university of nova gorica graduate school contested spaces and ...

Chapter Four
NEGOTIATING RUBBISH
The contents of the previous chapter described the remembered ancestral paths and
movements through which the elderly villagers reshape their present spaces within which they
locate their village and themselves. This chapter addresses the problem of rubbish on the coast
of Dhërmi/Drimades through which local people manage and control the sources, form their
identity and constitute their belonging. People’s dealings with rubbish are on the one hand
very much a reflection of historically contingent, political, economic and social relationships
in the village, region and country at large. On the other hand, rubbish negotiation became one
of the vital subjects in the process of construction and reconstruction of these relationships
and the social space in general. The chapter is comprised of two interconnected parts. In the
first part I present my discussions with local tourist workers just before the main season in
August. In analyzing these discussions I focus especially on the question of how people
experience the place and how they manipulate with it in order to gain certain advantages. In
the second part I present different stories by tourists and coastal tourist workers which
exemplify how rubbish produces spatial ordering and classifies what and who are either “out
of place” or “of the place”.
The accounts presented illustrate people’s never ending negotiations of who is responsible for
the dumping of rubbish and who for it not being removed. When talking about these issues
people delineate multiplicity of contradictions and shift the responsibility from “state” to
“locality” and from “locality” to “state”, from communal to individual and from individual to
communal, from foreigners to locals and from locals to foreigners, from themselves to their
neighbours and from neighbours to themselves. All these conceptualizations and
transpositions are quite complex and depend on the social and cultural background of the
individual speaker. With expansion of tourism and consequent growth in the number of tourist
facilities’ owners, seasonal workers, emigrants and tourists in recent years, the questions
about who or what is “dirty” and “disordered” and who or what is “clean” and “ordered” (who
or what is “of the place” and who or what is “out of place”) became even more relevant.
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