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Overview
Larisa Jasarevic offers an unforgettable look at the everyday experiences of people living in post-socialist, post-war Bosnia. Not at all existing on the world's margins, Bosnians today are concerned with the good life and are as entangled in consumer debt as everyone else. The insecurities of living in an economy dominated by informal networks of trade, personal credit, and indebtedness are experienced by Bosnians in terms of physical ailments, some not recognized by Western medical science. Jasarevic follows ordinary Bosnians in their search for treatment—from use of pharmaceuticals to alternative medicines and folk healers of various kinds. Financial well-being and health are woven together for Bosnians, and Jasarevic adeptly traces the links between the two realms. In the process, she addresses a number of themes that have been important in studies of life under neoliberalism in other parts of the world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253023858 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 298 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Larisa Jasarevic is Senior Lecturer in the Global and International Studies Program at the University of Chicago. An anthropologist, she is interested in bodies, natures, and popular knowledge in contemporary Bosnia.
Read an Excerpt
Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market
Intimate Debt
By Larisa Jasarevic
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2017 Larisa JasarevicAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02385-8
CHAPTER 1
Just Surviving
Living Well since the Better Life
Back from a supermarket, the woman was beaming. It was late autumn 2006. She had gone out on a morning mission to spend, wisely, no more than 2 konvertible marks (KM, about 1.25 USD) on essentials: fruit, sweet cream (kajmak), and milk. The family of four has nearly run out of money for the month — 2 KM is a third of their usual daily funds. Her excursion was preceded by a heated domestic argument about managing the budget better and resolving, once more, to do things differently next time, so as to truly make the two pensions, hers and her husband's, last. The woman oversaw the family accounting and ran out of steam and money by the twentieth of each month: her expense log regularly registers minuses, over expenditures, and loans for making do until the pensions arrive. She is a retired economist applying her professional skills to minute accounting of household expenditures; the smallest item at the time: "1KM to the beggar," reads one budget entry. Here are a select few entries, which do not do justice to the care with which expenses are catalogued under each household member's name, under the utilities for the flat and for the house in the country, or under the rubric of the "miscellaneous," placed right next to an unnamed column that seems to be opened from month to month to capture the unexpected (house and car repairs, medicines, education costs, etc.). From June 2007: "electricity 28,30 KM; laundry detergent 9,35 KM; hairstyling 26 KM, medicine 9 KM, magazine 3 KM, rattles x 2 for the neighbor's (newborn) twins."
That autumn morning she had walked out feeling the mood that sinks in when repetitions of a failure make us suspect that it's our fault, or still render us so hopeless even though we are not entirely to blame, but she came back from the store buoyant, impatient to tell what she found: on sale for just 10 KM — imagine, a bargain! — was a pair of beautiful green gloves, made of "genuine leather," perfectly matching the hue of her older daughter's new boots. She buried the pair at the bottom of the heap, hoping somehow to come up with the money. Had the gloves been in any one of the seven small stores clustered in her neighborhood, she could have promised the trader a later payment. But no such arrangements were possible with the supermarket staff. Still, the gloves were not lost, just out of reach and not impossibly so: the price was right, irresistible, the gloves well hidden for later retrieval — a surplus or a secret stash of money just might turn up. It had happened before.
I've known her for a long time. I care for her anxiously and fiercely, though I cannot presume to know her well: she keeps her secrets, like her poetry and her diaries, to herself, although she opened her budget logs, her drawers and closets, and her family door to the ethnographer, whom she sometimes calls "a child" (dijete). How can I turn her into an ethnographic character without enacting a fantasy of authorial power that, clearly, I could not have in a relationship where the woman's age, wisdom, and life experience urged her to confidently address me as "my dear child"? And not least when she itched to give me advice or when she got me out of awkward situations into which my research curiosity sometimes misguided me. Besides, who knows how her diaries describe me, in the privacy of handwritten Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, free from the pressure (or the pleasure) of an address to a wider, English-reading audience? In response to her secrets and to her own representations of what I call "our ethnographic encounters" and to account for the too many known and unknown fine details that bind us in a relationship, I will speak of her briefly, leaving her unnamed. She is my guide to the quotidian, sensuously historical experience of "just surviving" (samo prezivljavanje, hasprezivljavanje).
