Article of the Month - September 2023
 “The Fluid Dynamics of Viscous Identities:
Sedimentations of Time in Five Late-Ottoman Refuge Towns in Bosnia since 1863 ”
(Robert M. Hayden: Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh &
Mario Katić: Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Zadar)

Robert M. Hayden & Mario Katić, "The Fluid Dynamics of Viscous Identities: Sedimentations of Time in Five Late-Ottoman Refugee Towns in Bosnia since 1863," Slavonic and East European Review 101 ( 2023): 114-150

To read the article, download it (paywall), or contact the authors here.

Keywords: Ethno-national identities • fluidity and robustness of identity • groupness • antagonistic tolerance • trajectories of dominance over landscapes • marking local dominance through religious sites • late Ottoman Balkans • history of Yugoslavia • history of Bosnia & Herzegovina • contemporary Bosnia &Herzegovina

Abstract:
This article develops Reinhart Koselleck's concept of 'sediments of time' processually, as sedimentation and erosion of the social and physical indicators of the presence of Self- and Other-identifying communities through time. We expand the concept of the 'fluidity' of ethnic or national identities to include viscosity, the resistance of a liquid to flowing freely. Group identities may be viscous, changing slowly and maintaining much continuity through time. Fluidity thus becomes a variable quality, not simply a binary opposite of 'fixed'. Using this model we analyse developments in five towns newly founded by the Ottoman empire in 1862–63 on the northern border of Bosnia, to house Muslims expelled from Serbia and reinforce the border with the Habsburgs in places where few Muslims were then living. Throughout, the populations of the towns were largely self-distinguishing between Muslims (Bosniaks), Roman Catholics (Croats), and Orthodox Christians (Serbs). By 2013, only one settlement was still majority Muslim (now Bosniak), one was majority Croat, two majority Serb, and one nearly equal in Serb and Bosniak populations; though other balances had obtained in earlier periods. To explain the flow of social interactions through time in these towns we develop a model drawn from fluid dynamics, of the differences between the laminar flows of liquids that seem smooth but are composed of layers of differing composition that do not much intermix, and turbulence, when such laminar flows meet an obstruction. Interactions between members of ethnoreligious communities may also flow with apparent smoothness, yet in a laminar fashion. When events occur that disrupt this flow, by newly created borders or the transformation of jurisdictional boundaries into barriers, the resulting turbulence, often violent, may lead to the separation of some of the layers, possibly into new forms of laminar flow. By paying attention to the varying ways in which physical and social indictors of such communities have developed through time in five contrasting locations, we gain a better understanding of wider historical processes that continue to be in play.

Nomination Statement:
Scholars now appreciate that inter-communal relations in ethno-religiously diverse societies, cannot be described simply in terms of “tolerance” and “intolerance,” or in terms of reified, static categories of identity, such as “Christian” or “Turk.” Yet how can one describe the complex processes by which confessional identities evolve and coalesce, particularly as they intersect with factors, such as relgional or ethnic identity, or when they are inflected by conversion or migration. In “The Fluid Dynamics of Viscous Identities,” Hayden and Katic look at a metaphor from physics, in order to convey the complexity and polyvalence of these processes. Their laboratory is the Ottoman Balkans from the mid-nineteenth century, specifically a handful of frontier towns were Muslim subjects were settled in order to shore up the frontier against the Catholic Habsburgs. Eschewing facile and out-worn tropes, whether of tolerance or “ancient hatreds,” they describe a process of ethno-genesis in the century that followed, as confessional communities began to express themselves as ethno-linguistic and eventually national collectives. Focussing on the interplay of flow of ever-changing “identities” rather than the interaction of static “communities” allows the authors to present a model that accounts for a range of outcomes vis-à-vis intercommunal relations and takes into account residual effects of the longue durée.

