Shortly after the book's protagonists moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More than a decade later, in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be. Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet critical portrait of people's sense that they were in limbo, trapped in a seemingly endless "Meantime." Ethnographically investigating yearnings for "normal lives" in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are caught shape our hopes and fears.

Stef Jansen is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He is also the co-editor of Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People (Berghahn 2008, with S. Löfving), and has conducted ethnographic research in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1996.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface

Introduction: [or, Towards an Anthropology of Shared Concerns]

PART I: FIGURING 'NORMAL LIVES'

Chapter 1. 'Normal Lives' [or, Towards an Anthropology of Yearning]
Chapter 2. Waiting for a Bus [or, Towards an Anthropology of Gridding]
Chapter 3. War-Time Gridding for 'Normal Lives' [or, Towards an Anthropology of Hope for the State]

PART II: DIAGNOSING DAYTONITIS

Chapter 4. First Symptom: 'There Is No System' [or, Towards an Anthropology of an Elusive State Effect]
Chapter 5. Second Symptom: 'We Are Pattering in Place' [or, Towards an Anthropology of Spatiotemporal Entrapment]

PART III: LIVING WITH DAYTONITIS

Chapter 6. Conviviality in the Meantime [or, Towards a Critique of Dayton Non-Politics]

Epilogue: Shovelling and Numbering for 'Normal Lives'

References
Index