Bridging the Macro with the Micro in Conflict Analysis: Structural Bridging the Macro with the Micro in Conflict Analysis: Structural Simplification as a Heuristic Device Simplification as a Heuristic Device

This chapter presents a theoretical argument that looking at how some grand matters of politics are simpliﬁed for practical use on the street is necessary to adequately understand how ordinary Serbs and Croats (and to a limited extent, Muslims) were transformed into enemies of their neighbors, workmates, and covillagers in the havoc wrought in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. Locals’ shifting attitudes toward consanguinal identity, expressions of greeting, and dressing patterns are found to be examples of everyday practices through which perceived differences in civilization, competitive ideas of statehood, and macro-constructions of group identity produce ethnic conﬂict. A broad conclusion is that attention to localized manifestations of the macro-political will yield more comprehensive understanding in analyses of ethnic conﬂict.

developing a conceptual tool with which macro-and micro-level factors can be bridged to yield a better understanding of collective violence and its consequences.
In a recent, insightful article, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins created the phrase ''elementary form of structural amplification'' (Sahlins, 2005, p. 25) with which he intended to capture the process in which a conflict characterized by its local nature is inflated to the supralocal level. Charting the course of Cuban and US governments' and publics' heavy involvement in what was otherwise an oft-repeated and ordinary state of affairs, 2 Sahlins documents how the little Elian Gonzalez became entangled in discussions of communism, freedom, and the Cold War. The fight over Elian's custody, waged initially between Elian's relatives in Miami and Cuba, engaged the larger ideological opposition between American and Cuban governments and publics. Sahlins refers to the process wherein a minor, localized dispute engages a broader set of opposition as ''structural amplification'' which makes a macrohistory out of a microhistory (Sahlins, 2005). In my discussion below, I chart the course of a reverse process -one in which an ethnonationalist and exclusivist discourse gets appropriated in a village whose inhabitants have otherwise been living in relative peace and harmony. In other words, I look at how ethnonationalist macropolitics gets deflated only to be reconfigured within the power relations in a rural context. I will thus appropriate Sahlins' term with a slight modification: ''Structural simplification'' of ethnonationalist exclusivism in a central Bosnian village, or the reconfiguration of power relations in a rural context out of macropolitical discourse.
In the first section below, I will provide a brief account of the 1992-1995 war in the Balkans which ended with the peace agreement signed in Dayton, Ohio in 1995 during the Clinton presidency. The second section discusses some macrolevel phenomena whose on-the-ground appropriation will be treated in the third section, where I rely on Bringa's (1996) ethnographic analysis of a village in central Bosnia called Dolina (a pseudonym). In the fourth section, I seek to shed some anthropological light on the subject matter with reference to the work of such political anthropologists as Friedman (1998) and Tambiah (1996). I end the paper with some concluding thoughts, inspired by Lewellen (2003) and Gledhill (2000) AU :1 , on the benefits of anthropological thinking for a better understanding of the processes in which grand concepts such as history, ethnicity, and religion get dissolved and find parochial manifestation. As a result, power relations in a given microcosm may come to be conceptualized rather differently compared to how they were before, with the end result being ''collective violence.'' A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE 1992-1995   Relying on Norman Cigar's (1995) benchmark study Genocide in Bosnia, I would like to emphasize in concise form some of the important overarching factors instrumentalized by the Serbian political decision-making mechanism to induce Serbian public opinion into believing in the legitimacy of Serbian government's dream of achieving a pure ''Greater Serbia'' at the expense of other ethnic, non-Serb groups populating Bosnia-Herzegovina. These factors pertain to competitive ideas of statehood in the post-Tito era, normative constructions of ethnic superiority and vulnerability, and the supposed threat of escalating radical religious (Islamic) fundamentalism. Two other factors, voiced by some American writers such as Robert Kaplan and Samuel Huntington, include the idea of the ever-presence of historically embedded ethnonational rivalry and hatred, and the notorious ''clash of civilizations'' thesis as they apply to the region. Whereas Cigar's account of macrolevel factors is well documented