 The joint seminar for the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies and the Department of Anthropology and I'm delighted to be able to introduce Safet Haji-Mohamedovic today who's going to be talking to us about, anthropology has had a long relationship with concepts of time but obviously more recently the whole question of affects and temporality has been extremely important, an important addition to the things that we research and especially when we come to look at migration and displaced communities. So I'm delighted that we're having this paper today. Safet is a research associate at the Interfaith Relations at the University of Cambridge. He also works in our summer school here on the travel tourism and pilgrimage program that we do. He has a book waiting for Elijah which I think some of what he's going to present us with today is going to be based on and he's going to be talking about the spatio-temporal continuity in fractures in the lives of returnees to Southeast and Bosnia especially around the disruptive sacred calendar of syncretic feasts and around the figure of Saint Elijah as well which is a shared Christian Muslim figure. So I think Safet's going to be talking to us today for about around 40 minutes 40 45 minutes is that enough time for you and that will be followed by questions. So the title of the paper is waiting to wait, exiled times, sacred landscapes and struggles to return in the Bosnian-Denaric Highlands. So Safet I'll hand over to you and we look forward to hearing what you have to say. Thank you very very much Parvati, good whatever time it is to you. I'm very grateful to Ruba Salih, to Parvati, to Kimberly for organizing this wonderful series first of all and then for inviting me to contribute and my plan is indeed as Parvati mentioned to return to some of my previous writing including that book Waiting for Elijah. Now I'm very happy also to see some of my favorite researchers and some of my favorite anthropologists in the chat room so it's quite an exciting if-don't-sync task ahead and I look forward to the conversation afterwards. Now let me see if I can share my screen first of all. Now do you all see that just nod your heads I see a couple of heads perfect thank you very much. So the plan is really for the session to return to the some of my ethnographic research in Bosnia and through it attempt to situate the notions of waiting and spatiotemporal exile and or distemporalities in Bosnia. Now as Parvati mentioned anthropological studies of temporality of home migration and belonging are a rapidly developing field and particularly over the past decade or so I would say and as a sub-genre we find a number of longitudinal studies of waiting and this is just a snapshot of some book titles that came out although the actual number of books articles chapters dissertations projects is now much wider and we had a chance recently to also hear about one of these big projects on waiting when Christine Jacobsen spoke for this series. So many of these projects and of these books appeared relatively recently even some of the slightly older ones like the Sanhaj's edited collection on waiting a beautiful edited collection on waiting did not originally feature in my methodological framework. Some eight years ago I decided to study religious proximities in the aftermath of systematic ethno-religious cleansing in Bosnia which occurred in the early 1990s and in different forms continues still in this landscape as a project post-war sort of project to finish up some of these forms of ethnic cleansing that began with war. My guiding literature at the time was primarily in anthropology of landscape but I was not really sure where to conduct this research and even though it did end up branching into multi-sided fieldwork I wanted to have a deeper understanding and perhaps a more significant body of research stemming from attention to quote unquote one place little did I know that this one place would split into several temporarily oriented ones. I remember two peculiar engagements that shifted my direction to southeast Bosnian highlands. One was an early interview with Jevd an internally displaced person from the field of Gatsko who spoke to me for several hours in the cafe of Hotel Bristol in Mostar. He gave me in what seemed like one breath a detailed vibrant visceral depiction of a carousel field rich in inter-religious coexistence relations between muslims serbs and Gurbati Roma a landscape punctuated by the sequences of seasonal colors chores herbs get-togethers and shared feasts and when I asked specifically about the effects of the 1990s war Jevd searched for some evidence that refugees can indeed once again have a good life there and return. At the same time my other early engagement was with a website intriguingly titled Gatsko in my mind it was a diasporic portal into a world of photographs memories and discussions and stories about Gatsko where exiled people inhabited their landscape with great attention to detail this website Gatsko in my mind was a grassroots movement it wasn't supported by any kind of funds any institutions and so on quite to the contrary its antipode was the official internet presentation of the Gatsko municipality which set forth the political structure of the municipality and gave a short history of the town in this short history all references to non-serbs and traditions serbs shared with others had been very carefully omitted so influenced by Gatsko in my mind I traveled to Gatsko to real Gatsko as it were quote for the first time I did not see much else my travel itinerary was already indicative of the kind of geography in the making to which Gatsko was subscribed in the 1990s after its departure from east Sarajevo or Serb Sarajevo as it was officially known for a decade the minibus stopped to let off and receive passengers at homogenized villages and towns along its route in other words we had been carefully driven through the jurisdiction of Republika Serbska the Serb Republic one of the two entities forged in the war of the 1990s and confirmed through the Dayton peace agreement in 1995 it was winter and we drove in to the field through the filmic mountain peaks of Chemiarno I was breathless at the site and as the bus rolled down a capacious cars landscape opened suddenly before us it seemed endless the snow covered land had lost the strong outlines of the horizon melting it into the sky I experienced this descent many times afterwards but the first one still lingered through the memories of its excitement the landscape just like the one in the historic narratives and the website seemed stated uninterrupted almost paradigmatic and I lost focus on the detail it took me a substantial while to notice the image of Draža Mihailović the infamous second world war general of the Serb royalist guerrillas on the wall of the bus stop the ruined houses on every corner the nationalist sculptures the gigantic thermal power plant with its white slag heap the size of a small mountain the graffiti celebrating people convicted for genocide spray painted around the town and it still seems possible to me to arrive at one bus stop but two different places in the center of the field of Gatsko is the town of Gatsko a completely ethno religiously cleansed space near a site where a mosque was raised to the ground in 1992 on the main intersection a new church of the holy trinity had been erected in appearance and size it resembled none of the other older churches in Gatsko like many other post-war churches in the region and across the diasporic worlds in fact it was a replanted image of Serb nationhood this neo-Byzantine style and echoing the style of the medieval monastery of Gracanica in Kosovo now an independent or semi-independent country Kosovo continues to function as a place of great symbolic importance for Serb nationalism and primarily centered through the myths about the battle that took place in the field of Kosovo in 1389 between the Ottoman army and the Christian medieval crowns of the region the introduction of this symbolic language into Gatsko thus projected a unified identity a distinct nation was being forged through designated authentic materials from the past in 2013 as part of a municipal project to beautify Gatsko a wall next to the church was adorned with graffiti saying Kosovo and Metohia the soul of the Serb man the traditions of local Orthodox Christianity were thus systematically subjected to pan-ethno-national unification the nationalist temporal project constructed histories and futures of ethnic suffering always on the horizon and given as an ominous warning in the speeches of the clergy on his