Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market , livre ebook

Indiana University Press - Larisa Jašarević

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160 pages

English

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Larisa Jasarevic offers an unforgettable look at the everyday experiences of people living in post-socialist, post-war Bosnia. Not at all existing on the world's margins, Bosnians today are concerned with the good life and are as entangled in consumer debt as everyone else. The insecurities of living in an economy dominated by informal networks of trade, personal credit, and indebtedness are experienced by Bosnians in terms of physical ailments, some not recognized by Western medical science. Jasarevic follows ordinary Bosnians in their search for treatment—from use of pharmaceuticals to alternative medicines and folk healers of various kinds. Financial well-being and health are woven together for Bosnians, and Jasarevic adeptly traces the links between the two realms. In the process, she addresses a number of themes that have been important in studies of life under neoliberalism in other parts of the world.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Oddly Bodily Lives in the Market
1. Just Surviving: Living Well Since the Better Life
2. Insanely Generous: Making Wealth in an Economy of Debt
3. On the Edge: Worries in Common and Circumstantial Communities
4. Medical Detours: Materiality and Magicality of Quotidian Cures
5. Strava: Distant Bodies at Hand
6. What if Not For Real? Troubles with Medical Efficacy
Bibliography
Index

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Médecine

Médecine Générale

Medical

General officer

Anthropology

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Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	30 janvier 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780253023858
Langue	English

