Questions of housing are a key prism through which people in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) have experienced social transformations over the last three and a half decades. They shaped experiences of the 1992-1995 war, in which half of the country’s population was displaced and had to find accommodation away from their original place of residence. They were at the heart of a vast foreign-enforced programme of reconstruction and return of the displaced, which effectively centred on restitution of property and tenancy rights. What has attracted much less attention, including in BiH itself, is that these war and postwar developments simultaneously entailed an ideological shift in terms of the value attributed to housing. In practice, from a society in which a substantial proportion of the population lived in socially-owned property according to the Yugoslav socialist self-management system, BiH was turned into a ‘property-owning democracy’. Considerations of exchange value gained precedence over those of use-value. This presentation traces the processes through which this has come to be.
Social anthropologist Stef Jansen is professor at the University of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and honorary professor at the University of Manchester (UK). His ethnographic studies in the post-Yugoslav states have focused, amongst other things, on questions of home, hope, the state, borders, political subjectivity, social transformations and everyday geopolitics.
Veranstaltungsort: Campus Westend (Hörsaalzentrum HZ 10), Frankfurt am Main
digitale Teilnahme: BigBlueButton (Zugangscode: 98kbz7) https://meeting.uni-weimar.de/b/rooms/f2l-jnf-ajn-mfo/join