Her home is a comfort zone furnished with clues about lives that were deliberately cultivated and ornamented in the last decades of Yugoslav socialism, interrupted by the 1990s' war ("I feel that the best years of my mature life have been stolen," she often says, reflecting on the war and the years right after, when the couple was getting back on their feet), and lived beautifully, though the family was merely surviving, ever since the 1995 peace. The war upturned routines, habits, and expectations, and repurposed the objects in the domestic inventory, making room for emergency responses: a wooden stove in a corner of a high-rise apartment; duct tape over the windows, anticipating a shell blast; plastic water barrels; and volatile gas lamps. From her home I step out onto the streets of Tuzla, and when she is willing, I gladly join in on her routes. Otherwise, I go on my own, trekking further than she wants to, getting into the crowded spaces of marketplaces, waiting rooms of health centers, and pharmacies, lingering around shops and market stands long after the customers have left or before anyone has appeared, gathering a sense of what was so strange about the present (cudno neko vrijeme, cudna vremena) that people generally complained they've been weathering, enduring.
The two-bedroom apartment was furnished in the early 1980s with solid wooden pieces meant to last — shelves, cupboards, a dining-room set — and hastier purchases of cheaper plywood that were still bitterly regretted since they did not age so well and their flimsy joints and surfaces needed propping, gluing, nailing, painting, disguising, and upholstering to retain a functional and decent shape. The dark wooden shelves in the living room host a home library whose many titles, it seems, were on the essential reading list of their worldly-minded generation: de Maupassant and Zola, Marquez, Dostoyevsky, Selimovic, Sartre, complete works of Marx and Engels, a few of Kardelj's, splendid volumes of Arabian Nights, Health and Beauty and You and Your Child, two hardcover, instructive reference books, and Tito, a glossy biography. New titles have been acquired since the 1990s, in particular the Koran, the Bible, and texts on Islamic practice and philosophy. However, the book collecting seems to have stopped. Prohibitive prices and small pensions orient the family toward the public library.
The honey-hued dining room furniture lends itself to joint meals, coffee rituals, important meetings, like this morning's dispute, and display souvenirs from earlier travels — a vase from Greece, a tea set from Germany, Sienna pottery, Czech crystal bowls. High above anyone's reach, on the corner of a cupboard, sits propped, a fat, sumptuously illustrated volume of a Svjetski Kuhar (Worldly Chef). It was never more frequently consulted nor ever so closely read than during the war years, when the family — like so many others — cooked creative meals out of the basic staples of humanitarian aid packages, out of foods found or gifted from the war black market, and with whatever produce and weeds urbanites managed to cultivate or glean on the town fringes or in the nearby forests, villages, and fields. Stacking an ottoman onto a chair, the youngest child would reach the Worldly Chef and pour over it. Other household members joined in, decoding the unknown culinary words while feasting vicariously on picture-perfect dishes between the inadequate and repetitive meals they were grateful to have.
