
































Grid Desires, or How to Tame a Three-Headed Dragon 

Review by Safet HadžiMuhamedović

Yearnings in the Meantime: 'Normal Lives' and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex

by Stef Jansen

Berghahn Books, 2015

Hopes have histories – they may turn into yearnings.

(p. 168)

When the spatiotemporal anchors of daily lives begin to disintegrate, they may become the backbone of

not only the structural, but also the moral dissatisfaction with the present. The emphasis placed on the

absence of these life-frames, the desire for their return, congeals into a novel, affective and discursive,

political request. Detailing the qualities of such expectations in one Sarajevo suburb, Yearnings in the

Meantime confirms  Stef  Jansen’s  position  as  the  leading  anthropologist  working  in  Bosnia.  This

focused and thoroughly researched monograph builds upon his earlier concerns with the temporality of

home, nationalism, borders and migration. First and foremost, it reads as a convincing ‘critique from

within’ of the contemporary Bosnian political system, a never-ending transition rooted in the Dayton

Agreement, which is said to have officially ended the 1990s war. From this vantage point, Jansen is

then able to raise important questions for the anthropology of the state, developing a case for a shift

away  from what  he  calls  the  ‘libertarian  paradigm’,  which  ‘posits  the  state  predominantly  as  an

imposed externality’ and/or ‘documents people’s resilience in opposition to, or oblivious to, statecraft

thus conceived’ (p. 105).

Dobrinja, the spatial backdrop of the book, is a neighbourhood of late-Yugoslav apartment blocks in

suburban Sarajevo, built, for the most part, shortly before and after the 1984 Winter Olympic Games.



Since  the  ceremonial  ratification  of  the  peace  accords  at  the  Wright-Patterson  Air  Force  Base  in

Dayton, Ohio, the suburb remained divided by the ‘inter-entity’ border, which imbued an ethnonational

logic into the project of a ‘multi-ethnonational’ state. The experimental concoction followed the lines of

the brutal ethnic engineering and resulted in ‘three largely nationally homogenised fiefdoms’ (p. 195),

which Jansen analytically distances from the remembered/expected ‘normality’, by referring to it as

‘Dayton BiH’.  He locates  the  refusal  of  this  ‘Dayton BiH’ in  both the  popular  and elite  political

discourses, but demonstrates how they significantly diverge. The popular Dobrinja position against it

lies in the lament/request for ‘normal lives’ in a ‘normal state’. On the other hand, the political state

structures are partly maintained, despite the popular dissatisfaction, by way of blaming the predicament

of ‘Dayton BiH’ in which consensus is beyond reach (pp. 197-8). This critique, contextualised and

nuanced, is a far cry from Robert Hayden’s contentious support for the dissolution of the state based on

‘what people are willing to accept’ (2002: 219). Jansen shows how the same individuals who dismiss

Dayton BiH structures may become co-opted into its perpetuation.

The once Olympic, now divided Dobrinja was thus seen to represent the heyday of the old state and the

troubles of the new one. To understand why its inhabitants diagnosed their lives as the abnormal, not-

quite-postwar Dayton BiH Meantime (pp.  174, 183),  Jansen turns to several stations of Dobrinja’s

‘emic histories’.  Chapters  4 and 5 discuss the diagnosis of the  Dayton affliction (also rendered as

‘Daytonitis’) through two main ‘symptoms’, the lack of system and the lack of forward movement. The

comparative frameworks for both of these absences are found in the ‘histories of hope’, the memories

of ‘gridded’ and ‘forward-moving’ lives in the socialist Yugoslavia, but also the resistance to the sudden

dissipation of ‘grids’ during the wartime, a ‘will to grid’ as it were. Jansen is careful not to portray the

Dobrinja yearnings for ‘normal lives’ as merely a nostalgia for socialism. They rather ‘shaped up on the

intersection of the “ought” and the “was”’ (p. 163) … ‘the intersection of both histories of hope (i.e.,

futures once had, both thwarted and fulfilled) and projected normative paths’ (p. 49).

The book is organised into three parts, the first two dealing respectively with the configurations of

‘normal  lives’ and  the  ‘Daytonitis’ affliction  in  Dobrinja.  The  third  part  discusses  the  uncanny

coexistence of yearning for a ‘normal’ state and the co-optation into the Dayton political constellation.

