, before the war, in which such things were said to be even more commonplace.

She said, remembering the echoes of a frightened little girl who has been forced to flee her home, that when they got to Croatia and saw her father’s boss:

“He saw me and asked me what I wanted. And I said, ‘Can I have some pomfrit? (french fries)’ And he started crying, and he picked me up and held me and he said, ‘Of course you can, sweetie, you can have all the french fries that you want.’”

“What I remember about him the most,” she said, “Was seeing how his face was and thinking how different his face looked. How different from all the faces I’d been seeing during the war; everyone was sad and miserable. His face was different because it was happy.”

Almina said, remembering those initial moments in Zagreb:

“My brother and I took our first bath, and we were so dirty, and then we were sitting on the bed, and my uncle came by and said, ‘Can I get you anything?’ and her brother said, ‘Uncle can you give me a shirt?’ Almina paused and looked at me and said, “He had given away his shirt to another little boy on the journey there, I think one who needed it more. And my mother said ‘you should be ashamed when you have nothing and you are giving it away, now you have to ask your uncle for a shirt.’”

At times when we would lie on the grass by the Bosna river, or sip tea or coffee in the cafes of Baščaršija, and she would talk about memories that came after their escape from

Sarajevo to Zagreb, about her childhood memories of the years she lived as a refugee in

Germany:

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“When we lived in Germany,” Almina remembered, “kids wanted to explain to me what cheese was, or what a television was. She mimic-mocked the other children, thrusting out her hand, “This is Cheese.” Almina continued, “I remember asking my mother, ‘why do they try to explain to me what cheese is?’ My mother said, ‘oh well, I’m sure they have good intentions and maybe they just want to show you things, and you never know when they might show you something you don’t know about. And Almina says, “but I think she KNEW, she was just trying to be nice or something like this, but I think she KNEW.”

Almina talked about the time a friend came over to their house when they were living in

Germany as refugees. “And he was a little boy and so of course he was asking me about the war and he was so excited, because we were little kids. We were sitting at the kitchen table and this little German boy asked me, “So you saw someone shot?”

Almina said, “Yes.”

Her school friend is fascinated, excited. “And what did your face look like when you saw someone shot?” Almina’s mother can hear them talking in the kitchen, and she storms in and cries out, “Why can’t you two talk about something normal, you should be talking about sports, or playing games, or what’s happening at school.”

Almina pauses and says, “And my mom left the kitchen and started crying. I didn’t understand why she was crying at the time.”

As children do, and as children who one day grow into adults do too, Almina remembers vividly the times she saw her parents cry.

Almina wonders if she would have been someone else if the war hadn’t happened. She said “it’s a little crazy, these thoughts that I have.” She wonders what kind of person she would be if she had not fled a country at war, if she had not been a refugee. Maybe she “wouldn’t be as open to meeting new people from new cultures, maybe she would be more closed in some

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way.” She talks about feeling...a little different...from her friends here, her friends who stayed during the war. She talks about how grateful she is that she had a psychologist when she was a kid and that they went to Germany. And how her friends here say, “you had a psychologist, we were here four years and never had a psychologist to speak to.” It’s a source of tension; she at times feels guilty she had someone professional to talk to, but mostly she just feels grateful. She says that she wishes her friends could have had access to psychologists.

Almina first started seeing her psychologist because in her class at her new German school in her new German country she would stare into space and then frantically jump out of her seat in school - JUMP OUT, completely startled, ready for fight or flight. “And so they called my mother,” Almina said. “My mother went with me to every visit to the psychologist. I remember that I had to draw the things that I saw, the pictures in my head. And what I remember the most is that I drew with such detail, such colors. The psychologist tells her….

Almina asked her psychologist, “Will I ever forget these things?” She was nine years old.

The psychologist told her, “Many of these things you will forget the details of. But those three pictures that you see in your head over and over and over again, those will be with you forever.” One of the pictures is of a woman’s head being blown off in front of her, and the

“blood, blood everywhere.” I wonder sometimes if one of the pictures is the memory she has of watching her grandmother violently beaten in front of her, but I don’t ask.

She said “I was nine years old, NINE. And I thought, surely she’s wrong; it can’t be that

I will see these pictures forever.” But now Almina is in her early 30s, and she knows the psychologist was right. Those pictures are still there.

When they returned to Bosnia, Almina wasn’t prepared:

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“My parents did everything they could to never talk about the war, never mention it. We returned to the wreckage of our old house, and I don’t know why but all I could think about was this Barbie doll that I had left in the window upstairs. And I ran into the house and I looked everywhere for that barbie doll, but it wasn’t there. And I heard my father come up the stairs behind me and I turned around. He asked me, ‘If there was anything that I wanted to talk about?’

And I said, “Can we go back?”

Almina remembers that her father began to cry and that he had to leave the room. She said she didn’t know any better, that she didn’t know what she was asking, she was just a little kid.

When they lived in Germany and the German kids would come to the house, and they would see that the Delic family had food, and tv, and lifts (elevators) and exclaim comments about their normal looking lives, Almina’s father would say, “oh yes, we’re normal, we survived, nobody likes us.” Almina says the last thing he always said, whatever his variation on this rift, was “nobody likes us.”

Almina said, “People like Karadzic stole my childhood from me.212 And can you believe that he gets 40 years, 40 years for all he did? From some people he took entire families. From me, just my childhood. Cause I can’t remember any of my childhood until I was four or five, I don’t remember it. And then when I do remember it, it is just these things, these pictures in my head.”

Almina fasts for Ramadan. She tells me her boyfriend from Vienna is interested in doing it with her, but he says he’s not sure about going without water. She replies, “The body

212 Radovan Karadzic is a Bosnian Serb who was President of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War. He was convicted for genocide in Srebrenica, crimes against humanity, and war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2016.

