Managing Ambiguity

How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78533-414-6
Verlag: Berghahn Books

Buch, Englisch, Band 31, 208 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 462 g

Reihe: EASA Series

Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare.

Managing Ambiguity follows how neoliberal insistence on local community, flexibility, and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back, and how this fostered a specific mode of power.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brkovi¿, ¿Arna

Brkovic, Carna

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Staatsbürgerkunde, Staatsbürgerschaft, Zivilgesellschaft
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Figures

Acknowledgments

Note on transliteration

Introduction

PART I: PERSONHOOD

Chapter 1. Creating Knowledge about Others: Locating, Knowing “by Sight”, and Ethnography

Chapter 2. Favors Reproduce Social Personhood

PART II: CITIZENSHIP

Chapter 3. Local Community and Ethical Citizenship: Neoliberal Reconfigurations of Social Protection

Chapter 4. Pursuing Favors within a Local Community

PART III: POWER

Chapter 5. Managing Ambiguity in Social Protection

Chapter 6. Navigating Ambiguity: the Moveopticon

Conclusion: Morality, Interest, and Sociality in the Global Postsocialist Condition

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Brkovic, Carna
Carna Brkovic is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg. She co-edited Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and won the 2015 SIEF Young Scholar Prize.