Yearnings in the Meantime is a carefully conceptualized and thoroughly researched ethnographic account of “yearnings for normal life” among ordinary people living on the outskirts of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The book is also a timely theoretical investigation of statecraft, statehood, hope, temporality, normalcy, and citizenship in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina and beyond. Jansen’s account is well-written and accessible, and its “tone” is complex as it moves from intimate and reflexive (“I thus plead for patience”) (6), to bold, critical, and analytical.
Grounding his thick ethnography in Dobrinja—an apartment complex on the outskirts of Sarajevo—Jansen demonstrates how everyday life at this socialism-built assemblage of apartments, bodies, and souls powerfully captures what he calls “gridding.” Gridding is a temporarily shaped, “multilayered, dynamic and plural” (70) array of practices—including waiting for the bus, attending war-time staircase schools, “working” at mjesna zajednica (local commune), house councils, and perpetual ganjanje (chasing)—by which people seek incorporation into the post-Dayton state structures. They seek this incorporation as they (yearn to) hope for “normal lives” in their currently “abnormal spatiotemporal location” (17), which the author calls the “Meantime.” This Meantime is a predicament in itself, an in-between temporal and spatial condition, not quite war but not postwar either. People living in the Meantime Bosnia-Herzegovina are profoundly marked by the lack of a “system” and deeply infected by, and suffering from, this spatiotemporal affliction—the “symptom” Jansen terms “Daytonitis” (18).
The focus on the practices of gridding in the Dayton Meantime Bosnia-Herzegovina allows Jansen to draw another important analytical distinction between the questions of statehood (what the state is, claims to be, or should be) and statecraft (what the state does, claims to do, and should do). This distinction allows Jansen to unpack numerous seeming contradictions: where many Bosnians, regardless of their background, share their concerns about the statecraft or what (material) services the state does (not) deliver, thus provoking massive ganjanje/chasing of people and things to get the most rudimentary things—such as a visit to a doctor, or having a building permit signed—accomplished. They differ greatly when it comes to the ideas about what their state is or ought to look like (centralized, further compartmentalized, fully divided, and so on).
Jansen does not represent his interlocutors as passive sufferers/victims of Daytonitis in the Meantime, however. Rather, he uses numerous examples of how people accomplish things in a context overburdened with corruption, “primitive accumulation” and clientelism. By mapping out these everyday “pursuits of life projects” (218) which are “pragmatic routes to secure bare lives and to transcend them in the direction of ‘normal lives,’” the author shows the complexity of gridding and state desire. Since Dobrinja residents’ “already existing” state is experienced as corrupt and system-lacking, acting while yearning for a “not-yet-state” (215) has a dual social force; first, while all of Jansen’s interlocutors were critical about the shortcomings of their already-existing state without the proper “system,” most of them, reduced to rudimentary economic survival, also worked within that broken system, causing its perpetuation. Second, their discourses and practices emerged as a site of ideological critique (“see what these broken rules made me do”) and a smart, prudent deployment of the “broken rules” to advance one’s life projects. These practices are seen as acceptable, even necessary, in the context of the “actually existing state.” These routines—such as ganjanje, seeking connections, joining a political party to increase a likelihood of getting a job—were “in fact ‘gridded’ & but in ways that people considered a far cry from the ‘system’ that featured so centrally in their yearnings for “normal lives’” (211).
Jansen’s focus on the Dobrinja apartment complex is ingenious. The importance of ulaz or “entrance” (most socialist apartment buildings in Bosnia-Herzegovina have multiple entrances) for the rhythm of everyday life, for the structuring of (political and intimate) hopes and dreams, for the use of connections to get things done, and for survival amidst catastrophic political, economic, and domestic crisis, is the key to understanding life projects in (urban) Bosnia today. This was true during Yugoslav socialism, during the war, and it is true today, in the context of Dayton Meantime Bosnia-Herzegovina. One issue that this reviewer is left wondering about, however, is the absence of an ethnography of a household/apartment. This absence is puzzling because the author writes: “Very few respondents formulated any hopes beyond their households” (2). I was left wondering about how this “household bounded” hope is being negotiated, distributed, and discussed between, for example, a mother and a daughter around a kitchen table. What kind of everyday register and vocabulary of speech and silence does this negotiation employ? How is this very palpable “burden of hope,” unevenly distributed across generations and genders, shaping families and, by extension, the apartment buildings and the state? How is this “unbearable burden” of having parents’ hopes—for a functioning system, for normalcy, for survival, for care, for justice, for inclusion, for the state, for the future—being invested in and folded into the bodies and souls of the youth? Maybe Jansen is already working on another piece that will address these profound familial intimacies and intricacies of normalcy, care, politics and love, and the horizons and burdens of hope in the Dayton Meantime Bosnia-Herzegovina. This reviewer genuinely hopes so. In the meantime, the book should be of great interest to anyone thinking about the state and future in contemporary Bosnia and beyond.