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can go without water for three or four days.” She says, “I look at the children from Syria and I know exactly how they feel. They are tired, and scared, and they are just children and all they want is a piece of chocolate.” She made this remark often. She tells me that she commits to fasting for Ramadan in honor of her own memories, and for the way she feels watching Muslim refugee children travel through Europe twenty years later. “There’s something important about being reminded that you don’t always have those things, and that my life is really good,” she tells me.

Ines

I walked along the streets of the Old Town in Sarajevo with Ines, my friend and a former war tour guide. Ines now works as a translator at the British embassy, helping Sarajevans who apply for visas to travel abroad. She supports herself and her husband (who also works, as a mechanic) as well as her younger sister, Adna, helping her make her way through school as she studies physics. Ines is so proud of Adna. Ines tried to apply for a loan in order to buy a car - despite the steady nature of her employment (a difficult find in Sarajevo) she is denied a loan. The rationale given to her is that if there is another war, if Sarajevo is ever bombed again, then the British embassy will certainly be shut down once more, and she will have no longer have a steady source of income. She was outraged. At night, Ines has to sleep with the lights on, despite her economic precarity and the extra money spent on energy. She wishes it wasn’t so, and occasionally, as couples do, she and her husband fight about money – the extra money for night-time lights – but she hasn’t been able to sleep with the lights out since the war, and she has long since resigned herself to the feeling that flicking the light switch on at night is a budgetary necessity. Rijad, her husband, has resigned himself too, and when the darkness falls he holds her in their lit-up apartment until she can fall asleep.

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Lights that one can see patches of through eyelids, the low hum of electricity, a human body holding another – these sensorial experiences are a low-level burn of the war years that blazes through the present. Within such assemblages, I remain amazed at the human ability for connection and endurance. Sensorial suffering, it seems to me, merits our attention on two fronts. We may at times privilege sensational violence that has the ability to disturb and provoke, rather than the slow-paced repetitions and reverberations that linger long after. And within these spaces of sensorial suffering, there is also the potential to proliferate subjectivities.

These subjectivities are not those produced by terms such as victim or processes of victimization.

They are rather, subjectivities that acknowledge the resources of humans that endure in the wake of sensational violence and continue to do so through conditions of intimate and structural distress. Sensorial suffering is a gesture toward a lens that critiques these ongoing conditions, while at the same time, moves toward Michael Jackson’s assertion that “the situation of the other may be seen, not just as one we want to save them from, making them more like us, but as one we might learn from.”213

Ines and I walked along the Old Town streets discussing, of all things, her name; “Ines” is traditionally a Spanish name. Ines told me, “All the time here people are confused because of my name. The first thing the people are asking me, “Are you one of us?”

The “us,” in this context, I now know, codes as fellow Bosnian Muslims asking, “Are you Muslim?”

Names in the Balkans serve as instant classification systems - Azim is a Muslim, Dragan or Dragica is a Serb, Marko might be a Serb or a Catholic. Serb and Croat names share Christian

213 Michael Jackson, Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), 157.

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origins and due to this religious identification sometimes overlap, though the Christian origins of

Serbian names are historically Orthodox and Croatian ones have Roman Catholic leanings.

Last names too, are instantly categorizable. Though often sharing an “ic” ending denoting “son of,” - Cvetovic, Lachevic, Causevic - they too, are instantly sortable into ethnicities for those who have grown up in the cultural context of the former Yugoslavia.

Ines’s name is coded as foreign, and thus does not fit this instantly accessible categorizing system. Sometimes, parents deliberately name their children foreign names in order to avoid such characterizations. A colleague named Jakov from a mixed family shares with me that his parents gave him a historically Jewish name both to honor of a Jewish friend and with the active intention of making him less “instantly categorizable.” There are also, it merits saying, many names in the Balkans that are not obviously foreign which to some degree also bely this name sorting. Sarajevo’s traditionally mixed population lends itself to those who have grown up, as they say in the Balkans, in “mixed marriages,” and such children may have first names that code “Serbian” and last names that code “Muslim.” In the States such a term often conjures up images of those crossing racial lines and creating interracial bonds, in the Balkans, a mixed marriage is one in which ethnic lines are crossed, interethnic bonds are created.

Sarajevo, long before the war, was an incredibly “mixed” population. This plurality of place which infused private and public life still exists; now it exists alongside the tensions of a war often attributed to ethno-religious antagonisms, but that itself produced and re-organized ethno-religious divisions in Sarajevan life.214 In Sarajevo, life before the war exists in memory; it is referenced to simply as, “The Before.” The tip of the tongue question “are you one of us?” Was that a question that people asked in the Before?

214 Ivana Maček, Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

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Ines and I stepped into a cafe for coffee and I turned on the recorder. “This is what I want to tell you about today. My sister, she was born when the war stopped. She was 18 when she first asked me, I guess she started to realize that we had a war, (Ines laughs), that she was a kid. She was one of the first babies born in the peacetime. And that was the first time, it was two years ago when she came and asked me. I said, “18 years! 18 years, it took for you to come and ask me about the war. Why is she asking now? She asked me because she is having Serbian boyfriend. Family’s making the pressure because she’s not with a Muslim man, she wants to know why the pressure is there.”

The “pressure is there,” now, in part, because Ines’s father is a former soldier in the

Bosnian army. He returned from the war another man, a wreckage of a man in which from time to time you catch a glimmer of the man he might once have been. He drinks. And he has just found out that his youngest daughter, Adna, has been with a Bosnian Serb man, Bojan, for the last five years - a relationship that she has been keeping from her father. But now that relationship is coming to light, as Adna wishes to travel to Prague with Bojan to visit his siblings. Her marked absence in the house for three weeks will be too big a secret for her to hide from her father.

