Gilbert Andrew, Assistant Professor
Andrew Gilbert
Assistant Professor
Faculty
Department of Anthropology
Members
Institute on Globalization & the Human Condition
Area(s) of Interest:
Biography
I am a broadly-trained sociocultural anthropologist and conduct research on the politics of social transformation, which I investigate in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina. In particular I focus on the politics of international intervention, human mobility, history, the changing world of work, and the affordances of diverse artefacts of ethnographic practice and communication.
My first research project develops and advances an anthropological approach to the study of international intervention, predominantly those projects rooted in and promoting Western models of development, democracy, care, and the nation-state form. In particular, I studied how a diversity of foreign and domestic actors sought to legitimize and authorize transformations in postwar Bosnian society and politics through the refugee return process, focusing on the struggle to define and deploy notions of peoplehood, popular sovereignty, and humanitarianism in a context of incomplete state-building. I have developed and shared these insights in publications, public events, a Wenner-Gren funded workshop and book entitled International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy: Encounters in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina.
I also explore a related but distinct set of research questions organized around how people experience and make sense of their own historicity or being-in-time after state socialism and after war, with a particular interest in the consequences for the relationship between the historical imagination (how people think about the past) and the political imagination (how people conceive of what is politically possible).
More recently I have embarked on a new research project on politics and the changing world of work, supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant and funding from McMaster University’s Arts Research Board. Here I investigate historical openings and closures to political experimentation and social transformation, taking a recent series of worker-initiated protests and their aftermath in the industrial Bosnian city of Tuzla as my case study. In doing so, I am part of a growing group of anthropologists exploring “worlds without work” left in the wake of mass dis-employment. For the most part, scholars have rightly treated wageless life as a site of debilitation, decline and dispossession. In this research project, however, I seek to go beyond the framework of loss, and to theorize these contexts as generative of new social fields and political forms in-the-making. This has led to a growing research interest in collaboration and in the political and ethnographic potential of diverse media, from photographs and drawing to podcasting, film and music. With support from a research grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, I am currently pursuing these interests by working on a graphic ethnography about syndical struggle and political possibilities in collaboration with anthropologist Larisa Kurtović and graphic artist Boris Stapić. I am also developing a new research project on the anthropology of social absence to analyze the political consequences of mass youth labour migration as tens of thousands of Bosnian youth leave the country each year.
At McMaster University I am a member of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, and my teaching and supervisory interests include: political anthropology, international intervention, humanitarianism, history, work and social reproduction, labour migration, art and politics, ethnographic theory and research methods, and post-socialism.
Education
PhD University of Chicago, 2008
Research
In Press International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy: Encounters in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. (Cornell University Press)
n.d. "Neutrality" in Humanitarianism: Keywords. Edited by Antonio de Lauri. Leiden: Brill.
2019 "Beyond Nostalgia: Other Historical Emotions." History and Anthropology. Web version published Feb 19. DOI 10.1080/02757206.2019.1579089
2018 “Tri vjere, jedna nacija, država Tuzla! Football fans, political protest, and the right to the city in postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Soccer and Society. 19(3): 373-399. Part of Special Issue "Fan Protest and Activism: Football from Below in Southeastern Europe."
2017 “The Limits of Foreign Authority: Publicity and the Political Logic of Ambivalence in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. 59(2): 415-445.
2016 “From humanitarianism to humanitarianization: Intimacy, estrangement and international aid in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina” American Ethnologist. 43(4): 717-729.
2015 “Dayton at twenty: towards new politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies. 15(4): 605-610 (with Jasmin Mujanović). Introduction to a special collection of papers edited by Andrew Gilbert and Jasmin Mujanović.
2013 “War and the Politics of Historical Imagination in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Srdja Pavlovic and Marko Zivkovic (eds.)Transcending Fratricide: Political Mythologies, Reconciliations, and the Uncertain Future in the former Yugoslavia. Baden-Baden; Nomos Verlag. 165-188.
2012 "Legitimacy Matters: Managing the Democratization Paradox of Foreign State-Building in Bosnia-Herzegovina." Süedosteuropa 60, H.4, S. 483-496.
2010 "Invited Commentary on Joao Biehl & Peter Locke “Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming.” Current Anthropology. 51(3): 317-351 (341)
2008 “Commentary: Reconsidering Postsocialism from the Margins of Europe: Hope, Time, and Normalcy in post-Yugoslav Societies.” Anthropology News. With Jessica Greenberg, Elissa Helms and Stef Jansen. November.
2006 “The past in parenthesis. (Non)post-socialism in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina” Anthropology Today 22(4): 14-18.
Book Reviews:
2018 "Precarious Workers and Political Community in potentia." Somatosphere Book Forum on Larisa Jašarević's Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market.
2017 Review of Yearnings in the Meantime. ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. Stef Jansen. American Ethnologist. 44(1):165-6
2016 Review of Bastards of Utopian: Living Radical Politics after Socialism. By Maple Razsa. American Anthropologist. 118(1):211-212.
2013 Murphy, Alexander, Alex Jeffrey, Andrew Gilbert, Adam Moore, Gerard Toal, and Carl T. Dahlman. "Reading Gerard Toal and Carl T. Dahlman's Bosnia Remade: Ethnic cleansing and its reversal." Political Geography. 36: 12-20.
2008 Nationalities Papers. Volume 36 (1): 164-166. Review of Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, (eds.) The New Bosnian Mosaic. Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007.
Recent Workshops, Conferences and Symposia Organized:
2013 Organized workshop entitled "Towards an Anthropology of International Intervention" at McMaster University. Principle funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
2010 Organizer of workshop entitled “European Interventions and State-Building in the Balkans” at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. Principle funding from the European Commission. 21-23 October.
2010 Co-Organizer of workshop entitled “Hopeful Spaces of Critique: Post-Yugoslav Anthropology in the Coming Decade”sponsored by the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL. 30 April.
2009 Co-Organizer of symposium “The EU and Statebuilding: Lessons for and from the Balkans” at Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. 8-9 May.
2008 Co-organizer of conference entitled “Critical Spaces of Hope. Locating Postsocialism and the Future in Post-Yugoslav Anthropology” hosted by the Center for East European, Russians and Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago and funded by the American Council of Learned Societies. 24-25. October.
2007 Co-organizer of workshop entitled “Towards an Anthropology of Hope? Comparative Post-Yugoslav Ethnographies”funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the British Academy, University of Manchester, UK, 9-11 November.
2005 Co-organizer of conference entitled “Politics and Society Ten Years after Dayton: Young Scholars Conference on the State of Social Science Research on Bosnia-Herzegovina,” hosted by the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina 10-13, November.