In analyzing qualitative interviews, it is important to remember three dimensions of narrative: narratives are social, in that they are both communicated to others and shaped
by their audience; they are selective, in that they are created through the omission of other possible versions; and they are rhetorical, in that they serve not only to describe the world but to convince (oneself and others) to see the world in a particular way (Mattingly 1998; Tonkin 1992). These three features of narratives also come together to describe what narratives are not. They are not simply after-the-fact accounts of experiences. They do not provide unmediated access to the past (A. Feldman 1991; Frisch 2016; Thompson 1988). On the contrary, narratives are mediations in and of themselves. Their relationship to the past (or, more concretely, to a past “event”) is tenuous, and can shift and change over time (Allison 2004; Browning 1998; Freund 2016; Portelli 1991).
Repeat interviews were thus crucial in this research. By meeting with the same women over and over again, I was able to slowly get past the “scripts” I was sometimes presented with initially, and to see how some participants actually changed their narratives over time (see Fujii 2009; 2010).
The examples of two women can illustrate this. One woman, Milka, whom I interviewed many times over the course of nearly eleven months had from the beginning positioned herself as a reluctant Serb. She was in her seventies, and was married to a Bosniak man with whom she had three children. Both she and her husband preferred to identify themselves as Sarajevan, Bosnian, or Yugoslavian. She often recounted how the logic of the war forced people into ethnic categories, but how she herself refused to partake in this compartmentalization. Her “mixed” name (she had taken her husband’s surname, which read as Bosniak, while her first name read as Serb) put her in a good position to push back against ethnic categorizations, and she often did. Consider for example the exchange she narrated below, recalling how during the war, a local humanitarian worker insisted on writing down her ethnicity before giving her an aid package:
“What are you?”
“What am I? Don’t you mean who?”
“Bosniak, Croat, or Serb?”
“There’s no more of that.”
“Fine, put down Bosnian.”
“It’s not on the list.”
“Put down Sarajevan. Put down human.”
“Come on, I need to fill out the form. Bosniak, Croat or Serb?”
“Look at my name. What do you think?”
“Well, what are your parents, then?”
“What are my children?”
The questions and responses in this short exchange contain a subtext that displays a deep cultural knowledge on both sides. In saying “Look at my name,” Milka effectively tells the aid worker that since she could be classified as both Serb (based on her first name) and Bosniak (based on her surname), she therefore should not be confined to either category. The aid worker responds by asking, “What are you parents, then?” In asking this question, the aid worker opens up two possibilities: either Milka’s mixed name comes from her own mixed ethnic heritage (a Bosniak father whose surname she bears, and Serb mother); or Milka’s mixed name is the result of her marriage to a Bosniak, while she herself is a Serb. Milka refuses to respond to this line of inquiry, and instead asks, “What are my children?” Through this question, she signals her refusal to accept a system that would divide her and her children into separate categories.
The smoothness of this exchange leads me to suspect it may be a composite of numerous similar exchanges she had over the course of the war. Through stories like this, Milka often critiqued the ethnicization of Sarajevan society. Whenever she spoke about the war (she had stayed in Sarajevo throughout the siege), it was in the language of “we, the Sarajevans” against “them, the [Serb] aggressor.”
It was not until nearly ten months into our interviews and informal conversations that she suddenly began to speak about the war differently. “We the Sarajevans” became
“we the Serbs,” and her usual narratives about neighbourly solidarity during the siege gave way to new narratives that exonerated the VRS from blame. She began to share some doubts she had about the dominant narrative of the siege, suggesting that the VRS was not really responsible for all of the atrocities for which they were blamed, such as the Markale massacre (see chapter 6).
Her narrative shift revealed a “hidden transcript” (Scott 1990) of Serb ethno- nationalism (see chapter 6). Some women revealed their ethno-nationalist views to me immediately, on the first interview. Other women did not let me in on their ethno- nationalist views until months into our research relationship, months they spent taking care to either avoid certain topics, or to speak about them ambiguously. Milka’s narrative shift felt particularly unsettling because of the strength of her cosmopolitan convictions. The shift seemed to contradict everything she had told me until then. And it certainly sat uneasily when, in later conversations, she again situated herself among “we the Sarajevans,” and again criticized the ethnicization of political and social life.
I spent a long time reflecting on her change of tune. I had immediately recognized her new narrative as part of a Serb ethno-nationalist template, but I began to wonder how much of her previous narrative had been part of a liberal18 template, one that emphasized ethnic hybridity and solidarity, one that I did not recognize was actually a template. I struggled to assess which of her two narratives was the “authentic” one. Was the first version more honest because it was more unprepared (Fassin, Le Marcis, and Lethata 2008)? Or was later narrative more honest since over time she had decided to trust me more and thus to reveal more of herself?
