Travelling with the Argonauts: Informal Networks Seen without a Vertical Lens 9781785338991

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Travelling with the Argonauts

Travelling with the Argonauts Informal Networks Seen without a Vertical Lens

Małgorzata Irek

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2018 Małgorzata Irek All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Irek, Małgorzata, author. Title: Travelling with the argonauts : informal networks seen without a vertical lens / Małgorzata Irek. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017054238 (print) | LCCN 2018010233 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785338991 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785338984 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Trade routes--Europe--History. | Business networks--Europe--History. Classification: LCC HE323 (ebook) | LCC HE323 .I74 2018 (print) | DDC 382.094--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054238 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-898-4 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-899-1 ebook

To my father, Stefan Jerzy Ilczyszyński

Contents

e Contents

Acknowledgements viii Introduction1 The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks: Concepts, Definitions and Theoretical Approaches to Informality

15

Chapter 2.

Empirical Research on Informal Social Phenomena and the Limitations of Formal Methods

46

Chapter 3.

Exiting the Emic-Etic Logic: How to Conduct Successful Fieldwork on Informal Phenomena

81

Chapter 4.

Thinking Beyond Sectors: Informal Economy and Informal Networks

107

Chapter 5.

Escaping Locality: Ethnography beyond Systems, Zones, Countries and Sites

133

Chapter 6.

Interfaces between the Formal and the Informal: Actors, Places and Routes

163

Chapter 1.

Afterword

194

Bibliography201 Index221

e Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who, during the many years of this research, have provided me with the information on which it is based. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for improving the present text, many of which I have taken into account. Naturally, the final responsibility for the contents of this work remains mine alone.

e Introduction

‘Moved by the god of song, I set out to commemorate the heroes of old who sailed the good ship Argo up the Straits into the Black Sea and between the Cyanean Rocks in quest of the Golden Fleece’, wrote Apollonius of Rhodes (1971: 35) in the opening passage of his story The Voyage of Argo, telling of the adventures of Jason and his companions. It was one of the greatest epic tales of antiquity, though its protagonist differed significantly from those of its predecessors, for Jason was not a hero endowed with divine powers, but an ordinary man. He did not throw himself into a fight, but held back, relying on his better endowed companions to fight his cause. Jason was amechanos, one without resources, and knowing this, he was at times despondent (Rieu 1971: 15). However, he still went on with his mission and, despite his own limitations, was able to negotiate his fate with the help of his friends, his lover’s witchcraft and, when necessary, by rejecting the code of honour, for which he was called an anti-hero (De Forest 1994). The protagonists of my book were given different derogatory labels, like undocumented migrants, petty traders, illegal workers or smugglers, but like the mythical anti-hero they were just ordinary people, amechanos, trying to make the best of the situation they were in. They were the pioneers of non-vertical social organization in the times before the virtual revolution, the expansion of cheap airlines and the opening of borders across Europe. Even before the fall of the Iron Curtain, they patiently and relentlessly crossed the world in search of economic betterment, political freedom, adventure and happiness, despite the Cold War, its borders, barriers and restrictive migration policies. They were the Argonauts of our time.

2 • Travelling with the Argonauts

In Europe they travelled mostly by land, using the cheapest possible forms of transport, including train, coach, bus and bicycle, along time-worn, well-known trading routes. It was on the ‘Middle Route’ connecting Moscow, Warsaw and Berlin, past the industrial areas of the German Ruhr, the French Pas de Calais and going further on to London, that I realized the significance of the informal links developed by these travellers. It was a bitterly cold winter, the temperature having fallen below minus 30°C. I was sitting in a hall in an important rail hub in the west of Poland, waiting for a train from Moscow to West Berlin. The waiting hall was unheated, scruffy and dirty beyond human imagination, but since this was the only shelter, all the waiting travellers – about a hundred of them – had squeezed into this tiny room to escape from the biting wind. People were standing along the walls shoulder to shoulder, staying close to each other to keep warm, or sitting on the few benches, eating and talking to keep themselves from falling asleep. Several dogs were running around, begging for food. As there was no ventilation, the stench of dogs’ faeces mixed with human breath smelling of onion, garlic and vodka was unbearable, but there was nowhere else to go. Two Russian-speaking men next to me, looking like close friends, were eating bread with fat, and I heard them complaining that because of the long delay, they would soon run short of food and drink. I offered them hot tea from my thermos, at which they laughed: it was home-made moonlighter about seventy per cent strong that they were running short of. I shared my food and Polish vodka with them, and they shared their stories with me. It appeared that one of them was a Russian, while his friend was a Chechen. They had met accidentally in Moscow as they were getting on a train and had travelled together all the way through Warsaw to the German border to sell their goods to Poles, who sold them to Germans on the Polish side of the border, and they were coming back home, only to return next month. ‘But the Chechens hate Russians! How come you travel together?’, I wondered, surprised by their friendship even more than by the sight of an alcohol-consuming Chechen. ‘It’s them in the government – they want us to fight each other, but when we travel, we normal people, we’re all brothers’, replied the Chechen. ‘Yes, here we’re brothers’, laughed the Russian, hugging the Chechen. Even though this brotherhood might have been to a great extent forged by the unsavoury liquor they were consuming, it was still there and was an observable social fact, for to drink together they had first to establish some sort of understanding, despite their countries being involved in a conflict which soon turned into open war. And in the cold and stench of the waiting room I optimistically thought that,

Introduction • 3

perhaps after all, one could find a formula for the social glue that was responsible for cooperation between social actors. The behaviour of these informal actors seemed to hold the answer to the question of how to overcome differences and link people across the dividing lines of conflicting interests. I thought that if the scholars of the social could include informality in mainstream research and, following the call of Nietzsche, the father of horizontal thought, stop judging its ‘ugliness’ and accept it as an inherent part of the human condition,1 they might learn better the content of horizontal links. The present book is the result of longitudinal research into the informal networks of migrant petty traders and informal workers, during which I have shared their quotidian lives and observed their informal transactions. I have travelled with them on their trading routes, visited them in their homes and shared their hardships, sorrows and joys. I have observed how these ordinary people glued Europe together, reshaping its social space and creating the transnational and trans-ethnic links along which, apart from goods and services, they redistributed knowledge, wealth and power in a horizontal way, even before the rise of the ‘virtual community’.2 I witnessed their resourcefulness, resilience and sheer joy of life, despite their hardships and often dire circumstances. I came to consider myself as one of them – not a scholar, but just a human being. And I came to understand that the normative distinctions that allow ‘wrong’ informal actors to be differentiated from those who were ‘right’ were not necessary valid, for I saw that those who were deemed ‘right’ were as much involved in informal activities as the stigmatized others. And since the actors described in my book belong chronologically to the ‘primitive’ social reality before the virtual revolution, understood as the switch to the internet and satellitebased technologies of communication,3 their horizontal organization precedes the horizontality of the virtual society. By chance, and thanks to the persuasion of Georg Elwert, then a professor at the Institute of Ethnology in Berlin, who convinced me to pursue this fieldwork, I had a rare opportunity to observe informal networks in slow motion, when the horizontal links were still being made mostly through physical action, through the actual movement of bodies, through travel and migration, rather than expanding within a remarkably short span of time via virtual contacts. The research method was fieldwork with participant observation. My first observations of informal networks started in 1980 in the southern border area between the then East Germany and Poland, formerly part of the medieval Via Regia, and continued later on the so-called ‘Koło’ (ring), a circular trading route running from Poland through

4 • Travelling with the Argonauts

Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to Turkey or Greece, and back to Poland through Yugoslavia, Austria, West Germany and finally East Germany. Since 1987 I have conducted systematic research on the so-called Middle Route, en route between different locations in Poland and West Germany, as well as in these locations. Among other research activities, the fieldwork involved regular train journeys (up to two weekly) between West Berlin and different locations across Poland for six years, as well as car and coach journeys from a small town in western Poland through East Germany to West Berlin, and after 1990 also to the area of Frankfurt am Main. In a period of eighteen years, over 2,000 informal interviews were conducted, plus numerous group discussions regarding the presence of Poles and other migrants in Germany. The research in Germany was regularly updated until 2005, when a year of participant observation began in Spain, involving Russian, Ukrainian and Polish travellers, as well as migrant communities in tourist towns on the route from Przemyśl on the Ukrainian–Polish border to Murcia in the south of Spain. The research in the UK started in 1995 and has continued until 2012. It has included fieldwork in several medium- and small-size towns in England and Scotland, together with regular coach journeys between London and a small town in the west of Poland (up to twice monthly) until March 2005. From 2006 fieldwork was carried out on the planes of cheap airlines and at airports, mostly in the London vicinity, as well as en route to different destinations in Poland. A similar number of interviews (about 2,000) and group discussions were conducted in the UK as in Germany. The empirical materials used in this book come exclusively from my own fieldwork: other materials were used only where I could verify them by my own experience. The empirical cases I quote come from a period before the current regulations regarding ethical standards were in place, though the highest ethical standards have been adhered to. Since the theme of the research was the informal activities of the actors involved, for ethical reasons which will be discussed in the chapter on methods, the names of the locations in Poland, as well as any information that might identify my informants, including dates, have been changed or otherwise kept confidential. No identifying data have been revealed: pseudonyms have been used for the names of both persons and places, with the exception of large metropolises such as Berlin, Warsaw or London, where the probability of a person disguised under a pseudonym being identified through a description of his or her circumstances is limited. Also, following the best practice of informal economy research, as represented by Gerald Mars (2013), for ethical

Introduction • 5

reasons the publication of findings regarding activities hidden from the state has been postponed by up to twenty years. As already mentioned, my first observations in the early 1980s were not systematic, and the notes were not taken in situ, but a posteriori. However, when, a few years later, I started systematic research into the subject of informal networks employing the standard methods used in academia, including taped interviews, I found that these methods were obstructing my research, for I learned much more about informality in the earlier phase. By making my own mistakes, I discovered that to observe informality I had to go back to the informal methods I had been using at the earlier stage. Also, in looking for a suitable theoretical framework, I discovered that informal social relations have been undertheorized and often wrongly conceptualized. In the discursive space of the social sciences of that time, there was surprisingly little place for the horizontal dimension of phenomena. As with the research methods of the time, the theories were specific to research into verticality, hierarchies, structures, patterns and human groups with definite numbers of members and criteria of belonging. Such works as Manuel Castells’ The Rise of the Network Society (2000), Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social (2005), Sallie Marston et al.’s ‘Human Geography Without Scale’ (2005) and Mark Falzon’s Multi-Sited Ethnography (2009) had not yet been published, and there was no specific guidance for those who were looking for the horizontal aspects of social life. Therefore, I decided to continue my research without any theoretical perspective to guide me and to bias my observation. And when, after over twenty years, I finally decided to finish my research and to write up the findings of my fieldwork, I uncovered a disparity between theory and practice, as if I were doing my research on a different planet from that described by the theoreticians of the social. I observed human relationships developing in long chains stretching from Beijing via Berlin to Chicago, with links appearing and disappearing spontaneously, without obvious structural reasons, without regard to the boundaries of class, status, professional group, sector, nationality or ethnicity. An uneducated Polish woman from western Poland, who I met on a train, would lead me through her egocentric network to a Russian dignitary in Moscow, an American businessman in Chicago, a native Indian chief in Toronto, an Italian priest in Rome and a Turkish shopkeeper in Berlin. And the extensive network of this single person was only a minor fragment of the whole, of the neverending network chains. There were no endpoints to such network chains, and each person contributed his or her own connections to the whole. The dignitary in Moscow and the businessman in Chicago each

6 • Travelling with the Argonauts

had their own egocentric networks containing multiple connections, which they were able to activate should this woman need a favour, as did the Indian chief and the Turkish shopkeeper. These chains crossed state borders, ethnic boundaries, class and status distinctions, and they ran across faith groups and occupational sectors; they had no stable structures, nor any distinguishable pattern, and yet they existed empirically. However, I could not find a theory that would account for their unpredictability, the spontaneity of links or the infinite character of the chains of relationships, nor their wide geographical scope. At that point I realized that informal social relations were perceived through the exclusive prism of vertical notions that did not allow their horizontal dimension to be observed, since the whole academic machinery of the social sciences has been constructed for research into forms and hierarchies. The axioms were fixed so as to exclude whatever had no form and no structure; the social space itself was regarded as polymorphous – that is, one assumed the existence of a plurality of forms, thus leaving out the very possibility that amorphous phenomena might occur. Then I started to investigate the theoretical possibilities of a niche that would accommodate these phenomena in the discursive space. It seemed logical to place the non-forms within some kind of horizontal theory. A horizontal perspective would allow me to theorize both the infinite dimension and the lack of pattern. If one could forget about structure and hierarchy of any sort, one would be able to observe a smooth flow of information, goods, services and emotions along the links between the ‘nodes’. But there was just one problem: absolute horizontality does not exist in the empirical world, for horizontality is just a heuristic device. Once we introduce it into our analysis of social space, we also introduce verticality, and the two must somehow be reconciled. Moreover, in the scholarly practice of textual production, even a degree of horizontality is hard to achieve, for, as has long since been discovered (Chomsky 1957, Dumont 1980), human perception and language are both constructed vertically. Thus, a social theory that is purely horizontal does not exist: once we start observation of the empirical world, we automatically start ordering vertically whatever we see, and we continue this process while describing what we have observed. In fact, the horizontality of any horizontal theory is compromised in the very act of formulating this theory. Therefore, any horizontality we would be able to achieve in a scholarly description would be relative. And even if we were to move towards a radical horizontality and assume that there exist social relations which are absolutely horizontal and not related to structure(s), we would still have to reconcile

Introduction • 7

this assumption with the fact that the actors themselves have to relate to structures, simply by virtue of living in a nation state. Thus, to research the horizontal dimension of social relations, all we can do in practice is to restrict verticality as much as possible. Therefore, rather than attempting to follow the unattainable ideal of Nietzschean horizontality, I decided to construct a theoretical framework, which I called Restricted Verticality Perspective (RVP), and which offers a pragmatic solution to the theoretical and methodological problems connected with research into informal social relations. The RVP allows the vertical bias to be partly removed from our perception, thus creating a conceptual space for the horizontal dimension of phenomena. Verticality is here restricted by changing assumptions and adjusting analytical tools – that is, controlling the choice of analytical categories which a priori organize discursive space in a vertical way. The RVP is based on the assumption of the heterogeneity and continuity of social space that is endlessly produced by social actors. Thus, rather than speaking of segments of social space or of multiple spaces, we assume here a single space with plural attributes that need not be mutually exclusive. Social phenomena can therefore have informal and/or formal attributes. Moreover, in contrast to current theoretical perspectives, where the informal is considered to be a deficient form and thus a subcategory of the formal, the RVP does not assume any priority of formal over informal phenomena. The assumption of a heterogeneous social space implies that forms continually shape and dissolve within the infinite continuum of this space, suggesting that they should be conceptualized as subsets of the infinite universe, not the other way round. When we now use informality as the analytical category, it is no longer understood as a deficient form, but defined as the total social space minus whatever is controlled by the state or has form. This definition solves a basic conceptual difficulty connected with informality as defined by economists, where, after Keith Hart (1985), it is understood as activities hidden from the control of the state. Here, the problem consists in the inability to differentiate between casual, unreported economic activities and organized crime. However, under the proposed definition, since criminal organizations do have form, they do not belong to the category of informality, even though they are hidden from the gaze of the state. Also, it becomes more visible that informality is not necessarily connected with breaking the law, nor with economic transactions – it is not contained within a ‘sector’ or a group, and it is not some deviation, corrupting the desired form. Another axiom which differentiates the RVP from theories currently used in research into informal social relations is the assumption

8 • Travelling with the Argonauts

that the relations of actors to actors and between the informal and the formal are mediated through individual actors’ negotiations based on common sense, which cannot be researched using mathematical methods, as distinct from the current assumption that these relations are determined by rational choice, which can be researched by these methods. Also, in the RVP we want to learn about links between actors so that we can further explore the possibilities of human cooperation; therefore, we choose the Eliasian concept of homo apertus, a complex being emotionally dependent on other people and driven by rational and irrational choices alike, in preference to the notion of the selfish and rational homo economicus. For the purposes of informality research, we assume that the essence of the human condition is the pursuit of happiness and the search for acceptance by other humans, rather than mere competition and fighting for survival. In order to follow the horizontal dimension of the links we want to research, we need to keep our perspective relatively flat. Therefore, the RVP assumes the priority of synchrony over diachrony. However, since the perspective is pragmatic and does not claim absolute horizontality, it also assumes that synchrony will be relative. For example, if we mark time on the vertical axis and space on the horizontal, we can research how networks develop in space in a given, fixed interval of time, as if it were a layer of a geological rock (full synchrony would be achieved if it were a fraction of a second). Thus, we do not deny the existence of diachronic processes, but we concentrate our research on the synchronic developments, with time assumed as given and space as variable. We do not deny that processes develop in time (although admittedly, in the case of virtual networks, this time can be very close to what we understand as instantaneous), but for the purposes of informality research, we do not analyse this change in order not to lose the horizontal dimension from sight. We do not research phenomena as a function of vertical variables; instead, we map the chain of events in physical space, which is the locus of actors creating the social space and therefore also of the interfaces between informal and formal phenomena. Another step in the horizontal direction for the RVP is to restrict context in order to approach as close as possible to the isometry of the social landscape, as advocated by Bruno Latour (2005). But rather than eliminating it completely and replacing it with several layers of thick description, as in Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), I propose to restrict contextual information to one layer of thick description, necessary to understand the content of the link. Following Latour, this restriction also applies to theoretical excurses and intellectual genealogies which invite context and increase diachrony.

Introduction • 9

Since the RVP restricts verticality, but does not deny its existence, it needs to reconcile the horizontal and vertical dimensions and explain how the informal and formal interface with each other. In the RVP, we assume that the interfaces between the formal and the informal are individual actors. Therefore, if we want to follow our habitus of tracing patterns, without simultaneously destroying informality itself, we need to place these patterns in the physical world, the locus of actors’ bodies and technological devices, and not in the relations of actors to actors, which are form-free by our own definition. To eliminate the vertical bias as much as possible from the very research methodology at the stage of observation, as well as the description of amorphous and continuous phenomena, the RVP proposes to control the analytical categories themselves, avoiding those categories that are marked for value and are thus inherently vertical (which can be done using a simple tool borrowed from Chomsky’s transformative grammar). Thus, against our habitus, in observing informality we should be looking for those relationships which need not be defined in terms of class, status or power. We should also abstain from using mathematical methods, which are per se vertical by virtue of the incremental increase in natural numbers. In the RVP we are not looking for some alternative universe, but applying a different filter to our perception of the same social reality, trying to remove the vertical lens from what we see. This leads to methods of gathering empirical materials allowing us to make observations in a way which permits the closest access to the milieu without distorting actors’ behaviour. So as to avoid the Hawthorne effect, the recommended method is participant observation, which should be covert, with notes made a posteriori and, following the good tradition of Franz Boas’ ethnography, possibly recreating the dialogues (Bernard and Gravlee 2014) and meticulously describing the details of observed situations. The covert research method complies with another axiom of the RVP, namely the inclusion of the observer in one and the same epistemological category with the observed, which is one of the principles of Nietzschean horizontality. Thus, the researchers themselves are not excluded from the researched space, nor from the common-sense principles governing it – there is no etic–emic distinction. Also, such fieldwork should not be bound by locality so that we can observe relationships developing across large distances and not within the boundaries of territories, like states, districts, towns, villages or neighbourhoods. Similarly, the analysis of findings should not be closed within one territorial unit, which is important for research into informality, because it is defined in opposition to the state and thus

10 • Travelling with the Argonauts

a priori ‘condemned’ to methodological nationalism. In calling for a site-less (rather than multi-sited) ethnography, the present work represents an attempt to move beyond the hierarchical and localized concept of culture that has prevailed in the social sciences to date. Following James Clifford’s call for the continuity of ethnographic observation and for a research method that will not divorce the journey from the site (Clifford 1997), in this book the journey is itself the site where human interactions happen and are observed, and not, as Claude Lévi-Strauss expressed it, a necessary evil and a nuisance, one of the ‘vain expenditures’, with ‘the dead weight of weeks or months wasted en route’ (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 17) to the research site. But also, the route of the journey is different, for its endpoint is not always known in advance, at the start of the journey, but realized while following the individual actors. Thus, the route and the site are dynamic, and with each new actor in the network they develop like a picaresque novel. Yet another problem connected with researching informal phenomena is the structure of the academic text. Not only do we have to deal with the verticality of language itself, but also with the vertical structure of presentation, which is imposed by academic standards. The basic difficulty here is how to actually present the large bulk of fieldwork findings, typically collected over a period of several years, while avoiding diachrony and, moreover, without excessive reference to the vertical categories conventionally used in the social sciences. To apply the rules of the RVP in practice, the text has to be written across the material, rather than making an in-depth study with a rich context provided for each case, all presented chronologically and discussed against the failures or achievements of other authors. And although the idea itself is not unknown in the social sciences – flattening the social landscape is recommended by Actor Network Theory – ‘surfing’ on the surface of the social instead of ‘digging’ is not a common practice of academic texts (Falzon 2009). In my case the surface to be described had a depth of up to thirty years, for the period being discussed started and ended before the virtual revolution, inviting diachrony and thus tempting a generous use of historical context. In the present book, the conflict between the naturally occurring diachrony and the necessity of ‘streamlining’ the text in order to preserve at least a degree of horizontal dimension was solved by abandoning chronology and structuring the book as an intellectual journey. The journey starts in the scruffy waiting hall somewhere in western Poland and continues in a logically ordered sequence of six chapters, each discussing one aspect of informality research and describing social reality in the least vertical way possible, that is, with as little reference to standard vertical categories like class,

Introduction • 11

status, power or social capital as I was able to make without rendering the text meaningless for the reader, whose habitus is to perceive the social reality through them. The text represents interdisciplinary research, using ideas from philosophy, linguistics, social anthropology, sociology, economy and human geography. Hence, given the mass of literature in each separate discipline, only the most relevant sources have been chosen as references, and there is no ‘in-depth’ discussion of other authors. This itself is consistent with the requirement in the RVP, already mentioned, to reduce the construction of intellectual genealogies. The purpose of this book is not to assess the work of others but to explore the possibilities of the new theoretical perspective in researching informal phenomena. Thus, Chapter 1 presents theoretical considerations connected with existing conceptualizations of informal social relations in the social sciences generally and (im)migration studies in particular. It discusses the concepts of network and informality and the main problems in applying existing theoretical approaches to research into informal social relations. Following this discussion, it presents in ten simple steps the RVP as a pragmatic solution to the problem of investigating and describing the horizontal dimension of social space. It then discusses the concept of horizontality and positions the RVP in relation to the social theories of Elias, Giddens, Bauman and Castells on the one hand, and on the other hand to the Nietzschean idea of absolute horizontality, the ideas of synchrony and diachrony of the Kazan school of structuralists and the newer social theories which followed Nietzsche’s idea, such as Latour’s Actor Network Theory, Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome and DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory. The theoretical assumptions of the RVP are then applied while interpreting the empirical data from my fieldwork in the remaining chapters of the book. Chapter 2 discusses the methodological aspects of informality research, namely problems of conducting empirical research on informal phenomena, resulting from the logical contradiction in methodology itself. Although informality cannot be researched by formal methods – for, in the very moment of recording informal phenomena, we attribute form to them and their very nature is destroyed – the use of formal methods is required by highly bureaucratized research institutions. The chapter discusses the ethical and institutional problems connected with this requirement and quotes ethnographic cases to show examples of the common faults committed during fieldwork on the informal social activities. In Chapter 3, in turn, examples of successful fieldwork are presented, discussing best practices in fieldwork, finding the ‘right’ networks

12 • Travelling with the Argonauts

and accessing them. The problems of fieldwork on informal phenomena discussed here include practical advice on what to use instead of recording in situ, how to manage emotional involvement, how to endure disturbing stories and how to actually ‘go with the flow’. The examples include a typical day from my fieldwork diary, showing how, thanks to the avoidance of the emic–etic dichotomy, the RVP permits better access to the milieu being studied. In this perspective one is not concerned with hierarchy, therefore the usual power or status distinctions between the members of privileged elites, ordinary people, smugglers and prostitutes do not apply: nobody is considered a ‘sensitive’ case to be approached with particular care, for they all are included in one category, together with the researcher. Chapter 4 discusses the relationship between the informal economy and informal networks. Thus, while informal networks are instrumental for the existence of the ‘informal economy’, they are not restricted to or by the economic activities of social actors. Hence, research into these networks has to go beyond economic activities, as well as beyond the analytical concept of a ‘sector’. The shortcomings of the idea of sectors used in research into informal activities are discussed using examples from my fieldwork. The quoted cases, from the textile industry, building and house care, demonstrate the instability of hierarchies and the blurred boundaries between formality and informality themselves, as well as between ‘occupational sectors’. Exiting the logic of sectors and looking at the whole, rather than analysing the economy segment by segment, the RVP allows the social to be described in a more realistic way, without forcing the researcher to choose between homo economicus and homo sociologus. In Chapter 5 the problem of segmented social space is discussed further, this time with reference to ethnography of informal phenomena, which needs to be open-ended and not constricted within economic systems, zones, countries or sites. While empirical research is usually conducted on smaller units which are strictly defined localities such as vicinity, city, village, neighbourhood or household, thus making it impossible to embrace informality as a continuum, the RVP makes it possible to observe the informal flow of goods, information and services along the links created beyond the boundaries of the territorial units. The cases quoted from fieldwork show social actors with several identities, who are involved in numerous chains of egocentric informal relationships extending beyond the borders of systems and localities. To describe their lived experiences, the limitations of the very concept of a ‘site’ can be escaped by making the ethnographies site-less.

Introduction • 13

The last, sixth chapter discusses the problem of interfaces. Although the RVP seeks to investigate the horizontal dimension of social relations, it does not claim that vertical relationships do not exist. Since formal and informal phenomena do not occur in parallel universes, but within the same social space, and since every social actor has both informal and formal experiences on a daily basis, the relationship between the formal and the informal is mediated on the level of the individual actor. Hence, the interfaces between the two occur in the physical space, the actors’ locus, which makes them traceable. The chapter discusses the loci which are significant for researchers interested in finding the ‘patterns’ in physical space, as distinct from patterns in social relationships. The empirical examples include a description of the Koło trading route and of the Middle Route between Moscow and London, as well as examples of the Yes-Places, in which multiple chains of networks come together. Presenting a pragmatic approach to informality, defined in ten points, as well as empirical data on informal networks, together with practical advice on how to conduct fieldwork on informal social phenomena, I hope that both the theoretical and methodological contributions of this book will be useful for future studies of the horizontal dimension of the social space.

Notes 1. ‘I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse … some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer’, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1974: 223). 2. A virtual community is understood, after Rheingold, as ‘People who use computers to communicate and form friendships’ (Rheingold 2000). 3. The simplistic concept used in the present study is derived from Manuel Castells’ famous but not precisely defined concept, ‘Information Age’, understood as an organizational switch to the technological paradigm constituted around ‘information/communication technologies and genetic engineering’; see Castells 2000: 5–6, 9–10.

e1 The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks Concepts, Definitions and Theoretical Approaches to Informality

If we were to describe the life of Everyman, typifying all the people on our planet, our first claim would be that he is a complex being motivated by a mixture of biological drives, instincts and rational calculations with irrational choices, emotions, fears and desires. We would call him homo apertus, a person who is not closed within a shell but shaped in the process of interactions with other people, a social being driven in contact with others by the need for acceptance and altruism, as much as by competition and selfishness. Our Everyman would not be physically attached to one place, but would be able to move in a horizontal direction, across large distances, and even if he were not a migrant himself, he would be descended from one. The long list of his quotidian activities would include eating, using some sort of hygienic facilities, grooming, dressing up, talking to other people, going to work, working, resting, visiting his family, meeting his friends and acquaintances, taking care of his family, having some sort of entertainment and perhaps spending some time in worship. And although Everyman would live in one of the world’s nation states, most of the activities on this list would be done informally, outside the gaze of the state and outside formal institutions; for people do not necessarily need a formal arrangement to eat, sleep and clean themselves, have intimate relationships, talk to each other or exchange emotions, favours, gifts, food or ideas. Even work and trade in many parts of the world is carried out within a subsistence economy, that is, without any formal arrangement. And yet, when we look at social theory in general, we see that while the formal aspect of the social life of human beings has been extensively theorized, paradoxically this is not

16 • Travelling with the Argonauts

the case for the informal aspect, which has been undertheorized and often mis-conceptualized, as well as misapplied in the social sciences in general and in (im)migration studies in particular. Scholars of the social have looked for patterns and structures, for units closed within borders, for forms they can position, measure and compare to create a hierarchy. In effect, social reality has been theorized as a vertically constructed multiplicity of forms rather than a heterogeneous mixture of informal and formal phenomena. Everyman is thus closed within forms. His relations with other people are conceptualized vertically, neglecting whatever has no form and is therefore not conceivable in terms of hierarchy, status, class and power. And whatever informal activities he might pursue are conceptualized as marginal, inferior or substandard.

Concepts and Definitions In the social sciences, informality is usually understood as an umbrella category for describing everything that happens beyond the control of the state, the currently dominant social form (Hart 1985, 2005, 2006). This concept is wider than the popular definition of informal activities as developed by the economists (Feige 1985, Gutmann 1985, Henry and Sills 2006, Kanbur 2014), but it is still in line with their idea of the ‘informal’, alias ‘shadow’, ‘hidden’, ‘irregular’, ‘submerged’, ‘secondary’ or ‘underground economy’ consisting of economic activities that are not reported to a taxman. Despite its obvious imperfection, consisting in grouping into a single category activities ranging from a housewife cooking a dinner for her family to organized mafia crime (Ferman et al. 1993), such definition has been generally accepted and used by scholars of the social, such as Pahl (1984), Carson (1993), Portes et al. (1989), Guha‐Khasnobis et al. (2006), Hann and Hart (2009), Chen (2012), Richardson and Pisani (2012), Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris (2014) and Routh and Borghi (2016), to name just a few. In the effort to differentiate between quotidian activities and crime, some scholars recommend defining informal activities as a derivative of the state’s regulations and its respective policies (Kanbur 2009). Effectively, a given state becomes the single analytical unit, excluding from analysis whatever might count as informal in another state, which is problematic for those informal social relations that extend beyond state borders, such as informal network chains. These chains are a rare example of horizontal phenomena observable in vertically conceptualized social space. Jeremy Boissevain (1968,

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 17

1971, 1974), who, in researching human groupings, noticed that not all of them are closed or have a structure, described them as non-groups, constituted by open-ended sets of ego-centred relationships. These relationships are not regulated by state legislation, are non-prescribed, are not mandated by culture or institutions and can be of very different natures: the links between the actors engaged in the informal network can be transactional, emotional or a mixture of both, they can be defined by kinship, friendship, love, sex, sympathy or common interest, they can be one-sided or reciprocal (mutual), and they can also vary in scope, intensity and complexity. Some nodes in an individual’s network may be connected by many links, while others have single connections, which, in contrast to impersonal corporate relations, are usually accompanied by some type of affect, ranging from fear to love. The type of relationship in every single link of a network is variable, so that it is impossible to find some repeatable pattern: informal networks flow like a Heraclitean river. They are unpredictable like the synapses responsible for creative thought in the human brain – one cannot be sure whether and when it will occur and what its content will be. Taking Boissevain’s concept as a point d’appui, in this book1 informal networks2 are defined as the endless, open-ended chains of egocentric relationships, which are created and negotiated by social actors in an informal way. The concept of networks used in this book is different from the classic definition in which a network was a closed structure understood as a ‘specific set of linkages among a definite set of persons’ (Mitchell 1969: 3). It is also different from Manuel Castell’s concept of the information network that is powered by information technologies and fitted into a Marxist, conflict-based, vertically constructed theory of capitalism, with a system of power at its core. Castells (2000, 2013) does not distinguish between formal and informal networks, but calls networks a ‘specific form of social structure’ (Castells 2000: 5), while the informal networks described here lack any form and could be called ‘quasi-structures’ at best. Thus, in Castell’s concept, networks are the forms themselves: they are not merged into endless chains of relationships, but are conceptualized as separate ontological beings which occupy definite space, evolve in time and may overlap, but not merge. They are definite organizational structures which control the rules of society through political systems (Castells 2015) and have the power to deconstruct the state, rather than being dependent on its existence. In line with Marxist determinism, Castells’ networks are programmable, project-driven automatons – closed forms rather than open, unpredictable, form-free chains of egocentric relationships. As distinct from the two concepts mentioned above, in my book I am dealing with networks

18 • Travelling with the Argonauts

which are open-ended and devoid of structure. My definition differs only slightly from that of Charles Kadushin (2004, 2012), who, in theorizing informal networks, saw them as a process in which the actors ‘work the system’. Although in practice this means that the actors are working their way around the system, using the very word ‘system’ would leave the definition open to an interpretation that invites back in the idea of structure and the possible dialectical relationship of actors to structures, whereas informal networks are relations of actors to actors. Researching such informal social relations has been obstructed by the hierarchical approach that predominates in the social sciences, in which informality is seen as a micro-level phenomenon, a mere subcategory of formal social activities, usually describing those activities which are not compliant with the law, whether fully or ‘partially’. The prevalence of the hierarchical and thus vertical approach to social space, dating back to the idea of Darwinian hierarchy, is the main factor responsible for the misinterpretation of informal phenomena, for ascribing negative value to the very concept of informality and for transferring this value on to every linguistic entry (term) connected with it, such as the economy, work, activity, association or migration. Characteristically, in conjunction with any other term, the very meaning of the word ‘informality’, which is ‘devoid of form’, is redefined as a ‘form’, although a deficient one. The informal economy is seen as a deficient (pathological) form of the proper, formal economy, informal work as a degenerate form of ‘proper’ work, informal migration as a degenerate form of formal migration and informal networks as a suspicious form of interpersonal relations. Conceptual Dualism The main problem with theorizing informal phenomena is linguistic in nature: informality is defined semantically in opposition to formality. This opposition seems to be responsible for triggering conceptual dualism in the social sciences, in which the formal and the informal have been treated as two mutually exclusive categories marking two separate and mutually exclusive social spaces, conceptualized as two separate ‘realms’, sectors or zones. These spaces are hierarchically organized into two categories: 1) a lower category of informality, understood as a relic of pre-industrial societies in the ‘earlier’ stages of human development, and seen as a destabilizing force, representing the elements of social life that are primitive, backward, disorderly, destructive and chaotic, but that can also be spontaneous, natural and creative; and 2) a superior category of formality characteristic of more highly developed

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 19

societies and understood as their stabilizing mechanism. Formality represents law, order and civilized behaviour conforming to given rules, but it also represents the dominance of bureaucracy, the repression of the individual and the constraining of his or her freedom of expression. It is because of the ‘behaviour’ component that informality has usually been connected with face-to-face contacts, the micro-level of social analysis and individual freedom of expression, consisting mostly in the ability to move outside the obligatory dress code or specific local etiquette, rather than being linked to the very nature of human society. Negative Connotations Thus, in microanalysis, understood as a margin of freedom left for interpreting the actor’s individual role, informality is positively marked for value. However, despite the observation that it can counteract bureaucratic totalitarianism, increase trust, lead to cooperation and stimulate creativity and innovation (Misztal 2000), when it is used as a social category at higher levels of analysis, it is negatively marked for value. While social scientists, especially in the fields of economics and sociology, tend to view it as both a pathology leading to the dysfunction of the economic system and to social exclusion, and a survival strategy which perpetuates the structural status quo of a given society, the state, supra-state bureaucracies and NGOs, they all view it as destroying or undermining labour conditions and therefore as a ‘problem in need of fixing’ through the introduction of new regulations and control regimes (cf. Irek 2016: 245). In sociological and legal macro-analyses, informality is perceived as a dangerous type of social interaction, which, not being regulated by official institutions and rules, may be a ‘threat to fair and just treatment resulting in favouritism, nepotism and patronage’ (Misztal 2000: 18–19). In the current discourse, this negative marking is particularly conspicuous with reference to socialist and post-socialist countries, where informality used to be regarded as a curiosity particular to communism, a social pathology resulting directly from the moral decay and hypocrisy inherent in communist ideology and from the artificial structure of socialist society (Grossman 1977, Brus and Laski 1985, Sampson 1987, Łoś 1990), and is now viewed as a heritage of the ‘wrong’ past and a threat to democracy. As Barbara Misztal rightly observed in her analysis of how the concept of informality has been used in the social sciences, the dualism of formality versus informality hinders the adequate description of social reality, for ‘in many spheres of life both formal and informal aspects co-exist and these multiple relations become too dynamic to

20 • Travelling with the Argonauts

be expressed by the rigidity of dualism’ (Misztal 2000: 8). But since, as already mentioned, conceptual dualism is built into the very lexical term ‘in-formality’, the question arises of how to overcome it without rendering the term itself meaningless. The pragmatic answer is to ‘flatten’ the theoretical perspective and change axioms. Instead of assuming a single, vertically constructed social space or multiplicity of such vertically organized spaces, we should assume one space with a plurality of neutral (i.e. unmarked for value) attributes.