visits to Gatsko in May of 2012 patriarch Irine of the Serbian Orthodox Church stood in front of this new church in Gatsko to announce to the joy of old Serbdom my soul is peaceful when I say this is the piedomont of Serbdom by making this reference to the role of the piedomont region in the Italian national unification he assigned Gatsko a vital role in the maintenance of the ethnoscape territory and religion were conflated into a single identitary trope the human body was equated with the national body the field was occupied with ordained dead bodies which naturalized power and symbolized its loss and the need for it to be regained so as you can see here mass graves were read through ethnic selection as with Khorizh Kayama sort of a natural karst pit into which bodies of a Muslim family called Dizdari were thrown in the first world war and then Orthodox Christians from the village of Korita were thrown into it in the second world war now the contemporary commemoration of this site sort of looks at a layer of these bodies in this mass grave and when the commemoration is organized sort of local historians regional historians give modules in history very much again filled with warnings about the future so the nationalist temporal politics latched onto a particular reading of the past and future whilst which constructed the present is a perpetually precarious endeavor to distance one's self from the other those unfitting to this image were exiled both spatially and temporarily scattered around the field are satellite villages which have their own satellite hamlets to the south is the village of Kula the only part of the landscape to which a few mostly solitary and elderly Muslims had returned the lands of the nomadic Gurbati Roma were empty they did not return after the war and the returners lived under lockdown in their villages and considered the town to be a hostile crossing they remembered how upon the first return late 90s their buses had been stoned and land mines were placed into the rubbles of their houses the mosque in the village of Kula had been burned once more since its first post-war reconstruction the school in the village of Kula optimistically rebuilt after the war through a Spanish grant entitled support to sustainable return stood empty canita the only returning child lived next to the school which was a hollow reminder of hope and its discontents to endure such a disorienting violence the returners constructed two opposing temporarily specific landscapes the homely past and unholy present from the past only the defining moments of social touch were selectively nurtured my interlocutor seldom spoke about this present their narratives turned to a landscape as structured by the cyclical calendar shared shared by muslims christians and gurbati to understand their orientations we need to briefly consider this traditional time as narrated by my interlocutors so this image was taken in late march if you can believe it for the better part of the year the field of god school was locked under heavy snow so heavy that all social interaction would be reduced to a few houses in the neighborhood which would organize storytelling evenings called siella literally sit-ins and landscape was the main topic of these siellas and not so much the one sealed in frost but the one that's on the temporal horizon they waited in their lockdown for the first sign of change blagoviest literally glad tidings the feast of annunciation on the seventh of april according to the julian calendar marked by muslims and christians alike to mark the change children from all the villages would seek out the highest hill tops and light tall bonfires around the field in the evening the cattle were taken out of the stables for the first time and the children herding them to pasture would sing this rhyme the annunciation glad tidings the cattle into gluttony and the shepherds into coma the full swing of spring was celebrated celebrated through intricate rituals on the sixth of may george have done or yuriyava which is george's day at the wake of dawn before the daylight is set young women would go either to river rapids or water mills and wash their faces with omaha the magical water that brings health and prosperity young men wake up early to watch the ritual from safe distance while the girls attempt to hide the girls decorated their house doors with milo duch the chisup blossom which translates literally as kind spirit as the evening would fall young men would sneak up to houses of the girls to steal or scatter the chisup blossoms of the girls they liked the girls who knew or at least hoped this will happen according to the narratives then pretended to be angry and complain about the loss of these virginal flowers young women were pushed high into the air on swings attached to large trees especially oaks they planted nettle in front of their houses or in the manure close to the farm sheds to unriddle the directions of their marriage proposals from the turning of the nettle leaves women lashed themselves with the witties of willow or cornell branches hoping to get pregnant around the same time the nomadic gurbati roma communities would arrive to the field now this image that you see is actually from a central bosnian roma celebration of george's day because roma did not return to gatzko roma gurbati roma and gatzko worked at tinning copperware in copper dishes for communities for the settled communities generally recieving in return fresh farm produce or cooked food the settled christians and muslims celebrated george's day with the gurbati roma and the feasts included a dance around the large bonfire and one of the returnees described this longing we knew everything about them they're every step after a long winter believe me people longed for them just like they longed for spring just like when you wait for your exam dates or the way a feast is expected so people waited for the gypsies and we prepare some tools for them to fix they throw those beans so many things george's day was another opportunity for kumovid to meet now kumso is a particular institution of spiritual kinship similar to god parenthood which can be forged between two people but then extends to their entire households and it really established a mutual care protection and affection between these sometimes it would be traced you know for longer than a century and it would be a kind of a a form of kinship and proverbially once kum it's closer than a brother and this spiritual kinship in godsco was exclusively cross religious formed between christians and muslims i was told one of my interlocutors said it was a common approach and the greatest bond of friendship between serbs and muslims muslim women in the field would not cover their faces before orthodox christian men as with a kum it was as if a member of your family was there there was no hiding now the interfaith encounters of st george's day however only marked the entry into the season of hard labor cattle herding fieldwork and jobs in the gigantic thermal power plant built by socialist the socialist ugo slav state in the 70s took up most of the summertime one last annual feast was required a gathering par excellence awaited and desired throughout the year elijah's day on the 2nd of august according to the julian calendar muslims call it alijun serbs ilindan it is the turning point of the summer marking the ends of the harvest and the heavy workload a ubiquitous saying in the field of godsco goes until noon ilia afternoon alia for orthodox christians the day started with the morning prayer in the church of saint elijah in the village of nadanichi and for muslims around noon near the kula mosque and the string of support elijah's day is traditionally the culmination of the social calendar as my interlocutors told me everyone knew that the winter is approaching and that this feast was the final outlet for interaction there was an abundance of food and drink group singing and dancing and the number of peculiar athletic tournaments like climbing up a pillar covered with grease or rock from the shoulder younger people flirted with each other others sat in shade in the shade and talked fistfights between groups of men were not uncommon either although i did not witness any they came as a sort of ritual cleansing of emotions all communication was condensed into this one day which commemorated the social life of the community and as soon as one elijah's day ended as my interlocutors told me people would steer the entire year towards the next one planning waiting and dreaming of the next second of august so as you can see a closer analysis of the configuration of these two