“I told her, continued Ines, “You are 20 years old, you have nothing to hide.” “My father said to her, ‘You can have friends, you can go out, you can have colleagues. Marriage,’ he says,

‘I will renounce you. He will publish her disownment in the newspapers.’ My mother, she told my father, ‘Dog-shit. Adna is financing herself by her own, she’s working. She has someone that she loves and that loves and takes care of her for five years.’ He was so surprised. Five years...all this time, he didn’t know.”

Ines continued passionately, remarking on her name as a signifier once more, “But, look, there is one thing: I disagreed with my father. I said to him, ‘My name is Ines, I have a Catholic

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name. My family, Rijad’s parents, they never judged me for it. My mama, she has family in

Serbia. So, my first cousins are Serbians, they are living in Belgrade. I am liberal. If the two religions can come together, if they can reach agreement, then why do you have to interfere?”

“Then my father said, ‘If they get the baby, what is she/he going to be?’ And I said, ‘You cannot know. And you should not know. Just let the things go.’ But he just cannot accept. That is because of the war.”

Ines tries to reason with her father, to remind her father of another time, the time in

Sarajevo referred to as the Before. “I said to him, ‘Look, up to 1992 what did you do? What were you, up to that point? How old were you when the war started?’ He said to me ‘29.’ So I said , ‘What did you do, then, in that 29 years, that 28, what was life like then?’ He said he could feel that something started happening already, that things were falling apart.”

Another time Ines’s father re-visits the Before, and he tells her, “I never ate pork, pig.” Ines laughs as she tells me, “And so, what did I do? I went to photos where we were young, and you can see the pig. What is this, you didn’t eat. And I told what he said to my uncle, and my uncle said I will bring you a photo of the two of us with one plate, where we are killing ourselves eating.” A reconstructed memory of not eating pork becomes loaded, less a religious practice one participated in and far more a way that one remembers oneself as participating in a distinctly defined Muslim group set apart from other religious actors in

Sarajevo. Memory is fraught with tensions; and it, like history, is often a dialectic, where assertions made about the past exemplify not what once was but rather how the past exists in relationship to the present.

Ines told me, “I ask him always, ‘Why do you lie?’ He wants to hide it, to put in under the carpet. It was never like that. It is because he thinks, that if the war starts again, they really

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will shoot directly at us. It won’t be like now. It’s going to be like neighbors killing neighbors.

It really will be like that again. That’s the picture in his mind.”

I asked Ines about her father’s friends from the Before. “He had friends that were Serb before the war, does he now?” Ines replied, “Now things are a little bit iced, frozen, but that’s because my father is a little bit broken. She waits a moment before she continues. “Dino and

Slava. They were friends with my parents before the war. Slava is Catholic, Dino is Muslim.

They have daughter named after me. My parents went to Christmas with them. So while Adna’s marriage and the relationship is out of league, he can still function.”

“Look, one more thing,” Ines states, gesturing her arm forcefully and looking me directly in the eyes. “Adna’s boyfriend is Bojan. They are five years together. He’s a great guy. And,

Bojan’s father, he had lost his wife in the war. Sniper. She was killed by the shot when she went to pick up some water, while standing there - there was only one pipe in Dobrinja. (a Bosnian neighborhood) So now he is in the situation like so many other people who you know their stories, like Azim, (a mutual friend), and now his wife is dead and he has to supply the water for those two days. But in Bojan’s case...he has two children Sergei and Irena. Immediately when the war started, Bojan’s father had some connections to send them to Prague. Because without his wife, he was not able to take care of them and to defend the country. He was also a soldier, and he had to defend the country. So Bojan stayed. What happened? He decided to continue with his life so he married another lady. Biljana. And they had Bojan, so Bojan is the kid from the second marriage. But he loves very much his brother and sister. That is why he wants to go visit them in Prague, and for Adna to travel with him.”

Often on war tours, or even from Ines herself – perhaps because she is a self-identified liberal, or perhaps even because she is a former war guide - a geopolitical message emerges about the Siege of Sarajevo. A myth that is in part true but never quite in its entirety comes into

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existence as tour guides and war tourists co-perform and create a narration that authorizes memories of Sarajevo’s Siege. This message is that the Siege of Sarajevo has created a solidarity between the Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims who were all Sieged together, even amidst the violence of everyday life under Siege conditions, Sarajevo’s ethno-religiously mixed population and pluralistic style was maintained. And yet there are reverberations of war, and those reverberations are intimate.

It matters not to Ines’s father that the father of his daughter’s boyfriend lost his wife to a sniper, nor even that he himself was a soldier who fought on the Bosnian side of the war, just as he did. From time to time he says to Ines, “His father could have been shooting at your father, doesn’t that matter to you?!!” It matters simply that Bojan is a Serb; it matters that at any moment, intimate familiars, neighbors, might turn on one another and start shooting the world apart, just as they did twenty years ago - that his youngest daughter might experience the betrayal of a youthful broken heart alongside the betrayals of a broken body and a broken world.

“One more thing,” as Ines herself might say. Ines loves her father very much. She has always been his girl. During the war, when Ines was a little girl and fell sick from jaundice, for

70 days he went every day, twice a day, to the hospital on the other side of the city and back, on foot, through sniper and mortar fire, to bring Ines the daily dosage of infusion she needed, because supplies in the city were limited and they wouldn't give him two dosages at once.

