BOOK -- yearnings in the meantime

-- BOOK-- 2015 (Hardback) / 2018 (Paperback). Yearnings in the Meantime: 'normal lives' and the state in a Sarajevo apartment complex. Oxford: Berghahn.

Soon after they moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, this book's protagonists were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia. More than a decade later, in 'Dayton' Bosnia and Herzegovina, their lives unfolded in a seemingly endless 'meantime.' This book investigates the yearnings for 'normal lives' of those ordinary Sarajevans. Starting from their everyday concerns, it ethnographically addresses questions of temporal reasoning and the state from a postsocialist, postwar vantage point in the European semiperiphery. In critical dialogue with recent theorizations of time, hope and the state, Yearnings in the Meantime proposes innovative analytical tools to conceptualize how our hopes and fears are shaped by the kind of political configuration in which we lived yesterday and in which we live today, and by the geopolitical location and conjuncture in which we are caught.

Introduction: [or, Towards an Anthropology of Shared Concerns] / PART I: FIGURING 'NORMAL LIVES' / Chapter 1. ‘Normal Lives’ [or, Towards an Anthropology of Yearning] / Chapter 2. Waiting for a Bus [or, Towards an Anthropology of Gridding] / Chapter 3. War-Time Gridding for ‘Normal Lives’ [or, Towards an Anthropology of Hope for the State] / PART II: DIAGNOSING DAYTONITIS / Chapter 4. First Symptom: ‘There Is No System’ [or, Towards an Anthropology of an Elusive State Effect] / Chapter 5. Second Symptom: ‘We Are Pattering in Place’ [or, Towards an Anthropology of Spatiotemporal Entrapment] / PART III: LIVING WITH DAYTONITIS / Chapter 6. Conviviality in the Meantime [or, Towards a Critique of Dayton Non-Politics] / Epilogue: Shovelling and Numbering for ‘Normal Lives’