Ana Aceska Current Project Ana Aceska Curriculum Vitae Current Project My doctoral research is a contribution to the ethnography of city life. Cities have traditionally been seen (by their inhabitants and analysts alike) as zones where rigid, traditional status and ethnic distinctions sustainable in rural life dissolve in a melting pot of anonymous public space and, eventually, a ‘society of the masses’. We now know that cities give rise to new forms of distinction. One of the most dramatic of these is the formal division of a city along ethnic/political/religious lines. After a long process of war-time ethnic cleansing (1992-1995), mass deportation and land seizure, the formerly mixed city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been spatially and institutionally divided between Bosniaks (Muslims) and Croats (Catholics), a process that officially lasted until 2004, when a formal reunification of the city was agreed. I am currently investigating how these processes of spatial and institutional division and reunification take place through ‘negotiations’ (often bodily, silent, informal, but at times noisy and conflictual) among the two ethnic groups over the use of public space. My main research questions are driven by the situation I find in Mostar today: What is the interplay between national (re)building processes (and post-war ethnic relations) and the social construction of public space? How is the management of public space in the post-war processes of spatial and institutional division and partial attempts at reunification achieved? How are the people from the two communities “creating” public spaces that will serve as “instruments” in building their distinct identity in the city? Are they doing it by creating public spaces that are exclusively “theirs” or do they use different means than this? If yes, what are the “means” that people form the two communities “create” in making public spaces “ours” and “theirs”? Mostar represents an ideal place to study these issues. With a long history of multiethnic and multireligous urban life and the absence of “borders” in public spaces, until 1992, it allows for an

ethnography of a radically reconstructed city near the inception of this process. Pre-war Mostar represented a key symbol of the ex-Yugoslav ideology of brotherhood among nations, the most “Yugoslav” of all Yugoslav cities, the kingdom of mixed marriages and the most celebrated territory of successful urban cohabitation among different ethnic groups. Post-war Mostar is considered as one of the few remaining “problems” of the dissolution of Former Yugoslavia; one of the few former Yugoslav cities where the one side couldn’t get rid of the other. This state of affairs is legitimated through ideologies of “ancient hatred” and “national awakening”. How do such "invented traditions" take root so fast? Conflicts of identity, from colonial to post-modern times, refer to demographic, economic, social and symbolic tensions, which in the case of Mostar and Bosnia and Herzegovina crystallized into three and a half years terrible ethnic war, the biggest one in Europe after World War II. Since June 2007 I have been living full time in Mostar, gathering observational, archival and interview data in order to understand both the long-tern development and the contemporary (post-war) transformation of interethnic relations using the concept of “public space” as a tool. I am investigating the interplay between the post-war creation of identities (Croat and Catholic on the one side and Bosniak and Muslim on the other) within the city and the social construction of public spaces. By August 2008 I will have completed all required interviews with Mostar citizens, gathered archival material about the use of public space in the city since the turn of the 20th Century, ethnographic data on key public spaces in Mostar, as well as data about the history and present work of the official relevant institutions.