Unnatural fractals
Or, how to become extraordinarily ordinary in the Balkans:
an ethnographic note from the Greek-Albanian border
Sarah Green, Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. sarah.green@manchester.ac.uk
Abstract:
This paper uses ethnographic research from Epirus (Greek-Albanian border), to explore how the frequently asserted natural complexity of the Balkans combines ideas about the regions’ geomorphological characteristics with its political and social history. This generates an image of the place as riven by instability, a continual process of fragmentation and recombination that never seems to be finally resolved. This reputation has some unexpected (or at least little noted) outcomes, and one of the most unexpected is the way some peoples associated with the Balkans end up being defined as constituting nothing in particular – of being ordinary, unremarkable, not especially distinguishable from anyone else. Using long-term ethnographic research on some peoples living in the Pogoni region of Epirus (which is either located next to or straddles the Greek-Albanian border, depending on your perspective), the paper argues that this peculiar kind of ordinariness has to do with the “where,” not the “who,” of the Balkans. Many debates discussing the complex identity politics of the region, while apparently discussing the construction of subjectivities, in fact often implicitly ascribe these characteristics to the “fractal” characteristics of the place, not the people as such. The densely mountainous topography, the particular (but imprecise) location of the region in the European continent and its continually contested borders come together to generate a hegemonic sense of the “where” of the Balkans that is assumed to somehow generate the region’s peoples and their conflicts as fractal (constantly proliferating, overlapping and self-similar jagged fragments with no centres, beginnings or ends). The paper focuses on how this perspective of the Balkans also generates peoples who cannot be clearly identified, classified and made distinctive, but who instead are cast as undistinguished “ordinary” or “generic” Balkan peoples. This is used as a means to demonstrate how the “where” not the “who” is the most important element in this hegemonic construction of the “problem” of the Balkans – and for that reason, the paper argues there is something missing in studies that focus solely on essentialism, orientalism and/or ethnicity in attempting to resolve this “problem.”