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ABSTRACT
This article aims to contribute to the formulation of an analytically operational notion of hope best suited to its treatment as an object of ethnographic investigation. First, it dissects epistemological and political assumptions of recent writings on the burgeoning anthropology of “hope”. Then, reflecting on an ethnographic study of temporal reasonings in the “Meantime” in supervised, post-war, postsocialist, post-Yugoslav and presumably Europeanizing Bosnia and Herzegovina, it constructs a critical conversation between anthropological replications of hope that seek to valorize indeterminacy as a principle and studies in the political economy of hope that seek to understand determinations of hope (including people’s engagements with indeterminacy) in particular conditions. The article argues that the latter approach—conceiving of hope as a relational phenomenon in historical time—is better placed to capitalize on the specific strengths of ethnographic research.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the participants of the 2015 workshop Precarious Futures? Hoping, moving and waiting in times of uncertainty (organized by the Dansk Institute for Internationale Studier), to Jan Grill, and to the editors and anonymous reviewers of History and Anthropology for constructive criticism of earlier versions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The BiH team go on to beat Iran 3-1, but this occurred after hope.
2. While I normally tend to phrase this point as hope being “situated”, “historically specific”, “shaping up in particular conditions”, etc., here I purposively use the term “determination” to crystallize key points in dialogue with the valorization of “indeterminacy” in replications of hope.
3. For a critical assessment of this claim, see Jensen (Citation2014, 342).
4. In an analysis of practices focused on endurance by other inhabitants in Hoyerswerda, Ringel (Citation2014) explicitly differentiates his approach from Deleuzian interpretations.
5. For a discussion of this point in relation to the study of affect, see Jansen (Citation2016).
6. This is facilitated by the widespread, unacknowledged muddling of the distinction between what I have called transitive and intransitive modalities of use of the term hope.
7. Miyazaki only touches on Bloch’s Marxism in a mention of his support for Stalin, tucked away in a footnote and rendered as a criticism raised by others.
8. Clearly, Miyazaki’s work has normative underpinnings too, yet, unlike Bloch’s explicitly Marxist hope, his “hope for anthropology” is described negatively (for example, a preference for a “nondirectional stance”). It remains vague to me. Moreover, how does one hope for anthropology? Whose anthropology?
9. Using emic terms, a common strategy in anthropological replications of hope, does not eliminate the issue of linguistic convention, for whatever it is that these terms denote is still incorporated into texts that enter in non-emic conversations on hope as understood in the English language.
10. Crapanzano (Citation2003) also warns that hope can paralyse. Yet for that phrasing to work, he seems to equate hoping with waiting (“One hopes—one waits” (Citation2003, 18)). While the two may be closely related to each other (Čelebičić Citation2013; Hage Citation2009), I see no advantage in collapsing them into each other. Notably Crapanzano (Citation1985) himself opts for “waiting” as the more appropriate term elsewhere.
11. This does not mean, of course, that people do not use the register of hope even when they have a very high degree of certainty of outcomes.
12. These four dimensions also seem to underlie writings on similar questions that do not use the term hope (for example, Appadurai Citation2004; Auyero Citation2012; Ferguson Citation1999; Guyer Citation2007).
13. The subsequent sections briefly summarize some key findings from Jansen (Citation2015).
14. For a more detailed discussion of “yearning”, see Jansen (Citation2015, 54–57).
15. Regarding ethnonational divisions, many inhabitants of BiH invest their hopes not in this country’s team but in that of Serbia or Croatia, both of which include players from BiH as these are the preferred destinations for many Serbian- or Croatian-identifying footballers from BiH. Some commentators went through the names of the Zmajevi (mostly identifiable as Bosniak names) to stress the ethnonational non-representativeness of the BiH team, but this did not seem a major concern either way amongst those who shared in the buzz. Probably they would like to see some of the Bosnian-born stars of the Serbian and Croatian teams to play for BiH instead (and this reminds us that hopes for the BiH team always shape up in relation to those of specific others for specific other teams). Yet more important to them, I suggest, was the fact that the BiH team in Brazil consisted overwhelmingly of children of the BiH diaspora. And while this sometimes drew mockery of their language skills, again it reinforced a pattern in questions of hope in BiH: this generation of diasporic Bosnians was portrayed as embodying a promise of professionalism, dedication and success, untainted by the hopelessness in BiH itself (as exemplified by the BiH Football Association, for example, widely considered a nest of corruption and incompetence).
16. As for “mutual reinforcement”, I do not aim to detect political hope in the buzz around the BiH football team. I am interested here in understanding the political conditions in which particular forms of hope came to be centred on the Zmajevi in particular ways.