Читать книгу Wastelands - Eirik Saethre - Страница 9

Throughout Europe, Romani populations have been confined and controlled for centuries. The most horrific example occurred during the Nazi regime, when Roma were labeled an inferior race, sent to concentration camps, and exterminated.³⁹ Today, Roma are no longer overtly murdered by the state but they continue to be detained in sites across Europe. In Italy, for instance, state-sponsored “nomad camps” are often fenced, guarded, and surrounded by security cameras while residents must meet strict eligibility criteria.⁴⁰ In areas such as these, the normal rule of law is suspended and ciganski bodies are controlled.⁴¹ While I am not equating nomad camps with concentration camps, there is a family resemblance between the two. In each case, cigani were confined, functionally stripped of citizenship, and rendered as nonpeople.

Foucault argues that modern states govern their populace through these conditions.⁴² In the past, individuals deemed aberrant and a threat to social order were the subjects of explicit violence, but contemporary regimes rely less on openly taking lives. Instead, they subtly disallow existence through “indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.” ⁴³ Agamben builds upon Foucault’s ideas, asserting that sites such as concentration camps, airport detention centers, and squatter settlements are “zones of indistinction,” where noncitizens are defined, labeled expendable, and ultimately left to die.⁴⁴ These spaces are constituted through a state of exception, when governments portray certain events—such as migration, drug use, or an epidemic—as a national emergency. Then, citing security concerns, the state is able to justify abandoning legal norms and revoking the rights of those judged outside the national order. Citizenship is delineated by forging geographies for noncitizens.

In contrast to many other European countries where Romani camps were created, monitored, and controlled, those in Belgrade were characterized by the state’s absence. While Zgrade was established after the Kosovo War, informal Romani settlements had been a feature of the urban landscape for decades. In the 1960s Roma established Deponija (“landfill” in Serbian) on top of a trash heap surrounded by industrial land. Over the next forty years it became synonymous with destitution, growing to over 153 shanties and 856 people.⁴⁵ But communities like Deponija were relatively rare until the 1990s. As Serbia was beset by war and economic collapse, settlements began appearing in parklands, under bridges, and on vacant commercial lots throughout the city. Eventually an estimated eight percent of Belgrade’s area was occupied by squatter shacks.⁴⁶ Casting this as a national crisis, Serbs routinely attributed the proliferation of settlements to the influx of refugees and IDPs. In actuality it was the introduction of neoliberalism during the postsocialist era that played the most significant role.⁴⁷

With the country’s resources severely strained and prioritized for Serbs, authorities allowed cigani to construct makeshift homes on ostensibly unclaimed land.⁴⁸ Although the state did not publicly create and monitor settlements, it tacitly supported their existence through deliberate ignorance and lack of intervention. For instance, a municipal worker confessed to me that the city had no reliable record of the number of settlements around Belgrade or their location. Furthermore, no effort was being made to gather this data. But the state’s inability to fund the infrastructure necessary to surveil and regulate ciganski bodies nonetheless resulted in an effective environment of domination. Settlements were clearly delineated from the rest of the nation because they existed in a vacuum. Withholding resources legitimized government portrayals of cigani as inherently Other. As sites like Deponija, Zgrade, and Polje became increasingly visible, they were branded as illegal, unhygienic, and substandard. Informal Romani settlements were icons of impoverishment and cast as a threat to public security, community health, and national safety. And their residents, cigani, were dangerous aliens, undeserving of rights or inclusion, let alone respect.

