Ethnographers of the region have shown how various notions of belonging, often outside of ethno-religious belonging, have been mobilised by the populations of the ex-Yugoslav region for identity construction. In these works, the ethnographers focus on how such ideas of belonging are constructed and employed and how these discourses then serve to reify or destabilise essentialised versions of identity politics. For example, a number of ethnographers have demonstrated how entrenched the urban/rural divide is when considering notions of identity in the ex-Yugoslav space. Stef Jansen has written extensively about ‘evocations of cosmopolitanism’ in the former Yugoslavia and its prominence in identity discourses in the region, especially as a reaction to rising ethno-nationalism (Jansen, 2005a, 2005b and 2008). In his works, urban dwellers mobilise notions of ‘cosmopolitanism’ as an opposition to rising ‘hegemonising nationalisms’. In these studies, Jansen shows that city dwellers define their urban identities counter to newcomer, nationalist ‘peasants’ (2005a and 2005b), and this allows them to subvert the rising tide of ethno-nationalist politics by ‘othering’ these newcomer ‘peasants’ who engaged in the nationalist discourses. Bojan Bilić and Paul Stubbs (2015) also discuss the urban/rural divide in the post-Yugoslav space, arguing that ‘a line needs to be drawn between “real” rural-urban differences in former Yugoslavia and the “symbolic” ways these have been reinscribed as both causes and consequences of the wars of the Yugoslav succession’ (120). Similarly, Xavier
Bougarel has written about the ‘Revenge of the countryside’ (1999), showing how ideas were mobilised that painted besieging forces as uncultured newcomers (157).
Outside of the urban/rural divide, another binary often mobilised for identity construction in the ex-Yugoslav space and in BiH in particular is the East/West binary.
For example, Xavier Bougarel (1999) shows that notions of East and West have been mobilised to differentiate Serb and Croat populations in the former Yugoslav space. He highlights how this notion has been employed, stating ‘in their opinion, the war in Croatia is a mere confrontation between two cultural areas, the Western and Catholic one, represented by the Croats and Slovenes, and the Eastern and Orthodox one, represented by the Serbs and Montenegrins.’ (160). In Sarajevo, specifically, this binary is often mobilised for identitarian purposes, focusing on Islam as ‘eastern’. Elissa Helms (2008) discusses this notion in her article ‘East and West Kiss: Gender, Orientalism, and Balkanism in Muslim-Majority Bosnia-Herzegovina’. In this article, she shows how the ideas of a ‘superior west and a backward east’ have been employed for identitarian politics, reaffirming ‘such dichotomous representations, masking a much greater complexity of global, regional, and local dynamics at play’ (90). Helms discusses the ‘pattern of “nesting orientalisms” in what was Yugoslavia, in which members of one nation have attempted to portray themselves as
superior/western/European while casting their southern and eastern neighbours as part of the inferior, oriental “east”’ (91). Thus, identity discourses in the former Yugoslav space and in BiH employ ideas of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in order to convey specific notions about oneself and one’s community.
As a continuation of the East/West binary employed for identity discourses, Xavier Bougarel (2008) has shown that while Islam may be seen as part of the ‘East’ through the nesting orientalisms of the former Yugoslavia, within the Bosnian Muslim community itself, the idea of ‘European’ Islam is employed as a way to distinguish the Islamic tradition in Bosnia from other, ‘less tolerant’ variants. He states that:
The will to present Bosnian Islam as a sort of positive cultural exception sometimes entails a conception of this ‘European and tolerant’ Islam as homogeneous and sui generis, set in opposition to another, implicit Islam, considered ‘intolerant since non-European’, which is located beyond the Bosporus and the Strait of Gibraltar, or represented by the ‘non-autochthonous’ Muslim populations living in Western Europe (97).
Ethnography, again, in this case shows how the construction of identity in the former Yugoslav space and in BiH in particular is much more complex than a strict adherence to ethno-religious nationalisms and their politics.
In general, many works on the anthropology of post-socialism in the former Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, have shown that the salience of entho-religious belonging dissovles in many everyday contexts. For example, Stef Jansen’s work Yearnings in the Meantime (2015), which is an ethnography of the lives of residents in the Dobrinja neighbourhood of Sarajevo, goes beyond questions of ethno-national identity. Jansen state, ‘I contend that a focus on identiarian questions, important as they are, fails to account for very important dimensions of life in Sarajevo or, for that matter, BiH (11). Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms and Ger Duijzings (eds) make similar claims in their book The New Bosnian Mosaic (2008). They state in the introduction that, ‘our intention...is to show that local-level realities defy reduction to such simple categories. It is not enough to presume that ethnic nationalism informs every aspect of Bosnian political and social life’ (19). Stef Jansen, Čarna Brković and Vanja Čelebičić (2017) also argue that the contribution of ethnographic studies of the former Yugoslavia (especially BiH) is that they go beyond the ‘identitarian matrix’. They explain that:
It is here that ethnographic studies have made their first important intervention in knowledge production about BiH. Aiming to subvert dominant representations of lives in the country, many of them
contributed to the deconstruction of the ethnonational identitarian matrix as the primary one through which to understand all things Bosnian. (8) Thus, by looking at the realities of everyday life in BiH, the focus on ethno-religious identification can be shifted to other notions of belonging, which, in many cases, can be more salient to the populations involved.
Like these works of ethnography in the ex-Yugoslav space, in order to gauge the importance of new urban interventions on the population of the city, complex constructions of identity must be taken into account, especially outside of ethno-
religious belonging. New forms of Islam, especially those espousing stricter moral and behavioural codes than those traditionally found in Sarajevo, could find more willing audiences in certain socio-economic classes. Other interventions could bring out senses of Yugoslav or Bosanac belonging amongst the population, and hybrid or multilayered forms of identity might allow for greater acceptance of new cultural forms and spaces. By understanding that urban populations maintain a multiplicity of roles, which they perform to different networks and audiences, the plurality of the urban fabric can be maintained. Sarajevo has always been a multi-ethnic city, and even though identity politics in the country have officially homogenised the urban centre, intricate and multilayered conceptions of self and others are not only possible but also apparent in the city. How individuals interact with architecture and public places and how these interventions affect their lives depends not only on ethno-religious affiliation, but also on education, origin, gender, sexual orientation and affiliation with various networks outside of the established faith-based communities. Simplifying and flattening identity in Sarajevo will not accurately reflect the intricate processes at work in the city and will only serve to continue the focus on ethnicity that is so prevalent in scholarship on Bosnia and Herzegovina.