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

In one of her well-known works Purity and Danger (2002 [1966]) Mary Douglas has already
shown how the meaning of dirt and filth is socio-culturally conditioned. The meaning of dirt
cannot be understood as a unique and isolated phenomenon, but as a deviation from the
ordering. Dirt is a “matter out of place” (Douglas 2002: 44). It is the “by-product of a
systemic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting
inappropriate elements” (ibid.).
On the coast of Dhërmi/Drimades dirt and rubbish could also be understood as by-products of
social and spatial ordering. Thus in this chapter I place the emphasis on how the owners of
tourist facilities, seasonal workers, emigrants and tourists debate and negotiate who is
responsible for rubbish and who should clean the coast. Through their debates and
negotiations about the rubbish as well as through other practices, people express their views
about tourism and continuously construct the tourist coast. I will argue that while the tourist
coast serves as the source for these negotiations, the negotiations themselves construct the
same coast on which people who claim to originate from Dhërmi/Drimades place their
locality and belonging.
Gupta and Ferguson (2001: 13) already emphasized the mutual relation between the process
of the place making and the process of constructing locality and identity, which are unstable
and often contested. Locality does not imply a “rootedness” to a place. It is continually
reconstructed through interrelations as well as differences between people and places. Thus
locality is a constitutive and constituting part of the process of social changes; and
simultaneously the social changes such as tourism on the coast of Dhërmi/Drimades for
example, are constitutive and constituting of locality and formation of the local identities.
Referring to Hall, Gupta and Ferguson suggest that “identity is a ‘meeting point’ – a point of
suture or temporary identification – that constitutes and re-forms the subject so as to enable
that subject to act” (2001: 13). On the coast of Dhërmi/Drimades people form and redefine
their identity upon their links or “meetings” with other people on the coast. Local
entrepreneurs, newcomers, emigrants and tourists thus refigure the differences between
“them” as being “of the place” and “others” as being “out of place”. The sutures of
differences are points of their temporary identification, which allow them to act in the place.
Moreover, the differences between those “of the place” and others being “out of it”, are not
based only on the recognition of commonality or invention of identity, but they are also an
effect of the structural relations of power and inequality. Therefore I am concerned not only
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