Читать книгу Wastelands - Eirik Saethre - Страница 11

While artists, novelists, television producers, governments, and NGOs all perpetuate common narratives about Roma, so do researchers and anthropologists.⁸⁴ From the outset of this project I was concerned about how my own writing would be situated in regard to these narratives. What impact would it, and I, have upon the lives of Polje’s residents? First, the topics that I sought to engage seemed prone to replicating long-standing assumptions. By studying the enduring displacement of people in excepted spaces, my work risked resembling the very stereotype that I most wished to challenge: that Roma choose to lead iterant lives on the margins of civilization. Second, I, a non-Romani white American male, would be telling a story about people whose lives were unlike my own in profoundly significant dimensions. Polje’s residents and I were not only separated by differing ethnicities, nationalities, languages, and lived experiences but also by vast economic disparities. My own background, education, and embeddedness within a wage labor hierarchy would invariably structure any writing that I produced. And while I hoped for this book to be read by a “wide audience,” I knew that group would not include the people it was about, many of whom were unable to decipher written Serbian, let alone English. In all likelihood, most readers of this text will share far more traits in common with me than with Polje’s residents. Consequently, if Polje is an Other world, it is only because a world of assumed whiteness, housing, and paychecks is privileged, frequently taken for granted, and portrayed as normative.

Conscious of these issues and committed to a collaborative methodology, I determined the project’s feasibility by first consulting with settlement residents and prepared to abandon the research if Ashkali and Roma did not want an anthropologist such as myself delving into their communities. It was at this point that I met Endrit. Not long into our first conversation, I explained that I hoped to spend months working with scavengers, taking part in their daily lives, and having them guide my project. But I also conceded that I was still learning Serbian, had never scavenged before, and was largely unaware of the social complexities and norms that suffused settlements. In thinking together about whether we might collaborate in this project, we discussed how his assisting me could be invasive and onerous. Having laid out my goals and concerns, I asked Endrit for his opinion: What did he think about my research and methodology? Was it appropriate and would anyone be interested in participating?

Rather than answering me directly, Endrit asked a question of his own: “What will you give me?” Would the project fund houses? Grant residents access to land? Guarantee that water and power was legally supplied to the settlement? Improve their lives? I replied that I could do none of those things. While I would assist in a personal capacity and provide whatever resources I could, my work would not lead to systemic improvements in his status, housing, education, or health. In fact, it might make things worse. Detailed information about his settlement, albeit disguised with pseudonyms, would be publicly available and could no doubt be used in ways we did not intend or foresee. Endrit thought for a moment before replying that I was the first person who had been honest with him. Journalists, NGOs, and government representatives all promised to change lives, he said, but no one did. Because I refrained from making similar pledges, Endrit declared that he would be honest with me: he was the leader of a nearby settlement and would be willing to speak more about my project. Two days later I visited his home, met other Ashkali, began the slow unfolding process of nurturing relationships, and was subsequently invited to conduct fieldwork with them in Zgrade.

Two years passed before I returned and began research.⁸⁵ By then, Zgrade had been razed and Endrit was living primarily in Kosovo. However, I located his daughter’s family in Polje and I was invited to spend time with them. After speaking more about my project, they and their Ashkali neighbors agreed to participate. As we discussed, I would not conduct surveys, focus groups, and formal interviews. I also refrained from audio recording and public notetaking. I did not want people to feel as if they were being put under a microscope or subjected to unfamiliar practices. I would be present in the moment with people, what some anthropologists have called “deep hanging out.”⁸⁶ Consequently, all quotes are from memory. To document events, I wrote copious field notes when I was alone or others were sleeping, usually late at night.

Although I attempted to be as unobtrusive as possible and integrate into the settlement, I was nevertheless a non-Rom and foreigner. Concerned about how an outsider like myself would be received, I employed a Romani research assistant to act as a facilitator, translator, and advisor. Slobodan was studying social work at the University of Belgrade and he assisted me approximately one day a week.⁸⁷ His conviviality, local knowledge, and Serbian language skills significantly eased the awkwardness of many early interactions and, as fieldwork progressed, his insights were invaluable. However, I quickly learned that my assumptions regarding insiders and outsiders were inaccurate. Aside from being Romani, Slobodan had little in common with Polje’s residents. His family had lived in Belgrade for generations, owned a house, and were members of an educated working class. Upon meeting Slobodan, many of Polje’s Roma actually failed to identify him as a Rom. Meanwhile, Ashkali residents routinely stressed their difference from, and at times superiority to, Roma such as Slobodan. He was thus never treated as an insider. Consequently, Slobodan’s Romani identity did not necessarily facilitate my entry into the settlement and, in some cases, complicated it.

