Postsocialist Mediterranean - Scalar gaze, moral self, and relational labor of favors in Eastern Europe - Berghahn Journals
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Postsocialist Mediterranean
Scalar gaze, moral self, and relational labor of favors in Eastern Europe
Čarna Brković
Abstract: This article opens a conversation between anthropological studies of the
Mediterranean and of postsocialism in order to propose the notion of a “scalar
gaze” as an analytical approach useful for capturing veering practices in their so-
cial complexity. The article argues that favors (veze/štela, lit. relations, connections)
in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina were a practice through which people
fulfilled the demands of capitalist economy to be active, rather than a pre-capital-
ist excess that prevented “proper” development of the country into a neoliberal
democracy. Zooming in and out and looking sideways between moral reasoning,
internationally supervised structural changes of the job markets, and electoral
politics, this article explores how the relational labor of favors reproduced moral
selves, as well as hierarchy and inequality.
Keywords: Bosnia and Herzegovina, clientelism, ethics, favors, inequality, the
Mediterranean, moral personhood, postsocialist studies
One December evening in 2009, I was having Vlatko he could not get the job before finish-
coffee with Maja, a student who was worried ing his degree. There was a chance for a position
about her job prospects in Bijeljina, a town in only after having the degree in hand. However,
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Maja told me the fact was that for Maja something had hap-
about Vlatko, her friend and fellow student at pened that day: Vlatko had found Ana to be a
the local university, who had come to her place new veza (lit. a relation, a connection), that is, a
a month ago. Vlatko had coincidentally picked new personal connection to a potential job. This
a day when Ana, Maja’s friend infatuated with confirmed Maja’s belief that “you never know
him, was there. Ana told Vlatko that there was when you might need someone.”
a job opening in a company run by her cousin. How can we understand the relationship be-
Maja said to me: “If he hadn’t been there the tween Ana, Maja, Vlatko, and Ana’s cousin? Was
same day she slept over at my place, nothing Ana a potential provider of a favor for Vlatko?
would have happened . . . you never know when Were they about to become a patron and a cli-
you may need someone.” Nothing happened ent? Did Ana’s romantic feelings shape their
with the job, since the company owner told relationship into a form of nepotism or cor-
Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 92 (2022): 82-97
© The Author
doi:10.3167/fcl.2020.072007Postsocialist Mediterranean | 83
ruption? The question here is not just how to tionship) across various scales. A scalar gaze
classify this relationship. The question is also to means ethnographically tracing a practice, ob-
which body of anthropological literature should ject, or relationship across various scales, from
this relationship be connected? Can it tell us global and transnational to interpersonal and
something about the use of favors, informality, individual ones (see Fraser 2010; Herod 2009).
clientelism, nepotism, or corruption? Most of- A good elaboration of a scalar gaze can be
ten, these terms are discussed separately in so- found in Sarah Green’s (2005: 141) study of
cial sciences. My aim in this article is to briefly how northern Greece appears across different
place anthropological works on clientelism and scales (including in sociopolitical commentar-
patronage in the Mediterranean in conversation ies, geomorphological reports, anthropological
with postsocialist works on favors in order to accounts, everyday stories of people, and so
argue we need to develop a “scalar gaze” to un- on) and where her approach was “to switch to
derstand the work of favors in the reproduction and fro between scales, to switch the sound off
of political economy as well as of a moral self. and switch it back on again repeatedly, to try to
In postsocialist studies, favors and informal- understand the relations between them, rather
ity are predominantly understood as ambiguous than the fragmentations.” Present in the emer-
practices with an economic rationale: they are gent anthropological studies of the Mediterra-
explained as strategies people use to overcome nean (e.g. Green 2019), this approach seems
deficiencies of developing markets and imma- particularly useful for analyzing entities that do
ture democratic institutions. Patronage and not quite fit into the categorical apparatuses of
clientelism in Mediterranean Europe, however, Western liberal nation-states (which includes
were usually discussed as hierarchical practices all those practices, objects, and relationships
with implications for the organization of poli- that spill over conventional institutionalized
tics and power, particularly between the “local” boundaries between politics and economy, gift
(peripheral, rural) and the “national” (central, and payment, clientelism and networking, and
urban) communities. For understanding the so forth). Thinking between particularities of
work of veze and štela in BiH, I found useful an- area studies can be useful in developing and
thropological works that approach clientelism fine-tuning such a gaze. While BiH is formally
and patronage as a field of “class relationships” a Mediterranean country (approximately 20 ki-
and “unequal power relations of an historical lometers of BiH’s territory around the coastal
and structural nature” (Shore 2006: 43; see also town of Neum is located on the Adriatic Sea),
Lauth Bacas 2015; Zinn 2019). “An understand- it is more firmly situated in the anthropological
ing of clientelism as a field of relationships of conversations about postsocialist and postwar
political struggle” (Stubbs and Zrinščak 2011: transformations.1 Trying to think about BiH
4) and as “a broad set of hegemonic political as “postsocialist Mediterranean” can help us to
practices and strategies marked by particularis- disentangle ambiguities of joint political and
tic modes of governance, exclusivist definitions economic effects of veza/štela across scales.