and evidenced, Kaplan's journalistic impressions regarding the causes of violence and Huntington's remarks, which I briefly look at below, will exemplify in particular why top-down analyses should be corrected and complemented by views ''from below.'' The Grand Picture and Its Dominant Colors Cigar (1995) traces the roots of Serbian nationalist expansionism, whose culmination was the war, to the goals explicitly voiced in a document produced in 1986 by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Serbian Memorandum. Drafted in a Westphalian spirit, this document envisaged the foundation of a pure Serbian state encompassing all Serbs regardless of which former Yugoslav republic they were living in. In Cigar's words, ''Coming at a time of impending change and uncertainty, the Memorandum seemed to answer the need for a national strategy blueprint for Serbia'' (Cigar, 1995, pp. 23-24). The implementation of the Memorandum could only come about by uprooting other ethnicities of the former Yugoslav republic, which is precisely what Serbian nationalism sought to do with the war, as indicated by the forced displacement of several hundred thousands of Bosnians now scattered across Europe and the United States. Thus, the post-Tito Serbian nationalism found its most obvious expression in the statements of Serbia's academic elite. This was followed by the stereotypification of would-be victims, in particular Bosnian Muslims, in and through popular culture. An example discussed by Cigar (1995) is the description of Bosnian Muslims as aliens, inferiors, and cold-blooded murderers by a best-selling novelist named Vuk Draskovic, whose writings influenced no less a figure than the commander of the Serbian Guard,who admitted to having beaten Muslims (and Croatians) because of the fury ingrained in him through these writings (1995, p. 25).
Next came the work of Serbian scholars specializing in the study of Islam. This work represented Islam and its adherents as backward, hostile to European civilization, and fundamentalist masterplanners of Serbian destruction. This work further disseminated the idea, frightening to the average Serb, that there were plans to repatriate more than a million Turks to Bosnia, which clearly would contribute to the Islamization of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the post-Tito era (and would indicate a reembracing of the spirit of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over the Balkans for more than four centuries). Serbian scholars felt that these developments should be countered by any means possible. This academic effort was then bolstered by the efforts of the Serbian Orthodox Church whose representatives evidenced their claim of Muslim primitiveness by pointing to the fact that walls were built around (Muslim) Albanian houses, which to them demonstrated that Muslims (especially Muslim women) were not liberated, and ''hidden behind walls'' (Cigar, 1995, pp. 27-32). The Memorandum, Serbian popular literature, the denigrating work by Serbian scholars of Islam, and the Serbian Orthodox Church's efforts were thus factors in the escalation of Serbian ethnonationalist exclusivism which culminated in a 4-year war between 1992 and1995 against non-Serb ethnicities. Although the macrophenomenal reality of these factors and their influence are well illustrated in Cigar's work, a more comprehensive understanding requires ethnographic particularism to visualize the processes and mechanisms in and through which such macrophenomenal realities are effectively parochialized -or structurally simplified. This will help in answering the question: ''How were people [of the Balkans] who had lived quietly together as neighbors for forty-five years [since the end of second World War] manipulated into killing one another and burning each other's houses down?'' (Besteman & Gusterson, 2005, p. 7) Whereas accounts of the conflict in the Balkans such as that of Cigar would get enriched and not necessarily refuted or corrected by an anthropological approach, other works on the Balkans would probably have to be rewritten in view of the insights provided by an anthropological perspective. Such two works on the two supposed causes -ancient hatreds and civilization clash -of the war are Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts (1993) and Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations (1993). Following is a brief overview of the arguments of these two works, and anthropological critiques of them. For Robert Kaplan (1993), the collective violence in the Balkans was a modern-day reincarnation of ancient ethnonational feelings of hatred that all sides partaking of the violence had been breeding against one another since time immemorial. The ''Balkan syndrome,'' as he termed it, was something like an evil gene predisposing Balkan people toward erupting in violence. Hence, there is not much reason to be startled at the atrocities that the Balkan people meted out against one another.