Vertical Approach to Social Space Once we have accepted the definition of social space, which is constantly being produced by social actors, that is, being made of both physical objects and mental processes, we have assumed both its heterogeneousness and continuity. Under our own definition (Lefebvre 1991) social space thus contains both formal and informal phenomena. Yet, there is remarkably little place for these phenomena in the vertically constructed model of social relations, in which social space is understood as a multiplicity of forms. And while it cannot be questioned that the vertical perspective is useful in the analysis of the predominant social forms, such as nations and institutions, its applicability in the analysis of amorphous social phenomena is limited. But since there is no viable alternative, we keep using the vertically constructed model of society, turning a blind eye to the well-known fact that it is based on several assumptions which have either lost their relevance long ago or are rapidly losing it. One such outdated assumption, for example, is the idea of human society as composed of a certain number of homogenous, unique and distinguishable ‘cultures’, each contained within their boundaries, which might interact with one another or not do so at all. Such groups were then classified into ‘primitive’ in opposition to ‘developed cultures’. The epitome of this idea was the concept of the Kulturkreis coined by Leo Frobenius, which fell into disgrace after becoming a part of Hitler’s political demagogy. Surprisingly, a century later, despite criticism of the homo clausus concept, which saw the individual as ‘a closed container with an outer shell and a core concealed within it’ (Elias 1994: 212), despite declarations that we have to move beyond methodological nationalism (Glick Schiller 2009, Amelina et al. 2012, 2014), and despite admitting that ‘it is no longer possible to pretend that the world is made up of discrete cultures’ (Gellner 2012: 4), research methodology in the social sciences is still based on very much the same normative ‘static’

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 21

and ‘sectorial’ concept of distinguishable populations, of societies and cultures delimited by real or imagined borders, that is so deeply rooted in European social and political thought. And although it is generally understood that borders and identities are porous, the vertical concepts live on: human society is still understood as a sum of definite populations, each containing a finite number of people with fixed identities, living in a given territory, forming groups with set and constant characteristics that differentiate them from other groups in a permanent way. As I have noted elsewhere (Irek 2016: 243), ‘one still looks for the boundaries of studied groups [Hernes 2004], for patterns and the specific positions of actors within these groups [Bourdieu 1984, 1985], classifying them according to whether their cultural, social and economic capital is high or low – one looks for anything that can be expressed in numbers and that fits the normative approach’. For the sake of keeping within this concept, it is regarded as good scholarly practice to support any research, even if it is qualitative, with some numerical values, although it is known that these are very rough estimates. Even when we admit for the hundredth time that we should not ‘assume the existence of uniformly cohesive and discretely bounded groups’ (Marin and Wellman 2011: 13), research still comes back to the assessment of values and boundaries. We are trying to open what Barry Wellman called ‘little boxes’ (Wellman 2002) and to move away from the old concepts. We speak of structuring rather than of structured social relations, of flows, transnationalism, interconnectedness, intersectionality, translocality, creolization, hybridization and super-diversity.3 However, we are still bound by their vertical logic, for all these ideas are still developed with reference to a set ‘group’ or series of groups. In this view a ‘flow’ is not something formless and continuous like the Heraclitean river, but is understood as a definite number of resources or ideas being transferred between specific places, numbers of people and positions. Similarly, ‘creolization’ and ‘hybridization’ assume ‘pure’ forms existing prior to them. Intersectionality assumes clear-cut sections situated in specified locations in defined nations. Translocality suggests organization around a definite group defined, for example, with reference to locality or ethnicity. ‘Super-diversity’ assumes the presence of a variety of pure types against the background of nation as a super group. Multiculturalism, finally, assumes clearly definable cultures existing prior to it (cf. Irek 2016: 244), bringing us yet again back to the Kulturkreis. Thus, older vertical concepts are replaced with newer ones, instead of introducing horizontal concepts. Observing amorphous phenomena, Jeremy Boissevain found it problematic to name them, so he called

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the wider networks ‘non-groups’ because they lack the stability and permanence of corporate groups, with a subclass of more tightly knit coalitions of persons with a ‘degree of patterned interaction and organization’ (Boissevain 1968: 550), which he had called ‘quasi-groups’. Although Boissevain himself did later move away from the concept of quasi-groups (Boissevain 1971), starting from his observation, one looks for quasi-structures as regular elements of society, thus producing a logical contradiction by claiming that ‘not regular’ is regular. Such concepts as ‘non-group’, ‘quasi-group’ or the ‘foggy structure’ still refer to the original idea of a fixed pattern (structure) and of a group understood as a recognizable set of elements, for in the social sciences we do not have enough conceptual space for infinity and unpredictability: we are looking for the definable and the repeatable. Whatever is found not to be Fixed, not to be Finite, is still presented as the finite succession of specific events in the vertically constructed social space, defined in mathematical terms and ‘analysed using traditional categories and vocabulary developed in the time of Georg Simmel’ (Irek 2016: 244). And since the Fixed is the Formal, the process of academic knowledge production is as counterproductive for describing everything that lacks form and boundaries as attempting to describe the flight of a butterfly by pinning it to a board.

Anthropology and Researching Informal Phenomena Of all the disciplines in the social sciences, anthropology, with its qualitative methods such as fieldwork with participant observation and informal interviews, with its dislike of definitions, clear-cut distinctions, borders and normative approaches, seems most suitable for researching informal social networks. However, there is no fieldwork methodology and no theoretical perspective in anthropology itself that can embrace informality as a continuum without simultaneously destroying its essence, which rests in both its infinite dimensions and its dialectical opposition to form, as represented by the nation state. Although anthropology, as the name clearly indicates, was developed as a ‘holistic science of man’, it has long lost its holistic dimension and been split into numerous sub-disciplines and ‘adjectival anthropologies’ of different disciplines and geographical regions (Stocking 1984, Fardon 1990), offering no general framework for describing continuity of any sort. As has been pointed out, the meta concepts that are the basic concepts of anthropology, such as culture, identity or community, are criticized for being too general to render the necessary degree

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 23

of utility (Amit 2015). And yet, despite their meta-level, they still are bound to locality. In line with the old tradition of researching the multiplicity of pre-industrial societies, anthropological research tends to split the social into multiple, micro- or middle-range fields, reflecting the cognitive and physical limitations of a single ethnographer, who has to juggle with what David Gellner has called ‘productive and necessary antinomies’: the observation and participation, the face-toface contact and the whole picture, the global and the local (Gellner 2012). Despite an awareness that social relations happen in the wider contextual framework of the world system, and despite the attempts to achieve a more holistic approach to the ethnographic field, such as the idea of multi-sited ethnography proposed by George Marcus (1995), in practice ethnographic fieldwork is usually closed within the limitations of some locality, within a site or several sites, each of them delimited by borders. Because of these limitations, even research within so-called ‘holistic anthropology’ still presents a highly segmented picture of the whole, if any, despite attempts to glue the ‘science of man’ back together again and to reclaim what has been appropriated by other disciplines such as human biology or psychology (Parkin 2007). The ‘holistic approach’ makes it possible to use a single object or an action as an excuse for a long, Proustian journey through possible associations and aspects. However, these are still limited to locality, the immediate surroundings, that is, the specific geographical area in which the object is found or the action takes place, such as a settlement in Australia or Amazonia. In fact, through the re-inclusion of the scientific disciplines, the image of ‘the whole’ has been significantly blurred by splitting every single aspect of a phenomenon into even more layers of description, like passing light through a prism, and by adding even more context, thus increasing the vertical but not the horizontal aspect of descriptions of the social. Also, the technique of re-creating the ‘holism’ by mechanically assembling different articles into one book still leaves us with a selection of several discrete segments of the social. A common denominator is needed, some perspective through which it is possible to ‘synthesize’ at all. Until then, holism remains just an ‘odd-job word’ (Parkin 2007: xiii), a metaphor for inclusiveness (Gellner 2012), while ‘holistic anthropology’ remains just another sub-discipline of anthropology in which the analysis of human activities is still contained within segmented social spaces. Thus, the question is how to create meaningful links across the boundaries of these segments. Tim Ingold’s concept of ‘linear development’ (Ingold 2007, 2013, 2015), which links the man with the ecosystem

24 • Travelling with the Argonauts

by a web of lines or threads, is a major step in the horizontal direction. Yet, it still does not allow the whole to be embraced, but only the part which can be visually represented by a labyrinth of lines. It is based on an organic image, that of a fungal mycelium, which makes it limited, like all other organic concepts, including the Deleuzian rhizome. Unlike the heterogeneous social space, which contains not only the organic and non-organic forms, but also cognitive systems, as well as limitless ideas and amorphous social processes, organic life has clearly defined limes exterior – the border of the given ecosystem. Also, the lines are not formless – in the case of fungi, the metaphor chosen by Ingold (2003: 6), the linear spread leads to a sphere being formed and eventually a circle, known as a ‘fairy-ring’ (Ingold and Hudson 1993). Another problem with applying Ingold’s linear development to informal networks is that a ‘line’ is a mathematical concept describing a sequence of points or elements, hence it excludes the possibility of the simultaneous presence of one actor in two places, an exclusion which, in the era of virtual communications, is no longer sustainable, for a single person can be audio-visually present in a multiplicity of different places and can act there – be perceived by the senses without being organically present – at the same time. Even a theory like structuralism, which seems to fulfil the initial criterion for research into informality by offering a synchronic perspective and universalist approach, is not an appropriate framework, for, apart from being formal per se, in anthropology the notion of ‘structure’ is a pure concept not related to the empirical world (Allen 1990, Kuper and Kuper 2004). Thus, it fails to account for agency, just like the concept of structure in Marxism. Conversely, informal networks are all about agency, about individuals living their lives and continuously moulding and remoulding their social relations. Researching these realities cannot be done within a theory that does not account for the empirical space or that understates the role of agency.

Informal Phenomena and Social Theory Since informal phenomena have a continuous nature, it may seem that they could be described within those theories that emphasize continuity of processes as opposed to static equilibrium. But there is a fundamental obstacle: these theories are still based on the idea of patterns, structures, power relations and diachrony, while it is synchrony and a lack of structure that needs to be researched here. Thus, for example, the Giddensian theory of structuration (Giddens 1984), especially in

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 25

the interpretation of the American sociologists Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische (1998), and as employed in migration research by Ewa Morawska (2001, 2009, 2011), is dynamic, flexible and gives due attention to agency, to the changeability of actors and their surrounding social environments, but it is still not suitable for the analysis of informal network chains in their horizontal dimension. It focuses on the dialectical relationship of actors to structure(s), while informal ­networks are relations of actors to actors. Based on this feature, we may turn to the ‘process sociology’ of Norbert Elias, since his idea of homo apertus, a human being who is not a closed unit with a distinguishable stable core, but who is shaped by the ‘figurations’ that are conceptualized in a very similar way to informal networks, as ‘relationships between people themselves’ (Elias 1994: 480), is very close to the idea of the Nietzschean horizontal man. Indeed, the behavioural aspect of informality was theorized by Elias’s figurational sociology, in which civilization itself was seen as a process, or rather as a complex mixture of processes of formalization and informalization constantly shaping rules of behaviour which constituted social norms (Elias 1994). Thus, for Elias informality consisted in the relaxation of etiquette, for in his view manners and dress code were expressions of the current structure of human relations. Informalization of the ruling code of behaviour was possible due to the increased self-control of people themselves, resulting from their acquired social habitus (Elias 1994, Krieken 2001), which meant that the ‘civilized’ rules of behaviour had been internalized and were being used to reproduce the current social forms, rather than being abandoned in favour of primitive instincts and biological drives. While stressing the behavioural aspect, Elias, and later Cas Wouters who focused his work on informalization in contemporary European states, made no distinction between what was regulated by the state and what was hidden from its gaze: for both authors the dynamics of formalization and informalization reflected power relations as expressed by class ranking in the given society (Wouters 2007: 3–5). For Elias all social relations, including informal ones, are not the results of individual acts but socially constructed processes with patterns that can be understood only in diachronic perspective (Krieken 2001: 353, Hernes 2004: 36). Moreover, at the centre of these processes is an oscillating system of power and status, a flexible but quintessentially vertical intellectual construction starting from the very concept of civilization as opposed to barbarism. And even if, due to the flexibility of the whole theory and the relativity of its concepts, it were possible to fit amorphous informal networks into it, just like Manuel Castells

26 • Travelling with the Argonauts

placed his concept of ‘the network society’ within the theory of Marx (Fuchs 2014: 326), one still would need a separate methodology for researching synchrony (albeit a relative one), a methodology allowing us to cut through the hundreds of habiti of actors interacting in a short span of time, if not simultaneously, as when virtual technology is used. Even Zygmunt Bauman’s eclectic and hence conveniently versatile concept of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000), which has the potential both to give proper significance to the experience of ordinary people and to account for the liquid and sometimes volatile properties of informal networks, cannot be used, for, despite noticing the horizontal dimension of phenomena, it is still essentially a vertical perspective, and it assumes the priority of form (solids) over non-form (liquids). In describing the dialectical relationship of the fluid and solid elements of the social, Bauman firmly places himself within the Marxist logic of base and superstructure, capital and power. In this concept, liquidity is understood very much as in Elias’s theory, as the ongoing process of social transformation – a diachronic rather than synchronic idea, as much as the very concept of ‘modernity’. Moreover, contrary to the horizontal approach, for Bauman liquidity (informality) is an attribute of modernity which destroys ‘the whole complex network of social relations’ (Bauman 2000: 2), which are the solids (forms) that mitigate capitalism. Liquidity dissolves the superstructure, thus leading to the deepening of class divisions, rather than to bridging the differences between different human groups. Bauman described his approach as entering the same room by different doors and looking at things from different perspectives (Bauman in Welzer 2002: 109) in order to explain how the things are transformed, whereas researching informal networks requires looking at multiple rooms from the same perspective and searching for a path through the maze of secret passages and corridors in order to explain how these rooms are connected in a never-ending chain. The sociological hermeneutics postulated by Bauman would require a diachronic description of these connections. Also, Bauman’s postulate of the defamiliarization of sociological concepts, which is aimed at eliminating apriorism from judgement (Bauman 1982: 192), is the right step on the way to achieving horizontality, but it is still not radical enough to escape the vertical lens: whichever way we use them, concepts such as status, class and power will always invite hierarchy. Thus, the vertically constructed, normative concept of society, with its macro-, meso- and micro-levels as represented graphically within Euclidean geometry by three circles neatly contained within each other, its division into structure and agency, its mathematically constructed models and interpretations, is simply not suitable for the analysis of

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 27

informal phenomena. We need to exit its logic, and to do so we need a different theoretical perspective.

Informality and Migration Without such a perspective, the negative connotations of the word ‘informality’, resulting from vertically constructed system of valuemarked social categories, make describing form-free social phenomena problematic. And, since the vertical perception of social space has not only led to the segmentation of disciplines in the social sciences, but also to the reification of particular research subjects within the disciplines themselves, research into informality has been pushed out of the theoretical mainstream, similarly to migration research (Castles 2007: 364). Although we live in the era of exploded mobility, migration is conceptualized as a specific form of social change (Portes 2008), a separate and almost ‘abnormal’ sphere of social existence, as distinct from the default ‘norm’ represented by the established, stationary population. Since no alternative conceptualization has been offered, a scholar researching informal migrant activities has to use not one but two negatively marked categories. Thus, contemporary research on migration in Western states labelled rich or ‘developed’ economies has discussed informal activities as a by-product of migrants’ exclusion, with the unintended connotation of migration being causally linked to informal economic activities (Portes et al. 1989, Sassen Koob 1994, Vasta 2004). Consequently, the vast majority of migration studies dealing with informality are caught up in the swamp of an unproductive debate, having to prove over and over again that ‘informal’ activities are not clandestine crimes that migrants are spreading into the otherwise healthy host society like some infectious illness, but that they represent the survival strategies of actors who have been placed in precarious positions by state policies (Vasta 2004; Jordan and Düvell 2002, Düvell 2004, Richardson and Pisani 2012, Bloch and Chimienti 2013, Bommes and Sciortino 2011). Such works typically contain a disclaimer to the effect that there are no causal links between informal work and migration, yet they do describe the illegal actions of migrants, such as smuggling, crossing borders without papers or informal employment, thus inscribing the unwanted connotation even more deeply into the conventional discourse. And even though, in the spirit of political correctness, the term ‘illegal’ used with reference to migrants has been replaced by ‘irregular’ (Triandafyllidou 2012, Ambrosini 2013, Cvajner and Sciortino 2010), the problem itself persists, as does the linguistic

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one, for, unlike the word ‘informal’, which can be used with reference to a social actor, the words ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’ can describe an activity, but not a person. Another tactic is to try and bypass the problem by inventing new euphemisms intended to depart from the negative value-marking of the terms involved. This, however, gets us no further, for euphemisms such as ‘semi-regular’ or ‘semi-legal’ activities, besides being imprecise in legal terms, still denote inferior activities, implying they are half-developed forms of ‘full’ legality or regularity, much as the words ‘foggy’ or ‘shadowy’ denote something that is inferior to what is ‘clear’ and ‘bright’. Thus, we are stuck in a situation in which we cannot adequately describe migration, which, as a movement from one geographical place to another, does not involve hierarchy and hence is more a horizontal than a vertical phenomenon (Urry 2000, 2007). This has become even more the case in the era of the democratization of societies, cheap transport and the communications revolution, where the new technologies have questioned the certainty that one person can only be in one place at a time (Gellner 2012) – for, thanks to virtual technology, one person can now act in several places at once. Even though we may have opted for grounded theories, we are still stuck with the old categories and old research tools (Urry 2000), ones that have been developed for vertical phenomena and used successfully for a hundred years, but which are not sufficient in the era of liquidity (Bauman 2000, 2007, 2012) and exploded mobility (Hinds 2003, Bommes and Morawska 2005, Castells 2015), where it is often not technically possible to measure the size of a given population, nor even to define the very criteria of belonging (Rosenthal and Bogner 2009, Wimmer 2011). We think in the same old, hierarchical way, as if unaware that the socio-political situation has changed dramatically, with whole economic systems collapsing, causing a wave of migration from the former Soviet Bloc to the West, and resettling millions of people whose backgrounds do not easily render themselves into a hierarchical classification of groups and actors with their high versus low positions and their high versus low amounts of ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1984). In fact, many such migrants classified as being in low positions are much better educated than their counterparts in the receiving societies, although they may formally count as unskilled, and importantly they are no longer Bourdieu’s gens modestes, who know their place in the class hierarchy, but have high aspirations derived from the egalitarian socialist ideology of their home countries (Irek 2011). Moreover, it is no longer enough to say that people migrate together with their family and personal networks (Boyd 1989, White and Ryan

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 29

2008, Ryan 2011, White 2016) that provide them with all kinds of support. Now, in the era of global networks created beyond divisions of kinship, class, nation and ethnicity, it would be difficult to defend the assumption that, while this global ‘cyber-enhanced’ network of networks embraces unlimited numbers of actors across the states of the globe, the migrants have their own exclusionary informal networks, completely separate and independent of the equally exclusionary networks of other migrants and of the networks of the ‘host population’. Indeed, the very division between host and migrant populations is difficult to maintain, for it assumes an ideal, homogenous ‘host society’ of consistently stationary people, which is rather the exception than a rule in the world as empirically experienced. The approach, in which the social spaces of migrant and non-migrant populations are separate and mutually exclusive, which requires special ‘bridging links’ (Granovetter 1973), is one of the biggest methodological problems of migration research, for we should not research ‘informal migrant networks’ but just ‘informal networks’. The network chains are created by actors of different origins, classes, religions and professions, linking all people, migrants or not, in a continuously produced social space that is common to all humanity (cf. Irek 2016). For research into this space, a horizontal perspective would have been the most suitable in order to account for the continuity of the network chains.

In Search of Horizontality in Migration Research One step in the direction of horizontality is to develop perspectives marked by the prefix ‘trans-’, of which the transnational perspective used in migration studies is the most popular (Al-Ali and Koser 2002, Vertovec 1999, Portes et al. 1999, Portes and De Wind 2008, Cohen and Vertovec 1999, Amelina et al. 2014). It is considerably ‘flattened’ in comparison to the national perspective, for it extends beyond the limitations of any one state, making it possible to observe phenomena on a global scale. It looks at particular ethnic minorities, communities and networks, both formal and informal, but simultaneously it creates new boundaries – those between different ethnic groups within the same state. Also, it is still bound by the category of a ‘nation’ (Glick Schiller 2009, Bommes 2005, Amelina et al. 2014), for it produces separate, ethnic group-centred research into particular minorities, diasporas, communities and networks within a given state and their links with another state, known as the ‘home’ country (Cohen and Vertovec 1999, Vertovec 1999, Cohen 2008), but it leaves cleavages between different

30 • Travelling with the Argonauts

ethnic groups in the same nation state, thus implying that ethnicities are mutually exclusive in a given formal environment. Such a perspective does not fully account for the continuity of the social space, but simply represents a different way of cutting the horizontal axis up into manageable bits. This also happens in the case of the cross-border perspective, which again is a significant movement in the direction of horizontality, but it still keeps the ‘border’, the main attribute of the nation state, as the central analytical unit (Amelina et al. 2012), similar to the trans-locational perspective and other new frameworks marked by the ‘trans-’ or ‘inter-’ prefix, like, for example, the notion of intersectionality (Anthias 2012), which still refers back to power and social hierarchy in a given structural context. A viable option in searching for a horizontal perspective is ‘transethnicity’ (Wimmer 1998, 2007, 2011, Werbner 2015), which accounts for cross-ethnic modes of social organization (Vertovec 2007) and thus breaches the cleavage left by the transnational perspective. But then again, with the exception of a very few studies of wide geographical scope (Gladney 1996), it loses the global dimension that is characteristic of the transnational perspective. Despite the category of ‘ethnicity’ being far closer to horizontality than that of the ‘nation’, ‘trans-­ethnicity’ is presently still merely an outcome of studies of locality, rather than a perspective in its own right. To make it workable for the study of horizontal phenomena, the perspective would have to be extended to include multiple transnational spaces. Also, it would have to be further flattened and extended by taking the informal network chains, rather than one or two ethnic groups or a nation state, as the unit of analysis. It could then be conceptualized as a study of social space created by open-ended chains of informal relationships of people across ethnic and national boundaries. Used as ‘units’ of social analysis, trans-ethnic and transnational non-structures conceptualized along the lines of common interest ranging from the intellectual through emotional to the economic would allow us to escape the limitations of the localization that is characteristic of the anthropological perspective, as well as those of ‘methodological nationalism’ – understood, after Herminio Martins, as a default theoretical perspective which assumes that the nation state is the basic unit in the study of the social space (Glick Schiller 2009, Martins 1974). The next step towards horizontality would be to abandon the criterion of ethnicity altogether and to use the category of informality as a research perspective in its own right. Yet, we must be aware that even this perspective would not be absolutely horizontal, for as long as we have to use language as a medium of communication, horizontality

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 31

in absolute terms is not achievable. Language itself is a form, it is hierarchically constructed, and in addition, it contains hierarchical analytical categories. Thus, until we find some horizontal way of academic communication, all we can achieve is restricted verticality. Even Bruno Latour himself, the scholar whose Actor Network Theory and method, all in one, is closest to the idea of horizontality at the moment, could not avoid all vertical elements, for what he discarded as the unnecessary vertical context, he invited back in in the form of thick description (Latour 2005: 134–137).4 One might thus argue that since chasing the unattainable ideal of absolute horizontality is a futile exercise, one could instead follow Karl Popper (van Krieken 2001: 31) and turn back to the sciences of mathematics and physics, which were powerful and sophisticated enough to predict the laws of the universe and proved useful in developing models in Social Network Analysis (Scott and Carrington 2011). One could hope to predict some distinguishable mimetic, to find the same patterns that occur in the physical space repeated in the social space. For example, one could seek to research the multiplication of network links by such mathematical methods, like the theory of fractals, which offers an explanation that is spectacular in its simplicity (Abbott 2001). However, this is not applicable in the present case: while fractals are self-repeating, informal networks are not. We must not forget that the social space contains both the elements of the physical space as well as human ideas (Lefebvre 1991, Bernard 2006), hence, it is qualitatively different from the physical space. Consequently, the algorithms that apply to the expansion of the cosmos do not need to apply to social relations. Yet another theoretical consideration is that mathematical calculations are vertical per se, since they use a system of values expressed as numbers and establish patterns that impose on irregular phenomena ‘adequate regularity conditions’ (Girault 1974: 260), thus contradicting the amorphous nature of the phenomena we wish to investigate. Research on informal social relations must therefore abstain from mathematical methods and be qualitatively different from research on formality, so that phenomena that escape the lens of vertical thinking can be detected and described without destroying their informal nature.

Restricted Verticality Perspective Thus, the existing conceptualizations and modes of investigating social space tend to over-emphasize its formal aspects, which causes problems with research into informal social phenomena. These problems include:

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(1) conceptual dualism, as a result of which the formal and the informal are conceptualized as two separate spaces; (2) the assumption that these spaces are mutually exclusive; (3) the hierarchical ordering of these spaces; (4) ascribing a negative value to the term ‘informal’; (5) the marginalization of informality research and its exclusion from mainstream social theory; (6) vertical apriorism in investigating social phenomena, resulting from the use of vertical analytical categories; (7) the naturally occurring limitations of human perception; and (8) the use of language in the production of an academic text. These theoretical problems are accompanied by methodological difficulties connected with empirical observations of informal phenomena, their informal nature easily being destroyed through the use of formal methods imposed by academic procedures. The aim of this book is to contribute to a better understanding of the horizontal dimension of social relations by presenting a possible solution to the above-mentioned problems resulting from an over-emphasis on the formal aspects of social life. The book presents a new theoretical framework together with methodological guidelines, called the Restricted Verticality Perspective, which has been developed by the author. This perspective makes it possible to conceptualize and investigate informal social relations without the vertical lens. The Restricted Verticality Perspective (RVP) is based on the following axioms: 1. Heterogeneity of the social space, as distinct from polymorphism, its unity as opposed to a multiplicity of spaces, and its continuity as opposed to its segmentation. The formal and the informal are attributes of the same heterogeneous social space that is continually being produced by social actors. These attributes are not mutually exclusive. Thus, social phenomena can have informal and/or formal attributes, which we then use to create analytical categories, but they do not occur in separate spaces. 2. No priority of formal over informal attributes: indeed, as formal phenomena (finite forms) are shaped within the infinite continuum of the social space, they are to be conceptualized as subsets of the informal (form-free) universe, not the other way round. Informality is defined as the total social space minus whatever is controlled by the state or has form. 3. Restricted apriorism: the hierarchical approach in the cognitive schemas is mitigated by analytical terms being controlled for vertical marking (so as to avoid value judgements). 4. Relative synchrony: the research is synchronic rather than diachronic, with time assumed as given and space as variable.

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 33

5. Streamlining: the structure is not an object of the research, hence contextualization is reduced to the necessary minimum. There is no obligation to quote intellectual genealogies (which invite context and increase diachrony). 6. Cartography: since we cannot impose a structure on informal phenomena without destroying their informal nature, in looking for possible patterns we map physical space, which is the locus of actors creating the social space and of the interfaces between the informal and the formal. 7. Interdisciplinary hermeneutics: the function of language is communication, hence the terminology chosen should be translatable across disciplines to facilitate interdisciplinary research. 8. Affirmation of life: the essence of the human condition is the pursuit of happiness and seeking acceptance by other humans, and not only self-preservation, competition, fighting for survival, conflict and suffering. 9. Relational individualism: the assumption that the relations of actors to actors and between the informal and the formal are mediated through individual actors’ negotiations based on common sense, which, as distinct from rational choice, cannot be researched using mathematical methods. 10. Inclusion: the researchers themselves are not excluded from the researched space or from the common-sense principles governing it – there is no etic–emic distinction. The most important axiom here is the assumption of the heterogeneity of the social space, with its implied continuity and infinity, which creates a conceptual space for any amorphous phenomena to occur. Together with the rejection of the mutual exclusiveness of the formal and informal spaces, this assumption makes it possible to re-define the category of informality in relation to the total social space. In the RVP, the informal social space is no longer defined as the part of the social space that escapes the control of the state, but as the total social space minus what is controlled by the state, or has form. This definition instantly re-orders the discursive space by reversing the currently prevailing assumption: the primacy of the formal over the informal is eradicated, and the state is removed as analytical unit, without destroying the informal social space itself. The definition of informality as both hidden from the state and amorphous, which is used in this book, allows for differentiation between the closed concept of the network in the classical understanding of Mitchell, who defined it as a ‘specific set of linkages among a definite set of persons’

34 • Travelling with the Argonauts

(Mitchell 1969: 3), and the concept of open-ended chains of egocentric networks. This definition solves two theoretical problems that trouble studies of informality: a clear differentiation between the activities of the proverbial wife cooking a dinner and organized mafia crime; and the distinction between open-ended chains of relationships and closed networks such as secret societies, corporate networks or cliques, gangs or mafias. Under the old definition, by virtue of not being controlled by the state, such closed networks would automatically fall into the category of informality, despite having form and therefore being structured rather than amorphous, closed rather than open, hierarchical rather than horizontal. In contrast to Nietzschean philosophy, the RVP does not assume absolute horizontality, which is anyway unattainable in the empirical world. The RVP is a pragmatic solution that aims to restrict verticality, but it does not deny its existence, and it recognizes that obtaining an ideally isometric social landscape is as impossible as obtaining an ideally synchronic perspective. In accepting the Cartesian terminology, the RVP accepts both coordinates; but in contrast to current theorizations of social space, which tend to over-emphasize the vertical dimension, the RVP emphasizes the horizontal dimension of social phenomena. It does not exclude nor deny the existence of structure(s), just as the horizontal axis does not exclude the vertical one. The latter is still there, but in keeping the perspective reasonably flat, the RVP assumes that whatever is marked on it is given (fixed). Since the RVP does not research social phenomena as a function of vertical variables, it is able to achieve synchrony, albeit a relative one. For example, if we mark time on the vertical axis and space on the horizontal, we research how network chains develop in space in a given, fixed interval of time (full synchrony would be achieved if it were a fraction of a second). If we could imagine this time interval as a layer of geological rock, we would analyse only the material within this layer (its content), without much concern for how deep are the layers above it. Thus, the vertical axis is still there, but it is prevented from disrupting the continuity of the horizontal flow by introducing a rift, which cuts the flow every time a vertical category or term is used. Nietzsche himself needed no interface between agency and structure, since neither was relevant for his horizontal thought, as he did not distinguish between subject and object. In the RVP the assumption that vertical and horizontal phenomena do not occur in separate universes but in the same social space, implies the existence of crossing points between the horizontal and vertical axes. The RVP assumes that such crossings are the interfaces of the informal and the formal. These interfaces occur on the level of the individual social actors: in their quotidian activities,

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 35

they have both informal and formal experiences. Hence, the interfaces between the two can be found in physical space, the actors’ locus, which makes them traceable. And since in the process of academic conceptualization of the social we want to impose patterns on the phenomena we observe, while informality is by definition form-free, the RVP places these patterns in the physical space, outside the informal social relations. Thus, in researching the horizontal dimension of the social, we stop looking for patterns in the relations of actors to actors themselves.

RVP and Horizontality The dichotomy between verticality and horizontality is understood here as a heuristic device based on mathematical logic and derived from the early structuralist thought of the Kazan school of linguistics. While verticality means the hierarchical ordering of given elements, beings or phenomena based on their value, which can be expressed numerically or descriptively, horizontality means abandoning this classification and flattening the research perspective. Bruno Latour (2005: 16) called this manoeuvre making the social landscape flat (isometric). Such ‘flat landscape’ is then extended ad infinitum along the horizontal Cartesian coordinate. Thus, the very word ‘horizontal’, as used in this book, is derived from Cartesian mathematics, in which the horizontal line is an infinite straight line, with all points having the same y-coordinate. This is distinct first, from the finite, ocular concept used in geography, where the horizon is a circle and represents the exterior limes of the individual’s view; and secondly, from the metaphorical–cognitive concept as theorized by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1977), where the horizon is understood as the context of interpretation, the immediate whole of which the text or interpreter is a part and which is a subject of hermeneutics. Horizontality is understood here after Nietzsche, the father of horizontal thought (Lechte 1994), as the permeability of borders and the instability of difference, including that between subject and object: in horizontal thought there is one, all-embracing life and its affirmation. Horizontal phenomena cannot be valued, expressed in numbers or pitted against one another to form a hierarchy.

Synchrony and Horizontality Versus Diachrony and Verticality Since it is not possible to obtain an ideally isometric social landscape, the pragmatic question is not how to escape verticality, but rather how to

36 • Travelling with the Argonauts

control it. This cannot be done when the two axes of reference are being persistently confused by scholars of different disciplines and trends, arbitrarily attributing verticality and horizontality to different notions. As it happens, the major contribution to this situation came from within structuralist thought, where the idea of ‘horizontal’ research germinated. The early structuralists of the Kazan school of linguistics proclaimed horizontality even before it became an avant-garde philosophical idea of Nietzsche’s, a rival to the popular dialectical thought of Hegel. Polish linguists Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski rigorously applied the tools of mathematical logic to language research. They divided the research space using Cartesian axes: whatever was historical was called diachronic and put on the vertical axis, while on the horizontal axis they placed whatever was contemporary, calling it synchronic. But they were aware that this distinction was not identical to that of ‘static’ versus ‘dynamic’, for, as Baudouin de Courtenay noted, the ‘static’ is just a form of the ‘dynamic’ (Fisiak 1975), meaning that the dynamic is constituted by a sequence of static moments, just as the straight line is a sequence of points. It was de Saussure who, about two decades later (de Saussure 1966), mixed these two pairs of categories after taking over the foundations of structural linguistics from the Kazan school (Godel 1957). While Baudouin de Courtenay demanded equal attention should be paid to synchronic and diachronic research, de Saussure rejected diachronic (vertical) research as represented by the so-called Junggrammatiker, dominant in his time, who were preoccupied with the evolution of Indo-European languages, in favour of synchronic (horizontal) research, which was to be focused on the description (rather than prescription) of contemporary human language as such. In doing this, he failed to recognize that the opposition of static versus dynamic was not the same as synchronic versus diachronic (Fisiak 1975), and he used the horizontal perspective to describe vertical structure. Since at that stage there was direct feedback between the mainstreams of linguistics and anthropology, with social anthropologists such as Boas and Malinowski also researching linguistic issues,5 the problem was transferred to the social sciences. By the time Lévi-Strauss, the main proponent of de Saussure’s teaching in anthropology, had published his Tristes Tropiques (1955), structuralist research in linguistics already had its own eighty year-long history, but it was only two years after Lévi-Strauss’s magnum opus appeared6 that the linguists managed to order their axes of reference. Chomsky’s transformational grammar brought back the rigour of the Kazan school’s concepts of horizontality and verticality:7 it was synchronic in the sense that it did not account for historical development,

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 37

and vertical because it described the development of vertical transformations through different levels of language, from deep structure to surface structure. These useful tools, developed by linguists, have been waiting to be used by social scientists ever since. Using them may also solve other problems, especially those connected with interdisciplinary research, which arise from the lack of linguistic rigour that produces different meanings for the same term across different disciplines. An example is the very word ‘horizontal’, which means ‘radial’ in geography, ‘transcendental’ in philosophy and ‘infinite straight line with all points having the same y-coordinate’ in mathematics. While de Saussure confused the Cartesian coordinates in linguistics, Nietzsche – who is considered the father of today’s horizontal thought (Deleuze 2006), and who also rejected history and verticality of any sort by trying to leave the Cartesian space altogether in order to ‘venture into the open sea’ (Safranski 2003) – brought this confusion to a higher level by encouraging an arbitrary interpretation of space. His classification was not based on synchrony versus diachrony, but on the distinction between ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ elements. Unlike the linguists, Nietzsche considered history to be ‘static’, since whatever was in the past was a fait accompli that could not be changed. His concept deemed history to be vertical (Lechte 1994), together with all the other notions, categories and phenomena that Nietzsche himself considered static, such as the concepts of the actor, cause, the very distinction of subject versus object, the notions of identity, objective truth, idealism, dialectical thought as well as the thought of everyday bureaucratic hierarchies, and the equality of democracy. Despite the apparent verticality of his most famous concept, the Übermensch (Nietzsche 1969), Nietzsche is considered a father of horizontal thought because his idea of dynamic events (as opposed to that of a set structure) rests on the assumptions of subjectivity and the agential role of the creative thought and instability of differences and values (Deleuze 1994). His interpretation of life and the will to live is per se horizontal, for in the philosophy of Nietzsche there is one, allembracing life and its subjective affirmation: amor fati, the love of the human condition (Nietzsche 1982).

