Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Womens Activism in Postwar Bosnia-

Herzegovina. By Elissa Helms. Pp. xv + 325. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.
2013. $26.95. ISBN 9780299295547.

Innocence and Victimhood is a meticulously researched, clearly written, and gripping ethnographic
account. The book explores the awkward and ambivalent relationship between victimhood and
nation that is made apparent through the logic of gender (p. 4). Building on more than two decades
of scholarly, activist and humanitarian engagement with Bosnia-Herzegovina and its people, Helms
masterfully, patiently and boldly, but always respectfully and caringly, explains the complicated and
at times paradoxical relationship between womens activism, victimhood, morality, gender, and the
Bosnian state and its many nationalisms. In order to illuminate the fluid and historically informed
relationships between gender, morality and politics, Helms embarks on a demanding journey to
explore and explain the workings of the politics of victimhood. In pursuance of this goal, the author
combines an impressive engagement with and knowledge of extant literature with her long-term
ethnographic field study. She does this by laboriously unpacking the constructions and
manipulations of the symbol of ultimate victimhood a (raped and refugee) Bosniac woman. Helms
shows how these representations of Bosniac women almost always essentializing, totalizing and
homogenizing emerge as a powerful index of (ethno-)national and gendered suffering, a site of
multiple international, regional and local political, economic and historical claims to innocence,
recognition and rights.

This ethnographic study of womens activism in Bosnia reveals that there is a vast space between
the experiences of victimhood, on the one side, and the (totalizing) representations (and therefore
politicization) of victimhood, on the other. This space is filled with clashing political visions,
competing claims to power, the gendering of innocence, the ethnicization of morality, powerful
personal interests, an omnipresent patriarchy, urban/rural class struggles, and horrific and uneven
memories of war and survival.

In order to portray the wide array of international and local agencies, actors and historical events
that shape narratives and representations of gendered victimhood in Bosnia, Helms spends over one
hundred pages of the book introducing the reader to multiple histories of nationalism, socialism and
ethnoreligious coexistence in Bosnia and especially Zenica, as the authors principal ethnographic
site. While for this reviewer such a long contextualization seemed somewhat excessive, as well as
fragmented into too many subsections, the painstaking groundwork presented in it will undoubtedly
be useful to readers less familiar with Bosnian history.

Helmss theoretical apparatus is outstanding: she develops and/or adopts some powerful analytical
concepts that help capture the complexities of the phenomena studied, including affirmative
essentialisms, strategic avoidance and, this reviewers favourite, the nationing of gender, all of
which add theoretical richness and wider significance to this ethnographic account, beyond Bosnia
and the Balkans. While this book is certainly one of the finest theoretical interventions into
contemporary studies of gender, morality and nationalism in the Balkans, this reviewer was possibly
even more taken by the authors methodological choices. Helms decision to take a critical approach
to the work of her main informants the Bosnian (mostly Bosniac) women activists is brave and
unique, and it reveals some of the (rarely talked about) tensions at the heart of most ethnographic
endeavours: the possibility of perceived betrayal. It is exactly in those moments that Helms is most
reflexive: namely, when she speaks to her main interlocutors and friends the women activists,
many of whom were victims of war violence about why she needed to question the
[representations of] victimhood (p. xi).

It is in this space that some of the most difficult and critical questions about ethnographic fieldwork
at large are illuminated. How do we do research and write about those who are deemed powerless
and victimized? How do we recognize the physical and structural violence that shapes their lives,
while also recognizing their agency and subjectivity, even if it unfolds in the language of
nationalism or exclusion? How do we critically write about the work of those who have become our
friends in the field, whose accomplishments we appreciate, and whose friendships we cherish?
Ethnography is ultimately about the betrayal of friendships we make in the field, I was once told
by a senior anthropologist. Helms book allows the reader to see these ethnographic complexities,
including the tension between being a researcher and an activist and friend. Helms is hopeful that
her intervention will be understood by the Bosnian women who enabled this ethnography. It is my
sincere hope, she writes, that the survivors, advocates, activists, and others I got to know in the
course of this research understand these intentions and still feel that I have rendered their words
fairly and in the context of their everyday realities, even when I come to critical conclusions (p. xi).
This is the hope of this reviewer as well.

One of my favourite parts of the book is its Conclusion, in which the author ventures beyond her
rich arguments to complicate them even more by opening up the possibility of the activists
resistance to the dominant ethno-nationalization of victimhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Here, Helms
first briefly turns her lens to the significant, yet largely ignored, space of (the politicization of)
masculinity in this context, and she then ventures into the arena of journalistic, artistic, and
academic opposition to ethno-national scripts that have hijacked the politics of victimhood in post-
Dayton Bosnia. It is on these pages that the authors activist side however hesitant and aware of
the numerous obstacles ahead is most available to the reader, offering a tiny horizon of hope.

Helms is an ethnographer of the Balkans who really gets it her ethnography is refreshing
because it is sincere, courageous and rightfully suspicious of the hopeless/hopeful duality which
marks the majority of the studies of the region. The authors knowledge and understanding of
history, culture and contemporary politics of the region are truly exceptional. This book
demonstrates this impressively through its critique born out of care, and through the intimacy and
frustration that stem from its proximity to and perpetual engagement with its subject.

Syracuse University Azra Hromadi