3 “W HERE WERE THEY UNTIL NOW?” Aging, Care and Abandonment in a Bosnian Town Azra Hromadžić Department of Anthropology, Maxwell School, Syracuse University is article delves into Bosnia-Herzegovina, and especially into the town of Bihać, to ethnographically examine the changing nature of the state and family, as visible through practices of elder care. I use my ethnographic data gathered at a nursing home Vitalis in Bihać, and especially the predicament of an elderly Bosnian woman whom I call Zemka, to argue that both the state and family in postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina materialize as semi-absent. In the process of unpacking these multiple semi-absences, I reveal the lived effects of changing postwar and postsocialist state, and altering kinship relations as they affect “ordinary” people. Keywords: care, aging, the state, family, semi-absence, socialism and postsocialism, war and postwar e “crisis of care” (Phillips and Benner 1995), and especially care for the elderly, is emerg- ing as a momentous topic in anthropology, sociology, gerontology and other academic disci- plines, as well as in the world of policy-making. Numerous studies point at different domains of this “crisis”, including the socio-economic impact of the longer life span in more privileged parts of the world; shrinking of states’ social and health services; and novel configurations of family relationships that challenge traditional expectations of caregiving in diverse socio- cultural contexts (see United Nations 2002). In this article, I delve into the Balkans, and especially Bosnia-Herzegovina, to examine the effects of these shiſting topographies and modalities of care on “ordinary” 1 lives. It is within the Balkans, I argue, that the anxiety around “the aging predicament”, and the altering roles of family and state in providing care for the elderly are especially evident and exac- erbated by the converging postsocialist (1989 to present) and postwar (1995 to present) transformations (see also Havelka 2003). is domain of social transformation is leſt unexamined by the majority of scholars of the region. 2 e overwhelming number of anthropological and other studies of the Balkans and especially Bosnia-Herzegovina, my own included, analyze this region mainly through the lens of ethnicity, nationalism and postwar reconstruction (see, among many others, Bieber 2005; Brown 2006; Chandler 1999; Campbell 1999; Coles 2007; Fassin and Pandolfi 2010; Hayden 1996; Hromadžić 2015; Jansen 2005; Kurtović 2011; Sorabji 1995; Veredery 1994; Woodward 1995). e concerns of “ordinary people”, however, reflect many other domains of struggle, which powerfully and complexly shape the lives of people and yet, they stay ei- ther invisible or marginalized in the majority of (ethno)nationalism-focused studies (for an 1 I use “ordinary people” with much caution in this work. As Veena Das (2007) has pointed out, “everyday” is where much deeply political work happens. 2 is “omission” is closely related to the ways in which what counts as (useful) knowledge (about the Balkans in this case) is being produced, and to the distribution of research grants and fellowships. DOI:10.15378/1848-9540.2015.38.01 original scientific paper, submitted 6.3.2015., accepted 10.6.2015. etnološka tribina 38, vol. 45, 2015., str. 3-29