Books by David Henig
Bosnian Fluxes: Belonging, Caring, and Reckoning in a Post-Cold War Semiperiphery, 2025
This volume offers unique conceptual and empirical insights into ordinary lives in the violent af... more This volume offers unique conceptual and empirical insights into ordinary lives in the violent aftermath of the Cold War. Considering Bosnia and Herzegovina as a comprehensive coordinate of larger social, political, and economic fluxes, it demonstrates why the widely used tropes of stuckedness, immobility, and frozenness associated with post-Cold War semiperipheries need to be understood in the context of excessive upheavals that mobilise or suspend modes of belonging, care, and reckoning. Bringing together emerging and leading scholars from across the social sciences with long-term research experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with scholars who have been documenting similar processes in other parts of the world, this volume develops new analytical heuristics and interventions into global post-Cold War studies. It will be of particular interest to researchers and students of Anthropology, Sociology, Human Geography, Contemporary History, and Area Studies along with those studying the history, politics, economy, and culture of semiperipheries.
Religion and Society, 2022
The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cultural and economic dispossession caused by th... more The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cultural and economic dispossession caused by the collapse of socialism continue to force Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina to reconfigure their religious lives and societal values. David Henig draws on a decade of fieldwork to examine the historical, social, and emotional labor undertaken by people to live in an unfinished past--and how doing so shapes the present. In particular, Henig questions how contemporary religious imagination, experience, and practice infuse and interact with social forms like family and neighborhood and with the legacies of past ruptures and critical events. His observations and analysis go to the heart of how societal and historical entanglements shape, fracture, and reconfigure religious convictions and conduct.
Provocative and laden with eyewitness detail, Remaking Muslim Lives offers a rare sustained look at what it means to be Muslim and live a Muslim life in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Muslim World, 2021
David Henig's Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina is a compel... more David Henig's Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina is a compelling and beautifully written account of the forms of caring and giving in post-socialist and postwar Bosnia. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the Muslim village of Brdo in the Zvijezda highlands of central Bosnia, Henig examines what it means to live a Muslim life amid political breakdown and economic deprivation, following the collapse of Yugoslavia and the brutal civil war in the 1990s. Bringing together Anthropology of Islam and Post-socialist Studies, he argues that living a Muslim life "is ordered by deep relations of obligation and care among the living, the dead, and the divine that are generations deep" and that are "governed by notions of exchange and reciprocity" (p. 13). The book contributes to the ongoing debates about neoliberal precarity, fragile relationality, and religious experiences that layer the everyday lives of people in times of conjoined crises. This examination is especially relevant to the current moment, when many of us grapple with the question of how to live ethically, as our lives are increasingly entangled in multiple and often conflicting obligations of care and reciprocity. Moving away from the depiction of suffering, caused by political turmoil and socioeconomic dislocation in Bosnia, Henig turns to the locally resonant religious imaginings that guide the modes of caring for the land, the house, the living, and the dead. Part 1 of the book, titled "Making and Unmaking Village Lives," does so by introducing readers to the concepts of guardianship, neighborliness, and halal exchange, through which the villagers reconfigure their lives. For example, expressed in the practices of reciprocal visitations, mutual aid, and mourning the dead, neighborliness is shaped by the broader "ethics of proximity," composed of giving and taking amidst pervasive unemployment, crippling debt, and state abandonment. Failure or unwillingness to care for one's neighbors reflect the fragility of neighborhood ties, which are continuously tested by the deepening socioeconomic inequalities and the lingering war memories, captured in the local idiom of "bitter coffee." Henig illustrates this point through the lives of his interlocutors, two friends Zakir and Ragib. With Zakir's material support and encouragement, Ragib opened a sawmill during the civil war and became wealthy. Prioritizing his own wellbeing, he distanced himself from the villagers and eventually stopped paying visits to their homes, which Zakir and others considered a breach of "ethics of proximity" and a reminder about postwar societal ruptures. Another example of the binding yet fragile ethics of care is "halal exchange," whereby more fortunate villagers share surplus produce, goods, and services free of charge with their neighbors in need.
