My First (Almost) Extinction Event
At the time, I did not know that I was swimming in a mass mortality event.
Balkan Waters
These spa towns all have traces of the different empires that thundered through the region that at least had the decency to leave behind some nice pools. Two of them are particularly close to my heart.
Against Summary
Escaping the summary’s grip would mean to choose observation over argument, arriving at conclusions through sustained—perhaps interminable—seeing and listening.
On labels, taxonomies and (self)identities
Labels and taxonomies don’t define museum objects only. By trying to see myself in academia, I realized that academics come with their own.
Following the Fear
She tells me to keep my heart under my pillow for the next several weeks, and she instructs me to wash myself with water from the ritual three times a day. When the water finally runs out, she says, I am to throw my heart into the river.
From atop a mountain: Living, writing, etc.
It was the research process itself that connected all the dots, the biographical and the ethnographic: honeybees and our father’s land, local Sufis’ lessons and my past academic teaching, ruinous new habits of weather and a search for “a life” on this altitude.
Counting Change
Unwelcome change welcomes languages, and all of the languages I come to know to some degree—come even to forget—share numbers. The numerical representation of the word “one” is 1 in Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian; it is 1 in Turkish; it is 1 in English; it is 1 in French; it can be 1 in Japanese. My aunt says, “You have just 1 life. Live it. Treasure it.”