Čarna Brković
Biographic Data
| ID | 106952 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Čarna Brković |
| GIVEN NAMES | Čarna |
| FAMILY NAME | Brković |
| SIGNATURE | BRKOVIĆ Č |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Göttingen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4569-6342 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
How and Why DEI Matters in Ethnology and Folklore
As researchers based in Europe, we are deeply concerned with the recent initiatives and executive orders for cutbacks in funding vital for the fields of ethnology, folklore, and anthropology, and the discreditation of researchers operating in the field of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Researching the diversity of communities, marginalized voices, silenced histories, and cultural heritage controversies are intrinsic to our understanding …
Re-Turns, Entanglements and Collaborations: Anthropological Experimentations
Forum: Confronting the Genocide of Palestinians and Refusing Repression, edited by Lori Allen and Heidi Mogstad
Chelsi West Ohueri: Encountering Race in Albania. An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife
Article Chelsi West Ohueri: Encountering Race in Albania. An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife was published on September 1, 2025 in the journal Comparative Southeast European Studies (volume 73, issue 3)
Disappointment and awkwardness as ugly feelings: Humanitarian affect in a “Global East
What does transnational humanitarianism look like when considered from the perspective of a "Global East"? Ethnographically studying the disappointment and awkwardness generated by two transnational humanitarian projects illuminates a sense of suspended agency among Montenegrin citizens that was developed after the end of the Cold War. Montenegrins are often simultaneously included in the racialized and class-based humanitarian discourses of the …
Vernacular Humanitarianisms: An Introduction
There has been an increase of anthropological interest in small-scale humanitarianisms that make situated claims to universality. The articles in this collection demonstrate that some genealogies of such situated universalisms have been explored more than others. Focusing on vernacular humanitarianisms, the goal is not to celebrate the standpoint of ‘radical alterity’ but rather to acknowledge that imagining and recognising similarities of people…
The Humanitarian Theater in the Mediterranean and the Threat of Violence in the Balkans
This article compares the Mediterranean and the Balkan routes of migration into the European Union, exploring the (in)visibility and (un)knowability of the management of European borderlands. It offers a historical overview of the hotspot approach in the Mediterranean, where securitarian concerns merged with humanitarian affects, making certain practices and subjectivities possible, but foreclosing others. Lampedusa, Italy, has been turned into a…
Postsocialist Mediterranean: Scalar gaze, moral self, and relational labor of favors in Eastern Europe
This article opens a conversation between anthropological studies of the Mediterranean and of postsocialism in order to propose the notion of a “scalar gaze” as an analytical approach useful for capturing veering practices in their social complexity. The article argues that favors ( veze/štela, , lit. relations, connections) in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina were a practice through which people fulfilled the demands of capitalist economy to …
Thinking With” When Peer Reviewing: Introduction to the PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation on Peer Review
Imagine a person writing a peer review. Perhaps you will picture a skeptical individual crushing scholarship just because they can. This is at least the popular image that circulates in social media groups such as “Reviewer 2 must be stopped!”: an angry person who inflicts pain because they do not (want to) understand an author's argumentation. The sense of being misunderstood and wronged by a peer reviewer seems to be almost universally shared i…
Minority sexualities, kinship and non‐autological freedom in Montenegro
I propose an alternative conception of freedom in an actually existing liberal order by focusing on how gay men in Podgorica, Montenegro maintain love and kinship relations. For theorists of late liberalism, the demands of liberal freedom and those of social relatedness have been seen as opposed. By contrast, in Podgorica we can trace a notion of non-autological freedom understood as an ability to engage in a certain practice while thinking throu…
In the Name of the Daughter – Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro. An Introduction
In 2012 international organizations warned that Montenegro is one of the world's leaders in sex-selective abortion, with as a result significantly fewer births of babies recognized as girls. 1 Initially, that piece of data seemed to attract little attention, but that changed after a few years. NGOs working on women's rights organized campaigns advocating against the practice of sex-selective abortion; German journalists came to Montenegro and rep…
European Anthropology as a Fortuitous Accident: Reflections on the Sustainability of the Field
Under what conditions does European anthropology emerge today as an intellectual project? European anthropology takes shape only provisionally, as a fractured, heterogeneous and uneven field, for the duration of time-limited research projects and meetings with Europe-wide participation. In the currently dominant socio-economic conditions of academic life, European anthropology as an intellectual project has little chance to develop, except as an …
John Clarke/Dave Bainton/Noémi Lendvai/Paul Stubbs: Making Policy Move. Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage
Preference for censorship: Yugoslav film and changes of the regime of visibility after the Cold War [bonus en ligne - article]
Post-Yugoslav artists relatively often claim that the major international successes of Yugoslav films were the result of novel artistic approaches developed to circumscribe state censorship. Some filmmakers say that socialist censorship was better than being ignored, like they feel today. This article explores the preference for socialist censorship articulated by filmmakers from Serbia, suggesting that it needs to be situated in the change of th…
The Everyday Life of a Homo Sacer. Enclave Urbanism in Podgorica, Montenegro
This article ethnographically follows the everyday life of a homo sacer-a young Roma woman who has lived her whole life in a camp for displaced persons. The camp has been built for Roma, Ashkalias, and Balkan Egyptians who in 1999 fled from the violence in Kosovo to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. The key aim of the article is to see what happens with the concepts of 'homo sacer' and 'bare life' when ethnographically engaged in the context …
Epistemological eclecticism: Difference and the 'Other' in the Balkans and beyond
This article's concern is epistemological in that it seeks understanding of the nature of ethnographic knowledge production. Its background assumption is that decolonization of anthropology requires decolonization of anthropological epistemology. The article argues that anthropology is not so much a study of the 'Other', but an effort to acquire knowledge by translating across some sort of socio-historically established difference. Anthropologist…
Managing Ambiguity
Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart …
Managing Ambiguity: How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local community and ethical citizenship: Neoliberal configurations of social protection
This article explores the consequences of redefining citizenship as an ethical category during social protection reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Ethical citizenship refers to a particular way of defining the relationship between the state and a person; a special politics of behavior that seeks to redefine citizens as moral subjects of responsible communities. The article ethnographically demonstrates that a local community, imagined as a…
Bypassing Chokepoints: On the Anthropogeography of Smuggling, An interview with Elizabeth Dunn by Čarna Brković
In this interview from 16 June 2016 at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies at the Universität Regensburg, postdoc Čarna Brković speaks with Elizabeth Dunn, an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Indiana University Bloomington, about Dunn’s current project on ‘Chokepoints’ and research on displacement and humanitarian aid in Georgia. Dunn also discusses writing for different audiences, differences in acade…
Managing Ambiguity: How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entanglements
Depoliticization “from Below”: Everyday Humanitarianism in Bosnia and Herzegovina
This paper explores how the boundary between humanitarianism and politics was reproduced in the everyday life in a Bosnia and Herzegovina town. It addresses the use of (post)Yugoslav ideas about humaneness as an apolitical core surrounded by layers of socio-political identities in the course of humanitarian actions. The paper suggests that the depoliticization of humanitarian actions allowed people to distance themselves from the hegemonic unders…
Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entanglements
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Scaling Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Actions in a Bosnian Town
Through an ethnographic focus on humanitarne akcije in Bosnia and Herzegovina - a local form of raising monetary donations to people who need medical treatments abroad - this paper explores humanitarianism and its understandings of life. Ethnographically tracking the course of a humanitarna akcija organised in one Bosnian town, this paper makes two related points. First, it ethnographically demonstrates that lives of the 'helpers' and 'helped' in…
Depoliticization “from Below”: Everyday Humanitarianism in Bosnia and Herzegovina
This paper explores how the boundary between humanitarianism and politics was reproduced in the everyday life in a Bosnia and Herzegovina town. It addresses the use of (post)Yugoslav ideas about humaneness as an apolitical core surrounded by layers of socio-political identities in the course of humanitarian actions. The paper suggests that the depoliticization of humanitarian actions allowed people to distance themselves from the hegemonic unders…
The Humanitarian Theater in the Mediterranean and the Threat of Violence in the Balkans
This article compares the Mediterranean and the Balkan routes of migration into the European Union, exploring the (in)visibility and (un)knowability of the management of European borderlands. It offers a historical overview of the hotspot approach in the Mediterranean, where securitarian concerns merged with humanitarian affects, making certain practices and subjectivities possible, but foreclosing others. Lampedusa, Italy, has been turned into a…
Epistemological eclecticism: Difference and the 'Other' in the Balkans and beyond
This article's concern is epistemological in that it seeks understanding of the nature of ethnographic knowledge production. Its background assumption is that decolonization of anthropology requires decolonization of anthropological epistemology. The article argues that anthropology is not so much a study of the 'Other', but an effort to acquire knowledge by translating across some sort of socio-historically established difference. Anthropologist…