Nietzschean Horizontality Nietzschean horizontality, also known as a philosophy of difference, thus consists in the instability of differences and the permeability of all barriers and in his unconditional affirmation of life, with all its

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suffering injustices and contradictions. But although it sounds like a promising perspective for research into informality, it is still unsuitable for that purpose. Following Nietzsche’s radical call for an independent, horizontal thought that dissolves identities rather than making them concrete and for abandoning Cartesian coordinates altogether in search of some completely new system that has been invented from scratch, that is not related to any previous thought and that is unbiased by a priori categories, seems like the proper way to achieve horizontality (albeit a relative one, due to the use of language). Unfortunately, however, it is not applicable in the practice of the production of scholarly knowledge. Apart from the cognitive-linguistic considerations mentioned above, it would be like reformatting a computer and losing all its data every time it is switched off. And since, in line with this concept, every creative thought of the philosopher creates the world anew, there would be no progress in knowledge, progress itself here being an irrelevant concept as much as a sequence. Not only would we lose what humanity has learned so far, but also everything each of the individual philosophers conceived in their previous creative acts. Indeed, it would have to result in a ‘thousand plateaus’ per thinker per day, producing an unmanageable bulk of ideas, which would anyway stop being absolutely horizontal the moment they were verbalized. Also, Nietzsche assumes a closed, cyclical system, whereas the informal social space is open. Its central idea that the world is a game of dice repeated an infinite number of times so that eventually the outcomes are repeated (Lechte 1994) is mechanical, for the reality is replicated, not reproduced, as it is in Elias’s theory. The automatically repeated cycle does not account for agency any more than structuralist or Marxist thought. In the world thus constructed, there is no place for emotions, nor for the common-sense judgements that constantly shape the relations of actors to actors and the interfaces between agency and structure in human society: individual actors do not influence the Nietzschean game of dice, nor Lévi-Straussian structure, nor the Marxian class conflict. But, as Nietzsche did not distinguish between subject and object, agency and structure were not relevant for his horizontal thought. This, however, was consistent within his own system: by the law of his own philosophy, Nietzsche was entitled to do whatever he wanted with space. Poetic licence was written into his horizontality and, through this licence, every creative thought of a philosopher meant entering a desert and creating a new world. Nietzsche’s ideas enjoyed wide reception, and it would go beyond the scope of the present book to describe all the theoretical works he inspired, culminating in the Deleuzean organic concept of the rhizome

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 39

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987) – the epitome of the philosophy of difference and the psychiatrists’ contribution to the social sciences. The rhizome as conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari can be seen as a polythetic arrangement, understood after the structural anthropologist Rodney Needham as a grouping of organisms which share common features, though ‘no single feature is essential to group membership or is sufficient to make an organism a member of the group’ (Needham 1975: 356). It is a multiplicity that can assume different forms, the system from which a unit has to be differentiated and subtracted, and thus the ultimate opposite of the egocentric network. It is described as a subterranean stem … Bulbs and tubes are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic … Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply movement, evasion and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubes. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed’. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 6–7)

As psychiatrists have long been well aware, it is precisely this kind of perception that is achieved when the part of brain responsible for logical thinking and the sense of individual unity is disabled because of damage, be it mechanical such as a stroke, or chemical such as poisoning with toxic substances, including alcohol, as well as magic mushrooms and other drugs. The second option has long been known as a folk wisdom exploited by witches, poets, mystics, artists and philosophers. Manuel DeLanda, who, inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, called for a flat ontology (DeLanda 2006), openly admitted that a horizontal perception can best be achieved in a psychedelic state (DeLanda and MacDonald 1986). Yet, in spite of destroying hierarchies, thus making social space flatter, DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory is not the most suitable for the analysis of informal networks, for it is preoccupied with the re-ordering of forms, understood as ontological entities, leaving the question of non-forms open for philosophical debate. Also, the rhizome itself, despite its obvious attractions for research into informal networks, consisting in its unpredictable shape and in the Nietzschean instability of difference between the forms within the system, as well as between the system and a unit, is not useful here. The very concept of the rhizome as a multiplicity from which a unit has to be differentiated – for the unit as such does not exist by itself – resembles the concept of structure and, on the other hand, that of the Soviet kolkhoz (the collective farm). Hence, it does not fulfil the basic

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criterion of research into informal networks: that of recognizing the role of human agency.

Horizontality Versus Verticality in Actor Network Theory (ANT) If one could remove the vertical axis from the discursive space produced by the social sciences and forget about hierarchy of any sort, one would observe a smooth flow of information, goods, services and emotions along the links between the ‘nodes’. Using such a horizontal perspective, one could concentrate on how the links are actually created, as advocated by ‘actor network theory’ or ANT (Latour 2005). In ANT, horizontality is achieved by eliminating context, as well as by removing the distinction between human and non-human actors, which corresponds to the Nietzschean rejection of the distinction between subject and object, seen by him as the ultimate cause of verticality (Lechte 1994). Leaving aside the consideration that placing people in one epistemological category with animals and objects can be problematic (Collins and Yearley 1992), this specific logical manoeuvre (whose version is anthropomorphism, long known to anthropology and literary criticism) is not applicable to research on informal social networks, defined as ego-centred links between people. Here non-humans are excluded by definition. Unlike non-humans, human actors are capable of creative thinking, they have linguistic competence, and their actions are influenced by emotions. The last is especially important in the context of artificial intelligence: we have to think of a perspective that allows us to differentiate humans from machines. Also, Latour’s idea refers to very specific circumstances, preferably an environment such as a scientific laboratory, office or production site, where the non-human elements (such as bacteria cultures, animals, documents or machines) can be said to ‘act’ and can therefore be included in the network together with the human actors, including the observer. However, in such an environment space is limited, and the ‘acts’ of the non-humans are performed as part of a repeatable series – they are not creative. This is a stable, formal environment in which the observer has unlimited time to describe every single element, including his or her own reactions. But while the fundamental requirement of a scientific experiment (or a bureaucratic procedure or a machine production cycle) is its repeatability – so that if an ANT researcher misses some action, they can come back to the same moment in the next cycle – in the open space the same situation cannot be re-created; the observer

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 41

remains the subjective other, the unanimated objects do not ‘act’ by themselves (except in a natural disaster) and, what is most important, the non-humans do not have their own egocentric networks (as yet). Another aspect which makes Latour’s theory unworkable for research into informal networks is the very requirement of ‘thick description’. This involves slow, ant-like work in the meticulous construction of numerous sets of different records, referring to one and the same situation, which practically excludes the possibility of accounting for the infinite dimension of the horizontal line and makes it methodologically impossible to move across large distances: the physical space has to be cut into workable bite-size units, the smaller the better.8 Besides, despite removing the subject/object distinction, the theory itself is not horizontal in absolute terms, for whether the critics of the so-called ‘linguistic trend’ in the social sciences like it or not, to make any sort of description, be it thick or thin, one needs two things: perception to observe; and language to express. And although one cannot deny the existence of pre- and extra-linguistic forms of communication, such as gestures and signs, these have no pragmatic validity for the actual process of scholarly description: in the social sciences scholars still communicate their findings through verbal expression, as distinct from any form of empathy, ‘affectation’9 or body language and from any musical or pictorial presentation (Ingold 2013). Regardless of whether it is inborn or learned, de facto human perception is at least to some extent vertically constructed (Dumont 1980), for to perceive one entity as different from another, the existence of at least one binary opposition is necessary which is also reflected in the construction of human language. Such an opposition is per se hierarchical and thus vertical.10 The fact is that once we speak of horizontality we are moving within an epistemological space ordered by the Cartesian coordinates, and whichever way we decide to twist them, we will always end up within a space that has both horizontal and vertical attributes. Thus, to emphasize again, horizontality must be understood as a relative concept, for all we can achieve in scholarly practice is restricted verticality.

Controlling the Verticality of Language Unless something is done about linguistic expression, the search for absolute horizontality will remain a futile exercise: as discussed above, since any new system still has to be expressed in language, it will have to use categories which are inscribed within it. In other words, however horizontal or open the system might claim to be, it will always to some

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degree be vertical and biased by linguistic apriorism. It is then pragmatic to adjust the language itself and to find a method allowing its verticality to be restricted by eliminating or at least controlling the use of vertical categories. This can be achieved by applying the tools used by structural linguistics to trace vertical marking in the commonly used terms. These tools can be found within the semantic theory that was developed as a part of Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar (Chomsky 1957), where each word (lexical entry) can be represented as a semantic matrix built of so-called semantic markers (Katz and Postal 1964). These are ‘atoms’ out of which the meanings are composed: different combinations of a small number of these ‘atoms’ create a large number of meanings. The markers have binary characteristics: each marker is either positive (+) or negative (-). Where the marker can be both present and absent, the entry is neutral for that marker, and when it does not apply at all, the entry is unmarked for that particular marker.11 So, for example, a semantic matrix for the word ‘boy’ consists of the following semantic markers: [+noun ^+countable ^+animate ^+human ^+masculine ^-mature].12 In the biological sciences, the marker [mature] entails additional distinctive features, these being: [body cells function, body size and ability to reproduce]; in theology and philosophy, the additional distinctive features are [morality, innocence and purity]; in psychology, [emotional and intellectual maturity] will be relevant; and in the social sciences, the additional distinctive features of the term ‘boy’ are [status] and [power], which, by virtue of implying value, are vertical markers: one can have high or low status, great or little power. Value is an indicator of verticality: it can usually be numerically expressed ranging from low to high or described as negative or positive. Thus, ‘boy’ has a lower position in the biological sciences than a mature person, and in the social sciences too it has a lower status and less power than a ‘man’. Being marked for [maturity, size, status and power], ‘boy’ is clearly a vertical category, so an additional marker [+vertical] can be added to make its verticality visible. Although it is apparently redundant, the additional marker will make it clear that the word must be used with caution: the innocent word ‘boy’ can become a derogatory category. A man placed in the category [boy] will be reduced in status. And indeed, this was done during slavery in North America, where black men, regardless of age, were called ‘boy’. Such a system is used in the basic language of computer programming, where the binaries are represented as 0 or 1 rather than as minus and plus. Using this method, it is possible to develop a set of semantic markers for the terms and categories used in the social sciences that allows one to select for research into informal phenomena

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 43

those categories that are not hierarchical and thus do not obstruct the description of the horizontal flows. The visibility of semantic markers other than verticality will also make it possible to use each term – for example, ‘perception’ – in its original meaning as developed by medical science and then, if necessary, to use discipline-specific distinctive features as additional distinguishers in order to make it workable in other disciplines like anthropology or sociology, without changing its original meaning. This system makes it possible to control hermeneutics, so that the semantic content of each term will no longer be left open to creative misinterpretations by scholars in other disciplines. Once value/verticality is used as an additional semantic marker indicating hierarchy, it becomes visible that the major categories used in the social sciences are vertical, with marking for value particularly conspicuous in those cases in which it can be expressed by natural numbers. Thus, apart from Hierarchy, which is vertical per se, such categories as Level, Status, Position, Density, Proximity, Distance, Power, Capital and Class are vertical by virtue of being marked for low or high value, whereby Capital and Distance are explicitly hierarchical, since they can be expressed in numbers, while the categories State, Society, Nation, Church, Organization, Institution, Prestige, Centre, Periphery, Exclusion, Inequality, Clan, Family, Gender, Religion and Kinship are vertical by virtue of being marked for hierarchy. Not surprisingly, very few commonly used categories are not marked for verticality, these being Role, Function, Ethnicity, Vicinity, Neighbourhood, Community, Dwelling and surprisingly Race, understood as morphological variation within one species.13 Finally, such categories as Culture, Structure, Milieu, Group, Sociality and Network can be defined both ways so that they are neutral for verticality: they can be marked as either vertical or non-vertical. A pragmatic solution here would be to re-write the dictionary of the social sciences by including the criterion of verticality in the definition of all commonly used categories as an additional characteristic. This could be done through a computer programme that would permit a simple function to be added, just as one marks the changes in a text. These ‘verticality-sensitive’ analytical tools could then be used for the investigation of the horizontal ­dimension of social space. Thus, the proposed theoretical approach makes it possible to research informal social relations which cannot be adequately described when investigated through the exclusive prism of vertical concepts. The informality-sensitive perspective is achieved by assuming the heterogeneity of the social space in which the forms are shaped within the amorphous universe (rather than assuming that form-free phenomena

44 • Travelling with the Argonauts

are a subcategory of formal phenomena, imperfect forms or deviations) and by creating a clearly marked, significantly flattened discursive space. The RVP allows us to mediate the overpowering verticality of such concepts as the state, institution, class, status, level, position, upward mobility and capital, by providing a simple system of choosing analytical tools permitting one to view the prescription of verticality for each analytical category. It also allows interdisciplinary research in which there is understanding between the practitioners of the different disciplines, achieved through the same perspective and through the linguistic obligation to use translatable terms and categories across the disciplines involved, as well as across different languages. Such understanding will help us to avoid the situation described by Andrew Abbott, in which bits of theory that are outdated in one discipline are recycled in other disciplines (Amit 2015) and reproduced over and over like fractals (Abbott 2001). Better communication between disciplines will lead to better interdisciplinary research and save scholarship from the post-disciplinary Armageddon prophesied by John Urry (2000), of a world in which all socially relevant knowledge will be produced in private think tanks, away from academic disciplines and their rigour. Unlike the normative approach of vertical theories which favour form and use the same analytical concepts in describing form and non-form alike, the Restricted Verticality Perspective will allow researchers to embrace human life in its horizontal dimension, understood as a continuity of human experience, together with its central figure, homo apertus. However, this is not the corporate homo apertus defined by the economists in studies of entrepreneurship as a whistle blower who can notice potential hazards because he defies the rules of the group (Hoogenboom et al. 2013), but the Eliasian open man, a complex human being, a mixture of selfishness and altruism (Davis 1972), an individual governed as much by rational choice as by common sense and by irrational choice, a human being with unpredictable emotions, sentiments and erratic decisions, and above all a social actor, that is, one seeking acceptance by other humans and therefore being open to their needs.

Notes  1. This chapter includes certain passages originally published as part of Irek 2009. ‘Black No More: Towards a New Theoretical Framework in the Studies of Social Space Connected with the Informal Economy’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online 1(2): 207–25. I am grateful to the editor of the journal for permission to reproduce these passages here.

The Restricted Verticality Perspective in Researching Informal Networks • 45

 2. For the benefit of the reader, to help differentiate between the popular concept of informal networks and the one used in this book, I am using the term ‘informal network chains’, over ‘informal networks’ although the word ‘chains’ is here redundant.  3. On structuring social relations, see Blau 1994; on flows, Urry 2000, 2007, Scott and Carrington 2011; on transnationalism, Vertovec 1999; on interconnectedness and intersectionality, Anthias 2007, 2012; on translocality, Goodman 2006, Freitag and von Oppen 2009; on creolization and hybridization, Keith 2005; on super-diversity, Vertovec 2007.  4. This is a different concept of thick description than that of Geertz (1973), understood as a contextualization, which, according to Latour, is the cause of misery in social sciences.  5. Boas, for example, made the very important linguistic observation that the basic unit of human language is not the word but the sentence. This became an axiom for the later TG (transformational grammar) linguistic model developed by Chomsky. See Fisiak 1975. On structural thought in American linguistics and its relation to social sciences (the Sapir versus Bloomfield debate), see Lyons 1970.  6. Although for anthropologists Lévi-Strauss’s most important contribution is Anthropologie structurale (1958), known in English as Structural Anthropology (1963), for the general public the author is best known for his autobiographical Tristes Tropiques, which sums up his experience and was published in 1955, whereas Chomsky’s ground-breaking Syntactic Structures was published in 1957.  7. American linguists were influenced by the Kazan school via the Prague School, as represented by Roman Jakobson; see Fisiak 1975.  8. The ‘cutting of the network’ is thus done by the researcher. This is a different situation from that described by Marilyn Strathern, where the networks are cut by the actors/actants themselves; see Strathern 1996.  9. For an exemplary description of affectation, see Navaro-Yashin 2009, 2012. 10. Dumont 1980, Chomsky 1957, Lyons 1969. An obvious criticism here would be that the binarism is only a structuralist assumption in linguistic analysis, not the only way of describing language. Yet, this assumption was based on empirical findings, which cannot always be said of other theories. Also, withdrawing from the very assumption on which computer language is based does not seem viable in the present era, especially given that no alternative system has yet been proposed. 11. The system proposed in the present chapter is different from the original, which had to be modified in making it simple. 12. Fisiak 1975. To mark a matrix, square brackets are used in mathematics, logic and linguistics. 13. The most unfortunate concept humanity has ever known, which Ashley Montagu rightly called the greatest error of our time (Montagu 1945: 1), is horizontal by being value / sequence / hierarchy free, whereas it is the colours used in the description of race that are explicitly marked for value, their value ranging from [white] as the maximum amount of light down to [black] as the minimum.

e2 Empirical Research on Informal Social Phenomena and the Limitations of Formal Methods

Formality and informality have so far been conceptualized and researched as two separate social spaces. However, both theoretical and empirical research on these spaces has been conducted using the same methods and the same analytical categories, making empirical research into informal activities extremely difficult, especially in the era of the bureaucratization of academia and the formalization of academic rules for research. The basic problem has been a logical contradiction in methodology itself. That is, informality cannot be researched by formal methods, for in the very moment of recording informal phenomena, we attribute form to them. They instantly become formal, their very nature being destroyed (Henry 1993, Henry and Sills 2006), so our observation is distorted and becomes as relevant as if one were to research the habits of deep-sea fish by taking them out of water. To avoid such contradiction, ideally the research should not rely on written sources. This, however, would exclude all documentary analysis, which is problematic anyway, for the records of activities hidden from the state are incomplete or non-existent, making it impossible to achieve accuracy in quantitative research. Therefore, as scholars studying the informal economy are well aware, all numerical data are estimates made for the purposes of orientation (Tanzi 1982, 1999, Salt 2005, Salt and Hogarth 2000, Williams and Windebank 1998, Buehn and Schneider 2012, Triandafyllidou 2012, Williams and Schneider 2016). On the other hand, access to actors pursuing informal activities, which under current definitions are activities hidden from the state, is practically blocked by the formal requirements of highly bureaucratized research institutions (Katz 2006, Calvey 2017),

Empirical Research on Informal Social Phenomena • 47

which demand the same procedures to be followed in research with human participants regardless of academic discipline1 and of whether the activities in question are formal or informal. There are no special provisions for research into informal activities which would take into account that: (1) informality is destroyed in the moment of recording it; (2) the hidden nature of informal activities makes it difficult to find potential informers; (3) it is very difficult to obtain comprehensive data from the actors involved, who often refuse to talk about their secrets or give false information on purpose (Gutmann 1985, Irek 1998, 2016, Girtler 1990, 1991, Coletto 2010). On this ground, even such practical solutions like ethno-surveys (Massey 1987, Portes and DeWind 2008, Gold and Nawyn 2013), respondent driven sampling (Tyldum and Johnston 2014) or purposive sampling (Richardson and Pisani 2012), despite their remarkably wide scope and low refusal rate, do not guarantee the obtaining of truthful data from those respondents who have agreed to participate in the research. Yet another consideration here is the discrepancy between actors’ subjective perceptions and social reality, as well as between what they say and what they actually do (Irek 2011, Garapich 2012). Also, the concept of sampling is by definition not consistent with the informal nature of the social phenomena being researched, and therefore this standard method of research cannot be expected to create credible data here, for one cannot expect regularity in what is amorphous. Therefore, a sample, regardless of its size, has no representative value (Miller and Tewksbury 2010). Moreover, the concept of a ‘group’, itself a form with structure and boundaries, does not apply to those social relations which by definition are devoid of form. It is thus not the best analytical unit for investigation of the horizontal aspect of social relations, and one therefore cannot speak here of a ‘representative group’. In the case of informal phenomena, statistics based on representative data cannot be trusted, any more than demographic calculations, sophisticated algorithms and generalizations expressed in percentages and made on the basis of as few as fifteen interviews, often conducted through an interpreter. Given that, on top of these limitations, the information obtained from these fifteen unrepresentative actors may very well be false, the reliability of such data is limited. Yet, these are precisely the data the political authorities are looking for: numbers and statistics to shape the political scene and popular opinion (Düvell et al. 2010, Triandafyllidou 2012).

48 • Travelling with the Argonauts

Between Detachment and Identification: Relation of Observer to Observed What remains as a workable research method is a thick description made on the basis of social anthropology’s favourite method: ethnographic fieldwork with participant observation. But fieldwork alone does not guarantee that reliable information will be obtained: to be successful, the researcher must be able to find the right balance between detachment and identification, the two opposing approaches that ethnographers have traditionally been faced with.2 One has to choose between two intellectual standpoints: keeping a formal distance from the actors one is researching in order to guarantee scholarly objectivity of judgement; or immersing oneself in the milieu being researched and dissolving all barriers to the extent of losing one’s own scientific goals. While placing oneself in a different epistemological category from the researched actors has been regarded as a key virtue in conducting empirical research, ‘going native’ has been considered the least desirable, disqualifying one as a scholar. But then, as many inexperienced ‘fieldworkers’ have learned the hard way, keeping one’s distance can lead to exclusion from the field, as shown by deterrent examples from my own fieldwork, which I describe below. Thus, as mentioned in the introduction, my earlier research on informal networks was carried out by means of participant observation, including total immersion in the milieu, as well as numerous informal interviews, that is, interviews which are not structured, with questions not being asked in the same environment and the same sequence, but recorded post facto, without the formal consent of the interviewee, as well as group discussions, and it was documented in a series of unstructured notes and photographs. This was an intuitive, spontaneous, common-sensical and highly disorganized method, which, according to George Stocking, was characteristic of the social anthropology before the 1960s (Stocking 1984: 8). It had allowed me to gather a large bulk of materials and to obtain considerable knowledge about the functioning of the informal space. However, I was aware that this mode of knowledge acquisition was not considered ‘academic’ and would stand no chance of being accepted by contemporary research institutions, which understand a research activity as ‘a closely-defined, project-based, time- bounded programme of work with a clear plan, statement of objectives and method of working’ (Spicker 2011: 13). Thus, when Georg Elwert, a professor of ethnology in Berlin known for his fieldwork in Africa (Elwert and Fett

Empirical Research on Informal Social Phenomena • 49

1982, Elwert et al. 1983) and later the author of a German manual on fieldwork under a descriptive title loosely translatable as Fieldwork: From Literary Reports to Methodologically Organized Quantitative and Qualitative Research (Elwert 1994, 2003), commissioned me to do ‘proper’ academic research on the ‘informal networks of foreigners in West Berlin’, I felt obliged (not that I was asked) to conduct the fieldwork using standardized methods, in accordance with the rules of academia and in particular the institute of ethnology I then represented. Influenced by early German anthropology, I firmly believed that scientific objectivity, consisting mostly in emotional detachment from the ‘object’ of research and in recording on tape whatever I could, was imperative for any academic research. In that context, I was particularly impressed by the principle of ‘icy enthusiasm’ established by Franz Boas, who was trained as a scientist in the field of physics and conducted his first anthropological research on Baffin Island (Cole 1984). Importantly, this strict, positivist method was not a goal in itself, for it was developed for one great purpose: the service of humanity, rather than knowledge for its own sake. With this grand goal in mind, I put myself in the epistemological category of the observing subject, as opposed to the category of the observed others, who, by virtue of being separate ontological entities from myself, automatically became my research objects. The subject/ object distinction therefore did not consist in the grammatical difference between humans and non-humans but, in the good Kantian tradition, the distinction between the subjective mind and the rest of the world, the thinking ‘self’ experiencing everything which is ‘not self’ (Brook 1997). As already mentioned, the research started before the current ethical regulations had been put in place, so at that time using the term ‘research object’ with reference to people was not yet regarded as unethical. Also, the subject/object distinction adequately defined both the distance between the researcher and the actors who were to be described, as well as the hierarchical relationship between the two: the scholar and the ‘ordinary’ person. But even after the term had been scrutinized and the linguistic distinction between non-human objects and human subjects had become mandatory, the epistemological ­cleavage – the distance between the two and their hierarchical relationship – remained the same. Paradoxically, in research on informal activities, the person described as a ‘research subject’ can be still deprived of subjectivity when defined as vulnerable, that is, ‘lacking the ability to make personal life choices, to make personal decisions, to maintain independence, and to self-determine’ (Moore and Miller 1999: 1034), thus being deprived of agency and reduced to the position of a case to

50 • Travelling with the Argonauts

be described ‘in a sensitive way’, while the observer remains cast in the role of the powerful other. Assuming vertical thinking and placing myself in a different epistemological category from that of my research ‘objects’ proved to be the basic mistake of my new approach to fieldwork on the informal phenomena I was going to study. In my pre-conditioned academic bias, combined with my admiration for empiricism and for the methodological discipline of positivist thought,3 I rejected my earlier, natural approach4 and refused to follow the common-sense observation that, since the informal was different from the formal, it should be researched by different methods. But then, like all those who believe in the exclusionary relationship between common sense and academic knowledge, I believed that following common sense would lead to me failing to maintain academic standards. Thus, based on the academic standards of the time, I decided that the most objective way of conducting my fieldwork would be to interview the actors, recording everything on tape. For this purpose, I borrowed from my friends a solid German tape recorder, the size and weight of two standard building bricks, with a separate massive microphone to be stuck right under my research ‘objects’ noses, as well as spare tapes. I could not literally put my tent in the middle of the village, as Malinowski did, but nevertheless I followed his rules when, as a white man in the wilderness, he was supposed to maintain the standards of Western civilization by wearing an appropriate costume for the job and behaving appropriately at all times.5 To emphasize my academic standing and legal status in Berlin, as opposed to the ‘low’ standing of my informants – ‘savages’ by virtue of the clandestine character of their activities and their lack of legal status in Germany – I chose a formal, masculine look popular with Berlin’s fashionistas, which consisted in a borrowed leather trench coat, black leather boots with flat heels called oficerki bought in East Germany and a ‘Humphrey Bogart’ hat, which I found in a funeral parlour back in Poland. I took my office briefcase and walked into the streets of Berlin in search of good interviews.

Formal Methods in an Informal Setting: Empirical Examples Case 1. How Not to Interview People in the Street Only fifty miles from the Polish border, West Berlin, which was visafree for tourist purposes, was a popular destination for Polish petty traders, smugglers and informal workers, the only obstacle being that

Empirical Research on Informal Social Phenomena • 51

the passports of Polish citizens were kept at the local police station, so not everybody was allowed to travel. The situation (Irek 1998, 2011, Kochanowski 2010, Stola 2012, 2016) changed dramatically after the introduction of freedom to travel and the opening of Poland’s borders in January 1989, when large numbers of Polish citizens aimed for West Berlin,6 which was conveniently linked by cheap trains and a highway. The ‘tourists’ aimed to sell whatever they could ship from Poland in the so-called ‘Polish Markets’ or on the streets and to buy often large quantities of goods for sale back in Poland. One subgroup here were the illegal workers, who supplemented their salaries in this way. The favourite venues of the ‘tourists’ were places near the ‘Polish Markets’ and the main streets in Charlottenburg, an elegant district in the centre, where they made themselves very visible. Tired and unshaven after the journey, the men dressed in blue jeans or jogging suits, the women in the same, but accompanied by high heels and colourful plastic jewellery, they shouted to each other in Polish, picnicking and urinating on the lawns, crowding in front of cheap shops, blocking the passage for ordinary pedestrians and taking all the available parking spaces for their cars and coaches, thus provoking unfriendly reactions on the part of some of the local residents. My first official encounter with the people I then called my research objects (as distinct from myself – the subjective ego experiencing the reality in a structured way) can be described as a success only in comparison to the mission of St Adalbert, who was sent in medieval times to Christianize the heathens in today’s Pomerania, only to be chopped up into pieces pretty soon after his arrival. Thus, I started my interviews from the Aldi shop nearest to where I was staying, one of two in Kantstrasse, which at that time the local residents called Warschauerstrasse or Warsaw Street by virtue of the large numbers of Polish traders visiting the cheap electronic shops, conveniently situated in proximity to the (in)famous Zoo station, at that time the main railway station in West Berlin, with a direct connection to Poland and friendly West German customs officers in situ, where they could obtain a stamp that allowed them to redeem the VAT on the same journey. On weekdays and at night there was always a long queue blocking the pavement in front of the Aldi shop, which I recognized as an opportunity to make some good interviews. I approached the queue, stopped, took out my tape recorder from my elegant leather bag and asked the last person in the queue for an interview. He was a well-fed male of around thirty, unshaven and smelling of sweat and beer, dressed in blue jeans and startling white brand new trainers, with greyish white socks and a grey V-neck pullover with a black geometric design in the

52 • Travelling with the Argonauts

front, made in Turkey and sold in the cheap shops near the Zoo station, worn over a creased blue shirt. ‘Excuse me, sir, would you give me an interview?’, I asked, struggling with the tape recorder. I was talking in pompous, elegant Polish meant to stress my moral superiority over the shadowy creature I was going to interview. ‘Interview?’ His facial expression indicated that he probably would have been less surprised if I asked him for his kidney. ‘What do you want this interview for’, he asked, nervously looking around, most probably looking for an escape route. ‘I am a sociologist. I work for Berlin University and I am doing sociological research on Polish smugglers!’ I said proudly, putting the egg-size microphone under his nose. ‘What smugglers? I don’t know any smugglers. You know … We are all decent people from a poor country. We are just … well … buying this and that for our private use!’

This was not running to my carefully planned and memorized interview scenario. I knew from my previous, informal observations (and judging by the number of big empty bags he had on him) that this was a bold lie, and I was quickly thinking how to force him to tell me the truth when I spotted a group of three Polish men emerging out of Aldi, carrying perhaps a carload of cheap cans of beer, still factory-packed, and about ten huge, red, white and blue checked bags full of other goods between them. ‘You must be joking, sir. Please look at them. How could that ever be for private use? Why don’t you tell me the truth, sir, so that I can record it?’ Then a big man in front of him turned around. ‘You, man, don’t you talk to the bitch! You hear?! The socialist! Surely she is a bloody kapo from the security services! ‘Turn off that f…ing machine and f… off you bitch’, said another, pointing to my tape recorder and making a move in my direction.

He used the wrong form of ‘f… off’ for this context, which should have been ‘spier…’ rather than ‘wypier…’ because we were not inside a building, unless he considered the pavement his zone, which he obviously did. But this was no time for linguistic niceties, nor for a critical appreciation of his behaviour as a sub-cortical mechanism of survival in which a person in a situation considered dangerous experiences a boost of adrenaline, which causes aggressive behaviour or quick escape. My own survival mechanisms chose the second option, and as I was running back home, having lost the borrowed microphone, I learned my first lesson: for research into informal activities, flat shoes are much more practicable than high heels. This knowledge proved very useful

Empirical Research on Informal Social Phenomena • 53

when I had to run more than once while documenting the smugglers’ journey by taking pictures at railway stations, which in Poland and the German Democratic Republic were classified as military objects with a strict prohibition against taking any photographs. To act ‘natural’, I often asked actors to take my picture against something, which proved a good strategy, but then I chose to take pictures in the form of slides, which at that time in Poland was considered the next best thing to moving pictures; and since making copies of these was then time-consuming and expensive, I made none. This was another big mistake: the whole set of photos of the informal networks of foreigners in Berlin, as I followed them on their journey through the East German and Polish borders, was later lost by one of my publishers. The second lesson I learned that day was when I entered the flat where I was subletting a room. Upon seeing me, my host, an elderly German lady who remembered both World Wars, exclaimed: ‘For God’s sake, Małgorzata, why are you dressed up like the Gestapo!’ Thus, my carefully chosen costume proved to be a major step too far in emphasizing my status in relation to the subjects I was researching, for it played on the deepest Polish and German stereotypes of power relations and scared my potential informants, making them feel uncomfortable and putting me in physical danger. Therefore, still in line with the imperative of scientific objectivity, achieved by placing oneself in a different epistemological category to that of the observed, I changed my outfit into a nice, feminine style, with an elegant but genuinely fake ‘Chanel’ costume, handmade by a Polish seamstress from fabric imported straight from Turkey and sold in Poland on the open market in Warsaw, called Bazar Różyckiego. I also invested the sum, exorbitant for a Polish person, of 35 German Marks or about 17 dollars – roughly the monthly salary of a teacher in Poland – in a cutting-edge compact voice recorder, the size of my palm, with inbuilt microphone. Case 2. Effort and Risk for No Gain: Formal Interviews in a Train Full of Smugglers After the failure of my attempts to conduct research in the street, I decided to go for an easier environment in which it was more natural to talk to people. The obvious choice was a train going from Berlin to Poland, when, in the absence of other distractions (at that time there were no mobile phones), people had no choice but to talk to each other and hopefully to me, as they did before, when I was just observing them. The train in the direction of Warsaw, Poland, was descriptively called ‘The Smuggler’ or Przemytnik after its main clientele.7 When the same

54 • Travelling with the Argonauts

train came back in the morning, it was called ‘The Worker’ or Robotnik. As distinct from the train called the Berolina, which departed midafternoon from the Zoo station in West Berlin, the Smuggler departed around 9 pm from Lichtenberg station in East Berlin and headed to Warsaw. Originally, its passengers were mainly Polish workers posted to East Berlin on contract. Their labour was significantly cheaper than that of East Germans, but they still earned much more than in Poland, where living standards were significantly lower. To increase their salaries, they bought the greatest possible amounts of East German goods they could handle, transported them to Poland, sold them for double the price (at least double; it could just as well be five times as much), bought goods that were cheaper in Poland, brought them back to Germany and sold them through networks of acquaintances for double or triple the price to East German workers and contract workers from other countries, like Vietnam and Mozambique, who were working in the same factories and who lived in workers’ hotels, as well as foreign students from socialist countries in Europe, Asia and Africa who lived in student dormitories. Then, for double the sum, a double amount of East German goods was bought and shipped to Poland. Although one had permission to shop in East Germany if one worked there, it was only within prescribed limits. Each transport had to be itemized on a special card or Ausfuhrkarte that Poles called the Smuggler Card or Szmuglerka: whatever was above the limit was then hidden in the walls of the compartment, corridor and even the train’s toilet. In the 1980s, after US sanctions were imposed on the socialist government in Poland, the shortage of goods in the country became so acute that people queued at railway stations to buy anything from the smuggling workers that could then be exchanged or re-sold. It was at that time that the train obtained its name. In 1989, after the fall of socialism, Poland’s borders were opened, but the East German borders remained closed, and the original smugglers became a minority in their own train, outnumbered by smugglers travelling in transit from the West. However, instead of fighting for territory, these two apparently different groups immediately reached an understanding and cooperated smoothly in outsmarting the customs officers of the two countries. To make the most of the opportunity offered by the hundred-mile journey through East Germany and a part of Poland, which could last anything from four to twenty hours, I prepared questionnaires for the shy and for those I would not have time to interview. Apart from the standard demographics, it contained eloquently worded questions in formal Polish about the motives for performing semi-legal economic activities, the frequency of travel and the average profit from each

Empirical Research on Informal Social Phenomena • 55

journey. I planned to go into all compartments, present myself as a Polish scholar working in Germany, avoid the word ‘smuggler’, which could cause an allergic reaction, then guarantee anonymity to my respondents, after which I planned to distribute leaflets and collect them afterwards on the Polish border. However, this was exactly the information the customs officers in eastern Germany and in Poland were looking for, so again, despite my nice outfit, I put myself in a highly suspicious position in relation to my research ‘objects’. Fortunately, the train was too crowded for me to distribute the leaflets in all compartments, so I did not put off too many people. Needless to say, nobody filled in the questionnaire, and those who took it usually left it on the floor under the seats. It took me several journeys to confirm beyond all doubt that the formal interview formula was simply unsuitable for an environment in which economic and emotional success depended on secrecy. Presenting myself as an outsider, and looking like one, I was depriving myself of the benefit of trust, through which the passengers on the train were linked while facing the perils of the journey. On each journey I first tried to interview all the persons in one compartment, possibly two to three of those standing in the corridor and then those in another compartment, after which I would return to my own compartment and talk to a chosen passenger sitting opposite. Of all these attempts, only the encounters with people in my compartment and in the corridor were relatively successful, and only in the sense that people were talking to me at all. However, it was impossible to learn anything of interest. An average interview went like this: ‘Hello, I am a sociologist and I would like to make an interview with you’. ‘Socio? What? Well, why me? Ask somebody else. There are so many smugglers here (on the train). I travel only casually. Besides, I must look for my brother-in-law’.

