I’ve spent most of the past 10 days in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Dubrovnik (Croatia). Apart from the weather, Sarajevo was great…beautiful city, nice people, good food, etc. It is also very good value for money. On the road to Croatia you can see a lot of beautiful, snow-capped, rocky mountains. It is an interesting drive, as you actually go from Bosnia to Croatia, then back to Bosnia (for its 10 km of coastline) then into Croatia again.

While Dubrovnik is a nice place, it is clearly overrun with tourists. It seems that prices have shot up a lot in the past few years and are now on par with pretty much anywhere else in Europe (Greece, for example). Still, it is a very beautiful place and was worth going. The train back (from Ploce) was interesting, a relic from the 70s or 80s.

I’ve just left Sarajevo after attending the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) 13th conference.  Apart from the weather, it was a good experience, I met a lot of wonderful people and learned a lot.  My own presentation went fine, although though truthfully speaking it was poorly attended and not a very valuable experience.  Anyway, I now have lots to think about and to read, which should help with the ongoing dissertation.

Asne Seierstad’s Bookseller of Kabul recounts various episodes in the life of a family in the months after the fall of the Taliban in 2001.  The patriarchy of Afghan society seems to be an overriding theme: the author shows how Sultan, the title character, rules his family almost despotically: women are regarded as chattel and marriage is viewed as an exchange of property.  The stories are based on true events, Seierstad actually spend several months living with the family.

I am not an expert on Afghan society, so it is difficult for me to interpret the Bookseller of Kabul, but I did find the repetitive theme of male domination to be somewhat reductive: it sometimes seems to be the only defining feature of the family.  Additionally, the work is in fact a type of ethnography, it lacks reflexivity that might lend greater credibility to the events. Seierstad is completely transparent in all the episodes she portrays, as if she were invisible and suspended from the ceiling.  Although she acknowledges she frequently fought with the Kahn family in the foreword, her realationship to them is never mentioned again  It seems unlikely that a Norwegian women could live with an Afghan family without influencing the course of their lives: portraying that would have added greater depth to the book.  Also, the book itself is problematic: Seierstad depicts the characters and their relationships in an almost entirely negative light.  Is the family aware of the book?  If so, what were their opinions and how does the author construe her relationship to them?

Without doubt, the Bookseller of Kabul is a captivating and well-written book, but it at times it seems to only tell part of the story.

I just tried to download firefox in Croatia, but found it nearly impossible. Going to firefox.com takes me to http://www.mozilla-japan.org/products/firefox/, which displays mostly ????? as Japanese fonts are not installed on this machine. Finding an English download is actually quite difficult, as google search results are similarly localized to prioritize Croatian pages. It would be much easier if organizations simply took one to the URL one requested, rather than trying to infer something about you based on your IP address.