Jansen does an excellent job of leading the reader through the everyday drama of ‘immobile’ Dayton

BiH suburb,  its  bus  stops,  wages and pensions,  schooling and local  council  meetings.  The clearly

written and organised manuscript makes every attempt to open this otherwise dense information to

wider audiences. The ethnographic content is an illustrative argument in itself, and we are warned not



to expect:

stories  of  spectacular  wartime  suffering,  resistance  or  revolutionary  struggles.  The

nonspectacular, frustratingly unchanging predicament of living in the Dayton Meantime

featured centrally in how people tried to make political sense of their lives. (p. 42)

The most evocative and analytically valuable of these everyday situations, discussed in Chapter 2, is

the image of people waiting for the public transport whose erratic schedule becomes one of the many

metaphors for the abnormality of the state. This allows Jansen to discuss the discourse of normality and

the affective positions that simultaneously draw on the socialist past and project a futurity beyond the

‘Dayton  Meantime’.  He links  such small  instances  of  waiting  to  a  ‘form of  meta-waiting  for  the

movement statecraft was supposed to entail’ (p. 16).

Grid desire

Anthropology has recognised the importance of the ‘bottom-up’ understanding of the state and located

governmentality in the mundane encounters between people and stately routines (cf. Sharma and Gupta

2006: 11-14). What happens when the ‘eyes of the state’ are not an obstacle to, but the main request of

popular dissent? Jansen introduces the notion of gridding, an orientation towards the various ‘ordering

structures’ of the state in the Dobrinja inhabitants’ references to ‘normal lives’. His concern with ‘grids’

speaks  to  the  work  of  James  Scott,  but  makes  a  significant  variation  to  the  theme.  Rather  than

emphasising the governmentality of imposing state geometries and their evasion (p. 104), he locates in

Dobrinja a yearning for the return of the normalising effects that the state structures are seen to have

had on daily lives and expectations from the future. I see this concept of ‘grid desire’ as the book’s

central theoretical contribution, for which he notes:

A decade and a half after the war, rather than displaying outrage against high modernist

tendencies  to  ‘see  like  a  state’,  Dobrinjci  still  desired  more  than  the  occasional  eye

contact with it. Can we please see the state, they wondered, and, especially, can the state

please see us? They were clamouring for legibility and thus called forth the state as a

‘hope-generating machine’ through desires for protection and possibility. (p. 154)

This  conundrum is  developed  into  a  critique  of  the  anthropological  project.  Jansen  proposes  that

anthropologists of the state have ‘become experts in grid evasion’ (p. 107), under the umbrella of what

he calls the ‘libertarian paradigm’, which is lodged between an approach to the state as imposed order

and the parallel hope of counteracting it by highlighting bodies of knowledge not fully compatible with

the state (p. 105). Ultimately, he argues, it ‘facilitates the replication of people’s hope against the state

in the search for our discipline’s continued relevance’ (p. 106). The example of Dobrinja points to a



seemingly paradoxical situation where a desire for the (‘normal’) state becomes a resistance to the

‘Dayton BiH’, which is, for better or for worse, also some kind of state. ‘Dayton BiH’ produces its own

grids  too,  albeit  ones  widely  perceived  as  deficient,  abnormal  and  almost  imponderable.  The

organigram of the government institutions (p. 140) partly reveals the labyrinthine body of this ‘three-

headed’ Dayton monster. Its grids also aim to standardise, particularly in ethnonational terms. Jansen’s

interlocutors then do seem to be resisting these ordering schemes, but they do it ‘with a barrage of

language of stateness in cafés, at the barber’s and in trolleybuses’ (p. 130).

Ungridding (beyond the state)

The remembered ‘normality’, as linked to the structural possibilities provided by the state, became

obvious with the ‘shock of sudden ungridding’ (p. 114). Chapter 3 discusses the wartime disruption of

‘grids’ and struggles to retain some ‘sense of normality’ by re-establishing them. Here, Jansen makes

use of some very effective archival material, such as the wartime logbook of a local school (p. 118). As

the grids came to a halt, the inhabitants of Dobrinja ‘became conscious of the “temporal structure” that

had – largely unnoticed – governed their mundane practices’ (p. 101).

I should note that my reading of Yearnings in the Meantime is also a comparative effort, as the book

was fresh off the press when I completed my doctoral thesis, which examined the practices of waiting

in  the  Field  of  Gacko,  a  landscape  in  the  southeastern  Bosnian  highlands  (2016).  There,  too,  the

temporal structures of ‘normal lives’ suddenly gained stronger affective and discursive dimensions. Let

me  briefly  introduce  some fascinating  similarities  between  Dobrinja  and Gacko,  which  reveal  the

theoretical potential of ‘ungridding’ and ‘grid desire’, but also draw important lines of distinction to

contextualise Jansen’s contribution.

