Shane Brennan / Marc Herzog, eds, Turkey and the Politics of National Identity. Social, Economic and Cultural Transformation

Abstract

tive academic methodology as ‘refl exive ethnography’ (13). He, however, also relies on other theories and methodologies, such as those of the social anthropologist George Marcus and his writings on places. Halilovich considers ‘place’ to be a factor that contributes to people’s identities and to be a concept that is never fi xed or static. Furthermore, he refers to the Foucauldian term ‘popular memory’. For example, he shows how the popular memories of survivors of the Prijedor and Srebrenica massacres now living in St. Louis, Missouri, have even become part of an offi cial commemoration, initiated in 2005. In sum, most of Halilovich’s fi ndings derive from personal stories collected in interviews and related sources. While he might have problematized his methodological approach somewhat more clearly, his main argument is easily comprehensible even to someone who has no profound knowledge of ethnographic methods. The bott om-up perspective in particular makes Places of Pain an interesting and moving read. Halilovich employs many Bosnian words to describe local habits and traditions; he also includes a great variety of personal stories and anecdotes about forced displacement. Through these testimonies he accesses broader developments. While this approach does not provide a comprehensive overview of the confl ict and its consequences, it conveys its diverse—often horrifying—impact and consequences in diff erent places. Sejo, for example, one of the interviewees, now works as a nurse in Austria, but had been a student when his village was raided and ethnically cleansed by Serb militias. Nowadays, a quarter of a century after his forced exodus, he is still searching for the remains of his father among Bosnian mass graves. Halilovich’s personal commitment to the transformed places in Bosnia and to the displaced persons he interviewed is of great value to his book. At the same time, precisely because of this involvement, he may have produced a too nostalgic, indeed too rosy image of multicultural eastern Bosnian villages before the war. And in the last chapter, where the author seeks to underline yet again the diversity of forced displacement, he suddenly switches to a gender perspective. Although the chapter incorporates insights from the previous chapters in an interesting manner, its sudden, exclusive focus on women comes across as an abrupt shift. Perhaps it would have been more eff ective to have integrated insights about gender with the conceptual approach taken in the other chapters. Ever drawn to testimony, Halilovich introduces three new personal stories even in the book’s conclusion. He might have included these accounts earlier, which would have improved the structure of the book. By adding them at the end, he returns once more to his most pervasive theme: the immense diversity of displaced persons and their life stories. In Halilovich’s words: ‘what emerges from the heterogeneity and diversity of the performative enactments of memories and identities is a distinct patt ern, a common point of reference’ (231)—namely, the ubiquitous infl uence of translocalism.