Kin norms and the ageing society

According to classic local kinship discourse, the question of the elderly concerned the whole family. Social scientists of the Balkan region have identified extended household structures well into the 20^th century. Since the early 19^th century, “zadruga” has been the semi-orientalist term for a patrilocal, patrilateral extended household of married brothers and their offspring.¹⁷⁵ Other folk terms for extended households abounded: “kuća (house), domaćinstvo (household), and čeljad (household or members). Zadruga […] was first imposed by historians, ethnographers and folklorists, but was later adopted by the peasants themselves” (Rasson, Stevanović, and Ilić 1999, 181).

Maja and Veljo, as we know from the entry vignette, lived close to several junior generations of their family, but physical proximity did not always map to social closeness. Especially their son, a truck driver who lived with his wife in the yard, seldom found time to talk with his parents, even when he was at home. “They are in strange relations [oni su u čudnim odnosima],”

Ljilja thought. Veljo himself used to be a womaniser and had been constantly out of the house, leaving Maja to raise the children virtually alone. He had only lately become more caring, Ljilja told me secretly. In this respect, Maja and Veljo’s household was not untypical because married family life was seen as desirable and the norm, even if relations were far from ideal (Gudac Dodić 2010, 113). Furthermore, the surrounding households of the junior generations had relied until recently on Maja’s family care work – she had therefore lived up to the normative expectations since the 1970s:

A grandmother could make a significant contribution to the family by providing childcare, which was costly and hard to find. Also, she had company. ‘There is an especially warm relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, with much kissing, stroking, and verbal manifestation of affection […]’ (Halpern and Halpern 1972, 89 in Rasson, Stevanović, and Ilić 1999, 194).

Veljo tried to act on the customary “great-grandfathering,” too. Yet, without the support of his wife he sometimes forgot to obtain the obligatory treats for the children. By 2011 he also worked hard to assume a caring role for Maja, as the phoning of the emergency medical service against her wish indicates. Nonetheless he experienced unknown difficulties as a caregiver, as he confessed to the medical sister (“I don’t know anything about that [medication]”).

The above represented practices were supported by the prevalent self-image of Serbian families as involving intensive three generational bonds. Children and parents alike believed or at least made believe in intergenerational family care as a “deferred exchange strategy” (cf.

175 For a summary of the protracted debate on zadruga, see Brunnbauer (2012). The Yugoslav socialists had later appropriated the term to denote diverse types of cooperatives.

177 Hollstein 2005, 194). When the ideals of reciprocal kin care could not be lived up to, one possibility was denial of the dissonance. Such denial could reach the point that “outsiders” like caregiver Ljilja found the family of Maja and Veljo relatively reserved and uncooperative.

Another option was offered by the new discourses on the problem of the ageing population and the inadequate medical system. Representing ageing as a societal, not merely a family problem made it possible to voice concern about, yet stop short of questioning, the value of kin care.

Ageing as crisis

During my fieldwork, public discourse on the demographic ageing of the population was typically linked to ideas about a general impoverishment of Serbian society, with apocalyptic undertones presaging the doom of the nation. This was a post-socialist development. During socialism, the percentage of people below 20 had fallen slightly from 38.47 per cent (in 1948) to 34.40 per cent (in 1981). At the same time the share of people aged 60 and above had very moderately risen from 10.03 per cent in 1948 to 11.03 per cent in 1981, while the general life expectancy rose from 50 to 70 years. Professor of Social Work Dušan Lakićević had evaluated these demographics as a manageable challenge for social policy:

These data show that the population of Yugoslavia ages, but in comparison to other European countries our age structure is favourable. [...] The rise of the absolute and relative number of the elder is of special importance for social policy, because it elicits heightened needs for societal activities concerning their protection, especially taking into account the reduction of the social-protective function of the family. By the way we talk about a world process, needs, and activities (Lakićević 1991, 347, emphasis mine).

However, post-Yugoslav nationalist circles interpreted the continuing demographic trends of the “reduction of the social-protective function of the family” very differently. First of all, the challenge was stood on its head and the lack of care by parents and grandparents for children emphasised. Nationalists called the perceived threat to the body politic the “white plague” (bela kuga).¹⁷⁶ The term referenced a “perceived epidemic of low birth rates,” which “has long been a prominent theme in the Serbian media, promoted mainly by conservative nationalist politicians and their clerical and academic allies” (Jansen and Helms 2009, 222). Since the late 1980s “national-moral education, a return to family values and the overhaul of reproductive and welfare policies” have been suggested as remedies (ibid, 223).

176 The term “white plague” is derived from the “black” plague: “[A] feminine force in the languages of the region, the plague or ‘black death’ was seen to take especially greedy pleasure in taking away children. ‘White’

likely refers to the void left in their absence” (Jansen and Helms 2009, 222).

178 Since the 1990s, Serbian society has been customarily divided into a Nationalist camp, and a liberal, civic “Other Serbia” (Druga Srbija, also translatable as “Second Serbia”) (see Naumović 2009). In practice, the dichotomy of the two Serbias did not hold. Protagonists from both camps shared many basic assumptions. Thus, war veterans (read: Nationalist Serbia) and NGO workers (Other Serbia) shared “the conceptual and material reliance on the state as the one key similarity […]. Even though their specific state projects were different, and even though they saw the state as consistently failing their expectations, both groups continued to look up to it to resolve the crisis” (Mikuš and Dokić 2015, 17).

