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Paper short abstract

Through ethnography of Bosnian highland returnees, I consider genocide as chronocide: a protracted unweaving of communal & more-than-human temporal relations. I trace nationalist distemporalising violence & the fragile labour of antigenocidal reweaving through return, ritual & cyclical time.

Paper long abstract

More than three decades after the destruction of their towns, landscapes and communities, small groups of returnees to the Dinaric Bosnian highlands remain the timekeepers of an erased world. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this paper approaches genocide as a protracted unweaving of communal temporal relations – seasonal cycles, ritual calendars, neighbourly rhythms, and more-than-human cosmologies – through which lifeworlds were once held together.

I start by sketching out the main features of nationalist distemporalising violence, as it latched onto the communities, with attention to the reappropriation of the traditional cyclical calendar and the constructions of the ‘wounded history-ominous future’ ideological complex employed to perpetuate the genocidal regime. Chronocide, I suggest, is neither straightforward nor immediate; it slowly and insidiously fabricates new worlds out of the fragments of those it destroys. Usurped time thus haunts it intrinsically, always pointing to the anti-syntactic quality of dislocated temporal fragments lodged into new relations.

Attending to agriculture, feasts, rebuilding efforts and everyday sociality, I trace how returnees labour to reweave these relations under conditions of ongoing structural denial and genocidal governance. In other words, I ask what it is that the returnees keep returning to, and why some entanglements matter more than others in their quests for healing.

Genocide operates through both obliteration and a deep reconfiguration of the targeted world; its chronocidal aspect includes the colonisation of temporal ecologies and orientations, as well as the counterfeit repurposing of their rubbles. Yet, the rubbles are neither abandoned nor silent.