Postsocialist Mediterranean

Abstract

This article opens a conversation between anthropological studies of the Mediterranean and of postsocialism in order to propose the notion of a “scalar gaze” as an analytical approach useful for capturing veering practices in their social complexity. The article argues that favors (veze/štela, lit. relations, connections) in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina were a practice through which people fulfilled the demands of capitalist economy to be active, rather than a pre-capitalist excess that prevented “proper” development of the country into a neoliberal democracy. Zooming in and out and looking sideways between moral reasoning, internationally supervised structural changes of the job markets, and electoral politics, this article explores how the relational labor of favors reproduced moral selves, as well as hierarchy and inequality.

Ethical Endeavours

“…Th e third special issue -'Th e Anthropology of Post-Socialism' (edited by Gallinat 2022a) -looks at the past, and its relevance for present and future, through the conceptual lens of 'post-socialism' (see also Brković 2022). Th e authors engage with the 'anthropology of post-socialism', a once thriving sub-discipline, and ask whether and how its inherent spatial and temporal binaries and boundaries (East-West, beforeaft er/'post', etc.)…”