Long-distance mourning for the missing: gaps, absences and silences in two diaspora contexts

In recent years, we have witnessed the proliferation of scholarly interest in the role of war memories in shaping social identities and migratory patterns within the global-local framework, shifting the focus from transnational to trans-local practices of mourning and remembering the lost: countries, homes and people. From the disciplinary standpoint of sociocultural anthropology, this thesis adds to this contemporary debate by exploring the reverberating impact of the unresolved casualties from the 1992-1995 Bosnian War, in which more than 35,000, predominantly Bosniak men, ‘disappeared’—those who were actually killed and buried in a series of unmarked mass graves. By focusing on the everyday lives of the Bosniak survivors from two different localities (Prijedor and Srebrenica), fleeing distinct episodes of genocidal violence, I seek to unveil the everyday challenges they face in relation to the unresolved loss of their family members and life in exile. Drawing upon the methodological pluralism of multi-sited, conventional and digital ethnography, in combination with narrative inquiry and elements of participatory action research, I explore the range of sociocultural implications of the mass disappearances for the surviving families in the diaspora. These range from the suspension of ritual action in the absence of bodies to be buried and the role of religion and biotechnology in negotiating closure, to the reconstruction of kinship, gender roles and norms in the aftermath of genocide as well as the transgenerational legacies of paternal absences and forced displacement. Additionally, I discuss the social dynamics of the trans-local(ised) commemorations of the missing in Melbourne in Australia and St. Louis in the United States of America (hereafter US or USA), and the use of the digital plane in mediating long-distance mourning and remembrances. In addition to making a contribution to knowledge about the missing and the survivors, with this work I also call for a greater recognition of the lasting effects of war disappearances, as well as for appreciation of the surviving families’ remarkable capacity to create and regenerate in the face of loss. Rather than ‘pathologising’ the painful past, I propose that we shift our scholarly gaze towards human resilience and creative energies that arise out of the contexts of destruction, as I sought to illustrate in this ethnographic account.