of citizenship, and asymmetrical distribution Turning briefly to anthropology of the Medi-
and redistribution of resources” (Stubbs and terranean, this article suggests that veze/štela in
Zrinščak 2015: 398) is crucial for understanding BiH were a practice through which young peo-
the work conducted through favors in Eastern ple fulfilled the demands of a capitalist economy
Europe beyond modernization theory. to be active (and not some “precapitalist” excess
By “scalar gaze” I refer to an analytical ap- that prevented proper development of the coun-
proach that involves an intentional analytical try into a neoliberal democracy). Internationally
move of zooming in and out and looking side- supervised reforms of labor market and welfare in
ways, attempting to see what happens with the BiH created structural conditions of uncertainty
presumably same entity (practice, object, rela- and precarity in which people were expected to84 | Čarna Brković
be active, flexibly adapt to ever-changing cir- these works understood patronage and clien-
cumstances, and work on themselves in order to telism through a set of distinctions between the
increase their life chances. This is precisely why presumably modern, bureaucratic, developed,
people turned to veze/štela—pursuits of veze/ rational system of a nation-state at its center and
štela were a way for Bosnians to be flexible and the presumably pre-modern, personalized, de-
to actively work on increasing their life chances. veloping, social and affective system in the rural
When we take a closer look at Maja’s attempts to peripheries of a country (Campbell 1964; Kenny
find a job, we can see her pursuits of veza/štela 1960; Silverman 1975; Weingrod 1968). For in-
as a form of relational labor that was necessary stance, Sydel Silverman (1965: 173) suggests
in order to secure stable employment in a cap- that a patron’s key role was to be a mediator who
italist labor market in a global semi-periphery. established the relations between the client and
The article also looks at how such relational the world outside the local community as well
labor of favors was used to reproduce hierar- as “between a local system and a national sys-
chy and inequality. Veze and štela contributed tem.” Such ideas about clientelism underwent
to a particular politics of favors in which favors criticism from a Marxist perspective. Luciano Li
reinstated a sense of self as a moral person as Causi suggested that the key to understanding
well as unequal power relations among differ- patronage and clientelism lies in the social and
ently positioned people. Veze/štela were part of class differentiations within a peasant commu-
people’s attempts to carve themselves into moral nity, rather than in distinctions between centers
persons—helping others to get things done was and peripheries: “‘Patronage’ is thus an ideology
what a good person would do. Being able to to which the landlord frequently subscribed,
help many different people increased your in- as did the peasants themselves, mainly by the
fluence and prestige in the town—which some virtue of their lack of different, class-based so-
people could convert into official political posi- cial and political relations” (Li Causi 1975: 99).
tions and/or various sources of income. In other From this perspective, a particular moral qual-
words, favors helped people translate moral ity of the relationship between clients and pa-
value into other forms of value, such as social, trons—a sense of gratefulness, trust, intimacy,
political, and economic. In order to understand and even friendship—presents an ideological
how veze/štela reinstated people’s moral per- mechanism of concealing exploitation and
sonhood, as well as socio-political hierarchies domination within peasant communities.2
between them, we should zoom out our ethno- The 1980s brought a strong internal anthro-
graphic gaze from the level of individual moral pological criticism of the Mediterranean as a
reasoning and turn our attention to several meaningful regional or cultural framework for
multiple social fields and scales simultaneously. anthropological studies, which led to a call to
That is what a scalar gaze would entail. treat it as an “ethnographic datum for an anal-
ysis, rather than exclusively as an analytical
category” (Herzfeld 1987: 86). The production
Hierarchy of patronage/clientelism of anthropological knowledge about the Med-
and reciprocity of favors iterranean was criticized for imputing socio-
Clientelism and patronage cultural homogeneity where it could not be
in the Mediterranean found and for politically “othering” people
and places around the Mediterranean from the
Anthropological studies of the Mediterranean West (Herzfeld 1980; Pina-Cabral 1989). Af-
during the Cold War present a relatively well- ter the 1980s, “the discussion on the category
known segment of the disciplinary history that ‘Mediterranean’ progressively lost its force and
illustrates epistemological problems inherent instead tended to follow geopolitical lines of
in the culture-area approaches. The majority of demarcation into an ‘anthropology of Europe’Postsocialist Mediterranean | 85
and an ‘anthropology of the Middle East’” (Cas- Favors in Eastern Europe
sia and Schäfer 2005: 6; see also Kavanagh and
Bacas 2011). The idea of the Mediterranean as The concepts of clientelism and patronage lost
a cultural area is still alive and used for various their strength in the anthropology of Europe
purposes in non-academic discourses (Rogo- more or less simultaneously with the fall of
zen-Soltar 2020), but anthropologists are not ap- socialism. The concepts of clients and patrons
proaching this region as a cultural area anymore. and centers and peripheries largely disappeared
Recently, there have been several calls to in discussions of post-socialist contexts (but
“return to the Mediterranean” (Albera 2006; see Vetters 2014). Their place was taken by the
Shryock 2020). Emerging anthropological analytical language of informality (Cvetičanin
studies of the Mediterranean take a more trans- et al. 2019; Ledeneva 1998), favors (Henig and
national perspective and focus on social com- Makovicky 2016; Humphrey 2012), grey zones
plexity (Meneley 2020; Parla 2020; Slyomovics (Harboe Knudsen and Frederiksen 2015), or
2020; Viscomi 2020). Contemporary anthropol- corruption (Zinn 2005).3 This historical link
ogists look at how different “locating regimes” between the changes brought by 1989 and the
(Green 2019) produce the Mediterranean dif- transformation of the anthropological studies of
ferently and make it sometimes stable and at patron-client relations in Europe may be more
other times dissolve into irrelevance (Douzi- than coincidental.
