Houses in Flames
Houses in Flames
This chapter takes the house as a prism to shed light on the transformation of the intimate topographies of belonging, care, and the material world in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina resulting from the “postsocialist” and “postwar” junctures. Ethnographically and historically grounded, this chapter shows how for village Muslims the house is first and foremost a container of hi/stories, trails of past lives, materialization of care across generations, materials of religious experience, and bundles of relations and exchanges that are enacted with and through them. These elements of intimate relations and belonging constitute the ground of one’s life. Yet this is a ground that is nowadays profoundly shifting for many villagers. In the postsocialist, postwar years, many families have been driven away from their houses due to ongoing economic marginalization, long-term unemployment, and heavy indebtedness. The story of the house in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina thus bears witness to the scale and pervasiveness of the push factors, and corrosive effects of the neoliberal restructuring on rural communities in the world today.
Keywords: Bosnia-Herzegovina, gender, house, Islam, kinship, property regimes, rural depopulation, outmigration
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