Lose, Remain, Regain: Biographic Objects and Forced Migration

Abstract

The keeping or discard of objects is not always within people’s power range. War and the escape from war are instances when people are violently separated from their possessions due to massive destruction. At the same time, few objects might be saved or regained in later stages of life. This paper is about objects that people who fled the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s as children were able to preserve. In my analysis, I point out how the biographies of people and things are entangled, joining and parting at various points in time. As people’s and things’ biographies do not inevitably align with each other, the conditions that facilitated such a keeping or recovery are reconstructed. The article concludes that agency does not always reside with humans but is distributed between people, things and the material and social infrastructures that both are embedded in.

KEYWORDS: :

• biographic objects
• forced migration
• Yugoslavia
• war
• dispossession
• agency

INTRODUCTION

The material universe of homes is connected to practices of care and discard. Both practices are a way of managing social relations, as anthropological discussions on discard have shown (Miller 2001, Marcoux 2001, Gregson et al. 2007). The literature on keeping and discard perceives objects primarily through a lens of human agency: what we keep or not is a question of people’s choice. This choice might be a necessity or even force, when for example elderly people move into care facilities and thus have to clear their homes (as in the “casser maison” ritual described by Jean-Sébastien Marcoux 2001) or when others make these choices, such as professional home organisers who sort out possessions of people diagnosed with hoarding behaviours (as described by Katie Kilroy-Marac 2016, 2018). However, we are not always the ones deciding on our possessions’ fate. Keeping and discard might be beyond human intention: when disposed things return to us, such as family heirlooms and old photos that are kept in the attic and gain a new significance when they are found. In such instances, things might assume agentive power (Hetherington 2004, p. 167).

The aspect that I wish to add to the discussion on keeping and discard is the perspective of displacement and forced migration. When people escape a war, being separated from one’s possessions is not a voluntary act of giving things away but a violent dispossession, including the destruction and/or abandonment of the home itself. Given the experience of loss, what are the conditions that certain things do remain with people, are regained in later stages of life and survive? In moments of distress, what are the choices to bring something along on the escape and how do these things change their value and significance over the course of years?

This paper is about biographic objects of people who fled the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s as children and from then on lived in Austria. Whereas the project includes the whole time period between 1991 and 1995, the two cases presented in this paper specifically concern the war in today’s Bosnia, starting from 1992. The findings presented are part of the research project Language in Motion,¹ comprising biographic interviews that focussed on language and media. In the interviews, objects emerged that accompanied my interview partners throughout their lives. Some of these objects were among the few things that they had been able to bring on their escape from war, whereas others came back to them later. My central concern in this paper is to explore the survival and regaining of biographic objects in a context of war and dispossession.

The paper is structured as follows: First, I discuss material culture in the context of war and forced displacement, focussing on the historical and regional background of the Yugoslav war. The next part discusses biography with regard to material culture studies and introduces an analytical lens which allows to capture human-object ties. In my analysis, two cases of biographic objects are presented alongside the conditions for things to remain with people or to be recovered years later. In the conclusion, I argue that these items become biographic objects because they afford social action in various stages of my interview partners’ lives.

WAR, FORCED DISPLACEMENT AND MATERIAL CULTURE

Forced displacement and material culture are closely interwoven. One can serve as an analytical lens for the other (Auslander and Zahra 2018). On the one hand, war and displacement in the twentieth century profoundly impacted on demography and material culture: new forms of warfare like genocide or ethnic violence shifted war zones from battle fields to civilians and aimed at destructing not only human lives but any material trace of ethnically defined subjects. On the other hand, material culture helps us to understand wars and their aftermath (ibid.).

