Dr Safet HadziMuhamedovic

Research Fellow (CSPM)

Philosophy Stirling

Dr Safet HadziMuhamedovic

Contact details

About me

RESEARCH FELLOW, CENTRE FOR THE SCIENCES OF PLACE AND MEMORY

OVERVIEW

I am an anthropologist of politics and religion specialising in the relationship between memory, place and belonging in contexts marked by nationalist violence, displacement and environmental change. With a primary ethnographic interest in the Bosnian Dinaric highlands, my work intertwines studies of time, ritual, sacred geography and restoration.

I hold a PhD in Social Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London, where my doctoral research examined post-genocide memory and interfaith relations in southern Bosnia. Prior to this, I completed an MPhil in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and dual undergraduate degrees in History of Art and Sociology from the University of Sarajevo and Kenyon College.

In my current research role at the Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory (CSPM) at the University of Stirling, I am working to finalise a long-term ethnographic study of sacred sinking rivers in Bosnia. This project focuses on the entanglement of disrupted religious traditions, ecological knowledge and genocide by way of the karst Bosnian underworld.

Before joining Stirling, I held a variety of positions at the universities of Cambridge, London (SOAS and Goldsmiths), Bristol and Goethe Frankfurt. At Cambridge's Faculty of Divinity, I held courses dealing with the anthropology of memory, conflict, politics, religion, heritage, migration, gender, landscape, economics and social change, kinship, travel and tourism, social theories, as well as ethnographic and case-study research and qualitative methods.

FIELDWORK

In most of my publications, my fieldwork in the Bosnian Dinaric highlands is an aperture on issues of global significance like the entanglements of religion and nationalism, migration and homemaking, heritage destruction, and environmental degradation. I have also conducted stints of fieldwork across Bosnia, in Palestine, the Basque Country and across the Mediterranean.

TEMPORALITY, COMMUNITY AND RETURN AFTER GENOCIDE

One of my core research projects, which culminated in my first book, Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (Berghahn, 2018/2021), explored how the disrupted communities in southeast Bosnian highlands engage with their environment to re-establish interfaith relations and syncretic practices in the aftermath of genocide and forced displacement. Ethnographically and theoretically developing the notion of waiting, the book probes the spatiotemporal configurations (and their fractures) in the lives of returned refugees. Central to their experiences of disorientation and reorientation is a process I called schizochronotopia—referring to the deep rifts in the chronotopic narrative of home—which accommodated the ‘reality’ of an unhomely landscape, but also substantially rejected it by intervening into the temporality of place. The returnees, I argue, connected the “was” to the “ought” by reference to the folk cyclical calendar as orientational devices, whilst imaginatively dissociating from the unwanted present of nationalist violence. Considering multiple and contradictory forms of commemoration, the book also provides critical insights into the politics of memory and the active embodied memory practices that individuals and groups deploy to navigate disrupted temporal and spatial ecologies.

MEMORY, JUSTICE AND BELONGING

Questions on memory, truth and the past are raised across my work, perhaps most clearly in my exploration of legal archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In my 2018 article ‘Syncretic Debris: From Shared Bosnian Saints to the ICTY Courtroom’, I sketch out how the legal expectation of memory as an act of witnessing towards a particular adjudication of war-time fact comes up against memory as the articulation of long-duration relations and their disruptions. In other words, I read the legal archives against their grain, finding in witness testimonies surprising interventions that would usually go unnoticed due to the Tribunal’s unfamiliarity with the violated lifeworlds of the questioned witnesses. I have also considered the entanglements of law and memory as a researcher on a large-scale ERC-funded project ‘Bosnian Bones, Spanish Ghosts’: Transitional Justice and the Legal Shaping of Memory after Two Modern Conflicts’, led by Dr Sari Wastell at Goldsmiths. The project ethnographically investigated how legal activity has influenced efforts at peacebuilding after the 1990s war in Bosnia and the Spanish civil war.

Following up my inquiry into memory as negotiation of belonging, I co-edited (with Dr Marija Grujić) a 2019 special issue of Ethnoscripts, titled Post-Home: Dwelling on Loss, Belonging and Movement, which combined ethnography and art to understand the workings of the various aftermaths of home, from forced displacement caused by war, environmental degradation and gentrification to the traces of memory in pilgrimage places, tradition of gendered rehoming and postcolonial resistance through hospitality.

SHARED SACRED LANDSCAPES

As the Principal Investigator of the Shared Sacred Landscapesproject, a research and outreach project funded by the University of Cambridge Public Engagement Fund, I investigated how environmental and religious pluralities shape community resilience and interfaith dialogue in fragile post-war regions. This project utilised innovative ethnographic and visual methodologies to assess how memory and place attachment operate within complex ecological systems.

TRANS COSMOLOGIES

I am also currently coordinating a Q+/CIP-funded collaborative project titled Trans Cosmologies’ which seeks to understand the religious dimensions of various historical and contemporary trans subjectivities as a way of addressing the increased exploitation of religious tropes to solidify transphobia across the world. Our first international workshop in Cambridge in May 2024 brought together artists, philosophers, playwrights, anthropologists, activists and theologians, who in their talks, paintings and performances addressed the erasures, or exiles, of transness from place and memory in Euro-colonial contexts. This project is set to continue over the coming years, with further events, publications and funding applications. It emphasises my commitment to producing research with public impact and to engaging diverse audiences, both academic and non-academic.

THE SOCIAL LIVES OF WATER

Bodies of water and/as memory are central to my current ethnographic work. My research has addressed broader issues of disorientation and the role of place memory in navigating social and political transitions. In the book I am writing right now, I extend my focus on place and memory to examine how communities engage with disrupted landscapes and cosmologies to maintain a sense of belonging in conditions of environmental and social precarity. I seek to understand the more-than-human entanglements, shaped by the south Bosnian karst underworld and its sacred sinking rivers, in the context of protracted genocidal world-erasure/world-making. In so doing, I raise questions about survivance and cross-species technologies of evasion and repair.

Over the past two years, I have been investigating political and sacred ecologies as part of a Cambridge Interfaith Programme team, linked to the Ofwat-funded project ‘Water Efficiency in Diverse Faith Communities’. In April 2024, I convened a large international conference ‘Being with Water Otherwise: Sacred Knowledge and Sustainable Water– Human Relations’.

ARTICULATING JOURNEYS

I’m co-editor of the 'Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials, and Homecomings' book series with Tom Selwyn and Nicola Frost, published by Berghahn. Please get in touch if you have a manuscript to propose.

SOME KEY QUESTIONS

  • How do sacred geographies—such as sacred landscapes, waterways and pilgrimage sites—mediate collective responses to loss, displacement and environmental upheaval?
  • In what ways do communities negotiate fractured temporal and spatial realities and desires in post-conflict or ecologically unstable contexts?
  • How do religious pluralism and interfaith practices intersect with ecological survivance and environmental justice?
  • How can we, as social researchers, account for the absences, silences, fragmentations and disorientations in the past-reckoning of our interlocutors?

Name pronunciation

Safet HadžiMuhamedović is pronounced as Sah-fet Ha-jee-Muhammad-ovitch

Research programmes

Research themes