The Embers of Allah

263 Pages·2014·14.56 MB·English

Durham E-Theses
The Embers of Allah: cosmologies, knowledge, and
relations in the mountains of central Bosnia
HENIG, DAVID
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Abstract
The Embers of Allah: cosmologies, knowledge, and
relations in the mountains of central Bosnia
This thesis is a study of living Islam and Muslims’ lifeworlds in the margins of the
postsocialist world, in the mountains of central Bosnia. Its main scope is an analysis of
the scales of relatedness and the domains of knowledge traditions that assemble
Muslims’ lifeworlds as tangible, coherent and meaningful social forms. In doing so, the
thesis draws inspiration from the Barthian anthropology of knowledge to shed light on
‘what a person employs to interpret and act on the world’. A knowledge tradition, here
understood as a local cosmology, is a product of multiple persons and relations that
create the context in which knowledge and bodies of knowledge are produced and
sustained. Therefore, I argue that it is a knowledge tradition that informs a ‘meaningful
agency’ in the flow of everyday sociality and that continues to be Islam in the Bosnian
mountains. In particular, I suggest that Muslim life in the mountains is lived along four
complementary meaningful contexts, that is relatedness, spatiality, temporality and
ritual.
Relatedness embraces multifaceted processes of ‘living together’ that (re)fabricate, relate
and extend Muslim persons through sharing of substances, memories, identity and
divinity (chapters 3 and 4). The flow of everyday sociality between persons who ‘live in
proximity’ is tapestried from day-to-day forms of exchange such as hospitality, intimacy
and mutuality between neighbours, and enacted within two overlapping spheres, that is
immediate (komšiluk) and extended neighbourhood (mahala) (chapters 5 and 6). The
lifeworlds of Muslims as well as the flow of the everyday in the mountains are
orchestrated and punctuated by particular rhythms embracing multiple forms of time
reckoning and calendars, and orchestrating various agricultural and religious activities
and practices (chapter 7). Ritual is a mode of appropriation of personal or communal good
luck, fortune, blessing and well-being (chapters 6, 7 and 8), and cuts across the spheres of
intimacy and proximity and embraces Muslims’ lifeworlds, well-being of the house, the
land and the persons with the sacred landscape and divinity.
Throughout the thesis I argue that our research in the post-Yugoslav regions needs to
take into account local knowledge traditions as a serious matter of concern, and situate
the war atrocities or postsocialist transformations within the larger analytical scales
entwining cultural continuities and historicities with social, political and economic
breakdowns. In doing so, I show that the ways Bosnian Muslims value and conceive of
being a Muslim are primarily focused on cultural creativity, knowledge, morality and
domains that inform, shape and (re)create their lifeworlds and cosmologies, and through
which Bosnian Muslims exchange, communicate, validate and understand their religious
experiences and imagination in the context of turbulent social, economic and political
transformations.