In this vein, during the 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, archives were systematically destroyed as a strategy of warfare by the Serbian Army and its associated paramilitary groups. Material culture such as archives, museums, galleries, registry offices and libraries were specifically targeted, one of the most famous being Bosnia’s National Library (the Vijećnica) which was burned down in 1992. The attempt to reconstruct these archives from the scarce materials that remained intact plays an important role in the ongoing restoration process. As noted by Hariz Halilovich, survivors of the Bosnian genocide, “despite attempts to erase them physically, symbolically and bureaucratically” (2014, p. 236), were however able to reconstruct their own memory resources from a few remaining memory objects, in analogue and digital space. Halilovich refers to “cyber villages” (Halilovich 2014, p. 242) as the digital networks of former local communities that had been displaced, currently often Facebook groups, where memories are shared, e.g. by posting photos from the pre-war past.

Personal objects relating to the 1990s war in Ex-Yugoslavia have to be regarded against a background of massive destruction of lives, cultural heritage and private possessions. As ethnically defined populations were displaced and shifted to other regions, their previous homes became occupied and inhabited by others. Sanda Üllen (2016) reports cases where personal memory objects contained in these houses such as photo albums were taken away or deliberately destroyed by the new occupants, whereas Vida Bakondy and Amila Širbegović (2022) report a case where personal documents had been saved by the new occupants and sent to the previous owners. The survival, remaining and regaining of personal possessions therefore must be regarded as an exception, requiring explanation.

In the aftermath of war and displacement, objects that people are able to take with them are subsequently subject to constant change (Navaro-Yashin 2009, Povrzanović-Frykman 2016, Dziuban and Stańczyk 2020). When displaced people speak about these objects, they often contrast their prospective and retrospective views: the perception at the time of flight, when things had to be packed with a certain horizon of expectation about the future that changed in hindsight, as these things turned into something very different in the course of history (Wallen and Pomerance 2018). According to Sandra Dudley (2018), change in objects is, first, accelerated by war and displacement and secondly, emanates from things as well. Objects do not always obey people’s projects, they can be recalcitrant and rebellious, having an agency of their own (Auslander and Zahra 2018).

Even though things might assume an agentive role, they do not have an intention of their own which is why Dudley, referring to Alfred Gell, prefers to speak of a potentiality rather than an agency of objects (Dudley 2018). Agency, according to Gell (1998), cannot be explained by classifying people and things as agentive subjects versus acted-upon objects. Rather, both people and things might be subject to processes of objectification (being acted upon, i.e., patiency) and subjectification (acting, i.e., agency). Akin to Marilyn Strathern’s notion of distributed personhood (1988), agency is something that individuals might activate due to their position in a web of social relations and by the mediation of things. It is distributed between people, things and the social and material environments that both are embedded in.

Things do not possess one meaning that remains stable but there are shifts and ruptures in how things are perceived and used (Kopytoff 1986). Their movement in time and space goes together with perceived change in the significance and value of things. Referring to objects that could be saved by Jews on their escape from Nazi Germany, Wallen and Pomerance (2018) show how mass-produced, everyday commodities in the course of history became museum objects with a very specific propositional function in this context. Moreover, past and present meanings or uses of objects might not be consecutive but overlapping, resulting in objects’ “multiple lives” (Şanlı 2022).

BIOGRAPHY AND MATERIAL CULTURE

Applying a biographic lens allows to explore the entanglements and separations of people and things through time and space. In anthropology, things’ biographies are most commonly explored in connection to human biographies. Personal objects might become prominent mediational means for the narration of life stories in ethnographic research. Janet Hoskins describes how people use objects to gain narrative agency and on the other side, how human agency accumulates in objects, which is why she speaks of biographic objects (Hoskins 1998). War, displacement and forced migration trouble a linear understanding of biography and make us acutely aware that people and things are not only entangled but also violently disrupted (Yi-Neumann 2022). In line with this critique, the thing-person relationship cannot be assumed as granted but rather as one that constantly has to be (re)made and enacted. Analytic attention thus shifts to moments of disruption and the (unlikely) events of object survival and return. Why are things, after being disregarded and stored away, taken out of a private archive and reappropriated as biographic objects? Applying a praxeological approach to material culture (Warnier 2006), I am interested in the way that surviving objects are mediating and facilitating social action, not so much as an expression of identity or as a repository of memory.