Then the person I was trying to interview would leave the compartment in a hurry, before I even had a chance to take out my tape recorder, to come back only after the Polish customs control. The explanation ‘I must look for somebody’ was considered a polite way of removing oneself from unwanted or dangerous company without offending or irritating those who were deemed dangerous, such as thieves, skinheads, ‘Gypsies’, people with infectious diseases and the secret services (kapusie, or kapo). Like all passengers except myself (I had only as many bags as hands, while the rule among the smugglers was as many heavy bags as limbs plus a handbag across the shoulder), those

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I tried to interview had a considerable bulk of luggage indicating their true intentions. If a passenger was a solitary woman, she would most certainly be a cleaner and have two medium-size zipped bags of light synthetic material plus at least four plastic bags with goods from cheap stores near the train station, which she would acquire on her way, plus one handbag hanging over her shoulder. The men usually travelled in groups (males only or mixed) and the number of pieces of luggage between them was beyond human perception. After the ‘interview’ was over, the remaining passengers would sit in their places, showing signs of nervousness and too frequently going out to the corridor ‘for a cigarette’, even if they did not smoke. To document this reaction, I decided to take out my voice recorder discretely before starting the interview next time, which proved to be a very risky move and caused open aggression on the part of a group of drunk men in the compartment. I had to throw the recorder away through the window to prove my innocent intentions, after which I hurriedly left the compartment and, as I escaped to another carriage, I heard angry voices behind me: ‘We’ll throw such bitches off the train’. Since ‘socio’ obviously did not go down to well with people because of its connotations with ‘socialism’, I decided to present myself as ‘ethno’. A typical interview then went like this: ‘I am an ethnologist from Berlin University and I would like to do an interview with you’. ‘Ethnologist? What on earth is that?’ ‘Well, one describes the life of exotic people. Like, for example, the famous Polish ethnologist Malinowski described the life of people in Oceania’. ‘The same Malinowski that wrote that sex manual?’ ‘Yes, if you mean The Sexual Life of the Savages in North West Melanesia’. ‘Well, we don’t have sex on this train, that’s for sure! We’re normal people. What do you need this interview for?’ ‘I am writing a book on travellers on the Smuggler train’. ‘Then write that we are normal people of good character’.

At this point the others would join in the conversation, and the interview would become more of a group discussion. ‘Yes, write that we trade just a little bit, so that we can survive at all. Times are hard: there is crisis, unemployment, inflation…’.

The discussion always turned to the economic situation in Poland, and people in the compartment talked simultaneously, complaining about the nouveaux riches, capitalists and all ‘those thieves’ (political elites).

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I had to let them talk for a while and to interrupt the discussion to continue my interview at all. Then I tried to get some ‘solid’ data: ‘How often do you travel?’ ‘Only once, this time. This is my first and last journey’.

This was the standard answer, just as there was a standard reply to the customs officer’s question: ‘Do you have anything to declare?’ One had to reply ‘nothing’ in a steady voice, looking the customs officer straight into the eyes, even if one had ten bags of ‘nothing’ weighing half a ton. I would continue: ‘How much is the profit on such a journey?’ ‘Oh, it’s hard to say; actually it’s not that profitable. Myself, I do not have so much from this’.

Bearing in mind Evans-Prichard’s first experiences of his fieldwork with the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1940), I would not give up that easily and pressed for some basic information on their professional backgrounds and at least the name of the place they lived, but just like the Nuer, they would never give a straight answer. One person whom I knew had a ticket to Kutno said he was from the vicinity of Poznań (the two cities are 200 km apart), and so on. Moreover, after such a session nobody wanted to continue a relationship with me, and even if we accidentally met later, the person would avoid my company. This way I managed to put off at least twenty regular passengers before I gave up this futile effort, resigned from using any formal methods and solemnly swore never to use them again when researching informal phenomena. My experience was not very different from that of another novice in formal fieldwork, Zora Neale Hurston, a black student of Franz Boas, who was sent straight from her university in the north of the United States back to the south to research local black folklore, described in her autobiography: The glamour of Barnard College was still upon me… I knew when the material was all right. But, when I went about asking, in carefully accented Barnardese, ‘Pardon me, but do you know any folk-tales or folksongs?’ the men and women who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores looked at me and shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around there. Maybe it was over in another county? Why didn’t I try over there? I did and I got the selfsame answer… Oh, I got a few little items. … I stood before Papa Franz and cried salty tears. (Hurston 1942: 182–83)

It was only after she abandoned scholarship and came back as a local girl that she was eventually able to participate in the secret hoodoo

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rituals and to gather a unique collection of folk stories, Mules and Men, of which she wrote: ‘I had to go back, dress as they did, talk as they did, live their life’ (Borntemps 1972: 212). A decade later, yet another student of Boas, Paul Radin, who was researching working-class migrant Italians, made an equally surprising discovery: he was working in a team in which the qualified anthropologists appeared to be making poor interviews because, being educated, they could not establish an emotional link with ordinary people, while their assistants, who had not been educated in academia, were ­collecting quality materials (Radin 1970: 5–6).

Choosing the Right Role in the Field: Problems with ‘Melting in’ and Possible Mistakes to be Avoided Thus, inspired by Hurston’s true story, in order to reunite with the Polish travellers, I chose to present myself as one of them, which was true, for although my status was privileged, I was not some separate species of humanity but a Polish citizen taking part in the same journey. As long as I did not openly emphasize the scholarly character of my journey and did not object to interpreting for those who could not speak German, nor to swapping goods or hiding them under my seat, as a passenger on the train I was taking part in the informal activities called ‘the transport of goods between Poland and West Berlin’. Interpreting was regarded as a valuable favour which the research ‘objects’ were eager to pay back and which provided an opportunity to exchange telephone numbers in order to retain further contacts within the social space outside the train. Dressed in my usual outfit, I enjoyed the flexibility of my ambiguous position as a passenger and indirectly presented myself as a petty smuggler, a cleaning woman, an au pair or a student – depending on the circumstances. However, it soon happened that, after I suggested I was a petty smuggler, somebody from the previous journey remembered that last time I presented myself as a student. Under these circumstances I had to leave the compartment myself to ‘look for my brother-in-law’. Case 3. Choosing a Role is Not Enough: It Has to be Played Well It became clear that I had to assume one, possibly versatile and plausible role and to play it well. The obvious choice was a cleaning woman with the ability to smuggle, which guaranteed access both to traders, more and less petty, as well as to cleaning women, au pairs and casual

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prostitutes (as distinct from professional sex workers). Students from West Berlin were an extreme rarity on the train, for they were not numerous and, if at all, they travelled direct from the Zoo station on the Berolina, so this role was suspicious for someone regularly travelling on the Smuggler train. My choice was right, but although I had previously been employed as a cleaning woman for a short time (my greatest achievement in that field was being paid 100 German Marks – about US$ 50 – by a good-hearted cafeteria owner to ‘never ever’ return to work at his place), I had not learned all the details of the job. This inevitably came out in one heated conversation about German and Polish concepts of cleanliness, in which the cleaning women quoted examples of German filth, completely rejecting the Polish stereotype of the proverbially clean and well-organized German housewife: ‘But my German [woman] is the dirtiest of them all! When I went there for the first time the flat was so dirty that I had to clean the windows with Viss!’ ‘What is Viss?’ (I asked).

This innocent question betrayed my false identity. It was suddenly silent in the compartment, and one woman said: ‘So, you are not a cleaning woman after all!’ I found myself in the position of a suspicious, morally unclean spy, sitting among honest illegal workers. Viss was apparently a potent abrasive cleaning powder popular amongst Polish cleaning women. I had to remember the woman and avoid her company ever after. The first thing I did to prevent such a situation from happening again was to ask my close friend, a very successful cleaning woman, to teach me everything about cleaning. I also volunteered to replace one of her ‘girls’ on several occasions, so that I could practice my new know-how. The next step was to change my appearance to suit the new circumstances. To avoid being too quickly recognized by those I had already put off and to blend in with the crowd, I had my hair bleached, permed and cut in the mullet style (na małpę) popular in the GDR and socialist Poland. I also decided to adopt the proper costume of the cleaning woman for all purposes: it could not be too sexy in order not to provoke drunk men, nor too fashionable or expensive in order not to provoke the jealousy of other women, but not too shabby in order not to draw the attention of the German customs officials. To show my serious smuggling capacity I acquired an oversize brown-beige pullover, which could accommodate another person like myself, knitted for me by my friend Czesia. I wore it under a shapeless grey jacket or a trench coat and with skinny jeans (rurki), white socks and snow-white,

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cheap trainers, which might be replaced by high heels in some bright colour. I also took care of the luggage and provided myself with two medium-size, cheap, light synthetic carrier bags in blue and red, plus several plastic bags from Aldi and Woolworth’s (highly desirable in Poland as symbols of high financial status and indicators of an elegant lifestyle). The costume was so successful that nobody could recognize me anymore, including myself.

Informal Methods in Ethnographic Fieldwork: Ethical, Practical and Institutional Considerations Thus, my experience of using formal methods in research into informal social phenomena merely confirmed that informality simply does not lend itself to scientific observation. By definition, one cannot expect any repeatability, distancing oneself from the observed field is undesirable, and verification of data by conventional methods can be problematic, as no ‘datasets’ are produced, apart from the data included in the final text. Although in the majority of instances scholars with experience of researching informality will be able to recognize whether the materials from X’s fieldwork are genuine by comparing them to their own fieldwork observations, this is only informal, subjective verification, which can easily be questioned from the viewpoint of formal rules. However, although the list of the more objective data verification methods is very short, these methods are available. As advocated by Latour, the ultimate verification of research results can be done by ‘the people themselves’, that is, the actors involved (research subjects) commenting on the text. Otherwise, if verification were considered crucial for an understanding of some highly relevant social problem, covert research in the same milieu can be repeated by a different person. Yet, even if it is assumed that the verification of such data is not possible at all, considering the inherent bias of formal methods discussed earlier, the ‘subjective’ data gathered by informal methods cannot be dismissed, regarded as insignificant or less valuable, for these methods are the only way of accessing information that otherwise would remain hidden (Miller and Tewksbury 2006, 2010; Spicker 2011, Calvey 2017). As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, the basic difficulty in research into informal activities is of an epistemological nature: although formality and informality are attributes of the same social space and as such are not mutually exclusive – because a person can be involved in formal and informal activities at the same time, and one activity can be both formal and informal in different contexts – once

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we accept the popular definition discussed earlier, the same activity can be exclusionarily classified as either formal or informal, depending on whether or not it is recorded, that is, given a form which is potentially controllable by the state. As those researching informal economic activities have correctly pointed out (Henry 1993, Hart 2005, 2006), at this stage formality defies informality – whatever is informal ceases to be so in the moment of being formalized. To use the deep sea metaphor again, one cannot describe the habits of a fish by taking it out of water because it dies. The difference is that between the living fish and the dead one, which is also the difference between informality experienced and recorded. Therefore, the research methods for the purpose of investigating informal activities cannot be based on questionnaires, working with focus groups or standard interviews, for all forms of recording in situ, whether in writing, on tape, filmed or electronic, destroy informality. For reasons of both an epistemological and a practical nature, the best methods in researching informality are those which do not involve formalized procedures, such as covert fieldwork with participant observation and informal interviews, devoid of structure, conducted without the formal consent of the research subject and without revealing the researcher’s purpose. Admittedly, covert research on human subjects triggers a variety of ethical and institutional problems,8 which have been acknowledged and exhaustively discussed in the existing literature.9 However, since in certain circumstances it is the only way of obtaining credible information on the problems researched, this method has been accepted in social sciences,10 although it has been viewed as a somehow ‘morally lesser’ way of knowledge acquisition (Spicker 2011, Lugosi 2006). Despite its obvious shortcomings, covert research allows the fundamental difficulty resulting from the contradiction just mentioned between informality and formal methods to be bypassed. This method can be recommended as a pragmatic solution in situations where revealing one’s true identity and presenting the researcher as an outsider, usually as a person of authority over the people being observed, practically ends research on informality before it even starts by formalizing the researcher–actor relationship, as well as by destroying the actors’ anonymity in relation to the researcher. As is generally known among ethnographers, the very presence of a researcher in the field causes different reactive effects in the form of atypical behavioural responses of actors or interlocutors (e.g. Shaffir and Stebbins 1990). Numerous examples from ethnographic fieldwork, including my own encounters with smugglers and petty traders described earlier, illustrate that, once researchers explicitly present

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themselves as social scientists, they automatically place themselves in a different category, thus excluding the possibility of immersion in the milieu. The researcher becomes a ‘professional stranger’ (Hobbs and Wright 2006), both defining themselves as an outsider and thus following the emic–etic distinction between themselves and the given milieu, and also being defined as such by the insiders. Researchers’ selfinflicted exclusion from the milieu usually prevents them from obtaining a sample large enough to be statistically representative and from acquiring accurate insights from those informants who agree to participate (Miller and Tewksbury 2010), for not only does the very presence of a third party change actors’ behaviour, any information given to outsiders may be deliberately false. The actors can lie in expectation of winning the researcher’s sympathy or when they consider that it could profit them. Some informal milieus, like those of smugglers, addicts, prostitutes and pimps, are known to construct a special ‘persona’ for the outer world to induce pity and possibly more profits when it suits them (Ratliff 1999, Bloor et al. 1993, Girtler 1990, 1991, Irek 1998). Where their success depends on activities being hidden, informal actors do not reveal anything important to strangers, as a matter of common sense. Participant Observation, Confidentiality and Legal Issues Apart from the need to satisfy a variety of bureaucratic demands inherent in research institutions and funding bodies (Katz 2006, 2015), another group of institutional problems is connected with the legal systems of most countries. Under currently used definitions, the category of informality comprises a wide range of human activities, including organized crime, and even when informality is defined as being devoid of form, explicitly non-criminal informal networks still cut across all milieus and organizations, including gangs or mafia-type criminal structures. And since the most effective method of research into informality is fieldwork with participant observation and with full immersion into the multiple studied milieus, the risk that the researcher will come into close contact with criminals or may acquire knowledge of criminal activities cannot be excluded. Not only does the law not protect the researcher who, having blended into a given milieu, may be forced to commit acts of violence or participate in semi-legal or strictly illegal actions (Miller and Tewksbury 2010, Pearson 2009), the very fact of possessing such knowledge raises several issues connected with the violation of ethical and legal regulations. Witnessing a crime and not reporting it is in most countries a criminal offence (exceptions to this rule may be made for journalists, but not for scholars), leaving

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the researcher vulnerable to legal sanctions, while on the other hand the researcher is bound by the rules of academic ethical committees, as well as data protection regulations. Moral Issues: Faking Friendship and Emotional Bonding The dilemmas involved in research on informal activities may also be moral and emotional. To obtain any reliable information from an informal, semi-legal or clearly illegal milieu, one must enter it and win the absolute trust of its actors. Access to the milieu is therefore usually achieved through informal friendship networks (Girtler 1990, 1991; Irek 1998; Coletto 2010), which involves emotional bonding with people whose ideals one might strongly despise, for example pimps, traffickers or thieves. Building trust and establishing a rapport with informants is a generally recommended strategy in qualitative research, aimed at putting the research subject at ease, with the purpose of achieving better data quality, but it also raises the issue of faking friendship (Duncombe and Jessop 2012) or manipulating one’s research subjects, which have been used by the advocates of covert research as arguments against the supposed moral superiority of overt research (Amstel 2013). And even when emotional ties with research participants developed in the course of longer fieldwork are genuine, exploiting them adds to the list of the moral dilemmas faced by ethnographers using both covert and overt methods. Yet another problem in such cases is the conflict between a researcher’s own moral imperatives and protection of the research subject’s personal data, for a researcher might find some participant’s actions deplorable, but he/she is still obliged not to reveal the actor’s personal circumstances in any way. Reporting one’s own research subjects not only conflicts with the rules of ethical conduct and the moral obligations resulting from these rules, it practically means the end of research. Effectively, a problem deemed important enough for its research to be supported by an academic institution will not be solved. As ethnographers working on semi-formal or strictly criminal milieus are well aware, any violation of trust, even a slight suspicion of disloyalty towards the illegal milieu, can result not only in being excluded from it, but also in violence towards the researcher, including death, especially in the case of ‘mafias’. Thus, obtaining any reliable and publishable data on informal activities is a complicated task that can put the researcher in uncomfortable, if not risky situations, but as a member of a democratic society the researcher should be able to exercise his/her agency and make his/her own choice. Bearing in mind the benefits to society, such research should not be excluded en bloc

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from the academic mainstream, since, as Miller and Tewksbury note in their The Case for Edge Ethnography, ‘setting restrictions on academic investigations in an a priori fashion based on potential harm is at odds with both the values of an open democratic society (including individual freedom and autonomy) and the traditional academic standard of free inquiry’ (2010: 496). Informal Social Relations and Quantitative Research Methods Although it is generally understood that informal relations are an important part of social reality, this opinion is not reflected in the process of academic knowledge production, where formal methods are openly favoured, while informal ones are heavily censored on institutional, legal and ethical grounds. Moreover, apart from anthropology, where fieldwork with participant observation is standard, in the majority of disciplines quantitative research is preferred to qualitative, and even evidence in support of the latter is interpreted as a counterargument (Miller and Tewksbury 2006, 2010). Thus, for example, the fact that the presence of a third party changes the behaviour of the observed actors, known as the Hawthorne effect, is surprisingly cited as a shortcoming of qualitative methods, making a case for quantitative research, as if the actors were obliged to be ‘natural’ and ‘truthful’ when answering anonymous surveys in writing or talking to strangers over the telephone. When researching informality, the probability of obtaining genuine insiders’ knowledge through surveys is very limited (if any), especially in an environment in which people are being virtually harassed by too many queries and questionnaires from consumer research groups or, for example, in specific contextual situations such as war, dictatorship or other crisis situations, when people fear surveillance leading to persecution. But even under ‘normal’ circumstances in the more open democratic societies and rich capitalist countries, the validity of standard surveys of informal activities can be questioned on the ground that the responses need not be true. The very assumption of the honesty of respondents, who otherwise lie to the taxman, is questionable (Gutmann 1985). Similarly, one cannot expect to obtain insider information from standardized interviews, since in the formal setting informal actors can (and usually do) refuse to betray sensitive information or lie about their hidden activities out of a fear of being exposed, shamed, ostracized, condemned or ridiculed; or, as mentioned above, if the activity is of an explicitly economic nature, out of fear of being punished for tax evasion. Another important consideration is the actors’ distrust of researchers

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using formal methods, mentioned above, which I observed during my encounters with smugglers. Any form of recording is regarded as highly suspicious, for it can potentially be used as evidence in court, which causes actors to withdraw from the research or provokes their violent reaction. Researchers using formal methods have reported their disappointment at the negative reactions they encountered, the small number of volunteers, the time taken to fill out forms and the difficulties interviewees had in properly understanding the questions, usually requiring the researcher’s assistance, as well as an inability to explain more complex cases by such methods (e.g. Izdebski 2000).

Ethnographic Fieldwork and the Production of ‘Solid’ Data In searching for solid, verifiable data, it is therefore common practice to base research on informal space on ‘dead fish’ interviews with more easily available, formal actors – the representatives of enforcement agencies, local authorities, NGOs and civil society, as well as prisoners and detainees (Miller and Tewksbury 2010). In this way, knowledge intentionally produced for the benefit of outsiders and already available to the general public through official documents, the press and the internet is being replicated and legitimized by scholars. An extreme example here is the contrast between the public image of prostitution and its reality, which I encountered in 2002–2004. At that time the problem of trafficking for prostitution was high on the political agenda, resulting in the production of widely publicized research on migrant prostitutes and human traffickers, and presented to the general public in the classic, black-and-white propaganda style, with human traffickers cast in the role of quintessential ‘bad guys’ and prostitutes in the role of innocent, vulnerable victims (Coomaraswamy 1997). But while the image of a brutal villain tormenting an innocent girl is a powerful emotional construct, in this case it did not fully correspond to the ethnographic reality: the prostitutes were not always victims. Migrant prostitutes could be sexually experienced women who were making an informed decision to choose both the occupation and their way of getting into it (Whitehead and Demirdirek 2004) and who viewed themselves as sex workers and entrepreneurs for whom prostitution was a quick and effective way of accumulating capital. For them, migration from a poor to a rich country provided both the additional bonus of leverage resulting from the exchange rate (Bantle and Egbert 1996, Hann and Hann 1992) and a desirable distance between work and normal life (Day 1994). The vicious traffickers in

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turn were, despite the media image, a different group from the human smugglers, who were seen as the facilitators of a better life, enjoying the silent approval of local populations, while the enforcement agencies and humanitarian organizations alike were considered the true ‘bad guys’ in obstructing the path to people’s personal happiness. Checking Validity of Outsider Knowledge in Fieldwork on Prostitution and Trafficking My own ethnographic fieldwork on prostitution and trafficking was conducted in various places in the wide area of the German–Polish border in 2002–200411 and consisted of three separate periods of pilot fieldwork. The sources quoted are relevant for this particular setting during the period of pilot research, and therefore the literature is restricted to this particular period, which ended in 2004 with Poland being admitted to the EU. The method used was participant observation, informal interviews and a series of group discussions in which I oscillated between overt and covert positions, depending on the particular situational context. The brevity of each period of pilot fieldwork made it impossible to immerse myself fully in each milieu, therefore access to them was obtained through friendship networks developed while studying the trans-ethnic informal trade networks of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans and Turks. The research subjects were migrant prostitutes from Ukraine, Russia and Bulgaria and Polish prostitutes formerly sold as human chattel to pimps based in Germany; their friends and family members, and foreign and Polish pimps; traffickers, their former clients and human smugglers; and people connected to the trade by informal networks, such as bodyguards hired by road pimps, women working in kitchens serving the brothels (or night clubs), night club owners, people living next to brothels, taxi drivers, restaurant owners, waitresses and experts in the local ‘mafia’, lawyers, border guards and policemen, as well as numerous ordinary people living in the region and sharing geographical space with the pimps, prostitutes, smugglers and traffickers. The last study conducted in 2004 – just before Poland joined the EU – also included interviews with low-ranking border guards on each side of the German–Polish border and migrant women from Ukraine and Poland who were informally employed in the domestic sector in Poland and Germany respectively. At the time of my project, on top of the traditional ‘pathology’ approach12 characteristic of early sociology, social sciences in the socialist countries and medical literature,13 there were two basic approaches to prostitution: victimization and sex work. The ‘sex work’ approach

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removed the moral distinction between sexual contacts of a ‘relational’ or ‘romantic’ nature and selling sex for money (Bernstein 2001: 414, Whitehead and Demirdirek 2004), but then it tended to overlook the large amount of medical evidence for the physical and psychological trauma of women in prostitution and denied the fact that the great majority of people do not perceive prostitution as just ‘normal work’ or a desirable career path (Anderson and Davidson O’Connell 2003). The victimization approach, in turn, passed moral judgements regarding the act of prostitution and presented all prostitutes as the victims of gender-based exploitation (Raymond 1998, Hughes 2000), often dividing women into the ‘bad’ voluntary prostitutes who had to be rehabilitated, and the ‘good’ victims of traffickers who needed to be saved. International legislation has long recognized the problem of human trafficking, and in particular of vulnerability in the case of migrant prostitutes, who were a traditional object of such trafficking, but a clear distinction was made between human smuggling, which had a voluntary character, and human trafficking, which involved deceit or force (Herz 2003). With the problem high on the political agenda of governments and international organizations due to its gender-political aspect, academic research into prostitution has been sponsored by non-academic institutions, which not only tended to bias the research through their own agendas, but also over-emphasized formal methods and the need for quantitative data. The voluntary prostitutes – sex workers who were active in the field – were of no interest to this discourse and hence almost disappeared from the picture, together with the distinction between human smuggling and human trafficking, as if all women involved in prostitution were victims. Most of the data were produced through interviews with recorded victims of violence or by simply regurgitating statistics produced by the International Organization for Migration, without being verified through participant observation and interviews with the voluntary prostitutes. Treated as the ultimate villains, the human smugglers were merged with the traffickers, deprived of subjectivity and not included in the debate in any other way than as the ultimate evil, so that the motives of their actions in other than economic respects remained unknown. Due to the wide range of the interviewed population, the pilot fieldwork mentioned above showed discrepancies between reality and the existing research, reflecting the discrepancy between the informal nature of activities and the formal process of knowledge production. It appeared that the ‘fuzzy and unworkable’ distinctions (Anderson and Davidson O’Connell 2003: 7, Salt and Hogarth 2000) between trafficking, human smuggling and migration became significant when

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contextualized in this particular field and experienced by real people. Local people and actors alike applied the common-sense definition, which made sharp differences between trafficking, understood as transporting a person across borders against his or her will; human smuggling, or transporting a person at his or her request; and migration, or someone crossing a border on their own, whether legally or not. While the first category was considered bad, the other two enjoyed the sympathy and support of the local population, who still remember GDR citizens crossing the border in the other direction, often swimming across the river in order to run away from the regime. Helping these illegal migrants was considered a noble task in the fight for democracy, and more than a decade later this ethos was still present in the German–Polish border area. Since the Polish–German border was also the external border of the EU that divided the rich West from the poor East, smugglers, thieves, gamblers and prostitutes were at that time an integral part of the local landscape. Of all illegal or semi-legal activities, only one was not socially acceptable: even local criminals condemned human trafficking and traffickers. The ‘ordinary citizens’ and representatives of the local demi-world alike repeated the scare stories of ‘some young girls’ who had gone out to drink orange juice with a friend and disappeared for years, eventually being found in a brothel in Hamburg. The traffickers were usually conceptualized as the dangerous others, meaning mafia from abroad, who were involved in procuring prostitutes for brothels in the West. It was said that they did not share space with ‘normal’ people but hung out in heavily guarded secluded places, impossible to access without spending serious money. Nobody could give me a single example of a local girl who had actually been kidnapped. During in-depth interviews, people usually admitted that they had heard the story from others, or that it had been featured in a magazine or on TV, which made the traffickers more of a media myth and ‘cultural constructs’ than reality. It was impossible to test the validity of these ‘kidnap’ stories in the course of a short pilot fieldwork project. However, through informal networks it was possible to ascertain empirically that the traffickers were not a mere myth. They were physically present in the area, although, just as the local story said, their presence was confined to certain areas. They were almost too keen to confirm the ‘kidnap’ story and boasted that if one of them liked an ‘ordinary’ girl he would have her, even against her will, and if she were not nice enough she would be shipped abroad to a brothel, a narrative that echoed the current understanding about human trafficking. Also in contradiction

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to the opinion that drug traffickers, human smugglers and human traffickers were basically the same people who were using the same methods and resources, the ‘mafia’ experts who were interviewed claimed that the traffickers would never do Trolls (trole) or ‘Blacks’ (mostly Asians and Roma, so-called because of their posture, dark hair and complexion) or ‘back of the lorry’ transports. They said that the ‘girls’ (dziewczynki) were always transported separately from other migrants, on ‘almost original papers’, although along the same routes. Apparently, the ‘women traffickers’ regarded themselves as distinct from other ‘mafias’, whom they despised. This feeling seemed to be fully reciprocated by the representatives of the other ‘mafias’, who informed me that these traffickers were referred to as ‘cunt fed’, as distinct from respectable car thieves, cigarette and alcohol smugglers or human smugglers. Case 4. Human Smugglers and the Local Narratives of the ‘Bad Guys’ Interestingly, it was relatively easy to get hold of a local human smuggler. He was usually an otherwise decent local citizen, with a house, wife and children, and he always made sure to distance himself from human trafficking, which he fully condemned. On more than one occasion I was told, in great confidence, another border zone horror narrative which made even the traffickers look like ‘good guys’. A former human smuggler (who was caught red-handed on the German side of the border, was arrested but managed to leave prison thanks to a good lawyer) described the situation as follows: ‘Madam (prosze Pani), the smugglers take money from the Trolls, that’s really true. But they are honest. The others would take money and drive into the wood in the night and tell them Trolls they are in Germany, and the next day them Trolls find out they still are in Poland. That is really cheating’. ‘So what happens to these guys?’ ‘They wait for nightfall, and they cross the river in boats. But the guards shoot them like geese. These guards have no honour at all. There are women and children in the boats’. ‘Polish or German guards?’ ‘Both. They talk to each other by walkie-talkie or radio and make a shooting competition over who will sink the boat first. They call the Trolls schwarze Scheisse (black shit). Here comes the black shit, they say’. ‘Don’t fool me. How would you know what they say?’ ‘The smugglers are professional here. And they have all the professional gear. All cutting-edge army gear bought from Russians. They listen to what the guards say so that they know where they are and when

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to cross the river. They can see the guards in noctovisors, and they know all what they (the guards) talk about’.

It was not possible in a short pilot fieldwork project to verify the validity of this story, but even if it were constructed merely for the benefit of the outside word, it reflected the wide moral support for the human smugglers, especially since it coincided with other, more widespread local gossip relating to the corpses of ‘Blacks’ (mostly Asians) who had allegedly been found in the river. Although the local people interviewed did not recall ‘excessive shooting’14 and in general did not particularly like ‘Blacks’, they still expressed their sympathy with the victims. In this context, the human smugglers were perceived as heroes fighting for a humanitarian cause, as opposed to the border guards, who represented an oppressive and cruel state blind to human suffering. Social Reality Observed by Informal Methods: a Glimpse of Insider Knowledge Thus, the reality of the border zone was more complicated than could be predicted based on the official knowledge and approaches to prostitution prevalent at that period. Although initial observations confirmed the existence of both victims (traded women) and sex workers (free women) living as two separate groups occupying separate spaces, after accessing the milieu through informal networks of friends and acquaintances, it became apparent that existing labels did not quite work in this field. It appeared that the women classified as victims, living in strictly supervised upmarket places, were not only trafficked migrants but also locals, who, of their own free will, came and stayed in these places, despite the latter being described by locals as prison-like. Apparently, they were allowed to keep a greater share of their earnings than the trafficked migrants. And while the local sex workers shared the same space with the trafficked ones, the supposedly proud sex workers or free migrant prostitutes in local night clubs, in turn, were not proud of their profession and considered themselves the victims of circumstances. These women came voluntarily from the former Soviet countries through networks of friends and relatives and were single providers for families back home (some of them were single mothers), whom they called regularly and, as the club staff overheard on numerous occasions, usually lied about their occupation, crying and getting drunk afterwards. They did not consider sex work a desirable career path and planned to leave it as soon as possible and move on to some respectable enterprise at home. And although they were clearly

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not happy doing their work, their biggest fear was being ‘saved’ by the do-gooders from the humanitarian organizations. Case 5. Fantine, the Non-Miserable Fantine was a pleasant and moderately attractive Ukrainian woman in her late twenties, a mother of two divorced from her alcoholic husband. When the factory where she worked together with her parents was closed down, the whole family and indeed the whole town faced hunger. ‘My friend offered me a well- paid job in Poland. She said I will have to work in a club’. ‘Did you know what sort of club it was?’ ‘Sure, what do you think!? We are not stupid there in Ukraine. I knew it was for sex! She told me everything. But she said that I need not worry because in the West it is called exotic dancing’.

Fantine left her children with her parents and went to Poland as a tourist. The work was in a night club whose owner was a serious businessman, a respectable local member of prestigious organizations, known as a decent person of good character. He had become rich from cigarette smuggling between Ukraine, Poland and Germany, and soon after the fall of socialism he decided to establish himself in legal business. He bought a property, renovated it and, using his wide informal trading network stretching from Hamburg to Moscow and beyond, he recruited the first ‘girls’15 or dziewczynki from Ukraine. In an interview, he said: ‘I could not be a smuggler forever, you know; I had to find some honest occupation (porządne zajęcie). I understand the girls are here for work. You know, I am trying to help them. I paid for their journey and so on. I have a lot of expenses keeping this club, but I allow them to keep their earnings. Actually they pay me only for the rooms. They keep the rest for themselves’. ‘How much?’ ‘Fifty percent. But when they are ill I get them to the doctor, and they get a holiday when they really need one’. ‘So how do you earn?’ ‘On the drinks’.

However, the women had to pay for the doctor out of their own money, with a highly specialist consultant visit costing in Poland an equivalent of one oral intercourse at that time.16 Fantine regularly sent her earnings home, and given the favourable exchange rate between the Polish złoty and the Ukrainan hrywna, the proceeds from one vaginal

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intercourse were sufficient to support her entire family for a month. She had to invest some money in her looks: she wore fashionable clothes and regularly went to the hairdresser, dentist, solarium and a beautician. The rest she saved for some family business, perhaps a restaurant. She did not regard the Polish police as a real threat, for they had enough common sense not to interfere when there was no obvious crime and to take a bribe now and then. The only nightmare in her life as a prostitute and the only event she was really scared of was a raid by anti-traffickers, who had a bad reputation for brutal methods and a lack of common sense. ‘They would send me back home, and everybody in town would find out what I am doing here. I do not really know what would happen then. I would have to kill myself. My father would have a heart attack. I really cannot imagine such a thing!’, she said. Insider Knowledge and Political Bias Fantine’s confession contradicted NGO reports and police records, according to which prostitutes arrested in police raids claimed that they had been lured into the work under false pretences, usually through an advertisement in the local press promising them work as a waitress or a hotel maid, but had then been kidnapped and forced to prostitute themselves. However, off the books the local policemen confirmed their awareness that what the ‘victims’ officially reported need not be the truth, especially since, as part of the process of their ‘recovery’, they were subsequently forced to confront their parents. Apart from the police, local people also knew which prostitutes were victims and which were voluntary, and surprisingly, while the migrants working in the clubs were generally well tolerated by Poland’s Catholic society, the prejudice against them came from the male clients themselves, being directed against the supposed victims, the street prostitutes from Bulgaria and Romania, whom these men described as ‘dirty’ or ‘Black’. When interviewed, Polish men were quite open to the possibility of marrying an upmarket prostitute, but none of them would consider marrying or even having sex with a street prostitute, unless they were very drunk. Men cited narratives of robbery by foreign pimps or clients being blackmailed into paying exorbitant prices. The main clients of the ‘victims’ were truck drivers from ex-Soviet Union countries. It was known in the vicinity that the ‘girls’ were mistreated by their clients as well as beaten up by the pimps, who were heard openly boasting in bars, shops and petrol stations how they disciplined the women when they were ‘lazy’. Therefore the ‘victims’ attracted the sympathy

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of local barmaids and chefs working in the bars and restaurants along the roads. The most surprising discovery contradicting the outsiders’ knowledge was that some of the voluntary sex workers, who already had relatively well-paid freelance jobs in the mid-market night clubs, traded themselves to traffickers from the upmarket clubs, apparently knowing that they would be raped and abused there. This posed the question of why any person would choose to be abused. Apart from the old argument citing mental disability popular in the medical and social sciences alike,17 one possible answer is the exploitation of the media image of violence by mid-range club owners, aimed at preventing ‘their’ workers from moving to better paid jobs. The other possible explanation would be the existence of an initiation rite consisting in rape by several brutal men to ‘prove’ their worthiness in the trade, as reported by some voluntary sex workers18 and confirmed by local gossip. However, this information could not be verified, nor could other disturbing stories, like the one of ‘Trolls’ shot for sport by the border protection soldiers, since verifying the information gained in the short periods of pilot fieldwork would require longer-term investigation with covert observation in which the researcher would assume the role of a credible insider in the milieu and move together with traffickers in unknown directions to observe their practices in situ.

