Everyday Life in the Balkans

David W. Montgomery

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253038197
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

Everyday Life in the Balkans gathers the work of leading scholars across disciplines to provide a broad overview of the countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Turkey. This region has long been characterized as a place of instability and political turmoil, from World War I, through the Yugoslav Wars, and even today as debate continues over issues such as the influx of refugees or the expansion of the European Union. However, the work gathered here moves beyond the images of war and post-socialist stagnation which dominate Western media coverage of the region to instead focus on the lived experiences of the people in these countries. Contributors consider a wide range of issues including family dynamics, gay rights, war memory, religion, cinema, fashion, and politics. Using clear language and engaging examples, Everyday Life in the Balkans provides the background context necessary for an enlightened conversation about the policies, economics, and culture of the region.

1 Seeing Everyday Life in the Balkans

David W. Montgomery

We all encounter the world with incomplete knowledge, and this is no less the case when we approach the Balkans—a region characterized by orientalists as backward yet understood by residents as home. How we come to understand the Balkans is thus heavily dependent on the sources we prioritize and the narratives we privilege. To schoolchildren in the West, it is taught that both world wars began in the Balkans, there was repression under socialism, and the years after socialism were difficult, as the violence of war and the struggle to figure out life in a postsocialist world were fraught with uncertainty. The majority of what is taught and learned—through textbooks and modern media—focuses on the actions of both elites and nations as actors; but this is only part of the story. Indeed, it is only part of what one needs to know to understand anywhere. The more complete story—one that conveys the affective richness of life—comes in understanding the stories of the everyday, stories where the taken-for-granted aspects of the ordinary define what it means to belong to a certain locale, where well-being can be seen in neighborly relations despite the struggles of life, and where the quotidian nature of existence is recognized for what it is: part mundane and part tragic, yet also at times heroic.

Often, the full context of what connects people to their worlds is occluded when we focus on a region or a particular event. What defines any place must be understood in relation to what makes it home for those who reside there or otherwise remain connected to the area. The boundaries of these connections are, however, often fluid and ambiguous, requiring a nuanced, interactive relationship with others to contextualize meaning. This can be seen even in the very way a generalizing term like Balkans holds baggage and implies varying categories of identity. The importance of interrogating the implications of such a catchall term cannot be understated,¹ for implicit prejudices can be pernicious when outsiders see locals as less than equals. But in starting to see local ways of creating meaning and value in everyday life, we are afforded the opportunity to appreciate the range of struggles and joys that capture what it means to be in relationship with others, that make sense only in relation to the everyday negotiations that constitute life.

The Ambiguity of Balkan

To appreciate the complex nature of everyday life in the Balkans, I turn to the ambiguity of the regional moniker itself. Here I opt for an indirect way of doing so because it is more reflective of what takes place in social interactions than the conventions of scholarly writing that advocate for clarity and directness. Thus, as so many days begin in the region, I begin with coffee.

Coffee is an important part of everyday life in the Balkans. The first coffee of the day begins a morning at home. The second and third may be with friends or colleagues midmorning and midafternoon. Another may be had after dinner with friends. More may be had in between. Covered by the filigree of tradition, coffee is a conduit of social relations, an invitation that brings people together to share stories, anxieties, hopes, and all that grows out of people coming together. Meeting for coffee creates a space where the ambiguities of life can be worked out (or managed) and as such comes to represent a social characteristic of the region.

To the outsider, the invitation to coffee is not always straightforward. Meeting someone for coffee often means a drink of roasted, finely ground coffee beans that are boiled in a cezve (ibrik) and served in a small cup in which the grounds settle prior to drinking. Yet meeting for coffee can also mean lunch, dinner, or even a beer, anytime throughout the day. The invitation to “meet for coffee” has multiple meanings that are contextually understood without the need to distinguish the details of what the meeting will entail. Misunderstandings may still emerge, but generally people know the context without everything needing to be worked out beforehand.

Balkan is a similarly ambiguous term that has come to hold political, cultural, and geographical characteristics, all used contextually yet as if the uses were widely agreed on. As such, when the term is used, it takes context to know if it implies a geographical setting—either as the Balkan Peninsula or Southeast Europe—or a cultural setting, suggesting cultural similarities within the region that are distinguishable from those beyond the region. People from different places may be talking about two very different things—much like the meaning of coffee can be differently interpreted by the outsider unfamiliar with the nuances—and thus it becomes all the more important for people with roots outside the Balkans to appreciate the local context of the Balkans. To this end, the various uses of the term—and how the political, cultural, and geographical aspects of life within the region get animated in the everyday—are employed throughout this volume.

The main goal of these contributions is to convey what life is like for people who understand their home as being within the Balkans. The focus, thus, is not the elite newsmakers of the region, but rather those toiling closer to the land in which they live, whose lives are often seen as unexceptional. It is the everyday of these lives that best captures the dynamism of any place.

Nonetheless, cognates associated with the region, like balkanized and balkanization, are commonly used to imply a process of political fragmentation and uncooperative hostility. This is, of course, an unfortunate and inaccurate representation of the people who live here that says more about the prejudices of those using such terms than it does about any specific population in the Balkans. Because of the pejorative connotations the term sometimes holds, many from the region prefer the regional identifier of Southeast Europe, despite colloquially talking about the region as “the Balkans.” On multiple occasions, several of my interlocutors from throughout the region have advocated identifying the region as Southeast Europe, yet in informal settings referred to the region in terms that are both ubiquitous and ambiguous, such as “Balkan culture” or “Balkan mentality” or “historically Balkan”—all terms that captured something meaningful and cohesive yet not easily bounded. Within a geospatial sense, in relation to the European continent, Southeast Europe works somewhat neutrally to convey a bounded region. But in terms of holding the ambiguity of boundaries and belonging within a local context of understanding, Balkans remains useful.