na-Bakalaki 2017; Scalco 2019; Soto Bermant Namely, anthropological accounts of post-
2017). This revival of anthropological studies of socialist transformation made it clear that the
the Mediterranean seems to be motivated by a “veering” ways of doing things can thrive within
desire to discover alternative and theoretically European states. (Post)socialist favors usually
promising ways of thinking about borders, con- did not involve discrete “local” (peripheral) and
nections, and disconnections beyond the hege- “national” (central) communities, but seem-
monic political categories of the Global North ingly reciprocal exchanges among members of
(such as the nation-state, or the EU). A good the same polity—many of whom had shared
ethnographic illustration of this approach can economic and socio-political status. In numer-
be found in Venetia Kantsa and Michael Dob- ous cases, there were no obvious patrons, since
son’s (2020) exploration of whether an island it seemed as if everybody was brokering some-
should be thought of as an isolated mass with thing for someone else (Kononenko and Moshes
clear borders, or as a part of a larger, networked 2011). People pursued favors regardless of their
whole with blurred boundaries and unequal re- gender, age, class, ethno-nationality, sexuality,
lations among its entities (e.g., an archipelago), profession, or any other social position and iden-
and how this can help us think about certain tity marker. They did so in all possible arenas:
urban spaces differently. Similar to other wa- within state and public bureaucracies, in private
ter-worlds, the Mediterranean has a capacity to companies and generally in the markets, in civic
call forth alternative imaginings of relatedness associations as well as in the intimacy of one’s
and so it offers anthropologists an opportunity home, and so on. Because favors are so common
to conceive of (dis)connections, relations, and in postsocialist contexts, they were not analyzed
separations in new ways, but without glorifying as characteristics of a life in the rural peripheries
the region as an idealized space of cosmopolitan of a nation-state—favors were crucial for a life in
interconnection (because not every alternative Moscow as much as for a life in a Siberian town.
is to be celebrated). As Naor Ben-Yehoyada, The overwhelming ubiquity of favors in state bu-
Heath Cabot, and Paul A. Silverstein (2020: reaucracies and economies across post-socialist
4) write, the Mediterranean offers anthropol- Europe made it more difficult to see how they
ogists “a map of potentialities, both lethal and contribute to the reproduction of socio-political
redemptive.” hierarchies, inequalities, and power.86 | Čarna Brković
Postsocialist favors were explained in two both the political economy of favors as well as
ways. The first dominant interpretation is sys- their effect on personhood and interpersonal
temic: it understands favors as socially mean- relationships (e.g., Dunn 2004: 119–125; Stan
ingful attempts to mediate the pressures caused 2012). Some of these works look at how various
by the underdeveloped markets and immature postsocialist actors use favors to flexibly move
democracies in Eastern Europe (Ledeneva across boundaries between public and private
2009). Systemic perspective follows modern- arenas, increasing their economic and/or po-
ization theory to a large extent as its political litical power in doing so (Pantović 2018; Wedel
imagination is founded upon the assumption 2009). Let me explain what a scalar gaze entails
that the West provides the model of how poli- as an analytical approach and how it can help us
tics and economy should work, while the Rest to understand the socio-political and economic
ought to try to fashion themselves in the image effects of favors differently.
of Western countries. Another important thing
to note is the methodological nationalism of the
systemic perspective, since it understands the Conversation between Mediterranean
“system” as a (nation-)state. Informal practices and postsocialist studies: The scalar gaze
present a strategy for dealing with deficiencies
of Russian market economy and democratic When we take a comparative look at the an-
institutions full of “imperfections” (Ledeneva thropological studies of the Mediterranean and
2006: 27). Systemic interpretation loses sight of postsocialist Europe, we can see there are a
of the political and economic forces that may number of issues that could be gained through
shape favors from various local, regional, na- a more sustained conversation. For instance,
tional, and transnational scales. In order to un- anthropology conducted in the Mediterranean
derstand veze/štela in BiH, I argue that we need can help us to see the importance of the scalar
look across various scales, including at how gaze. Anthropology has “returned” to the study
transnational processes may affect everyday of the Mediterranean by looking at how this re-
pursuits of favors (and vice versa). gion is constituted differently through various
The second dominant interpretation is regulating regimes that operate simultaneously
moral and it approaches favors as informal across transnational, national, local, regional,
economic practices that people turn to in order and other scales (Green 2019). This focus on
to craft themselves into locally specific modali- social complexity and regulating regimes that
ties of moral self. Moral interpretation demon- cannot be contained within the borders of na-
strates that “clientelist” or “corrupt” practices tion-states can be inspirational for overcoming
actually provide the material from which peo- the problems with the methodological nation-
ple make themselves into good persons and alism that often pervade studies of favors in
that they do so willingly (rather than because postsocialist contexts. By “methodological na-
they are pressured to do so by the failures of tionalism” I refer to the tendency to take the na-
a system). For instance, Caroline Humphrey tion-state and its boundaries as a given in social
(2012) argues that in Russian and Mongolian analysis (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). As
education, we can see that people willingly briefly mentioned above, a wide range of post-
choose to get things done through favors, be- socialist studies approached favors as a rational
cause this gives them a sense of self-worth and by-product of systemic deficiencies of national
confirms their vision of themselves as a “nor- economies and/or national electoral democratic
mal hero” (see also Henig 2016; Makovicky systems. There are many examples of the ways
2018; Pine 2015). postsocialist states fail to fulfill citizens’ expec-
Finally, there has also been a set of studies tations. However, assuming that favors and cli-
that employ what I call a scalar gaze, exploring entelism are a response to deficiency within thePostsocialist Mediterranean | 87
country shrouds the effects of these practices on ethnographically on the last pages of this article,
the production of a moral self as well as their a scalar gaze on favors means looking simulta-
relation to the transnational, global economic neously at the moral reasoning of a person who
and political aspects of postsocialist transfor- pursues or provides a favor, their social worlds
mations. Taking processes within a single state with all the gossip and stories, structural con-
as a relevant scale of reference also suggests that, ditions of politics and economy, international
once these states are fully developed and mod- calls to “cut off ” clientelism and eradicate cor-
ernized, there will be no further need for favors ruption, and so forth.
