“Smoking Doesn’t Kill; It Unites!”

Abstract

This anthropological study examines the meanings and practices of “mixing” among youth at the Gymnasium Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H).¹ I use the local term miješanje, or mixing, to describe instances of “border-crossing” among youth of different ethnic groups at the school. Furthermore, I look at formal and informal spaces of miješanje and I portray novel boundaries of intimacy reflected in processes of making friends, coffee drinking, and dating. In addition, I describe fears, tensions, resistances, and obstacles to mixing that reflect changes in the social environment. I understand mixing as multileveled processes of interaction and relationship building among ethnically divided people in a post-conflict society. Processes of mixing simultaneously take place on the individual, communal, and societal levels, often with different intensities. For example, while some forms of mixing are tolerated or even encouraged in one context, they are socially or culturally forbidden in others. In what follows, I illustrate the how, why, who, when, and where of mixing in order to discover its local logic and to map out emerging forms of social relations among the youth in B&H.