‘The dead have given up on us’. Space, the dead and morality in contemporary rural Muslim Bosnia
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article brings necrogeography into conversation with moral geography to examine how the dead participate not only in the production of space but also of moral life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Muslim Bosnia and Herzegovina, it explores how post-socialist and post-war transformations in mobility, sociality, and rural livelihoods have reshaped village space and its moral order. While geographical scholarship has shown that the dead may exert agency through material and affective relations, it has paid limited attention to how such agency contributes to the moral charge of space. In this paper I argue that the dead act as co-agents in the making of moral geographies. The article traces a shift from pre-war encounters with impersonal ghosts in communal spaces, especially graveyards, to contemporary encounters with familiar dead in dreams and private homes. This transformation reflects broader changes in everyday spatial practices and social relations, including the decline of neighbourly interaction and neighbourhood as a moral institution. Whereas ghostly encounters once reinforced communal ethics of care and reciprocity, interactions with deceased kin increasingly sustain kinship-based obligations. The article demonstrates that the agency of the dead is historically contingent, spatially mediated, and implicated in the moral reconfiguration of rural life.
Source: Social & Cultural Geography
Author: Mirjam Mencej
Institution: University of Ljubljana
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7203872468