and clientelism. Such “dis-timing” (see Jansen What could anthropological research of the
2008) of favors and clientelism as pre-demo- Mediterranean take from postsocialist studies?
cratic or pre-capitalist prevents analyzing the There is an obvious difference between these
ways these practices are a reflection of contem- two regions that makes difficult any attempt to
porary globalized socio-political and economic generalize about the Mediterranean: postsocial-
processes. The most recent anthropological en- ist countries shared a political and economic
gagements with the Mediterranean can be use- framework, while the Mediterranean did not.
ful for developing analytical frameworks to ap- Anthropological studies of Eastern Europe have
proach the work of favors from different scales, explored in detail how the experiences of life
including the transnational ones. in actually existing socialisms have shaped the
A scalar gaze can also help us see that hier- introduction of liberal democracies and capi-
archy and inequality are a constitutive part of talist economies. The Mediterranean countries
various moral-ethical projects and that there lack similar shared institutional histories—de-
are people who benefit from particular moral spite the recent grassroots’ and activists’ calls
constellations. It is important to observe peo- for establishment of a Mediterranean citizen-
ple’s attempts to carve themselves into particu- ship (Solera et al. 2018), this is not a region
lar moral persons—what James Laidlaw (2002) with a shared political framework. Still, perhaps
calls freedom—not as standalone ethical proj- Mediterranean studies can take from postso-
ects, but as efforts embedded into broader social cialism an interest in economy and a focus on
worlds saturated by power and inequality. If we capitalist exploitation, since the same economic
understand pursuits of favors solely as individ- processes seem to shape places throughout the
ualized ethical projects of making yourself into Mediterranean and Eastern European regions
a particular kind of a moral person, we cannot (see Rommel 2018). As Ognjen Kojanić (forth-
see how such projects may contribute to the coming) suggests in his plea for a “theory from
reproduction of wider social relations shaped the periphery,” two potentially major contribu-
by power, inequality, and hierarchy. “Clients” tions of the anthropology of postsocialism to
in Bijeljina discussed their “patrons” as good the broader anthropology of Europe could be
people who helped them and others out of the “analyses of the construction of the peripheral
goodness of their hearts. At the same time, these position (e.g., Balkanism, the invention of East-
“patrons” benefited politically and economically ern Europe) and analyses of political-economic
in a very clear manner from providing favors for changes and their social impacts (e.g., debt, the
many different people. There is no contradiction feminization of poverty, the rise of xenophobia
in such a constellation: inequality and ethics do and extreme nationalism, the lack of participa-
not exclude one another. In order to understand tion in political processes).” Thinking between
intersections between the ethical and the socio- peripheries and their area-studies could help
political dimensions of favors, we need to adopt to determine further points of intersection. We
a scalar gaze—that is, to pay attention to how will now take a look at an ethnographic illustra-
favors work in multiple contexts and across var- tion of how a study of favors could benefit from
ious scales simultaneously. As will be illustrated such a conversation.88 | Čarna Brković
You never know when The idea that “you never know when you
you might need someone might need someone” made a link between
knowing and needing people: to meet your
Maja was in her final year of undergraduate needs in an uncertain future, it was sensible to
studies, and she actively worked on improving meet many different people. The sentence “she
her chances to get a job. For instance, Maja took knows people” (ona zna ljude) was used to ex-
English lessons, we polished her CV together, press that a person had plenty of potential veze,
and she browsed the employment opportuni- that is, a large network of relations who could
ties section of the local newspapers. However, be useful and productive or who could provide
Maja was convinced these common job-seeking a favor. Knowing (the right) people was ex-
practices were not enough: she also needed a tremely helpful in resolving all sorts of practical
veza/štela to find decent employment. She com- issues—from accessing public healthcare, so-
plained to me several times that she “did not cial support, or ID cards and passports to get-
know anyone in Bijeljina,” which meant she did ting a job in both private and public sectors, to
not have any kind of a veza that could secure her being able to find affordable and quality goods
a job afterward. Maja was frustrated with the and services. Once these connections and rela-
long-term residents of Bijeljina, because they tions resulted in a favor, they were described as
all “had someone” and “knew people.” However, a veza (singular) or veze (plural). Veze can be
even though her job prospects did not look translated as “relations,” or “connections.” The
good, coincidences and surprises could happen. word comes from the verb vezati, which can be
She repeatedly said, “you never know when you translated as “to relate to,” but also as “to link,”
might need someone.” When I asked what she “to tie into a knot,” or “to put together.” Some-
meant by it, she gave me an example from her times, these connections and relations were also
own experience. described as a štela. The word probably comes
Maja grew up in Foča, another town in BiH. from the verb štelovati, which means “fixing,” or
When she was in secondary school, she met a “setting up something or someone.”