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The Embers of Allah: cosmologies, knowledge, and
relations in the mountains of central Bosnia
David Henig
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
Durham University
Dr Stephen M. Lyon, Supervisor
Dr Iain R. Edgar, Supervisor
2011
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Table of Contents
List of illustrations ............................................................................ 7
Acknowledgement ............................................................................ 11
Chapter One
Introduction ...................................................................................... 14
The Gift of the night .................................................................................. 14
The Argument ............................................................................................ 17
Bosnia, marginality and the work of imagination ...................................... 18
Bosnia and history: a bird’s eye view .......................................................... 20
Fin de l’époque?: Bosnia and a postsocialist perspective ................................ 25
The postsocialist religious question and Bosnia ......................................... 28
Living Islam in Bosnia ................................................................................ 30
Plan of thesis .............................................................................................. 31
Chapter Two
Methodological Framework ................................................................... 33
Region and fieldwork ................................................................................. 34
Constructing the field site ........................................................................... 36
The region: authenticity and tradition ....................................................... 37
The village .................................................................................................. 38
The alchemists of the soul: dervishes ......................................................... 40
Methods and methodology ........................................................................ 40
Fieldwork and reflexivity ............................................................................ 46
Positionality ................................................................................................ 46
Historicity ................................................................................................... 47
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 48
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Chapter Three
‘Household retreated?’: Practice and reassessment of the domestic
domain ...................................................................................................... 49
Zadruga reassessed ....................................................................................... 50
Joint family household reassessed and contextualised ................................ 54
The kuća in the mountains of central Bosnia ............................................. 58
The house as economy: Bosnian kuća embedded 60
Fission and reproduction of the house in Brdo: an outline of recurrent
processes and emergence of social forms ................................................... 65
Joint households and the dynamics of fission ............................................. 65
A biography of the house: case study of the dynamics of the fission ........ 69
Inheritance and marriage patterns ............................................................. 72
The land and the kuća as a process ............................................................ 75
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 76
Chapter Four
About the house: towards a general cosmology of life ..................... 78
The kuća in the mountains ......................................................................... 80
The gender of the house: inner experience ............................................... 84
Socialisation ................................................................................................ 91
Names, persons and substance ................................................................... 94
Pedagogies of muslimness .......................................................................... 97
The land(scape) and the making of relatedness ......................................... 104
The genealogy of the land ......................................................................... 104
The polytropic character of the land and its value(s) ................................. 106
Extended relatedness: of biography and agency of trees ........................... 111
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 114
Chapter Five
Beyond the house: komšiluk reassessed ............................................... 116
Komšiluk disputed ........................................................................................ 118
Komšiluk in the mountains of central Bosnia .............................................. 124
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The rhythms of komšiluk: hospitality, guesthood and compassion .............. 126
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 136
Chapter Six
Halal money: mahala and spheres of moral economy ....................... 138
Mahala: an overview ................................................................................... 139
Mahala in the mountains of central Bosnia ................................................ 141
Communal participation: beyond mahala ................................................... 143
Cooperation and mutuality: mahala as multiplied spheres of moral 144
economy .....................................................................................................
Komšiluk and cooperation ............................................................................ 145
Mahala ......................................................................................................... 152
Halal money and the morality of exchange ............................................... 155
Halal exchange ........................................................................................... 157
Moral economy and ritual: kurban bajram .................................................... 160
Kurban bajram in the mountains of central Bosnia ...................................... 161
The rhythms of kurban bajram in Brdo ........................................................ 163
The power of exchange networks .............................................................. 170
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 174
Chapter Seven
The rhythms of Islam ............................................................................. 176
Time and anthropology ............................................................................. 177
Seasonal morphologies: vegetative cycles and agricultural management .. 179
Winter period ............................................................................................. 180
Summer period .......................................................................................... 185
Morphology of the summer period: ritual calendar .................................. 186
Islamic rhythms .......................................................................................... 190
Everyday rhythms ....................................................................................... 191
The life cycle rhythms ................................................................................ 195
Religious rhythms ....................................................................................... 199
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Conclusion .................................................................................................. 206
Chapter Eight
Sacred landscapes contested .................................................................. 208
Holy sites in the Balkans: a theoretical overview ........................................ 210
Pilgrimage, contests and anthropology ...................................................... 213
Sacred landscape in Bosnia ........................................................................ 214
Karići ......................................................................................................... 215
Karići as a spiritual cradle .......................................................................... 220
The pilgrimage ........................................................................................... 221
Sacred sites in the making: contested meanings ......................................... 222
Prayers for rain: conversations and discontent in the mountains ............... 228
Recasting the sacred landscape? ................................................................. 231
Instead of conclusion: holy sites and appropriations of fortune ................ 237
Conclusion ........................................................................................ 240
Bibliography ............................................................................................. 246
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List of illustrations
Map 2.1 Map of the region where the fieldwork was conducted ..................................... 36
Picture 2.1 The Stećak gravestone in the village/The valley ............................................. 38
Picture 2.2 Collecting oral histories .................................................................................. 43
Picture 3.1 Stone markers/Fences .................................................................................... 58
Picture 3.2 Shifts in the architecture and materiality of the brick houses/Old wooden
sheep sheds are still in use ................................................................................................. 60
Picture 3.3 Workers on strike (March 2009) ..................................................................... 61
Figure 3.1 The gendered economic model of ‘milked money’ ........................................ 64
Map 3.1 Kinship and residence: agnatic groups and the houses in the Upper mahala ..... 67
Figure 3.2 Overview of the house units in the Upper mahala ........................................... 67
Figure 3.3 A case study of spatio-agnatic clustering ......................................................... 69
Figure 3.4 Formalised processes of land distribution, inheritance and marriage 74
procedures .........................................................................................................................
