Flexibility of Favors - Rethinking Informality and Care in Post-Yugoslav Contexts

This seminar explores how veze, semi-formal relations in former Yugoslav countries, have been interpreted in social theory and in everyday life in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro. From an ethnographic perspective, there has to be a meaningful, contemporary reason for people to persistently pursue favors and engage in shady bureaucratic and economic practices, which has nothing to do with “primitivism”, “backwardness”, “mentality”, or inability to shake off the “chains” of socialist past. One such reason has been found in the faults of the post-socialist and post-war political and economic systems, while another has been found in senses of moral duty and local ideas about what constitutes a good person.

On the basis of ethnographic research, this seminar aims to link the focus on the social and moral investments made through veze with their systemic effects on the organization of life and wellbeing in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Montenegro. Placing culturalist, systemic, and moral explanations of veze in a conversation, the seminar will address how veze affected people’s senses of self as flexible and active beings, while encouraging socio-political hierarchies and inequalities.