At a center of Agamben’s work is homo sacer, a figure in Roman law who could be killed but not sacrificed. This illustrates the paradox at the root of Agamben’s thought: politics is made possible by excluding those in whose name it is produced. This was exemplified in a tragic series of events that occurred in Polje. As segregated spaces outside the sovereign state, settlements had no right to electricity. To access the power grid, residents illegally siphoned electricity from neighboring streetlights. But municipal authorities routinely severed these connections and arrested offenders. When this occurred, families relied on candles to provide illumination. One evening, a family put their three children to sleep and went to visit a neighbor nearby. While they were away, a candle fell over and ignited their small shack. The fire spread so quickly that the children were unable to escape and burned alive. Although this incident was widely reported in the national media and thought to be heartbreaking, it not only failed to motivate a change in government policy but instead reinforced Serbian attitudes toward cigani. Newspapers decried the family as uncaring and reckless, while the police arrested the children’s mother and charged her with neglect. These three children were the embodiment of homo sacer. They were viewed as vulnerable innocents who should have been protected, but it was the policies of the state—functionally ignoring settlements, their rickety wooden shacks, and lack of basic services—that allowed the children to be killed. In blaming the parents, Serbs exonerated the government and found another justification for consigning the Other to slums: cigani were an immoral people who permitted the death of their own children. At Auschwitz Roma were brutally slain, but in Polje they were abandoned to die.

Although cigani inhabited geographies of exception, the state’s absence gave Ashkali and Roma an opening, albeit a limited one, to create their own sovereignty. Humphrey, in her examination of public transportation in Russia, asserts that while the state mechanics of exclusion shape everyday existence, so too do the ways of life of those who inhabit these spaces.⁴⁹ Individuals do not merely acquiesce to power. Through informal interactions and economies, they snub state strategies and generate their own localized forms of authority. Even within circumscribed environments, “everyday life ‘throws in’ its own exigencies and excitements. These burst beyond the confines of the notion of sovereignty and qualify it by responding to a different logic.”⁵⁰ A similar set of relations also pervaded Romani settlements. While a denial of electricity rendered residents as homo sacer, it also refashioned social and political life through cooperative labor. Although the lampposts were monitored, an underfunded police force ensured that illicit connections could nevertheless be made and maintained. But wiring streetlights was a dangerous activity, which necessitated a series of rules and norms to govern residents. Through these actions, Ashkali and Roma established an order independent of the Serbian state. However, the primary avenue to micro-sovereignty was the trash.

Barred from the formal economy, Ashkali lived on its margins, searching dumpsters for resalable materials. Across Belgrade between 9,000 and 16,000 people derived a significant portion of their income from scavenging in dumpsters, landfills, and building sites.⁵¹ For these individuals, who were predominantly Romani, Ashkali, or Egyptian, recycling was a profession. When Endrit left his settlement to search for trash, he spoke of going to work. Cardboard was taken to paper recyclers while metal products were offered to junkyards. If clothing or household items were found in good condition, they were hawked at local markets. While garbage provided cash, it was also a primary source of building materials, clothing, and food. Worn-out couches left on the roadside were stripped and their pressboard used as walls for shacks. Old clothes, ranging from Dolce and Gabbana sweaters to neon-orange construction vests, were salvaged and reworn. Rotten vegetables discarded by supermarkets were trimmed, washed, and cooked for dinner. If a particular item was needed—rugs for the floor of a shack, pots to cook dinner, or laces for shoes—it was sought in the trash.⁵² Why pay for something, Endrit’s wife, Drita, asked, when you could find it for free? Noting that almost everything he owned, wore, or ate came from dumpsters, one man proclaimed it was impossible to live without trash.

Garbage was a seemingly endless resource but it was also unpredictable. Some articles were impossible to locate immediately, forcing people to make do. When Bekim needed a new shirt, he had difficulty finding a suitable replacement and wore a woman’s halter-top for two days. Scavenging was a constant struggle but it was nevertheless the most reliable method for improving one’s living conditions. Refuting the comparison made in The Economist, one man told me, “This isn’t Africa. You might not be able to buy a BMW from working in the dumpsters but you can do alright for your family.” Ashkali repeatedly asserted that one could succeed, albeit only incrementally, if an individual scavenged consistently and had few expenses. Over the decade that Endrit lived in Belgrade, he was able to save enough to build a three-room brick house in Zgrade. A satellite dish was perched on the roof, a computer stood in the main room, and intricate blue Arabic designs adorned the white walls. Income from the trash allowed Endrit to build with sturdier materials and beautify his home, but he was still living illegally in a segregated settlement. Nevertheless, for those Ashkali who had left Kosovo with nothing, having a brick house was a crucial accomplishment.⁵³ Garbage made life bearable.