My own positionality was also created and situated within the context of the settlement. First, Polje’s residents steadfastly refrained from commenting on my ethnic or racial identity. I was never called a non-Rom nor was I labeled “white.”⁸⁸ My difference was articulated through my nationality. When I was ignorant of local norms, asked about what trash to collect, mispronounced words, or confessed to being a vegetarian, I was called an American. Initially, my desire to live and work in Polje was attributed to this as well. As I returned from my first scavenging trip pedaling a trokolica—and Roma stared in confusion—Bekim loudly announced, “He is American!”

My nationality not only marked me as socially atypical but also was a signifier of wealth. In addition, Polje’s residents were aware that I was employed as a professor and had been given a grant to conduct research in Serbia. However, conversations about my affluence were rare and, contrary to the stereotype of the begging Gypsy, only men in Bekim’s and Endrit’s households requested my financial assistance. Not only was it deemed rude to inquire about another’s income; men took pride in being able to support their families. Accepting cash, especially from someone outside the domestic unit, was an admission that they had failed in this endeavor. Consequently, when Bekim or Endrit desperately needed money for food and other essentials, they quietly asked for “loans” that I did not expect to be repaid. My labor, on the other hand, could be and was publicly utilized. I carried water, prepared paper for recycling, watched children, and scavenged.⁸⁹

But it was not my skin color, nationality, or wealth that most determined my place in Polje; it was my gender. I spent the vast majority of my time with men participating in their activities. In contrast, my interactions with women were much more circumscribed because significant relationships between men and women were largely restricted to familial settings. My eventual embeddedness in Bekim’s household allowed me to speak with Fatime at length, but I could not replicate this with other female residents. Polje’s women possessed their own sociality but it was one that I was unable to access. As a result, Wastelands focuses primarily on men, their viewpoints, and pursuits, even though women played crucial roles in the settlement. They maintained homes, prepared food, raised children, and exchanged knowledge. However, women were also among the most vulnerable residents of Polje. They were routinely the subject of sexual jokes and often expected to cede their agency, and bodies, to men. In exploring this context, my own gender limited my ability to engage women’s experiences and perspectives. Thus I must acknowledge that my account of Polje is structured by my positionality within it.

While my first weeks in Belgrade were spent watching horse carts pass on the street below, I would become the one riding in a cart while Serbs stared at me from their windows. After a few months, I moved into Bekim’s shack and ultimately became godfather to his two youngest children, who were born during my stay. As I grew familiar with Polje’s residents, we spoke about how they wished to be represented. Endrit urged me to focus on the personalities and hard work of scavengers. They were individuals, he declared, each with his or her own history, aspirations, and agency. Rajim echoed this, instructing me to portray Ashkali as I knew them, as people.⁹⁰ Endrit, Rajim, and others wanted to be acknowledged as persons, not “poor cigani.” Consequently, this book seeks to counter monolithic depictions by providing an intimate account of the everyday. This is not a story of “the Roma” or “the Ashkali” but of Bekim, Endrit, Fatime, Harun, Jovana, Goran, Milica, and others. I aim to describe how people with diverse backgrounds are thrown together to endure life in an excepted geography. Hence, my focus is context, not culture.

Polje constitutes a very precise and circumscribed place. Informal Romani settlements are not the norm in Serbia or Europe. Likewise, Polje’s inhabitants are not representative of the wider Romani community: the vast majority of Serbia’s Roma live in houses, not shacks. When I asked a member of Slobodan’s family what I should stress, he replied, “Be sure to tell everyone that not all Roma are the same.” Wastelands, therefore, does not claim to represent Roma throughout Europe, Serbia, or even Belgrade; rather, it portrays a specific group in specific circumstances. Furthermore, I am not chronicling an eternal people or an eternal context; what follows is a series of bounded moments. The instability of Polje ensured that almost nothing remained the same. To depict it or the people who called it home as static is simply impossible. As a result, I have chosen to abandon the ethnographic present in favor of the past tense.