Displacement, in contrast to a journey, is mobility across a threshold. When persons and objects are displaced due to war, they can never return because the time-and-space configuration at the place of origin has profoundly transformed (Dudley 2018). Even if people physically return to the place of origin after a conflict, its pre-war social fabric and political era ceased to exist. An analytic concept that captures change in both people’s and objects’ biographies is Maruška Svašek’s (2012) differentiation between transit, transition and transformation. Transit signifies the conditions under which people and things come into contact with each other. Transition refers to the perceived change in significance and value that is ascribed to objects through the process of transit. Transformation, finally, refers to change in people through transit: the change in social role or status that people go through, such as becoming a pilgrim, a refugee or a parent.

Analytic attention in this paper is paid to domestic space as part of an infrastructure that is the condition for things to survive. As (unreliable) repositories for memory objects, homes comprise both carefully exhibited objects in prominent places and forgotten things in attics, basements, boxes and closets. These “hidden” places, or private archives, often contain things that cause what Alyssa Grossman calls “involuntary memory” (Grossman 2015, p. 294). The interview, then, is part of an intervention, inviting people to reflect on things that are usually stored away and to activate stories connected to these things (Wallen and Pomerance 2018).

Domestic spaces, however, are not necessarily places of object rescue and safety. In a war situation, homes and what they contain are constantly under threat of destruction, abandonment and looting (Stein 2015). Furthermore, just as any archive, collection and museum, things that are kept in homes require care labour. The storage of things in homes might not preserve them but on the contrary, contribute to their decay (Kilroy-Marac 2016, 2018). Therefore, if homes are infrastructures for keeping and preserving objects, this is due to gendered (classed, racialised/ethnicised) labour that is most often not or poorly paid (Haug 2016). Homes, therefore, are both necessary conditions for the survival of objects that require care work and they are unreliable containers that might be under threat.

METHODS AND DATA

For this research, I interviewed four persons who escaped the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s when they were children, moved to Austria and are now living in Vienna and surroundings. The core of the research consisted of three consecutive one-on-one-interviews, focussing on language and media biographies. The interview partners and I discussed my first rough analysis and there was a period of time when they would explore biographic phases and topics of their own choice which they presented in the last interview. Objects that came forth are thus a result of the specific research interest and the co-construction of knowledge which “configured,” at least to a certain extent, a biographic object (Woodward 2019, p. 15). Vice versa, objects facilitated the speaking about biography and supported to construct biographic narratives (Hoskins 1998). In the following analysis, I will present two reconstructions of biographic person-object entanglements that my interview partners explored.

TWO CASES: A LETTER AND A CLASS PHOTO

Common Characteristics and Analytical Lens

For my interview partners, the time of escape from war was part of their childhood experience that is now temporally distant. This is why biographic objects have to be understood not only against a backdrop of massive destruction and dispossession in the course of war, escape and asylum regimes, they also have survived all later transits: the movement to every new place of residence. The fact that the biographic objects which appeared in the interviews remained with my interview partners was thus remarkable not only from the perspective of one singular move – the escape from war, although it might retrospectively appear as the most remarkable transit – but also because of all subsequent moves where things were repeatedly faced with the decision of being kept or disposed of.

In the following two accounts, the conditions of two objects to survive will be reconstructed: how could they become biographic objects, considering their survival in comparison to all other things that were lost? Secondly, if transit, according to Svašek (2012), goes hand in hand with a change in object value and people’s subjectivities, what do things effect at certain stages of their trajectory? What do they mediate? I pay analytic attention to the reasons and processes whereby things unfold their potential for social action in different spaces, be it domestic space and the private archive, digital platforms or exhibitions. In both examples, a vignette is provided first that is followed by an interpretation.

