Searching for Healing Amidst the Genocidal Logic: Fragmentary Exiled Bosnian (Im)Possibilities

Abstract

This PhD Dissertation is situated within the domains of political and psychological anthropology, guided by a decolonial perspective partially inspired by the psychiatric-political works of Frantz Fanon. I engage with Bosnians in their fifties and sixties living in Belgium and the Netherlands who were forcedly exiled from Eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina during the genocidal violence in the early 1990s. Examining how the enduring and morphing impacts of this mass violence manifest as suturing knots of health disruptions, I foreground how there is an undergirding genocidal logic extending far beyond singular spatiotemporal events. People were searching for healing from the ongoing disruptions in their health and well-being through various healing modalities of which I highlight the practice of struna (stomach ailment realignment) and psychotherapeutic encounters. In challenging the prevailing trauma frameworks, I critically examine how ‘trauma’ is approached, disseminated, reconfigured, experienced, and reconceptualised within broader discourses and lived experiences. Both a ‘trauma-literalist’ (as literal neurological imprints or delayed and solidified representation) and a ‘trauma-constructivist’ (as a product of professional technologies and disciplining practices) perspective imply a binary either/or understanding. There has been an ongoing movement towards depoliticising mass violence into personal trauma, which through different healing modalities but predominantly through therapeutic encounters, people were made to understand as implying a personal responsibility for wanting to get better. Thus, a ‘failure to heal’, however partial, became an individual failure which erased the political interstitiality of exiled Bosnians and a minimally threefold impossibility that they lived within—the impossibility of being Bosnian, the impossibility of Bosnia as a legitimate country, and the impossibility of full healing. Stemming from intertwining diachronic personal, familial, and more formal research experiences, I argue that such either/or thinking is ruinous and that searching for healing is better understood through a both/and perspective that foregrounds the knotting personal and political dimensions. I use the partially analytical mind-body-duša (soul) composition to highlight lived realities and to approach ongoing reconfigurations of subjectivity and affect. I term the type of research and writing endeavored here, ‘Intimate Fragmentary Ethnography’. This points to lived experiences of attempted annihilation and the gaps, aporias, and ruptures through which people try to make (historical) sense and to heal, how anthropologists can approach silenced lived histories, how we all co-construct knowledge herein, how writing can be done otherwise, and the trust and care work that this implies. This approach also highlights the intimate households that I was allowed to co-inhabit where the mind-body-duša health disruptions and reconfigurations were experienced most strongly.