In situating Polje’s residents in time and space, I also wish to resist attempts to homogenize their experiences of precarity and suffering. Anthropologists increasingly invoke precarity to make sense of how the twenty-first century’s burgeoning economic insecurity has created fragile and vulnerable existences.⁹¹ Allison comments that “where everyday efforts don’t align with a teleology of progressive betterment, living can be often just that. Not leading particularly anywhere, lives get lived nonetheless.”⁹² Unsurprisingly, trash-pickers are frequently cast as the epitome of precarity.⁹³ Indeed, the contents of Belgrade’s dumpsters were unpredictable and scavengers constantly struggled to provide for their families. But for Ashkali, much more was at stake. In addition to being economically marginalized, they were expelled from their homes in Kosovo, stigmatized as cigani, and segregated in slums. Facing chronic racism and inequality, they negotiated a continuum of structural, symbolic, and physical violence.⁹⁴ Kleinman, Das, and Lock argue that these traumas have societal origins and should therefore be conceptualized in terms of social suffering, which “results from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people and, reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems.”⁹⁵ However, while labels such as “precarious sufferers” draw attention to the severe effects of inequality, they do not always adequately reflect people’s embodied realities.

Concepts such as experience, suffering, and precarity are, like all ideas, socially and historically constructed.⁹⁶ In contrast, individual responses to distress emerge from everyday life and can therefore be expressed in many different ways. Das aptly notes that any comprehensive understanding of precarity and suffering must ultimately decentralize theoretical discussions in favor of ethnography focusing on actual lives and encounters.⁹⁷ This is particularly true in excepted geographies where heartache is routine and remarkable. She writes, “suffering that is assimilated within the normal and yet not fully absorbed in it is much more difficult to decipher.”⁹⁸ For Polje’s Ashkali, shacks were simultaneously unstable structures and cherished homes, while scavenging was both evidence of marginalization and a source of wealth. Suffering was simply a daily reality and, as a result, it was not a cause for despair, regret, or anger. Instead, people like Bekim were bored.

Boredom is best conceptualized as an ordinary affect: public feelings that suffuse interactions, sensations, and ambitions.⁹⁹ When one examines impoverished populations, boredom is routinely linked to solitude and despair. For instance, Agamben notes, “the man who becomes bored finds himself in the ‘closest proximity’—even if it is only apparent—to animal captivation.”¹⁰⁰ Severed from humanity, bored individuals are encased in spaces that lack possibility. In his study of homeless Romanians, O’Neill adopts a similar approach. He defines boredom as a “persistent form of social suffering made possible by a crisis-generated shift in the global economy.”¹⁰¹ In Bucharest it signifies an estrangement from contemporary consumerism and downward socioeconomic mobility. Boredom is a feature of distress in the midst of existential crises, where individuals strikingly realize their alienation from the neoliberal order. Although I agree that boredom is a hallmark of social abandonment, Polje’s residents, as Ashkali and Romani scavengers, were differently situated. Unlike homeless Romanians, Bekim never even contemplated the possibility of inclusion. He was always already the Other. Consequently, boredom was not an indicator of trauma but of normality. Poverty, marginalization, and violence were boring precisely because they were so ordinary. Suffering was, in Heideggerian terms, ready-to-hand. Reflecting upon this context, Wastelands seeks to reframe narratives and understandings of suffering by grounding them within the lives of Polje’s residents and the trash that they collect.

Finally, I must clarify three choices I have made regarding terminology. First, debates continue to rage regarding the appropriateness and acceptability of the words Roma, Gypsy, and cigan.¹⁰² For the purposes of this book I follow the preferences of Polje’s residents and refer to them as Ashkali and Roma. However, because the epithet cigan is commonly employed in stigmatized and pejorative portrayals, I invoke it when communicating these narratives and perspectives. Second, informal Romani settlements have also been given a number of labels including slums, shantytowns, unhygienic settlements, substandard settlements, cardboard cities, and mahalas. Locally, communities such as Zgrade and Polje are simply called settlements (naselja) and I echo this convention. Third, I describe informal waste recycling as scavenging and those who do it as scavengers. In Polje, however, these terms were not in use. Searching through dumpsters was spoken of in euphemisms, namely as going to the trashcans (po kante) or to work (rad). In denoting these activities as scavenging, I aim to acknowledge the difficult, dirty, and desperate nature of this livelihood.

Each of the following chapters progresses chronologically and thematically. The first illustrates the diversity of Polje’s residents and the economic and social bonds that tied them together. Governments, NGOs, journalists, and researchers routinely homogenized the inhabitants of informal settlements and dismissed them as impoverished cigani. However, Polje’s population did not constitute a uniform group. From its founding almost three decades ago, the settlement was home to a varied collection of people. This chapter recounts the histories of a few of these individuals and in so doing explores the ethnic, religious, linguistic, and occupational differences that suffused Polje. Despite these contrasts, settlement residents shared one commonality: inhabiting an exclusionary space in which trash was the primary means of survival. Lacking social and economic affiliations elsewhere, Polje’s denizens had no choice but to rely on one another. The ubiquity of barter, debt, and the sociality that accompanied them forged functional but volatile bonds. In an environment of displacement and privation, the never-ending struggle for commodities and cash created reciprocal relationships through an economy of trash.