places of the nationalist and this kind of sacral calendar revealed temporal rifts in gotzko and so i repeated to myself roi wagner's questions are there different kinds of time or merely different ways of counting time this time have a structure as a clock does or does it merely seem to have a structure because a clock has one the rhythms the sequences the durations the expectations between the two fields of gotzko were qualitatively different and most importantly they formed two different spatiotemporal systems of orientation now michael bakhtin coined the term chronotope to indicate the indivisibility of spatial and temporal categories admittedly only with regards to its function in literature time he noted thickens takes on flesh and space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time plot and history i employed chronotope as a heuristic device to think of the divergent social currents in the field of gotzko chronotope is a discernible alliance of time and space a time thickened as bakhtin said in a landscape and a set of practices and relationships a space articulated through a time of specific quality each chronotope has its own story or rather i would say each chronotope is a story situating the protagonist the choice of chronotopic orientation in gotzko had obvious political implications although the lives of the field told many stories just like lives anywhere else there were two dominant systems of spatiotemporal orientation it wasn't just the case of multiple but contrasting chronotopes that people had to function in unlike bakhtin's literally literary image of man who is always intrinsically chronotopic i have argued that people and landscapes are sometimes trapped between time spaces and thus schizo chronotopic from the greek schizane to split what i encountered in gotzko were two salient overarching collective themes they both relied on certain kinds of past and laid claims to the field's future i sometimes untangle them to make the narratives easier but these two fields were not simply parallel spacetime dimensions because the two chronotopes had to meet in daily life despite opposing each other so to make the schizo chronotopic conundrum easier we can turn to the question of waiting how is waiting tied into these two overarching systems of orientation elijah's day was the first piece of temporal heritage that the returnese had restored for about two decades now each second of august thousands of displaced people living in the diasporas across the world gather in gotzko for a single day time and community seem to be if for a moment regained after they're leaving the few elderly people who remain scattered around the gotzko villages would retreat into the time space of home their narratives again saturated with the past of the landscape in which the future of elijah's coming used to be an expected certainty and again they waited for elijah all year round but this was now a double coded waiting a waiting to wait a waiting to wait the ways they once waited a waiting for time to resemble itself in his waiting the whites of south africa anthropologist vincent krapanzana understood waiting as a kind of passive activity through which the waiters he studied lose their grip over the present and have no control over the future he noted the world in its immediacy slips away it is derealized it is without elan vitality creative force it is numb muted dead it's only meaning lies in the future in the arrival or the non arrival of the object of waiting for the most part this is precisely what the waiting in gotzko was not although certainly faced with dread it was through waiting that the returnee's world was voiced realized enlivened given meaning to give up when waiting meant to give up completely rethinking the agency of waiting gasan haj suggested that we understand it not only as passive activity but also as active passivity waiting keeps alive that which is awaited it works towards the realization of its own goal reflecting on the migrants waiting to return home salim laka has argued that their waiting is not passive but rather an active conversation with the present even a resistance similarly in her ethnography uh rubas alich considers the temporariness and precarity of palestinian refugee camps that became a permanent transgenerational horizon she thinks about the political qualities of such persistent temporariness in the struggle against the normalization of the occupation or when steve yansen wrote about the temporal entrapments the meantime of the sarajevo suburb of dobrinja he noticed that people still waited for the public buses for example to arrive on time continually complaining about the disorganized post war state and desiring the supposedly punctual yugoslav bus arrivals as if describing the situation in the field he noted the oath was thus opposed to the is but intimately related to the was people in this suburb performed their desires for normal lives by waiting for the bus and the visibility of the state's order people in the field of gatsko waited for the feast of elijah and the visibility of the community thus structured now the many traditional proverbs and sayings about waiting charted out the logic of the future waiting in the field when someone was in a hurry but ran up against an unavoidable schedule people would ironically refer to a structural inequality that required waiting cool your heels until the priest's grain is milled or they would reference the certainty of the seasons in their advice don't die donkey before the mount turns green the same local knowledge recalled that waiting and subtle efforts had a particular strength silent water rolls the hills in gatsko the creativity of waiting lied precisely in that it worked around the impossibility of direct confrontation with the state it was waiting as oriented endurance yet unlike the traditional form of waiting for Elijah the return ease waiting was no longer a qualification of some certainty when Elijah used to be an expected certainty the worst curse in the field was may you not await to see the next Elijah's day along with the discontinuation of this curse after the war waiting had been imbued with the precariousness of the present however much the two gatsko chronotopes worked to erase or forget each other there were discernible moments when they met one was when the diasporic Elijah's day visitors started to leave another one was revealed in loneliness return ease mostly lived lonely solitary lives and the land itself was perceived as lonely it was unattended disocialized confined and withdrawn one strategy of dealing with loneliness was life in the past of the landscape filled with desired social relations given the absence of a younger generation the transfer of memory had shifted from public performance to intimate narrative the return ease seldom spoke about the war or life in exile almost as if that period of their lives lacked language it seemed as if their toolbox for time reckoning was not really equipped to deal with the unwanted absence of community and habitual relations and when the war was mentioned it somehow always came back to the encounters with the old landscape i would spend hours hearing about the male choirs causing the village lamps to burst with their bachata tenors during the Elijah's day festivities the village boys lined up in makeshift dresses for their circumcision rites of passage the seasonal succession of medicinal herbs in the field the intricate workings of fairies and ghostly apparitions a sigh meant that my interlocutors had been shaken into sudden lucidity something had broken through their temporal transposition and we were back in the now the after the war the absence summed up by a short lamentation or a sip of coffee or a deep pull on the cigarette or the heaviest of silences it was only when i started transcribing my recorded conversations that i noticed the endings the regressions and here i give you some of them so these are the endings of some of my conversations different conversations with different interlocutors what can you do where there used to be 700 households now there are 30 souls all old like me there that's how it was there was beauty there really was there were many things but there you go but now by god none of that exists the villages have died out almost completely died out ah they were beautiful traditions now it has all dissipated nobody practices them anymore there's no life not here it won't there is no there's no there is no there is no life by god there were lots of stuff before my son and today it cannot be they've taken all of this today nothing can be as it was before there are no more