The family closets attracted me most. To my ethnographic-voyeuristic eyes, they afforded peeks into a history of consuming habits, a collection of tastes, a display of desires: a color-coded history of sorts, finely threaded with smells of moth-repelling herb sachets, trailing perfumes, and trace odors of bodies and their brushings with the outside world: a whiff of cigarette smoke, city smog, or a bakery. What closets no longer contain, the photo albums and coffee-prodded tales invoke in a full contextual and textual richness: a yellow mid-1970s coat, perfectly cut, wool tweed that proved elusive during a cold month of one late autumn, which the determined woman spent searching the stores of Frankfurt until, so the story goes, she ended up in a hospital with pneumonia. Her husband showed up with the yellow coat on his arm, on his first visit, and it was just right, just as she wanted it. Or the smart, green evening dress, gently bell-shaped on the bottom, which matched her husband's moss-green, rich velvet suit, in which they danced into a New Year's Eve sometimes in the 1970s, and many years since. Silk blouses. Clever blazers. Yellow, green, brown, shy pinks: a small history lesson could be had around these colors, from primary to more ambivalent hues, and around the fabrics and cuts: the clothing items were carefully collected, registering splurges and savings, and from the mid-1980s to the last years of socialism, purchases above one's means courtesy of a mass speculative shopping scheme known as na cekove (on checks) and more accurately na cekove bezpokrica (checks without the collateral), issued confidently in advance of a salary in agreement with some friendly sales staff about a delayed release of a check. The closets present clothing as collections, composed with a particular sense of ownership as a relation between self, the milieu, and things, guided with a stated preference for a few items only but of finest quality (jedno al' vrijedno), tailored in ways to outlast finicky fashion trends while dressing up the person as sharp and "classy" or "most modern" (klasika, najmodernije). Clothing collections hang together memories of items' provenance, memorable shopping events, and special occasions, as well as the sedimented but constantly stirred traces of familiar moods and past occupations.
Since the woman retired from a career in now abolished socialist enterprises in the city of Tuzla, the capital of Bosnia's northeastern region, and had attempted jobs in small, private, trade-oriented businesses that failed, her dressing habits included new, inexpensive, functional pieces. Much of her wardrobe was second-hand, handed down to her or purchased at the market. The elegant everyday clothes needed special occasions for wearing — an outing downtown, a doctor's visit, a celebration. This fall she had been managing some ordinary misfortunes, including a death in the family, with tranquilizers, which she consumed only when her other techniques, Islamic daily prayers (namaz — Bosnian Turkism) and a yogic breathing practice, brought no relief. There was no medicine, however, for the chronic money troubles, which dressed her domestic quarters like an oppressive wallpaper periodically before the war and constantly, ever since, erupting at times, like water stains or wall cracks that furrow bumpy, busy patterns but remain contained within the taut fabric of the everyday. The rhythm of her monthly accounting, beginning with optimistic expenditures and diligent payment of bills (from utilities to her daughter's fashion-design classes and French lessons) and slowing down to negative numbers, borrowed funds, and disciplined appetites, exemplifies the more general struggle to live on average incomes or state pensions (from around 400 KM or 250 USD in 2007 and up to 800 KM in 2015. The minimal incomes and pension remain below 400 Km, though). Let alone to live beautifully, lijepo zivjet. What else was there to do but to keep trying?
SINCE THE GOOD LIFE PAST
This chapter is interested in the shared existential circumstances and experiences of surviving, as well as in the mundane modes of pursuing a good life. It attends to spaces, objects, and practiced habits in present-day Bosnia — from dressing to eating, from caring to craving, from valuing to accounting — that regularly enact a sort of historical unforgiving of the stark difference between the presently precarious life and a better life (bolji zivot) of the past. This is no simple nostalgic memory but a comparative disposition that is at once critical and indulgent, stubbornly committed to the values that seem out of step with the objective conditions of possibility, but often sympathetic to the logics of yearnings. I often heard such ambivalence articulated in the field, sometimes decidedly resolved into a harsh critique, as when a nurse on a lunch break at an herbalist's street stand remarked with dismay: "See? Everyone walks about beautifully dressed but with empty pockets." This was a serious young person speaking out for sensible consumption and from the position of an employed, single man devoted to cultivating his iman, the inward aspect of Islam, and ihsan, beautiful conduct, as opposed to fashionable appearances. I will describe others who are more hesitant to judge, more entangled in outstanding obligations, more easily swayed by the attractive commodity callings even when it means hammering with determination into the interior fixtures of bathroom walls to redecorate — not because anyone else will ever see the results, but because one learned to live in nice dwellings. By the end of this chapter, I will show how this particular costly resolve proceeded while generating debts, bodily aches, and serious doubts about one's own plans, making substantial yet only privately noticeable differences to the flat in an apartment unit that was seriously close to crumbling as a whole. In other words, investments in better life, bolji zivot, are often not simply about keeping up appearances, self-consciously tending to the skin of things, but are more complicated and more ambitious aspirations for goodness that inheres in a comprehensive, enveloping sense of being and having, that saturates life thoroughly, with quality.