Ethical Standards, Deception and the Personal Responsibilities of the Researcher As discussed earlier, covert research is presently not the most acclaimed method of academic investigation. Reading current literature criticizing the use of covert fieldwork with participant observation as a research method, one is struck by the proportion of theory to practice: ethical and moral problems are described across hundreds of pages, but very little reference is made to the actual fieldwork, leaving the general impression that obtaining ‘secret’ knowledge about the functioning of society is not worth the moral hassle of invading privacy and abusing ethical standards while producing useless knowledge for the sake of knowledge (de Laine 2000). But while one cannot argue with the importance of ethical standards, one can dispute whether the same criteria of assessment should be used for clinical trials in medicine, research into obedience in psychology as conducted by Stanley Milgram (1963) and research on the quotidian life of petty smugglers in anthropology, where the risks of potential damage to the research subject are

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significantly different. And, while the critics of covert research claim that its use of deception is not ethical,19 such statements are based on deductive reasoning, despite the surprisingly little empirical evidence of suffering or other damage caused to research subjects by the deceit involved in such methods (Lugosi 2006). The moral burden of deceit involved in covert methods of investigation is thus on the side of the researcher him- or herself, but then nor are the formal, overt methods deceit-free (Sieber 2012). Following the rhetoric of moral blame, one could thus question on ethical grounds all types of academic enquiry into the social behaviour of human actors. As discussed earlier, observing and interviewing human subjects involves building a rapport, establishing fake emotional ties and using different forms of manipulation, involving possible abuses of authority to convince social actors to participate in research and agree to intrusion into their privacy (Cassell 1980, Duncombe and Jessop 2012, Amstel 2013). Ironically, compared to the formal methods used in overt research, covert research, with its informal methods of investigation, scores higher on avoiding the ethical problems of intrusion and the abuse of authority: participants are not harassed for information, as often happens in the case of surveys, and since the relationship between the researcher and the participant is horizontal, they are not at risk of being subjected to pressure by a person of authority. And although the data acquired during covert research on informal social phenomena might be criticized for their subjectivity, which makes them largely dependent on the personal integrity of the researcher, the truthfulness of such data, their security and actors’ anonymity are guaranteed even better by the informal nature of social networks than by the bureaucratic procedures of academic institutions. Thus, while data protection is one of the formal requirements of ethical standards during overt research (Hammersley and Traianou 2012), demanding that datasets be safely stored in a lockable cabinet, which does not exclude the possibility of third parties taking over the collection of consent forms that include the names and signatures of interlocutors, such personal data do not even exist when the research methods are informal. In Malinowski’s times it was possible to write whatever one pleased about ‘savages’ without those being observed having any opportunity to react to false information, which is no longer possible in the era of the internet. Not only do the actors have the ability to read texts about themselves and to react immediately through litigation, they also know the whereabouts of the author and, in the case of some informal milieus, they can punish him or her immediately. As the so-called ‘edge ethnographers’ are well aware (Miller and Tewksbury 2006, 2010), any

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breach of unwritten contract by which the participants in informal networks are bound to secrecy about their hidden activities results in the instant and permanent exclusion of the perpetuator, with possible shaming and violence. The more hidden the activity the more violent the consequences – in researching semi-legal workers and petty smugglers this may mean just exclusion, verbal threats or minor damage to the body or property, but in researching more profitable, criminal activities, where different ‘mafias’ are involved, such as drug or people trafficking for slave work or prostitution, the sanction can be death. It is thus in the researcher’s best interests to protect the anonymity of his respondents and not to spread false information. For this reason alone it is imperative that personalized data like ‘names, addresses or specific locations and dates’ (Düvell et al. 2010: 233) must be deleted and never used formally, not even in datasets. Experienced researchers and insiders know that, especially in smaller towns and villages, more specific information regarding personal data, as well as time and place of the interviews that is habitually required in other types of research, would be like pointing the finger. Thus, because of a researcher’s hidden agenda and his or her personal interest in not being discovered and punished by participants, covert research ensures truthful information as well as levels of participant anonymity and protection that are comparable to, if not higher than, those demanded by the procedures of the ethical standards committees. One can also dispute the statement that ‘secret’ knowledge is useless, for such knowledge is needed to address urgent social problems like, for example, drug smuggling, disease transmission, human trafficking or terrorism. Moreover, given the fact that activities researchable by formal methods constitute only a fraction of human experience, to obtain the full image of social reality we cannot dismiss knowledge of informal activities. And since covert research is the only realistic option in gaining access to insider information on these activities (Shaffir and Stebbins 1990, Spicker 2011, Pole and Hillyard 2015), it should not be discouraged, marginalized or banned on ethical grounds en bloc. However, until the current rules governing modes of academic investigation are modified to incorporate research by informal methods, describing quotidian life experienced by social actors pursuing informal activities, researchers will be put in a ‘lose–lose’ situation. They will be left with the choice between the Charibdis of no data at all or data which are false but have been collected in a formally correct way, and the Scylla of exhaustive and truthful data gathered by means of methods deemed problematic (Hammersley 2007) or ‘inferior’.

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Methodical Apriorism: The Influence of Preconception on Perception Apriorism excludes discovering the new. As Latour pointed out in his manifesto for Actor Network Theory, by choosing a theoretical approach before even commencing empirical research, we condemn ourselves to seeing only what we know (Latour 2005: 29, 143). This way, instead of advancing knowledge, we end up multiplying and reinterpreting only known elements, which can be represented mathematically as fractals (Abbott 2001). Apriorism became an integral part of academic research and yet another formal barrier to observing informal phenomena. Following Roland Girtler, an Austrian anthropologist who conducted successful fieldwork on smuggling and prostitution, it can be said that any formal structure or preconceived plan undermines the research rather than helps it (Girtler 1991). However, this approach is not acceptable in academia, where formal methods are openly favoured and are dominant. And although the social sciences are not the natural sciences, in which the research is hypothesis-based, in the textbooks on ethnographic fieldwork (Hammersley and Traianou 2012) in social anthropology and sociology alike, one will usually find the obligatory formula whereby, before going into ‘the field’, a review of the relevant literature has to be carried out, the history of the area has to be studied, information on the given culture has to be gathered, the theoretical perspective has to be chosen and, unless one chooses a grounded theory, in the majority of instances (though varying across countries) research hypotheses have to be formulated. Similarly, no funds are granted without a research proposal in which a theoretical perspective has been chosen and the hypotheses formulated before the empirical research can even start. In complying with these rules, the process of academic knowledge production neglects the physiological side of the observation process, namely the influence of preconception on perception. This inborn property of the human mind has long been acknowledged in ophthalmology and development psychology: babies do not see things properly until, with the help of other senses, they work out what they are. Also, the image of the world pictured on the human retina is upside down, and it is through the early experience resulting in forming preconception, that images are reconstructed in the association centre of the human brain. It is through this mechanism that we always recognize the known in the unknown: for example, we see familiar shapes in the clouds, a mechanism that has long been confirmed by behavioural psychology.

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Norbert Elias, by training a medical doctor and by experience a psychotherapist, referred to this very property of the brain when he wrote: Theoretical investigations without an empirical base are usually, at bottom, elaborations of preconceived dogmatic notions; the dogmas are enshrined as a matter of faith, and cannot be refuted or corrected by any empirical proofs or detailed investigations. At most, an attempt is made to buttress them a posteriori with a few empirically related arguments. (Elias 2009: 130)

Thus, although the generally accepted formal methods are useful for research into the formal aspects of human life, their applicability to the investigation of informal social relations is limited. The difficulty in applying these methods derives from the contradiction between form and the amorphous nature of informal phenomena. Investigation of the latter demands a new, less vertical methodological approach to be assumed by the social sciences and given space in bureaucratic procedures. To investigate informal phenomena adequately, we need to depart from the dominance of formal methods and the existing logic of research based on the principle of exclusivity of social spaces and their vertical ordering, with the formal being preferred to the informal. We should adopt a flatter research perspective in which there is no observer–actor distinction, and in which the categories of emic and etic are made irrelevant by including the researcher as one of the actors in the field. And since the present rules governing academic knowledge production, by virtue of being formal, destroy informality, they should be amended to incorporate informal ways of knowledge acquisition. We therefore need to set aside some formal regulations, allowing truly participant fieldwork on informal social relations to be conducted, accepting covert (hidden) observation and granting more agency to researchers and actors alike. And, in the spirit of Latour’s horizontal method, the formal requirement that theoretical research be carried out before the fieldwork has even been started should not apply in this case, so as to prevent prejudgment and bias resulting from observing informality through a vertical lens.

Notes  1. Ethical regulations concerning research with human subjects are discussed in depth in Marlene de Laine’s Fieldwork, Participation and Practice: Ethics and Dilemmas in Qualitative Research, 2000. See also Hammersley and Traianou 2011; for standards developed in health care, see Moore and Miller 1999.

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 2. For a classic discussion of this problem, see Clifford and Marcus 1986. David Gellner mentions it as one of the antinomies of ethnographic work, calling the very concept of ‘participant observation’ an oxymoron, for one can either observe or participate (Gellner 2012).  3. The distinction between the humanist and positivist approaches in the social sciences is discussed in Bernard 2006: 14–22. The positivist perspective, as distinct from the naturalist one, is discussed in Hammersley and Atkinson 2007: 5–7.  4. For Husserl, the father of phenomenology, this approach was the pre-philosophical attitude toward the world and the essential attitude of human life that he called the ‘natural standpoint’, which constituted ‘the most basic web of all human relationships to the world and to other persons’ (Stewart and Mickunas 1990: 24).  5. In his Argonauts (1932), Malinowski was explicit about the need to keep himself distinct from the observed natives.  6. For the history of Polish migration to Berlin, together with an analysis of theoretical approaches, see Praszałowicz 2010.  7. For an extensive description of the petty trade on the train between West Berlin and Warsaw, including contextual information, see my Der Schmugglerzug (Irek 1998).  8. Discussed in Hammersley and Traianou 2012. The authors describe the evolution of social science research ethics from ethics in medical sciences in the wake of Nazi experiments on people, as regulated by the Nurnberg Code of 1947. In the social sciences, regulation was prompted by researchers’ work for non-academic, governmental and non-governmental organizations. Outlining the history of ethical regulation, the authors discuss philosophical positions on ethics and the role of ethics panels and institutional review. They note that ethical regulation is particularly problematic in qualitative research, which has to be flexible. For a discussion of the need to navigate around the ethical regulations, see also Denzin and Lincoln 2011. For a comprehensive study of covert research method, its history and its ­practical aspects, see Calvey 2017.  9. See, for example, the works of Shaffir and Stebbins 1990, Mitchell 1993, Hobbs and Wright 2006, Miller and Tewksbury 2006, 2010; Spicker 2011. The formal requirements of research with human participants, for example approval by the respective ethics committee, are described in Düvell et al. 2010, Denzin and Lincoln 2011. The problem of informed consent forms, or at least verbal agreements, which have to be obtained from each participating actor before conducting an interview, is discussed in De Laine 2000, Miller and Bell 2002. 10. Although in general ethical guidance is designed to discourage covert research, even the highly formalized research institutions like the ESRC in the UK do recognize that ‘covert research may be undertaken when it may provide unique forms of evidence or where overt observation might alter the phenomenon being studied. The broad principle should be that covert research must not be undertaken lightly or routinely. It is only justified if important issues are being addressed and if matters of social significance

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

which cannot be uncovered in other ways are likely to be discovered’ (ESRC Framework for Research Ethics 2010: 21). A series of pilot fieldwork for the project ‘Commodities or Enterpreneurs’, developed under the auspices of the Institute of Cultural Studies at the European University Viadrina, run by Professor Werner Schiffauer, was conducted in 2002 and 2003 on the Polish–German border, then the eastern border of the EU. With the emergence of feminist scholarship, the ‘pathological’ label was rejected, as it was declared to be denigrating and politically incorrect. A prostitute was no longer a ‘delinquent person’ excluded from ‘normal’ society (Foucault 1991) but someone who became normalized as a ‘woman in prostitution’ as either a ‘sex worker’ or a victim (Bernstein 2001). Within the pathology approach, one can situate research carried out in the context of the epidemiological risks of prostitution and its connection with the AIDS epidemic (e.g. Helman 2001, Ratliff 1999, Waddell 1996, Izdebski 2000). It is within this approach that one can find rich material from direct interviews with active prostitutes (as distinct from detained ones), sound statistical data and competent information on such issues as post-traumatic stress disorder in prostitutes. In contrast to American borders, which are guarded by few soldiers, on the Polish side alone at least four garrisons of soldiers were stationed for this purpose alone, plus a separate team of customs officers (civil servants) at each crossing. Shooting exercises have been a daily routine in the area ever since the end of the Second World War. The local word for prostitutes is dziewczynki (literally ‘girls’), regardless of age. I put this vertically marked word in quotation marks as distinct from the unmarked word girls, meaning female children. Due to the leverage of foreign exchange, in the year before Poland’s accession to the EU the migrants were able to offer competitive prices, which at the time of fieldwork ranged from about 7 Euros for vaginal intercourse with the ‘victim’ in the open air or the client’s car to 25 Euros for any intercourse lasting not longer than an hour in the clean room of a ‘night club’. For comparison, native escorts of comparable looks and education, the elite of the trade, could earn up to 1000 Euros per night. Downmarket prices in Poland were particularly competitive in comparison to those on the German side of the border. About fifty miles from the border, in Berlin, prices started at 60 Euros for a ‘number’ in the street (performed by a prostitute of comparable class) or in a client’s car, and each additional demand had to be paid for. In sociology, prostitution has traditionally been regarded as a pathology or as one of several ‘bastard institutions’ or ‘chronic deviations … operating without benefit of the law, although often with the connivance of the legal establishment’ (Hughes 1994: 192–93). This placed a moral evaluation on the issue, directing the debate towards biological deficiency, which was especially poignant when using racist argumentation, deviant behaviour or a pathogenic environment as alleged causes. Within this approach falls the environmental debate, which considered whether prostitution was

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caused by having a pathological family, contacts with the criminal world or the rise of a system of exploitation, as well as the bio-psychological debate on the aetiology of prostitution, the argument being that it was due to the prostitute’s psychopathic sensuality, hysteria, lack of restraint, mental underdevelopment, frigidity or lack of moral standards and feelings (Kowalczyk-Jamincka 1998). Remarkably, the client and the pimp were totally missing from these older debates, as were the upper levels of the milieu, who were often closely connected with the elite of society. 18. See the interview with a rape victim in the next chapter. 19. These problems have been the focus of a heated debate between the opponents of this method in social science and its advocates. Discussed in Herrera 1999, 2003, Lugosi 2006, Amstel 2013.

e3 Exiting the Emic–Etic Logic How to Conduct Successful Fieldwork on Informal Phenomena

Assuming the informal network as a unit of social analysis, and including the observer in the researched social space, the RVP allows one to exit the emic–etic dichotomy. There is no ‘insider’ versus ‘outsider’1 perspective, and rather than being a reflexive other, the observer himor herself becomes a thinking and experiencing actor, placed in one category with the observed and involved in the web of informal networks just like all the other actors engaged in pursuing their private individual goals and happiness. In this approach nobody is excluded nor privileged. No power or status distinctions are assumed a priori between the members of privileged elites, the ordinary people, the smugglers and the prostitutes: nobody is considered a ‘sensitive’ case, for they all are members of humanity. Most importantly, no value judgements are made about actors and their actions as a matter of the restricted use of vertical categories, such as social or culture capital,2 that dominate current migration research. And, since informal networks cut across all sorts of organized groups and less organized groupings, the traditional analytical constructs, such as borders and identities, can finally be ­dissolved, which so far has proved just an empty declaration. In the RVP the old assumptions and statements about human groupings, which have so far ordered space in a vertical way, together with figures like the ‘expert’ or ‘gatekeeper’, do not dominate the empirical investigation. The task of the researcher is to trace the knowledge distributed along the network links and not to obtain it ‘factory packed’ from a recommended contact person who is assumed to hold a monopoly of such knowledge. Such shortcuts may be made but are justifiable only during pilot fieldwork, not in the main body of research.

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Unfortunately, interviewing experts and gatekeepers, usually through an interpreter, or hiring a native assistant who becomes a gatekeeper himself has become a very common, time-efficient ‘wash and go’ style of research method in fieldwork, replacing genuine participation. Pressed by time limits imposed by the unrealistic expectations of bureaucrats, scholars recommend good informants to each other, and in effect knowledge obtained from one and the same person is often circulated in numerous texts. Academia should openly resist these pressures, for, as is generally known, successful fieldwork must take time and money. To enter the right chain of networks, thus allowing genuine information to be obtained, participant observation must last long enough to gain the trust of the observed, including the widest possible range of participants, and to make thick description possible. To win the trust of informal social actors, we have to be with them and participate in their pursuit of happiness and their misery alike, in their quotidian activities and their feasts and, generally, be useful to them. Establishing emotional links with one’s research subjects was called the researcher’s dilemma, for sympathy can potentially hinder the obtaining of objective information by biasing the observer’s perception (e.g. Mitchell 1993), but while researching informality, establishing such links is a prerequisite for obtaining meaningful information from the actors involved. Here, to make empirical observation at all, we have to show empathy, as distinct from sympathy, and be able to feel what the actors feel so that they allow us to watch and interpret their actions. And when the actors are mobile, it is not by sitting there, meticulously collecting and recording four sets of different data on the same act (Latour 2005: 134–35), happening repeatedly in a definite time and space, that the genuine data are gathered. The researcher investigating informal network chains should make their observations by moving rapidly along the links in unpredicted directions, together with the actors, covering the largest possible extent of their journeys, following them by train, coach, plane or car, visiting them in their homes and meeting places, observing their everyday lives and their transactions in different situations, and assuming their viewpoint to understand their motivations, refuting the bondage of action to ‘place’ and changing ‘multi-sited fieldwork’ into ‘site-less’ fieldwork. It is through the sheer bulk of observations in greatly diversified circumstances – documented by descriptive notes made a posteriori in which, after some time, the information becomes repetitive – that, whatever qualitatively ‘new’ might be happening, can be discovered, a degree of objectivity is finally achieved, and one can possibly trace any ‘regularities’ in the irregular. The method of empirical investigation recommended by the RVP is

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thus similar to the idea of George Marcus’s multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) in its call for ethnographies to follow the people and their connections in space. However, while Marcus wants ethnographers to work in two or more spatially dispersed sites, which are still understood much in Malinowskian tradition as the social spaces where we can observe cultural difference (Falzon 2009, 2016), in RVP there is no site as such, and one does not look for spatialized cultural difference, but for the content of the links that connect social actors. And while multi-sited research is ‘designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of physical presence, with an explicit, positioned logic of association or connection among sites’ (Marcus 1995: 105), in RVP the research has no design, one does not assume any positioned logic of association among sites, and the ethnographer does not travel to meet people in previously chosen locations (Falzon 2009: 10), but travels with the people, wherever they might go.

Fieldwork’s Best Practice: Where to Find the Right Network and How to Access It Informal networks are everywhere, for they are part of human life, but since life as such is rarely an object of the social scientist’s enquiries, usually the research has some theme which needs to be followed. To find the desired type of information – for example, on informal traders or informally employed domestic workers – one has to access the respective network chains and then just ‘go with the flow’, along their links, adding as many new chains as possible, which could be described as ‘multi-chain accumulation’ (as distinct from snowball sampling, which groups people from one chain), embracing the largest possible space. Since, in line with Latour’s call for a flat social landscape (Latour 2005: 16), contextualization is kept to the minimum, and since there is no ‘site’ to describe, it is possible for one researcher to include significantly more interlocutors than in a standard anthropological research, as discussed by Gellner (2012). Observation can start like ordinary anthropological fieldwork by identifying the places frequented by our research subjects, found through one’s own personal networks developed in a given locality. Such ‘starter’ networks should include actors like taxi drivers and bartenders, known for having extensive information about informal activities, and following their contacts, the process of observation has to move on, together with the actors. The role of places in finding informants will be discussed in the following chapters, but

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obvious choices are restaurants, beauty salons, hairdressers, discos, shops with ethnic food, churches, school, playgrounds, a beach or any place with a waiting room (e.g. a doctor’s surgery). However, one has to spend generous amounts of time and money in the restaurant, shop or salon, enough to become a welcome guest. A good strategy is to start observations at bus and railway stations, as well as airports, where one can join a crowd of people waiting for transport from any direction. Case 1: Back in the Street: Finding a Common Language Coming back to the Berlin example from the previous chapter, it is clear that I made the right choice of place, but chose the wrong method together with the perspective inherent in it, starting from the very title of the research, which should have been not ‘informal networks of foreigners in Berlin’, but ‘trans-ethnic informal networks in Berlin’, since ‘native’ Berliners were as much involved in these networks as the other actors in the transaction chains. Also, instead of detaching myself from the actors and emphasizing my supposed superiority, I should have shown humility, for, although I had never done anything illegal and was in a privileged legal and economic position, I was still not some better species of human. The informal traders in the street were as human as myself, and passing moral judgement was not the objective of my research. I should not have imposed myself on them with my questions, but followed them and done whatever they were doing. When I returned to continue my research in the same Aldi shop using informal methods, the results were quite different, and I managed to contact a large cohort of informants, who in turn led me to other actors in their own personal networks spanning across Europe. An example of such observation was a night in the autumn of 1989, before the unification of Germany, when the traffic intensified in anticipation of Berlin losing its visa-free status. Needing to experience the overnight queue, I started my observation shortly before the shop was due to close. I was just standing quietly in the street in front of the shop, looking at what was happening. Although it was after six, there were about dozen people in front of me, and I was not the last person in the queue, which was getting longer with every minute. When the shop closed right in front of our faces, I expected an angry chorus of Polish curses, but people were neither angry nor surprised. It appeared that they did not expect to obtain any goods that day, for the whole stock of desirables had been cleaned out by other Poles. People were waiting in the queue for the next day’s delivery, leaning against the walls, sitting on small tourist chairs and killing time with stories.

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‘It is bloody cold’, complained a skinny woman near me, talking to her companion. They were both dressed in Polish style, had similar bottleblond hairdos and looked just like myself, as if we were one person in different sizes. ‘Yes, and the legs get deeper into the ass’,3 I said, joining in the conversation. ‘Fortunately it is only two little hours more, then the other shift will come’, said the other woman. ‘Where will you sleep tonight?’ I was not sure what kind of shift she was talking about, therefore I asked a neutral question so as not to reveal my obvious ignorance, implementing a golden rule that about unclear things one should speak in an unclear way. ‘By the bridge, on this small parking lot. Other buses have taken all the places under the bridge’, said the woman.

It then became clear that they were sleeping in the buses and cars, which also solved the mystery of why all the lawns near the S-Bahn bridge were covered with trash and smelled of human urine. Urinating on a lawn, a gate or behind a bush, even if it were on somebody’s property, was then considered an acceptable, natural behaviour in an emergency in Poland, in contrast to defecation in an inhabited area, which was considered undignified. Traditionally, for anything other than liquid purposes, one should have waited until the bus stopped in a wood, bushes or at least a field. ‘I only wonder where they all come from? It is like ten buses under the bridge’, I said to the other woman. This utterance sparked a discussion of the faults of others – the Poles who were newcomers to the trade and spoiled the ‘working conditions’, as well as the usual ‘thieves’ in government. The conversation was digressing in different directions, but although I was anxious to learn about the shifts, I did not try to interfere and speed things up. Only after a while did it become clear that there exists a ‘queuing business’ organized in a similar way to how it was formerly in socialist Poland: people in the queue were only representatives of those waiting in the buses and cars parked nearby. Each party of travellers was divided into smaller groups, four to eight in the case of the bus, but in the case of cars just single persons, who were taking turns to wait for the grand opening of the shop in the morning so that they could take advantage of the early delivery of goods. I learned what kind of people come to Berlin and from which regions (which was easy to prove by looking at registration plates with clearly marked regions), why they come in the buses and why they choose to shop right in the centre, instead of going to less crowded shops in other parts of the city. The crucial moment in developing my relations with the other actors came when we were approached by two men passing by. They both had

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moustaches, were dark-haired and dark-skinned, dressed very much like Poles, but instead of white trainers they were wearing ordinary leather shoes. Upon seeing us, the blonde triplets, they stopped and started a conversation in broken German: ‘Beautiful woman’ (schöne Frau), said one, looking at us with admiration. ‘Coffee drink’, he continued in broken German. ‘I don’t bloody understand what he is saying there’, said the skinny woman. ‘I speak German’, I said. And this was the beginning of a great friendship. ‘I understand “coffee”, but I don’t know what he wants. Ask him whether he wants to sell coffee. By the way, I’m Barbara’, said the bigger one. ‘Gosia’, I replied, and then turned to the men. ‘What precisely do you want?’, I asked in German. ‘Nothing. Talking and coffee drink’, he repeated, which I translated as ‘He wants to invite you for coffee’.

In a similar context in Poland, drinking coffee with a woman and vodka with a man would be a standard invitation to an informal transaction with the ruling principle ‘let’s drink, talk and see what can be done’ (wypijemy pogadamy i zobaczymy co da się zrobić), and Barbara seemed interested, especially given that possessing personal ties to native Berliners was a significant advantage for a Polish trader. One could bring the goods directly to them, instead of risking trading them in the street. ‘It is so cold, and I could do with a toilet. Ask him where is this coffee and tell him we are interested in some business’, she said. Hearing that they were invited to a nearby snack bar, Barbara decided that she and her companion would go for a quick cup of coffee, although they could barely understand German, while I was to keep their places in the queue. The four of them walked in the direction of the snack bar. After a while the women came back hurriedly, very irritated. ‘What swines (Ale świnie)! They wanted us for sex! As soon as we got our coffee, one took out fifty marks, waved at me and said ‘fikać’. What impudence! I should have slapped his face!’, said Barbara.

He must have said ‘ficken’, a version of the German f--- word, which she remembered as Polish fikać, meaning a physical exercise involving the legs, used also as a euphemism for sexual activities. ‘And a waste of time. There wasn’t even a toilet in the place. We had to pee inside a gate’, added the other woman.

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‘Fifty marks is a lot of lettuce (kupa siana). I would take the money. It (vagina) is not soap, it won’t get used up (sie nie wymydli)’, a man from the queue chimed in, and everybody started to quarrel over paid or casual sex.

When Barbara’s shift ended, we parted like friends, and I wrote down in my pocket notebook the names (typically, one would not exchange surnames and addresses) and telephone numbers of both women, as well as their professions and the place they came from. I also exchanged phone numbers with several other people in the queue. I could not make notes of the conversation itself while it lasted, but I tried to remember as much as possible, so that I could write it all down immediately after coming back home. Having a good or bad memory is an individual feature of the person, which can be additionally enhanced by training, preferably at a young age. In order to optimize research, memory can be improved by a known mnemonic technique: one has to visualize whatever people are talking about and carve it into one’s own memories, remembering also the details of their looks, facial expressions, the sound and tone of their voices, their accents and the smell of their bodies and to associate it all with one’s own sensations and feelings at the time of the conversation and with significant events from one’s own list of sensations. The ‘mental film’ technique allows one to recreate dialogues and events in detail, which I personally confirmed in an experiment meant to check the accuracy of my ‘mental recordings’. I recorded on tape an hourlong interview with an acquaintance. Later the same day I wrote up what I remembered and then compared the text with the recording. It appeared they were identical, plus I remembered all the visual circumstances that were not recorded on the tape. In my case, however, the ability to memorize was accompanied by a loss of spatial orientation, which again could be used to my advantage as a researcher, confirming Elias’s late experiments with shoelaces (Moerth 2007), where, by walking with untied laces, he managed to establish contact and enter into natural conversation with passers-by. Similarly, asking for directions proved to be an excellent opportunity to make first contacts with research subjects and a good way of gathering secret information. In my case the help was usually extended to literally leading me to the proper place, showing that research subjects respond better when they are put in a position of authority themselves, rather than when they are interviewed by someone in a position of power. In over twenty years of journeys I have never had an aggressive or negative reaction from strangers I asked for help in finding

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directions. The same principle of a reversal of roles goes for language: deficient language skills can work to the advantage of the researcher, providing an opportunity to make emotional links with the actors in a relaxed atmosphere, with the informal and often disadvantaged actor cast in the role of teacher or expert. Speaking in a broken language also provides an opportunity to ask intimate questions and to repeat one question many times until one achieves the desired outcome. This is far preferable to employing an interpreter, which immediately creates a distance between the researcher and his or her research subject, not to mention the possibility of misinterpretation and formalization.

Going with the Flow Observing moving people in one locality of a route is a usual strategy in fieldwork, but to learn more about the nature of informants’ journeys, such observations should be treated as a starting point, not as the goal of the research. In the Berlin case discussed above, research subjects could be easily identified by their looks and the language they used, and although they represented only one ethnicity, by entering their informal networks it was possible to observe and enter the long transactional network chains running across other ethnicities, starting from the ‘native’ Germans to Nigerian or Beninese students, Iranian, Turkish and Yugoslavian traders or Vietnamese4 guest workers. Due to the specific political situation in Berlin at that time, pedestrians could cross its wall in only one place, Friedrichstrasse. To start genuine participant observation, it was enough to join the stream of people moving in this direction at the right time. The right time was in the evening, after the trading day was over, and in any case more than two hours before the departure of the last train to Poland from Lichtenberg station in East Berlin. Even more effective was identifying Polish markets from information provided by native Berliners, observing the markets throughout the day and going with the eastward flow in the evening, as exemplified by the description below of a single, moderately eventful day of fieldwork, based on my fieldwork diary. Case Study 1. An Ordinary Day in the Field That day I planned to do some observations in the so called Polenmarkt or Polish market. It was located by a new state library, the pride of West Berlin, situated in a cultural centre also comprising a philharmonic, a museum of modern art and a little old church. In the square between

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these architectural treasures belonging to high-profile institutions, there was a comfortable car park for the literati. For some reason then unknown to me, Polish traders chose this place as their trading centre. They came each morning with their cars loaded up to the roof and stayed there, blocking all the parking space until they had sold the cargo to the poor of Berlin, mostly foreigners like themselves, as was generally known in the well-informed elite circles of the town. As soon as I entered the car park-cum-market, to my greatest astonishment I saw my posh, Polish smuggler-hating German acquaintances driving their brand new limousine. Just the previous evening they had been complaining about Poles breaking all the parking rules and making West Berlin an unlivable place. Now they themselves parked in the middle of the square, breaking all possible rules, got out of their limousine and started to shop. From what I could observe they bought amber jewellery, several bottles of vodka (or pure spirit) and two full cartons of cigarettes. It was obvious that they knew the place, for some people greeted them like old friends and after about five seconds fetched a huge package from the booth. They paid for the contents without checking them, put the bag into their car and hurriedly drove away without noticing me. Then I started to look around, wondering what could be in the package, and saw other well- dressed middle-class Westerners. It then became clear to me that it was the upmarket German clientele who had chosen this place for their own convenience, not the other way round. But I was wondering what such rich and influential people could possibly have bought in this shabby place. Yet, as I kept walking around I noticed the wide range on offer. There were luxury goods such as crystal glasses and vases, tablecloths, bed linen, silk scarves, wooden toys, folklore objects from Poland and Russia, amber, fox skins and furs, cigarettes, vodka, pure spirit, sour cucumbers, sausages, ham, butter, bread, apples, pears and eggs. Everything was about ten times more expensive than in Poland, but still significantly cheaper than in the West. The goods were displayed without any respect for marketing rules, being dropped recklessly on rugs laid on the ground or on the boots of the cars, and the ‘salesmen’ handled them with their hands smeared with fat dripping from their food, behaving as if they were on a picnic. They were eating, drinking liquids of different sorts, talking loudly and laughing. Suddenly, people started to shout ‘police, police!’ Within seconds the goods disappeared into the bags or the cars, and people started to run. By the time the police car had stopped and the policemen had got out, the people and their goods had just disappeared. Only the cars remained, left behind in the car park while their

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owners evaporated together with their bags. A few cars, mostly with local registrations, were attempting to leave the car park, completely blocking the exit. Then I understood why Poles used to call this place the Bermuda triangle. Since I looked like a typical Pole, I decided to remove myself from the place so as to avoid a police interrogation and to hide in the nearby library. Some other people had had the same idea, so the library hall looked like a train station, and there was a queue for the toilet. As I was correcting my make-up, a woman in her twenties asked me for lipstick. She was blonde, had a pony tail on the top of her head with a mulletstyle haircut in the manner of Polish and East German women, and wore bright plastic earrings and a loose pullover in a composition of sharp colours, combined with tight jeans. Apparently, she had lost her cosmetic bag in the police raid. My lipstick did not match her clothes, but she liked it very much, so I told her to keep it. Her name was Maria, a student at a reputable university in Poland, but when I invited her to go upstairs to wait until the raid was over in the comfort of the reading room, she refused. She said she had to sell her remaining items. So, we exchanged phone numbers and parted. While returning home a few hours later, I had to walk by the ‘Bermuda triangle’ again. All the Polish cars were gone, but a group of men were sitting on the stairs to the art museum and singing patriotic Polish partisan songs from the Second World War. As I came closer, I saw they were drinking vodka. ‘What a shame to waste that vodka after you smuggled it all the way to Berlin!’, I said. ‘Madam’, said one in a tearful voice, ‘that is so f... true! But what can we do? We haven’t sold it, and it is as f… bad to smuggle it back again! Our hearts break, but we just have to drink it!’