there are no more fairies no good ones these saints there is nobody to see ghostly apparitions utvare nor to experience noor the supernatural light coming from the graves of the good these and hundreds of similar temporal adjustments were how long narratives of how it used to be usually ended bodily immersion in a past landscape lingered like a phantom limb its sensations were relived with the excitement and texture of immediacy before regressing into the present the present committed repetitive acts of violence upon the effectively returning landscape all these endings were moments of disenchantment in them the field of magic beings of goodness had disappeared the general tenor of narration would take a sharp turn from rich and vibrant descriptions visceral and tactile reconstructions often laughter toward brief fractured and sober realizations of an explicit loss and the usual moment of silence elaine scary has argued that physical pain might resist language but simultaneously also shatter it by deconstructing it into the pre-language of cries and groans the awakening silence following narratives in god's voice a shattered language a kind of post language a bodily arrest at the overwhelming the unnarratable an inexpressibility marking the point where the two chronotopes face each other looking at a photograph of his house in bombay salman rushley wrote in his imaginary homelands the past is a foreign country goes the famous opening sentence of lp heartley's novel the go between they do things differently there but the photograph reminds me that this is that it's my present that is foreign and that the past is home albeit a lost home in a lost city in the midst of lost time god's cause present was likewise broken up into an illicit present past felt a stable and homely and a recurring and unwanted present present felt as uncertain and unhomely steve yansen and stuff and loaf loafing have highlighted the temporal scale of home for open quote home itself then needs to be problematized and particularly the self evidence with which it is territorialized if we fail to do so home is all too easily represented unwittingly as a timeless entity in an unchanging context of origin something that is particularly inappropriate if we take into account the context is often one of dramatic transformation such as war or socioeconomic restructuring close quotes hearty's hallelujah which has likewise argued that for displaced bosnians the original place is not located in space anymore but in time which has passed now the legal document that regulated migration and the entity of republic aserbska which i mentioned earlier forced migrants to migrate swiftly between legal categories they cease to be displaced as soon as they entered upon the status of return ease article 10 of the same legal act noted the status of return he shall cease by the expiration of the six month deadline counting from the day when the competent when the competent body issued the certificate of returning status the idea that people in godscope could have regained their lives spatially or otherwise within just six months is divorced from any kind of reality there this time placement it's a cumbersome word but it's it's a kind of exile from from their time space this lasts for almost three decades now even though they're spatially after six months returned so home for for them appeared as a locus allied with time of specific quality and the question of hope of whether the lost can be imagined to somehow regained was for them a question on whether the return of a temporally specific landscape was possible in the introduction to his principle of hope and bloch wrote hope superior to fear is neither passive like the letter nor locked into nothingness however the fear and the hope of the fields return ease were not mutually exclusive rather they challenged each other's persistence and channeled each other's expressions in everyday life the delicate hope produced by this dialectic seldom acquired the manifest some manifest superiority it was understood that what had been and what is now are embroiled in a mortal combat over some future plateaus as francis pine noted through the fear that lies in uncertainty hope is always mirrored or shadowed by its opposite despair now delva one of my interlocutors did not resolutely embrace you know any big hopes she was a return to the village of kula only during the warm months she stayed with her children in the city of moster during the winter her hope of return was only ever short term to come back the next spring and i came to know this most effectively when i helped her paint the walls of her kitchen next to her dwelling room it looked exposed unholy she gave me her son's old shirt so that i did not soil mine when we were done with the painting she cooked a chicken dish for us and we watched television together much later i noticed on this photograph that you see here the apron that she was wearing that day adorned with red apples and white flowers that said home sweet home in english i still wonder how ontologically removed from the field this image was and whether we can ever allow ourselves to speak of home as such delva's kitchen which stood for her hope of return was not a bold and uttered hope but one performed through a small restorative task the tensions between the yearning for home and the fear of return were often resolved by death bodies were returned to be buried where they belong close to their destroyed homes and dead ancestors i spent one summer afternoon on an outing with the chustavich family in the village of sevnica we camped between the graveyard and the stone rubble that used to be their home or in fact which is their home one of their sons was working as an expert for an oil company in texas and the other as a dj in creation nobody had immediate plans to live in the village their outings were becoming a recurrent practice a peculiar ritual of being at home elvedin's grandmother fata went into exile shortly before the war and had been one of the first returnees i was puzzled by this fact as there was not a single habitable house on their land how how could she have returned and elvedin told me her mate her corpse returned amongst the first she asked to be buried here next to her husband others have told me about the gurbati roma families who as part of uh who inhabited god school before the war uh coming back from belgium to bury uh someone in the local cemetery and these returning bodies were another intimate strategy of dealing with the loss of home within the tapestry of effective remains these bones bodies ancestors acted upon the exiled and to return dead was for many a form of hope fantomly voices of the old field textured lively and abundant were actively negotiating the unwanted present through effective temporal transpositions they seemed unwilling to forfeit their claims over the future home which meant many things all of them different from the present was performed daily almost as a prayer and any sign of home's restoration from the reconstructed buildings the birth of the only returnee child the Elijah's day diasporic arrivals or the result of the dead bodies to come back was taken as a limited indication of the future home was the prerequisite for hope many existing texts about waiting have looked into the phenomenon uh as the bodily experience of time the existential encounter of our body within with the pace of the world in the passage of waiting on the berksan argued time has lived the world coincides with our own duration and we come to know the substance of our existence and the existence of the world building one berksan's philosophical writings herald schweizer so waiting as the intimacy of time the waiter does feels impatiently his own being he wrote time enters our bodies we are the time that passes however the focus on duration and experience of time through waiting uh is reveals but one of the qualities of waiting and we need to understand the structures the collective experiences and as we see in god's code the traditions of waiting uh that cut across various scales uh sort of intimate bodily communal collective institutional and so on or as gassan hage noted the differences in waiting are not just differences in individual forms of waiting there are also differences in the way waiting is present systemically in society now in closing i would like to repeat a couple of verses from a poem by mcdizda the bosnian poet just a couple of verses it's a much longer poem it is time to think of time low it is time to think in time what puzzles me is the difference between the thinking of time and the thinking in time the people of