According to Mikuš and Dokić, the crisis-narratives of veterans harked back to the lost model of socialist Yugoslavia, and those of NGO workers to the frustrated liberal-revolutionary hopes following the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003. Yet the nationalist remedy to the perceived demographic crisis lay, as we saw, not in a return to socialist humanist values but in their denial, advocating a return to natalism. At the same time the Other Serbia groped towards a stance on elder care similar to socialist humanism. This becomes evident in a contribution of the liberal media channel B92:¹⁷⁷ “Because of the absence of proper health care, a large number of old people live a hard life. This is not only the case in Belgrade and Serbia.

It is like this in the whole world” (B92 2009, my emphasis). In these lines the post-socialist depravation of the elderly was described not so much as a national phenomenon, but as universal, very much like in the quotation by Lakićević above. Three discursive elements were important in this statement: first, it premised deficiencies of the health system (see Chapter Two). Second, it evoked an alarmist discourse on the ageing of the population – a mirror-image of the nationalists who posited a fertility crisis. Third, while during the 1970s Serbian journalists might have proudly surmised the world could learn from them, their post-socialist counterparts had lost faith in their own vanguardism and understood that ‘the Health’ should be reformed in line with “world” (read: Western) experience in elder care.

Similarly, while senior social workers leaned towards socialist humanist values (see Chapter Five), they responded to the ‘problem’ of the elderly with recourse to Scandinavian models. At the same time they translated these models through the lens of local forms of neighbourly and

‘social children’s’ help.

177 B92 had started in the early 1990s as a rebellious underground station (Collin 2004). In 2011 it still had a reputation of belonging to the “civic” Other Serbia (Mikuš 2013, 133).

179 Neighbours and social grandchildren

In the 1980s, several late socialist welfare systems began to professionally organise old age care homes (for the Czech Republic, see Read 2007). Serbia hardly followed this trend. Since 1991 the ratio of people over 65 in Serbia had stayed above 1.2 million, or 16.0 per cent of the population (16.6 % in 2002, 17.3 % in 2011) (RZS 2014, 37). However, in 1998 there were only 32 homes for institutional care (Budurin 1998, 312). This number rose to 78 by 2011, which was still not enough to meet demand.¹⁷⁸Support by non-biological relations like neighbours and social children often played the key role in old-people’s care.

Anthropologists of kin politics have long questioned “common Euro-American ideas about kinship, according to which only the biological parents are the ‘real,’ ‘natural,’ or good parents, whereas other forms of parenthood through adoption or fostering are viewed as precarious solutions in crisis situations, with somewhat ‘deviant’ connotations” (Alber 2003, 488). They argued that fostering children could often have positive, normative outcomes both for the children and for the elderly social parents (cf. Donner 1987; Bledsoe and Isiugo-Abanihe 1989).

However, the extent to which grand-parenting could effectively activate “rearing reciprocities”

(E. Goody 1975) remained to be seen.

Zorana (b. 1965), a dedicated social worker and a driving force behind “Help at Home for the Elderly” explained how she was inspired by the customary neighbourly relations of help when pushing for a care at home service:

These good neighbourly relations are also some sort of ‘help at home,’ when the neighbour helps in the field, to prepare a slava, calving, well, collecting plums, i.e. any specific kind of work … Today it is only differently thought out […]: it is known who comes, when, how long the person stays, and approximately what sort of work will be accomplished. And on the other hand there are people who need somebody to ‘open their doors.’ Because when we are diseased and are not active we withdraw inwardly […] and have our own world (tI, Zorana, 23.5.2012).

This neighbourly support, especially the “opening of the doors” of inactive or old people, was sometimes practiced by what might best be termed social grandchildren. I met one social grandchild when I accompanied Zorana’s colleague, the special pedagogue Goca (b. 1981), on the hunt for potential elder care receivers in a village near Creek Town:

We entered a tended courtyard with restored traditional wooden houses and full of flowers.

A young woman who lived in Belgrade most of the year opened the door. She had just visited the owner, an old unmarried lady, who was her former family neighbour and with whom she had practically grown up. Every year she came several times to look after (gledati) the lady, who could not hear well and was weakened from a stroke. Recently, the old lady had also developed a cyst in the brain. Yet there was no exact diagnosis, she only complained that she felt drowsy. The social grandchild began to read the contract of care

178 Data by the MWSP (http://www.minrzs.gov.rs/cms/yu/adresar), accessed 10.10.2011. Regionally, in River City two private old people’s homes have been built since 2011, but Creek Town had none as of 2013.

180 for the elderly. She had not heard of the project but had seen the informational letter from the CSW on the cupboard. Goca explained: ‘The gerontodomaćica is not a domestic worker, but the ‘right hand’ of the older person.’ The social grandchild thought it was a good initiative and it was agreed that the carer should come on Tuesdays and Thursdays (D, 10.8.2009).

As this excerpt from my field diary shows, some social work professionals and social grandchildren experienced the posited elder care crisis as an accurate depiction and collaborated in devising state care arrangements in order to alleviate the situation in their social environment.