Faruk

Through Ines, I meet a man named Faruk, a former Bosnian soldier who has now opened his own PTSD center. He is not a licensed psychiatrist, but after a doctor diagnosed him with

PTSD he strived to learned everything about it that he could, in order to help other people who live with trauma however he can. His “center,” as he calls it, is not a location, it is rather, a network of seven people - including doctors and women who work at centers for rape victims of

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the war. Faruk told me that this is especially important, given that women feel uncomfortable talking about this kind of trauma with him because he is a man. Faruk pays for the center himself; most of his money goes to attempting to raise awareness of PTSD. I interviewed him on a warm and windy afternoon in April, at a cafe in Dobrinja, (a Bosnian neighborhood, further out from the center of the city and heavily affected by the war, incidentally also the neighborhood

Ines grew up in) alongside Ines, who made our introduction and accompanied me.

Faruk and Ines and I sipped our coffee; cigarette packs were placed on the café table.

The wind was bustling and the cars zipping by were honking, but the sun was a lovely April kind of warm and it’s nice to be sitting at one of the outdoor tables. Ines made introductions and we all chatted conversationally until Faruk intonated that he was ready to begin answering my questions. I placed my recorder on the table alongside the cigarette packs and opened the conversation broadly by asking Faruk to tell me a bit more about the trauma center he has started. Faruk takes a sip of his coffee and answers, “We started in 2013... I do not know if you can understand this, but the government is deaf to our problems. I personally financed the web site you saw, with my own money. I am also the administrator, I add things up and update the site. So far, we haven't managed to provide facilities where we can gather people.”

Faruk’s reply, and his positioning of the government as “deaf to our problems” prompts me to ask him what kind of support veterans and those living with trauma receive from the government. Faruk responded, “We get occasional financial help from the state, particularly with suicide cases. This might be an interesting data for you: from 1995 until today, some 6000 veterans committed suicide, and that is terrible. There is an official research: 3000 veterans of the Army of Republika Srpska, 1500 of B&H Army, plus 5000 veterans in Serbia. So, to get back to your question, when the numbers of suicides swells (and the government is always trying

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to hide it), and it becomes public, then the government helps us financially, but the amount they give us is always very small.

I told Faruk that what he said made sense to me in a terrible way.

Faruk’s comments reminded me of some of the history I’ve learned about the formation of “trauma” as a moral and scientific category in Didier Fassin’s work.215 Governmental interest in obscuring the suicide rate of veterans who fought in the Bosnian war seems in keeping with some of trauma’s older geneaological formations, in which veterans who return home with PTSD and suicidal thoughts are posited as failed soldiers. Prior to WWI, as Fassin notes, trauma as a field was already infused with notions of the intentionality of the victims, and soldiers who exhibited symptoms of PTSD were regarding as those who did not “regard the values of the nation and deserved to be treated with the disdain they aroused.”216 I shared some of Fassin’s research with Faruk.

Faruk nodded and said, “Unfortunately, all governments around the world are similar when it comes to this. Every government wants to represent its army as some kind of terminators. And then it turns out as shameful if somebody... (a moment of silence as Faruk leaves a veteran’s suicide lingering in the air). People think PTSD means we were scared to death there, and that we got sick from the fear. That's not true at all. The greatest number of people who suffer from PTSD got it because they saw their co-fighter got shot, or even beheaded by a grenade blast. I should have said this earlier in the interview - our motto is PTSD is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. It is not normal when someone wants to take your life, nor it is normal when you want to take someone's life. As a result, you have a conflict inside your head. On one hand, you are fighting for some great cause, and that is a positive thing, but

215 Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

216 Ibid., 38.

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on the other hand you have to kill somebody because of that. And so there you have a clash that an average human being can hardly live with.”

Faruk lives with that.

Faruk’s stance that PTSD is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation is in keeping with contemporary renderings of trauma as a psychiatric diagnosis, one that has moved away from blaming the victim of traumatic events for their trauma. Though it can be tempting to think of this shift teleologically, or as the inevitable advancement of science’s explanatory power over the human condition, this sentiment, as Didier Fassin’s research notes, has been a product of both a moral and a scientific genealogy of trauma.217 This historical shift operates morally by transforming the victim of trauma from one that was blamed or doubted into a victim whose victimhood is to be acknowledged and represented. When the locus of a traumatic event is located outside the self, it is no longer a deficit in a person, anyone can have a traumatic response to events that are abnormal. At the same time, trauma as a moral discourse can elide the fact that perpetrators, too, can experience the aftershocks of trauma.218 In thinking about this elision, I found myself asking Faruk, “Do you have any theory as to why the number of people who have committed suicide is higher amongst Bosnian Serbs or people that were in the Serbian army than in the Bosnian army?”

Faruk replied, “Unfortunately, they were committing crimes and they couldn't live with that afterwards. It devastated their psyche. No matter how justified it seemed to them to burn down a village or slaughter people at a certain moment, a few days after, when they return from the battle line, they start wondering if that was really necessary. And after some more time has passed, they realize it was not necessary at all and it starts to trouble them.”

217 Ibid.

218 Ibid., 77-97.

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I wonder as Faruk is talking if he is ever contacted by former soldiers that were on the other side of the war he fought, the Bosnian Serbs who left their homes to join the former

Yugoslav army and “burned down villages and slaughtered people.” What would that be like for him? When I ask Faruk if he is ever contacted by people from Republika Srpska, he replies, “It’s not that I don’t have some contacts I try to help; it’s that they are literally not allowed to work with us. Because, like here, they are financed by their government. If their government were to find out they're working with us, it would stop financing them. They were pretty open about it.”

Faruk’s talk of governmental restrictions prompted my next question, “I read on your website that you had written about drafting of new legislation for people with PTSD...” Faruk takes a slow drag off of a cigarette and then says, “The government made a decision that only those who registered as people with PTSD by the end of 1997 can get some benefits from the government. Yet, the occurring of PTSD depends on many variables. The thing that triggers it doesn't have to be a major event, and it can happen even 20 or 25 years after the trauma. The government set the deadline for registering for PTSD benefits on purpose, because it's fantastic for them. It's probably only 5% of the affected that managed to register.”