In a devastating critique of Kaplan's travelogical assumptions (my term, by which I intend to convey a sense of the unreliability of such sweeping generalizations which do call for an attention to detail of the anthropological kind), anthropologist Tone Bringa (2005) sets the record straight. Building on her fieldwork in central Bosnia (which I relate in more detail below) for a total period of 6 years, from 1988 to 1993, Bringa notes in her critique of Kaplan's work that before the war in the ethnically mixed village (Muslim Bosnians and Catholic Croats) where she carried out her fieldwork, adherents of the two separate religious communities helped each other build the village church and the mosque, attended one another's holy days, and extended a hand to one another while building houses. These observations on the ground refute Kaplan's overgeneralized, impressionistic statements about the violent nature of the region's inhabitants. The ''ancient hatreds'' argument is further contradicted by the work of another anthropologist Lockwood, who, as early as the 1970s, documented in his ethnography The European Moslems (1975) how Serbs, Croats, and Muslims were peacefully woven into the social fabric through the integrative mechanism of the marketplace.
In a tone somewhat more sophisticated and ostensibly more scholarly than that of Kaplan, Samuel Huntington sees the violence in Bosnia as an instance of a clash of three civilizations, namely the Western, Islamic, and Eastern Orthodox ones. This was a war occurring at what Huntington (1993) named a civilizational faultline. His analysis was contradicted when the Christian United States brokered the peace agreement -thus possibly saving Bosnian Muslims from extinction on a much larger scale than had happened thus far -and also accommodated hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Muslims as refugees during and after the war. 8 As noted by anthropologist Brown (2005), Huntington's theory that countries belonging in the same ''civilizational kin group'' (a term invented by Huntington, who is not a kinship theorist) was discredited by on-the-ground empirical reality. Based on his fieldwork in the region, Brown exposes how the kin links that Huntington thought were so clearly identified were much more complex given the institution of fictive kinship in the Balkans whereby people became related to one another through kumtsvo (godfatherhood) ties, which crosscut so-called civilizational attachments.
I suggested at the beginning of this paper that explanations of collective violence based solely on the macro concepts of state, nation, religion, and history tend to remain rather rigid. With reference to various treatments of the Bosnian war, I emphasize that a view from below would either substantially complement such accounts (as in the case of Cigar's macrophenomenal account of the causes of Serbian atrocities) or expose the irrelevance of them to concrete situations experienced by real human beings in real locales (as in the case of Kaplan's and Huntington's accounts of the factors behind the escalation of collective violence). An anthropological approach seems better suited to help understand otherwise unexpected cases of violence: How did ethnonationalist exclusivist discourse get structurally simplified to the village level, as a result of which neighbors, covillagers, perhaps old-time friends and confidantes turned against one another? 9 The following section seeks to describe instances of structural simplification by relying on the ethnographic work of anthropologist Tone Bringa in a central Bosnian village. By structural simplification, I mean that process in which a larger opposition between two overarching identities gets parochialized through the identification of any such overarching identity with its local counterpart. In this process, the differences invoked at the macrolevel (discursive, or otherwise) between the larger forces of opposition are simplified and selectively appropriated to forge new identities, filling in, or overriding, a preexisting set of local relations with new and mutually oppositional content.