god's code were exiled not only from their land but from the temporal structures and experiences from the cyclical calendar with its seasonal and daily movements and proximities in their disorientation these spatio temporal migrants were made to think of time the temporal structures were foregrounded through their denial or as another bosnian poet abdulax idran once remarked i found out that i have a neck only when they started strangling me to recognize time to think of it to wait for it can be a powerful tool in reclaiming home in so doing the returnees to the field of god's co-worked against the systems of temporal disinheritance that latched onto their bodies with unimaginable force thank you so much for listening to this rather long presentation i appreciate it very much and i look forward to some questions comments and just our conversation oh thank you so much that was fantastic a really rich and evocative paper which to me had many resonances with other diasporic communities other experiences i really enjoyed it so whilst everybody is thinking of their questions maybe i can get us going i'm sorry i still seem to have a blank screen i am quite happy to be seen but there seems to be a problem um okay so i wondered if i could start off by asking you this whole notion of before yeah because you're very um successfully described this construction of a idyllic um sort of using the past to sort of look at some sort of idyllic present with a sort of beauty looking for the future but i wondered if you could say a little bit about how far back this before goes how far back um in time before is and what is actually being constructed on thinking particularly about the socialist period and how it fits into this whole experience about whether it's a a blip in the middle of a sort of longer history or if some of this actually does relate to ideas of a socialist past and how that's actually lacking in the present so maybe if you could start us off with that we could take it from that thank you so much parvati that's such a fantastic question because what transpires is that you know if we think about the socialist past and it's certainly made and i write about this in in the book in some other places the socialism certainly made an intervention into the landscape into the lives of these people uh you know physical interventions like that huge thermal power plant but it made temporal interventions and it's sought to make temporal interventions and there is a very interesting documentary about the making of the thermal power plant and the narrator says time uh was once measured through sheep and bare life here but but from now on time will be measured as before the power plant and after the power plant so it was a very sort of articulated temporal intervention um at the same time socialist calendar closely followed and sort of aligned to this cyclical kind of traditional sacral calendar and uh so you know the the best example is the first of may uh kind of celebration which you know you know just five days before or after depending on which calendar you take st george's day pretty much the same kind of get-togethers and rituals and so on um really a celebration of spring or kind of a mass kind of gathering and so on um also all of the other rituals were um seen as more of a kind of a folk thing more of a kind of a rather than religious uh by the state so a lot of these gatherings because they included all the dance and kind of a mass of people lots of drinks food they weren't seen so much as kind of the religious thing so what what they did you know and i think this is what nationalists are doing as well they sort of uh built onto an existing framework and in in that sense uh there's no significant rupture in these narratives of my interlocutors um you know about this past you know of this kind of through the idealized past you know looking into the cyclical calendar and uh and nationalism is using uh you know some of the main building blocks you know these feasts and so on the nationalists are very much doing that but at the same time the kind of communal gatherings the kind of interactions between people of different religious groups and so on that that is what they're a kind of fighting against and very much kind of erasing uh so in that sense that's a very clear rupture and it also produced all this exile so the 1990s really are a breaking point yeah fascinating yeah because it um illustrates how socialists themselves were using this sort of a romantic notion of the past to help produce a sense of continuity so it wasn't just about rupture but people taking people with them in some sort of continuous history so i think that's really interesting okay yeah so uh kim do we have any other questions i can't actually see i hear you you need to unmute yourself yes we don't have any questions in the chat just yet but if any of you would like to enter any in please do feel free and also equally if you'd like to raise your hand to ask a question you can do so feel free and then we'll invite you to ask your question then i know it's quite a lot quite a lot of information to take in but do any questions you have or thoughts you have do you feel free to add them into the chat or to raise your hand perhaps while we're waiting suffer you could tell us a little bit about when you were last doing your um field work when it was you were last doing your field work uh and you're out then maybe how long because the other thing that struck me was that um these are very intimate histories in a way and that uh people are talking about a lot of thing uh quite traumatic events and how they're sort of helping to heal these ruptures so um how did you find it doing your field work in those sorts of circumstances i mean how willing were people to talk to you about these issues was it something that they wanted to talk about i mean that was in itself if you like a part of creation of this sort of idealization of the past or um did it take more than that so so most of this uh all of what i what i'm talking about what i was talking about today relates to to field work that i've conducted in 2011 12 and 13 um and uh you know for you know a bit longer than than a than a year and it was really kind of following these various kind of seasonal changes but then because of the disrupted kind of not only community but also this calendar uh i really wanted to understand that and you saw some of the images from other places i wanted to branch out sort of to uh to understand these nodes in the calendar uh where they actually are practiced still like st george's day and so on um so so it was also a multi-sided field work to a certain extent um so this you know which which is the the the main point of waiting for Elijah my my book um it really relates to an earlier earlier field work in in that time in 2012 and um apologies there was another part of your question that i have now seemed to have forgotten oh no no i was just asking uh how happy people were to talk about around the kind of events yeah in this history thank you for reminding me uh so i conducted research with um on the one hand with returnees and on the other hand with usually again elderly people because there's a lot of brain drain from Gatsko anyway um in in orthodox christian villages and uh in both kind of settings which are now very much divided and sort of opposed to each other um politically in both settings uh there was almost kind of a a desire to to transfer these narratives to me that i noticed and you know somebody mentioned well this is usually how you know older people you know like to speak to younger people and i was a very young anthropologist then but it's not just that there was a kind of a almost a transference of what would be the kind of life and that public ritual and so what would be lived uh you know with the absence of younger generation with the absence of other ways to transfer it to translate it it was it seemed to me it was uh um i was welcomed as a person who would then receive this knowledge which wasn't meant for me uh originally and i think we have a question from um rebecca yes thank you so much for the presentation and for your insights it was really interesting to hear um i had to think first when you talked about um your when you began to introduce the theme of waiting i had to think about prosciuri polaco so even though you hurry up you can still take your time so no worries about that um that was really some nice thought i had and the question i have now for you maybe you want to go into that is that i thought about the younger generation now so i met a lot of people i used to live in bjerina in uh republica