Evasive Memory and the Human Fish: Entanglements and Genocidal Violence in the Bosnian Karst

Citation

HadžiMuhamedović S (2026) Evasive Memory and the Human Fish: Entanglements and Genocidal Violence in the Bosnian Karst. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, p. not yet assigned, Art. No.: JRAI-D-25-00129R2.

Abstract
Set in southern Bosnia, in the lingering shadow of a genocidal project and its last escalation in the 1990s, this chapter follows the meandering course of one sinking river as it submerges into and reemerges from the karst underground chambers of the Dinaric highlands. On the way, it engages protagonists torn out of their shared material and cosmological frames, from postwar returnees and the chthonic ‘human fish’ to the sacred sounds of cave wind, and an array of other ‘super/natural’ beings and matter, which bear witness to one another through the ruins. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the chapter raises questions about the shaping of memory along and against an ethno-religious nationalist ideology, as more-than-human relations are drawn into and resist enduring racial imaginaries and genocidal violence. It approaches genocide not only as mass killing, but as a project of world-making that reorganizes landscapes, infrastructures, and memory into a counterfeit world. Against this, the chapter draws on karstic vocabulary to trace evasive memory as a tactic of submergence within well-rehearsed systems of relation, under the ongoing force of a genocidal project.

Keywords
Genocide, Memory, Terraforming, Bosnia, Human Fish, Karst, More-than-human relations, Trebinje, Popovo