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