LOCATING PANDEMIC GRIEF IN SARAJEVO: GEORGIC NOTES AGAINST SELF-ISOLATING REGIMES
LOCATING PANDEMIC GRIEF IN SARAJEVO: GEORGIC NOTES AGAINST SELF-ISOLATING REGIMES

Summary/Abstract: I began to write these lines on the sixth of May – St George’s Day in the Julian calendar. Known as Jurjevo or Đurđevdan in Bosnia, it signals a cyclical revival, a world suddenly awake and burgeoning with diverse and entwined life. Set against the preceding hibernal restrictions, the day is a ritual celebration of movement, encounter and interaction, an antithesis of the endured seclusion. Its apotropaic rituals rely on interspecies and interfaith entanglements, as wellbeing is understood to necessitate a sensitivity to the relations between manifold vital actualities. Before I return to the potential implications of this tradition, I would like to make a couple of leaps into less jubilant themes. Chiefly focusing on recent developments in Sarajevo, I argue that the biopolitical regime of power in Bosnia – wholly conceivable through the currently deployed concept of “self-isolation” – is irreconcilable with the Georgic symbiotic perspective.

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