Theatre Of Wars
The Kosovo war of 1999 presented a theatre of political passions that collided with one another on multiple levels. These passions arose out of collective experiences framed by such slippery yet impassioned concepts such as ethnicity and the nation, but these passions were also anchored within individual experience, often at the limits of that which can be spoken, remembered or transmitted. Finally, these experiences are penetrated, within a context of crisis management, by the technical apparatuses and procedures of humanitarian interventions which vacillate between the poles of compassion and dispassionate bureaucratization, thus raising the question of violence in a whole new manner. Ethnographic work, which involves not only presence on the scenes of war and intervention but also the production of voice and narratives, also infiltrates these experiences and must assume responsibility for its role. Under such circumstances, how might it be possible to develop a mode of interpretation that is functional in such extreme scenarios without succumbing to institutionalization or instrumentalization?