P rije nekoliko mjeseci David Henig, vanredni profesor na Odsjeku za kultur(al)nu antropologiju n... more P rije nekoliko mjeseci David Henig, vanredni profesor na Odsjeku za kultur(al)nu antropologiju na Utrecht univerzitetu u Holandiji, objavio je knjigu "Remaking Muslim Lives" (Preoblikovanje muslimanskih života). Podnaslov knjige "Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina" (Svakodnevni islam u poratnoj Bosni i Hercegovini) telegramski opisuje glavnu temu Henigove knjige, kao i vrijeme koje ovo djelo pokriva. Ne bez opravdanih razloga, respektabilna američka izdavačka kuća University of Illinois Press uvrstila je ovo djelo u svoju uglednu ediciju Interpretations of Culture in the New Millennium (Tumačenja kulture u novom mileniju).
American Journal of Islam and Society, 2021
The books seemingly have different foci, partly because of their respective disciplinary backgrou... more The books seemingly have different foci, partly because of their respective disciplinary backgrounds and partly because of the perspectives used in each: Reinhart proposes a large scale interpretative key to intricate relations between local manifestations of Islam, the standardized shared religious framework, and Islam of its cosmopolitan layer (the 'ulamā'); Henig, on the other hand, zooms in on a particular period and geography, that of postwar Bosnia, piercing together the ways in which Bosnian Muslims articulate religion and make meaning with Islam and to Islam. While Kevin Reinhart's book ultimately stresses place as the key factor in his interpretative model, David Henig emphasizes the role of historical consciousness in Islam as it is lived by its practitioners. Both books together give a complementary picture of understandings of Islam in the modern world beyond essentialization and relativization, by observing what values and practices are labelled as Islamic and by fleshing out how Muslims interweave Islam in the thread of their lives.
Since the onset of the global economic crisis, activists, policy makers, and social scientists ha... more Since the onset of the global economic crisis, activists, policy makers, and social scientists have been searching for alternative paradigms through which to re-imagine contemporary modes of thinking and writing about economic orders. These attempts have led to their re-engagement with fundamental anthropological categories of economic analysis, such as barter, debt, and the gift. Focusing on favours, and the paradoxes of action, meaning, and significance they engender, this volume advocates for their addition to this list of economic universals. It presents a critical re-interrogation of the conceptual relationships between gratuitous and instrumental behaviour, and raises novel questions about the intersection of economic actions with the ethical and expressive aspects of human life.
Scholars of post-socialist politics and society have often used 'favour' as a by-word for corruption and clientelism. The contributors to this volume treat favours, and the doing of favours, as a distinct mode of acting, rather than as a form of 'masked' economic exchange or simply an expression of goodwill. Casting their comparative net from post-socialist Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe; to the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and post-Maoist China, the contributors to this volume show how gratuitous behaviour shapes a plethora of different actions, practices, and judgements across religious and political life, imaginative practices, and local moral economies. They show that favours do not operate 'outside' or 'beyond' the economic sphere. Rather, they constitute a distinct mode of action which has economic consequences, without being fully explicable in terms of transactional cost-benefit analyses.
Book chapters by David Henig
Bosnian Fluxes: Belonging, Caring, and Reckoning in a Post-Cold War Semiperiphery, 2025
This volume offers unique conceptual and empirical insights into ordinary lives in the violent af... more This volume offers unique conceptual and empirical insights into ordinary lives in the violent aftermath of the Cold War. Considering Bosnia and Herzegovina as a comprehensive coordinate of larger social, political, and economic fluxes, it demonstrates why the widely used tropes of stuckedness, immobility, and frozenness associated with post-Cold War semiperipheries need to be understood in the context of excessive upheavals that mobilise or suspend modes of belonging, care, and reckoning. Bringing together emerging and leading scholars from across the social sciences with long-term research experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with scholars who have been documenting similar processes in other parts of the world, this volume develops new analytical heuristics and interventions into global post-Cold War studies. It will be of particular interest to researchers and students of Anthropology, Sociology, Human Geography, Contemporary History, and Area Studies along with those studying the history, politics, economy, and culture of semiperipheries.
Porous becomings: anthropological engagements with Michel Serres, 2024
This chapter introduces Michel Serres as an important theorist of modern warfare and violence. It... more This chapter introduces Michel Serres as an important theorist of modern warfare and violence. It brings together Serres’ topological perspectives on time, history, and general ecology of pollution together. The chapter thus opens new avenues for thinking and writing about the long-lasting socio-environmental effects of wars and their aftermaths. It draws on examples from Henig’s ongoing research on explosive war remains in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, toxic legacies of the Cold War era military projects, and Serres’ reflections on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bomb explosions. In so doing, the chapter retraces Henig’s encounters and resonances with Michel Serres, and his thinking with Serres about wastes of war, their unruly temporalities and insidious planetary effects.
