On not moving well enough: Temporal reasoning in Sarajevo yearnings for "normal lives"

In this article I investigate ethnographically how people in the outskirts of Sarajevo attempted to reason their way through a widespread sense of persistent "pattering in place" in postwar, postsocialist, post-Yugoslav Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna i Hercegovina [BiH]). Concerns with household futures were explicitly contextualized within the everyday geopolitics of life in a semiprotectorate presumably on the "Road into Europe." Rather than conceiving of their predicament in terms of "crisis," my interlocutors diagnosed and criticized spatiotemporal entrapment through a politicizing understanding of the nesting of these different scales. Yet this politicization ultimately had depoliticizing effects, encouraging waiting rather than collective action. At this particular historical conjuncture, I have discerned an economy of temporal reasoning where yearnings for what were called "normal lives" evoked linear, forward movement as an imperative. Acknowledging that yearnings have their own histories, I investigate how a specific valuation of existential mobility along linear temporal templates shaped up at the intersection of, on the one hand, past futures-recalled from lives in Yugoslav socialist BiH and during the 1992-1995 war-and, on the other hand, futures projected as part of BiH's ongoing "Road into Europe". © 2014 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.