Disappointment and awkwardness as ugly feelings: Humanitarian affect in a “Global East
What does transnational humanitarianism look like when considered from the perspective of a "Global East"? Ethnographically studying the disappointment and awkwardness generated by two transnational humanitarian projects illuminates a sense of suspended agency among Montenegrin citizens that was developed after the end of the Cold War. Montenegrins are often simultaneously included in the racialized and class-based humanitarian discourses of the …
Thinking With” When Peer Reviewing: Introduction to the PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation on Peer Review
Imagine a person writing a peer review. Perhaps you will picture a skeptical individual crushing scholarship just because they can. This is at least the popular image that circulates in social media groups such as “Reviewer 2 must be stopped!”: an angry person who inflicts pain because they do not (want to) understand an author's argumentation. The sense of being misunderstood and wronged by a peer reviewer seems to be almost universally shared i…
The Everyday Life of a Homo Sacer. Enclave Urbanism in Podgorica, Montenegro
This article ethnographically follows the everyday life of a homo sacer-a young Roma woman who has lived her whole life in a camp for displaced persons. The camp has been built for Roma, Ashkalias, and Balkan Egyptians who in 1999 fled from the violence in Kosovo to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. The key aim of the article is to see what happens with the concepts of 'homo sacer' and 'bare life' when ethnographically engaged in the context …
Floating signifiers”: Negotiating the meaning of national in Montenegro, at the Internet chat room Café del Montenegro
The paper represents the analysis of the narratives that deal with the sentiment of national belonging in Montenegro within the chat room Café del Montenegro. The practice of the Internet chat room users is perceived as cultural engagement – „practicing“ the State and the emotion of national identification of its own kind. By writing, arguing, negotiating the meaning of the state and nation an abundance of different and broken knowledge’s are cre…
Governing the sense of belonging: An anthropological analysis of "culture"and "identity" in the constitution of the Republic of Serbia
The topic of this work is critical reconsideration of a cultural idea which is standardized by the highest political-legal document of the Republic of Serbia. I am starting from the assumption that if in the Constitution as a "founding legal and political document of a state", are incorporated concepts of human rights, and, particularly, the rights of the minorities (as set apart and protected), then a certain idea is standardized by it, i.e., a …
Floating Signifiers. Negotiations of the National on the Internet Forum Café del Montenegro
Article Floating Signifiers. Negotiations of the National on the Internet Forum Café del Montenegro was published on January 1, 2009 in the journal Comparative Southeast European Studies (volume 57, issue 1)
Guilt, responsibility, and denial. The past at stake in post-Milošević Serbia by Gordy, Eric: Reviews
Management of ambiguity: Favours and flexibility in Bosnia and Herzegovina
This article ethnographically outlines how one woman politician in a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina used favours to help ‘get things done’, becoming perceived as a ‘goddess’ who ‘spent herself’ for the sake of others. The article suggests that such people managed to gather power through the paradox of keeping‐while‐giving (Weiner, . . . Berkeley: California UP). People able to grant numerous favours in multiple public and private arenas kept asid…
Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entanglements
Depoliticization “from Below”: Everyday Humanitarianism in Bosnia and Herzegovina
This paper explores how the boundary between humanitarianism and politics was reproduced in the everyday life in a Bosnia and Herzegovina town. It addresses the use of (post)Yugoslav ideas about humaneness as an apolitical core surrounded by layers of socio-political identities in the course of humanitarian actions. The paper suggests that the depoliticization of humanitarian actions allowed people to distance themselves from the hegemonic unders…
Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entanglements
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Scaling Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Actions in a Bosnian Town
Through an ethnographic focus on humanitarne akcije in Bosnia and Herzegovina - a local form of raising monetary donations to people who need medical treatments abroad - this paper explores humanitarianism and its understandings of life. Ethnographically tracking the course of a humanitarna akcija organised in one Bosnian town, this paper makes two related points. First, it ethnographically demonstrates that lives of the 'helpers' and 'helped' in…
Managing Ambiguity
Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart …
Managing Ambiguity: How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local community and ethical citizenship: Neoliberal configurations of social protection
This article explores the consequences of redefining citizenship as an ethical category during social protection reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Ethical citizenship refers to a particular way of defining the relationship between the state and a person; a special politics of behavior that seeks to redefine citizens as moral subjects of responsible communities. The article ethnographically demonstrates that a local community, imagined as a…
Bypassing Chokepoints: On the Anthropogeography of Smuggling, An interview with Elizabeth Dunn by Čarna Brković
