City of survivors Trauma, grief, and getting by in post-war Sarajevo

This dissertation examines how the urban poor in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) cope with trauma and rebuild their lives in a new post-war state and economy. The dissertation is based on twenty months of fieldwork with relief agencies and their beneficiaries. I carried out participant-observation of the activities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and conducted interviews with policy-makers, mental health professionals, and individuals and families searching for care.;The dissertation charts the impact and sustainability of psychosocial support services---originally funded and delivered by international humanitarian organizations, now provided by local NGOs as foreign engagement in BiH declines. After surveying the available medical and welfare services for war victims in BiH, I conducted a study of "Wings of Hope," an organization that supports families considered to be traumatized by the war and its aftermath. The dissertation focuses on how these families relate to Wings of Hope and other services that comprise a new, fragile therapeutic apparatus that is crucial to sustaining their survival and aspirations for the future. The dissertation explores how people adapt and transform the language of trauma as they struggle day-by-day to make ends meet in an environment of corruption, ethnically divided politics, and myopic, ineffective post-war reconstruction efforts.;Grand political and mass-therapeutic interventions---executed under the rubrics of reconciliation, democratization, and market reform---fail to incorporate the local expertise gleaned by ordinary people struggling to rebuild social worlds and to sustain deeply held values. Sarajevans are redefining the language of trauma to make moral and political claims and to convey the persistent intractability of the loss of cherished relations of care and ways of being. In accounting for this human agency, the dissertation demonstrates how anthropological evidence can help to ground debates about international humanitarianism and democracy-building, reconfigure social scientific and clinical approaches to trauma, and generate a new approach to post-war social repair that better incorporates the values, needs, and desires of survivors.