Carna Brkovic
I am Professor in Cultural Studies and European Ethnology, University of Mainz, Germany. Previously I taught at the University of Goettingen, and the University of Regensburg. I have a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester.
I currently work on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Suspending Disbelief: Humanitarian Worldmaking in a Refugee Camp in the Balkans”. This is an account of how Red Cross humanitarians in Montenegro pursued worldmaking differently within the Non-Aligned Movement and, forty years later, during the Europeanization process. Realigning Red Cross humanitarianism in Southeast Europe meant changing the vision of the world advocated by this organization away from the imaginary produced during the Non-Aligned Movement and toward the one epitomized in the liberal humanitarian tradition. Looking at local humanitarian staff and Red Cross outside the West/Global North, I explore links between morality and imagination.
Theoretical concerns that have motivated many of my works address how people deal with the situations when their agency is suspended; how people navigate ambiguity, uncertainty, and failure; and how power and inequality are structured in such ambivalent and complex conditions that abound in Southeast Europe as a region undergoing multiple and simultaneous socio-political transformations.
My work combines a focus on inequalities and power with a focus on social complexity and ambiguity. I am particularly interested in developing concepts that help us to understand how differently positioned people pursue their projects of the good life within structural inequality. I also work towards understanding fractured, fragmented, and ambiguous forms of governance. I wrote about IDPs living in refugee camps, LGBT activists, and grassroots attempts to raise money for healthcare in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Montenegro.
In my work, (South) Eastern Europe figures as a region that poses unexpected theoretical challenges to conventional directions of anthropological analysis. I am deeply critical of hegemonic visions of the region as a poor copyist of theory produced elsewhere – in the former colonial centres, or peripheries. To counteract such visions, I strive to test and develop new concepts that reflect the ethnographic realities of the region but also help understand socio-political entanglements throughout the globe.
I authored an ethnographic monograph 'Managing ambiguity. How clientelism, citizenship, and power shape personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina' (Berghahn 2017) and co-edited ‘Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Peripheral Entanglements’ (Routledge 2016).
I am a member of the Executive Board of SIEF, a former Secretary of the AAA's Society for the Anthropology of Europe (SAE), and a member of the editorial board of PoLAR. I founded and co-convened EASA’s Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network (EASA AHN) 2018-2020.
I currently work on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Suspending Disbelief: Humanitarian Worldmaking in a Refugee Camp in the Balkans”. This is an account of how Red Cross humanitarians in Montenegro pursued worldmaking differently within the Non-Aligned Movement and, forty years later, during the Europeanization process. Realigning Red Cross humanitarianism in Southeast Europe meant changing the vision of the world advocated by this organization away from the imaginary produced during the Non-Aligned Movement and toward the one epitomized in the liberal humanitarian tradition. Looking at local humanitarian staff and Red Cross outside the West/Global North, I explore links between morality and imagination.
Theoretical concerns that have motivated many of my works address how people deal with the situations when their agency is suspended; how people navigate ambiguity, uncertainty, and failure; and how power and inequality are structured in such ambivalent and complex conditions that abound in Southeast Europe as a region undergoing multiple and simultaneous socio-political transformations.
My work combines a focus on inequalities and power with a focus on social complexity and ambiguity. I am particularly interested in developing concepts that help us to understand how differently positioned people pursue their projects of the good life within structural inequality. I also work towards understanding fractured, fragmented, and ambiguous forms of governance. I wrote about IDPs living in refugee camps, LGBT activists, and grassroots attempts to raise money for healthcare in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Montenegro.
In my work, (South) Eastern Europe figures as a region that poses unexpected theoretical challenges to conventional directions of anthropological analysis. I am deeply critical of hegemonic visions of the region as a poor copyist of theory produced elsewhere – in the former colonial centres, or peripheries. To counteract such visions, I strive to test and develop new concepts that reflect the ethnographic realities of the region but also help understand socio-political entanglements throughout the globe.
I authored an ethnographic monograph 'Managing ambiguity. How clientelism, citizenship, and power shape personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina' (Berghahn 2017) and co-edited ‘Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Peripheral Entanglements’ (Routledge 2016).
