Thousand and one flavours of the 'Silver City' : Structural violence and identity in the perspective of anthropology of food
Abstract
Eastern Bosnian city of Srebrenica is known generally for the war in 1990's that broke out after disintegration of Yugoslavia. During the war Srebrenica had become an isolated enclave under the siege, that was in April, 16 1993 declared the UN 'Safe Area'.
In July, 1995 Srebrenica subdued the heavy military offensive by the VRS (Vojska Republike Srpske). This lead to event titled the 'Srebrenica massacre', that was classified by the ICTY as genocide carried out by the leadership of the VRS against the Bosnian Muslim population and is regarded as the second worse mass atrocity in Europe after the WW2.
Genocide (unlike massacre) is a systematic intentional act to destroy targeted group of people that takes course in several identifiable phases and features a certain characteristic internal logic (see Zwaan, 2003). This clearly raises questions of construction of both individual and collective identities and mechanisms that stand behind defining and potentially targeting groups.
This presentation suggests that the 'food perspective' is useful for approaching such matter from a different angle. Edibles can 'tell' many stories about social cohesion or exclusion and both collective and individual identity.
Ethnography of everyday live eating practices combined with an 'insight into Srebrenica's history' reveal that the riddles of identity are far more intriguing. What we find in individual daily practice fits perhaps best Malkki's idea of identity as of 'always mobile and processual' - a 'creolized aggregate composed through bricolage' (Malkki, 1992).
So who are the people of Srebrenica at the 'crossroads' of identities and how does it relate to what happened in 1995?