Figure 3.5 Marriages in the village - overview .................................................................. 74
Figure 3.6 The developmental dynamics of Zahid’s kuća ................................................ 76
Picture 4.1 Locally made ćilim and the house symbolism ................................................. 82
Picture 4.2 A shelf of purity ............................................................................................. 83
Picture 4.3 Freshly made bread ........................................................................................ 85
Figure 4.1 Name giving practice: ancestor and living persons ......................................... 95
Picture 4.4 Situated learning in practice .......................................................................... 97
Picture 4.5 The gender of the house: a Muslim peasant family in the 1950s .................. 99
Picture 4.6 Ramadan in the village mosque: mekteb .......................................................... 101
Picture 4.7 Selim’s calligraphic practice .......................................................................... 103
Figure 4.2 A genealogy of the land .................................................................................. 105
Map 5.1 The boundaries of komšiluk ................................................................................ 125
Picture 5.1 Sijelo ................................................................................................................ 129
Picture 5.2 Dženaza (funeral) unites Muslims from surrounding villages .......................... 133
Map 6.1 Spatial and symbolic boundaries of the village mahale ....................................... 142
Picture 6.1 Akcija in Brdo .................................................................................................. 144
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Picture 6.2 Moba: cooperative work and unanimous help between neighbours .............. 147
Figure 6.1 Hay making actor-by-actor data matrix .......................................................... 147
Figure 6.2 Network model of mutual help with the komšiluk .............................................. 148
Figure 6.3 Actor-by-actor data matrix of interactions within the komšiluk ........................ 149
Figure 6.4 A network model of the komšiluk ...................................................................... 151
Figure 6.5 A network model of interactions within mahala ................................................. 153
Picture 6.3 Exchange of help/Cooperation ..................................................................... 154
Figure 6.6 Generalised scheme of the halal exchange ...................................................... 158
Picture 6.4 Hospitality in the making/Barjam namaz (prayer) ........................................... 164
Picture 6.5 Rams, sacrifice and the poetics of manhood ................................................. 165
Picture 6.6 The practice of sacrifice ................................................................................. 165
Picture 6.7 The practice of sacrifice II. ............................................................................ 166
Picture 6.8 Implicit meanings embodied .......................................................................... 166
Picture 6.9 Cutting kurbani ................................................................................................ 169
Figure 7.1 Winter period according to Islamic calendar .................................................. 182
Figure 7.2 Winter period summarised .............................................................................. 184
Figure 7.3 Morphology of summer season ...................................................................... 188
Figure 7.4 Summer period summarised ........................................................................... 189
Picture 7.1 Islamic healer advertising her service in a local magazine ............................. 198
Picture 8.1 Šehitluci/Kurban kamen ...................................................................................... 215
Picture 8.2 Karići today ..................................................................................................... 217
Picture 8.3 Karići in the 1960s .......................................................................................... 218
Picture 8.4 Anti-Ajvatovica graffiti ................................................................................... 220
Picture 8.5 Presentation of a Turkish folklore group that performed during Ajvatovica
in 2009 .............................................................................................................................. 224
Picture 8.6 Bosnian and Turkish Islamic elites in local newspapers ................................. 235
Picture 8.7 A mosque built thanks to a donation from the United Arab Emirates .......... 236
Picture 8.8 Hajdar-dede Karić’s tomb .............................................................................. 238
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