family in the street carrying suitcases. They There were different ways to increase the
asked her for help, and she took them to her likelihood that veza/štela would result in some-
cousin’s place who rented them a cheap room. thing useful and productive. First, you could
They were from Bijeljina, and they gave Maja cast your network as widely as possible: the
their personal phone number and address be- better connected you were (e.g., the more cof-
fore leaving. When Maja went to Bijeljina to fees you had with different people), the better
start her studies at the university, she called this chances you would have to get what you need.
family and stayed with them for the first couple Second, you could join a political party. For in-
of days, before she found a room for herself. In stance, Maja joined not one, but two political
Foča, she had helped them before she had even parties in the course of my fieldwork. She had a
thought of going to Bijeljina to study. As a conse- very pragmatic and self-interested understand-
quence, when she needed someone in Bijeljina, ing of party politics. Maja left the first political
she could count on them. She said that, if she party because they gave her only “pens and
had not helped them that day, if she had cho- pretty notebooks, nothing more substantial,” as
sen to walk down a different street, she would she said. Describing political party meetings,
not have met them, and she would not have had Maja recounted how she was expected to col-
anyone to help her during her first few days in lect signatures for a party event for no compen-
Bijeljina. The fact that she was useful for them sation. Another problem in her view was the
before she could possibly know they might be competition—there were 30 other younger peo-
useful for her was a proof that, indeed, you can ple in Maja’s division, most of whom were bet-
never know when you might need someone. ter connected in the town than Maja, throughPostsocialist Mediterranean | 89
their long-existing family networks.4 After a few These “noncapitalist excesses are at the same
months and repeated efforts to establish a more time vital to capitalism. They are a source of its
personal connection to the higher positioned energies, the condition of its success, the pos-
people in the party, she decided to quit. sibility of its power to reproduce. They are a
This was not the end of Maja’s political ca- heterogeneity that makes possible the logic of
reer: she then joined another, smaller political capital, and thus ensures both its powers and its
party. Maja was more satisfied with the second failures” (Mitchell 2002: 303).
political party, since the competition was not so This point can be well illustrated by the fact
large and the outlook for getting a job looked that it was the internationally supervised reform
promising. The programs of the two parties had of the job market in BiH that created the condi-
little to no relevance for her decision-making tions in which you never knew when you might
process. The primary reason for Maja’s involve- need someone. The Bosnian job market has
ment in party politics was to establish a wider been extremely severe for young people at least
social network to find a job after graduation. since 2008 (Mastilo 2015). Youth unemploy-
Anthropological research already noted that ment is a major problem in the European Union
many young people in BiH vote with a particular as well, but its numbers in BiH at the time of
temporal frame in mind—they focus on imme- my research were four times higher than in the
diate benefits one could obtain through voting, EU: in 2010, almost 60 percent of Bosnians be-
such as small payments (Čelebičić 2016; Kur- tween 18 and 35 years were unemployed.5 The
tović 2016). An interesting thing in Maja’s case dominant explanation of this infamous Euro-
was that sociality (a developed social network) pean record was that young Bosnians were in-
and a pragmatic goal (a personal benefit) could active. For instance, the director of an agency
not be clearly distinguished. Following Jeremy for youth employment in Mostar suggested that
Boissevain (1974), we could say that knowing the passivity of the youth was the key problem:
and needing people were practically one and “It is devastating when you ask a young person
the same for Maja. She valued membership in if they have any plans and what they would like
a political party not just because it promised an to do and they respond ‘I don’t know!’”6 A lec-
immediate benefit (financial compensation for turer at the Faculty of Economics in Tuzla, BiH,
collecting signatures, for instance), but also be- suggests that one of the major problems in this
cause it offered her an opportunity to connect field is “distinct inactivity (over 50 percent of
to the “important” people in Bijeljina. Political young people are economically inactive—they
membership enabled Maja to work on expand- do not have a job, nor do they look for one)”
ing her network of social relations—this in itself (Čavalić 2016: 5). A BiH think tank published a
increased the chances of getting things done in policy brief on youth unemployment that sug-
the future. How can we understand Maja’s re- gested that “the attitude of the young and highly
lentless pursuit of promising social connections educated people in BiH who are entering the job
and relations? market is not best suited for today’s capitalist
market” (Cvikl 2013: 2). The author of the brief
(a graduate of the University of Manchester who
Relational labor in comes from the former Yugoslavia) argues that
a precarious job market to be employed in the twenty-first century “asks
for a little bit more. And that little bit more is:
Favors and clientelism in BiH are dominantly the right attitude” (Cvikl 2013: 9). According to
framed as obstacles to “proper” capitalist devel- the same policy brief, the “right attitude” among
opment. Yet, I would suggest favors and clien- the BiH youth presumably includes decreased
telism are practices through which capitalism expectations of the working conditions and
operates in the Southeast European periphery. salary; readiness to do anything, even unpaid90 | Čarna Brković
work, in order to gain experience; preparedness job and securing a better future. Relational la-
to “stand on your own feet even if the floor is bor conducted through favors and clientelism
shaky and insecure” (Cvikl 2013: 7), and so on. is not a postsocialist or Mediterranean cultural
The top-down expectation that, in order to specificity whose function was to overcome the
find a job, the Bosnian youth had to get moving, anomalies of BiH institutional development.
