Knocking on my neighbour's door: On metamorphoses of sociality in rural Bosnia

The idea of neighbourhood (koms?iluk) has been widely discussed in the anthropology of

Bosnia. In the hegemonic academic discourse metaphorical usage prevailed over ethnographic

examination. The dominant perspective portrays koms?iluk as a social mechanism

producing long-lasting differences between ethnoreligious groups that might at

times result in inter-group hatred. However, intimate ethnographic encounters reveal

that such ethnicization of neighbourliness seems to be problematic, and even mixes

different scales of social complexity. It is argued here that the Bosnian idiom of neighbourliness

is a vigorous social process that embraces localized, face-to-face sociality,

morality and lifeworlds, and thus a very different scale of relations. In contemporary

Bosnia, wedged between post-war as well as post-socialist trajectories of societal

change, the intimacy of koms?iluk has changed profoundly. This article critically reassesses

the academic discourse and questions how far anthropological imagination and metaphorization

can travel without impairing experience-near insights.