This dissertation explores the phenomenon of "apparitions" in the post-war context of ex-Yugoslavia. On the one hand, it interprets the experience of seeing visions, and on the other it contextualizes these sightings into a political climate in the aftermath of the war in the 1990s. Drawing on more than thirteen months of fieldwork on the borders of Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia, and in close conversation with seers, medical personnel, and former soldiers, I described apparitions as post-religious mechanisms of becoming that produce meaning in an otherwise disastrous history of the individuals who undergo them.

The dissertation argues that the clarification of apparitions is only possible through recourse to the war that preceded it, and in a way shaped the territories where they presently occur. As such, apparitions do not only belong to a religious field of personal affects, but are in fact a contested site between conflicting subjectivities, medical epistemologies, and post-socialist transformations.

Through this anthropology of the apparitional formations I intended to unravel a transition from the so-called spectacle culture to the apparitional culture. This transition is investigated through ethnographic work in ex-Yugoslavia, as well as through the investigation of the ephemerality of contemporary art production and architectural practice in Croatia. At the same time, the dissertation not only maps out individual experiences of suffering, but it also unfolds a trajectory of nation-building, delimiting events from a socialist collapse to the problematic transition into democracy.

As such, my dissertation is intended to contribute to the anthropology of sensation, to comparative war studies, to the anthropology of religion, to the study of visual culture, and to different theories of the state.