Chapter 2 focuses on Ashkali attempts to establish homes in an excluded geography. Because the Serbian government considered informal settlements illegal, their inhabitants were denied basic amenities such as adequate housing, clean water, and electricity. Detailing people’s struggles, this chapter explores how a domesticity of exception was wrought from scarcity and precarity. For instance, Ashkali collectively labored to transform shacks built from trash into respectable homes. Meanwhile, basic services had to be illicitly appropriated, which could result in arrest or electrocution. Although Polje’s residents cooperated to survive, they also demarcated family from neighbor, contributor from competitor, through food and drink. The settlement’s vulnerability was particularly evident after flooding that left the rest of the city largely unscathed. Losing what little they possessed and receiving almost no external aid, families worked to rebuild their shacks and recreate a marginalized area that was nevertheless their refuge.

Despite their physical segregation, Polje’s residents participated in international networks by converting discarded value-laden commodities into cash. To make sense of this process, the third chapter examines the labor, embodied experience, and signification of scavenging. It follows Ashkali and Roma as they sort through dumpsters, recycle paper and metal products, sell salvaged goods at markets, beg, and engage in wage labor. Dumpsters were abject, but Ashkali earned their living and identity through these receptacles of disgust. Scavenging created a web of interactions and implicit understandings between Serbs and settlement residents. Destabilizing the boundary between private property and waste, trash-picking generated diverse but overlapping identities including the needy sufferer, the devious thief, and the entrepreneurial worker. Crucially, it transcended meaning and shaped Ashkali corporeality. Pedaling a fully loaded trokolica, stooping over dumpsters, and stacking tons of cardboard were physically debilitating. Consequently, trash work resulted in a life of pain. As Ashkali endured physical discomfort, social stigma, and economic marginalization, their afflictions were multidimensional and born out of garbage.

Chapter 4 charts entrepreneurial aspirations by following Bekim’s efforts to achieve financial success. First, he attempted to increase his family’s income by applying for welfare. Because the steps required to receive state aid employed technologies of governance to constitute biopolitical citizens, Bekim, as a cigan, was functionally excluded. As an alternative, he hoped to increase his scavenging revenue by emulating his Romani neighbors and collecting metal via horse cart. Bekim purchased a horse but was still unable to comprehensively support his family. If welfare was a function of state sovereignty, working with horses was the domain of a localized Romani sovereignty. Consequently, Bekim’s desire to diversify his economic status was viewed as a betrayal of Ashkali values and he became increasingly estranged from these social networks. Bekim’s identity and that of the trash he scavenged were intertwined. Just as he attempted to transform materials from commodities to garbage and back again, Bekim actively manipulated his own status both within the settlement and without.

Chapter 5 follows Ashkali as they negotiate the precarious transition out of informal settlements. Although formal accommodation boasted amenities like water and electricity, settlements provided access to important economic resources—trash—that could not be found elsewhere. For instance, state-sponsored apartments lacked storage space for recyclable paper, while container settlements and NGO-funded homes in Kosovo were situated in peri-urban and rural areas devoid of waste. On the other hand, those applying for asylum in the European Union temporarily received state benefits but were almost always repatriated to the Balkans. National and international resettlement programs, while ostensibly intended to improve housing, only succeeded in relegating Ashkali and Roma to other equally uncertain geographies. Prevailing economic, social, and political conditions ensured that spaces like Polje, although impermanent, were nevertheless enduring.

The conclusion lays bare the fragility of life in settlements by charting what appeared to be the impending eviction of Polje as trucks began dumping dirt, broken concrete, and other rubble near people’s shacks. While Ashkali and Roma strained to cope, they were further burdened by the very people who purported to provide aid: a church group aiming to solicit donations from their American parishioners began recording emotional videos of scavengers. As Ashkali and Roma sought to scavenge resources from these interlopers, they also had to negotiate hunger, pain, violence, and death. Examining the events surrounding my final weeks in the settlement, I return to the concept of boredom. After years in Polje, I too had become bored, not with the people or the place, but with the enduring afflictions. As nights searching for food in dumpsters while attempting to avoid assault became common, I grew inured to the constant struggle. Rereading my field notes while preparing this manuscript, I was struck by the number of times I described being hungry, sore, and under threat. Yet, at the time, it all seemed routine and inconsequential. As a result, it is my desire to recount not only the trials that people faced but also the simple monotony of these extraordinary events.