Durable Remains
Glass Reuse, Material Citizenship and Precarity in EU-era Bulgaria
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33425Keywords:
Bulgaria, citizenship, consumer cultures, European Union, glass, materiality, precarity, recycling, reuse, RomaAbstract
Bulgarian Roma living in the capital city of Sofia rely on glass for EU-era survival becauseof its role in food-jarring practices and its ability to be repeatedly used and reused withoutbreaking down. The durability of glass emerges as a salient material quality for ensuringa means of preservation in the face of everyday economic precarity. Glass's durability ismaterial and temporal: temporal in that it transcends political and economic upheavals,and material in that, unlike plastic, metal and paper, glass does not naturally decomposeover time. Instead, it enables structurally disadvantaged urbanites, like the Roma, touse homegrown food packaging technologies in order to survive in the era of EU "free"markets, plastic packaging and neoliberal discardability. The temporal and materialdurability of glass juxtaposes the precarious circumstances of those most engagedwith its contemporary reuse for whom glass enables both survival and a form of EU-eramaterial citizenship. However, EU regulations focused on recycling fail to acknowledgethe widespread practice of glass reuse in Bulgaria. This paper analyzes how EU policy,recycling company officials and Romani and non-Romani Sofia residents reconfiguredurability through different temporal materialities - and practices - of recycling and reuse.
References
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Dawdy, S. 2010. “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity.” Current Anthropology 51 (6): 761–793. https://doi.org/10.1086/657626
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____. 2008. “Postsocialist Spores: Disease, Bodies, and the State in the Republic of Georgia.” American Ethnologist 35 (2): 243–258. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00032.x
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____., E. Potter and K. Race. 2015. Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water. Cambridge: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262029414.001.0001
Ingold, T. 2012. “Toward an Ecology of Materials.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 427–442. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920
Jasarevic, L. 2015. “The Thing in a Jar: Mushrooms and Ontological Speculations in Post-Yugoslavia.” Cultural Anthropology 30 (1): 36–64. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.1.04
Jung, Y. 2009. “From Canned Food to Canny Consumers: Cultural Competence in the Age of Mechanical Production.” In Food and Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World, edited by M. L. Caldwell, 29–56. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Keane, W. 2005. “Signs are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things.” In Materiality, edited by D. Miller, 182–205. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822386711-008
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Lemon, A. 1995. “‘What Are They Writing about Us Blacks?’ – Roma and ‘Race’ in Russia.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 13 (2): 34–40.
____. 1998. “‘Your Eyes Are Green like Dollars’: Counterfeit Cash, National Substance, and Currency Apartheid in 1990s Russia.” Cultural Anthropology 13 (1): 22–55. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1998.13.1.22
____. 2000. Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381327
____. 2002. “Without a ‘Concept’?: Race as Discursive Practice.” Slavic Review 61 (1): 54–61.
Manning, P. 2010. “The Semiotics of Brand.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 33–49. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104939
____. 2012. Semiotics of Drink and Drinking. London: Bloomsbury.
Mazzarella, W. 2003. Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385196
Molé, N. J. 2010. “Precarious Subjects: Anticipating Neoliberalism in Northern Italy’s Workplace.” American Anthropologist 112 (1): 38–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01195.x
Muehlebach, A. 2011. “On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (1): 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01080.x
Ozkan, D. and R. J. Foster. 2005. “Consumer Citizenship, Nationalism, and Neoliberal Globalization in Turkey: The Advertising Launch of Cola Turka.” Advertising & Society Review 6 (3). Available online: http://www.volkskunde.uni-muenchen.de/vkee_download/derya/oezkan_colaturka.pdf. https://doi.org/10.1353/asr.2006.0001
Resnick, E. 2016. Nothing Ever Perishes: Waste, Race, and Transformation in an Expanding European Union. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
____. 2017. “Protests and the Practice of Normal Life in Bulgaria.” Lietuvos Etnologija: Socialin?s Anthropologijos ir Etnologijos Studijos [Lithuanian Ethnology: Studies in Social Anthropology and Ethnology] 17 (26): 193–214.
