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