Paper long abstract:

The paper will discuss how different, primarily political research circumstances, determine the anonymity or the visibility of ethnographic actors. Conceived as a personal account, the paper is based on research experiences from Southeastern Europe. The first example is taken from doing fieldwork in Dubrovnik, Croatia, and the second from the Bay of Kotor, Montenegro. Both examples have to do with an anthropologist facing the change from doing "anthropology at home" to doing "anthropology in the neighborhood". The difference was that the borders of the newly formed states of former Yugoslavia, and thus the ones the researcher had to start crossing in the midst of her fieldwork, were established in the earlier case through a civil war (1991-1995), and in the later, via one-sided referendum (2006). After the two ethnographies were published, the anonymous actors across the Croatian border remained silent, while the named actors in Montenegro became (the) public, in position to comment, promote and criticize.