If burnout is an example of a personal crisis, when all the old skills of routines suddenly seem to disappear, the Sarajevo example highlights other aspects of routines. For example, it illustrates how much ordinary routines create a seamless rhythm during the day. Now these normal rhythms were broken up by the erratic supply of basic amenities. Was there any water in the tap? When will the electricity come back? People had to devise new routines like sleeping with all the lamps in the bedroom turned on, so that you would wake up when electricity returned and could hasten out in the kitchen in the middle of the night to do the laundry or cook some food. By keeping the water tap on you learned to listen for sounds of water returning momentarily at the oddest hours.
Instead of the well-known habits and rhythms there was a constant improvisation and confrontation with unexpected situations, with no chance of long-term planning, no steady routines. ‘If I have three children I will call them Electricity, Water and Gas,’ a 10-year-old boy said. The new life was based upon a constant uncertainty, and this was a conscious strategy of the attackers. They were out to break routines and create chaos and thus get the civilians on their knees.
Another aspect of the Sarajevo ethnography concerns the ways in which routines that usually are taken for granted become elevated to almost sacred rituals in times of crisis. In Sarajevo the phrase ‘to imitate life’ became a common figure of speech that signalled a desire to keep some of the old and well-known routines and at least create an image of normal life. Even the most trivial routines acquired a new symbolic charge. People would do almost anything to be able to bake a loaf of bread or dare the snipers for a walk to a bakery. The smell of fresh bread turned into ‘an oasis of normality’. Taking a hot bath or dressing up for a visit to a neighbourhood café turned into an event.
To sum up: private burnout and a society collapsing during warfare represent two different kinds of what the Swedish ethnologist Gösta Arvastson (2006) has called zero-making. What happens when old routines all of a sudden disappear and another everyday life has to be constructed from new conditions? What is it that gets lost? In Sarajevo it was demonstrated how much the routines of everyday life were based upon an often unnoticed infrastructure of amenities and resources. In burnout it was as if the skills of routines and multi-tasking just evaporated. The body refused to obey orders; the autopilot gave up.
In both cases, however, the crisis also created a new platform, a feeling that there was a possibility of building up an alternative existence. The breakdown of everyday routines does not only have to be paralysing, but also provides a chance to rethink and reorganize your life. Much that once was seen as given and absolutely necessary turns out to be possible to do away with or change into new routines.
Routines – Made and Unmade
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