I am a member of the Executive Board of SIEF, a former Secretary of the AAA's Society for the Anthropology of Europe (SAE), and a member of the editorial board of PoLAR. I founded and co-convened EASA’s Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network (EASA AHN) 2018-2020.
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– a local form of raising monetary donations to people who need medical
treatments abroad – this paper explores humanitarianism and its understandings of
life. Ethnographically tracking the course of a humanitarna akcija organised in one
Bosnian town, this paper makes two related points. First, it ethnographically demonstrates
that lives of the ‘helpers’ and ‘helped’ in humanitarne akcije were understood
as immersed in the intense talk and gossip of the town and as exposed to the sociopolitical
environment troubled in the same way. Comparing this understanding of life
with the international humanitarianism, this paper suggests that the notion of ‘bare
life’ in international humanitarian projects in emergencies may be the product of
the separation of infrastructures, which enable and manage lives of the ‘savers’ and
‘saved’. Second, those who needed help through humanitarne akcije strongly criticised
the lack of organised health care and social security in Bosnia and Herzegovina that
pushed them to initiate humanitarne akcije. They criticised less how other people perceived
them (the terms of their sociocultural recognition) and more the shrinking public
health-care insurance, unavailability of medical treatments, unequal allocation of
medicines, tissues and organs, and so forth (the unjust redistribution of resources).
Their dissatisfactions imply that humanitarianism as an industry of aid can be criticised
for failing to intervene in the global regimes of unequal redistribution of resources in a
transformative way.
favours to help ‘get things done’, becoming perceived as a ‘goddess’ who ‘spent herself’ for the sake of others.
The article suggests that such people managed to gather power through the paradox of keeping-while-giving
(Weiner, 1992. Inalienable possessions. The paradox of keeping-while-giving. Berkeley: California UP). People
able to grant numerous favours in multiple public and private arenas kept aside the position of the person able
to manage ambiguity, which was part of the new ad hoc, flexible forms of governance, exercised by both the
international and the local actors in the country.
– a local form of raising monetary donations to people who need medical
treatments abroad – this paper explores humanitarianism and its understandings of
life. Ethnographically tracking the course of a humanitarna akcija organised in one
Bosnian town, this paper makes two related points. First, it ethnographically demonstrates
that lives of the ‘helpers’ and ‘helped’ in humanitarne akcije were understood
as immersed in the intense talk and gossip of the town and as exposed to the sociopolitical
environment troubled in the same way. Comparing this understanding of life
with the international humanitarianism, this paper suggests that the notion of ‘bare
life’ in international humanitarian projects in emergencies may be the product of
the separation of infrastructures, which enable and manage lives of the ‘savers’ and
‘saved’. Second, those who needed help through humanitarne akcije strongly criticised
the lack of organised health care and social security in Bosnia and Herzegovina that
pushed them to initiate humanitarne akcije. They criticised less how other people perceived
them (the terms of their sociocultural recognition) and more the shrinking public
health-care insurance, unavailability of medical treatments, unequal allocation of
medicines, tissues and organs, and so forth (the unjust redistribution of resources).
Their dissatisfactions imply that humanitarianism as an industry of aid can be criticised
for failing to intervene in the global regimes of unequal redistribution of resources in a
transformative way.
favours to help ‘get things done’, becoming perceived as a ‘goddess’ who ‘spent herself’ for the sake of others.
The article suggests that such people managed to gather power through the paradox of keeping-while-giving
(Weiner, 1992. Inalienable possessions. The paradox of keeping-while-giving. Berkeley: California UP). People
able to grant numerous favours in multiple public and private arenas kept aside the position of the person able
to manage ambiguity, which was part of the new ad hoc, flexible forms of governance, exercised by both the
international and the local actors in the country.
activism in Montenegro, suggesting that it has been firmly intertwined
with the “Europeanisation” of the country. Making "homosexuality" appear inseparable from "Europe" , is potentially problematic: it positions non-heterosexual practices and people as not quite legitimate parts of the Montenegrin polity. We argue that the real challenge for improving the position of LGBT people is to destabilise this conceptual link and to make homosexuality a legitimately Montenegrin political issue. As long as public officials and state institutions engage with LGBT concerns because the EU requests it of them and because it is presumably a European "thing to do" — rather than because of people who live in Montenegro and experience various forms of oppression on the basis of their sexuality and gender— non-heterosexual sexual practices will not be perceived as constitutive of the political and social life of Montenegro.
