Uncanny Experience and Its Meaning-Making as Moral Experience

Abstract Anthropological, historical, and folkloristic studies have shown that there is a close connection between morality and cosmology in many cultures and that the dead, as spirits, play an important role in upholding moral norms and expectations and respond to their violation. However, these studies have rarely endeavored to highlight the unique individual experiences behind the general argument. In this article I focus on individual experiences. I will argue that encounters with dead agents are moral experiences within which moral problems can be fruitfully negotiated, leading to their possible resolution. More specifically, based on the fieldwork I conducted in 2016 and 2024 among the Muslim population in the rural areas of central Bosnia, I will trace the ways of personal coping with the consequences of violations of moral rules of behavior, as culturally encoded in Bosnian Muslim culture, and the search for their meaning.