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics, 2023
What motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? Who benefits from and who... more What motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? Who benefits from and who is excluded from our favour? In this chapter, we tackle the long-standing anthropological puzzle of how to attend to manifestations of spontaneity, free will to act, and sympathy – that is, manifestations of favour. We argue that acts of favour constitute a significant ethical dimension of social life. We show how favours perform the intermediary and balancing work between incommensurable values, interests, obligations, and ethical sensibilities that underpin our lives. Favours can mediate, for example, between the calculative values of the market and those of friendship and kin relations, between the divine grace and performing good deeds; or in the situations of radical distress, when the question of life and death is at stake. Ultimately, if human sociality is grounded in the exchange of sentiments and gratitude mediated by the ethical labour of favours, then favours need to be considered as one of the key articulations of the ethical condition of social life.
WHERE IS THE GOOD IN THE WORLD? Ethical Life between Social Theory and Philosophy, 2022
In recent years, anthropological debates on the good have evolved into rather polarized and incom... more In recent years, anthropological debates on the good have evolved into rather polarized and incommensurable binaries critically portraying the focus on the good either as disentangled from the underlying ‘dark’ conditions, which produce inequalities, suffering and despair in the contemporary world; or as a normative position detached from ordinary ethics of the everyday. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic research in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, this chapter interrogates this deadlock. It documents how even in the midst of suffering and despair, everyday practices of hope can become generative for creating and realizing the good in people’s lives.
in: Muslim Pilgrimage in Europe, edited by Ingvild Flaskerud and Richard J. Natvig
This chapter considers the significance of journeys and the forms of veneration to Muslim sacred ... more This chapter considers the significance of journeys and the forms of veneration to Muslim sacred sites in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina. We specifically focus on the sites that have been elevated in various degrees to the status of “national sites”, and fallen into an embrace with the realm of post-war Muslim identity politics in the past two decades. Yet we attend to these changes with caution. We argue that despite the ongoing process of "nationalisation" of these sites in the public discourses — the process that is also often taken as a proxy and starting point in the scholarship — more attention needs to be paid to the complex affective and historical intertwinements of Bosnian Muslims with the sites. Throughout the chapter, we argue that a more nuanced ethnographic attention needs to be paid to the rich Bosnian Muslims’ conceptualisation and practices associated with both journeys and the forms of veneration to Muslim sacred sites to fully appreciate the complex engagement with these sites.
Economies of Favour After Socialism, Dec 2016
Economies of Favour after Socialism
Scholars often conflate the act of doing a favour with notions of corruption, nepotism, or briber... more Scholars often conflate the act of doing a favour with notions of corruption, nepotism, or bribery. This chapter seeks to demonstrate the need for differentiation between these concepts, their im/moralities, values, and the ethical conduct they entail. It explores the relationship between corruption, bribery, favours, and the Muslim moral imagination in postwar Bosnia. Specifically, it juxtaposes and analytically distinguishes some of the normative discourses on illicit economic practices with situations of doing favours in three ethnographic contexts. It argues that the negotiation of the line between morally (halal) acceptable conduct or immoral (haram) conduct in the day-to-day struggle for life is not a morally clear-cut matter for villagers, but a matter of constant evaluations and judgements. Hence, the chapter suggests that the use of personal connections, pilfering, and petty bribery should be understood as being part and parcel of the ‘ordinary ethics’ of life.
Published in:
Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entanglemen... more Published in:
Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entanglements. Edited by Stef Jansen, Carna Brkovic, Vanja Celebicic. Routledge 2016
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Books by David Henig
Provocative and laden with eyewitness detail, Remaking Muslim Lives offers a rare sustained look at what it means to be Muslim and live a Muslim life in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Scholars of post-socialist politics and society have often used 'favour' as a by-word for corruption and clientelism. The contributors to this volume treat favours, and the doing of favours, as a distinct mode of acting, rather than as a form of 'masked' economic exchange or simply an expression of goodwill. Casting their comparative net from post-socialist Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe; to the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and post-Maoist China, the contributors to this volume show how gratuitous behaviour shapes a plethora of different actions, practices, and judgements across religious and political life, imaginative practices, and local moral economies. They show that favours do not operate 'outside' or 'beyond' the economic sphere. Rather, they constitute a distinct mode of action which has economic consequences, without being fully explicable in terms of transactional cost-benefit analyses.
Book chapters by David Henig
Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entanglements. Edited by Stef Jansen, Carna Brkovic, Vanja Celebicic. Routledge 2016