ruska and a lot of people in their early 20s for example they wait a lot and i have the feeling that they wait for something they do not really believe in anymore so there is this loss of hope and you stressed the meaning of hope for especially the older generation so maybe you would like to say a few words about that if you want to that would be great thank you rebecca i imagine you know given you know the kind of the kinds of histories although possibly bjerlina has seen a slightly kind of more returnees and than than gotzco uh but similar histories of ethnic cleansing um i would imagine that the situations are also similar so what i noticed whenever in the returnee kind of community um there was uh one younger couple who returned from the united states they had this child that was the only child in the returnee community and there was another person of my age who lived somewhere else but because his grandparents had returned he would come back and uh and they were very strikingly different in terms of younger people it was much more diverse in terms of how they might wait or not so many of them had already plans to leave and it was kind of directed usually towards banyaluca or belgrade to study um or somewhere else whereas others and you could notice how some of these orientations formed so for example this person of my age who would return seasonally to live with his grandparents he was very intimately he had intimate knowledge of this landscape even though he was a couple of months old when they went into exile and like his grandmother was actually the one who took him in her arms and they ran towards the mountains but he had this intimate knowledge and when I met his grandmother I understood completely why and it's this kind of craft of storytelling and zahidah his grandmother was a very eloquent very kind of skilled storyteller and the way he kind of related both to the past of the landscape and the way he waited for kind of the return of elijah was very different and it was really again because of this transfer of the kind of traditional waiting that that his grandmother very much embodied so there was that influence of that generation but you're right there's a very much I think a process of giving up on waiting for people who are now you know it's not even young people it's people you know in their 30s and 40s who kind of waited and waited and waited for something to happen and every sign is taken like elections very recently as some kind of movement but it's there's a lot of kind of giving up on waiting I think with younger people whereas the older people I think probably feel that they that there's nothing to lose either way and that there's kind of this push towards the return of Elijah and then I think we had another question yes that was really really brilliant and I really really enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed your book I had a question that really links up your research with my ongoing research in South Turkey in Antakya which engages belief in al-hudr al-huzr al-hudr as Elijah or St. George is referenced or referred to in the geography where I worked of course these are largely interconnected geographies of course and if we were to write them not as national geographies or post-Ottoman post-colonial geographies but as cosmo geographies or cosmological geographies your spaces and mine would be entirely interlinked but I had two related questions if I may the first one is the main discontinuity that you refer to in your paper which really brilliantly as you do in your book you refer to as a schizo chronotopia or a chronotopic discontinuity refers to the war of the 1990s the before and the after and people waiting for for a previous time somehow I find that very very compelling but the follow-up question to that would be is that the only kind of discontinuity that you have found in relation to Elijah St. George in the sense that this is a very long tradition that spans I don't know if it spans of course it it spans back to Ottoman times but even perhaps before that but are there previous discontinuities that you have found while tracing the route of Elijah that is out of interest the first one the second one is a reflection that comes from my own research on Al-Hudur Huzur St. George in South Turkey and that is that almost sadly tragically the opposite has happened from my observations in that Al-Hudur or Huzur which referred to somehow as you note a shared sacred experience in the past has been reinterpreted in the aftermath of the Syrian war and the shadow that it has cast over Turkey as well as Turkey's involvement direct involvement active involvement in the Syrian war to in amongst Arab alloys at least to a reinterpretation of Al-Hudur as somehow their profit almost we could say by reference to your ethnography the new chronotope in your terms swallowing up or taking over the previous one in a very sad way and I was wondering whether have observed similar such tendencies in your research well thank you Yael I'm so happy that you're here and I will absolutely be the first person to buy your book on Hiddur and cosmography I so very much look forward to it and what other kinds of discontinuities I was thinking of how you know lots of discontinuities which not necessarily you know which are not necessarily recorded in in different kinds of archives become recorded in in language and how people but they become recorded in a kind of didactic way in terms of how people deal with them so there was this you know the big the big proverb that really attracted me to this space and you know it's a kind of pan Bosnian proverb until noon Ilya afternoon alia I mean what what is encapsulated there is at once a kind of a discontinuity and the meeting and an encounter as any kind of shift a change and so on and it certainly kind of is thinking about this I nobody can for sure say how old this is but it kind of it encapsulates some of that kind of change and possibly it relates to a certain kind of purification of religions shall we say not to use some other more crude terms so possibly you know kind of when when the Ottomans kind of acquired this area of the Balkans and that there are other discontinuities you know when I think of the 20th century certainly in terms of how for example that power plant was built on the locus of Elijah's day feast later on Elijah's feasts were kind of held in two different locations this is something I didn't have time to go into but the oldest one is actually in the middle between the Orthodox Christian and the Muslim villages and this now sits under you know very much you know the way they wanted to rebuild time with the power thermal power plant that's how they sort of placed that symbol of that new time on top of the old symbol of the old time and then for sure the expulsion and this I think this perhaps relates to the to the second question you had as well the cleansing of saints particularly through the institutions of the church and we can see that you know these saints which possibly you know I don't think I've ever asked anybody in Gotsko whether you know they were kind of an ardent nationalist or not about Elijah's day without some kind of narrative about the kind of the shared aspects of this day but the way kind of these feasts are organized now by the Serbian Orthodox Church in Gotsko and so on it includes a lot of very violent nationalism a lot of parading of symbols and so on and they're being cleansed out of you know of their shared meaning and shared histories and shared practices and this is absolutely visible across Bosnia it's a very kind of slow insidious process and then you know suddenly you wake up and you read something about a feast that you thought everybody of course understands it's a shared feast you know everybody has those histories in one way or another but in the news you know a politician will be talking about the feast as you know as you know this pan-Serbian feast that unites Serbia and Republic of Serb Sky in Bosnia and so on and so on and this kind of just began as a process in the late 80s and the 90s and certainly you know one can see it with the Muslim Metno-scape and with the Orthodox Christian one with the Catholic one and so on and then I wonder on the other hand sorry to take such a long time in my reply I wonder so when you were saying that this kind of reinterpretation or the claiming of Hyder we're speaking about Kurdish claims or Syrian okay I wonder if it's similar to what Roma people in Bosnia are doing now so very much you know Roma feast still and the ones I visited across Bosnia of St. George's day they include you know people of different