Harvard University

Department Member, Anthropology

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Thesis Title: Silver Bosnia: Precious Metals and Society in the Western Balkans

About

In the early 1990s, Bosnia and Herzegovina became known for a particular ‘innovation’ during the violence that gripped the region: the invention of secondary mass graves. Not only were civilians executed and buried, but their bodies were, at a later time, exhumed, transferred and reburied in multiple sites, in order to hide evidence of a mass crime.  Mass graves around the concentration camp of Omarska were created using specific types of knowledge gained from local populations. Omarska was situated on the site of an old and sprawling iron mine. The mine’s managers turned warehouses into detention centers and designated exhausted mine shafts as mass graves. The technical knowledge of machinery and local terrain possessed by miners and ore truck drivers, coupled with bulldozers, transport trailers and railways, allowed for the location of secondary graves and the transfer of cadavres. Engineers attempted to then render the remains in the ground unrecognizable by flooding secondary mass graves with acids used for purifying iron ore, and by setting off controlled blasts with the mine’s explosives supply. This dissertation research is animated therefore by the following questions: how do extractive industrial processes impart a technical knowledge that can be mobilized both in daily labour and in moments of violence? How does this knowledge move between banal daily practices and violence? How do extractive labourers invent and define the ends to which technical knowledge is used, especially in their relation to certain political and ethno-ideological projects?

My project’s question is most salient not only in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but all over the world, where resource extraction has found itself often at the conjunction of local conflicts and translocal industrial processes. My research approaches this topic ethnographically but also historically, by recognizing the Omarska mine controversy as familiar in the region’s longer extractive history. One could easily look at the Omarska controversy and argue that extractive industry only serves to affirm and heighten ethnonationalist divisions in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. Or the controversy could also be analyzed as part of the problematics of the post-socialist, post-war situation—where local demands for justice, recognition of suffering, modernization and prosperity encounter aggressive neo-liberalism on a ‘global’ scale. This assessment of the region, however, is quickly rendered insufficient when the ‘post-war’ situation is reinserted into a longer history. What is striking about the opening paragraph of my statement is not the supposed underlying ‘ethnic hatreds’ that motivated killing at Omarska, but rather how older and well-known mining knowledges, technologies and infrastructures were mobilized to carry out systematic killings.

The immense scale of extraction practices calls into being and reveals previously invisible translocal, transimperial and, today, transnational connections that have to be established and maintained to sustain a metals-based economy. In my dissertation, I intend to argue that the primacy of mining has shaped the Western Balkan region, especially Bosnia and Herzegovina, in different ways than previous scholarship, focused on ‘nations,’ ‘ethnicities,’ and religious universalisms has revealed. Through the longue durée practice of mining, a regional infrastructure and concurrent social space was created in which peoples of very different origins and ambitions—from Ottoman conquerors to Saxon miners, from French rail labourers to today’s corporate executives from Delhi—could enter, settle, remain in and depart. The space of resource extraction sometimes did collaborate in conquest, repression and death, but it also created a set of durable relationships over time which provided extraordinary new mobilities and livelihoods.

My interests include :

· the history of imperialism, especially in relation to investment practices and monetary/fiscal regimes
· human-environment relations
· intellectual history of territorial conceptualization in resource-rich regions
· ethnographies and histories of militarization
· Balkan/Ottoman 18th century economic history
· ideas of debt and debt relations/practices
· the history of banking in the Balkans
· labour and antifascism in the former-Yugoslavia
· Yugoslav cinema and the Partisan movement

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