to be active, to “take life into one’s own hands” Nor was this a case of resistance to the “neolib-
got translated into relational labor invested into eral politics as failed sociality” (Giroux 2011).
veze/štela. In my view, various actors within the Favors provided a meaningful way to engage
BiH and beyond who criticized the youth for with official demands of contemporary, neolib-
“sitting in a cafe in the middle of the day and do- eral, overcrowded markets in a global periphery.
ing nothing” (see Čelebičić 2013) were wrong: Yet, the structural conditions of the job
going out for a coffee was a form of relational market that caused the need for the relational
labor that Maja had to invest to find a job—and labor do not explain why Maja pursued veza/
later on, to keep it. If it was up to Maja to be štela also through political parties. She did this
active to get employment—and she could never to get personal links to the people positioned
know when she might need someone—going higher up in the social hierarchy of the town. As
for a coffee with many different people was a I illustrated in this section, having a wide social
sensible way to work toward securing a better circle was important. It was equally, if not more
future. It was not necessarily the attitudes of important, to have powerful people in your so-
the young people that needed changing: Maja cial network. Political activism—and religious
worked hard to meet both the conventional charitable work—presented good ways to meet
job-seeking requirements (by improving her powerful people in Bijeljina.
English-language skills, polishing her CV, etc.)
and to establish social connections and relations
with multiple potentially useful people. Ethics and hierarchy
Here I use the notion of relational labor in patron–client relations
that was developed by Nancy Baym (2015) to
analyze the US music industry. Baym suggests In order to understand how seemingly recipro-
musicians in the United States are increasingly cal exchanges of favors reproduce hierarchy and
expected to engage in the necessary, but unpaid, inequality, we need to zoom out from interper-
labor of fostering and sustaining communal ties sonal relations and to take a look across various
with their audience. They do this not for direct social domains and scales—to employ a scalar
compensation, but as an investment in a career. gaze, in other words. In Bijeljina, practically
In order to become successful in a precarious everybody was a “broker” (Alexander 2002)
and overcrowded market, there is an imperative who pursued favors through the ever-chang-
to connect with their audiences: “this connect- ing networks of social relations in the town and
ing exemplifies contemporary demands to en- beyond. Everybody seemed to pursue relations
gage in unpaid social labor to have any hope at because, as Maja said, “you never know when
professional success” (Baym 2015: 14). you might need someone.” People tried to per-
In the BiH job market, the imperative to get sonalize their relations with public institutions.
active in order to find employment was simi- Occasionally, at some institutions, some people
larly translated into an imperative to connect, were successful. At other times, in different in-
although the connections took place in person, stitutions, those same people were unsuccessful.
rather than online. If we understand the pursuit Since there was no single broker, the right sort
of potential veze/štela as a form of relational la- of relation—the one that got things done—de-
bor, we can see young people in BiH as assertive pended on the context. This dependence on
subjects who actively worked toward finding a context—a contingent, and yet socially embed-Postsocialist Mediterranean | 91
ded (in)ability to get things done—created a a mother of a child with developmental diffi-
peculiar sense that everything was potentially culties to send the child’s medical test results
possible, while at the same time remaining po- to Norway for special analyses. This particular
tentially impossible (“sve može i ništa ne može,” need of the mother and her child was created
as my interlocutors would say). Yet some peo- by the slashing of healthcare budgets that left
ple were much better than others at navigating more than 20 percent of BiH citizens without
across social contexts, and they usually became public healthcare insurance (Salihbašić 2011).
patrons able to provide favors to many others. Furthermore, social protection reforms explic-
Ratka was one such person who operated as itly placed responsibility for many different ser-
a small-scale broker not just for herself, but for a vices onto a “local community.”7 For a mother in
large number of other people as well. I stumbled need, asking a respectable and powerful mem-
upon stories about Ratka’s help and influence ber of a local community, such as Ratka, for a
almost everywhere I looked. One evening, as a favor presented a direct and logical outcome of
researcher of local forms of humanitarianism, new visions of how healthcare and social pro-
I was invited for a dinner at the local Ortho- tection ought to be organized.