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HEALTH AND WEALTH
ON THE BOSNIAN MARKET
HEALTH AND WEALTH
ON THE BOSNIAN MARKET
Intimate Debt
LARISA JA AREVI
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington Indianapolis
Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a grant from the First Book Subvention Program of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Larisa Jasarevic
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jasarevic, Larisa, author.
Title: Health and wealth on the Bosnian market : intimate debt / Larisa Jasarevic.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016038362 (print) | LCCN 2016051562 (ebook) (print) | LCCN 2016051562 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253023728 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253023827 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253023858 (eb)
Subjects: LCSH : Medical anthropology-Bosnia and Herzegovina. | Traditional medicine-Bosnia and Herzegovina. | Bosnians-Health and hygiene. | Bosnians-Social conditions-21st century. | Bosnians-Economic conditions-21st century.
Classification: LCC GN 296.5. B 54 J 37 2017 (print) | LCC GN 296.5. B 54 (ebook) | DDC 306.4/610949742-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038362
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Oddly Bodily Lives in the Market
1 Just Surviving: Living Well since the Better Life
2 Insanely Generous: Making Wealth in an Economy of Debt
3 On the Edge: Worries in Common and Circumstantial Communities
4 Medical Detours: Materiality and Magicality of Quotidian Cures
5 Strava: Distant Bodies at Hand
6 What If Not for Real? Troubles with Medical Efficacy
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANKING WILL NOT DO. THIS BOOK IS NOT A DONE DEAL, ALL packed and buttoned up for a final departure, so that I can thank so and so for helping me push it out the door. It is stuffed full of unsettled scores, open accounts, still sustaining or consequential encounters. To thank, I feel, would be to hasten the accounting of past transactions with hopes of squaring and closing them, or discounting them as definitive gifts. Instead, I would rather take stock and acknowledge ( admit the existence or truth of; make notice of; express gratitude or appreciation, according to the Oxford English Dictionary) the vital, critical, nurturing, indebting, some daunting, contributions to the venture that became this text.
Judith Farquhar has always been my first reader. Inspiring, tactful, and conceptually unpredictable-hers were oracular interventions. Her own work on materialities, medicine, and salience of traditional metaphysics set an example for just how tightly the ethnographic can embrace the philosophical. Sue Gal, John Kelly, and Moishe Postone at the University of Chicago profoundly shaped this project in its initial years.
Friends were variously involved with the making of this text and the undoing of the author that such process entails. Larisa Kurtovic, who restored the sense of the writing task too many times to count, and who also delivered vital staples at critical moments. George Meiu, who made us laugh, seriously. Caryn O Connell, who kept me on a rich diet of words, words I could savor in my mouth, forever unstable in English, even when the meaning was flat.
Many colleagues, readers, and listeners-kind beyond measure-literally granted vital attention to what was too raw, too tentative, too awkward to have been thought of as text. I shall only list a few of them who lent ears at critical points: Tatiana Chudakova, Andrew Gilbert, Andy Graan, Chris Hann, Keith Hart, Jim Hevia, Azra Hromad i , Stacey Kent, Owen Kohl, Aleks Prigozhin, Matt Rich, and Marko ivkovi .
Students who took part in the classes I taught over the years at the University of Chicago have no idea how substantially they changed what I had to say in the Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market . I want to acknowledge the collective marvel that is the UoC undergraduate thinking body, though I can only list a handful of names: Yandy Alcala, Jennifer Cohen, Harry Backlund, Deniz Inal, Meltem Kaso, Sarah Mendelsohn, Michael Pierson, Myra Su, Laura Tong, Melisa Unver, and Treva Welsh.
Indiana University Press gave the manuscript a chance-who would have thought!-as did the anonymous reviewers, whose given time show how alive and well is the present, smack in the middle of the academic traffic. The field research was generously funded by the Advanced Research Fellowship of the American Councils Southeast European Research Scholar Program, and the Individual Research Opportunity Grant ( IARO ) of the International Research and Exchange Board ( IREX ), and the writing was comfortable thanks to a Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship at the University of Chicago.
In Bosnia, people who shared their experiences; who let me into their market stalls, shops, cars, clinics, pharmacies; who invited me to their homes and gardens; fed me or worried that I did not eat; intervened in my health and wealth are the first to acknowledge. They were the many interlocutors, acquaintances, contacts, friends, thinkers, experimenters, medical practitioners, experts in the kitchen or in the field. Among them, some knew me before I wore an ethnographer s hat-we knew each other forever-while others and I were brought through the contingencies or logistics of fieldwork. Sandra, Melika, and ejla made sure that returns were always, somehow, homecomings. My parents were mostly eager for this writing to end. Still, they have been most patient and most present (at a distance). They are as grounding to my being as all the many trees are to the orchard in which they live. My aunt, among the brightest spirits I know in Tuzla, was sometimes also a field guide or a buddy, especially on issues of domace foods and medicine. My nieces are my trusted source of common sense and fashion advice. (And how do they laugh!) My brother-in-law has been kind and resourceful beyond belief-tending to save the day when obscure paperwork was missing, obtaining critical medicine seemingly nowhere to be found, and such. My sisters if I were stranded on a desert island, I would bring nothing but the two of them, and this is sort of how it felt over the years of writing: stranded, insular, but, thank Goodness, with the two of them.
Acknowledging is a form of renewed indebting, and certain debts in Bosnia call for forgiving as often as settling. This I learned firsthand from my grandmother ( rahmet joj du i ) who overwhelmed me with offerings, and from whom I now regret not taking more, each and every gift ventured at our annual parting that I, stupidly, refused by pointing to my overfull suitcases. At a doorstep, seeing her guests out, she always asked to be forgiven ( halali 1 ): the unintended wrongs or too indulgent hosting. I too would ask all those acknowledged-and those unmentioned and unnamed-to forgive my slights if not my debts.
1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
HEALTH AND WEALTH
ON THE BOSNIAN MARKET
Introduction
Oddly Bodily Lives in the Market
Waiting rooms of a home medical practice in a village of northeastern Bosnia fill up with patients every day except Tuesdays and Saturdays. Seventy to one hundred people hang about waiting-forgivingly-until they hear their names called out by the assistants. Some are obviously unwell, held up by their companions or propped up by the wall, slumping on the chairs, eyes shut, wearing bandages, gripping crutches, visibly tense, growing silent. There is nothing obviously the matter with others: a motley crowd of young and old, women, men, and children. Dressing styles, dialects, postures, and hairstyles are social clues, avidly read in a casual manner of resident experts who can hear, pick up, and tell apart salient differences in lifestyles and habits: provincial, regional, professional, urban, rural, refugee, or diasporic. Far less obvious are ethnic or national affiliations among patients who seek out this powerful woman s help from across ethnic and religious distinctions, and entity and state borders. Her patients call her the queen, a vernacular honorific that signals greatness and a streetwise coolness, a mastery of some craft. From 2006 to 2007, this anthropologist was among the patients: waiting, observing, asking questions when allowed, taking notes, feeling painfully awkward at first, precariously admitted, challenged, tolerated, and mistrusted. Things changed over the years, as I kept visiting over the summers and felt more welcomed. I first heard of the queen at a flea market in the nearby town of Lukavac, economically depressed since the socialist, heavy-industry complex had shrunk to a few foreign-owned metallurgical coke and by-products factories that employ a fraction of the former labor force, export profits, and massively pollute the air. Many of my regional ethnographic itineraries led from or to various market sites, where people trafficked in health complaints and medical recommendations as often as in produce, commodities, and second-life, second-hand goods. It was the only way to learn about the que