kinds of religions or ethnicities what not yet there is a drive towards kind of branding this a little bit more and I think very much it relates to a lot of these you know NGOs that are doing their work to kind of strengthen the community and their kind of right to heritage and identity and so on but what happens in the meantime is that you speak especially to younger people and say no no but St. George's day is Roma day first and foremost and then it's other people's day and and it's a kind of process which you know you can see some of the stakeholders you can see it being developed and yet when you actually arrive to the festivity I asked you know I made the mistake asked you know are there any you know kind of Serbs Muslims are there any any non-Roma people here and then this woman you know who was kind of she was engaged in a ritual of washing her face she turned quite angrily to me and she said I am a Serb you know so it's just to kind of show that this these kind of narratives they might you know work discursively but in terms of the actual practice you know people kind of push back and people continue certain practices anyway and I wonder whether that will be the case with the Alawi sorry for a long answer thank you and I thought I might invite David if you want to share your thoughts I know you've put a few comments in the chat and it would be good to hear from you so if you would like to I think I've unmuted you hi yeah hi Suffith yeah thanks so much for your presentation I was just really amazing to hear it I guess I want to tell you a little bit about my background I am I worked with an international NGO in Bosnia from 2000 to 2003 and it was UMCOR United Methodists they were we were they whether we call it the the secular division of the church but anyway we used to so I wrote a you know a lot of intricate return for minority return programs and we had funding from the Dutch government and in the US government and so it and it was just we did like I think 30 of these return programs all around the country and I guess I often had to tell a story similar to you just to kind of get the money from the donors about how you know why we were going to help you know the idea was to get minorities to return and to reverse the war aims of serve cleansing so a lot of those programs were just you know housing programs you know we would help them shelter and livelihoods this type of thing to get people to come back but I guess I was kind of discouraged but not surprised you know you were sort of describing how it was really the older people who came back and really not you know and it seems like a lot of those returns weren't really sustained you know I think you know obviously I guess they had to deal with the community around them not wanting them to be there and you know livelihoods is a big problem and yeah I think obviously the younger folks would just try to go where the jobs were where they thought they could find a future and so it's just you know I guess what you've written is I mean I didn't really study after 2003 I sort of followed it with any with interest but I didn't really have like you know like a longitudinal approach where I could see what happened to my particular village afterwards but I can think for example of only there's only one village I remember where you know we would put we do the housing we would help them with livelihoods we'd have radio shows so that people could discuss returns and you know we even got the government to sort of put in like some electrical lines and there was just this is only one village that I can remember where there were it seemed like the people the minority came back this was in the Coupres this is sort of a predominantly crowed area but these were serbs who came back and they were the only ones who came back because we just threw everything we had at them you know like just just like electricity and they had to build their own houses you know they had to we gave them cows you know and it just you just think of that that the amount of effort that goes into trying to make that that that village come back to life and you know a year later they were there and the electricity was on and they seem to be making a living and but I wonder right now it's like you know if I went back there what 17 years later would they still be there I don't know I mean I I kind of tend to think that it would maybe really just the economy for the old people it's their memories of you know of their life and their culture but for the young people they know that you know they need to make a real living somehow and that's why you have so many people leaving or you know or you know going to the big cities like you know to to make a living so yeah I don't know anyway those are my comments I really enjoyed your presentation thank you so much I mean it's very interesting to to to meet you know I've read a lot of these reports from different projects sustainable return here and there and to meet you know people who have worked on it and I know that today we have at least two or actually three people working on cultural heritage in Bosnia and what their findings show particularly Amra's is that the reconstruction of cultural heritage and Amra was concerned with the built cultural heritage for the most part but these kind of traditions and cultural heritage and just kind of these scapes that are known to people are you know as important or more important than than you know having you know a reconstructed house and so you had this school you know reconstructed a huge school fully fitted school in the Kula village but the same amount of attention was not paid to because there was no understanding from within of what really matters to people and you know if there was the attention to St George's day Elijah's day you know Castle Mitrovdan and so on these kind of a temporal points and the gatherings and the kind of attention to community building and sustainable life there in that sense I think that those programs would be much more successful and you know so Yael you know mentioned Syria and all of these kind of new spaces we can think of in terms of destruction or after Bosnia and I wonder you know now I mean I'm not even sure what the situation is in Syria to tell you the truth you know in terms of the armed violence but after the armed violence ends there will be like like you know birds from a sky these people will descend the NGOs the companies the different kinds of international organizations to to figure out you know how to help and there's also lots and lots of kind of lots of funds are moving through through those hands and you know the question is should we then learn from what we already know the kinds of mistakes if we're made for example in Bosnia of not having the the this kind of anthropological knowledge or you know you don't even have to quote anthropological just kind of intimate a long-term understanding of of those spaces and certainly in Syria the kinds of syncretism shared landscapes and so on are very very similar question to be asked or in Yemen and so on yeah I'm gonna mention I mean I know that for us there we were constantly changing and improving the programmer approaches and I think in that time like raw politics and power had everything to do with whether people could come back whether you get support whether you know it was just it was a lot of fighting and kind of just you'd had to fight among all the groups to see whether you put somebody back in there so it was very imperfect you know I don't know I mean I feel like yeah we learned a lot but I I don't know it's it's I don't know what to make of it really at this point you know it's just tragic that's all I guess it's that maybe it's that so that was the the lacking area if you like if that you could build something new you can build something you know that has facilities that you need but people can also have that elsewhere so what would draw them back and if you looked at more the cultural and the anthropological kind of pools that would make the difference between deciding where you were then going to reside whether you were going to return or whether you were going to start a new life somewhere else that you know maybe doesn't have those ties so I guess it's that it's it's going back to what you say the importance of the cultural side of things to really have that pull to people to come back mm-hmm yeah and but you know these kind of configurations of home um I think you know time differently configured and as as the body gets used to something else you know it's you know you can be I don't know whether this is too strong of a word but deontologized you know