“And for the people you work with, is it more common for PTSD symptoms to take longer to appear?” I asked. Faruk laughed. “Oh, yeah. They were perfectly aware of that when they were making this law. And, as everything about this country makes no sense, they introduced this law in 2001. That's Bosnia.” He laughs, and Ines and I do too.

That is Bosnia, and it is also other places. The status of “trauma victim” is one that may well engender a certain subjectivity that creates access to benefits. At the same time, as Asma

Abbas points out in critiquing the place of suffering within a liberal political tradition, this suffering is often imbricated in new violence when suffering must be transcribed into terms that

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meet the criterion of the state.219 I asked Faruk what kind of benefits people who managed to register by 1997 receive from the government? Faruk replied, “Even these benefits are very symbolic. I receive only 50 BAM per month for that. So people who don't receive this money aren't really ripped off financially. But it's a terrible thing on an emotional level. These people got sick because of this country, yet this country abandoned them. And it's clear to them that they've been betrayed.”

The waiter comes and asks us if we’d like another round of coffees. We break and Faruk asks me a bit more about the study of anthropology and about my life in the States. When inquiring about my family he jokes that it’s good that I have found a partner already, since it would be hard for me to find a man in Bosnia that didn’t have PTSD, and he and Ines and I all laugh heartily.

After the laughter died down and new coffees were brought, Faruk continued, “Here is a study that will be of interest to you. In 1998, the UN World Health Organization conducted the only official research for the entire BiH and they estimated that there were 1.2 million people suffering from PTSD. That is, approximately, one third of the population. But an even bigger problem is that they are all family men. So, in reality, you can multiply that number by at least three.”

Faruk pauses and turns to Ines. He looks at her empathetically and says, “You understand that, as a daughter...” Ines joins the conversation adamantly. “Yes, it is true what he says to you about families in Bosnia; it's not only my father who suffers from PTSD, but also my mother, my sister, I too am struggling. The whole family is suffering.”

Faruk nods and says, “Trauma is not just about veterans, but those in their lives. Wives are the ones suffering the most and small kids. Wives are usually the first in the impact zone.

219 Ibid.

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Kids are the second in line. It has been proved that PTSD can be transmitted through generations; not through DNA, but through the trauma the parent transfers to the kid, or through learned behavior. For example, the child can adopt an aggressive way of solving problems from his/her parent. Now, regarding the access to rehabilitation...officially, everybody has access to it... But I'll give you an example: In the city of Sarajevo we have 11 mental health centers, and as a result of those centers, we have around 700 suicides among veteran population. Because eventually it all comes to drug prescriptions - "Here, take these drugs and come check in in three months". It is absolutely not enough.” But the government can just say, "There are 11 centers for mental health." Yet 1.500 people committed suicide, that's the result. Pardon my French, but fuck you and your 11 centers!

I asked Faruk if he could tell me a little bit about general attitudes of people in Bosnia towards psychology, psychiatry, trauma. Ines looks at Faruk and says to him knowingly, “I told her already, if you were to suggest therapy to someone, they would immediately tell you you're crazy.” Faruk nods at both of us and says, “Because for them, such suggestion means your whole family is sick. And then nobody wants to marry you or your family member. Nobody wants to have any kind of business with you. There's a horrible stigma there. The PTSD sufferers know about that stigma, and that is why they don't go public with that. That's one of the problems.”

I asked Faruk if he received any help or aid from international organizations or non- profits. Faruk sighed and said, “Not really. Two years ago, the US embassy gave us 5.000 or

6.000 BAM we needed to print out the brochures. The cover of it says that the brochure was printed out thanks to the help from the American people. And that was about it. I contacted other embassies too, the Dutch embassy for example, but nothing really came out of it. Speaking of the

Dutch, let me tell you about my experience with a PTSD association from the Netherlands. They

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had a cycling tour from NL to Srebrenica. They came to Sarajevo first, and then went off to

Srebrenica. I organized a reception for them here in the Government. They have many people there in the Netherlands suffering from PTSD. They also have problems with suicides. They have almost identical problems like we do here. Their problems started with their missions here, with UNPROFOR, EUFOR, and such. I suggested to them a joint project that would be called a

Center for Rehabilitation. The idea was to grow raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, and so on, as occupational therapy. The Center would have been the size of a mountain retreat with around

10 beds. It would have had a psychotherapist, a psychologist, two masseurs, and this occupational therapy. Meals would be included too, and a nurse, yes. The project would have been entirely financed by the berries business. But of course, we would have needed some financial support at the beginning, to kick-start it. The project would be self-sustainable later.

The idea was that Belgian, German, and Dutch veterans come and spend 10 to 15 days in the

Center. The people from all parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina would also be there. In a way, they are all brothers. Same like people with cancer have their support groups. But, what happened? In

Netherlands they did all of that without me. I have the photos. The only difference is they don't grow berries, they don't need that because they're financed by the government. But everything else is exactly the same. Their name is Wounded Warriors. And Bosnians cannot go there, it's only for the Dutch.220 I was supposed to go visit them, I was exchanging emails with the headmaster. They have a veteran institute there. However, it was canceled in the end just so that I couldn't see what they did there. But, what can you do but to move on...? I think they actually

220 The Dutch contingent of the UN peace-keeping forces was understood to have played a significant role in the utter failure to prevent the genocide of thousands of Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men at Srebrenica. This event has provoked a significant national conversation and self-questioning in the Netherlands, making this point of Faruk’s particularly salient. In fact, Dubravka Zarkov argues that Srebrenica has become a “Dutch national trauma” whose function is to offer possibilities for remedy and recovery (184). Dubravka Zarkov, “Srebrenica Trauma,” in The PostWar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities, and International Peacekeeping Bosnia and the Netherlands, ed. Cynthia Cockburn and Dubravka Zarkov (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2002).

