The intimate debt: Health, wealth, and embodied experience on the Bosnian market.

摘要

This dissertation starts with a hugely popular healer Nerka, a Bosnian "Queen of Health," (Kraljica Zdravlja), who heals with her hands without touching and without a price; it ends with a chapter visiting her excessively generous and tactless practice to raise a question more puzzling than the secret of her healing gift: what historical and ethnographic circumstances make Nerka a people's Queen? The Intimate Debt describes ethnographically and phenomenologically the new de-monetized market that spreads pervasively by means of informal debts, exchanged much like gifts, and is said to be suffered in various health disorders. It follows people's everyday, anxious travels across multiple medical terrains - clinical, alternative, and traditional - in pursuit of better health, wealth, and a therapist "for real." By paying serious attention to people's complaints that life since the end of Socialism and the 1990s war and peace is "just surviving" (preivljavanje), and by excavating an embodied history of the idea of a good life from the everyday, broadly economic practices, this dissertation reopens "experience" as a theoretical and methodological problem for an anthropological study. It argues that careful attention to intimate exchanges at therapeutic sites and sites of the market lends insight into local bodies as constituted by deferrals of gifts and capital. Because alternative medical therapists in Bosnia do not construe local cosmologies so much as they invoke and intervene in plural bodily ontologies that complement the human anatomy of global biomedicine, I argue that these competing knowledge claims assemble a new image of the material existence that includes invisible, incorporeal but spatial and tangible extensions. Exploring the local forms of experiential knowledge about body and drawing inspiration from some pre- and post-structuralist phenomenology, I suggest that the study of the power of healing at a distance and the superficial bodies it presumes, contributes to our understanding of contemporary Bosnia's moral economy and popular politics since the emergence of the Queen. Drawing on the Queen's claim that indebtedness renders the otherwise exceptional Nerka like everyone else in Bosnia - properly human - this dissertation asks: under what conditions can a community be formed on debt? Can we conceive of it as being political? And if so, what forms of being political are available to us ethnographically in a place infamous for a genocidal violence and believed to be over-determined by the formal politics of ethno-nationalism?