The following brief discussion seeks to demonstrate the dissolution and parochialization of exclusivist nationalism in the context of the relations between Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians. Although the foregoing discussion has focused on the development and outcomes of Serbian nationalist aggression, in this paper I am less concerned with the origins of the ethnonationalist discourse than with the actual dynamics involved in the process of structural simplification.  (Bringa, 1996, p. 30), which seems to be a telling example of what may be termed ''consanguinal expansionism.'' 10 This demonstrates the structural simplification of Serbian academic exclusivism (which considers Bosnian Muslims nonentities except when they are considered Serbs) to the village context. Another instance indicative of the simplification of supralocal nationalist rhetoric becomes manifest through villagers' changing greeting practices. While in the public space of communal interaction, village inhabitants came to use ethnicity-or religion-neutral phrases of greeting when they encountered one another during various times of the day and on different occasions (on the road, while attending a feast, in neighborly visits, etc.), and they reserved exclusive greetings for intraethnic encounters (Croat vs. Croat, or Muslim vs. Muslim). Eventually, the escalating symbolicdiscursive and physical violence found a localized manifestation: once Croat forces gained control of the municipality to which Dolina belonged, Croat-specific greetings dominated the public realm (for example, the dealings at administrative offices and in the marketplace), thus extending macrolevel ethnic exclusivism (the idealized ''Greater Croatia'') to the parochial level by exerting linguistic dominion over a particular portion of everyday life through the imposition of a new greeting structure. As Bringa notes: ''Indeed, the Catholic Croats were redefining the whole area (market town and surrounding villages) as ''theirs'' and transforming the local Muslims into outsiders, people who did not belong, [which] was one of the many steps in a long series of more or less violent measures to squeeze the Muslims out of their villages and the municipality'' (1996, pp. 57-58).
Yet another example of the simplification of high-level nationalist politics whereby Bosnian Muslims were represented as remnants of Asiatic darkness and backwardness, relates to Dolina's Catholic (Croat) girls' changing perceptions of Muslim girls' dressing patterns. One of Bringa's Croat informants in the village notes that whereas they have left the ways of their parents' choices in clothing behind (and have thus become less and less separable from the modern urban woman), Muslim girls keep more and more to their ways. The expression seems to be a subtle practice of ''othering'' whereby Muslim girls are pushed into the categories of rural and traditional (Bringa, 1995, pp. 61-62). What is interesting, of course, is the emergence of an otherwise nonexistent practice. Although each group of girls' parents did not conceptualize one another in terms of their differing clothing practices, the nationalist rhetoric -disseminated through broadcast media, enforced as law in the emerging, ethnically-drafted constitutions (Hayden, 1996) -results in the creation of a simplified mirror image of differentiation and othering in the village context via changing perceptions regarding a group's dress.
With reference to Bringa's work, we have seen some examples of how macrolevel nationalist discourse manifests itself in a village in the context of consanguinal perceptions, expressions of greeting, and dressing patterns. 11 What follows is review of some key observations made by a number of political anthropologists regarding localized manifestations of macrolevel discourses which may result in changed perceptions of old friends and existing relations.

ETHNIFICATION, FOCALIZATION, AND TRANSVALUATION: RELEVANCE OF POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY TO ANALYSES OF THE WAR IN BOSNIA
The structural simplification process as a result of which old-time fellows, covillagers, and neighbors begin to subtly perceive one another through a reconfigured framework of relations -that is, perceive one another as belonging to different natures, historical roots, and linguistic groups -can be referred to as a case of ''ethnification.'' Although anthropologist Friedman (1998) uses the term ethnification as part of his Marxist approach with which he seeks to explain expressions of declining hegemony, the term has descriptive utility in the context of the war in Bosnia. In particular, Friedman suggests that ethnification, the turn toward an understanding of the nation-state ''yin which the nation is dominant, where the nation-state is converted from a contractual to a familistic-ascriptive model'' (1998, p. 288) is an expression of the decline of a civilizational perspective based on commercial capitalism. Thus, from the Titoist social contract in which Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Slovenes, and Montenegrins were ''Yugoslav'' emerged exclusivist, ethnified understandings of separate families of nations (for instance, the Serb nation idealized in the Memorandum as the ''Greater Serbia'') which admitted of no aliens: hence, Balkanization ensues . In other words, regional disorder was followed by huge migratory flows and demographic exchanges in the Balkans, specifically in Bosnia, as the result of a war guided by a macropolitical ethnified perception of state which dictated intrastate homogeneity (that is, Serbia for Serbs, Croatia for Croats). The term can have both macrolevel and microlevel application. The Serbian villager's remark that the others too are of Serbian blood may be considered an expression of homogenizing ethnification by which the ''others'' are precluded from having the right to their own identity. Furthermore, the increasing visibility of Croat-specific greetings in the public space could be seen as another expression of homogenizing ethnification by which the ''others'' are precluded from the reconstructed public space should they decline to conform to the new linguistic habits.
