The Bosnian House: Trajectories of (Non‐)Return Among Bosnian Roma in a Roman Shanty

Abstract

This article draws on materials collected during ethnographic fieldwork among Bosnian Roma refugees who reconstructed homes in an urban shanty at the periphery of Rome (Italy). In the last two decades, many of these Roma started building or refurbishing houses in villages in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, close to the Serbian Republic (where their former home village is now situated). The construction, refurbishing, and maintenance of these houses played (and still play) a role in the local economy; they also changed the local landscape and became the mark of a new but intermittent presence in post‐Dayton Bosnia. The houses and the transnational practices connected to them have become tokens of economic success and aspirations that revolve around both the Bosnian context and the Roman one. They also express nostalgic attachments to a lost homeland radically transformed by war, foreign interventions, and the advent of the market economy and eventually turned into an unfamiliar place. This article builds on the literature on transnational migration and material culture and explores the ambivalence and complexity of transnational trajectories that stretch between an urban context in the EU and a rural one in non‐EU and reveals complex scenarios of identity, movements, and unlikely returns.