The rural Gacko, arguably, did not ‘see’ much of the Yugoslav state, but it was torn out of a different

‘grid’ in the early 1990s. Whereas the Dobrinja inhabitants became aware of and yearned for the daily

rhythms  facilitated  by  the  state  and  its  provisions,  the  people  of  Gacko  turned  to  the  traditional

calendar, its rituals and festivals, as well as the communication and movement they enabled. In both

places, this awareness first required what Sara Ahmed has called moments of disorientation – ‘bodily

experiences that throw the world up, or throw the body from its ground’ (2006: 157). As in Dobrinja,

the  absences  in  Gacko affectively  revealed  the  supporting  structures  of  life,  which  were  carefully

idealised into a desired image of being in the world. Normal lives, Jansen notes, ‘appear only as an

absence, as the affectively overcharged object of evocations of what “was” and what “ought to be”’ (p.



43). Of course people waited for the bus in the Yugoslav Dobrinja (p. 79), just as Gacko’s subsistence

economy bore its own significant hardships. However, the past was remembered selectively to carve

out a position against the present political predicament.

Recently, after our flights from the Sarajevo Airport were cancelled due to (yet another) prolonged

period of severe smog, my friend Belma remarked: ‘Obviously, Sarajevo always had a problem with

smog, yet, while everyone is aware of that, they all somehow manage to blame the state and its corrupt

politicians’. Collective ‘selective memory’ is thus employed as a political argument, and Jansen’s book

speaks to this process. In Dobrinja, the normality of Yugoslav grids was summoned to destabilise the

normalising process of ‘Dayton BiH’ gridding. Although its unpredictable public transport became a

routine experience, people still ‘insisted that this should be seen as “an unusual state of affairs”’ (p. 70).

This alliance between the past and the future against the present was visible in the Field of Gacko too,

where people anchored their ‘normality’ in the celebrations of George’s and Elijah’s days, which were

shared by the Gurbeti, the Muslims and the Serbs. They waited to wait for George and Elijah like they

once did, just as the people of Dobrinja waited to wait for the bus like they once did. The political

qualities of such waiting and ‘nonresistance’ in Dobrinja are examined in Chapter 6.

Jansen does not attempt to draw conclusions pertinent to spaces other than this fieldwork location,

which I do not see as a shortfall. The situation would be unduly complicated by the inclusion of a rural

or a differently urban locale. He admits that gridding does not have to be linked with statecraft (p. 73),

as well as that his approach privileges ‘secular spatiotemoralities’ (p. 186). For the people of Dobrinja,

he fittingly argues that the ‘[s]ocialist self-management had shaped the rhythms and trajectories of their

lives more so than those of, say, many Bosnians in villages or in the old Sarajevo mahale’ (167). I have

shown  that  the  temporal  structures  in  rural  Gacko  were  maintained  through  taskscapes,  rituals,

festivities, sworn kinship and household visitations (2016), while others have written on the importance

of  the  neighhbourhood  rhythms  (see  Sorabji  2008).  These  different  spaces  were  also  tenanted  by

different ‘ghosts’. Jansen notes the bodily movements through landscapes of ruination, ‘amongst such

landmarks  of  Yugoslav  socialist  forward  movement’ (p.  182)  and  I  would  have  enjoyed  a  more

developed discussion of the affective potential of these remnants (cf. Navaro-Yashin 2012).

Another  line  of  distinction  between the  different  ‘Dayton BiH’ geographies  is  to  be found in  the

approaches to identitarian discourses. Jansen notes:

Ultimately, a lament of the demise of Sarajevan multiculturalism and an insistence on its



persistence are two sides of the same coin. Likewise, an ‘orthodox’ focus on differences

between  people  affiliated  with  nationality  groupings  and  a  ‘heterodox’ one  on  fluid,

hybrid positionings that bridge those differences both remain within the identitarian doxa

of Dayton BiH (Bourdieu 1982: 133). In both approaches, a unidimensional emphasis on

questions of (ethno)national ‘culture’ makes its inhabitants appear predominantly, or even

exclusively, in the identitarian register institutionalised in the Dayton configuration and

consolidated in much foreign media reporting. (p. 11)

Most of the ‘ethnies’ constitutionalised through Dayton have had well over a century to ‘brew’ through

various political systems. The socialist Yugoslav ethnic provisions in particular have been unevenly

amalgamated onto religious communities. I have noticed that ethnonyms in rural Bosnia have often

been reworked into a shorthand for the religious communities. A ritual of one community often does

not make sense without the other. Elijah’s Day, for example, is primarily known for being shared by

Serbs  and  Muslims.  It  would  be  unfair  to  claim that  their  ‘fluid,  hybrid  positionings’ are  simply

confirmations of the Dayton constellation. ‘Syncretic’ and shared traditions, like the Gacko calendar,

can teach us that continuity does not always have to resist change.