dox Christian charity The Holy Mother. Maja A scalar gaze can help us see that favors
wanted to join me. The charity’s offices were are often implicated in reproducing particular
located at the large Orthodox Christian monas- moral projects as well as hierarchy, inequality,
tery that was built in the center of Bijeljina af- and power. By providing favors, Ratka carved
ter the 1992–1995 war in BiH. Maja and I went herself into a particular moral person. Yet, if
there together and met with Ratka in the green we focus just on Ratka’s own moral reasoning
and nicely cultivated garden of the monastery. and/or people’s descriptions of Ratka as a god-
Maja was very excited to meet Ratka—she was dess and a good person, we will miss something
well-known in the town both for “being pow- important. If we look at Ratka’s practices with
erful” and for “doing good.” My interlocutors a scalar gaze and keep in mind interpretations
often described Ratka as a “goddess” (boginja) of clientelism in the Mediterranean, we can see
who could do what no one else could. Through- that Ratka also had a clear political incentive
out the evening, Ratka talked about her multiple to help. Since women who want to do political
roles and responsibilities in various private and work in BiH “must continue to be perceived as
public institutions. She was not just the presi- women, and moral women at that” (Helms 2007:
dent of the charity, but also the municipal poli- 237), Ratka also strived to be seen as a caring,
tician and a close associate of Bijeljina’s mayor, moral person, so as to engage in the world of
director of several boards on social protection, official politics.
language teacher in a public school—all at the She did this by becoming able to solve very
same time. Maja was clearly in awe of her, and different issues for many people—from getting
she expressed several times her admiration for a job or paying electricity bills to setting up an
Ratka’s goodness, kindness, and seemingly un- appointment at the municipality or obtaining
limited energy. As far as I know, Maja did not various documents. Over time, she has become
ask Ratka for a favor to obtain a job. She seemed a patron, hierarchically positioned over other
satisfied just to have Ratka as a personal contact small-scale brokers, able to get things done that
and a part of her social world. This was some- others could not. The key to transforming one-
thing Ratka was very good at—being available self from a small-scale broker to a hierarchically
to others as a potential future favor provider was positioned patron was to transform moral value
her specialty. (being seen as a good person who provides fa-
Ratka also actually helped many people in vors) into social influence (occupying multiple
the course of my fieldwork in Bijeljina. For in- public and private roles from which you could
stance, Ratka secured 200KM (100EUR) for provide various favors to many people) and92 | Čarna Brković
then into an official political position (e.g., of a effects of their exchanges of favors were quite
municipal parliamentarian). To be able to trans- different.
form different forms of value into one another, it
helped to have many roles in various private and
public institutions that enabled you to get things Conclusion
done for others. This is precisely what Ratka
worked hard to obtain for years: in the first Emic terms for the veering ways of getting things
postwar years, she helped people as a teacher done (e.g., veze/štela, znajomości, blat, etc.) can-
in a local school and a volunteer in grassroots not be straightforwardly translated as favors,
networks of support; then she helped as a Red clientelism, or informality. The choice of a par-
Cross member who also joined a right-wing ticular English term and the related theoretical
nationalist political party, which had been (and framework carries analytical and political con-
stayed) in power in the town; next she founded sequences. Something is both gained and lost
a religious charity; from there she became a when we translate veze/štela as favors, informal-
part of different municipal bodies for welfare ity, or clientelism. Informality stresses the dis-
and humanitarian aid and the “left hand” of the tinction with the official sphere of institutional
town’s mayor; finally, she has become one of transformations, but it loses sight of the roles
the most prominent members of the municipal of the transnational (large scale processes that
government. Over the years, Ratka became a shape such institutional transformations) and
patron because she could make things happen of the individual (how people pursue particu-
for others in multiple public and private venues lar moral projects through informal practices).
all at the same time. She generated official polit- The language of favors emphasizes individual
ical power by doing personal favors for others. moral reasoning and their small-scale economic
Her charitable work was inseparable from her effects, but it loses sight of the wider systemic
political work—they were mutually interdepen- processes, both on national and transnational
dent. By providing ever more varied favors to an scales. A scalar gaze opens up the possibility
ever-larger number of people, Ratka became a of illuminating how ethics and politics are in-
very influential woman politically. Providing fa- separable in such veering practices, in different
vors to others—and occupying multiple public constellations across scales. Taking into ac-
and private roles at the same time—produced count that these veering practices blur various
Ratka’s flexible political power.8 boundaries (e.g., between charity and politics;
This did not make her ethical project less pragmatics and sociality; reciprocity and hier-
genuine—here, hierarchy and ethics go hand in archy), this article suggests the most productive
hand. It would be wrong to see Ratka as a cyni- approach is to keep all these different languages
cal person who helped others solely for personal in mind in order to develop diverse theoretical
gain. To me, Ratka seemed like a capable per- explanations that will reflect the various mean-
son who genuinely enjoyed helping people for ings and practices of the veering ways of getting
various reasons. However, we should not focus things done across scales.
just on her individual moral reasoning and how Various veering practices follow different
the granting of favors allowed her to pursue the logics of relating and redistributing resources.
project of crafting herself into a moral person. This means that it is practically impossible to
Such a focus would mean losing sight of wider make the same interpretative claims about all
political effects of her work—how she contrib- such practices in Eastern Europe, or elsewhere.
