The Everyday Life of a Homo Sacer. Enclave Urbanism in Podgorica, Montenegro

In: Südosteuropa: Zeitschrift für Politik und Geschichte, Band 66, Heft 1, S. 10-26

Abstract

This article ethnographically follows the everyday life of a homo sacer—a young Roma woman who has lived her whole life in a camp for displaced persons. The camp has been built for Roma, Ashkalias, and Balkan Egyptians who in 1999 fled from the violence in Kosovo to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. The key aim of the article is to see what happens with the concepts of 'homo sacer' and 'bare life' when ethnographically engaged in the context of Southeastern Europe. The article argues that ethnographic fieldwork in urban settings reveals in what way a homo sacer has an everyday life and a complex sociopolitical existence, and that camps are urban formations that can be related to very different sociohistorical and political projects.