Case 1: A Letter between Private Archive and Public Display

I met the letter before I met its author, Melisa B. This was almost 30 years after the breakout of war, at an exhibition in the Vienna Municipal Library about forced migration to Austria due to the war in Former Yugoslavia. The letter is one of the exhibits which attracts my attention. Written in Bosnian in the spidery handwriting of a child, it features script and drawings and addresses the writer’s father. I eventually meet the author at a talk that she gives at the exhibition about her experiences of war and the letter that she contributed. Later, when we are having the interview, Melisa reflects on these childhood letters that were written during the war: her father had already moved to Austria, whereas her mother, her siblings and herself were still in Bosnia with the intention to join the father. In the war situation, transnational phone calls were impossible because of capped phone cables and this is why the children regularly wrote letters to their father. Melisa remembers that as a child, she was sometimes struggling with writing: “And I can remember that one night, my mother had to really convince me to sit down and focus and write a few lines. And that was a really hard task for me as a child.” (5w_3) The letters are written in today’s Bosnia, sent to Austria and kept by the father. They remain in their place of storage through decades until one day, one is taken out and displayed at an exhibition.

In this interview, two moments become salient: when the person’s and the object’s biographies come into contact and together enable communicative agency. Melisa B., the child, authors the letter and the letter authorises Melisa B., the adult, to speak in the public exhibition space. I will trace back the conditions for the letter to become a biographic object due to these transits.

In the interview sequence on the letter’s production quoted above, Melisa B. contrasts the telephone and the letters, saying that writing letters was difficult for her as a child and telephone calls might have been an easier way to communicate with her father. However, in retrospect, the letter gains an unexpected affordance: because of its very materiality, it outlasted time and space. The letter’s material qualities afford certain actions, like the storage or the exhibition, that a telephone call does not have.

The act of storage, to withdraw the letters from circulation, creates a difference in significance and value and marks an object transition: it is turned into a family keepsake. The private archive is a condition for the letter to survive. In this stadium, little seems to happen in the object’s biography. Nevertheless, the years of storage are an important condition of its survival, requiring domestic space that can be allotted to the storage of things (i.e., taken away from people’s living space) and, just as any archival item, requiring care work for the object’s preservation. At this stage, future uses are unknown but the very act of storage is the condition for any potential future practice connected to it.

I interpret the letter’s transit from a private archive to its display in the exhibition as an important step in its singularisation and reappropriation as a biographic object. After dormant years in the family archive, the letter becomes resuscitated by being chosen for the exhibition. The transit from a private archive to its display marks a difference in the letter’s communicative framework: at this stage, it is addressing the public. The letter thus obtains a new value and social reach, it is upscaled as collective memory. Melisa B.’s communicative agency to speak at the exhibition is on the one side authorised by the object. But on the other side, the act of taking an object out of a private archive and to put it on display in an exhibition crucially requires socio-material infrastructures to do so.

Therefore, I shall attend to the infrastructures and labour that made this particular transit possible. The exhibition was facilitated by years of political activism by migrant and minority groups, both nationally and internationally, who prepared the ground for the historisation and museification of migratory movements (Bakondy 2018, Akkılıç and Bratić 2020). Part of the curators’ rationale was the concern to frame the breakout of war in Yugoslavia and the subsequent forced migration to Austria as part of transnational history (and Austrian national history) and not just as history that happened elsewhere (Bakondy and Širbegović 2022). The event of this exhibition, therefore, was an outcome of previous political struggles for this discourse to materialise.

The trajectory of the letter – to become increasingly singularised and gradually turned into a biographic object – is caused by discursive and socio-material conditions and infrastructures. The object’s transits engender a gradual upscaling in audience and scale of discourse: from a medium of interpersonal communication to an object of personal/family memory to material evidence of collective memory by its public display. These transits, however, do not fully and finally transform the object. The letter does not cease to stand for mediated care relationships, nor does it cease to afford family remembrance and kinship relations. When it returns to the private archive, the letter’s phase of life as a museum exhibit is still present.