They invited me to join the party, but although it was an excellent research opportunity, I was afraid to sit with a group of drunken men and drink vodka straight from the bottle, so I said I had to catch the bus home. They were happy to have met a local person, so they gave me a bottle of vodka as a souvenir and invited me to meet them next week, same time, same place. We exchanged phone numbers, and as we parted I joined the stream of people walking in the direction of the nearest underground and I followed them to the S-Bahn in the direction of the border crossing. The S-Bahn was overcrowded with Poles and their luggage, but I managed to find a place to sit near a woman with a huge striped bag in the colours of the French flag attached to each hand, plus one smaller bag between her legs. She was obviously very tired, and she leaned against my arm, as she was taking a nap. I pretended to nap too,

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while trying to overhear what other Poles were talking about. I learned that they had already had their papers (VAT returns) stamped at the Zoo train station and that they expected to get a lot of cash back when they returned next week. When the train stopped at Friedrichstrasse, the men formed a line, and in a military-like manner quickly passed tonnes of luggage from the train on to the platform. There were several such teams in each carriage. Then they grabbed everything and carried it away into a tunnel, just as ants carry things that are much bigger than themselves. I let this river of people and goods carry me along until we reached a huge underground hall. People and their bags were crowded on top of each other in complete chaos. At the end of the hall there were several small booths. This was the passage to East Berlin. I did not plan to cross the border that day and wanted to return, but it was not possible. The people pushed me to the passport control and, thanks to the Polish habit of carrying documents on me at all times, after about an hour I was in East Germany. Having crossed the border, I decided I might as well accompany the people right to the train. It was the only train to depart from that platform, and although it was still about half an hour to its departure, the crowd was preparing for what they called abordage, an army term for hostile boarding. Individuals had only as many bags as limbs, but the groups had truckloads of factory-packed goods each. People kept arriving from both sides of the platform, and it was increasingly difficult to move in any direction. I was stuck in the crowd. When the arrival of the train was announced, a human wave just rose and followed it, running towards its doors while the train was still moving. The fight for places in the train happened according to the principle of survival of the fittest. The younger, stronger males were the first to get to the doors, forcing them open. They got in, reserved a whole compartment each and opened the windows, so that their friends on the platform could pass the cargo through windows. They loaded their bags into the compartments. Those who stayed on platform did not even attempt to approach the door. Having loaded the last bag, they jumped into the train through the windows, like tigers in a circus (na tygryska). It was an interesting experience just to observe the others and not to fight for a place myself. Having seen all I needed to know I wanted to retreat, but it was impossible: I was trapped between bags bigger than myself, and although I had no intention of going anywhere, the human wave just pushed me onto the train, like a cork into a bottle. ‘I have no ticket!’, I lamented aloud. Since the train was closed to DDR passengers, the presence of an East German ticket inspector was an extremely rare event, so having bought a return ticket in Poland one

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could re-use it until its expiry date, which was several months in the future. In Poland one could bribe the inspector with a can of Western beer or a bar of chocolate, so that the ticket would not be punched. I usually had it in my handbag, but unfortunately, to make it lighter, I had removed all unnecessary items on the previous day and all I had on me that day was my passport and some money. So, there I was, standing in the corridor, some huge bag between my legs, my chest pressed against somebody’s rucksack. ‘And who cares about tickets?’, said somebody behind me. I immediately recognized the familiar voice; it was Maria. She was sitting nearby on a mountain of boxes, exposing her white socks and trainers. She invited me to join her party in the adjacent compartment, designed for eight people but occupied only by a rather well-fed middle-aged woman and three men. All the available space, including the seats, floor and shelves, was taken up by bags, rucksacks and packages. ‘Working in import-export?’, asked the woman. This was an autoironic description of smuggling goods out of and into Poland. ‘Not today’, I said, and I explained that I was only looking for somebody when I was pushed into the train. ‘So, you are dancing’, decided the woman, and although I did not know whether she thought I was a pole-dancer and why would she assume so, I refrained from asking, wary not to repeat the mistake I had made with the scrubbing powder. Later it appeared that ‘dancing’ was another, ironic name for cleaning, referring to dancing with a brush. Although the woman looked more like a soldier, her nickname was Lalka (Doll). She commanded a young man in the compartment to make room for me. The men were obviously there to support and carry the stacks of packages, and it seemed that the only purpose of Doll was to direct them. One of the men keenly obeyed her and placed a big striped bag from the seat on to his knees, so that I could squeeze into a narrow gap between himself and another stack of bags. Maria was still sitting on the boxes. It appeared later that her mission was to guard twenty square metres of Italian tiles without VAT. As soon as the train moved off, the man by my side proudly displayed a bottle of East German vodka; Doll immediately fetched several deodorants from her bag, took off their caps and distributed them as glasses – a trick I repeated on numerous other occasions, winning me a keen crowd of friendly informants. ‘Let’s drink to blind customs!’, said the man. We raised our fragrant glasses, blocking the little holes in the bottom with our fingers, and I thought that, alas, it would take a blind, deaf and possibly fully paralysed customs officer not to react to such enormous amounts of cargo. Fortunately, I had nothing myself, so, apart from anticipating a small

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fine for travelling without a ticket in the highly unlikely event of being inspected by an East German, I could relax and observe my research subjects. By the time we left the outskirts of Berlin my own bottle of Polish vodka had been opened and my relaxation rapidly progressed, as did my smuggler’s know-how. I was without luggage like some outcast, but as soon as people started to swap goods, this became my asset, and I suddenly became a very desirable travel companion. Doll gave me two of her big bags. ‘And what is inside?’, I asked out of pure curiosity. I knew that the contents could not be incriminating, for this train was not involved in transporting drugs and spirits, and even if it were, the drug smuggling would happen in the opposite direction. ‘Nothing much; just some food. Basically nothing’, she said, as if I were a customs officer. It was a lot of nothing, perhaps thirty kilos in each bag, but I knew the smuggler’s rule, so I did not object. Two bags per person was in this environment an acceptable amount, and even if the cargo were confiscated, it would have been her loss, not mine. A man from another compartment turned out to be a posted worker travelling from East Berlin. He brought several long pieces of salami sausage, loads of wool for knitting and maybe five pairs of very elegant Salamander boots, worn in the Eastern bloc only by Westerners and high party dignitaries in Warsaw. All this was from the elegant shops in East Berlin. We took from him a stick of sausage each, and he squeezed about five packs of wool into ‘my’ bags. Since the boots happened to be my size, I bought one pair for about ten dollars, which was one tenth of what they would have cost in West Berlin. Doll told me to put the boots on, which I did, although they made me look even more ridiculous. In return the man took from her two ghetto blasters and a video recorder to hide, cementing the deal with a shot of vodka. He offered a packet of Frankfurter sausages, called Vienna sausages in Germany and Poland, as a complementary snack, after which he left to swap things in the next compartment. Someone in the corridor fetched a fizzy drink, so Doll had to open a fresh bottle of vodka to accompany it, after which she invited me home. The border control went relatively smoothly. The East German guards looked at our documents, and having established that we were travelling by transit from the West, gave us a look full of hate and disparagement, after which they left our compartment, disgusted as if we were some lower species. They spent all that extra time in the neighbouring compartment inspecting those Poles who had travelled from East Berlin only. As they were leaving, I heard one of them say in German: ‘Bloody drunkards. Shit! Look, my shoes are in vomit again. That’s simply hopeless!’

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Then the Polish customs came. In contrast to the East Germans, who were not interested in the transit of goods from the West, since their task was to prevent East German goods flowing from the local market eastwards (especially those subsidized by the government, like children’s clothes), the Polish customs officers were less interested in the East German goods and more sensitive to private imports of Western goods into Poland, which was a breach of the state monopoly on imports and exports. ‘What have you got to declare?’, asked the officer. ‘Nothing’, we all replied in chorus. He counted the bags out loud and at number fifteen turned to Doll. ‘OK, you come with me’. ‘Oh dear, what now?’, I asked Maria, who could hardly keep her balance on top of her boxes, so that each guard passing by had to help her get down and then climb back again, which they were very eager to do. Doing so, they were all smiles, touching her and laughing. One even grabbed her breasts as if accidentally, but she did not react at all. But then somehow nobody bothered to ask her what was in her boxes. ‘It will be all right’, said Maria, with a confident smile. Indeed, Doll returned after about five minutes and started to tell jokes as if nothing had happened. Only after we crossed the border did she say that the customs officer wanted to double the price, but she negotiated and it all ended up with the usual DM 50 (two monthly salaries in Poland, but about five hours work as a cleaner in West Berlin). She was talking about bribing a state official with such ease as if she were buying doughnuts. Later she gave the Polish conductor two cans of beer and a bar of chocolate so that he wouldn’t punch the tickets for us all – not that I had one. At that time I thought that social networks possessed patterns and that their links were based on purely economic calculation, thus I was trying to record the amounts of goods in my small address book so I could then compare the prices to check the leverage. With this purpose in mind I went to hide myself in the toilet, as I usually did on such occasions. However, in this case it was locked to protect salami sausage hidden in the toilet base from being urinated on. I had to wait for its owner to open the door, which could not happen until we were far enough from the border. Then we had a smugglers’ party, singing and shaking our bodies as if we were dancing. The posted worker from another compartment returned completely drunk to swap back the goods and, having forgotten what he had given to whom, he started to pull the boots off my legs. ‘All right give me back my Salamandras’, he mumbled. He smelled of vomit and put his hand on my thigh. Doll hit him over the head with a jumbo bar of chocolate containing nuts. It broke with a loud crack, and

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he fell flat on the floor. ‘Jesus, they’ve broken my skull!’, he moaned. He obviously did not know any more where he was and what was he doing. Everybody started to laugh. Doll poured some fizzy drink on his face, after which he got up and went out. Apparently, the goods he could not retrieve had already been calculated in his losses, balanced against the money he made on the items he had managed to smuggle. The main thing was that he managed to fool the East German guards by repelling them with his drunkenness (his breath alone had the potential to contaminate a whole army). Unlike him, Doll remembered our part of the deal in every little detail, although she did not hold back when it came to drinking. The distance was short, but the train had to stop again in the border zone on the Polish side and wait for the locomotive to be replaced, so by the time we reached our destination the men were in a deep sleep, lying on their bags covered with spilled beer and vomit. They snored loudly, exhaling the stench of beer and vodka mixed with whatever decaying leftovers were stuck in their teeth, their motionless bodies stinking with sweat and covering all possible space in the compartments and on the floor of the corridor, like corpses left after some horrible battle. When it came to getting out we just had to walk on their bodies, be it limbs, stomachs or heads, just as one jumps on stones in a stream, but nobody protested. The international express train was supposed to stop only in the big cities, but it stopped at a small station, which was not in the travel plan. Thanks to the power of the exchange rate beyond the Iron Curtain, it cost Doll a bar of chocolate and a can of a popular Western beer for each member of the train team and yet another can of beer for the station traffic controller to hold the train for ten minutes, until her whole cargo had been unloaded. Thus, while the men from ‘our’ party were unloading the compartment with Maria’s help, passing the bags through the window, Doll was talking to the controller to see to it that the train stopped long enough. My task was to run along the platform, to the front of the train and to shout ‘Stalin, Stalin’ as loud as I could. The task did not seem fully rational, but there was no time for explanation, so I obediently did what she told me. I ran to the front, stumbling in the darkness, shouting the dictator’s name as loudly as I could. After a while the window of a sleeper carriage opened, and a man with a Stalin-style moustache leaned out. He had never seen me before, but without any question he passed me a bag, a full-size baby doll and two unwrapped toilet seats. ‘I’m coming on Sunday’, he said, and then quickly disappeared back into the darkness of his compartment. We needed three taxis to take us and the goods from the station to Doll’s home in a nearby town, which she was renovating in grandiose

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style. That is why she needed tiles from the West and toilet seats from East Germany, as well as a second-hand Jacuzzi bathtub, which she got from a man who had it shipped all the way from the USA. It appeared that a member of her family had migrated there several years before as a political exile, and she regularly obtained goods shipments from him, so I was assured that if I ever wanted to organize anything in Florida, our people were there, ready to help. Maria was, on and off, her helping hand when it came to transporting things and selling them in Berlin. Stalin, in turn, was her man in the east. He lived near Warsaw and was a posted worker in Berlin. When I met him on Sunday, he told me he had previously been working in Libya, and when he came back to Poland he felt disgusted at having to work ‘for free’ (brzydziłem się kurde robić za friko) in socialist Poland, so he quickly joined another contractor to work in Berlin, although the earnings were not as spectacular as in the Middle East. This he compensated with the leverage he got from trading. He knew somebody near Warsaw who knew somebody near Moscow, so when he arrived with his share of goods, the cheap Russian cigarettes, the samovars, amber, bed linen and wooden folklore objects from Russia were waiting for him. In return, to Russia he sold ‘guaranteed genuine’ Western jeans made in Poland, with fake labels. His informal networks stretched from Libya, through Turkey and Russia to Berlin, where he worked and traded in foreign exchange with colleagues from Vietnam and Mozambique. Since he was Doll’s friend, her connections in Florida were also his. Now all this web of connections was also mine – just because I gave a lipstick to an unknown woman in need. Thus, as illustrated by the case described above, while researching informal networks one has to be spontaneous, go with the flow and be prepared to share one’s own privacy with unknown people, including visiting their homes and inviting them back to one’s own. Otherwise one cannot expect them to share their own privacy with the researcher.

Emotional Involvement: Empathy and the Moral Dilemma Good observation demands emotional involvement: as mentioned previously in describing the cases of Hurston and Radin (Chapter 2), as a rule, actors do not open up to detached strangers, that is, researchers who keep an emotional distance from them. When the observer does not share the actors’ emotions, even if he or she is sharing their circumstances, the actors usually interpret it as ignorance, contempt or a demonstration of one’s superiority. One cannot travel with smugglers while

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showing that one does not care about the outcome of their journeys and simultaneously expect them to share the details of their personal lives. Similarly, one cannot expect to learn anything from human traffickers by showing contempt for their actions, and one will learn nothing from thieves and sex workers but the standard lies created for the benefit of the outsiders. Empathy is a very important aspect of informality research. But what if our emotions towards our research subjects are negative? As mentioned in the previous chapter, one can come across people who are considered villains, and one can strongly disagree with their deeds. We must then remember that empathy does not mean sympathy. The researcher can feel sick afterwards, but during an interview one cannot betray any negative emotions towards an interlocutor. To demonstrate contempt, or even indifference, while interviewing informal actors would be counterproductive for the research itself and potentially dangerous for the researcher. We must remember that our task is not to pass a moral judgement but to see the subject’s world from his or her perspective, so that we can understand how it functions. If we do not force ourselves to share emotions with our research subjects, even those considered villains, we will never know their points of view and never be able to diagnose the causes of their actions. Despite the critical views discussed in the previous chapter, fieldwork on informal activities is not meant to satisfy an unhealthy curiosity in someone else’s private life or to produce useless knowledge for its own sake, but to deliver important information about the functioning of society, which can help remove the cause of a given social problem. The moral anguish of the researcher is a small price to pay for such knowledge. Case 2: Enduring Gruesome Stories An example of such a moral dilemma comes from the pilot fieldwork on prostitution, mentioned in the previous chapter. A friend of a friend in Berlin, who happened to be a migrant sex worker, invited us for dinner. She was an exceptionally beautiful woman in her twenties, though she looked ten years older. During an informal interview I asked her how she started her career as a sex worker, and she explained that she was recruited by pimps in Poland at a local disco. They lured her with the idea of good earnings, nice clothes and freedom from parental constraint to do what she wanted. Following up their invitation, she went voluntarily with the pimps to Berlin. Initially they took half of her earnings, but while working in the street she met German sex workers who had no pimps and upon their advice found a gay German man who agreed to marry her. Subsequently, she told the pimps that she

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had established herself as a self-employed street hooker and that if they bothered her any more she would report them to the local police. In the context of oral sex not requiring condoms, I asked whether she demanded that clients washed their genitals before erotic action. She replied, ‘No, that would be a waste of time. It is not possible to wash in the street. If he doesn’t f… care, why should I? I can have him released within five minutes and serve the next client’, after which she described in the most gruesome detail the look and smell of the dirty genitals of a truck driver who had not washed for several days. I shivered with disgust, at which she exclaimed: ‘Come on! What does it mean to me? Nothing! I have been raped by ten Turks (dziesięciu Turasów) with huge p….s, they f….d for hours and hours. They f….d me in all orifices, they released themselves [ejaculated] into my nose, they beat me when I was trying to escape, and they pissed in my mouth when I cried. I was seventeen then. So what’s a dirty p…k to me! I’m a professional, I can do anything, I don’t care anymore!’

It appeared that the first thing the two Polish pimps did after bringing her to Berlin was to close her in a room with Turkish men who raped her, until she lost consciousness and felt as if it were all happening to someone else.5 She had to start work in the street the very next day. Remarkably she recalled the event with pride, rather than self-pity or remorse, and she claimed that it was after the gruesome event that she was re-born as a professional prostitute.6 After this interview I started asking other prostitutes, pimps and knowledgeable local people about rape, but since I was not working undercover, all I learned was the usual media story, until a friend of a friend led me to a ‘man working in a brothel’. The man was a young, nice-looking Church member, with respectable parents, a wife and charming small children. I was conducting the interview in the idyllic atmosphere of his family sitting room while the wife was preparing snacks for us. He told me with smile that what he was doing was an ordinary job, for after all everything is for people, including brothels, to which I nodded, showing my approval. Besides, as he explained, one has to feed one’s family in a time of unemployment and transformation, arguing that he was not a trafficker or a thief but somebody more like a prison guard. So, I nodded again showing my deep understanding of his position. But then, in a very casual manner, he told me about the recruitment process, which involved the ‘testing’ of new recruits. ‘What kind of testing?’, I asked. ‘You know, a good girl costs a lot of money, and nobody will pay let’s say ten thousand euros for a useless prostitute. She has to prove herself’.

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‘What do you mean, prove herself?’ ‘Well, she has to show how durable she is’. ‘And how can one test that?’ ‘Well, normally, they call a bunch of men and these men f… them as long as they can last’. ‘The men?’ ‘No, the girls. They have to see how long such a girl can last before she collapses (zanim padnie). Also they do different things to her, and she has to endure all that’. ‘How long does it take?’ ‘Not long at all. Only several hours. … They make a lot of noise when it is being done, but if the girl is worthy she can start work the next day’. ‘And what if she does not want or perhaps cannot do so because she hurts?’ ‘They mustn’t hurt. They are prostitutes. That’s what the testing is all about’.

He also told me that the ‘girls’ must be disciplined and must know who is the master, otherwise they would be cheating. They had to know that disloyalty would mean severe punishment, the execution of which was one of my interlocutor’s responsibilities. He was talking with a smile which I could not reciprocate, nor could I have nodded, for I was taken aback both by the description of the atrocities he was a part of and by his casual tone. In order to perceive him as a human being sharing the same space with me, so that I could last till the end of my visit without offending him, I concentrated on the snacks his wife had prepared for us and on his good relations with the children. Obviously, for him a prostitute was exempted from the standards of humanity that he respected in his private life. He had been indoctrinated by the ideology of domination, which demands brutality towards a helpless victim. But since such behaviour is in conflict not only with male honour, but also with the moral code of ‘civilized’ society, it needs to be justified. As discussed by Foucault (1967, 1991), the infidel or heathen, the savage and the inferior, here fall into a single category of those who are excluded from the protection of the moral code, together with the insane, the rebel, the criminal, the soldier and the prostitute.

The Researcher’s Function in Informal Networks Despite a common opinion, participant observation is not really about ‘hanging out with people doing nothing’ (Gellner 2012), nor about shadowing actors, following them like an otherwise useless intruder. It consists in taking part in the observed people’s activities, which is

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necessary to make one’s presence credible. And since informal networks are based on the principle of functionality, somebody without function is redundant and therefore cannot be a participant observer. Usually, the appropriate function is ‘naturally’ attributed in the course of action. In the case of informal transactional networks, for example, in Berlin, somebody with a permanent place to stay would be useful as a provider of free storage or sleepovers, while somebody speaking German could act as an interpreter; somebody local would know the best and cheapest places to buy and sell products. Also, a local person would know local people and could be an intermediary in finding work. The more functions a researcher can possibly assume, the more embedded they will become in the network chains, and the more chains the greater the insights into the functioning of the whole. Hence, research into informality should be an act of total immersion, not one of balancing7 between the demands of bureaucrats and human decency. Case Study 2. A Roma Family in London In working with immigrants, an obvious and convenient function would be to act as their interpreter, as shown by the following example of fieldwork in London in the mid-1990s. In this case, while living in a poorer part of town, I was drawn into the network chains which included a family from Poland living in a council house. The father of the family was very fond of interpreters, since the previous one, who was appointed to him by the state, saved him from prison when he was caught red-handed stealing a collector’s expensive fish from a pond in a private park. Actually, it appeared that he came from the Roma family, but he spoke of himself ‘Ja Cygan’ (me Gypsy) and ‘My Cygany’ (us Gypsies) as being different from ‘głupie ludzie’ (them silly peoples). Officially he was an asylum-seeker running away from the Polish regime, although Poland had been a free, democratic country for several years. He spoke in a strong dialect and told me in detail how he spotted plenty of ‘free fish’ in the pond as he was walking through a nearby park on his way to a friend with whom he was doing business involving a rubbish skip. Upon seeing this he developed what he called a brilliant business idea: every day he caught one or two fish in a bucket and then sold them for five pounds to people he knew. Then, as he recalled, Christmas came and everybody wanted fish, so he went to the pond by car (with Polish registration plates, and with expired insurance) with a big wooden crate. He filled it with fish, went home, left the fish in the bathtub and came back again with two more crates.

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He managed to fill one and put it into the boot, but then, as he was standing in the middle of pond with a second crate in his hand, the police came. There was nothing he could say in his defence until the interpreter was summoned: ‘Actually, dem Englishmans are all strange … they must be born spies. This fish was free and belonged to nobody, so why did they have to call police?’, he wondered. This is how he recalled his encounter with the interpreter: ‘So, they asked me, why was I stealing Koi carp? And I said I was not stealing at all. I said I was hungry and I saw all dat unwanted food in a deserted pond, so I just took it. And then she interpreted this for me, and the policeman said it was not a fish but a coy carp (cnotliwy karp). So I told her that them Englishmens (te Angliki) are nuts. Why should I care whether some fish is coy? I thought that dem Englishmens must have been checking my mental health! I heard a lot about that, you know us Cygany are talking. And then the policeman said that it was a special breed called Koi. And that such big Koi carp could be worth up to two thousand pounds! And she was also surprised to hear that, because she was telling me that the fish was coy. And when she understood we laughed, and I told her to ask him how much the sparrows cost in here! It is insane country! If you put price also on water in dem rivers or on the air, everybody will die. And only then I understood why that fishes was so unhealthy yellow … I suspected that something was wrong with dem … but still dey tasted all right, although perhaps a bit too sweet! And the policeman did not believe me, and he asked why would anybody eat Koi fish? Then she told this policeman that it was a big cultural mistake. She told him that we grow this carp in Poland and then we fish it and eat it. And that carp is our traditional Christmas dish in Poland. She told him, “It is our must have like you have your Christmas Turkey in England. No Christmas without Carp”, she said. And in Poland there are no private parks, so I could not have known that dis fishes belonged to somebody, for in Poland a valuable animal would be kept in the zoo, she said. It was deep night and dat old policeman was eager to finish, so he got convinced. He has written a protocol and asked the interpreter to sign it, and also I signed it and then we were free to go home. She was a nice lady, and she even gave me a lift home in her car. She said I was playing a fool very well. Sure I was playing a fool, but I also had been a real fool! Had I known dem fishes are so expensive I would not have been selling dem for five a piece but for twenty!’

The woman did not give him a contact number, so he was left alone to face the British bureaucracy, without speaking a word of English. He was very happy to have met me, and I immediately became his private interpreter, of course free of charge. I invited him for a cup of tea, which turned into lunch, and that is how I entered his life. As soon as we had finished lunch he invited me to his car with Polish registration

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plates, a long-expired MOT and no insurance, and took me to a job centre, where he tried to obtain unemployment benefit on top of what he was already getting as an asylum-seeker. The next day he needed to register with a doctor, and in the next few days there was always some urgent matter requiring an interpreter for himself, his extended family or his acquaintances. He invited me home, to a council estate, to visit his family. He lived with his wife and three children in a two-bedroom apartment he had obtained from the council. ‘One good thing about dose Englishmens is big flats’, he admitted, as he led me into a stuffy living room. I had the impression that everything in the room, including a big sofa bed and two mattresses on the floor, had been freshly brought from the skip. And I was right. He boasted: ‘There are seven people living here, and still plenty of free space!’ ‘Seven? I thought you said you have three children!’ ‘That’s right. The children are at school most of the time, and the wife is at work or in the kitchen, so it could get lonely. Fortunately Russkis (Ruskie) work in shifts’. ‘What Russians?’ ‘Russkis girls, my woman met at work. Two live in the smaller room, but then they gets to pay less … They are lucky to have us. No Englishman would sublet a room to people without permission to stay! Dey are all spies, dem Englishmens’.

It appeared that he was informally subletting bedrooms to two young women from Russia who were working unofficially as cleaners in the same hotel as his wife, who was also working unofficially, for none of them had a job permit. ‘JaCygan’ said he could perhaps even like England if it were not for the bureaucracy. ‘Look here’, he said, opening a chest of drawers with a dramatic gesture. It was filled with unopened letters. ‘There are some new letters every single day. How am I supposed to read them? What are dem Englishmens really up to (co te Angliki naprawde kombinujo)?’ The letters were mainly overdue bills and requests for different documents which he was supposed to deliver to the job centre, the health centre, the school and the Home Office. When I finished reading the tenth letter, he sadly hung his head. ‘It seems it will soon come to the worst … one day I’ll have to go to a legal work’, he said in a gloomy voice. But before that terrible thing happened he had a new idea. He wanted me to establish my own job agency and employ him, of course informally, for he saw himself as a silent co-owner responsible for bringing all people interested in working without job permit, and I would be the front woman.

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‘Wouldn’t it perhaps be illegal?’, I asked. ‘It cannot be fully illegal if there are plenty of such agencies. My woman works for such people. De Russkis too. Dem inspectors come to hotel and de hotel people say my woman works for an agency and dat is all. No questions. And I have seen de agent! He is Indian, he has plenty of gold. Dem Indians are like us Cygany. Dem love Gold. He had thick golden chains and rings on every finger’, he grinned, showing off his golden tooth. ‘I can organize all the paperwork. We have our man in Southampton, and he can produce any paper you want. A blue card costs only fifty, so you don’t need to do anything. You just have an agency, just sit there, register people and take their money. Think of it … you could have Louis at home.’ ‘Why would I want some Louis?’, I wondered. ‘Louis (Ludwiki), the best Belgian furniture? Everybody wants it! … only the rich can buy Louis, and of course our family because we were trading them to Soviet Russia, across all communist lands … Those were de good times! Every summer we would travel all the way to Antwerp. Nobody else was allowed, only us Cygany. One could live a year having sold one Louis … and then we would go to Russia for gold … nine lovely caravan cars, and everybody would admire our caravans, with dem Louis furniture and portable toilets. Now we have been rotting more than half a year in one place like some clerks. What a f… shame!’

One day in January, which is the coldest month in England, he introduced me to Denca, a young Roma woman from Slovakia with four children, two of them of school age. She was waiting for the asylum procedures to go through and, ‘JaCygan’ claimed, the immigration authorities had put her in a flat without heating or electricity. The Slovaks were freezing, so he took them in until he could find for them some heating solution, which he eventually found in the skip, where he also found most of his own furniture. Yet, for some reason the electricity in the other flat was still not connected, so that eventually Denca and her children stayed with him, of course for free. He and his family shared whatever they had with this woman, whom he had never seen before and whose language they even did not speak. They communicated in a mixture of Polish and Slovak, and since her children spoke German, I was useful for translating what they said into Polish. Denca, the Slovak Roma woman, did not like it in England and decided to have a go at Canada. She appeared to be an expert in asylum, having lived as an asylum-seeker in Austria, Italy and Germany. She thought that the best country was Germany, for, as she put it, ‘Out there they still had a need to be good to Roma after what Hitler did’. Apparently, they put her family in a luxurious apartment in a block owned by some charity. She could use the swimming pool, and her children were sent to a

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school with a tennis court. She spent a wonderful time there, until her application was rejected, which she expected anyway. By then Denca already had an urge to travel and a plan to go to England, although it had such a bad reputation. ‘England had a bad reputation?’ I asked her to clarify this statement, for at the time of research the media in the UK were stating every single day that the country was reputedly a heaven for asylum-seekers, which, according to them, was a strong pull factor. ‘JaCygan’ chimed in: ‘She is right. First of all, dem Englishmens are racist. See, dem rich men rule here. Us poor foreigners mean nothing. Dey keep us in dose flats without electricity and send our children to school with Blacks (z Murzynami). To dem we are all N…s. Dey don’t teach well in dose schools. All de children learn is PE, so dey grow to be strong workers. We are all N…s. A N… like us must be always poor and stupid. That is racism. N… steals one fish, and dey puts him to prison, and the rich man steals millions and dey safeguard him. Once you put enough money in dem London banks, dey would protect you, no matter what. All Russian mafia money is here, mafia owns half of London, all best houses in Chelsea! But dem Englishmens don’t care … There are two races in England: de rich and de poor. Dis country is a big money laundry. No good to our children. And we already have enough money to go to Canada and back’.

Although at the time of the interview I interpreted his words as following a ‘conspiracy theory’, common in the circles of Polish Church devotees, it appeared later that ‘JaCygan’ possessed secret knowledge circulating in the Roma networks across Europe, for it was only later that the newspapers first wrote about Russian millionaires taking over London. Thus, thanks to my assuming the useful function of interpreter, by sharing my food, my time, my resources and my space with JaCygan and his friends, I was included in the informal Roma network chains ranging from Odessa to Toronto or in the networks of petty traders from countries like Vietnam, Poland, Mozambique or Russia, and I could benefit from the secret knowledge communicated along these chains. If we were to interpret JaCygan’s social relationships as a typical transnational network exclusively based on Roma ethnicity, we would fail to account fully for its horizontal dimension. When we look beyond ethnicity, from the perspective of the RVP, we can see that the ethnic criterion was not that exclusive, nor was the network impermeable, as it included the non-Roma Russian girls, the Indian owner of the job agency, myself as a Pole and hundreds of other people across the world with whom the Roma family had connections. Due to the open character of informal network chains, I was able to enter this particular Roma family as an ordinary Polish person. However, this would not

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have been possible without my full immersion in the informal milieus, which included relinquishing my position of authority as a scholar and assuming a credible role appropriate to the given circumstances, being useful to people and sharing their emotions, helping them and also asking for their help. But then, as discussed in the previous chapter, such immersion is almost impossible in overt research done with full adherence to the formal rules, where a distance between the observer and the observed is automatically created and the emic–etic distinction is required. This vertical logic, which hinders research into horizontal social relations, can be bypassed by using the RVP approach, which allows the researcher to remove the distance between the observer and the observed. The researcher stops being a ‘person of power and authority’, and the people being researched are no longer ‘vulnerable research subjects’, ‘part time criminals’ or ‘shadowy creatures’, but ordinary people, just like the observers themselves.

Notes 1. For an excellent work discussing the positioning of researcher as an insider in the fieldwork on migration, see Voloder and Kirpitchenko 2016. 2. As used in migration research by sociologists and social anthropologists alike, the concept of social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984) is a tool for the hierarchical classification of those in the receiving society into higher and lower categories, with the category of ‘unskilled undocumented migrant without language’ at the very bottom of the social ladder. In this logic a default equals sign is created between the ‘unskilled undocumented migrant’ and the lowest possible level of cultural capital. This is discussed further in Irek 2011. 3. A direct translation from Polish of a commonly used metaphor, meaning that the legs hurt from standing for a long time. 4. The informal networks of Vietnamese workers are described in an excellent study by Kristóf Gosztonyi (2004). 5. The ‘do not care’ aspect translates into the language of psychology as a posttraumatic disorder known as dissociation, or banishing traumatic events from one’s consciousness (Herman 1992). The statement ‘I left my body’, a symptom of dissociative disorder (Giobbe 1991: 125), strikingly resembles the splitting of the personality described in studies of the ‘breaking in’ in oppressive labour systems such as slavery and work camps (cf. Elkins 1963), the final phase of which represented adjustment to the system of oppression, described by witnesses as a ‘detachment (of the soul) from the actual body’ (Bettelheim 1943). The analogy with ‘tested’ prostitutes reporting a split between body and soul invites a closer comparison with these cases, especially since, in all three cases, the person who had been ‘broken in’ was, towards the end of the process, excluded from the moral norms of civilized

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Western society (Foucault 1967, 1991) and reduced to the status of being a commodity. 6. Studies of the ‘breaking in’ phase in slavery and work camps (cf. Elkins 1963) show that the final exclusion always happens through the same sequence of abusive and demeaning acts which bear the characteristics of a rite of passage, understood as ‘the way in which human beings indicate transformation from one social status to the next’ (Lindholm 1997: 409). 7. Düvell describes how, in working within the current bureaucratic ramifications, the CLANDESTINO team had constantly to keep balancing between research and humanitarian relief (Düvell et al. 2010: 234).

e4 Thinking Beyond Sectors Informal Economy and Informal Networks

Since form is an analytical concept, the differentiation between form and non-form, and thus, between the patterned and non-patterned organization of social relations, is a matter of analytical approach. In the empirical world actors are rarely closed within a single set of social relationships and even those who participate in what we regard as closed relationships or structures, simultaneously have relationships outside any patterns we might observe. However, investigation of these complex relationships has been obstructed by the confusion resulting from the ambiguous definition of the informal economy, which rests on the concept of networks, but does not differentiate between closed and open types of these. Thus, on the one hand we are dealing with an informal network, understood as the organization of social relationships within a given, definite set of people engaged in economic activities hidden from the state. This type of organization is usually referred to as an ‘informal structure’, the term itself being troubled by the semantic contradiction between the words ‘informal’, implying a lack of form, and ‘structure’, implying its presence. On the other hand, we have the logically consistent, ‘pure’ concept of informal networks used in this book, understood as open chains of egocentric relationships, that are devoid of structure and form-free by definition, can develop along the lines of common interests or shared emotions, and can, but need not, have a transactional character. As discussed in the first chapter, the networks theorized and investigated in this book overlap to some extent with the ‘informal structures’ described in the informal economy, but are not identical to them.

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Informal Economy The very concept of the informal economy was born once economists observed that goods and services could be exchanged along the links in social networks in a process that was hidden from official records (Hart 1985, Henry 1993). Thus, the term ‘informal economy’ was given to economic activities carried out through informal networks, understood as relatively closed, patterned sets of relationships. And although the social space created through the activities of actors involved in informal transaction chains extends beyond the production and exchange of goods and services (Irek 2009, Hann and Hart 2009, 2011), the major bulk of the research into informal networks has been conducted from the point of view of their economic significance, using the concepts applied in economics. In order to label economic activities hidden from state records, different authors have used different terms like underground, subterranean, hidden, shadow, grey, black, semi-legal, irregular and informal economy, with the meaning of each term varying slightly and without any success in achieving a single and precise definition1 (Schneider 2012, Buehn and Schneider 2012, Routh and Borghi 2016). While some authors use these names as aliases for the same activity, others have been looking for greater precision in terminology (e.g. Williams and Windebank 1998, Williams 2013, 2014), trying to differentiate between legal, illegal and semi-legal activities, or between the informal economy defined as governed by informal institutions, and the irregular economy defined as governed by individual calculations connected to rule-breaking (Dallago 2005, Blokker and Dallago 2012). However, for economists the major concern has been measuring the level of informal activities, analysing jobs and enterprises created in the ‘informal sector’ and examining the financial impact of this sector on the macro-level (Feige 1985, Feige and Cebula 2011, Williams and Schneider 2016). Following the same logic as that applied to the formal model of the economy, the ‘informal sector’ tends to be further segmented according to types of employment and labour, such as self-employment, waged employment, casual labour, domestic work, undeclared work and industrial outwork (homework). Additionally, segmentation may run along the lines of race, ethnicity, caste, religion and gender (Reich et al. 1973; Chen 2012).