Authors’ Comment:
This article has its roots in Robert Hayden’s comparative work from 2002-2016 on “Antagonistic Tolerance” (AT), or competitive sharing of religious sites and spaces, which was initially based on analyses of contemporary events in South Asia and the Balkans, regions he has worked in for decades. The literatures on these two regions rarely come into contact, but Hayden found strikingly similar patterns of trajectories of sharing, competing over, and occasionally violent transformation of religious sites in both of them. With support from the National Science Foundation, he developed a comparative study on such shared and contested sites in a multidisciplinary and international project from 2007-2012 that drew on historical, archaeological, and ethnographic studies from India, Turkey, Bulgaria, Portugal, Mexico and Peru. While there are many studies of individual religious sites that are said to be shared by members of differing religious communities, most of analyses valorize periods of peaceful interaction and see manifestations of violence as unnatural disruptions of tolerance. The AT researchers instead analyzed trajectories of cooperation and conflict though time at single sites, and more widely. As the project developed it became clear that single sites could only be interpreted as parts of changing religioscapes, networks of sites of the various religious communities interacting in spaces that could be defined narrowly or more widely.

With the completion of the Antagonistic Tolerance project, Hayden decided to look more closely at competitive sharing of larger spaces by communities defined by their religious heritages. Having done extensive research in Yugoslavia in the decade before that country collapsed into war in 1991/92, and then analyzed events in the successor states during and after the war, he felt qualified to investigate interactions in that most heterogenous of the constituent republics of Yugoslavia: Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was the only republic that did not have a single majority community, but rather had a history of interactions between mainly Sunni Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics, since at least the late 18th century. These communities were known by different terms over this stretch of time, but the distinctions between them remained common. Again with NSF funding, he teamed up with Mario Katić, one of the very few scholars who has done extensive research on the Croat communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Growing up in a religiously and nationally mixed community with very "fluid” identities that were “un-mixed” in a horrible war made Mario focus on these issues very early on, and inspired to try to understand these processes from an academic point of view. After a decade of researching pilgrimage sites of Bosnian Croats he started to notice how religious architecture, and different layers of architecture that were deposited thorough time, play an important role within nationally and religiously mix landscape. Inspired partially by Antagonistic Tolerance concept he started to look at these developments as a War of Architecture. However, this approach was not sufficient to understand how these top-down projects affected everyday life and local identities. How could Bosnia and Herzegovina simultaneously be a war-torn community with very defined identities yet also have locations and local communities that remained in peaceful coexistence? After a period of intensive correspondence on these issues, Mario joined Robert in the latter’s proposal for research in Bosnia & Herzegovina. After several years of joint fieldwork, innumerable discussions and questioning one another’s ideas, somewhere on the road between the five towns that we wrote about in this paper, we started to develop the approach presented here.

New approaches were needed because defining our study in terms of interactions between members of religious communities was incongruent with most work on ethno-national relations. Many scholars properly rejected the presumption that conflict was inherent, a matter of supposed “ancient hatreds” in the Balkans or South Asia, but replaced this presumption with others that saw communities as “imagined,” and identities as “fluid.” This approach ignores the striking robustness of configurations of social differentiation over more than two centuries, and under very different political regimes: Ottoman Imperial, Austro-Hungarian imperial, royal Yugoslavia, the fascist Independent State of Croatia, socialist Yugoslavia, and the robust electoral politics that have dominated the decentralized Bosnian state since the end of communism. If the identities of the Bosniaks (née Muslims, née Turks), Serbs (née Orthodox Christians) and Croats (née Roman Catholics) were imagined and fluid, why were they so robust in opposition to each other, over more than two centuries?

We addressed this problem by taking seriously the metaphor of the fluidity of identities, by utilizing concepts from fluid mechanics. Social scientists and historians conceptualize a binary between supposedly “fixed” identities and highly changeable “fluid” ones; yet no serious scholar could argue that any social phenomenon is unchanging, or “fixed.” On the other hand, no physicist would consider analyzing the dynamics of flow of any liquid without considering its viscosity. We thus saw that it was necessary to see communal identities as viscous: changing, but slowly, and reinforced through many social institutions and cultural practices, what Reinhard Kosseleck had called “sediments of time.”

The metaphor of sediments was also useful since we were both centering our work on the analysis of religious structures – such as their placement, features, modifications, destruction, rebuilding – as key indicators of trajectories of dominance, and its displacement, in societies where religious heritage is the key feature of social distinction.

Thus the article brought together elements of Hayden’s comparative work that he developed since the AT project began, in 2002, with Katić’s independently developed research on comparable issues within Bosnia and Herzegovina. The ideas in this article were worked out by both of us through extensive fieldwork, joint analysis and writing – a truly collaborative partnership.

See also, Robert Hayden’s presentation and powerpoint here.

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See the other Articles of the Month here.