Everyday Life in the Balkans , livre ebook

Everyday Life in the Balkans
Map of the Balkans, by Theresa Quill.

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Indiana University Press
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Montgomery, David W., 1968- editor.
Title: Everyday life in the Balkans / [Thirty-five authors] ; Edited by David W. Montgomery.
Description: Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, c2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index
Identifiers: LCCN 2018048030 (print) | LCCN 2018049206 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253038203 (web PDF) | ISBN 9780253026170 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253038173 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253038197 (ebook epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Balkan Peninsula-Social life and customs.
Classification: LCC DR23 (ebook) | LCC DR23 .E94 2018 (print) | DDC 949.6-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048030
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18
To our friends. . .
Kushtuar miqve tan . . .
. . .
Na imp prijateljima. . .
. . .
Prietenilor no tri. . .
. . .
Na im prijateljem. . .
. . .
Sevgili dostlar m za. . .
. . . and to Sarah.
Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Seeing Everyday Life in the Balkans
David W. Montgomery

Section I: The (Historical) Context of Everyday Life

2. Early Balkan Everyday Life
Andrew Wachtel

3. Crimes and Misdemeanors: Scenes of Everyday Life among the Gendarmerie in Ottoman Macedonia, ca. 1900
pek K. Yosmao lu

4. It s What s Inside That Counts: Furnishing the Modern in the Apartments of Socialist Yugoslavia
Patrick Hyder Patterson

5. Consuming Lives: Inside the Balkan Kafene
Mary Neuburger

6. Burek, Da! Sociality, Context, and Idiom in Macedonia and Beyond
Keith Brown

Section II: The Home(s) of Everyday Life

7. Kinship and Safety Nets in Croatia and Kosovo
Carolin Leutloff-Grandits

8. This Much We Know : Domestic Remedies and Quotidian Tricks since Tito s Bosnia
Larisa Ja arevi

9. Femininity, Fashion, and Feminism: Women s Activists in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Elissa Helms

10. That Black Cloud upon Our Family: Everyday Life of Gays and Lesbians in Slovenia
Roman Kuhar

11. Between Past and Future: Young People s Strategies for Living a Normal Life in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina
Monika Palmberger

12. But Where Else Could They Go? The State, Family, and Private Care in a Bosnian Town
Azra Hromad i

Section III: The Livelihoods of Everyday Life

13. Cars, Coffee, and The Crisis : Balkan Migration in Precarious Times
Ana Croegaert

14. We Don t Belong Anywhere : Everyday Life in a Serbian Town Where Immigrants Are Former Refugees
Mila Dragojevi

15. Neoliberal Spaces of Immorality: The Creation of a Bulgarian Land Market and Land-Grabbing Foreign Investors
Deema Kaneff

16. Making Ends Meet in a Rural Community: The Life and Times of Aleksandar ivojinovi
Andrew Konitzer

17. A Lot of Sweat, a Little Bit of Fun, and Not Entirely Hard Men : Worker s Masculinity in the Uljanik Shipyard
Andrea Mato evi

18. Perceptions of Balkan Belonging in Postdictatorship Greece
Daniel M. Knight

Section IV: The Politics of Everyday Life

19. Neither the Balkans nor Europe: The Where and When in Present-Day Albania
Nata a Gregori Bon

20. Growing Up in Montenegro: A Story of Transformation and Resistance
Jelena D anki

21. War Criminals, National Heroes, and Transitional Justice in Macedonia
Vasiliki P. Neofotistos

22. A Lively Border: Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia on the Shifting Banks of the Drina
arna Brkovi and Stef Jansen

23. Politicians Are All Crooks! : Everyday Politics in Bulgaria
Emilia Zankina

24. Life among Statues in Skopje
Ilk Thiessen

Section V: The Religion(s) of Everyday Life

25. The Hardest Time Was the Time without Morality : Religion and Social Navigation in Albania
David W. Montgomery

26. Ramadan in Prizren, Kosovo
Frances Trix

27. The Cross at the Crossroads: The Feast of Slava between Faith and Custom
Milica Baki -Hayden

28. Boundaries of Freedom, Boundaries of Responsibility: Everyday Religious Life of Croatian Catholic Women
Slavica Jakeli

29. Religious Boundaries, Komshuluk , and Sharing Sacred Spaces in Bulgaria
Magdalena Lubanska

30. The Everyday of Religion and Politics in the Balkans
Albert Doja

Section VI: The Art of Everyday Life

31. Unintentional Memorials: Everyday Places of Memory in Post-Transition Bucharest
Alyssa Grossman

32. Between East and West, Folk and Pop, State and Market: Changing Landscapes of Bulgarian Folk Music
Carol Silverman

33. Mothers in Balkan Film
Yana Hashamova

34. Memories of Foreign Love
Ervin Hatibi

35. The Sound of Charcoal Rustling: Drawing from Life in Belgrade
Marko ivkovi

Postface
David W. Montgomery

Index
Preface
Somewhat prosaically, the title of this book- Everyday Life in the Balkans -gives the reader a sense of what it is about. But each reader no doubt brings his or her own understanding (and corresponding biases) as to why either everyday life or the Balkans matter. Thus, some explanation about the composition is required, for therein one can see how the various chapters constitute windows into a way of seeing the world that is sorely needed if we have any hope of understanding it.
This is a large book and the chapter topics are diverse. Each author was approached to write on a specific topic corresponding to her or his expertise, with country, discipline, and thematic diversity being central to the project. All contributions are original and were not intended to be a review of the literature so much as a critical engagement with some aspect of everyday life-broadly framed-from the perspective of those living it. The writing is intended to be felicitous to the lay public, yet the approach of bringing so many topics to bear on the character and depth to the picture of the Balkans should have relevance to regional specialists whose commitment to certain disciplinary approaches can obscure the interdisciplinary environment in which people live. This gets us to the importance of everyday life, for it is here that most of life is lived.
Most of our days are spent in familiar environments with which we seldom critically engage. The commonplace, after all, is known, and thus its subtle yet formative role in our becoming who we are is easily overlooked. This applies also to our understanding of-or at least our attempts to understand-others: in failing to appreciate the everyday of their lives, we risk missing the more indirect engagements that give culture character and behavior clarity. As such, an implicit argument of this volume is that more empathic and thoughtful engagement with others comes from an appreciation of their lifeworlds and those factors that help explain what is valued and why.
Seeing everyday life requires us to look to places and relationships that are not commonly associated in regional introductions. Having an appreciation for the context in which people live forces us to know a bit about the diverse groupings that constitute this book: an understanding of history and tradition, the political face of quotidian life and its home, the nature of work and religion, and the role the aesthetic plays in local belonging. Brief introductions to each section explicate how the chapters fit within a section, but it is always the case that in life little exists in isolation. History, home, politics, education, labor, religion, and so on, are categories that offer each other reciprocity in the everyday, so one should read the chapters not simply as self-contained but also as speaking across sections. The work we do can be political; religion can be art; home has history. Everyday life is dynamic and syncretic, and we must see this if we have any hope of understanding the Balkans or anywhere else.
Acknowledgments
While created in moments of solitary composition, all books are collective endeavors, with this volume even more collective than most. It would not have been possible without the chapter authors, who turned to their research with the intent of drawing out the everyday of the places where they have invested so much of their work and observation. In many ways, this was both a reflective and reflexive process made possible by the generosity of our various interlocutors, who shared with us their hopes and fears as they allowed us to be part of their daily lives. Thus it is collectively that we acknowledge, in the many languages in which we work, that this book is to our friends who have made this possible and made our time in the region meaningful.
Alongside the general acknowledgment of those about whom we write, there are some who wer