SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Popovo Polje, a landscape stretched across the southern end of the Bosnian Dinaric highlands, is a karst system consisting of a wide field, a meandering sinking river and numerous caves and sinkholes, which are home to endemic species of animals and plants adapted to living underground, as well as to a plethora of “supernatural” beings animating the cosmology of the religiously plural community that once lived there. The destruction of the Popovo karst has had a lengthy history, from the 19th century Habsburg colonial regulation of resources, through the repeated use of its sinkholes as executions sites and natural mass graves since 1918, through the forceful Yugoslav quest for hydroelectric power with a network of dams, reservoirs and the excavation of the riverbed, to the ethno-capitalist environmental degradation since the 1990s. The effects of these interventions were the disappearance and exile of the various kinds of beings holding each other together in the system of karst relations. I pay special attention to the so-called human fish and its evasive tactics. In the contemporary Popovo, split between two ethno-religiously purified polities, competing ideologies of the past keep memory in the stranglehold of nationalist simulacra. Material remains are up for grabs, as schools from the Serbian provinces bring children to learn about the ‘old monasteries’, the cement walls of which had been concealed with blocks of stone taken from destroyed traditional houses and crumbling hilltop fortifications. The nationalist regimes, which re-inaugurated themselves through another genocide in the 1990s, perpetuate their necropolitical agendas through an industry of memory. Is there a way out of this occupation of memory? Employing the karstic vocabulary, I notice the patterns in the evasive manoeuvres across the endangered more-than-human system: poniranje (‘submerging’, ‘sinking’, ‘diving’) as a memory tactic. This paper is based on recent ethnographic research across and beneath the Popovo Field and the town of Trebinje, conducted for my forthcoming book.