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made a big mistake. And you know why? It would have been cheaper for them to do it here than it is there. A person could have spent 10-15 days in this retreat here for 500 or 600 BAM, and the price there is 1.000 EUR, at least, for 10 days. Also, their center is in the city, but our center would have been in the mountains. Because the nature itself relaxes you. We were also thinking of spreading the berries business to apples, pears, and other fruit... we thought about keeping sheep, too. It would be constantly evolving... Another thing, we didn't need the money from the

Dutch, the money would have come from EU funds, they give it for things like that easily. But not to us, we are not in the EU. The idea was that the Dutch get the money from them and then we do the project here.

I’m overwhelmed by the sheer brutality of this fact, the idea that Faruk’s hopeful project for his fellow Bosnian veterans’ struggles with trauma was re-routed to the soldiers of other nations, of Western nations, without so much a word.221 I’m about to ask Faruk another question when he looks at me and says, “If you want to know something personal, something intimate, don't hesitate to ask. I'll tell you, our sexual life is ruined.” I’m a little thrown off and find myself responding, “What do you mean?” Faruk good naturedly says, “If one wants to have good sex, one must not be anxious. Do you need any additional explanation?” and he laughs heartily. Ines is laughing, and I find I can hear myself laughing too, barking out through the ensuing laughter the words, “No, no explanation!” When the laughter dies down, Faruk says,

“So, if I could share with you something like that, you should know you could ask whatever you want.”

How did he do it? Faruk has transgressed my list of interview questions by revealing something so personally intimate, so potentially shaming, especially within the parameters of

221 But here again Fassin reminds us through the anthropological study of “trauma” that it is a category through which suffering can be categorized and hierarchized; its history is a history of marginalization and exclusions. Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma.

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“maleness” for a patriarchal society. He seemed to know that I would not ask him about his personal experiences, and so he has extended an invitation - created one through laughter. And so the next words out of my mouth acknowledge this, and I smile at him and then I hear myself saying, “Very well. You said you yourself suffer from PTSD. Can you tell me a little bit about your own experience with PTSD?”

Faruk replied, “I can, of course, but I cannot tell which of my traumas is the central one anymore. If my counting is right, I was shot 13 times. Let's put it like this actually: my life hung by a thread 13 times in 4 years when I was a soldier. That's regarding my own life, and it's the major source for my PTSD. But apart from that, I had to assemble body parts of other people countless times. For example, once a grenade cut open a man's stomach and his inner organs went out. He was our soldier. We put his organs back with our hands. The smell of his guts and this gluey heat coming from it were not actually the biggest trauma from that situation. The biggest trauma for me comes from the fact he was begging me not to let him die. But unfortunately he died. With time, I started to think I was somehow guilty for his death. I thought

I could and should have done more in order to save his life. That's what I was telling you before - you start to blame yourself. How come I didn't do something else that would save this man's life...? An interesting thing is that I did save lives, but I barely have any memory of that. It is strange how you only remember bad things.

Ines, too, is emboldened to ask Faruk a personal question, “Faruk, how did you admit to yourself you had PTSD?” Faruk responded, “That is up to one's character. If you are this kind of person who is ready to accept new things, if you are honest with yourself, you will admit it. For example, there are people who do not want to go see a doctor because they are afraid they'll be told they have cancer. At the same time, that same person has all the symptoms and it's clear to them it's cancer. My personal character is such that if I see a problem, I try to find a solution for

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it. For me it was important to understand who my enemy was. I had previously realized that I had some kind of an adversary, but I could not locate it. Then I looked for a doctor, and that is how it started. And when he diagnosed me with PTSD, I decided to arm myself with the knowledge about it. The first thing is to get the right diagnosis. Not all PTSD's are the same.

They are of different intensity and with different symptoms. So, a professional should give the diagnosis, and prescribe therapy. That therapy isn't necessarily great in the beginning. For example, I was lost with my therapy at first. Some drugs were good, but some were not. Some occupational therapies were good, and some were not. For example, pictography is an art form where you draw on a piece of wood with a heated metal wire. In my case, this therapy did not work because the smell of smoke reminded me of the war. This is why it is crucial that a professional supervises your therapy. And also, I started to attend therapy regularly. One part of the therapy is that you should try and avoid stressful situations, if possible. But in Bosnia, this is mission impossible.”

Faruk sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Denial is a whole other story. The person who developed PTSD is usually ashamed to admit that they are struggling. It is especially prominent over here in Bosnia, because we are still a patriarchal society, where a father is expected to be as strong as a rock. First, he has a problem admitting to his family something is wrong with him. He tries to hide it. But the symptoms are visible. The family sees the symptoms. In order to make it easier for himself, he usually starts drinking. Alcohol is very available here and this region has a long tradition of alcohol consumption. If he gets introduced to marijuana or some drugs, he will consume those too. But not once would he admit that he's got a problem. And that is the biggest problem. Those people who go to therapy regularly, who take their prescription drugs, and who, above everything else, locate their problem, they know what they should fight against. And when you know what you should fight against, then it's easy

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to get information on the ways to fight it. A person who treats his PTSD with alcohol ends up having a double issue. He remains with PTSD and becomes an alcoholic in addition. Here's the chemical explanation of it: When you are happy, the secretion of serotonin is increased. One of the problems of the PTSD population is the fact we don't feel happiness, like other people do.

For example, if I were to get a car that I really wanted, I wouldn't have a reaction like

"Woooow!", but, instead, I'd go "Mhm, okay...". Alcohol increases the level of serotonin, but very soon the person affected has to drink more alcohol in order to reach the same level of serotonin. And, eventually, we are talking about enormous quantities of alcohol.”

