Research Overview

Ethnographic studies in Anthropology of Law (1974-85):

The subject matter of my research went from religion and culture, and the Peacemaker Courts at the Allegany Reservation, to an ethnographic study of the council of a caste of nomads in rural India, to an ethnographic study of a socialist labor court in Yugoslavia. All of this work was done within the paradigm then dominant in Anthropology of Law, which focussed on the ways that disputes were managed in different social and cultural environments, and the work was supported by what was then the Law & Social Sciences Program atb the National Science Foundation (NSF). That program’s focus was on scientific studies of “law and law-like systems of rules” and the mechanisms utilized when such rules were involved. In anthropology, this meant a focus on “dispute processing,” with great attention paid to the various for a in which dispute claims could be made, rgued and in some cases resolved. My contributions to this literautre included what is, I think, still one of very few if not the only ethnogrtaphic studies of the ways disputes were handled and social statuses adjusted by the traditional council (panchayat) of a caste in India, in this case of illiterate nomads in the state of Maharashtra. (see India fieldwork). Products of the research were not only a monograph, but articles: on the economic adaptation of “service nomadism;” on the socio-linguistics of arguments when the “facts” were never at issue but only their meaning; on exclusion from and re-admission into “normal” social capacity in the caste; and on the metaphysics of a system in which improper action was seen to induce physical pollution, the task of the panchayat being to remove that dirt and thus re-include errant members, not to exclude them.

Within the disputes processing paradigm then dominant in anthropology of law, the “Courts of Associated Labor” in socialist Yugoslavia promised to be interesting, because they were based on the premise that workers, rather than lawyers, should handle work-related disputes (see Yugoslavia fieldwork). Since I had trained as a South Asianist and had no previous experience in eastern Europe, I had no idea going into this work just how different Yugoslavia’s sytem of “socialist self-management” based on its unique concept of “social property” (društvena svojina) was from other forms of state socialism (based on all property belonging to the state) and capitalism (private property in varying forms). Thus I not only had to learn what was then called Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian, but also the unique, newly invented terminology of Yugoslav self-management. Turns out that without knowing it, I was doing salvage ethnography on a social system and its institutions that were soon to disappear, my book on the Courts of Associate Labor appearing in 1990, the same year in which those courts were eliminated as Yugoslavia jettisoned state socialism. But it also turns out that I was doing salvage ethnography of the workings of socialist labor law, which really did favor workers’ claims over those of management. In the post-socialist states of what had been Yugoslavia, most workers are deprived of basic rights, and can be replaced by imported workers from Asia or Africa who do not have even the basic rights of citizenship and who can be deported if they complain.

Even though my research was ethnographic and basically anthropological, my affiliations were with legal institutions – the Institute for Comparative Law (1981-83) and the Law Faculty of Belgrade University (1995, 1991), and was employed by the American Bar Foundation (1983-86). Thus my legal training came into full use; I had to understand the legal premises of Yugoslav self-management socialism and the structure of the court systems within the Yugoslav federation. This made me one of few non-Yugoslavs with expertise on Yugoslav constitutionalism and law. This seemed esoteric in academic circles in the USA – I left the American Bar Foundation (ABF) after the Foundation’s board told me that despite substantial external funding for my Yugoslavia work (NSF, SSRC, ACLS, IREX), the ABF would not support any more such research. I thus left them for the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh in 1986.

Collapse of Yugoslavia and Formation of New States (1988-2001):

Thus far my work had been in law and social science, but as Yugoslavia collapsed into the violent antithesis of law, the work on Yugoslav constitutionalism and law that had been esoteric to the ABF Board suddenly became of great interest to the US State Department and others, as Yugoslavia went into a constitutional crisis which became constitutional breakdown, and then wars of dissolution. I suddenly found myself analyzing things I never had thought I would study: the cultural logic of ethno-national violence and the corresponding logic of the constitutional structure of ethnocracies, ethnic cleansing and gendered violence, the pretenses of international criminal justice in the Balkans, and the hypocrisy of certain forms of what is ostensibly humanitarianism and of some forms of anthropology. Some of this work is reasonably well known, if not uncontroversial.

I also found myself in the unexpected position of being called upon as an expert by various institutions, some U.S. government, some international organizations. A chance meeting with an American journalist on a beach in Rhode Island led to my five-day diplomatic career as a Personal Advisor to the Hon. Milan Panić, the last Prime Minister of federal Yugoslavia, at the London Conference on Yugoslavia in August of 1992. Panić, a Serbian-American businessman, had gone to Yugoslavia thinking that he could help end the wars there. The American journalist I met was his press spokesman; others on the team were a former US Ambassador to Yugoslavia and a former U.S. Senator as legal advisor, as well as a number of highly skilled Yugoslavs, notably Prof. Tibor Varadi. The fact that I was involved at all is an indication of how few experts there were who knew the constitutional, political and legal issues.