What I mean by this utility is that the boundaries implied in the term Balkans are inherently ambiguous and thus also a metaphor for understanding the context of everyday life. At times, people identify as belonging to a particular group, and at other times they may not. Named after a mountain range that forms the watershed between the Adriatic and Black Seas, the Balkan Peninsula includes those lands bounded by the Adriatic, Ionian, Aegean, Marmara, and Black Seas and the Danube and Sava Rivers. The cultural boundaries of what is within the Balkans is imprecise. The fluidity of where one group ends and another begins is locally understood and yet in a way obscured by titular nation-states. Where the Balkans end is fuzzier than where southeast Europe ends (though southeast Europe has its own problems of precision), and perhaps part of the challenge to understanding the region is to be held in that fuzziness.

Within this volume, the fuzziness of what constitutes the in- and out-groups can be seen. The various authors’ contributions cover Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia, with reference to Ottoman Turkey. Yet some parts of Greece do not self-categorize as Balkan despite falling within the Balkan Peninsula. Sometimes Slovenians consider themselves Balkan in relation to their Yugoslav experience, and other times they distance themselves by claiming themselves as central European; likewise, Romanians move between Balkan and central European. These are some of the peripheries of the Balkans and are included because it is along the periphery that the precision of a category can be appreciated for its fluidity. All chapters engage with populations connected to a Balkan identity and collectively convey the types of variation and exchange found by people across the region. As such, the chapters also come together to connect the everyday to the variability of experience across the region. After all, while any term may be complicated or have seemingly political ends, understanding the context in which people live means we also must look at the more quotidian environment of struggles and meaning-making.

The Everyday of Life

Much of the context of life’s stories comes from the everyday. The everyday is common yet also exceptional in its ability to influence the trajectory of our days. It is the home where most of life takes place, and yet its place as an object of discussion is often a second-level analysis for those concerned with specific events; everyday life underlies all major events yet is often overlooked for its seeming banality and unremarkability.² But the significance of the ordinary and commonplace becomes relevant when we think about notions of what makes a life worth living and how people come to value their surroundings.

Collectively, this volume focuses on the “everyday-ness”—both affectively and popularly—of experience in the Balkans. There is both poetry and urgency in the everyday, and part of what these chapters convey is a context for understanding the free verse quality common to life. The urgency should be apparent to anyone (self-)reflective about life and its conditions, poignantly captured in the dictum attributed to the playwright William Archer: “Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.” What makes life dramatic for our interlocutors—though also for ourselves—is that in the everyday, events unfold organically, situated as they are in a specific time and place. And they unfold with some need for response, for engagement. There is ambiguity here, but it is made manageable through connection with others.

In this book, we focus on the nature of the everyday to see the drama and the context as life unfolds. All people have dramatic—and meaningful—lives, even when it may not seem as such to those on the outside. When we put a frame around home and contextualize it in a larger setting—that setting being the everyday of life—we can more easily make sense of what is going on in a place and how people are thus relating experience and events to the story of their lives. Speaking of the everyday and everyday life is a way of seeing more holistically what goes into making life.

Seeing Everyday Life in the Balkans

In some respects, this book captures a moment in time, or rather, particular moments in particular times. It shows the specific as a way to make sense of the general, in part by saying that without the specific, the general becomes disassociated from the very actors for whom events are personal. After all, it is when experience is personal that it becomes meaningful. As such, this book conveys everydays as they are experienced from different perspectives to show the diverse character constituent of the region. In looking at the quotidian details of the Balkans, we can come to appreciate the more affective contexts in which people exist. The everydays of our interlocutors evolve across a lifetime, and we see this evolution in these chapters. Tomorrow is different from both today and yesterday, even as antecedents of the latter permeate—at times, even define—the former, yet coherence remains within a life’s trajectory.

The structure of this book reflects a way of seeing everyday life around six loosely categorized and interrelated topics of engagement and meaning-making. Beginning with the historical context of everyday life in the region, we are reminded that origins evolve, in varied ways, into presents that both reflect and obscure the past. This is played out in subsequent sections, where aspects of home, work, politics, religion, and art convey the dynamic context in which relationships emerge. As the chapters collectively express, to live in any place is to hold multiple interests across topics that engage in the present that surrounds us. This is true for those in the Balkans as well as people anywhere else and thus serves as a touchstone from which more empathic modes of understanding may prevail.

All this is a way of saying that this is a book that not only speaks to the local context of the region but also recognizes the varied components of everyday life that give a way for making sense of change and how it is both brought about and lived through. This is a book about the people living in the Balkans, but it is also about the centrality of seeing the seeming mundanity of the everyday as crucial to understanding any population. Both celebration and toil—and everything in between—take place in relationships that begin in the everyday of ordinary time.

Notes

1. See Bakic-Hayden 1995; Todorova 2009.

2. While the book largely concerns itself with the ethnographic task of seeing life unfold in daily contexts, and this contributes implicitly to framing the everyday as a way to see the world, more explicit engagement with theories of everyday life can be found in the work of, among others, Berger and Luckmann (1966), Bourdieu (1977), de Certeau (1984), Felski (1999), Heller (1984), Highmore (2002, 2011), Lefebvre (2014), Schutz (1970), and Schutz and Luckmann (1973, 1989). As such, there is a theoretically rich debate in the literature that shows how the varied ways of understanding the everyday affect the ways in which it is made sense of analytically. De Certeau sees the everyday as filled with acts of resistance and subversion whereas more sociological and phenomenological accounts, such as those offered by Schutz—and his students, Berger and Luckmann—look at the everyday as a space of information and information making. Felski offers a useful definition that comb...