Crapanzano (2014, 269) argues that as anthropologists, we are caught in an “epistemology of suspicion in which what lies under the surface — what has to be mined — is somehow more real, truer, more authentic than what lies on the surface.” Even though we may intellectually understand that we cannot ever truly know the inner-most thoughts and feelings of our interlocutors, the discipline is built around the possibility that we might,
and this possibility pervades our research methods (Fassin 2014). It is difficult to shake the idea that, as Nordstrom (1995, 139) puts it, the “silenced stories at war’s epicenters are generally the most authentic” (139). But what would it mean, ask Das et al. (2014, 21), for anthropology to acknowledge that “even if the other were made of glass through and through, we could not, or ought not, be able to see into her?”
While I was struggling with how to interpret Milka’s narrative shift, another unexpected shift occurred with another participant, Jasna. I had conducted only two interviews with Jasna, and we had scheduled to meet for a third and final interview a few weeks before my departure. Already in the first two interviews, Jasna had revealed herself to hold strong ethno-nationalist views. In addition to denials and justifications of VRS crimes, she maintained that she could not possibly have a true friendship with a Bosniak (although she thought it was possible for Bosniaks and Serbs to live “side by side”).
During the first two interviews, I found myself silently criticizing her views in my head, even as I smiled and nodded so that she would continue. I expected more of the same in our third and final interview. To my surprise, our final interview instead contained a “revelatory moment,” a moment where a detail was finally revealed that allowed me to better understand where her views came from, and why she held them so tightly (Parvez 2018, 460). She told me she had been betrayed by her own neighbours during the war, people whom she had lived alongside for years, people who knew her and her family. The betrayal, which I outline only in sparse detail in this dissertation, involved a phone call to the police, accusing her close relative of being a spy. This relative was arrested and detained in a make-shift prison for several weeks, where they were beaten. For years after the war, this woman continued to live in the same building as her neighbours, their relationship reduced to exchanging pleasantries in the foyer (see chapter 3, narrative 3).
This story had been vaguely alluded to in previous interviews, but without any details. When she finally told me the full story in the third interview, I was able to understand her in a way that I had not allowed myself to before. I was able to see her ethno- nationalist views as coming from a place of pain and betrayal, as festering and growing during all the years she had to continue living alongside her neighbours.
I do not claim to know her inner-most world, nor those of any of the women that I interviewed; these worlds are “largely inaccessible to ethnographic investigation” (Fassin 2008, 554). Making assumptions about unarticulated private thoughts and feelings is tempting, but it “trespass[es] the limits of anthropological understanding” (Crapanzano 2014, 30). However, this “revelatory moment” enabled me to examine my own defenses as a researcher, defenses which are shared by other ethnographers who conduct research with people with whom they morally disagree (Crapanzano 1986; Hochschild 2016). As Blee (1993, 604-605) writes regarding her research with female Ku Klux Klan members,
I was prepared to hate and fear my informants, to find them repellent and, more important, strange. I expected no rapport, no shared assumptions, no commonality of thought or experience. […] But this was not the case. […] Although it might be comforting if we could find no commonality of thought or experience with those who are drawn into far-right politics, my interviews suggest a more complicated and a more disturbing reality. It was fairly ordinary people — people with considered opinions, people who loved their families and could be generous to neighbors and friends — who were the mainstay of the 1920s Klan.
Jasna’s narrative shift prompted me to reassess my defensive posture and to become a better listener (if not in the course of our first two interviews, then at least in my later analysis of them). Both her and Milka’s narrative shifts occurred towards the end of my fieldwork, pointing to the slow but steady capacity for long-term ethnographic research to unearth perspectives that would be impossible to reach through short-term methods such as surveys. If I had left Sarajevo even two months earlier, before these narrative shifts occurred, I would not even have realized how much of my data was still superficial. I would have returned home and written about two women, the liberal and the ethno-nationalist, two “stock characters” (Blee 1993, 604) with little depth or complexity.
Conclusion
Figure 11: Old Town, Sarajevo
Source: Photo by author.
A post-war environment is defined by events that are ostensibly over. The “starting premise,” as Stoler (2013, 12) puts it, is often that which is intangible, hard to see and harder still to document. In this chapter, I discussed the slow beginnings of this research, and the importance of repeat interviews and long-term ethnographic engagement. These incremental and patient methods of approach were critical in a research context where the aftermath of the siege’s internal zone of violence is felt more often than it is articulated. I also discussed how my positionality affected the research process, attracting certain types of narratives, and discouraging others. Finally, I explained the methodological and conceptual reasons for focusing my research on Serb women, at the expense of gathering a broader history of the siege’s internal zone of violence. It was this research decision that fundamentally enabled me to access both a silenced history of wartime violence, and a clandestine “hidden transcript” (Scott 1990) of ethno-nationalist revisionism.