This is a remarkable anthropological study of the traces of intercommunal living in the “Field” of Gacko, located in Republika Srpska close to the border with Montenegro. Prior to the war, the Field (which the author capitalizes throughout the text) had a mixed population of Serbs, Muslims, and Gurbeti (Roma), with culturally- and religiously-entangled lives. During the war it was cleansed of its non-Serb population, and only a few Muslims have returned. The title refers to Elijah's Day, a shared harvest festival in the beginning of August that was eagerly awaited by the population, and celebrated together: Serbs celebrating it as Ilindan (Ilija's Day) and Muslims as Aliđun (Alija's Day), representing the two religious faces of Elijah. This shared tradition was erased by the war, dissociating the communities. Yet the shared traditions still resonate in the present: the intercommunal Field, “forgotten” on the town's official website, has been displaced into diasporic and cyberspace networks (32). Muslim returnees wait for the revival of Elijah's Day as a restoration of the pre-war communal time-space. This waiting (in vain) resembles the waiting for Godot: the book starts with a quote from Beckett's famous play.

Borrowing Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of “chronotopes,” the author distinguishes two time-spaces: the pre-war “sacroscape” and post-war “ethnoscape,” which collide and cause a situation that he calls “schizochronotopia” (57). The sacroscape stands for the proximity between the different communities that waxed and waned with the annual cycle, while the ethnoscape is about permanent separation and distance, the erasure of the memories of shared lives. The author remains committed to the sacroscape; his book can indeed be read as “an argument on the richness of ‘intercommunal’ rapport in the Bosnian village,” rejecting “the nationalist imaginations of pure traditions” (47). He employs the concept of “proximity” of spatial, temporal, and affective nearness, understood broadly, not only between communities, but also pertaining to encounters with and between the natural and supernatural, or the human and nonhuman. Proximity produces “In-Others”: a concept capturing the meshwork of the “Internal and Other, Integral and Other, Intimate and Other” (115). It is the most important contribution this book makes, reflecting the incorporated memories of shared living of the lost sacroscape. It is not some ethnic or religious Other writ large, but “any and all Others” (114). The Other is part of us, being the syntax and semantics of the Self. That is why the landscape is full of traces of In-Otherness. Encounters have been radically reduced, but past proximities linger on in everyday practices, places, rituals, and in the language of how things used to be; their absence felt like a phantom limb (94).

Various chapters deal with aspects of the pre-war fabric of shared communal life, for example the institution of “kumstvo,” or godparenthood, between Serb and Muslim families, which was a contract of intimacy with the Other, a reciprocal obligation in terms of mutual care and protection (128–29). Another chapter discusses residues of shared living in epic poetry, showing that nationalism cannot exist without intimate knowledge of the Other. The last chapter is more experimental in nature, showing the “grand cosmological interlacement” of the (Proto) Indo-European, Slavic, and Balkan syncretic religious traditions (7). It provides a lengthy analysis of Georgic traditions, celebrating fertility and the rebirth of organic matter in various countries like England, Israel, and the Middle East. Here the Bosnian Field extends into various other geographical spaces, particularly around the Mediterranean.

The book is not always an easy read because of the (by the author's own admission) “erratic style” and meandering flow of the text. It nevertheless offers mesmerizing moments of poetic beauty and clarity. Calling the site “the Field,” the text relates to any anthropological field setting, or to the universal human condition with our habitat and seasonal cycles being under threat. The author elegantly rallies against Robert Hayden's skeptical notion of the competitive sharing of religious sites in the Balkans, showing how rituals in Gacko are indeed competitive but in a very convivial and benign manner (16–17). One may take issue with HadžiMuhamedović’s idealized (or fossilized) depiction of the sacroscape, with the lack of attention for historical process and the role of religious elites, and with the inappropriate use of Anna Tsing's concept of “friction,” or with the lengthy folkloric and etymological explorations that read like old-school diffusionist ethnography before the rise of modern site-specific holistic anthropology. Nevertheless, the book is a towering monument to the intimately shared and connected lives that were violently erased, and one of the most original contributions to the anthropology of the region.