‘Gypsies and Anarchists’: Autonomy, solidarity, and sacrifice in Belgrade, Serbia
Defense Committee
Chair: Elissa Helms, Gender Studies, CEU
Supervisor: Don Kalb, Department of Social Anthropology, Bergen University (formerly Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU)
Second supervisor: Viola Zentai, Center for Policy Studies , CEU
External examiner: Maple Razsa, Global Studies Program, Colby College.
Abstract:
This is an ethnographic account of a unique experiment in solidarity that united the so-called ‘anarchists’ of a squatted social center in the Karaburma neighborhood of Belgrade, Serbia to the so-called ‘gypsies’ of the nearby informal settlement, Deponija. The experiment took the form of an autonomous kindergarten and youth solidarity program named ‘Koko Lepo’ which has been continually reborn over years of trial and error as well as struggles over the nature of solidarity, autonomy, and equality. Working with an anarchistic anthropological lens of the State as a holistic social agency and a class-struggle framework for understanding race in the capitalist city, this dissertation examines how ‘the anarchists’ and ‘the gypsies’ of this project confronted – or were confronted by – the State and racism and how, through acts of sacrifice and incommensurability, succeeded or failed to overcome the “inimical profane” of these forces in the creation of a new “sacred politics” of solidarity and autonomy on their own terms. This study entails an interpretive and power-centered analysis of the InexFilm squat and the mobilization of symbolic violence to create political identities therein, a political economic account of the Deponija slum and an argument for the political agency of racialized laboring and policed subjects, and finally an interpretive and historical account of the use and evolution of concrete values within the Koko Lepo collective. Methodologically, this work is an argument for the inclusion of direct action into ethnographic research and the experimental basis of solidarity.
