Managing Ambiguity: Study by Čarna Brković published

Čarna Brković, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, has just published her anthropological study "Managing Ambiguity. How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina" with Berghahn Books. It is volume 31 of the European Association of Social-Anthropologists (EASA) book series.

About the content

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. The study 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.

For further information, please see the Berghahn Books website.

Author

Čarna Brković is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies. She co-edited Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Routledge, 2016) and won the 2015 SIEF Young Scholar Prize.

Čarna Brković: Managing Ambiguity. How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017.

208 pages, 2 figures, 1 illus., bibliog., index
ISBN: 978-1-78533-414-6 $120.00/£85.00 Hb
eISBN: 978-1-78533-415-3 eBook

Cover: © 2017 – Berghahn Books