‘Knocking on my neighbour’s door’: On metamorphoses of sociality in rural Bosnia

Abstract

The idea of neighbourhood ( komšiluk) has been widely discussed in the anthropology of Bosnia. In the hegemonic academic discourse metaphorical usage prevailed over ethnographic examination. The dominant perspective portrays komšiluk as a social mechanism producing long-lasting differences between ethnoreligious groups that might at times result in inter-group hatred. However, intimate ethnographic encounters reveal that such ethnicization of neighbourliness seems to be problematic, and even mixes different scales of social complexity. It is argued here that the Bosnian idiom of neighbourliness is a vigorous social process that embraces localized, face-to-face sociality, morality and lifeworlds, and thus a very different scale of relations. In contemporary Bosnia, wedged between post-war as well as post-socialist trajectories of societal change, the intimacy of komšiluk has changed profoundly. This article critically reassesses the academic discourse and questions how far anthropological imagination and metaphorization can travel without impairing experience-near insights.