Tvrdim da dio odgovora na ovo pitanje leži u dominantnom režimu
vrijednosti u kome su aktivnosti uložene u održavanje i reprodukciju svakodnevnog života uglavnom prezrene. Moja teza jeste da su različita folklorna znanja o snovima tokom vremena postala rodno određena zbog dominantnog režima vrijednosti u kome se produktivni rad – onaj rad koji rezultuje nekim konkretnim proizvodom – vrednuje, dok reproduktivni rad – rad potrošen na obnavljanje života i društvenih odnosa – ostaje uglavnom nevidljiv.
Ovakav režim vrijednosti nije crnogorski, pa ni balkanski specifikum.
Međutim, doprinos većine žena njegovanju i obnavljanju društva će ostati
uglavnom nevidljiv sve dok ne potražimo načine da reproduktivni rad vrednujemo kao važan dio kulturnog nasljeđa.
Ovaj zbornik, zasnovan na opsežnim etnografskim istraživanjima, nudi briljantnu analizu kompleksnog odnosa između LGBT prava i evropskih integracija, i predstavlja značajan doprinos ne samo literaturi o aktivizmu na prostoru bivše Jugoslavije, već i sociološkoj građi o LGBT aktivističkom delovanju uopšte. U tom smislu, Preko duge u Evropu će biti korisna referenca svima koji se bave studijama roda i društvenih pokreta.
Džil A. Irvin
Univerzitet Oklahome
Ovaj izrazito originalan zbornik ne predstavlja samo pionirski doprinos istraživanjima LGBT aktivizma, nego nudi i odličan primer kako se političkim i društvenim konfliktima u jugoistočnoj Evropi može pristupiti na teorijski utemeljen i angažovan način. Rezultat takvog pristupa je knjiga koja je impresivna i po širini empirijskog zahvata i po akademskoj rigoroznosti individualnih priloga.
Erik D. Gordi
Univerzitetski koledž London
nastalog kao odgovor na kontekst „zapadnih“ država nisu primenljivi na „istočnoevropski“ kontekst
na jednostavan način. Protivljenje feminizmu u zemljama istočne i jugoistočne Evrope može biti
iskorišćeno kao povod za ponovno promišljanje i kontekstualno prilagođavanje bazičnih političkih
koncepata, poput „javnosti“. Etnografska skica razgovora o menopauzi u gradu na granici Bosne
i Hercegovine i Srbije ukazuje na postojanje jedne vrste „neformalne“ javnosti i isprepletenost
„ličnog“ sa zvaničnim medicinskim preporukama i praksama.
Contributors to this book show how the long EU accession process disseminates discursive tools employed in LGBT activist struggles for human rights and equality. This creates a linkage between “Europeanness” and “gay emancipation” which elevates certain forms of gay activist engagement and perhaps also non-heterosexuality, more generally, to a measure of democracy, progress and modernity. At the same time, it relegates practices of intolerance to the LGBT community to the status of non-European primitivist Other who is inevitably positioned in the patriarchal past that should be left behind.
This meticulously-researched, edited volume offers a brilliant analysis of the complex linkages between LBGT rights and European integration, and their implications for activists, citizens, and officials alike. It is a major contribution to the literature on activism in the post-Yugoslav space as well as LGBT activism more broadly. A must read for students and scholars of gender studies, European studies, and social movements.
Professor Jill A. Irvine, University of Oklahoma
This strikingly original collection represents not only a pioneering work in LGBT studies, but also offers a powerful case for engaging the study of post-conflict Southeastern Europe with enhanced theoretical depth and wider social engagement. The result is an impressive and useful volume both in terms of the scope of its coverage and the scholarly rigour of the individual texts.
Professor Eric Gordy, School of Slavonic and East European Studies
University College London