The Dayton dragon

The second part of the book explains the dissatisfaction with ‘Dayton BiH’, felt as an absence of a

system and a spatiotemporal entrapment. Its structural dispersion and elusiveness made petitions to the

state extremely difficult (p. 137). The inhabitants of Dobrinja felt that ‘they were collectively stuck in a

Dayton Meantime’ (p. 161), without the grids needed to move forward. Jansen shows that the Dayton

ruling  class  was  reproduced through  this  elusiveness  and a  web of  hegemonic  dependencies.  The

‘ordinary people’, the same ones who opposed Dayton, were, willy-nilly, co-opted into its structures

(see Chapter 6).

Symbolically captained by the three-headed presidency, with each head claiming representation over

one ‘constitutive’ ethnonational group, Dayton evokes the most ominous Indo-European cosmological

threat, the three-headed dragon. It is difficult to subdue. If only one head is severed, another one will

grow in its place. The successful act of slaying, however, is productive: it allows time to resume. With

it,  the  annual  cycle  opens  its  doors  to  vernal  fertility,  to  the  reproduction  of  humans  and  their

landscapes. In Gacko, and throughout the Balkans, the intricate rituals on the sixth of May used to mark

George’s defiance of the beast.



In Jansen’s accounts, people of Dobrinja perceived Dayton BiH as an obstacle to collective movement

(p. 174). As an analogy to the dragons of the traditional calendars elsewhere, Dayton was the reign of

the (three-headed) presidency, which forestalled the progression of time. The time Dobrinja yearned for

was the advancement of socialist modernity instead of a cosmic cycle. Jansen observes:

It was living-in-Dayton BiH that constituted their predicament, they impressed on me, for

it  reduced  people  to  ‘surviving’,  entrapped  in  BiH’s  borders  and  suspended  in  the

Meantime.  As opposed to  ‘normal  lives’,  which would entail  spatiotemporal  forward

movement, it was living in a waiting room, without it being quite clear what the waiting

was for and how long it would last. (p. 185)

Suburban Dobrinja should grasp the lessons of rural  Gacko. The demanding pursuit  of taming the

dragon, of whatever provenance, first requires a re-establishment of the basic temporal grids and a

ritual invocation of the future. The chthonic being, however, needs to be slayed so that (normal, any)

life may continue.

Fieldwork for  Yearnings in the Meantime was chiefly conducted between 2008 and 2010, whilst the

Preface and Epilogue also discuss the more recent popular uprisings and the establishments of citizen

assemblies (plenums) across Bosnia. A more comprehensive inclusion of latter developments would

also have to reflect the growing demarcation of the political margins in Dobrinja, as with the erection

of  Gavrilo  Princip’s  statue  by  the  Republika  Srpska  officials  to  mark  the  centenary  of  the  1914

assassinations. Judging by Jansen’s prolific and consistent scholarship so far, we will not have to wait

long to witness a further treatment of this matter.

In the end, perhaps contrary to the author’s plan,  the book does  give hope for the anthropological

project. Its arguments are pertinent not only to the understanding of the spatiotemporal fractures so

palpable in Bosnia, but also to our engagement with the state and, I would argue, with a much more

diverse world of ‘grid loss’ and ‘grid desire’.

References Cited

Ahmed, Sara

2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press

HadžiMuhamedović, Safet

2016.  Waiting  for  Elijah:  Time and Encounter  in  a  Bosnian Landscape.  PhD diss.,  Goldsmiths,



University of London

Hayden, Robert

2002. ‘Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South East Asia and the

Balkans’. Current Anthropology 43(2): 205-231

Sharma, Aradhana and Akhil Gupta (eds.)

2006. The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell

Sorabji, Cornelia

2008. ‘Bosnian Neighbourhoods Revisited: Tolerance, Commitment and Komšiluk in Sarajevo’. In

Frances  Pine  and Joao de  Pina-Cabral  (eds.)  On the  Margins  of  Religion.  New York:  Berghahn

Books, 97-112

Navaro-Yashin, Yael

2012.  The  Make-Believe  Space:  Affective  Geography  in  a  Postwar  Polity.  Durham,  NC:  Duke

University Press

Safet  HadžiMuhamedović is  an  anthropologist  of  religion  with  a  broad  range  of  interests  in

syncretism,  landscapes,  temporality,  home,  theories  of  affect,  historicity  and  agency.  His  doctoral

thesis Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (2016), discussed the post-war

echoes of syncretic and shared seasonal celebrations in the southeastern Bosnian highlands. Safet

obtained his PhD in Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London, MPhil in Anthropology from

the University of Cambridge and BA degrees in History of Art and Sociology from the University of

Sarajevo and Kenyon College. Since 2012, he has taught various social science courses at Goldsmiths,

SOAS and Goethe University of Frankfurt.

© 2016 Safet HadžiMuhamedović