Case 2: A Class Photo between Digital and Private Archive

The next example is from an interview with Alja M. who was born and grew up in today’s Bosnia and fled the war with her family when she was in the second grade of primary school. In the last interview, when Alja M. explains what the results of her exploration were, she says that this morning, she decided to bring the entire content of her private archive to the interview. She describes the archive as a large plastic box where different biographic objects are kept. One of these objects is a class photo in black and white. Referring to the photo, she says, “I thought I’d bring this to the interview because it is just a beautiful story. I escaped from Bosnia in ‘92 with my family and back then, we didn’t expect that we would stay in Austria for a long time or that we would stay in Austria for the rest of our lives and therefore, we also didn’t bring any photos with us.’” (1w_3) However, history turned out differently and the family remained in Austria. From a later perspective, everything they had left was forever lost, among them all of the family’s photos, including this class photo. Later, at the time when Alja M. is an adult, a former classmate or teacher decides to digitalise the photo (not Alja’s but their own version of the same class photo) and present it on Facebook. This is when Alja M.’s parents find the picture because they reconnected with former neighbours and friends from their previous place of living in Bosnia. Alja describes the intense emotional disruption when she received the photo as an adult, living in Vienna. Considering the scale of loss, she highlights the exceptional recovery of this item which is the only photo that exists from her as a child at this age. The photo gets printed out, put in a plastic sheet protector and is placed in Alja’s private archive, in community with other memory objects from different stages of her life.

The most prominent moments in the interview regarding the class photo are the moment of loss and the moment of recovery. Just as in the previous example, these two events are decades apart but related to each other. Alja M., the child, has to leave the photo behind but the photo comes back to Alja M., the adult. In my interpretation, I will highlight the difference in the prospective and retrospective views on the photo, the conditions of object survival and the role of domestic space and private archives for its reappropriation.

The object is introduced to the interview from a standpoint in the past: the escape from war. The expectation that the war would not last for more than a few months and that people would be able to return and continue their lives was a discourse that shaped their decisions about what to bring and what to leave behind. In the course of history, the expected scenario of a swift return was changed to a permanent settling in a new place and the war profoundly transformed the political landscape. This horizon of expectation at the time of flight is the reason why the family brings certain items along and leaves others behind. The family’s movement, at that time imagined as a journey of several months, in retrospect turned into a displacement. The relatively mundane object of a class photo becomes increasingly singularised: it turns into a more personal object, its significance increases and it mediates aspects of her biographic account. It changes from being a class photo to the only childhood photo prior to the escape.

The reason for the photo to be regained and to become a biographic object lies outside of Alja’s agency. If we try to reconstruct the circumstances of the photo’s unexpected recovery, it is owed to several factors. The first factor concerns the photo’s genre: because it is a class photo, the whole class received the same picture. Therefore, it is saved in someone else’s private archive at the moment when it was lost as a biographic object for Alja. Secondly, media change and the emergence of digital platforms affords networked sociability of dispersed communities. The digital platform is used as a shared repository where items previously perceived as personal or family memory are displayed. By their upload and display, these items are upscaled to collective memory. They become part of the piecing together of pre-war memories and livelihoods. Thus, if we ask how people and objects become agentive in terms of object survival, the photo is a case in point that object survival is not always in people’s power. At the same time, objects do not have an intention or agency on their own but as this example shows, it is due to socio-material infrastructures that the picture gets moved from A to B.

The picture is printed, put into a plastic sheet protector, enters Alja’s home and is placed in her private archive. The private archive is the plastic box where she keeps a particular genre of things, namely memory objects from different phases of her life. I interpret the printing of the photo as a significant step of reappropriation. Whereas the photo was upscaled to collective memory by its display on a digital platform, it is downscaled as family memory and personal memory in the act of printing, storing in the home and the placing in a specific container. While the photo is now dwelling in the box in community with other personal memory objects, it still continues to live its “multiple lives” (Şanlı 2022): it is a lost object, it is a (digitalised) group photo of a community of classmates who got violently dispersed and it is the only remaining photo of Alja M. at this age. Every transit (sensu Svašek 2012) resulted the crossing of a threshold. Each crossing went hand in hand with both object transition (the change in the way the object is perceived) and subject transformation (the way human subjectivity changes).

