Dragana Antonijević

An Essay on the Anthropology of Underground Economy: The Economic Behavior of the Tenants of a Building in Dorcol

The paper represents a case study of the economic behavior of the tenants of a building in downtown Belgrade. The data was gathered through ethnographic methods of observation and informal interviews. The external indicators of spending, as well as the researcher’s knowledge about the professions and income of a number of tenants pointed toward the conclusion that informal economy plays a major role in the earnings of the observed households. The goal of this paper is to point out the shortcomings of official statistical data on the income of Serbian citizens on which assessments of the standard of living are based. The outline of an “anthropology of informal earning” is given, and suggested as a way to access information on a wide variety of informal means of acquiring income which are left out of formal statistics, yet enable a significant proportion of Serbian citizens to attain a better standard of living than is suggested by official data. Another goal was to, by making a connection between informal economy and the political choices of Serbian citizens; point out the fact that the revolts occurring over the past two decades were mainly motivated by political and not economic reasons as would be expected. This is especially relevant, keeping in mind the catastrophic economic situation in the country which is often emphasized in public discourse, and taking into account the different events and parameters – starting with the hyperinflation in the first half of the 90’s, international sanctions, the increase in public spending on the part of all the regimes that had been in power, great budget deficits and national debt, up to and including the lack of much needed economic reform. Given all this, it is confounding that economic reasons do not cause the people to revolt, unless, we look to the informal economy which allows a significant number of Serbian citizens to have a more comfortable existence than public data suggests.

New rituals and New Serbian anthropology – The process of mutual constituting

The intensive shift toward studying new rituals in the mid-80 is one of the key points of modernization and anthropologization of Serbian ethnology. The key initiator of this shift was the Ethnological society of Serbia, the scene of events were the yearly councils of the Ethnological society, and Papers in Ethnology, the society’s journal, published the first papers about new rituals. In the ambience of ethnology back then, wherein the foremost interests were concerned with recording memories of rural life in the 19th century, the innovative character of researching the send-off of retiring workers, entrance of children into the pioneer organization, send off of men to obligatory military service, the behavior in coffee shops or at the promenade, was more than obvious. From today’s perspective, thirty years later, the significance of these events for the constituting of the new Serbian anthropology is reviewed.

The Methodological Framework for the Study of Nostalgic and Personal Narratives

Nostalgic narratives occur in two major forms – as historical nostalgia and as personal nostalgia. Personal contents and historical stories can be registered in the free form of life stories, a well-known genre in folkloristics, as well as in narratives obtained through two forms of interview. The first form of interview is generated from anthropological tradition, or rather, ethnographic data gathering and refers to descriptions of social, economic and all other elements of the past, while the other form of interview, generated in psychology, similar to an in-depth interview, refers to personal experiences from an earlier time. When nostalgic narratives are collected using either of these two approaches, it is possible to a) conduct an analysis of each narrative on its own, or b) compare them in order to determine similarities and differences. Based on this it is possible to determine where and how descriptions of the past which do not coincide with personal experience are generated, which is the main characteristic of both yugonostalgia and other similar ways of remembering the past.