I asked Faruk if he shared this kind of information with the folks who came to see him; I asked him what sort of things he did generally.

Faruk continued amiably, “I am not a psychologist, I just have a lot of information. I need to have a lot of information when I talk to people suffering from PTSD in order to assess the best way to help them. We work with doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists when we have a project. There are 7 of us in the association. But other members are not like me. We all give our time and effort, but I'm the only one who gives the money too. I feel I have to give more as the director of the association. I wish I wasn't the director though... All those stories affect me and I find myself laying in my bed at night thinking about these people. There's this guy in Ilijaš who every two months goes out and lies down on the train tracks. Fortunately, our railways are so bad that the trains go only around 30 mph. There's a Romani settlement close by, so every time the people from there see him lying on the tracks, they run and wave to stop the train. But what will happen if one day nobody sees him... I talked to this guy, but... We are just trying to keep him alive. It affects me deeply, I'm not made out of stone.”

I remember that there was a collective space for silence as the three of us sat and thought of this man, whose name I do not know and if he is alive… I remember growing aware of a

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stillness and it filling with the sounds of the cars honking and whizzing by as we sat at the café table outside in Dobrinja. I remember thinking of that man often, lying down on the train tracks day after another day, long after I met Faruk, long after Bosnia was a million miles away.

At the end of the interview, I asked Faruk if there was anything in particular that he wanted me to share with others in my work. He said, his spirit seemingly indominable, “The thing that I'd like you to do is to pass this information on. That PTSD is a normal reaction to abnormal situations. That's the key to understand everything about it. People automatically assume that there must be something wrong with you. But if you draw parallel between PTSD and a common cold, and show that there's a cause and effect there as well, it'll become something normal. That would be all from me. And tell America I said hi!”

As we all walk back together to the car I remember that I have yet to ask him one of my standard interview questions - what he thinks about the war tours in Sarajevo. Faruk responded,

“I think that has no importance. They keep a memory of something that is very ugly. Imagine the knife of Jack the Ripper was found in London and people start admiring it. That knife is a symbol of evil and ugly things and it should be thrown away, destroyed... I don't need things like the Sarajevo Roses [mortared pieces of the ground where people were killed filled in with red to symbol the blood of victims] to remember the grenades. It's a tourist bait rather than anything else. People in tourist agencies sometimes rely on the dark side of humans to make a profit.

People love bad things. It's an ugly thing. But people like to hear that somebody died there... I guess we all have a good and a bad side to us.”

“You think these things can be harmful reminders?” I interjected.

Faruk turned to me and said, “As I told you before, I remember the bad things all too well, I do not need a reminder. It's the beautiful things that I cannot remember.”

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I told Faruk that I, (in part), agreed with him about the strangeness of a war tour scene where Bosnian suffering is offered up for international tourist consumption. I suggested to Faruk that, (in part), the war tours might have some positive effects as well, that they might be a way to educate Western audiences about the events that occurred in Bosnia, possibly even question their own shared political culpability in its history. Ines, (no surprise as a former war guide) enthusiastically agrees. “No one knows Bosnia’s stories, our stories, until they come to the tour.

I have experienced it,” she says, waving her hands in the air as she speaks. Faruk smiles and nods; he seems to like the idea. We make our leave of Ines, who strides off to catch a bus the other direction; I walk with Faruk a bit further on the way to his car. On the way I ask Faruk what he thinks about this idea that Ines and I have asked him to consider – that the war tours have the possibility to educate international tourists about the war, and if he thinks it’s possible that the war tours might have positive effects for Bosnia.

“It depends,” he says.

“On what?” I ask.

“On if there is another war.”

Faruk laughed.

220 A CONCLUSION

In March of 2018, I presented excerpts from the first chapter of this book, “Bullets in

Baščaršija: The Social Life of a Post-War Commodity” at the Southern Conference for Slavic

Studies in Charlotte, North Carolina. Outside the walls of the hotel conference arena, students gathered in droves for the “March for Our Lives” event protesting gun violence and the high school shootings that seemed to have erupted across America. After an afternoon of attending panels and presenting my work on the life of used shrapnel pieces, I flipped on the TV back in my hotel room and was greeted by an advertisement for “Bullets 4 Peace.” Bullets 4 Peace is a company that collects used bullet casings and transforms them into handcrafted jewelry. The company website features Beyoncé and Bruno Mars wearing their favorite pendants. Beyoncé’s has a Swarovski crystal custom tip, Bruno Mars prefers a bullet design with a silver peace sign.

Customers can buy them engraved and make them custom, just like in the shops of Baščaršija.

Here’s how the website describes their business:

“Every bullet has more than one life span. The bullet gets shot, its casing falls to the floor, it is then collected by the manufacturers and reused, saving the manufacturers money, a process we call – Reloading. Bullets 4 Peace collects those used bullet casings from around the world before they become a fully functioning bullet again, giving them a new purpose – a hand crafted jewelry line promoting peace & compassion.”

One doesn’t have to travel as far as post-conflict Sarajevo or embark on a far-away journey to some place deemed “elsewhere,” to experience the endlessness of the commodity form and the ruins of war.

221 I’ve spent time wondering what would happen if I bought a Bullet 4 Peace the way I’ve bought

Tunnel of Hope entry tickets, wondering if I’d receive any information about it with my gift box.