Shevchenko, O. 2002. “‘Between the Holes’: Emerging Identities and Hybrid Patterns of Consumption in Post-Socialist Russia.” Europe-Asia Studies 54 (6): 841–866. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966813022000008438
Smollett, E. W. 1989. “The Economy of Jars: Kindred Relationships in Bulgaria - An Exploration.” Ethnologia Europaea 19 (2): 125–140.
Staski, E. 1984. “Just What Can a 19th Century Bottle Tell Us?” Historical Archaeology 18 (1): 38–51. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374038
Stewart, M. 2002. “Deprivation, the Roma and ‘the Underclass’.” In Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, edited by C. M. Hann, 133–155. London and New York: Routledge.
Stuart, I. 1993. “Bottles for Jam? An Example of Recycling from a Post-Contact Archaeological Site.” Australian Archaeology 36 (1): 17–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.1993.11681478
Verbeek, P. P. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Translated by R. P. Crease. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Anand, N. 2011. “Pressure: The Politechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 542–564. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01111.x
____. 2017. Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373599
Benjamin, W. and R. Tiedemann. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Busch, J. 1987. “Second Time Around: A Look at Bottle Reuse.” Historical Archaeology 21 (1): 67–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374080
Burley, D. 1995. “Contexts of Meaning: Beer Bottles and Cans in Contemporary Burial Practices in the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga.” Historical Archaeology 29 (1): 75–83. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374209
Callon, M., C. Méadel and V. Rabeharisoa. 2002. “The Economy of Qualities.” Economy and Society 31 (2): 194–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140220123126
Colloredo-Mansfeld, R. 2004. “Introduction: Matter Unbound.” Journal of Material Culture 8 (3): 245–254. https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835030083001
Creed, G. W. 2002. “(Consumer) Paradise Lost: Capitalist Dynamics and Disenchantment in Rural Bulgaria.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 20 (2): 119–125.
Dawdy, S. 2010. “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity.” Current Anthropology 51 (6): 761–793. https://doi.org/10.1086/657626
DeSilvey, C. 2006. “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things.” Journal of Material Culture 11 (3): 318–338. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183506068808
Dunn, E. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
____. 2008. “Postsocialist Spores: Disease, Bodies, and the State in the Republic of Georgia.” American Ethnologist 35 (2): 243–258. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00032.x
European Commission. 2011. Country Factsheet Bulgaria (BG). Available online: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/framework/pdf/BG_factsheet_FINAL.pdf
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. 2014. Roma Survey – Data in Focus Poverty and Employment: The Situation of Roma in 11 EU Member States. Vienna: European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Available online: http://publications.europa.eu/resource/genpub/PUB_TK0113754ENC_PDFX.1.3
Fehérváry, K. 2002. “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary.” Ethnos 67 (3): 369–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/0014184022000031211
____. 2009. “Goods and States: The Political Logic of State-Socialist Material Culture.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (2): 426–459. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417509000188
____. 2013. Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Foster, R. 2008. Coca-Globalization. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610170
Gabrys, J., G. Hawkins and M. Michael. 2013. Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic. London and New York: Routledge.