CONCLUSION

This paper dealt with the changing perspectives on biographic objects that survived the Yugoslav war. In the analysis, I traced back the unlikely conditions of these objects to survive or be regained against a background of war, destruction and displacement. Applying Svašek’s (2012) distinction between transit, transition and transformation, change in both objects and subjects was analysed as they pass several thresholds in time and space. In the first case, a letter was saved and survived the war, whereas in the second case, a class photo was lost but later regained due to networked interactions on a digital platform. I argue that these things become biographic objects not only because they survived a war but because they afford social action at several points of my interview partners’ biographies. Thus, these objects act as mediational means, reaching audiences on different scales and evidencing discourses. Crucially, I showed how these objects unfold their potential for social action due to their circulation in different social spaces: domestic space and the private archive, digital platforms and exhibitions.

The focus of this paper, biographic objects in the context of forced displacement, adds a further aspect to this special issue on keeping and discard in the context of homes. War and forced displacement are a case in point that we are not always the ones deciding about our possessions’ fate. Within this context, how can we explain the effective survival of these objects? As the two cases presented here show, the power of keeping and retrieval does not only (and sometimes not even primarily) rest with human agency but can only be explained in conjunction with material agency and infrastructures. Homes, together with domestic labour, are an important component of these infrastructures.

Things move from one place to the other also because of their material qualities. For instance, the letter, contrasted to a telephone call by the interview partner, afforded the possibility of storage and later of display in an exhibition. It was mobile due to the only remaining infrastructure of communication during the war: the sending of letters. It was later selected for display in the exhibition because its materiality expresses a child’s experience of war. The picture, on the other hand, survived due to the fact that it was a class photo and not a family snapshot. Because of the digital transformation of networked communication, it found its way back to the interview partner. In the case of these two examples, the genre of objects (Makovicky 2015) plays a crucial role for their effective survival: a class photo rather than a family snapshot, a child’s letter rather than a telephone call.

The private archive and domestic space, seemingly mundane and taken for granted, turned out to be crucial for object survival in the cases presented here. In the letter’s case, home is a place where the letter can physically survive the decades because of the care work that is put into its storage. However, at this stage it is not particularly singularised as a personal object for Melisa B. Rather, the letter is reappropriated as a biographic object in the exhibition context. In the photo’s case, the act of printing a class photo and to transfer it from the digital platform to Alja M.’s private archive is an act of reappropriation and singularisation. The picture started its life as class photo, an everyday object, but became the only surviving picture of Alja M. when she was a child.

Thus, agency emerges because things and people are embedded in socio-material infrastructures which are both material (the post, digital platforms, archives, exhibition spaces) but also social in the sense that they are connected to labour (e.g. domestic labour, political labour, memory work, or digitally networked interactions). War and flight are not the only explanatory frame that gives meaning to these objects. Rather, they became biographic objects because of their capacity to mediate social action in particular spaces and social networks. Thus, even if the private archive seems to be a dormant stage in the social life of things, it is nevertheless a necessary condition for any future action, when things are taken out of the archive and afford agency.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my interview partners for participating in this research project and for sharing parts of their biographies. Many thanks to the two guest editors of this special issue, Fancisco Martínez and Tomás Errázuriz for inviting me to the EASA panel “Reordering Domestic Spaces,” to Katie Kilroy-Marac for her insightful discussion of this paper and to the two reviewers for their constructive comments.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under Grant number T 1148-G.

Notes on contributors

Julia Sonnleitner

Julia Sonnleitner holds a post-doc position in Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna. In her current project, Language in Motion, she explores the impact of media and materiality on the lived experience of language. She was trained in linguistics, anthropology and Slavonic Studies and holds a PhD in social and cultural anthropology. Her research interests include historical memory studies, media, the transmission of language and memory, material culture studies and semiotic landscapes. [email protected]

Notes

1 The project, “Language in Motion. Exploring the linguistic repertoire and media biographies in the context of forced displacement.” (2020–2023) was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): T 1148-G. The project explores the lived experience of language and how mediatised objects enhance communicative agency: https://languageinmotion.univie.ac.at/.