Forced migration scholars have increasingly documented the agency of displaced persons. However, this scholarship has attended primarily to the positive or constructive dimensions of agency, documenting migrants’ capacities for resilience, resistance, and problem-solving. In this paper, I argue that forced migration scholarship should extend to recognize the darker dimensions of agency, such as complicity in acts of violence. Drawing on emerging work on ‘complex victimhood’ in conflict studies scholarship, which grapples with the difficult simultaneity of victimhood and complicity, I begin to articulate a figure of the ‘complex migrant’. As a case study, I draw on fieldwork with Bosnian Serb women who were part of the 1996 displacement of Serbs from Sarajevo, when the divided city was re-unified following nearly four years of siege by Bosnian Serb forces. Against the figure of the ideal refugee/victim, I outline the numerous deviations that made Serbs illegible as refugees. I also demonstrate how my interlocutors asserted the qualities of the ideal victim in their narratives to make their losses legible. I argue that a complex victimhood framework is useful for analysing other understudied retributive displacements. I also suggest that it can work to gradually disempower discourses that blame migrants when they fail to live up to the ideal of the good victim.

The siege of Sarajevo has altered the experience of ethnicity, reconfiguring ethnic categories into moral boundaries. From 1992 to 1995, the city was held under siege by the Army of Republika Srpska, and many Sarajevan Serbs still grapple today with the feeling that others view them as aggressors. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with Serb women of the pre-war generations, I describe how they intentionally make small alterations in gesture and body language in order to perform ethnic ambiguity, and avoid being read by others as Serb. While anthropological accounts have tended to use performativity to emphasize the constructed and situational nature of ethnicity, here I focus on the anxiety that drives Serb women’s performances in order to capture the inherent and inescapable feeling of ethnicity in a post-war space. I also discuss the difficulty of capturing this anxiety through empirical methods, navigating the discrepancy between Serb women’s narrative accounts of ethnic stigmatization compared to the apparently unproblematic flow of everyday social life. Through this discrepancy, I demonstrate how the embodied and ever-accumulating feeling of ethnic anxiety can conjure threats where there may be none, and how it can charge even the most (seemingly) mundane encounters.

No abstract

In this age of research accountability, community‐based ethnography is positioned to move from the periphery of the discipline of anthropology to the center. With increased recognition of its importance, this subdiscipline has gained greater depth and breadth giving rise to critical questions such as: How do we collaborate with interlocutors to acquire an understanding of their everyday struggles for justice? What forms should such collaboration take given the intricate and entangled connections between the local and the global? How do we take into account the politics of community organizations? How do we negotiate the power dynamics in the field?

The COVID‐19 pandemic severely disrupted work patterns in academia. There is mounting evidence that men's publishing productivity increased while women's decreased. Yet most studies of this phenomenon have analyzed authorship and peer review data separately, without considering their interrelationship. We conceptualize authorship and peer review together as visible and invisible forms of labor, a lens that connects service work to other forms of gendered unpaid labor. Drawing on a data set of author and review activity at American Ethnologist from 2014 to 2021, we blend quantitative analysis with qualitative insights from our positions as the journal's editorial assistants. We find that in 2020 women performed staggeringly more service work than men relative to their rates of manuscript submission. Our findings disrupt the discourse of “a return to normal,” which ignores the differential effects of our collective pandemic experience.