Galbraith, M. 2003. “‘We Just Want to Live Normally’: Intersecting Discourses of Public, Private, Poland, and the West.” Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe 3 (1): 2–13. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsae.2003.3.1.2
Gatti, R., S. Karacsony, K. Anan, C. Ferré and C. de Paz Nieves. 2016. Being Fair, Faring Better: Promoting Equality of Opportunity for Marginalized Roma. Washington, DC: World Bank. Available online: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/292771468196732276/pdf/102804-REVISED.pdf. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0598-1
Gille, Z. 2007. From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Greenberg, J. 2011. “On the Road to Normal: Negotiating Agency and State Sovereignty in Postsocialist Serbia.” American Anthropologist 113 (1): 88–100. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01308.x
____. 2014. After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press
Harrison, R. 2006. “An Artefact of Colonial Desire? Kimberley Points and the Technologies of Enchantment.” Current Anthropology 47 (1): 63–88. https://doi.org/10.1086/497673
Hawkins, G. 2006. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
____., E. Potter and K. Race. 2015. Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water. Cambridge: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262029414.001.0001
Ingold, T. 2012. “Toward an Ecology of Materials.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 427–442. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920
Jasarevic, L. 2015. “The Thing in a Jar: Mushrooms and Ontological Speculations in Post-Yugoslavia.” Cultural Anthropology 30 (1): 36–64. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.1.04
Jung, Y. 2009. “From Canned Food to Canny Consumers: Cultural Competence in the Age of Mechanical Production.” In Food and Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World, edited by M. L. Caldwell, 29–56. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Keane, W. 2005. “Signs are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things.” In Materiality, edited by D. Miller, 182–205. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822386711-008
Latour, B. 1992. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by W. E. Bijker and J. Law, 151–180. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lemon, A. 1995. “‘What Are They Writing about Us Blacks?’ – Roma and ‘Race’ in Russia.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 13 (2): 34–40.
____. 1998. “‘Your Eyes Are Green like Dollars’: Counterfeit Cash, National Substance, and Currency Apartheid in 1990s Russia.” Cultural Anthropology 13 (1): 22–55. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1998.13.1.22
____. 2000. Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381327
____. 2002. “Without a ‘Concept’?: Race as Discursive Practice.” Slavic Review 61 (1): 54–61.
Manning, P. 2010. “The Semiotics of Brand.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 33–49. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104939
____. 2012. Semiotics of Drink and Drinking. London: Bloomsbury.
Mazzarella, W. 2003. Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385196
Molé, N. J. 2010. “Precarious Subjects: Anticipating Neoliberalism in Northern Italy’s Workplace.” American Anthropologist 112 (1): 38–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01195.x
Muehlebach, A. 2011. “On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (1): 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01080.x
Ozkan, D. and R. J. Foster. 2005. “Consumer Citizenship, Nationalism, and Neoliberal Globalization in Turkey: The Advertising Launch of Cola Turka.” Advertising & Society Review 6 (3). Available online: http://www.volkskunde.uni-muenchen.de/vkee_download/derya/oezkan_colaturka.pdf. https://doi.org/10.1353/asr.2006.0001
Resnick, E. 2016. Nothing Ever Perishes: Waste, Race, and Transformation in an Expanding European Union. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
____. 2017. “Protests and the Practice of Normal Life in Bulgaria.” Lietuvos Etnologija: Socialin?s Anthropologijos ir Etnologijos Studijos [Lithuanian Ethnology: Studies in Social Anthropology and Ethnology] 17 (26): 193–214.
Shevchenko, O. 2002. “‘Between the Holes’: Emerging Identities and Hybrid Patterns of Consumption in Post-Socialist Russia.” Europe-Asia Studies 54 (6): 841–866. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966813022000008438
Smollett, E. W. 1989. “The Economy of Jars: Kindred Relationships in Bulgaria - An Exploration.” Ethnologia Europaea 19 (2): 125–140.
Staski, E. 1984. “Just What Can a 19th Century Bottle Tell Us?” Historical Archaeology 18 (1): 38–51. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374038
Stewart, M. 2002. “Deprivation, the Roma and ‘the Underclass’.” In Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, edited by C. M. Hann, 133–155. London and New York: Routledge.
Stuart, I. 1993. “Bottles for Jam? An Example of Recycling from a Post-Contact Archaeological Site.” Australian Archaeology 36 (1): 17–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.1993.11681478
Verbeek, P. P. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Translated by R. P. Crease. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Published
2018-06-04
Issue
Section
Research Article
How to Cite
Resnick, E. (2018). Durable Remains: Glass Reuse, Material Citizenship and Precarity in EU-era Bulgaria. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 5(1), 103-115. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33425