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Market Segmentation and Dual Labour Market Theory Although it has been admitted that informality is an anthropological concept and that it arises from theorizing basic processes in social life, which satisfy both economic and non-economic needs (Gaughan and Ferman 1987; Ferman et al. 1993, Hann and Hart 2011), ever since the concept of the informal economy was introduced, the economy bias has dominated the research. Thus, across different disciplines in the social sciences, anthropology included, one speaks of moral economy, prestige economy, shadow economy, black markets, undocumented labour, irregular work force, irregular employment and the informal sector, conceptualized as a separate segment of the economy that is secondary to the supposedly superior formal sector. The idea of a ‘sector’ is a basic concept in economics, but the ‘segmentation’ approach to informality, in which the formal and the informal are two separate, mutually exclusive social spaces, can be derived directly from the dual labour market theory. This was developed in the second half of the previous century (Piore 1972, Watcher 1974, Guha-Khasnobis et al. 2006), when economists described the segmentation of labour market into its primary and secondary segments, the basic distinction between the two being seen in terms of respective levels of stability. While in the primary segment jobs could only exist in a stable economic environment, with stable work routines, high skills and wages, and job ladders, in the secondary segment jobs were low skilled, low paid, with work routines being undesirable, job stability low and job ladders few. As David Gordon and colleagues observed (Reich et al. 1973), labour market segmentation runs along the lines of race, sex and geography, making the segmentation approach suitable for the analysis of social exclusion. The theory claimed that informal jobs were created within the unstable, secondary segment. Eventually, the informal economy itself was considered a secondary, or a ‘second economy’: volatile, unpredictable, difficult to measure, offering no upward mobility and undesirable. Although for some scholars, like Ray Pahl (1984), the informal economy was a realm of freedom allowing humane relationships in the process of production,2 informal activities were generally considered parasitic in relation to the formal economy, and the fluidity of the line between crime and informality was emphasized. Informality has been called ‘part-time crime’, ‘deviance’ (Mars 1982, 2013; Henry 1993) or, at best, a ‘grey zone’ (Frederiksen and Harboe Knudsen 2015). Despite the proponents of this approach themselves admitting that under some circumstances the informal economy can be beneficial for society, the negative value

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marking of the concept has been a dominant approach in the social sciences, with sociologists warning against the informal sector growing at the expense of the formal one, thus degrading labour conditions3 and leading industrial relations back to the nineteenth century by reviving backward forms of production like sweatshops. Informalization of Labour, Exclusion and Migration Not surprisingly, this approach has been officially supported by governments, NGOs and academic research institutions, producing numerous studies of the informalization of labour in the context of the problems of developing countries, such as gender inequality, poverty and exclusion, by such authors like Martha Chen (2008, 2009, 2012), Rosalind Boyd (2006), Ravi Kanbur (2009, 2014) or Supriya Routh (Routh and Borghi 2016), to name just a few. This approach to informality is also characteristic of migration studies, with its numerous publications4 on the economic exploitation of migrants. An undesirable side effect of this approach was that it provided evidence for the supposed existence of a causal link between informalization and migration from poor countries, for, as Alejandro Portes and Saskia Sassen-Koob noted: Informalization is most likely when a profit squeeze, brought about by increasing labor costs or competition from cheaper foreign goods, combines with the possibility of decentralizing work arrangements and the availability of a labor force to do so. … In the United States, the required labor force has been provided, to a large extent, by a surge of immigrants coming from Third World countries. … The immigrant flow was central to the informalization process of labor intensive industries affected by foreign competition but soon extended to others that were not. (1987: 54)

In the same publication, the authors admitted that, although the data from the USA do suggest such a link, when compared with European data (from Italy) it appears that migration is not a prerequisite for informalization, therefore any causality between the two is questionable. In a later work, Portes went even further and claimed that the informal economy is universal and does not depend on the stage of development or presence of migrant labour (Portes et al. 1989). As early as the 1970s, Jonathan Gershuny claimed that informal economic activities in capitalist countries are structural and that they result from the reduction of well-paid employment in post-industrial society, with people moving into what he called the self-service sector instead of the service sector, as predicted by liberal economists (Gershuny 1977). Early studies of non-migrant-based informal economies include those

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of Gerald Mars on pilfering in Canada and UK (Mars 1982), Ray Pahl’s work (1984) on households in Sheppey in Kent, Carol Stack’s classic ethnography (1974) on swapping goods in a poor Black neighbourhood in the USA and John Davis’s work (1972) on altruism in the gift economy in the UK. Yet despite numerous studies by social scientists showing the existence of widespread informal activities amongst the non-migrant populations of the ‘advanced economies’, the causal ties between migration, especially from the third world, and informality came to be written into the scholarly discourse and exploited in public debate in times of crisis. The link seemed natural – after all, in research on capitalism, migrants have traditionally been regarded as a reservoir of cheap labour, and squeezing costs was considered to be the main driving force of the informal economy. To break this link, it is necessary to exit the vertical logic of sectors and segmentation, which, despite its shortcomings and the efforts to overcome them has for several decades been the ruling paradigm in research on informal social phenomena. Economic Cycles and Informal Social Relations Despite its obvious advantages for research into discrimination, exclusion, poverty and migration, even if we chose to disregard its moralistic bias, this approach is not the best perspective for the investigation of informal social relations. Dual market theory, like other vertically constructed theories – including its very antithesis, liberal and neoliberal economics – tends to overlook the fact that in the empirically experienced world there are no isolated segments and that informal economic activities provide a degree of stability (Pahl 1984, Ferman et al. 1993). Thus, while the formal economy develops along sinusoid lines, in cycles marked by dramatic crises and wars, and is based on a system generally understood as involving the objective exchange of values, which de facto are arbitrarily prescribed, rarely verified and largely depend on an accounting system,5 in the informal economy the situation in all these respects is the reverse. Here values are realistic, immediately verified and not bound to accounting, which suggests that the overall level of informal economic activity across states and economic systems can be relatively stable, rather than undergoing fluctuation cycles symmetrical with those of the formal economy, as has been assumed so far.6 This assumption has been derived from the logic of a single universal market regulated by the ‘invisible hand’ and is grounded in the observation that ‘the overall prevalence of informality appears to fall as per capita income rises. … there is some evidence of a negative

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correlation between changes in informality and economic growth: more rapid growth is associated with smaller increases (or reductions) in informality’ (Heintz 2012: 18–19). The prevalent opinion is thus that the informal sector tends to ‘swell’ in times of depression, allowing economically deprived actors to survive, while in periods of economic prosperity the informal activities no longer dominate the scene and are not necessary for survival, since actors in the ‘secondary’ sector are smoothly absorbed into the formal economy. This rule, however, does not necessarily apply to third-world economies (e.g. Bosch and Maloney 2008,7 Routh and Borghi 2016), and it does not take migration into account, nor does it explain what happens ‘at the bottom’ of the social scale when actors progress up the job ladder. While it is true that informal activities are not so obvious and visible under non-crisis circumstances, they do not necessarily ‘shrink’ in times of prosperity, as shown by the informalization of labour in third-world countries. Moreover, rapid economic growth in one country creates a ‘suction’ effect in which, as soon as the more privileged local actors move on to better jobs, their place in the ‘informal sector’ is taken over by new actors, usually immigrants from a poorer district or country, who, as Bridget Anderson (2000) puts it, ‘do the dirty work’. Since these actors also want to take advantage of the favourable economic conditions, they subcontract their jobs to those who are most disadvantaged – migrants without papers, who are rarely visible. As Sassen-Koob has noted, although informality was not caused by irregular immigrants, it is for them one of the very few accessible survival strategies (Sassen-Koob 1994, 2013). Here the rule of the thumb is that as soon as a particular ethnic or national migrant group obtains legal status in a given country, their place on what is considered the bottom of the social hierarchy is immediately filled by those ‘without papers’ (Irek 1998, 2011). Thus, although some actors move to ‘formal sector’ jobs, this does not necessarily curb the ‘informal sector’, which can just as well grow together with the formal economy. However, it simply becomes less visible, rather than shrinking in times of prosperity, as has been assumed in economics. Abandoning the assumption of reverse cycles is a logical step on the way to a better understanding of the relationship between the formal and the informal economy: since one cannot prescribe identical properties to form and to something that is form-free, we should not necessarily expect the informal economy to develop in similar cycles to the formal economy. And since informal activities are by definition hidden from the state and cannot be researched, let alone measured, by using formal methods, looking for a causal relationship between the

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formal elements of the system (such as increased institutionalization, bureaucratization and taxation) and the ‘level of informal activity’ is an exercise based on speculation, as are the very efforts to compare and predict the ‘levels’ of the informal economy. We may as well act in accordance with common sense and measure what is measurable, while accepting that the informal is uncountable, like the social space itself.

Looking at the Whole: Where Homo Economicus Meets Homo Sociologicus Exiting the logic of sectors and assuming one social space with plural attributes allows us to describe phenomena which were hard to discern through the vertical lens and hence underappreciated by social scientists researching the informal economy. Looking at the whole, rather than analysing the economy segment by segment, one can see that even such vertical phenomena like job ladders and upward mobility in what is called the ‘informal sector’ have been generally underestimated by research, the simultaneous assumption being that for ordinary people active in the secondary sector, the consumption aspect of informal activities predominates over the capital accumulation (Dallago 2002).8 Similarly, the role of managers, business owners and upper-class clients in the informal economy has not been given enough attention in the social sciences, for in the ‘sectorial’ approach they function in a separate segment away from the ‘ordinary people’ who are engaged in the informal economy, and their activities tend to be researched by dedicated entrepreneurship studies. Viewing informal economic activities from the Restricted Verticality Perspective allows us to overcome the theoretical problems inherited from the dual market theory and to appreciate better the continuity of social space. Accepting the amorphous informal network chains, rather than separate sectors of economy, as the ‘units’ of analysis, one can better investigate the extent of informal activities that are not restricted by sector, be it primary versus secondary, formal versus informal, production versus services, or textiles versus heavy industry or agriculture. Looking across the sectors, one can not only include actors and activities which are lost from view when the analytical unit is a single sector, but, seemingly paradoxically, better appreciate vertical phenomena such as job ladders or upward mobility in the informal economy, investigation of which is usually obstructed by the limitations of the segmented approach. But what is more important for the present

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discussion, RVP allows us to place the owners of capital, managers and workers in a single category and to observe how individual economic agents pursue their goals while being interrelated in a web of informal relationship chains extending not only vertically but also horizontally. One can better observe, for example, that, due to actors’ horizontal personal connections outside a single occupational network, particular production line, trade or place, the stability of power relations in the subcontractor chains characteristic of the informal economy is undermined. This works to the advantage of the informal actors, for, despite being relatively structured, these chains (vertical by the virtue of the subordination of their elements) are flexible enough to enable progress from the lowest position of sub-subcontractor to that of the informal job agent, employer and eventually business owner. One of numerous empirical examples of such mobility, which is generally underappreciated when the informal economy is analysed by sector, and which I was able to observe in my longitudinal research, comes from West Berlin. It was shortly before I started my systematic research of Polish informal networks, described in previous chapters, that I first observed the informal subcontractor chains in the textile industry and discovered, to my surprise, that the owners of these enterprises were not shadowy creatures, but indigenous middle-class actors. Case Study 1. All Classes Included: Subcontractor Chains in West Berlin In 1987, during my first visit to the West, I met a Polish migrant, Janka, who was looking for informal jobs. She was a building engineer, a graduate of a prestigious technical university in Poland, and she was staying under false pretences as a tourist, rather than applying for asylum. Hence, she could not find a legal job in her profession in the ‘primary sector’, while in the ‘secondary sector’ all the available building jobs were for men. On the advice of other Poles, she put an advertisement in a local commercial paper specializing in ‘secondhand’ transactions. The advertisement matched similar ones by Polish females, reading ‘Polish woman looks for job’, and included a phone number. As her German was not good enough to conduct a telephone conversation, I had to answer the calls in her name. The majority of job offers were connected with sex, including phone sex and a ‘well-paid stable job’ in a brothel; however, on the second day after the paper was published, she was asked whether she could sew. I answered ‘yes’ just in case and accepted an offer of work in a textile factory in her name. It emerged that she could not sew, but she was desperate for money, so

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she decided to try. She thought that since she was a building engineer, simple sewing could not be that difficult. Since Janka’s German was poor and she was afraid to go there on her own in case it was really another sex offer, I agreed to accompany her to the job interview in a poorer part of the city in a small dry cleaning and ironing shop. As we entered the shop, we saw a black couple leave with a big plastic bag. The shopkeeper was quite a friendly man of around fifty, also speaking poor German, with a heavy foreign accent. We talked for a while, and he said that he himself was an immigrant and had been a farmer, but had had to leave his fatherland in search of work. He arrived in Germany empty-handed, but in this land of plenty, due to the hard work of his own hands, he had built his own business and owned a good car, at which point he indicated an old blue Mercedes parked in front of the shop. The only question he asked was whether she could sew, to which I answered that she was a fully trained dressmaker, although our joint qualifications in that area were very much restricted to telling a needle from a fork. He gave us a paper template and a bale of white cloth for twenty jackets and explained that all she had to do was to put the template on the cloth, cut it, sew the pieces together along the respective edges and then finish the trimmings, which seemed pretty straightforward. ‘Very simple job’, he said. ‘The pockets are difficult. I to show. You to make example so, and example so, understand?’, he said, showing us how to trim the pockets. He offered ten marks per garment, which was half of Janka’s monthly salary as a clerk at a building site back in Poland. He said that, since an average seamstress can make four jackets a day, he expected her to make twenty jackets by the end of the week. Most importantly, he did not ask for a work permit or any documents, but just gave us a bag of cloth, a template and matching thread, without any deposit. The bag was identical to that carried by the black couple. Before we left, yet another person came in with a plastic bag and waited right behind us. As we were leaving, she said Wiedersehen (‘bye) in a Russian accent. Janka had no sewing machine and no scissors, but she went to a second-hand shop recommended to her by Poles still back in her hometown, apparently owned by a Russian Jew, and bought all we needed for DM 50, which seemed a good investment. Then she discovered that sewing was not so easy after all. She had no big table or proper light, not to speak of experience, so I had to help her to make the jackets on time. It took us two days to cut the fabric alone, and even though we were working fourteen hours a day it took us the next five days to sew the bits together and to iron them all, so instead of delivering on Saturday, we were ready on Monday of the following week, hoping for our DM

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200, which just then was about US$ 100. The owner was not upset that we were late, but complained that the jackets had not been properly ironed, therefore he said he could pay us only two marks per item. This was a bold lie, for the jackets had been perfectly ironed, since ironing was a basic skill of a Polish housewife, but the offer was non-negotiable, so we got our forty marks (about twenty dollars), and we left the shop without getting another batch, using numerous Polish taboo words referring to his mother’s profession and to male private parts. ‘Bloody Ironman. … All immigrants are cheating bastards. If they could they would drink your blood. From now on we shall deal only with Germans’, concluded Janka. Her judgement was based on a statistically insignificant sample of one person, and she was an immigrant herself, but nevertheless the strategy proved right. By working with Germans, one dealt directly with an employer, bypassing an expensive step in the transaction chain. Having made twenty complicated jackets, she felt she was an expert seamstress and decided to pursue her career in the textile industry, asking me for help again. We found several advertisements in the local press, this time a prestigious local newspaper for the middle classes, and the same day we had our next job interview at a small atelier in a poor part of the city. The owner was a young German woman who presented herself as a beginner in fashion design. She said that she was preparing for a prestigious show and needed the whole collection to be ready in four weeks. She asked whether Janka had experience, and after I confirmed this, she gave us a paper template, thread and a bale of cloth for ten dresses, which Janka was supposed to deliver in two days. The woman offered payment of ten marks per garment and promised more work. The cloth was similar to the one we had been given previously, and the trims on the pockets were identical. I was unable to help with the sewing this time, so Janka called a few friends and found a genuine seamstress freshly arrived from Poland called Basia, to whom Janka promised twenty marks (ten dollars), without knowing how much she would eventually obtain from the designer. Janka and Basia worked two days and nights, but they got the dresses ready on time, and I was again asked for help with translation. When we arrived at the atelier we saw the familiar blue Mercedes parked in the front. The Arab man from the ironing shop was putting a bale of cloth into his boot. It appeared that he was working for the same atelier, obviously subcontracting the jobs. The designer checked the dresses and paid us the agreed sum. The next batch consisted of twenty jackets, the identical template that we had used for the Arab man, but the cloth was black and the price DM 12 a piece, which meant that the latter was earning ten marks

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per jacket without lifting a finger, by exploiting workers without documents. Janka got more jobs directly from this designer, sharing the work and profit with Basia. But then the collection was ready and there was no more sewing until the next season, so she asked me for help again, and we answered an advertisement for an experienced dressmaker for children’s clothes from a posh boutique in the richest part of the city. The owner was a very unpleasant woman who claimed noble descent by ostensibly emphasizing her ‘von’ and speaking to her workers in the most unpleasant manner to make them feel inferior. She was willing to pay up to ten marks for a garment, depending on how complicated it was, and did not provide any template, just an ‘artistic’ drawing, fabric and threads. The prices in the boutique ranged from DM 50 to 250. Janka took the job, which she shared with Basia on ‘almost equal’ terms, paying her five marks per garment. Shortly afterwards I saw the young designer’s name in the front window of an elegant shop in the best part of Berlin. Her black and white clothes collection was advertised as ‘sensational’ and featured ‘our’ jackets priced at about DM 300 (roughly 150 dollars). When I came back to West Berlin a year later, I learned that Janka had earned what she needed and had gone back to Poland to open her own business, while Basia had stayed in Berlin and had a regular illegal job in another boutique, paid hourly at DM 5. To maximize her profits, she had her own subcontractors. ‘Aren’t you scared to work in a boutique without a permit?’, I asked her. ‘Why would I? I have never seen a policeman in this part of town. Come on, expensive boutiques are the last place controlled for illegal workers!’ Judging by the number of advertisements looking for seamstresses, informal subcontracting was very common in the textile industry and, in line with Sassen-Koob’s (2013) observation that immigrants do not create informal employment opportunities, these chains were usually initiated by German entrepreneurs who employed migrants both directly and indirectly, mostly from countries in eastern Europe, but also from Asia and Africa. While the direct employment of illegal migrants on a larger scale would have been easy to detect, this was not the case with indirect employment through a frontman, usually an official contractor who used a sub-contractor chain and underreported his income. From the viewpoint of the profit–capital investment ratio, the home working system (as in the classic descriptions of Benton 1990, Waldinger and Lapp 1993, Chen et al. 1999 or Ybarra 2000) worked better than the sweatshops: the employers were not responsible for living and working space, machines and electricity bills, which were

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not as substantial as in the sweatshops, so that the risk of discovery was limited. The informal workers in turn were not bound to their positions by any contracts, therefore they were free to become informal job agents themselves and to take advantage of the demand for migrant labour, which was considered cheap in Germany. However, their humble gains were substantial sums in the migrants’ countries of origin, which was a powerful economic motivation. Within a year, Basia had become an informal patron in one set of relationships, while at the same time being a client herself in a different set of relationships. Janka, in turn, used the money she had earned informally to set up a formal enterprise back in Poland, thus contradicting the usual assumption that money earned through informal economic activities is used for consumption rather than capital accumulation. After eight months in Berlin she had enough capital to buy a boutique and enough capitalist experience to profitably exploit the home production system of clothes back in Poland, which at this time was still under socialist rule. The above example shows the inclusive character of transactional informal networks in West Berlin, which thrived even though there was no economic crisis: not only was the German economy on the upward curve of the cycle, with low unemployment, but the poor were also protected by a very efficient social benefits system that covered both German and non-German nationals. Informal economic activities were not restricted to a narrow spectrum of irregular migrants who were excluded from the system, for the networks I have described also included prosperous middle-class citizens, who were not necessary of migrant origin. The networks were thus inclusive across the whole spectrum of legal statuses and across social classes and ethnicities, involving actors of different nationalities, ethnicities and religions. Also, they were not closed within one ‘sector’, for actors like the young designer, ‘Ironman’ or the boutique owner were simultaneously involved in the formal sector and owned legal (tax-paying) enterprises, while also being active in what is called the ‘informal sector’. And although the networks described above were vertically structured by virtue of the very subcontracting, these structures, together with the power relations that shaped and maintained them, were unstable. This was shown by Janka’s business relationship with ‘Ironman’, which lasted less than two weeks and was dissolved abruptly without any economic, moral or legal consequences for either party. It took me several years of more systematic research before I realized that, in investigating informal networks, one cannot rely on the vertical logic, the normative approach, or the principle of the exclusivity of spaces or sectors. However, at that early stage of my research

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my perception was still vertically biased: since I was looking for the patterns and forms that ordered the social, rather than embracing its horizontal dimension, my observation was a priori falsified by my preconceptions. Having been brought up within the intellectual tradition of Marxist philosophy and German historicism, I did not contest the conventional categories, nor the classical concept of networks as defined by Mitchell (1969). I conceived of informal social relationships as power-based, hierarchically structured, closed networks with distinct positions of actors ranging from the capital owner down through the chain of contractors and subcontractors. I saw it as exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie typical of the capitalist economy and as a disgraceful return, by the back door, to the backward production methods of previous centuries. My approach was in this respect not so very different from that of world-systems theory, with its stress on the unequal distribution of wealth, which its proponents see as the cause of the informal economy in ‘peripheral’ countries (Roberts 2013). But as my fieldwork progressed, I recognized that informal relationships were not as simple as I had initially thought, for apart from the patterns I was able to observe, there also existed non-patterned relationships. The same people who were actors in what I initially saw as ‘closed networks’ were also involved in numerous un-patterned relationships outside the relatively ‘closed’ sets, and these relationships had no endpoints. It is through such horizontal chains of friends and their friends that Janka met myself and Basia and that she could freely cut her link with the ‘Ironman’. These un-patterned relationships were not necessarily of an economic, contractual, transactional or even reciprocal nature, and they went on in seemingly endless horizontal chains (as distinct from the vertical chains of subcontracting). And although these relationships were not confined to the textile industry, an ethnic group, a social class or a single locality, they still influenced types of organization that were regarded as closed ‘informal structures’ in that locality and that specific occupation, making them unstable and washing away their power from day to day. It was the rule rather than the exception that a ‘set pattern’ in a network I observed would change in a matter of weeks, if not days. However, at that time I was unable to theorize what was responsible for this instability, since these chains of ‘friends of friends’ were not specific relations that occurred in the production or distribution of particular goods, nor were they closed networks representing particular sets of people of the sorts usually described in the literature.

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Case Study 2. Exiting Hierarchy: (Im)possible Sanctions Unlike in the case of organizations with a distinctly closed character, such as gangs, sects, ‘mafias’ or relatively closed milieus bordering on criminality, in informal ‘occupational’ networks, the sanctions for disrupting a given chain by leaving it or establishing one’s own hierarchy were limited and could not always be applied in practice. Even in the small and seemingly closely-knit networks of cleaning women, which were usually centred around one woman ‘with contacts’ who acted as an agent and collected a percentage of the earnings, each ‘founder’ had to calculate that a person with good language skills would already be able to establish her own network after two to three months, while conversely it would take more than a year for a person without such skills to leave such an organization and start her own. Numerous examples of these occupational networks were described in my Berlin study Der Schmugglerzug (Irek 1998). Although the networks I described there clearly had some structure, as stated earlier, their organizational patterns were unstable, since the power relations were not sanctioned by any institution. And, since such networks were extended over at least two countries and two or more ethnic groups, the cultural codes that would normally define relationships in one location need not necessarily apply in the other location. As a result, it was possible for the ‘crime’ of breaching a contract to go without punishment, for even gossip and shaming, which are otherwise powerful weapons, were of limited use in this transnational and trans-ethnic environment. Also, the hierarchies were not as stable as I had initially assumed, for particular actors were coming and going home, and each actor could freely leave their employer or patron and develop his or her own networks of subcontractors. The fluidity of patterns caused by the open character of the informality was not particular to either the German or Polish setting, nor to chosen ethnic groups. In over twenty years of peregrinations on the trading routes of Europe, I was able to observe very similar examples in the UK and in Spain, where different ethnic groups ranging from Albanians to Ukrainians were involved in subcontracting chains that were continually changing under the influence of ‘horizontal’ social relationships. The following interview was conducted in the late 1990s on a bus between Poland and the UK. It was night, and since everybody else was asleep I decided to interview an extravagantly dressed, attractive young woman, a quintessential bombshell, speaking Polish with a strong British accent, who was sitting in the front row and flirting with the driver. There was no place left in the front row, so I sat on the steps, next to the driver. Bombshell was talking loudly about her private life.

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She was married to an Englishman whom she had met in Poland and for the last two years had been living in London, where her accent came from. Actually, her husband’s father was Polish, but he himself, according to Bombshell, was a typical Brit who had spent most of his life on the dole, although he was an engineer. The only time he took a job was when he needed to prove his income to the authorities so that he could bring his Polish wife to the UK. ‘What a crazy system they have in this country … a grown-up man would sit all day in front of the telly doing nothing, and they still pay him for that! What sense does it make?’ ‘Well, that’s why they let us Poles into the country. No Englishman likes to work these days. Them bastards would die in dirt if it were not for the foreigners! Soon they will call for a Pole every time they need to wipe their arses!’, said the driver, very happy to show off his knowledge of British life and institutions. ‘It’s not funny, not at all. I hate lazy people! I told my husband to move his arse to work. But he said we would be worse off working. They call it the “poverty gap”, or something like this … I’m telling you, there is no way to get an Englishman off the dole! Us Poles, we are completely different. I could also rot all day on the sofa doing nothing, but I would rather kill myself! I needed to go out, so I took a cleaning job with a very nice lady. Then she recommended me further, and when I had several jobs, I took a cousin from Poland to help me. Now I have my own agency of Polish cleaning women, nurses and au pair girls!’ ‘So, your husband is off the dole now?’, I said, joining in the conversation. ‘Do I look like an idiot?’, Bombshell laughed, looking at me with contempt.

Indeed, at first glance she did look like the proverbial dumb blonde ­stereotype, and with her heavy make-up, elaborate hairdo, skimpy skirt, jewellery and high heels in the middle of the night on a two-day journey on a coach, she resembled a working girl in a different sense than cleaner. But she appeared to be a smart and versatile entrepreneur. She registered herself as a self-employed cleaning woman with a reported income small enough for her husband to stay on the dole and also draw housing benefit, while her agency was not officially registered. At that time Poles could enter the UK only as tourists, without permission to work, so registering them in an official agency was not possible. Another practical factor was that, in the house-cleaning business, jobs were acquired through personal recommendation, rather than advertisements. ‘Why waste money on advertisements and other overheads like bookkeeping and those ridiculous taxes? It would take an idiot to do it. And do I look like an idiot?’, she reasoned.

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For herself she left only one cleaning job in a very posh house which she visited twice a week, only to spend some time in an elegant environment ‘with rugs, crystal mirrors and chandeliers’. The rest of her working time she spent looking after her business and perfecting her English, which, after two years in the UK, was at the middle level. She said she believed in fair play, therefore she charged only sixty per cent overheads for her services, so if the landlady was paying ten pounds per hour, the cleaning woman was getting four. ‘But don’t you think I am getting all that money for old rope! Four pounds is a good wage for a Polish woman and a horrible responsibility for myself. You know, the landladies give me all the keys, and if anything went wrong I would be fully responsible for that. For example, now I had to go all the way to (a town in central Poland) to retrieve the keys one stupid girl forgot to give back. They are good workers, those Poles, but they do not know what responsibility is. When they don’t like something, they may tell you they are going back to Poland and leave a job just like that, without any warning whatsoever!’ (Irek 2011: 16)

But this was not Bombshell’s only problem. It also appeared that yet another disloyal girl had stolen one set of jobs. ‘I am telling you, loyalty means nothing to Poles. It was such a good job. I had been working there for years, and this bitch just took it away from me. She said, ‘I quit cleaning’, and she took over all the connections that lady had. Now the bitch has her own girls working for her in my own households, and my girls have no job. And I can do nothing’. ‘Why?’ ‘Obviously, I don’t want any scandals. If there were a scandal, I would lose all these rich households. These ladies hate scandals, lies and such things. It would take an idiot to provoke them, and do I look like an idiot?’

Thus, the most effective sanctions in the informal world, namely shaming and excluding offenders, could not be implemented in this case. In the open, multi-million and multi-ethnic metropolis, Bitch could not have been ostracized without investing much time and effort, while in the milieu of the upper middle-class ladies, blaming one Polish cleaning woman could potentially have excluded them all from this exquisite market. And since there were no sanctions, and in any case executing them was not practical, the patron–client relationship between Bombshell, the woman who took the keys to Poland, and Bitch was thus short-lived and easily dissolved. Admittedly, such relationships were more binding when the actors were dependent on the employer for both jobs and housing, as could be observed in the building industry, elderly care and farm work. Yet, even these patron–client

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relationships were not structurally fixed through formal or informal institutions, and, as in the cases discussed above, actors could change patrons, switch to an agent–contractor relationship or become agents and patrons themselves. Such changes were possible because even while these informal actors were participating in a relatively closed type of network, structured by their economic activities, they were maintaining numerous relationships outside this particular network. It was due to these open, non-structured relationships that women like Janka, Basia and Bitch could control their situations. Thus, as discussed earlier, in the beginning of my research my Marxian background, combined with my admiration for German Methodismus, led me to perceive social reality as an essentially vertical construct. In observing social relations, I was looking for structures and hierarchies, for mafias, cliques, organized groups and closed networks with stable organizational patterns. And, in line with the psychological phenomenon that anticipation influences perception, I saw such structured groups and hierarchies in both trading networks of smugglers and among cleaning women, but failed to notice that the social relations of the participating actors were not restricted to these groups. However, when several years later I analysed the large bulk of fieldwork materials I had gathered across Europe, it appeared that, like informal networks in the textile industry, organizations in other occupational sectors – which, in line with current theoretical approaches, I initially identified as closed networks – were at the same time penetrated by open chains of egocentric networks. This was a completely different type of social organization, in which each actor had his or her own personal relationships outside any single occupational group or sector. These relationships were not necessarily of a transactional nature, but they could always be used for economic purposes. That is why even the seemingly closed occupational networks were characterized by the rapid turnover of members.

Belonging in Two Sectors: Primary Capital Accumulation Through Informal Activities Apart from the textile industry, I was able to observe the informal organization of work in the farming, gardening, building, hospitality, gastronomy, home care and cleaning services, of which the last two offered the greatest opportunities for informal career progress in the West, while trade, building and gastronomy, with their relatively higher earnings, were the quickest ways of capital accumulation. Informal

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activities were not only a quick route to economic progress for smallscale indigenous entrepreneurs with little or no capital who would otherwise have been unable to compete with the large companies, but also represented instant progress for migrants, whether informal workers or smugglers, who benefitted from the leverage across the borders alone. They could improve their quality of life in their own countries significantly by means of modest amounts of capital acquired through informal activities in the rich economies, which could become relatively large once transferred to the poor countries. But whereas one can speak of transfers of money from one system (capitalism) to another (a socialist or third-world economy) or from the informal to the formal economy, when it comes to people the situation is not so clear. As shown by the examples of the young German fashion designer, boutique owners, the Arab intermediary and the Polish builder-seamstress, the ‘native’ middle-class ladies and the formal and informal migrants alike did not necessarily transfer themselves from the informal to the formal ‘sectors’ and back again, for they were active as both formal and informal agents at the same time. Also, those migrants who came to the West informally did not instantly lose their formal statuses back home – they did not automatically ‘transfer’ their personalities to become pathological ‘irregular persons’. Legally migrating foreign students and posted workers, together with ‘undocumented migrants’ and petty smugglers, were actively participating at the same time in the informal economy of the host country and the formal economies of their respective countries, not only through financial remittances, but also by maintaining properties and families, keeping old jobs and even running official businesses. Case Study 3. Informal Economic Activities and Non-Economic Factors Defining Social Relations An example of someone who achieved financial success while being active in both the formal and informal economies is Krystyna, described in Der Schmugglerzug. I have known her for more than ten years, and I was able to interview her on numerous occasions and to observe her as she was building her small empire. I met her on a train as I was going home myself. I described her in my fieldwork diary as an ‘elderly, sexless and tired woman with mousy hair’. She was then forty years old, which by the Polish standards of the time made her old and redundant on the love and marriage market. A relic of this philosophy is the medical term ‘stara pierwiastka’, meaning ‘old primagravida’, officially used by doctors until recently to refer to a woman over twenty-five.

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She was coming home after three months away, but all she had was a couple of small bags, which made her stand out from the crowd of other travellers. Her dress was smart, she had impeccable manners, and she spoke elegant Polish. It appeared that she was a teacher, happily married to a medical doctor, and the mother of a twelve-year-old daughter. The reason for her journey was purely financial: the couple were trying to raise a lump sum to finish their newly built house to a high standard. The decision to migrate was made under the influence of Anna, a friend from university, who was newly married to a German and who offered to organize everything in Berlin. The economic calculation was simple: as a qualified teacher with responsibility for the safety of young people and many years’ experience, Krystyna was earning about DM 20 a month. In Berlin, working twenty days a month, eight hours a day as a cleaning woman, and paid DM 10 per hour, she would earn DM 1600, of which 300 would go on rent and as much for food and transport. In three months she could easily save DM 3000, which would be enough to buy a whole house, let alone finish one off. ‘Now I understand why you have such small luggage; all you have in these bags is money’, I joked when I heard her story. But instead of laughing she started to cry. ‘No, this is all I have’, she said. ‘My friend has not helped me to find any work. She moved together with her husband, and I had to vacate her flat after just a month. By that time I had spent almost all my rainy day money which I had brought from Poland, DM 400. … During the move I lost all my belongings. My best clothes, leather jacket, woollen suit, everything top quality. I was homeless, and I had only what I was wearing on me and only DM 100 in my pocket’. ‘So you decided to come back home?’ ‘No, I had debts, and it would have been such a shame to go back home having lost everything’. ‘And what about being a cleaning woman. Isn’t that a shame?’

I provoked her with this question, knowing that, despite the socialist ideology of equality, taking up a cleaning job was regarded in Poland as a degradation from the status of teacher. ‘Well, back in Poland nobody knows what I was doing in Germany. It is not that I intend to do this job till the end of my life. And besides, when I am at home I also have to clean. And I have to do it all for free!’

Krystyna stayed in Berlin for two months more, during which period she slept more than once at the (in)famous Zoo train station, but eventually she managed to find an au-pair position in the middle-class household of a German lawyer, a single mother of two the same age

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as Krystyna. She slept on a mattress placed directly on the floor and had to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week without a break, cleaning, washing, cooking, shopping and taking care of the children, for which she received standard pocket money of DM 300 a month. But through close contact with the children her German improved, and she replied to a job advertisement in a popular middle-class newspaper read by her employer. She was offered a cleaning job with an elderly German couple who were offering DM 12 per hour. Unfortunately, her passport had been issued to her for only three months and was about to expire, so she had to go back to Poland, but the elderly people gave her an invitation to come to Berlin,9 and she was confident that she could come back. ‘How come you want to come back? All you got in Berlin is bad experience, and you have had only losses!’ ‘Well, it makes you want more, like in a casino. In the beginning I lost everything, and then I started to win. Now I know how it all functions. I am not some loser. I play until I win’. ‘And how is it with your husband and the child?’ ‘I have missed them so terribly. Only good money, I mean really good money, can compensate me for this’. ‘How good should it be?’ ‘At least DM 1000 per month’. ‘Will you come back to live with the lawyer?’ ‘Never. She was really mean to me. I would have helped her of my own free will had she asked nicely. But no, she treated me as if I were dirt, although I was really committed to her children, and I worked my hands off for her’. ‘What do you mean, like dirt?’ ‘For example, I had to sleep on a mattress directly on the floor (in a box room), although she had a free guest room. Because of this I became chronically ill, with some sort of cold. And then, when I was feeling so poorly, lying on the floor, she turned off the heating. When she had a visitor she was always ordering me around, and her voice sounded as if she were talking to a dog’. ‘And you still want to come back to Berlin?’ ‘Yes, Now I already know my way around the town, and I am not going to let anybody keep me down (poniżać) anymore. And besides, not all Germans are so Hochmutig (arrogant). These older people have taken to me like I were their own daughter. Everywhere there are bad and good people, I guess’.

It was a good thing we exchanged addresses, for I never saw her on a train again. I managed to visit her in her home town in 1993. By this time she possessed a number of properties, including three detached houses in attractive locations, a holiday bungalow, a restaurant, a shop

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and two good cars of prestigious make. She said she did not travel by train anymore because she had bought a car and was using it to commute to Berlin to work and trade. Once she had established her restaurant business in Poland, she came back to live there and see to it, but at the same time she was pursuing her informal business in Berlin. She insisted that she had earned all her wealth with the work of her own hands. When in Berlin, for three years she worked as a cleaner for twelve hours a day, while at weekends she sold used clothes in the flea market. She did not spend much money on food because she was working at a restaurant from 6 to 8 am, where she ate as much as she was able, later feeding on rotten bananas sold at discount prices and powdered soups which she brought from Poland. By 1990, the year when the borders between Poland and Germany were opened to tourist traffic and the price differences between Poland and the West fell dramatically, Krystyna’s financial position in Poland was already established. She also had enough contacts in Berlin to take advantage of the freedom of movement and to organize her own informal cleaning network. The women paid her DM 300 (about 150 dollars) monthly for their jobs. Each regular cleaning activity with a German client, be it once, twice or more often in a week, was regarded as a single job (sztela, or praca). To fill up the working week, each cleaning woman ideally needed about eight jobs usually lasting three to five hours once or twice a week. Although Krystyna did not know all the clients, since she found the jobs through her informal networks of friends of friends, she was still responsible for managing the work schedules and for the professional conduct of her workers. ‘The main thing in the cleaning business is trust. The clients are happy to pay more only to have a cleaning woman who is known and can be trusted. Mind you, I have always demanded good payment for my people. Therefore I always had to choose them very carefully, since I had to be responsible for whatever they did. Besides, they could also live in my flat, and all this for DM 300 monthly’. ‘How come they could live in your flat? You were staying illegally!’ ‘Well, yes. I was cleaning for one German bachelor, and since he learned that I had nowhere to live, he offered me a room in his own flat. … then he was jobless himself, so we came up with the idea of organizing a cleaning business together’. ‘And what did your husband say to this?’ ‘In the beginning he was happy to get money from me. And then he got angry and demanded a divorce’.

She had a difficult period after coming back to Poland and had to go into psychotherapy to free herself from an inferiority complex. But

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as it appeared, it was only after she divorced her Polish husband that Krystyna freed herself from the constraints of traditional gender stereotypes and at the age of 46 happily re-entered the love and marriage market. But her economic and personal success came at a price: despite Krystyna’s efforts, her teenage daughter failed every level of education above grammar school, which, as a qualified teacher, Krystyna found difficult to cope with. Analysing her experience in terms of economic transactions alone would be a mistake, as it would be to classify her as belonging to the ‘informal sector’.

