Marek Mikuš

Turning Points in Fieldwork

In his book Gypsies, Wars & Other Instances of the Wild, Mattijs van de Port alludes to the difficulties that the outbreak of war in 1991 in what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia brought for his ethnographic research in Novi Sad. In this capital of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, the local bourgeoisie showed every sign of inclination to the modern Western European lifestyle and, in a slightly pompous manner, likened the town to ‘Athens of Serbia’.  Middle-class Novisadjani cherished values such as rationality, restraint, high-brow culture, career progress and advanced consumerism, and these were the stuff of their stories of themselves as fini ljudi (‘noble people’). Naturally, it initially did not seem an ideal site for van de Port’s intended research on bars with Gypsy orchestras and Serbs’ cultural practices of getting loose and wild in these places: ‘I remember how during the first months of my fieldwork I was in a state of mild panic about my failure to meet or make contact with authentic Serbs (…) what I saw around me was nothing but a thoroughly bourgeois society’ (40).

All this was radically changed by the onset of war, which resulted in a set of rather different problems. Not only was van de Port forced to worry over his and his informants’ security; fight with his visceral resentment of the nationalist propaganda that people repeated; or doubt the appropriateness of posing questions about ‘light’ topics like bars and Gypsy music in such trying times.

The biggest stumbling block to my research was of a more substantive nature. The collapse of the economy, the political disorder, and the rapid escalation of the war had transformed Novi Sad into a grimy, chaotic and squalid mutation of its own ideals and aspiration. The city was not itself. The dramatic events succeeded each other so fast that the stories people related about one another and their world sounded increasingly hollow. (20)

I would argue, however distasteful and cynical it may sound, that this tragic collapse of normality, emptying out of the official self-image, proved a quite fortuitous turning point for van de Port’s research. It enabled him to draw powerful (although, for me, questionable) parallels between the worlds of festivity and war and their place in Serbian collective imagination, and to demonstrate historical embeddedness of truths and forms of knowledge represented by these worlds in the paradoxical and insecure nature of Serbian national identity. As van de Port himself says, ‘I realised that if I had been doing research in this society some five years earlier, I might have been entirely convinced by the fictions that the Novisadjani allowed to determine their lives’ (21).
During my research on development projects in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, it is more likely I will find myself dealing with an opposite predicament – a lack of such dramatic and enlightening crisis. (I can envisage turning points in much more standard sense, such as an unexpected failure of one of the development projects I will examine, or sudden drink-related shifts in relationships between me and participants in my research.) People who will represent an important group of my informants, if not the most important one, will be development workers – middle-class, qualified, urban people who will probably ‘speak the same language’ and share some of my cultural, social, and political background (although I have not yet forgone hope they might really surprise me!). Whilst I aim to work with other groups of people too, in order to explore the meanings of notions such as ‘development’, ‘democracy’, or ‘Europe’ in the wider Serbian society, the development people will remain a crucial focus of my research, raising the question of how I can ‘estrange’ them, their actions and thoughts to myself, or even simply get them talking in a way different from what they expect me to expect. Although I do not have any ready answers at this point, I think without a major turning point like the one experienced by van de Port, I will simply have to persist in the common-sensical anthropological strategy of building ‘rapport’ while staying an ‘outsider’ with whom it might be interesting (or comfortable) to discuss the banal, the weird and the inconvenient – i.e., the kind of stuff anthropologists are after.