Two other concepts by another anthropologist Stanley Tambiah (1996) may serve as useful heuristic devices in the context of the analysis of the war in Bosnia: focalization and transvaluation. ''By focalization [Tambiah means], the process of progressive denudation of local incidents and disputes of their particulars of context and their aggregation. Transvaluation refers to the parallel process of assimilating particulars to a larger, collective, more enduring, and therefore less context-bound, cause or interest'' (Tambiah, 1996, p. 192). I introduce these terms not because they are used in Tambiah's (1996) work to describe processes similar to those I have called instances of structural simplification, but because they illustrate the reverse trends (in other words, they capture what Sahlins would call structural amplification). For example, Tambiah employs these two terms while describing ''how the original issue of the death of a schoolgirl ballooned into a more general protest against the inequities of the public transport system, and that, again, into an anti-Pathan backlash'' (1996, p. 191). As I noted in the beginning, I am interested in the reverse process by which general, macrolevel conflicts and exclusivist discourses are parochialized by the receivers of such discourses. Tambiah's terms may help describe the process whereby, for example, Serbian historiography strips the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 (where Serbs were defeated by the invading Ottomans) out of its context, and instrumentalizes that event by trying to assimilate the memory of it into the larger Serbian macropolitical objective vilifying the Muslims of Bosnia (who converted to Islam following the Ottoman conquest, and therefore, assumed the identity of the invader, as claimed by Serbian historiography). Thus, by placing these two terms against structural simplification, I hope to have made my terminological suggestion clearer.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
In this chapter, I first raised the idea that blaming collective political violence on differences in civilization, competitive ideas of statehood, and normative constructions of ethnonational group identity reveals very little, if at all, about how these differences, competitions, and vying constructions manifest themselves in the everyday practices of victims as well as perpetrators of destructive political conduct. In fact, interpreting collective violence as mere consequences of top-down orchestrations is limiting the political to the realm of governments, political parties, nationalist leaders, etc. Without looking at how the political is embedded in everyday practices, how it manifests itself through real human beings' dealings in such real locales as the village, the street, and the marketplace, one is unable to understand in their multifaceted dimensions the complex processes as well as instruments in and through which objectives declared, legitimized, or forced by the governmental or ruling elite get accepted and/or rejected by their addressees. Thus, when critiquing political scientist David Easton's view that there existed no such thing as political anthropology because ''practitioners of this nondiscipline had utterly failed to mark off the political system from other systems of society'' (Lewellen, 2003, pp. x-xi), Lewellen notes that the attempt to locate politics in everyday routines is in fact political anthropology's greatest virtue. The discussion in this paper of some instances of structural simplification would show to some extent that events in former Yugoslavia at the level of what Easton would call the ''clearly marked off political system'' need to be complemented and/or corrected with an eye on micropolitics. Unless we conceptualize the increased use of Croat greetings in public spaces, the commentary on Muslim girls' (''backward, rural'') dressing patterns, the attempt by the Serbian villager at enhancing the scope of consanguines as truly political phenomena in view of the then-reigning nationalist rhetoric, we are bound to fall short of understanding the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia in its complexity. The heuristic devices of structural amplification, focalization and transvaluation, are useful in conceiving of the aspect pertaining to how historically specific, localized cases are ballooned or inflated for utilization as part of larger nationalistic discourses. With the idea of structural simplification, however, we can conceptualize how broader macrophenomenal realities are locally parochialized and manifested in everyday practices. My hope is that structural simplification will yield greater understanding of what happened in Bosnia as well as serve as a useful conceptual tool in future research on political conflict. NOTES 1. Including, but not limited to, so-called ancient ethnonational hatreds, religious radicalism, and historically motivated territorial irredentism. In general, the adjectives macropolitical, macrostructural, and macrophenomenal are used in this paper to refer to those supraindividual groups, entities, or factors (''the nation,'' ''the state,'' ''history,'' ''religion,'' etc.) otherwise claimed to have an exclusive causative impact on the emergence and sustenance of political conflict.
