On Not Moving Well Enough

In this article I investigate ethnographically how people in the outskirts of Sarajevo attempted to reason their way through a widespread sense of persistent “pattering in place” in postwar, postsocialist, post-Yugoslav Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna i Hercegovina [BiH]). Concerns with household futures were explicitly contextualized within the everyday geopolitics of life in a semiprotectorate presumably on the “Road into Europe.” Rather than conceiving of their predicament in terms of “crisis,” my interlocutors diagnosed and criticized spatiotemporal entrapment through a politicizing understanding of the nesting of these different scales. Yet this politicization ultimately had depoliticizing effects, encouraging waiting rather than collective action. At this particular historical conjuncture, I have discerned an economy of temporal reasoning where yearnings for what were called “normal lives” evoked linear, forward movement as an imperative. Acknowledging that yearnings have their own histories, I investigate how a specific valuation of existential mobility along linear temporal templates shaped up at the intersection of, on the one hand, past futures—recalled from lives in Yugoslav socialist BiH and during the 1992–1995 war—and, on the other hand, futures projected as part of BiH’s ongoing “Road into Europe.”