Besides being historically minded, modes of surviving beautifully are also oriented toward the present where better life may be impossible but where pursuits of the good life are enthusiastic or quietly insistent, inventive and resourceful, disappointing and nourishing. Surviving in style entails selective remembering and learning fast and anew what makes life good, worth living, even if it makes little economic sense, strictly speaking, or precisely because it downplays the strictly economic priorities and economizing tactics.
Scholars of post-socialist Europe and the former Soviet Union have already noted how common the complaint about "surviving" is across the region. Studies have turned the rubric of popular grievance into a repository of local experiences and perspectives that critically diverge from macroeconomic portrayals of the necessary pains and inevitable gains of the transitioning economies. I pick up the task of listening for the local experience and take it further with a curiosity that is insatiably interested in the sensuousness that surviving presumes and invigorates. I am also intrigued by the possibility of following the experiential arc that involves an embodied sense of a good life with a memory of senses, retrained tactilities with familiar and brand new market objects, and finally, with wider historical materiality. Furthermore, surviving sounds and works differently here: not only was the end of socialism in Bosnia and ex-Yugoslavia obviously embroiled in the wars of the 1990s and post-conflict circumstances, but also the Yugoslav exceptional socialism, professing a humanist commitment to the better life in the future and a good life in the meantime, left in its wake particular expectations and disappointments. Thus, several historical reference points loosely orient present efforts to survive stylishly in Bosnia. One is the Yugoslav socialist and cultural economy, which formal records describe as going through four distinct phases, with the peak of its economic growth and life standard in the 1960s and the economic unraveling in the 1980s. Depending on the pace and context of storytelling, biographical memory may compress this history around key moments of economic plenty and of a more diffused range of possibilities that were taken for granted even in the moments of private privation and financial crises. The war of the 1990s is another reference point, although it figures in ways that are perhaps unexpected: less as stories of trauma, bleak despair, or mortal danger and more as offering witty tales of resourcefulness and simple pleasures that people managed to secure under extraordinary circumstances. The 1990s war is also tacitly operative in the complaint about present survival: it is a poorly hidden, grating note, dubbing the story of peace, which was long in the making and barely negotiated, and so, otherwise, a very much welcomed event; it is a grinding of teeth at the tales of peace as the end to all suffering. Insofar as the war conditions kept open the possibility that after the war life would carry on as before, or become better yet, complaint about surviving in the time of peace is an ironic comment on what was supposed to be a much more comfortable existence.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market by Larisa Jasarevic. Copyright © 2017 Larisa Jasarevic. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Oddly Bodily Lives in the Market
1. Just Surviving: Living Well Since the Better Life
2. Insanely Generous: Making Wealth in an Economy of Debt
3. On the Edge: Worries in Common and Circumstantial Communities
4. Medical Detours: Materiality and Magicality of Quotidian Cures
5. Strava: Distant Bodies at Hand
6. What if Not For Real? Troubles with Medical Efficacy
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"...A unique text and a brilliant intervention in two theoretical fields, as well as an important contribution to post-socialist ethnography. The author's incisive revelation is that ethnographers cannot forever segregate the economic and the bio-medical. ...A such, it is a highly important contribution to the field, and an exciting wotk from a new voice."
"...A unique text and a brilliant intervention in two theoretical fields, as well as an important contribution to post-socialist ethnography. The author's incisive revelation is that ethnographers cannot forever segregate the economic and the bio-medical. ...A such, it is a highly important contribution to the field, and an exciting wotk from a new voice."
"...A unique text and a brilliant intervention in two theoretical fields, as well as an important contribution to post-socialist ethnography. The author's incisive revelation is that ethnographers cannot forever segregate the economic and the bio-medical. ...A such, it is a highly important contribution to the field, and an exciting wotk from a new voice."