Perhaps I’d receive a little note telling me what country it came from, or who they were fired upon - maybe I’d receive a Sally Struthers-like sponsorship card, or maybe those answers are answers to questions already long lost, succumbed to that politics of universalization so often present in the process of commoditization. Even in my wonderings I hardly know which option is the better to hope for. I wonder other things too, thoughts that transpire at this jarring intersection of Bullets in Baščaršija and Bullets 4 Peace. What does it mean that we live in a world where someone’s death hangs from the neck of an icon? I wonder if there is anything that the commodity form cannot mystify, and I wonder what would happen if I looked a little harder. Would I find that Rafael Anteby, the company’s founder, an LA fashion designer whose declared inspiration for Bullets 4 Peace was growing up in an Israel “accustomed to war and violence” was once/is someone like Azim, transgressing with labor and love the twice-baked horrors of war and the commodity form?

Bullets 4 Peace, though it offers no ultimate conclusions, is where my conclusion starts. It starts in another time and another place, “separate” from the site of Bosnia’s war tours, though I wonder if any of those “re-loaded” bullets are from Sarajevo. It’s from this space of wondering, in a conference hotel in North Carolina two years after my fieldwork concluded, that

I was reminded once again that “separateness,” or the ability to occupy a space “set apart,” is never really there when it comes to the globalized horrors of war. Nor is it there when it comes to the political, historical, and economic violence it entails, nor to the post-war industries that inevitably follow. Diana Taylor writes of these imbrications at a different dark site, when she witnesses the trauma performance of a man named Pedro Matta, tortured at one of but many

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torture centers under Pinochet’s terrible reign. Of the tour he gives at a former torture camp outside of Santiago, Chile, she writes:

“Standing there, together, bringing the buildings and routines back to life, we bear witness not just to the personal loss, but to a system of power relations, hierarchies, and values that not only allowed but required the destruction of others...We might control a site and put a fence around it, but the city, the country, the southern cone, the hemisphere has been networked for violence-and beyond, too, of course, and not just because the U.S. openly outsourced torture. Is the dark site sickening because it situates us physically in such proximity to atrocity made visible and externalized in this small space? Or because, by participating, we internalize the violence? And how can we not participate when we recognize that the ubiquitous practice of torture situates all of us in constant proximity to criminal politics? As I follow Matta deeper down the paths, his experience resonates with me in part because I actually do always know what happened here/there and accept that this, like many other sites, is my responsibility.”222

We can’t really build a fence around the dark site, as Taylor notes. Not around Santiago, not around Sarajevo. Nonetheless, we do try to contain these sites, both in the world at large and in scholarship. In the end I don’t think this “fence-building” should be too surprising, given the brutality of their excesses and the human, all too human price we might pay in confronting them

– we are creatures that can be shattered and stripped away. Another word for “contain,” a sly synonym, might also be “separate,” and as such at some point we do have to ask ourselves how much our analytic ordering categories such as intentionality, motivation, liminality, pilgrimage, trauma tourism, or even an a priori or non-produced human sacred are going to have more to do with creating a separation between the dark site and ourselves, and with producing essentialisms and reifications that may insulate us further from its horrors.

As for those all too human, culturally contingent and socially constructed ways in which we do strive to “control a site and put a fence around it,” then I hold, it is better to theorize the fence itself and its emergence as a force of transgression, or as Taussig says, “a barrier that we

222 Diana Taylor, “Trauma as Durational Performance: A Return to Dark Sites” in Rites of Return: Diasporic Poetics and the Politics of Memory, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 277-278.

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have erected only to be fearsomely crossed.”223 Roger Caillois, who I have turned to in the writing of this project, suggests that it is when human beings come into contact with forces of intensity that have the power to change the world we occupy and know - the profane world - that we put up lines of prohibition, or create rituals, in order to safeguard ourselves from transformative power.224 It is as if we recognize those intensities and events which are the most transformative and in that recognition we surround them - we build fences - in order to keep them from overwhelming the profane world and our daily lives. In the end, that’s my hope for the war tour, that it is a contemporary ritual, a constitutive performance through which we might re-discover the intensities of memory, messiness, materiality, and the brutality that binds them.

It’s my hope that the creative endeavors of human ritual play are a space we turn to because we need the transformative, generative potential of the sacred to shake-up a shared and difficult profane world.

Toward the end of my fieldwork, the complexity and the significance of locating the war tour not as a contained or separate event, but rather as a part of our shared historical, political, and economic legacy within a globalized and interconnected world was brought home to me on a routine day in a kitchen in my temporary apartment in Grbavica, when Dzenana, a war tour company owner, came over to my home for a coffee. A good friend as well as a neighbor who lived but a street over, Dzenana and I often concluded the day with conversation over the day to day trappings of life and our shared interest in Sarajevo’s war tours. Dzenana bounded through the door, gave me a hug, and said, “I met the most interesting and wonderful tourist today from

Syria, and I wish you could have come with us on the tour, I knew you would enjoy meeting him.” “Oh?” I responded, interested, just as she thought I would be. “Did he say why he came

223 Michael Taussig, “Transgression” in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 350.

224 Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 33-59.

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on the war tour?” I asked, as I brought coffee cups out of cupboards. Dzenana looked at me and replied, “He said he wanted to see what his own country would look like in 20 years.”

That shared, profane world in which, at the time of this writing, both a war-ravaged Syria and Bosnia’s war tours are embedded is in the end, also where it’s at for me. After all, the sacred and the profane realm are demarcated through and alongside one another. Another way of saying this is that the world in which Sarajevo’s war tours and their potentially transformative intensity is embedded can only get “shaken up” when we acknowledge that the war tour’s arrival has been conditioned through history, and through power. In the refracting lens that the war tour casts back upon the profane world, we all reside somewhere that can be located in relation to those configurations of power that both permeate our everyday lives and that have led/are leading to the war tour’s emergence. That lens is one that compels us to undertake the labor of intersectionally locating our proximity to the dark site, and to transgress whatever fences, barriers, insulating ordering categories, or lines of prohibition we strive to put up around it.

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