This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in-person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundts hus.
Abstract
If the personal is often said to be political, then in Bosnia and Herzegovina the political can also be said to be geopolitical. Everyday lives in this supervised and contested polity have long been marked by particularly sharp geopolitical intensities that characterise its inter-imperial position. How, in such a setting, can anthropologists grasp geopolitics through the ethnographic study of routines and understandings of non-elite actors? And how do such insights -- not quite from the West, not quite from the Rest -- encourage us to reconsider dominant articulations of decolonial critique and its focus on alterity? This presentation offers reflections on the ways in which the ethnography of everyday geopolitics in the contemporary European semiperiphery can sharpen the critical anthropological questions we can ask about empire, agency and sovereignty.
Bio
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. For more information, see https://stefjansenweb.wordpress.com/