or kind of the this temporalized uh Vanya and I have this project on this temporalities right now you can be kind of this temporalized from particular homes you know if we think time as a form of home you can be disinherited from it and your body you know gets used to something else and as the bodies get used to something else then uh this kind of pull towards the the the frameworks that you know the older people's returnees still feel you know gets it gets smaller and smaller um but this is you know so so the the range of replies to you know to how to whether Gatsko has a future that is religiously plural you know with the returnees and so on the range of replies really gets more diverse when you when you ask younger people and and some are completely you know something that it's never going to happen um others you know are kind of temporarily I think giving up but you know they have certain feelings towards the landscape that kind of is related to their family narratives um it's probably similar everywhere uh where refugees are concerned okay let's see if we've had any more questions or thoughts coming through um and if anybody else would like to raise their thoughts do do let me know and I can unmute you and have you raise your questions or your ideas thank you Christine I mean I know many if not most of people here today always certainly continue some of these conversations oh I see Sarah Sarah has a raised hand let me get up to Sarah hello can you hear me yeah wonderful hi staffer hi everyone thank you for the great presentation it was thought-provoking as always also feels really really topical right now um with so many people experiencing weight in I noticed it's all over social media today or at least all over my uh my social media that it's the anniversary of the first case in Wuhan and so it's interesting that to me it's interesting that people are are marking that already as as a moment in time when something changed um so yeah it's been really good and it's great to gain some more kind of uh vocabulary to talk about this I know it's something that um a lot of my classmates and I are thinking about a lot in our work uh I guess my question for you is maybe um let me practical which is do you have any advice for students like myself as how to how to work in the field when the field itself is suspended or changed in some way by weight in uh it's Sarah that's such a fantastic question I would direct you to um a couple of thoughts that I recently read by Yael who was speaking earlier Yael Navarro and she wrote on the one hand the sort of a review in the annual review anthropology which she very kindly mentioned my work thank you Yael um a review of a sort of anthropological research which deals with these sort of absences and discontinuities and so on it's titled something like a research on negative methodology and there's another um I think blog post or a short article about the possibilities of kind of doing anthropological research during this time of the lockdown and um and there are some divergent opinions there um and what I would what I would say first of all I was very um as this my idea was for you all of you and all of us are experiencing this lockdown right now to perhaps think of some connections to the kinds of this temporalization that we are experiencing around the world in different ways and uh you know I mentioned I think you were there in an earlier seminar somewhere that's you know I'm constantly asking my Google my Google speaker what day of the week is it and I'm completely lost a sort of in in in time and we see that most other people also are and it's a very similar experience to what you know the people in Gotskow but much more violently were um exiled you know from their time because it has a certain structure that you follow and your bodies live time they don't have to ask for it so much and to think of it um in terms of what to do in the time of waiting lots of people are turning to these online spaces and as we are I think more generally uh and that might be useful on the other hand it might also be useful um to as we've done in the summer school for anthropology of travel tourism and pilgrimage when you wrote that wonderful auto ethnographic essay to to take the time to unpack some of the uh kind of uh some of these notions through by turning towards ourselves um and then my third suggestion would be we anyway always have to negotiate difficult access and this is the case uh you know with pretty much any anthropologist here in different ways you know uh accessing a very violent nationalist town sleeping you know for a time in a hotel you know that's pre-painted with slogans about people convicted for genocide and you know and other kind of more uncomfortable situations these are all situations that we navigate and there are of course always questions of safety that we also have to think about and I think this is just one of them you know it's not any more serious than the lockdown of Palestine the occupation of Palestine the lockdown occupation of of Yemen and Sanaa the and so on it's um these are different situations that we kind of very methodically and carefully have to think about how to approach them how to access them whilst making sure that we and our interlocutors are safe so I would suggest sort of uh working perhaps against this lockdown as well in some ways I don't know if that answers any other question it was a ramble more than a reply no thank you that's really helpful I mean we've been talking about it um as a cohort a lot as you can imagine I personally think it's bringing some really interesting opportunities or perspectives but there's definitely a lot of frustration from researchers who aren't going to be able to complete the research they wanted the work thank you thank you I don't know perhaps Yael would you like to to offer some advice to Sarah um based on one of your recent recent thoughts about this talk um sorry perhaps no at this moment I would be happy to talk separately sure okay um I will I I can't really put the video on because as Safit knows I am in a bit of a domestic situation in social isolation and but I just wanted to really thank you Safit for a really brilliant talk which was not only brilliant intellectually and very deep but also really poetically delivered so you leave us with a sense of really a possibility of writing and thinking poetically not only ethnographically which which has been very inspiring for me particularly um so thank you so much for this and I think I will just leave it to Kim to announce next seminar title and date and time and maybe a few details about how to overcome the issues with Zoom that seem um regularly but thank you again Safit and thank you everyone who participated tonight and for your thoughtful questions and time and yeah as please Kim if you want to announce next yeah yeah and thank you again Safit um and thank you everybody for joining us today and for all of the those of you who have joined us um for multiple sessions that we've run in this autumn seminar series we've had some really great speakers and the following events that we have coming up but again really interesting speakers and they all have kind of a different take but there's kind of a common theme running through through all of our through all of our different talks and so we would be happy for you to join us for the following event so I've just put in the chat the link to the event right for our next session and our next session will be running on the 25th of November so in a week's time same time five till seven this one is face fails face masks and selective liberal anxiety so again something I think that's very topical and very much of the here and now that we're seeing so definitely feel free to come along to that session and again you can confirm your place and book your place through the event right link I will be sending it around to everybody who registered for this session as well as the recording of this session so again if you want to kind of listen back and kind of go through it in more detail I always find personally I always get something out of rewatching these sessions if not cringing at my own video but but I'm kind of really going back through the information and I think and it was so poetically put again within this session so thank you all very much for attending please feel free to join us with the rest of our talks we have so we have this one coming up and then two more afterwards and they normally are week by week so again thank you all for taking the time thank you so again for delivering such an amazing talk and I hope to see you all in future events thank you