uted to the reproduction of power and inequal- It may even be wrong to make the same interpre-
ity in the town. There was a major difference tative claim about all veze/štela in one country,
between small-scale brokers and patrons; their such as BiH. Instead of a generalizable theory
moral projects were similar, but the political of favors/informality/clientelism, I think therePostsocialist Mediterranean | 93
should be many different theoretical explana- othy L. Zinn and Jutta Lauth Bacas during the
tions on why and how people get things done 2016 EASA meeting in Milan. I am grateful to
by veering off the expected course. This article both of them for pushing me to turn it into a
argues that, in order to theorize such indirect published article; it would not have existed
ways of getting things done, it helps to employ without their help. I am indebted to Paul Stubbs
a scalar gaze and to think between area-studies and John Clarke for continuously demonstrat-
that look at various global peripheries. ing to me that a focus on inequality and power
A conversation between the anthropological can go hand in hand with an eye for social
studies of the Mediterranean and (South)East complexity and ambiguity. I also want to thank
Europe teaches us that theories of the veering Taras Fedirko and the three peer reviewers for
practices may benefit from the following two their feedback on earlier versions of this article.
insights. First, the need to get things done in
a non-straightforward way can be a legitimate
outcome of transnational processes—rather
Čarna Brković is Lecturer at the Department
than an “ill” of an underdeveloped national
for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnol-
economy or politics. Profound economic, po-
ogy, University of Goettingen. She holds PhD
litical, and social changes that have been going
in Social Anthropology from the University of
on in BiH since the end of the 1992–1995 war
Manchester and has published in journals such
created widespread uncertainty and precarity.
as Anthropological Theory, Ethnos, and Social
Simultaneous postsocialist and postwar trans-
Anthropology. She authored the ethnographic
formation(s) made people largely unable to
monograph Managing Ambiguity (Berghahn
imagine their future. Veze/štela helped people
2017) and co-edited the volume Negotiating So-
to navigate their chances in such an environ-
cial Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Rout-
ment—as Maja said, you could never know
ledge 2016).
when you might need someone. Employing a
ORCID: 0000–0002–4569–6342
scalar gaze and ethnographically exploring dif-
Email: carna.brkovic@uni-goettingen.de
ferent fields of everyday life enables us to see the
veze/štela as a form of relational labor that was
necessary in order to find a job in the capital-
ist labor market in a global periphery. Second,
Notes
women who wanted to engage in the world of 1. For a comprehensive overview of ethnographic
official politics needed to invest this relational studies on BiH in the last twenty years, see Bou-
labor in a way that made others increasingly de- garel et al. (2007); Jansen et al. (2016).
pendent on them. Becoming a patron involved 2. Interestingly, studies of other parts of the world
the pursuit of a moral project alongside the re- demonstrated that patronage and clientelism
production of existing relations of power and could exist not only separately and parallel to
inequality. Thinking between area-studies and the state apparatus, but within it, as its consti-
across multiple scales can help us to illuminate tutive part (for instance, Scott 1972). However,
such important distinctions that are present in this did not shake the assumption that clien-
contemporary veering ways of getting things telism is antithetical to the modern state appa-
ratuses in Europe.
done.
3. There are works in political science and sociol-
ogy that discuss clientelism and corruption in
postsocialism (e.g., Kotkin and Sajo 2002; Rose
Acknowledgments 1999). However, they usually reiterate the foun-
dational assumption of the systemic perspective
This article was initially written for a panel by understanding clientelism and corruption
“Patronage-Clientelism 2.0” organized by Dor- as ills of premodern, predemocratic societies94 | Čarna Brković
that should go away through development of a Cassia, Paul Sant, and Isabel Schäfer. 2005. “‘Med-
postsocialist country into a “proper” neoliberal iterranean conundrums’: Pluridisciplinary
democracy. perspectives for research in the social sciences.”
4. For an analysis of strong discursive distinctions History and Anthropology 16 (1): 1–23.
between the “newcomers” and those who had Čavalić, Admir. 2016. “Analiza nezaposlenosti mla-
lived in Bijeljina before the 1992–1995 war, see dih osoba u Bosni i Hercegovini” [An analysis
Maksimović Pupovac (2019). of the unemployment of young people in Bosnia
5. “Nezaposlenost mladih u BiH četiri puta veća and Herzegovina]. Zbornik radova Nova naučna
nego u EU.” DW.com, 23 August. https://www edukativna misao, 5/2016, Nomotehnički Centar
.dw.com/bs/nezaposlenost-mladih-u-bih-%C4 Beograd, 26–34.
%8Detiri-puta-ve%C4%87a-nego-u-eu/a-5934 Čelebičić, Vanja. 2013. “‘Waiting is hoping’: Future
205. and youth in a Bosnian border town.” PhD diss.,
6. Ibid. University of Manchester.
7. I discuss this in detail elsewhere (Brković 2017). Čelebičić, Vanja. 2016. “Beyond to vote or not to
8. I discuss this in detail elsewhere (Brković 2015). vote: How youth engage with politics.” In Nego-
tiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzego-
vina, ed. Stef Jansen, Čarna Brković, and Vanja
Čelebičić. London: Routledge.
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