2. By which Sahlins (2005) means a group of Cubans escaping Castro, traveling in a boat (or some other craft), fighting sharks across the straits of Florida as well as the US Coast Guard, and, if successful, landing in Miami.
3. I recognize that the history of the 1991-1995 Balkan conflict, which resulted in the collapse of former Yugoslavia, is a contested one. But this paper should essentially be construed as a theoretical exercise, rather than as an attempt to explain why one set of contested explanations is preferable over another. My broader aim is to apply an inversion of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins' theoretical constructs with a view to developing a heuristic device to link macrolevel factors to microlevel practices. Given the limits of this paper, I cannot do justice to all accounts of the conflict that seek to explain it from various angles. Readers interested in getting a much fuller discussion of the contested accounts may consult Ramet (2005).
4. Kosovo was an autonomous region under the Serbian republic in the former federal Yugoslav state. 5. In particular, Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia. 6. Including Bosnians of different ethnic backgrounds, that is, Bosnian Muslims (major victims), Bosnian Croats, and even Bosnian Serbs who refused to acquiesce to the cleansing project.
7. For more detailed accounts of the war, see Cushman and Mestrovic (1996), Mestrovic (1997), Cohen (1997), and Burg and Shoup (2000). 8. I do not have the space here to extend this critique of Huntington's work. I offer a longer discussion in Keles (2007). 9. One reviewer who commented on this article suggested that ''it seems to be the macro-level politics and rhetoric (the ethno-nationalist ideal of ethnically pure interaction) that is a simplification of the complex pattern of interaction on the local level,'' rather than local level interactions being simplified, less complex versions of macrolevel discursive battles. Ultimately, this boils down to the question of whether macrolevel factors (for instance, nationalist, political leadership) met the public already raising exclusivist sentiments, or whether the public (otherwise relatively peacefully interwoven through the marketplace, intermarriage, and educational institutions) subsequently grew suspicious of one another's neighbors, coworkers, etc. Following the first track runs the risk of feeding fodder to the uncritical thesis that imagines the Balkans as a land of perpetual violence, where past grievances are never settled and latent hate is the order of the day. I am more inclined to the latter track, in view of the former U.S. President Clinton's foreword to the volume by Swanee Hunt (2004), former U.S. Ambassador to Austria, where Clinton noted: ''As the war raged in Bosnia, Hunty brought to my attention news not making headlines: that the women of Bosnia had been organizing to try to prevent the war, and they were still doing what they couldy to hold together their culturally diverse communities.'' Consider also what one Bosnian woman, Nurdzihana, said after the war: ''I've never accepted ethnic divisions. The way I was raised, we didn't say someone belongs to this or that ethnic group. The atrocities I witnessed had no ethnicity, no religion. We lived together until the day before'' (Hunt, 2004, p. 95).
10. By which term I want to refer to that effort to expand one's range of blood relatives, hence including them into an imaginary ''one of us'' category.
11. I acknowledge that the illustrations excerpted from Bringa's work tell only part of the story in the run-up to the war. For more detailed examples of pre-war (that is, pre-1990) happenings, one can peruse Bringa's ICTY testimony available at http://www.un.org/icty/transe16/990712it.htm (I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing the testimony to my attention). There, Bringa discusses at some length how the increasing Croat military presence in the region and the repeated, Croatcontrolled media broadcasts instilled a sense of fear which reconfigured the way in which Croat inhabitants came to see their long-time covillagers as ethnic others. What seems to have emerged from complex military objectives and carefully planned broadcasts is a divisive process that produced simple, previously nonexistent, and ethnically defined ''us versus them'' perceptions of a hostile nature.