The Shopping Center of Abnormal Normality: Ethnography of the Distribution Tent in the Refugee Camp in Slavonski Brod

Abstract

In a critical anthropological approach, a refugee camp is seen as a space of “humanitarian government” (Agier 2011), where it is primarily humanitarian organizations, social services and police that cooperate, whereas refugees are a “disquieting element” (Agamben 1998), non-subjects whose free will, freedom of movement, speech and expression of their personality is reduced to a minimum. As ethnographers and volunteers, we saw the transit camp in Slavonski Brod as an assemblage (Ramadan 2012) of space, time, practices and relationships that took place there, and whose dynamics was determined by legally unclear procedures of “triage” of refugees/migrants. The analysis focuses on the distribution tent which, despite being monitored, turned out to be the only place of “freedom” in the sense of conversational interaction and time and space management, both for refugees and volunteers. The predominant activity in the distribution tent was donating clothing and shoes to the refugees, which made us ethnologically rethink clothes as a cultural artefact and the non-verbal language which the refugees used to negotiate their identity and symbolically express their past, present and future. In addition to a description of abnormal normality of the distribution “bazaar” or “shopping center” as a globally recognizable genius loci, we also present autoethnographic reflections about the cultural, moral and emotional effects of unexpected meetings-events with the “ungraspable face of the other” (Lévinas 1991), which questions our existential and historical experience.

fear of immigrants, humanitarian government, abnormal normality of the camp, the camp as an assemblage, anthropologist as a volunteer, semiosis of clothing