Hope For/Against the State: Gridding in a Besieged Sarajevo Suburb

Abstract

Anthropological dealings with the state often convey hope by replicating the hope of their subjects against the state. This libertarian paradigm provides effective analytical tools to grasp people's evasion of state grids, through cultural resilience-in-authenticity and/or autonomous self-organisation. Yet it cannot conceptualise their affective and practical investments in ordering statecraft, i.e. their hope for the state. Through a case study of self-organisation in the besieged outskirts of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, this article traces inhabitants' yearnings for 'normal lives' and their efforts to allow the latter to unfold. I focus on schooling and its temporal calibration of routines, framed in the vertical encompassment of statecraft. Against the reduction of hope to hope against the state, the complementary analytical tool of 'gridding', I propose, allows an alternative form of replication, capturing people's yearnings for the convergence of topdown and upward/outward organisation of predictability on different scales.

State Kinning and Kinning the State in Serbian Elder Care Programs

“…While state practices and images rarely overlap entirely, the state's actual involvement in our cases surpassed citizens' expectations. This contrasts with many recent studies that show how citizens try to make the state see them or comply with their wishes for more state presence (Jansen 2014;Obeid 2010;Street 2012). The second fascinating point is the intimate, affective nature of relations between statefunded caregivers, or state carers, and their elderly clients.…”

“…Although the projects could be seen as part of a neo-liberal policy of state retreat, our examples show instead a gradual enlargement of services. In both cases the state surpasses citizens' expectations, much different from situations in which actors try to gain greater visibility to be 'seen by the state' (Street 2012), or processes in which actors mimic or want to become the state (Jansen 2014;Nielsen 2010). Meanwhile, local perceptions of the state as being distant and hostile remain surprisingly stable.…”

Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State

“…Referring to examples from South Africa, James Ferguson (2013: 259) has recently insisted on the growing importance of social service provision as a site of politics. It is a field in which citizens are not only disciplined or subordinated to state measures, but can use bureaucratic technologies to make the state 'see them' and act as desired (Jansen 2014;Street 2012).…”

Transformations of gender, sexuality and citizenship in Southeast Europe: New lenses for new, and not so new, times

“…These essays join a new wave of fresh research that has begun to shift the focus away from nationalism and war (e.g. Greenberg, 2014;Jansen, 2014Jansen, , 2009Jašarević, 2014Jašarević, , 2012aJašarević, , 2012bKurtović, 2012). Scholarship on gender, for the most part, whether fueled by the urge to comprehend the highly gendered and sexualized war violence or the desire to highlight women's peace activism and roles in ethnic reconciliation, has effectively solidified the narrative of patriarchal cultures in which men are violent, corrupt nationalists and women are passive victims or brave fighters for peace, anti-nationalism, and democracy (see Helms, 2013).…”