Endrit’s relationship with trash was not only the product of war and displacement; technological innovations and burgeoning capitalism also played significant roles. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, scavenging was lauded as an efficient reuse of resources and an inherently moral enterprise.⁵⁴ In fact, trash contributed materials vital for the development of modern technology: a significant number of books that made the Scientific Revolution possible were printed on paper derived from rags.⁵⁵ The rise of mass production gradually altered ideas regarding trash-picking and the practice became synonymous with poverty and poor hygiene.⁵⁶ By the early twentieth century, capitalist narratives in North America and Western Europe framed disposing of the “obsolete” as essential to precipitate progress and economic advancement.⁵⁷

This shift was delayed under state socialism, however, as nations were often beset by persistent shortages and citizens coped by intensively recycling.⁵⁸ In Hungary it was only after the introduction of a market economy and a focus on European integration that waste was associated with dirtiness.⁵⁹ Verdery contends that the postsocialist transition also played a significant part in structuring anti-Romani sentiment.⁶⁰ Their perceived roles as middlemen, market traders, and recyclers marked Roma as nonproducers, unlike the rest of the population who might be working multiple jobs to make ends meet. She writes that stereotypes of cigani as prone to laziness and thievery are “solidly rooted in the ideas of the socialist period: the productionist view that trade is bad and work is good (i.e., exchange is inferior to production), that it generates inequality, that it is illegal because it is ‘like’ the black market, that Gypsies aggravate shortage, and that for all these reasons they are criminals deserving punishment. As market reforms exaggerate all these problems of socialism, anger focuses on Gypsies, who have become their symbol.”⁶¹ Views of Roma were further augmented through their associations with trash, which was increasingly being cast as polluting and thus reinscribed the trope of dirty cigani.

Around the globe, waste is denotatively powerful. It has become a potent metaphor for social and economic marginality. The news media reifies garbage as an index of inequality, while anthropologists routinely employ the concept of trash as a metaphor to typify excluded groups.⁶² In recent years, scholars have sought to critically assess the social, economic, and political lives of waste under the banner of “discard studies.”⁶³ Research increasingly focuses on the institutions, policies, and technologies, which act to collect, manage, and transform garbage.⁶⁴ In an era characterized by globalization and neoliberalism, trash has become a lifeline for those whose previous economic niches were restructured or lost. Furthermore, governments and businesses depend upon scavengers, who play important roles in local and international recycling markets.⁶⁵ These interactions forge enduring bonds among individuals, corporations, and the state. Exploring the lives of informal recyclers on a Rio de Janeiro dump, Millar contests assumptions that waste work is evidence of economic exclusion. She writes, “To see the shift from Fordist wage labour to multiple forms of self-employment of the urban poor only in terms of a loss or disconnection prevents an understanding of how relationships of inequality are made and experienced in the world today.”⁶⁶ Poverty, Millar argues, is created through new links to neoliberal capitalism, not isolation from it.

Examining Romani economies including recycling, Brazzabeni, Cunha, and Fotta come to a similar conclusion.⁶⁷ They assert that while scholars often describe Romani strategies as “niche,” these practices are nevertheless firmly entrenched within commercial markets, albeit in unique ways. Highlighting the simultaneous internality and externality of Romani work within global capitalist networks, they note that it “is embedded in the modern economic system and created in relation to a milieu from which it cannot be dissociated, but which nevertheless cannot be fully characterised with reference to the modern economic system alone (such as being ‘outside’ it) without looking at the material processes that in each instance went into its fabrication.”⁶⁸ Consequently, people like Endrit and Bekim not only exemplify a burgeoning trend whereby people rely on limited and unstable resources; their lives illustrate the complexities of being incorporated into an economic system only to be segregated within it.

