While new acquaintances made simple presumptions about my identity, people whom I got to know over time tried to explain to themselves who I was and to figure out what national or ideological category I fit into. The fact that I was obviously Croatian and self-consciously not a nationalist was not enough; they had to sort out my position in relation to themselves, not simply regard me as a stranger and outsider. On my first visit to Sarajevo I got acquainted with a Catholic Croat family who helped me a lot and invited me to be with them for Sundays and Catholic holidays. I was happy to come, since it gave me the opportunity to meet people, to learn about their customs, share, and enjoy them. Only in 1996 did I realize that they were inviting me because they thought I should not be alone, without a family, on a holiday. They were treating me as one of them, while I was regarding them as different. In my eyes, they were very religious, going to mass, taking the holy sacrament, praying at home, and blessing the food. They noticed that I knew little about Catholicism, especially Croatian customs. One of the younger women in the family once told me that it must be because Croats were an absolute majority in Croatia that people like me were not so religious. At that moment, it struck me as a strange comment, especially since religion was making a tremendous comeback in Croatia, but later on I realized that she was right. Our identities are always shaped by our sociocultural context, and it matters whether you belong to a minority or to a majority group. The main purpose of her comment, however, was to explain to herself why I was not as religious as she was, since both of us were Croats. She was looking for a way to think of me as belonging to “us” rather than “them,” despite such important differences between us. As a Croat from Croatia, I could be nonreligious but nevertheless all right.
Another encounter with a Sarajevan Croat ended with my summary dismissal. He was a sociology professor who had done some work on war, so a mutual acquaintance suggested that we meet. The man treated me as if I were his student and told me in no uncertain terms that I could not do research on religious questions in Sarajevo. I never understood why, and I felt bad after this conversation. Later, when I transcribed the interview, I saw something I did not remember. In telling me of his time as a student in Zagreb, he emphasized how arrogant the Croatian Croats were toward him, a Bosnian Croat, and how the Croatians always thought that they understood Bosnia, although they did not. His comment condemning my interest in religions in Sarajevo came in this context. Again I was identified as a Croatian Croat, but this time characterized as an ignorant and arrogant person, thinking that the explanation of the war in Bosnia could be found in religious questions.
Those Muslims I became closest to, because of mutual sympathies and proof that we were willing to help each other, often said, “Look at you, you are like one of us,” although it was obvious to all of us that I was neither Muslim nor Sarajevan. This exclamation came usually when I did something in a way that they were used to. For instance, I preferred to drink coffee out of a fildžan (a small coffee cup without a handle) rather than out of a šoljica (demitasse, a small coffee cup with a handle). Traditionally, a fildžan is a Muslim coffee cup, and a šoljica a Christian one. To ask a non-Muslim guest what she would prefer had always been a matter of politeness, an adaptation to the frequent social interaction among members of different ethnoreligious communities. In the former Yugoslavia, the rest of Europe was perceived as a sociocultural ideal. Since the Italians and the French drank coffee out of demitasse cups, secularized people tended to see the fildžan as backward or slightly exotic. During the war, some anti-Muslim citizens regarded using a fildžan as a primitive custom, and in some homes I was told with a chilly tone that they did not have any fildžani. In Muslim houses, by choosing the Muslim coffee cup I demonstrated to my new acquaintances that I was open to them and accepting of their customs. Of course, I had absolutely no idea beforehand that this mattered; it was just a natural part of my anthropological attitude and curiosity to learn new customs, as I tried to explain. But, whatever my intentions were, by adopting simple everyday ways, I was also signaling national sympathies.
Once I was perceived as being “like one of us,” I was presented that way to others. To most Sarajevans, my name was obviously Croatian; it was Slavic, non-Muslim, and not the Serbian variant, Jovana. My accent, too, often needed an explanation when a Muslim introduced me to another Muslim: “Ivana comes from Zagreb, but she is like one of us,” or “She is Croatian, but she is all right.” This was the usual way of relating to someone whom one liked but who belonged to a different ethnoreligious or national group.
Being one of “us” did not always necessarily signify a national category. Some alternative collective identities were forged during the war; the solidarity between all Sarajevans who stayed in the city was among the strongest. Toward the end of the war, when Sarajevans were becoming annoyed by all the foreigners coming to their city after the siege was over, a Muslim friend introduced me to a colleague who was to help me with my research by saying, “Ivana is doing research about war in Sarajevo, and she has been here with us from the beginning, through all the worst.” When we left, I pointed out to her that I actually had not been in Sarajevo through the very worst, but she cut me off and explained that she had to say so because at that point people were so sensitive and the man would not have helped me otherwise.
During my fieldwork I met a lot of people with whom I never established closer relations, although I conducted interviews with them. This pattern was characteristic of my interactions with Muslim “internally displaced persons”11 from Eastern Bosnia. We found no common interests, probably because they were not in the focus of my research, and neither they nor I cultivated a relationship. I interviewed several Serbs and would have liked to get to know them better. But the Serbs were really the losers in Sarajevo; they were scared to stick out, so I did not insist on more meetings. I had a feeling that frequent visits from a stranger would have called attention to them in the neighborhood and aroused suspicious gossip.
Had I been of Serbian or Muslim origin, I would have been able to gather different material, but it would still have been incomplete and affected by my origin. As my host pointed out to me when I said that Croats seemed to be so negative toward Muslims while it was not the case the other way around: “You should only hear what your Muslims say about Croats in front of me!” Of course, I could imagine, because I knew what Croats were saying about Muslims and what Muslims were saying about Serbs, so it was unlikely that it would be any different the other way around.
The Ethics of Research on Suffering
I started my fieldwork during the Croatian war, spending two weeks in Zagreb and its surroundings in October 1991, and then one month in March 1993 traveling to Croatian and Herzegovinian front lines in Nova Gradiška, Dubrovnik, Ravno, Mostar, and Zadar. In the autumn of 1993 I spent three months in Zagreb preparing my way to Bosnia and interviewing Sarajevans who were in Zagreb at that time. Fieldwork in Sarajevo, which is central to this analysis, was conducted during five different periods: two weeks in September 1994; one month in March 1995; two weeks in September 1995; three months in the spring of 1996; and two weeks in September 1996. All in all, I spent six months in Sarajevo, and an additional six months in Croatia and Herzegovina.
My stays in Sarajevo were so short, especially in 1994 and 1995, because of the circumstances of the war and the limited duration of UN identity cards. When I once complained about not being able to spend a whole year in the field, as was conventional among anthropologists, my host told me that living in Sarajevo would make it impossible to do research. I could write a very good war diary, or even a novel, he said, but I could not do social-scientific research. I believe that he was right, because several times during my fieldwork I experienced the urge to abandon my research and do something more immediately useful. The rather abstract humanitarian project of documenting and analyzing people’s responses to political violence did not seem meaningful under the circumstances. I felt compelled to get a job that helped people directly, perhaps with a humanitarian agency or where I could use my skills in a more practical way. Many of my Sarajevan friends whose studies had been interrupted