SAFET HADŽIMUHAMEDOVIĆ, 2018. Waiting for Elijah – Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape. New York: Berghahn, 294pp. ISBN: ISBN 978-1-78533-857-1

“Syncretic Poetry” and Particular Synergies: A review of Safet Hadžimuhamedović’s Waiting for Elijah

Keywords: uncertainty, schizochronotopia, time, In-Other, syncretism, festivals, former Yugoslavia

While moving through the introduction of Safet Hadžimuhamedović’s engaging work of research and resistance, readers familiar with anthropology can be forgiven for wondering what realms of the discipline the author decided not to engage with in Waiting for Elijah – Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (2018; Volume One in “Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials, and Homecoming”). The expertly-crafted opening salvo of encounters-to-come moves through (cosmological) time, ethnicity, nationalism, post-conflict sociocultural considerations, waiting, friction, a multi-dimensional meditation of landscape, and “cross-temporal syncretic forms.” Indeed, “syncretic” is a concept Hadžimuhamedović returns to repeatedly in a treatise that delves into the interplay of encounter, time, and proximity with(in) one particular landscape of Bosnia today. In particular, “encounter” comes to encompass for the author “exchanges, alliances and intimate proximities between the bodies of ‘different’ characters” (2018, 234-235). In assembling its own (self-reflexive) syncretism, the introduction (re)turns the reader to the works of Tim Ingold, Michel De Certeau, Alfred Gell, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Anna Tsing, Ghassan Hage, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Their voices and Hadžimuhamedović’s initial remarks build a frame of engagement for what the author refers to as “the Field.” A field that is host to the celebrations for the titular “Elijah” – a georgic harvest festival day that relates a nexus of waiting, time, uncertainty, and communitas.

Clearly enjoying and employing a double entendre, Hadžimuhamedović follows with his interlocutors in taking “the Field” as general reference to the Field of Gacko, a wide plain in the southeastern highlands of Bosnia, while also signaling the more abstracted notion of the “field” with regard to ethnographic engagement and participant observation. Refreshingly, Hadžimuhamedović carefully unpacks and articulates his asserted structuring of multi-sited ethnography within the Field of Gacko thereby opening the Field to multiple considerations and “disruptions” (2018, 30) of the “site” concept. A concept that is thus found in time, in the virtual, and in the physical manifestations of geography and post-war ethno-religious politics today. As such, “multi-sited” means in one regard to follow “time through space” (2018, 31) or to move through “different locales, which experienced no active interchange” (2018, 32). “From following place through time,” writes the author, “the investigation thus extended to following time (the annual cycle) through space: it was like piecing together a time puzzle using a particular multi-sited approach [that] allowed for more elaborate questions” (2018, 4).

In looking and listening for answers to these elaborate questions, Hadžimuhamedović discerns alternative dimensions of the Field and develops a discursive toolkit that speaks along the lines of “sacroscapes,” “ethnoscapes,” “chronotopes,” and, “In-Other.” While I will refrain from any spoilers regarding the scapes, I will touch on two other concepts from the toolkit. For Hadžimuhamedović, chronotope – first used by Mikhail Bakhtin to indicate the indivisibility of spatial and temporal categories (2018, 58) – is employed “as a heuristic device to think of the divergent social currents in the Field” thus each “chronotope has its own story” (2018, 58). Moreover, he introduces that “people and landscapes are sometimes trapped between discursive timespaces and thus ‘schizochronotopic’ (from the Greek Σχίζειν – skhizein – ‘to split’)” (2018, 58). As intended by the author, both chronotope and schizochronotopic frame the reading of what he refers to as “the syncretic poetry of the Field’s warm season” (2018, 7) that is the central theme of Chapter Five.

However, a brief endnote touches on a reservation that I apparently share with one of his colleagues who “reproached [Hadžimuhamedović] for ‘pathologizing’ the Field through the apparent similarity of the terms ‘schizochronotopia’ and ‘schizophrenia’” (2018, 77-78). Certainly not unique to Waiting for Elijah, it is a valid point that cuts across the social sciences and speaks to an often uncontested habit of medicalizing terminology. Moreover, this reaches out to another concern with schizochronotopic as reflective of what his interlocutors experience: would they see themselves in such a word? Does the term retain viability or veracity if released from what is, at times, an academically dense work? Hadžimuhamedović himself notes the “anthropological advantage of spatial and temporal closeness and in-depth inductive analysis helps researchers avoid the abyss of ideological projects” (2018, 115). While he may be speaking of “ideological projects” in a different sense than myself here, I cannot help but wonder if “schizochronotopic” does not also further deepen the “abyss.” Without wanting to sound overly critical, we (anthropologists) must constantly question what is the use of “closeness” if when we seek to amplify life-worlds we do so in a manner that defies transparency for a spectrum of audiences.

Speaking of closeness, if Chapter Three is “the heart of the book” (2018, 6), then Hadžimuhamedović’s concept of “In-Other” is the heart of Chapter Three. As his development of In-Other runs for several pages and engages several conceptual horizons, I will but excerpt a brief selection:

Given that I want to primarily focus on difference that is not positioned as antithetical, but inclusive of proximity, difference reiterated by my interlocutors as integral to the meaning making of the Self, I invent here another handy term, ‘In-Other’, which should be read interchangeably as a noun, verb and an adjective.

…

I tell my Self and grasp the flux of my Self by way of In-Other, which includes all the ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ outsideness by which my body is anchored into the