These relationships were driven by the enduring materiality of discarded commodities. Contrary to popular wisdom, an item’s worth is not extinguished when it is thrown away. A shirt in the dumpster is still a shirt and, once removed, can continue to fulfill its function as clothing. Ultimately, trash is an arbitrary state that need not be permanent. Commoditization is an ongoing process that lasts long after a thing is produced, sold, and abandoned. Appadurai notes that objects are not static but rather circulate in differing regimes of value.⁶⁹ As a result, a commodity’s economic significance is tied to its social, political, and cultural framework. These differing registers allow a single item to have opposing values and meanings that are context dependent. In other words, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Appadurai observes that this disjuncture is particularly evident among extremely impoverished groups. For Ashkali, who had difficulty accessing commodities through ordinary channels, dumpsters provided an alternative. Consequently, an object’s trajectory is not linear but circular, necessarily moving in and out of a trash state. As items shift between categories, they acquire biographies and histories.⁷⁰ Like people, commodities are socially constructed and possess social lives.

For Ashkali, trash was not just a source of material goods; it also provided symbolic capital. Recycling required fortitude, strength, and expertise. Furthermore, scavengers had to be able to identify valuable goods, know the market value of each item, and possess keen negotiating skills. They were connoisseurs, gaining their knowledge through an unconscious and measured familiarization with instruments of value.⁷¹ Personal success depended upon one’s mastery of the art of living, not institutionalized learning, wage labor, or government assistance. Parents saw their children’s future in the dumpsters, not in the classroom. Youths were encouraged to go through the trash because it taught discipline and the value of labor. When a teenage boy refused, saying girls were watching, his father angrily responded that scavenging was not embarrassing; it was honest work. Taking pride in their abilities, individuals routinely showed off their best finds, such as a pair of barely worn designer sneakers, and bragged about the money they would generate. For Ashkali, garbage was not a sign of disadvantage and desperation; it demonstrated industriousness and integrity. But to Serbs, garbage marked Belgrade’s scavengers as perpetually polluted outsiders. The very thing that seemed to promise success ensured that Ashkali remained marginal.

Given that trash fulfilled so many needs and represented potential wealth, it became a way of life. Men like Endrit and Bekim dedicated many hours each day to searching through dumpsters. Even outside these times, Ashkali routinely rummaged through every receptacle they passed. No opportunity was wasted because trash was fundamentally uncertain: you never knew what you might find. Serbs, on the other hand, passed dumpsters without reflection. To nonscavengers, trash was ready-to-hand. For Heidegger, ready-to-hand denotes everyday objects that are taken for granted and routinely overlooked.⁷² They are unremarkable and uninteresting. For Ashkali, however, garbage was inherently conspicuous, expressive, and powerful. Much more than a simple source of cash, clothing, and food, it structured people’s days, living conditions, relationships, and ethics. Millar notes that garbage can be a “form of living,” which provides both an income and a worldview.⁷³ In Serbia, trash comprised the bedrock of an Ashkali economy, sociality, and morality and, as such, formed a complex nexus through which multiple meanings and relationships were negotiated.

Ultimately, the bibliographies of trash and the scavengers who collected it were strikingly similar. Consigned to settlements, Ashkali were stripped of humanity and abandoned by the state. Thrown into dumpsters, commodities were stripped of value and abandoned by their owners. Settlements and dumpsters were both excepted geographies that rendered people and things worthless. But these transformations were ultimately contextual and hence elastic. Cigani, in being discarded, were able to find worth in discarded objects. The Other world of Belgrade’s settlements possessed its own regimes of value. It was through this process of resurrecting economic worth that scavengers were able to assert their own sovereignty by constructing unique social and economic spaces. Trash was not just a means of survival where none other existed; it was a byproduct of global capitalism that, through its vacillations between detritus and commodity, simultaneously challenged and consolidated Ashkali identity.