Another unexpected role was as one of the first expert witnesses at the first international criminal tribunal after Nuremberg and Tokyo, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). I was actually the first expert witness in the first case (Tadić) – for the defense. This was unexpected and my initial reaction was to decline - I said I didn’t know anything about the case or the client and didn’t want to know. But the issue was a purely constitutional and legal one, not having connection to what the defendant may have done but rather with whether the Tribunal actually had jurisdiction to try him for certain offenses. The defense lawyer had read some of my articles and wanted me to say in the courtroom what I had already said in print. Since I thought that the Tribunal could not be fair if qualified experts would not testify for the defense on relevant issues, I accepted. The experience was fascinating; but the more I saw of the ICTY the less faith I had in it. And as I should have known, being a defense witness in a war crimes trial is unlikely to be viewed as acceptable, even by – especially by, actually – people who claim to be defenders of human rights. To my knowledge, nobody has commented on the incongruity that an organization named Amnesty International was such a strong promoter of prosecutions, and turned out to view any acquittal as illegitimate.

Throughout the 1990s, then, I was engaged in an intense form of participant observation of the breakdown of one state and the violent formation of new ones from it. My perspectives varied from the ground up – Milica and I were in our Belgrade house most summers with our children, so my roles in varying interactions were as affinal kin, parent, neighbor, friend, colleague, expert; and always as an American, at a time when Serbia was increasingly targeted by American sanctions and ultimately NATO bombing (of mainly civilian targets) for 77 days and nights. While I assume that I was being monitored by the Serbian government, I was never subjected to hostility, either official or in personal interactions. While Americans seemed incapable of seeing Serbs as anything other than supporters of Slobodan Milošević, people in Belgrade always distinguished Americans in general, and me in particular, from the Clinton administration and its actions.

Antagonistic Tolerance Project (2002-2013):

The mental and professional exhaustion caused by analyzing the demise of Yugoslavia in real time, and from personal closeness to it all, led me to want to start working on other things. Drawing on what seemed similarities over contestations over religious sites in India and the Balkans, I developed an international, interdisciplinary and comparative study on competitive sharing of religious sites, which my colleagues and I call “Antagonistic Tolerance,” (AT). With NSF funding and Wenner-Gren Foundation funding we did research in Bulgaria, India, Mexico, Peru, Portugal and Turkey. You can learn more about the project at the Antagonistic Tolerance Project Website.

“(Re)Constructing Religioscapes as Competing Territorial Claims in Post-War Bosnia & Herzegovina.” (2018-2024):

As the AT project ended I wanted to test some of its models in a single cultural setting through time. Bosnia & Herzegovina was interesting because, while there was a large literature on the destruction of cultural heritage during the 1992-95 war, there was very little on the reconstruction of sacral buildings and other monuments after the war ended. The AT model led me to anticipate that such (re)constructions would be done strategically, in terms of placement but also of the attributes of the buildings – height, mass, color and other features of what the AT project terms perceptibility. I happened to come across work by Prof. Mario Katić of the University of Zadar, who was starting ntno develop some similar ideas. We actually pulled together a powerpoint presentation for a conference in Zadar without having met, and then we put together a proposal to the National Science Foundation for a 3-year project. This proposal was successful; I became Principal Investigator of the project, with Mario serving as PI of parts of it sub-contracted to the University of Zadar. We started initial fieldwork in October 2018. Mario and I did much more intensive and extensive fieldwork together in 2019, but the arrival of the Covid pandemic prevented more fieldwork until 2021. Fortunately, the NSF, which usually grants no-cost extensions anyway, granted extensions due to the pandemic, so we are finishing the fieldwork in October 2024.

From the start of the project we included Prof. Ante Šileg of the Geography Department at the University of Zadar, and some of his associates, to engage in geo-locating and mapping through time sites in specific places, notably the cities of Banja Luka, Mostar and Zenica. We have also added other colleagues: Prof. Emerita Milica Bakić-Hayden, religious studies, University of Pittsburgh; Prof. Bogdan Dražeta, anthropology, University of Belgrade; Zorana Guja Dražeta, MA, ethnomusicology, SANU; Prof. Mirza Dženanović, historian, University of Zenica; Dr. Vladan Vuklić, National Archive of Republika Srpska. In varying combinations we have done fieldwork throughout Bosnia & Herzegovina, covering approximately 15,000 km by road, in almost every municipality (općina/opština) in the country. We do not know of any project that has covered all of Bosnia & Herzegovina.

We have developed several theoretical concepts that we think are of general utility. One is to have reworked Reinhart Koselleck's concept of 'sediments of time' processually, as sedimentation and erosion of the social and physical indicators of the presence of Self- and Other-identifying communities through time. We also have expanded the concept of the 'fluidity' of ethnic or national identities to include viscosity, the resistance of a fluid to flowing freely. Group identities may be viscous, changing slowly and maintaining much continuity through time. Fluidity thus becomes a variable quality, not simply a binary opposite of 'fixed'.

Further information on this project can be found on the Reconstructing Religioscapes in Bosnia – Herezegovina site.

Robert M. HAYDEN, JD, PhD

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