Social Analysis

With contributions from several of the Balkan countries that once were united under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire, this special issue proposes new theoretical approaches to the experience and transmission of the past through time. All of the articles in this issue explore themes to do with the transmission of collective memories of post-Ottoman state formation and the malaise associated with a contemporary epoch that, echoing late modernity, we might term ‘late nationalism’. This introductory article examines the several manifestations of this general phenomenon under the rubric of post-Ottoman topologies, suggesting that where history creates a fixed, empiricist record of the past, topologies denote the flux of collective memory in its multiple and mutable incarnations across time.

Drawing on ethnography from western Thessaly, this article reassesses notions of time and temporality in the Greek economic crisis. People experience the past as a folded assemblage of linearly distant and sometimes contradictory moments that help them make sense of a period of social change. Anthropologists should embrace the paradoxes of (poly)temporality and address the topological/topographical experience of time and history. During an era of severe uncertainty, in Greece temporality is discussed through material objects such as photovoltaic panels and fossils as people articulate their situation vis-à-vis the past, present, and future. Multiple moments of the past are woven together to explain the current crisis experience, provoking fear that times of hardship are returning or instilling hope that the turmoil can be overcome.

This article explores how Muslims in Central Bosnia engage with the violent past through acts of prayer to make history. It traces two idioms expressed in prayers whereby Bosnian Muslims affectively apprehend, remember, and temporalize the past: witness (šahit) and martyr (šehit). These two idioms, I argue, allow Muslims to reanimate recent critical events as the realms of personal moral-cum-temporal orientations rather than unreflectively participating in an ongoing nationalization of the past in the public discourses. This article thus suggests to take seriously an act of prayer as a mode of historical consciousness—an assemblage of divergent sensibilities, materialities, practices, and ethical conduct—in order to develop a more nuanced perspective on the past as actively and ethically in-the-making in the present.

This article charts political and affective responses to and transformations engendered by what has been widely considered a defining moment in the recent history of Turkey, namely, the murder of the Armenian editor and journalist Hrant Dink on 19 January 2007. In this analysis, the question of time and temporality is approached from a threefold perspective: the availability of and engagement with temporal discourses that provide schemes for relating time, loss, and value; mourning as a form of laboring on and in time; and activism as a sphere of practice where responses to loss can be reworked with a view to possibly reformulating hopes and promises.

This article examines how territory, the built environment, and the entropy of material things through time transmit and modulate legacies of ethno-national and global conflicts. Taking the Greek Civil War as a ‘critical event’, framed by its antecedents and its sequelae, I consider how overlapping histories of war at the international tri-state border of northwest Greek Macedonia and in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina shape dwelling, the control of space, and historical memory. The analysis explores how catastrophic events become materially embedded, how events age in place, and what role changing infrastructure plays in the commutation or preservation of injuries suffered in violent, especially internecine, conflict.

This article argues that the media event constitutes a critical mode for experiencing temporality in contemporary society. A perceptual and topological approach is presented centering on the event’s transitivity as it unfolds across event-spaces, media formats, and national media envelopes. My case is the unprecedented ‘live’ televisual coverage of the 1999 hijacking of a Greek bus by an Albanian migrant worker, whose death was publicly mourned in a widely circulated cassette-recorded Albanian memorial song. Focusing on the hijacker’s act of ‘speaking back’ to Greek bosses and police, I link the re-enactments and affective (re)sounding of this contested media event to the violent unsettling and reconfiguration of national borders, ideological discourses, social networks, and labor regimes that occurred after the collapse of European communism and prior to the establishment of the neo-liberal Eurozone.

The monastery of Agios Rafaïl, built in the 1960s on the northern Aegean island of Lesbos, commemorates the ‘newly appeared’ Saints Rafaïl, Nikolaos, and Irini. Their ‘apparition’ is marked by different forms of memory and commemoration: first, the juxtaposition of their trajectories with Asia Minor refugees visited by dreams, the main agents of the discovery of these saints; second, the local Bishopric’s search for people who could be canonized as saints as a result of their heroism during the Ottoman occupation of the island. Temporalities of varying dimensions are interwoven within these discourses, as the past intervenes in the present and marks the continuity of destinies and of sacred places. The future (or its promise) is equally tied to these events under the form of hidden treasures.

This article addresses the irreconcilability of memory in the context of the still contested history of the Greek Civil War of the 1940s. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Attica, the article analyzes past critical events that in many ways contest the concept of the linearity of time. The study explores the events surrounding the establishment of a monument in commemoration of the torching of a village by the German Nazis and the civil war, both of which have been indelibly engraved in people’s memories. Observing these happenings in simultaneity has enabled narratives to be understood, not simply as remembrances, but also as temporalities.

Post-Ottoman temporal topologies—cases where the past, present, and future may be bent around one another rather than ordered linearly—may produce uncanny histories. The uncanny is activated, as Freud noted, when something secret comes to light, but also when the expectations of a given genre are exceeded. In these cases, the genre of historicism has been violated. Rather than contending that the post-Ottoman world is entirely different from Western Europe, the examples here alert one to the presence of uncanny histories in many other places since historicism has nowhere managed to eradicate its alternatives. Unsettled pasts of violence and displacement and presents beset by ongoing tensions (political, economic, religious/ethnic) do contribute, however, to a particular vitality and saliency of uncanny histories in the post-Ottoman sphere.