In this interview from 16 June 2016 at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies at the Universität Regensburg, postdoc Čarna Brković speaks with Elizabeth Dunn, an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Indiana University Bloomington, about Dunn’s current project on ‘Chokepoints’ and research on displacement and humanitarian aid in Georgia. Dunn also discusses writing for different audiences, differences in acade…
Managing Ambiguity: How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina
The Everyday Life of a Homo Sacer. Enclave Urbanism in Podgorica, Montenegro
This article ethnographically follows the everyday life of a homo sacer-a young Roma woman who has lived her whole life in a camp for displaced persons. The camp has been built for Roma, Ashkalias, and Balkan Egyptians who in 1999 fled from the violence in Kosovo to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. The key aim of the article is to see what happens with the concepts of 'homo sacer' and 'bare life' when ethnographically engaged in the context …
Epistemological eclecticism: Difference and the 'Other' in the Balkans and beyond
This article's concern is epistemological in that it seeks understanding of the nature of ethnographic knowledge production. Its background assumption is that decolonization of anthropology requires decolonization of anthropological epistemology. The article argues that anthropology is not so much a study of the 'Other', but an effort to acquire knowledge by translating across some sort of socio-historically established difference. Anthropologist…
Preference for censorship: Yugoslav film and changes of the regime of visibility after the Cold War [bonus en ligne - article]
Post-Yugoslav artists relatively often claim that the major international successes of Yugoslav films were the result of novel artistic approaches developed to circumscribe state censorship. Some filmmakers say that socialist censorship was better than being ignored, like they feel today. This article explores the preference for socialist censorship articulated by filmmakers from Serbia, suggesting that it needs to be situated in the change of th…
European Anthropology as a Fortuitous Accident: Reflections on the Sustainability of the Field
Under what conditions does European anthropology emerge today as an intellectual project? European anthropology takes shape only provisionally, as a fractured, heterogeneous and uneven field, for the duration of time-limited research projects and meetings with Europe-wide participation. In the currently dominant socio-economic conditions of academic life, European anthropology as an intellectual project has little chance to develop, except as an …
John Clarke/Dave Bainton/Noémi Lendvai/Paul Stubbs: Making Policy Move. Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage
Minority sexualities, kinship and non‐autological freedom in Montenegro
I propose an alternative conception of freedom in an actually existing liberal order by focusing on how gay men in Podgorica, Montenegro maintain love and kinship relations. For theorists of late liberalism, the demands of liberal freedom and those of social relatedness have been seen as opposed. By contrast, in Podgorica we can trace a notion of non-autological freedom understood as an ability to engage in a certain practice while thinking throu…
In the Name of the Daughter – Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro. An Introduction
In 2012 international organizations warned that Montenegro is one of the world's leaders in sex-selective abortion, with as a result significantly fewer births of babies recognized as girls. 1 Initially, that piece of data seemed to attract little attention, but that changed after a few years. NGOs working on women's rights organized campaigns advocating against the practice of sex-selective abortion; German journalists came to Montenegro and rep…
Postsocialist Mediterranean: Scalar gaze, moral self, and relational labor of favors in Eastern Europe
This article opens a conversation between anthropological studies of the Mediterranean and of postsocialism in order to propose the notion of a “scalar gaze” as an analytical approach useful for capturing veering practices in their social complexity. The article argues that favors ( veze/štela, , lit. relations, connections) in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina were a practice through which people fulfilled the demands of capitalist economy to …
Thinking With” When Peer Reviewing: Introduction to the PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation on Peer Review
Imagine a person writing a peer review. Perhaps you will picture a skeptical individual crushing scholarship just because they can. This is at least the popular image that circulates in social media groups such as “Reviewer 2 must be stopped!”: an angry person who inflicts pain because they do not (want to) understand an author's argumentation. The sense of being misunderstood and wronged by a peer reviewer seems to be almost universally shared i…
Vernacular Humanitarianisms: An Introduction
There has been an increase of anthropological interest in small-scale humanitarianisms that make situated claims to universality. The articles in this collection demonstrate that some genealogies of such situated universalisms have been explored more than others. Focusing on vernacular humanitarianisms, the goal is not to celebrate the standpoint of ‘radical alterity’ but rather to acknowledge that imagining and recognising similarities of people…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Balkans: History, Politics, Society (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · History (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works)