Blurred Borders Between Occupational Segments Case Study 4. Van de Hooy, Student, Builder, Car-washer and Property Agent All in One In the world observed without a vertical lens, it was evident that not only were hierarchies flexible and the borders between formality and informality questionable, but the borders between particular occupational segments were also blurred. Miners were becoming traders, teachers becoming cleaning women, farmers becoming builders, and so on. The social landscape of lived reality was unbounded, for a person working informally as a builder was not closed within the builders’ world, but had relations with persons in other trades, who in turn had their own relations. An example of such multi-tasking is a Polish bon vivant whom I met on a coach heading in the direction of the UK, which as usual was overfilled. There were only two places to choose from and plenty of people looking for a seat, so I had to decide quickly. One place was near a very large woman, close to the driver, who, I knew, kept his window open, smoked cigarettes and played loud music to prevent himself from falling asleep, while the other place was next to a thin man, but close to the toilet. A comfortable place was important on a two-day journey, so having calculated that the large woman would take up most of the space and that driver would keep me awake with his music, despite the danger of the stench from the toilet, which by the middle of Germany was already overflowing, I sat near the thin man, who looked about thirty. It seemed a lucky choice. He appeared to be a successful businessman who had spent two years in England as a student. ‘Which university are you studying at?’, I was curious to know. ‘Oh, no. None. I just studied language in different schools. For the papers, of course’, he confessed. He thought that studying English was the best way to get into the UK, for one could buy a cheap course for four weeks and stay as long as one pleased, since nobody stamped

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passports on the way back from England. The only problem was that one could not visit Poland too often, because each time one wanted to leave one had to buy an English course, which was an obvious waste of money. He had worked on a building site for a well-known, prestigious British company when he came up with the idea of his own car-wash business. As he put it, unfortunately the business had to be legal, so he had to waste money on a lawyer to get himself the proper status. ‘How come you are allowed to work on a building site of X company if you do not have a job permit? How do you do it?’, I was wondering. And he gladly shared his know-how with me. ‘An absolute “must have” is protective equipment. You go to a car-boot sale or a charity shop, and you get yourself a yellow hard cap, steel-nose shoes and a high-viz vest’. ‘Why a car-boot sale?’ ‘You do not want to spend sixty quid on stupid shoes and a vest, do you? But of course there are plenty of expensive shops, for plonkers’. ‘Why do you have to have this stuff at all? Can’t you wear normal clothes?’ ‘Well, this is the secret of the trade I’m telling you for free. When you buy the stuff, you go to some big site and ask if they need people. They always do. And when they see you in those clothes, they immediately know you’re an insider. No outsider would ever wear protective equipment!’ ‘And what about the work permit?’ ‘Nothing. Should they ask you whether you have permit, you say, “Of course”. And you say you’ll bring it soon. But they are Englishmen. They just believe your word. For them “soon” means any time next month. They are never in a hurry’. ‘Oh dear, and what happens next month?’ ‘You say “sorry I completely forgot”, and you may work yet another month. Of course they may get impatient one day, but then you just quit and find another job … It’s so easy … And of course you must be a member of the equity. This way you save one pound per hour on tax’. ‘A tax, while working black?’ ‘Yes, you just give them a temporary number. Any number will do, but it is better if you make it almost real. You say you are waiting for the authorities to give you the proper number, and you give a fake one. It is TN, first two numbers of your birth date and F or M for your sex. Easy, ain’t it?’ ‘How do you know all this?’ ‘How? From other Poles, of course! There are hundreds of thousands of them, everywhere in England’. ‘How come nobody knows it? I could not see that many Poles myself.’ ‘That’s obvious. It is easy to be invisible! The beauty of the system is that they have no ID in England. Once you are in, there is no way they

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could possibly check you! Providing, of course, that you do not provoke them!’

Thus, that night I had made a very good choice, for I had the pleasure of sitting next to a true expert in the informal economy, eager to boast about his achievements. He told me how at the beginning of his stay, he thought he deserved a better status than all those ‘black’ Poles. Together with his other Polish friend, he bought a car with Dutch registration plates. When they appeared in their protective clothes and in their Dutch car at a building site, they claimed they were Dutch, and nobody ever asked them for a job permit! He said his name was Van de Hooy, which in Polish meant ‘Van de Ugly Name for Penis’, while the other man said his name was Van de Bill, which in Polish meant ‘Van de Moron’. They had a good laugh for half a year, until one day their British team leader came to them with a happy grin on his face, saying, ‘You can finally meet your countrymen! We just employed a party of Dutchmen!’ It was a good job that the building site was big enough for ‘Van de Ugly Name for Penis’ and ‘Van de Moron’ to disappear in a discrete manner. But Van de Hooy did not restrict himself to just one sector of the economy. Apart from being a student, a builder and an aspiring carwash owner, he was also an established property dealer. As a cheerful bon vivant who did not stint when it came to buying somebody a drink (he also paid for my coffee on the bus just because I was sitting next to him), he enjoyed popularity and the trust of a wide network of personal friends. One of these friends, an Englishman he had just met in a pub, was renting him a three-bedroom semi-detached house for five hundred pounds, which was about three hundred below the average agency price for that type of property. Van de Hooy in turn was subletting this house to a Thai family for two thousand pounds. ‘You are kidding! Why would they pay you so much money?’ ‘These yellows (żółtki) are here totally illegally. Nobody wants to risk having them in their homes. They would pay three thousand if I wanted. They are a big family. I think it is like in Poland, everybody you know is your family. More than thirty small “yellows”, they are all so similar to each other that you cannot distinguish who is who’. ‘But how can you put thirty people in three bedrooms?’ ‘It is not my business how they live. They are different from us’. ‘How did you meet them?’ ‘Through an acquaintance. He knew the driver’.

It appeared that the Thais had come in the back of the lorry, and so their status was even more illegal than that of Polish informal migrants. They

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came, stayed and worked illegally, whereas Poles came and stayed legally, but under false pretences, their work being informal and formal at once in the absence of job permits. However, unless they were house servants or cleaners, they paid both income tax and national insurance. And since, just like Poles, the Thais also had their friends and acquaintances, Van de Hooy, student, builder and car-washing business developer all in one, also became an informal property agent, renting more houses on a similar basis. Thus, he was acting both formally and informally in several industry sectors at once. Again, the situation I have described is not specific to those of Polish ethnicity, nor to the UK setting, nor to times of either crisis or prosperity. In the UK I met British citizens who were both ‘indigenous’ and with African or Indian background, who, like Albanian, Nigerian, Pakistani, Polish and Roma migrants with documents, were subletting flats to ‘documented’ and ‘undocumented’ Asians, Africans and Europeans from all possible countries. In Spain I have personally witnessed informal transactions being made by Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Libyan, Romanian, Pakistani, British and Egyptian actors alike. A decade earlier I was able to observe similar practices in West Berlin, with its over one hundred and eighty ethnic groups, despite being closed at that time in one territory behind the Berlin Wall. They were all united through informal transactions, by the chains of network links extended in geographical space and created beyond their ethnicities, religions, nationalities and professional or age groups. But although the majority of these transactions were carried out in what is habitually called the ‘informal sector’, the actors performing them were not shadowy creatures or criminals occupying a separate social or geographical space. They were not living their quotidian lives in sectors, nor were they merely ‘economic agents’ whose only purpose was to provide for their material existence. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, informal networks are not identical to the informal economy, and they are not restricted to or by the economic activities of social actors. We are speaking here of two different types of social organization, namely structured versus unstructured networks, as well as of two approaches to their analysis. However, investigation of both types will benefit from leaving behind the logic of sectors and embracing the continuity of the social.

Notes 1. For in-depth discussions of this problem, see Portes et al. 1989, Ferman et al. 1993, Sindzingre 2006, Guha‐Khasnobis et al. 2006, Kanbur 2009, 2014.

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2. Pahl saw the informal economy as a realm of individual freedom and as a safety valve for social tensions, without which people would turn into revolutionaries. See Pahl 1984. 3. See, for example, Portes and Sassen-Koob 1987, Sassen-Koob 1989, 1994, 2013, Portes et al. 1989, Williams and Windebank 1998, Williams 2013, 2014. 4. For discussions of this aspect, see Vasta 2004, Shelley 2007, Maroukis et al. 2011, Bommes and Sciortino 2011, Bloch and Chimienti 2013, Craig et al. 2015. 5. This was shown by numerous scandals involving accounting, such as the case of Enron. A typical example of a difference caused by the system of accounting is the story of Daimler-Benz, which in the same reporting period recorded a loss in one accounting system and a profit in another system. See Ball 2004. 6. For more recent work on the cyclicality of the informal economy, see, for example, C¸ ic¸ ek and Elgin 2011, Elgin 2012. 7. As Bosch and Maloney show, cyclical flows of workers between the formal and informal sectors in Mexico and Brazil are different from those one would expect (Bosch and Maloney 2008: 2–3). 8. However, as neo-liberal economists have long observed, informal economic activities may be used to accumulate the capital necessary to become a significant player in the ‘primary’ economy, for example, mafia bosses entering the ‘primary sector’ to launder money earned in explicitly illegal activities. 9. Berlin was visa-free for tourists, but to obtain a passport from the Polish authorities one had to possess an invitation from a German person (Irek 2011).

e5 Escaping Locality Ethnography beyond Systems, Zones, Countries and Sites

As mentioned in the previous chapter, empirical research on informal activities is usually conducted within the conceptual framework of the informal economy. And although it has long been admitted that the informal economy is universal (Hart 2005, Portes et al. 1989, Morris and Polese 2015), research on informal activities in the social sciences still follows the standard division into three systems of economy, representing three distinct types of society: capitalist, socialist and ‘third world’, each of them researched as a separately contextualized unit. Since informality has been defined in opposition to the state, the next logical step has been to discuss the informal economy of each state separately within a given system as a function of the given historical context, state-specific regulations, policies and their implementation (Sassen-Koob 1994, Kanbur 2009, 2014). As a result, one speaks of different informal economies framed respectively within each of the three systems, rather than of one economy, which makes it difficult to observe the informal flow of goods, information and services along the links that develop beyond state borders. But the state is usually a large territorial unit, so in practice it remains a fixed frame of reference, while actual empirical research is conducted on smaller units that are strictly defined localities, such as vicinities, cities, villages, neighbourhoods or households, making it thus impossible to embrace informal phenomena as a continuum. Within each of the three structural frameworks for research on informality, the approach is varied. Thus, as discussed in the previous chapter, although in capitalist society the informal economy has generally been viewed as an inferior ‘sector’, at the same time, and in line

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with the liberal and neo-liberal economist’s theories, it was admitted that it was the result of the invisible hand of the market’s reaction to overregulation by the state. In the context of the rich Western states, the informal sector was also analysed as a relic of pre-industrial times, a safety valve for social tension, a means of capital accumulation or a survival strategy in times of shortage (Feige 1985, Gutmann 1985, Pahl 1984, Carson 1993, Williams and Windebank 1998, 2011). A different approach governed analyses of the economy in developing countries, for which the very term ‘informal economy’ was initially introduced by Keith Hart in the context of the poverty of the third world’s big cities (Hart 1973, 1985, 2006). In this separately discussed system, informality was seen as a culturally specific mode of economic existence that was necessary for the survival of its actors in the face of a weak or nonexistent state economy (Geertz 1979, Elwert and Fett 1982, Elwert et al. 1983, Hart 1985). The general attitude was that, with the development of the third world, the informal economy would hopefully soon be replaced by the ‘proper’ economy, with formally registered enterprises integrated into the global capitalist project. Since by the end of the previous century it had become clear that ‘soon’ is a relative term, and that despite expectations the liberal practices of global capitalism were reinforcing the informal economy in the third world, causing disorder and decline, instead of supporting growth and development of the formal sector (e.g. Meagher 2010, Yusuff 2011, Chen 2008, 2009, Routh and Borghi 2016), the approach turned sceptical and aligned itself with the moralism of the dual market theory. In its turn, research on the informal economy in the socialist system was from the outset biased by anti-communist sentiment. Unlike the situation in third-world countries, where one spoke of the regulatory role of social networks and of informal economic governance, in the socialist countries the informal economy was considered an institutionalized pathology resulting from the intimidation of individuals by an oppressive system and a trespass on the limits of decency (Brus and Laski 1985, Kideckel and Sampson 1984, Wedel 1986, Sampson 1986, 1987) characteristic of the highly bureaucratized ‘communist’ state. Only since the end of the Cold War has the political bias been removed, the ‘pathology’ approach softened (Ferman et al. 1993, Giordano 1994) and the concept of the black market been replaced by that of a ‘grey zone’ (Smejda 1996, Fredriksen and Harboe Knudsen 2015). With the fall of socialism and the shift to the market economy in the postsocialist countries, numerous studies appeared in which informality is presented as an undesirable heritage of Soviet rule together with its economic peculiarities, such as the planned economy and homo

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sovieticus (Morawska 1999, Dallago 2002, 2005, Giordano and Hayoz 2013, Williams et al. 2013, Morris and Polese 2014, 2015). Very much as in third-world countries, the informal economy of countries in transition is discussed in terms of economies of shortage and the instability of democratic institutions and is analysed separately for each country (Wedel 1992, Ledeneva 1998, Bridger and Pine 1998, Konstantinov et al. 1998, Borocz 2000, Mandel and Humphrey 2002, Pine 2003, Williams et al. 2013, Morris and Polese 2014, Frederiksen and Harboe Knudsen 2015) as series of culturally conditioned, localized responses to ­particular policies. Thus, in line with our vertically constructed systems of knowledge, the ethnographies of the ‘informal economy’, even those describing informal networks, are usually restricted to chosen fragments of scaled geographical space, without attempting to go beyond their limits. Each ethnography is carried out in one or more sites, understood as distinctive territorial units inhabited by a particular population and placed within the borders of a particular state, which in turn is placed within the limits of the larger unit, this being one of the three economic systems, the largest scale units in the hierarchy of contexts. What is left out of this perspective is the horizontal dimension and the continuity of social space, the space inhabited by the Eliasian homo apertus,1 a social actor with a complex personality involving several identities that are not necessarily contained within the boundaries of his or her own community or state, an open person involved in numerous chains of egocentric informal relationships extending beyond the borders of systems and localities. To describe the living experience of homo apertus, we need to trace these chains, and to do so we must abandon the notion of locality and, following Nietzsche’s horizontal thought, we must freely venture into the open space, without being bound by the limitations of a given site. Multi-sited ethnography is a promising step in the direction of a flat social landscape in which actors and their associations are not bound to a single place, but its promise to account for the changeability, flows and continuity of social space (Falzon 2009) cannot be fulfilled in practice. Since its central concept is a site, even if we include multiple sites in the ethnography, each of the researched sites is still a separate unit, which, as discussed in chapter three, is a specific context for social phenomena happening within its limes (Marcus 1995, Falzon 2009). Therefore, we need to move further, beyond the conceptual limitations of the site (Cook et al. 2016). In researching informality, we need to be as mobile as our research subjects, to ‘go with the flow’ and to escape the very concept of a ‘site’, together with the necessity of contextualization, which makes it unrealistic to research more than two or three sites at a

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time (Gellner 2012). To achieve a flat social landscape, we need to make our ethnographies site-less.

Living Beyond the Borders of Economic Systems Even during the Cold War, the borders were to some degree permeable, with people and goods moving between the three economic systems (Irek 1998, 2011, Kochanowski 2010, Stola 2012, 2015), and, as demonstrated by the examples from Berlin and London discussed in previous chapters, the informal chains of relationships and transactions extended over large territories. As shown by the example of Doll, whose network ranged from a small town in socialist Poland through East and West Berlin to towns in Turkey, Mozambique, Soviet Russia and the USA alike, an actor living in a capitalist economy could be embedded just as much in the socialist system, while an actor from the third world, such as a student from Benin or Nigeria, could be living in a socialist state and be an important intermediary between the three systems; therefore analysing this actor’s network within a single system would be a mistake. To account for the horizontal dimension of the chains of informal transactions, we need to assume a single social space in which freely developing inter-human relationships are regarded as the essence of the human condition, while the borders between systems, states and other units are seen as artificial constructs which can be dissolved, moved or created anew. Strangely, while a free flow of cash on the global scale, beyond any units or the control of any state, is a standard concept (Urry 2014), the correspondingly continuous concept when it comes to flows of ideas, practices, emotions and goods is not that obvious. As already noted, everything social is viewed through forms, and the perception of flow is disrupted by the boundaries of categories and consequently restricted within given units, despite empirical evidence, some examples of which are given below. Case Study 1. Jacek, the Borderless I was introduced to Jacek through Jola, a Polish woman I met on a train travelling from a small town in Poland to Berlin. She was sitting in my compartment, and by the time our journey ended, I and the other people within it knew her personal life in detail, including the sex life of her ex-husband, who had thrown her out of her own flat in central Poland, and her Polish ex-boyfriend in Berlin, who partied loudly

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every night in their illegally rented room, until the German neighbours reported them to the authorities. ‘All Germans are spies; they don’t mind their own business. You cannot even fart without a certificate (bez kwita), for they will immediately send the police after you’, she claimed, and everybody in the compartment nodded in agreement. In support of this opinion, she recalled how she came home from her work as a cleaner in an Italian restaurant late one evening and saw German policemen taking away the nine Polish men she was cohabiting with, together with some other people whom she did not know and whom she described as ‘several coloured, perhaps Yugoslavians (Jugole) or Gypsies, devil knows them, for they are all eager to drink for free (na krzywke)’. They all lived in a one-bedroom flat which they were subletting informally from a Croatian, who had ‘good papers’ and apparently had several such flats all over West Berlin. Jola and her boyfriend were living in a small bedroom, another six men slept in the living room, and two on a double mattress in the kitchen. When she saw the police car under her house, she did not enter the gate but waited around the corner and observed the situation from a distance, mimicking behaviour she knew from Polish films about the Second World War. After she saw the police take the men away, she ran away and stayed with an acquaintance, who advised her never to go near the flat again, to avoid being arrested herself. So Jola could not even collect her belongings. ‘Luckily I had my pass on me. After half a year I was in the street bare-assed again’, she said. Fortunately, the Italians were not ‘born spies’ like the Germans supposedly were, and her Italian employer recommended her to ‘a kind man with plenty of empty, free room to live’, who was delivering ‘original Italian’ baked goods to the restaurant and who agreed to keep Jola for some time, against the usual DM 300, until she could find something better. Her new landlord appeared to be a Sri Lanka fugitive who had legal permission to stay as an asylum-seeker. He had been given a cheap studio flat by the state, which he was subletting to five Poles, his informal employees, whom he met through Jacek. As a woman, Jola had the luxury of living all by herself in a small kitchen aisle. The landlord himself was practically absent because he lived in a storage room at the bakery he worked for. However, although the five men were also working long hours and came home only to sleep, Jola thought that living with men was dangerous for a single woman, so she urgently looked for something else. I offered to help her with this problem, and in return she took me to a meeting with Rama, who, as it happened, was looking for a blonde wife, but not a Western one.

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We met him in the backroom of the bakery during his afternoon break. He offered us tea and a large number of different cakes. When Jola introduced me, speaking in broken German mixed with English, he apologized for the shabby surroundings, and he told me his story. It appeared that back in Sri Lanka he was very rich, happy and lived like in a paradise. He did business with people from all over the world. But one night the people from the neighbouring village came, burned down his house and his shop and cut him with machetes, after which they left. Somehow his servants survived and managed to put him together and carry him in a boat to a hospital. Having lost everything but his life, he escaped to India, where he lived like a beggar. Fortunately, his good friend from Germany sent him an invitation and paid for his flight to Berlin, where Rama asked for political asylum. The German friend was Jacek, but he was also a Pole, so Rama swore to be good to all Poles ever after. ‘I am used to luxury. One day I will be a rich man again and I will marry a nice European woman, but not German, nor from any other country of the West’. ‘How so?’ ‘Because people in the West do not know how to love. You must stay away from Western man yourself. If you want love, find an Asian man’. ‘And how are you going to get rich again?’ ‘You forgot here that a day has twenty-four hours. To get rich one has to work twenty hours a day and save on everything. Then you invest wisely, and then you get rich’.

Rama did the job of two people in the bakery, one formally and the other informally, and had nine more jobs in the ‘press industry’, where he was distributing papers. But since his various working hours overlapped, he was subcontracting five jobs to Poles, who had to pay him a cut (Abstand) in advance for each job, to ensure their honesty. Apart from this, he was paying them half of what he was receiving himself as a legal employee, and the rest he kept for himself, after paying a cut to a German supervisor who gave him nine jobs, knowing that the times overlapped. Since finding a stable informal job for a man outside the building industry was difficult, and since even what remained was a fortune in Poland, the Poles were grateful both to Rama and Jacek, who had recommended them to him, usually for some favour. ‘All the press industry in Berlin is Sri Lanka boys. Germans would never read papers without us’, boasted Rama, and I wondered what the Sri Lanka boys would do without illegal migrants from eastern Europe. The ‘Sri Lanka boys’ were a fascinating case, but the subject of my research was the informal networks of Poles, so instead of observing the

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boys’ networks and following them through India back to Sri Lanka, I decided to follow the Polish trope and asked Rama to introduce me to Jacek. It took me three months to meet him finally, and when I did it was not in Berlin but back in Poland, for although Jacek was officially living in Berlin, he rarely stayed there. He was always away on business, visiting such countries as Mongolia, India or Brazil, or going on holiday to Yugoslavia, and since I was also always en route, meeting him seemed impossible. One day, Jola called me and asked me for a favour. Apparently, Jacek had gone by car to Poland for a family meeting and had forgotten to take with him a little, but valuable parcel, so she asked me to take the parcel to Poland and deliver it to his parents. It appeared that the family meeting was the occasion of the christening of his extra-marital baby, and the parcel contained a gift he had brought from some sacred place in the south of Europe. Jacek was very grateful and invited me to the party, where I could hear his family history and interview as many persons as I was able to before everybody became heavily drunk. His family lived in a medium-size town in western Poland, his mother being a native German, his father Polish. The pair met during the war in Germany, where her father was a forced labourer on a German farm and her mother was the farmer’s daughter. They had a tragic and clandestine romance in Romeo and Juliet style and, despite the odds, after the war the pair moved to Poland and had a single son who grew up without speaking a word of German to avoid being stigmatized. Instead, Jacek learned some basic Russian and studied culture animation at a college, where he also learned some English. His father’s connections secured him a good job in a ‘centre for culture’ (dom kultury), where he was responsible for organizing parties and what were officially called ‘coach trips for youth’, but in practice the youths were aged from 12 to 60, following the simple rule: the more attractive the trip, the more mature the youth and the closer to governing party circles. It was also where he realized that in practice the animation of culture consists in drinking with the people, so that they become animated. Some of the trips were to other socialist countries, and since people had limited access to foreign currency, they took goods for sale with them, which is how Jacek acquired basic informal trading skills. After some time in the ‘culture animation’ business he organized a trip to Turkey, which was outside the socialist system, and since ‘everybody else’ in the group decided to travel to West Berlin and ask for asylum, Jacek followed them without much thinking. In Germany citizenship is ruled by ius sanguinis, as opposed to ius soli in countries like the United States, so as a person of German blood Jacek was given a generous

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re-settlement package, including a free flat and intensive training in German. And while the other members of the party had to give up their Polish nationality, Jacek was allowed to keep his, which later allowed him to buy property in Poland. He recalled his first encounter with the Berlin authorities in the following words: ‘Honestly, I was rather drunk when I got off that plane. And then everybody went to the office. The cheeky devils (skubańcy) knew exactly where to go and what to say. I just followed them. Mind you, two weeks of heavy drinking. I was not terribly clever … And then I had to show my passport, but in this nervous state I also gave them my Polish identity book (dowód osobisty) with my mother’s name in it. I gave it to the officer and he went away, and when he came back he separated me from the rest of the group (f…). I looked and saw and they led me into another part of the building. I was there, all alone in a room. I was so scared I almost shit my pants. And then they brought in an interpreter, and she said I was German, and I need not apply for asylum’.

I knew that Germans were entitled to emigrate from Poland legally, so Jacek’s story did not sound real. ‘But why did you run away at all? As a German you could have been officially re- settled!’, I asked. ‘Well, I never thought I was a German! I was always thinking of myself as a Pole. In that office, that was the first time ever somebody called me a German!’ ‘But you knew your mother was German, didn’t you? Waltraud Muhler is not a Polish name! And she has such a strong accent in her Polish’. ‘You know, who cares for accent! We always spoke Polish at home, and she never ever used that name. Dad and everybody called her Vala, so people thought it was a Russian accent. They would even call her Ruska. We never spoke of German family, as if she had none. Something terrible had happened back in Germany, but they never talk about it, and I don’t really want to know’. ‘So, what are you now, German or Polish?’ ‘And who the f… cares? I am a human. I can be a Chinese if I fancy. Nobody will stop me’.

In fact, Jacek looked like the ideal type of an ‘Aryan’ male, and if there were an antithesis to a stereotypical ‘Chinese morphology’, Jacek was it. But when I got the chance to know him better, I realized that he was as much Chinese as Polish, for he felt he was a citizen of the entire world, and in each country where he did his business he was well embedded, thanks to his network of numerous friends of friends. As his skills as a culture animator were useless for making money in Berlin, he had to find a different occupation.

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‘I worked as a house warden, but that was a lousy job. Then I met Alec. He was in Berlin for many years – you know, the Yugoslavs have all the permits here. … He was a one-person trading company. So, I registered myself and started to trade again. It’s not much different to what Poles normally do in the world, but the leverage is not that good. Those bloody taxes are killing all the profit. And in Poland or Russia, for example, you can sell anything, and people beg you for more. Here (in the West) you have these big chains that can finish you off. One has to sell at lower prices, and that’s f… unpleasant. It’s great when you’re on the dole, but when you have your own business, you have to fiddle (kombinować) as much as in Poland, or even more’.

To increase his margins and keep the lion’s share of profits for himself, Jacek did everything through personal contacts, and the transactions were registered only when necessary and only up to a certain level of reporting. He confessed he was drinking with the right people, which ensured perfect orientation in the informal business conditions: he knew whom to bribe to get official permissions, despite relevant policies, what was in demand and which goods were cheap in which country. His business was registered in Berlin, where he was also letting out two flats. He was informally subletting the flat he had obtained from the state as a re-settler to migrants without documents from the places he was visiting all over the world. However, he also had also a permanent address in Poland, a newly built house which he registered on his Polish documents (having paid off the right people for ‘not sniffing’ around his German status) and yet another permanent place in Yugoslavia, where he kept his yacht. He travelled regularly by car to Poland for cheap lumber, which he sold expensively in the West. On each journey he carried some goods in his car, exceeding the permitted amounts, bringing gold, silver and items from the usual smugglers’ portfolio on the way back. He also travelled to Turkey, where he had a ‘largely formal’ business and stable cooperation with the Yugoslav traders, and then, using his Polish papers, he imported textiles into Russia, where, through the networks of his friends from his ‘culture animation’ times, he informally sold the Turkish goods as ‘guaranteed genuine’ American jeans and bought gold, which he then sold back in Turkey, or in Germany, depending on his calculations and the route. At least twice a year he would go to India, where he was sourcing goods, such as furniture, through a network of his friends, and from there he made exploratory trips to other exotic countries. On one such trip he met Rama, who became his trusted business contact in Sri Lanka and his best friend. But Rama was not the only person Jacek invited to Berlin. In his flat there were always some migrants living, formal and

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informal alike. ‘Will you ever settle down?’ I asked, to which he replied ‘But I am settled. I just have several homes’. It is worth noting that at the time of his travels, West Berlin was surrounded by a concrete wall three metres high, with a large asbestos pipe on the top, guarded by heavily armed soldiers with dogs, and it was situated right in the middle of East Germany, with its dense network of security forces and equally tight borders on every side of the country. Moreover, in both parts of Germany, Berlin included, there was a system whereby all people had to register their current address at the nearest police station (Meldungspflicht). There were also no mobile phones in popular use at that time and no internet network, especially outside the USA. In countries like Poland or the Soviet Union even the phone landline was not generally accessible, nor was it yet automatic. To make a call abroad, or any distant call, one had to call an operator or go to a post office, which usually involved several hours waiting and, in the case of an international call, censorship as well. And yet it was possible for Jacek to live permanently both within and outside the Berlin Wall, and to pursue his informal transactions simultaneously in both capitalist and socialist systems and the third-world economy alike. Importantly, Jacek’s case was not at all out of the ordinary, nor was it a single exception from the rule that made all actors sedentary. At that time, about 100,000 Poles living officially in West Berlin alone were in a similar situation, benefitting from so-called ‘consular passports’, which not only enabled them to travel freely between East and West (Irek 2011, Stola 2015), but also to invite over other Polish and non-Polish citizens. And even though one cannot expect them all to have had such a lavish lifestyle as Jacek, I have personally not met a single person with a consular passport who was not exploiting its possibilities. But while Jacek was regarded in Poland as a Pole by virtue of keeping his passport, in Germany he was not counted in the statistics as a foreigner, but as an ‘original’ German who represented Germans born abroad and returning home from countries like Romania, the Soviet Union and Poland.2 Case Study 2. Ted, the Yes-Sayer I met Ted in 1996 during my research on the coach route between London and Warsaw. I was wondering why an elderly man, approaching eighty judging by his looks, would decide to travel over twentyfour hours on a bus, instead of flying or going by car. ‘Well, Madam, I guess I do it for the joy of being with people. You know, as they say “for the sake of good company, a Gypsy volunteered to get

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hanged”! You see, Madam, when I was younger I was always travelling by car with my family. We usually took a ferry to Hamburg, and we drove from there. But now I do not drive long distances. And when I go by bus, it is almost a door to door service’.

Ted, at that time still Tadeusz, had arrived in the UK after the end of the Second World War, as a soldier from the Anders Army, which had been formed by the Polish government in London. Earlier, in 1939, when Poland had been invaded by Germany, he was recruited into the Polish army, which for two months resisted the better equipped German forces. After the Soviets attacked Poland from the east, the Polish government escaped to the UK, and Ted’s division had to surrender. Ted and his colleagues were taken to a prison camp near Moscow and eventually deported to Siberia. ‘You just cannot imagine how bad it was. You know, Madam (proszę pani), there was cold, bitter cold, millions of lice, stench, hunger and poverty, Madam … They brought us to a labour camp, but there was no barbed wire like, for example, in Auschwitz. There were the guards, and there was taiga around, and in the taiga there were tigers. People had to dig holes in the ground and cover them with stones for the night so that the tigers wouldn’t get them. And in the evening there were mosquitoes. They were impossible. We used to cover our bodies with mud so that the mosquitoes wouldn’t bite. When they said that they were recruiting, that there will be a Polish army again, we all volunteered. Trenches, Madam, seemed to us like a paradise’.

Ted was transported to Kazakhstan and then to Iran, where he and his companions were nourished to back to health. ‘We were an army of skeletons; they kept us there for months, until we got better. And some people could even bring their families. My friend brought (sprowadził) his wife. The Soviets took his whole family to Siberia, but only the wife survived. The parents, the in-laws and two children, all were dead. The wife said she threw the baby’s body from the train with a card on it, so that good people could bury it. … I think the animals ate it. But it all ended well – this friend of mine met his wife, and they had a new child. It was born in exile. And then they were re-settled to India and to Kenya’.

Tadeusz himself had had no sign of life from his own family since the war started. Finally, he got a message that his entire family had been killed in a bombing. ‘When I was in Siberia, I survived only because I was thinking of my wife and my child. She was pregnant when I left for the war. And I as always wondered, was it a boy or a girl … and then in Iran I got the message that she was dead. They all were killed. … I wanted revenge. I fought all over

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Africa and Europe. I volunteered in all actions, all were crazy. … You see, Madam, I had as many medals for bravery as the bear in the joke. You know, the three bears met for dinner, and there were a Frenchman, a German and a Russian on the menu. One bear said that he would not eat the Frenchman, because after he had eaten one he belched with perfume for a weekend. The second said that after he had eaten a German he had indigestion and he felt the taste of beer in his mouth for a week, and the third said that he had once eaten a Russian general and, pardon my language, he was shitting medals for the next month’.

Tadeusz thus had no home to come back to, and bearing the Siberian experience in mind, he was not very much inclined to go anywhere near a Soviet-dominated country, which Poland became. And, since his war medals were useless after the war, he had to find himself a new occupation and to adapt to his new country. He changed his name from Tadeusz to Ted, went to work in a factory, married a young English woman called Emily, had children with her and, since his new wife was very close to her younger brother Philip, who had married Rosa, an Irish woman of Spanish descent, Ted had a very satisfactory Polishstyle family, who spent all their holidays together. Rosa’s parents had a prosperous family business in Gibraltar, but during the Second World War they were deported to Ireland, where Rosa’s siblings were born. The family could not go back home for a long time, so Rosa went to work in the UK, while some other members of her family migrated to Argentina. However, her parents were eventually allowed to go back to Gibraltar, although by then their business had been ruined and the home had become dilapidated. Outside his new extended family, Ted also maintained close contacts with his army buddies, especially with his best friend, who after the war decided to migrate to Canada. ‘Do you meet your army friends in the Polish club?’, I asked. ‘Not really. You see, Madam, I do not go to the club. Perhaps, sometimes for a New Year dance party. But otherwise I do not like going there. These people, Madam, think they are still in the old days. They all are suddenly gentiles (same pany) and officers. They are nothing here, and they come to these clubs, and they pretend they are somebody and push people around. They want us to pay contributions so that we can come to the club and serve them. No way! When I want to meet people I do not need a Polish club. I have my own club’.

Thus, Ted’s contacts with East Europeans were rather limited after the war, and he socialized within his own network, which extended from Canada through Ireland and Gibraltar to Argentina. However, towards the end of the 1960s he obtained a letter from the Red Cross telling him suddenly that some members of his family had survived the German

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bombing. He visited them as soon as he had sorted out the visa formalities. When he arrived, it appeared that only his sister, two aunts and their children were still alive. He also learned that his father and mother had been waiting for him all these years but died before the letter was sent, without knowing that he was happily living in the UK. The visit to Poland was another breakthrough in his life. ‘You see, Madam, I was very sorry that my wife had been killed and that my parents had not lived long enough to meet me. But then, what could I do to change it? And all these people greeted me as if I were a king. I had just a few presents for them, an odd mohair shawl and so on, but they were just happy to see me, that I was there, that I was not dead. They were simply enjoying my company. Everybody in the village got drunk. We were all not dead but alive. We celebrated this so much that I almost died of a hangover. You see, I’d got out of practice in the UK. They did not have the high-voltage alcohol. On that return plane, Madam, I thought I would die. The Soviets haven’t finished me off, nor did Hitler, but those peasants almost did’.

Contrary to what he was expecting, the Polish security service did not interrogate him at all when he was in Poland, and he did not have to suffer the consequences of his choice to stay in a capitalist country. It had also appeared that there was one army skill he could use as a civilian: swapping and trading, which he had mastered in Italy. As his sister Izabella happened to be an entrepreneurial woman, from that time on, despite the Iron Curtain, Ted made his living in the capitalist and the socialist systems simultaneously. Although he could not take a holiday more than once a year, he regularly sent parcels with goods which were cheap in the UK but in Poland were very much in demand as luxuries, such as tights, chewing gum, chocolate, coffee, mohair scarves and shawls, mohair knitting wool, non-iron shirts, nylon fabric and tons of used clothes. The money from their sale was re-invested in goods for sale in the UK. On the way back, Ted would take cheap Polish cigarettes, spirits, jars of homemade conserves, crystal vases, silver and amber jewellery, goose-feather duvets and pillows, as well as different religious and national symbols, including tapestries with the Polish eagle and pictures of the Mother of God from Częstochowa. He kept some of the goods for himself, and the rest he sold at a great profit through his network to Poles and non-Poles alike. He reinvested some of the money in travel expenses and in buying more goods for Poland, which his sister then sold for at least double the price within her network of acquaintances. He obtained the best leverage on used clothes, which he acquired ‘almost for free’ from his family, acquaintances and their acquaintances.

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‘What does it mean, almost for free?’ I asked. ‘Well, I had to entertain them and to feed them a lot of liquor. Mind you, these Brits don’t have high voltage. Thirty vol is the maximum you can get in this country. But then, they can drink like dragons!’

This was a reference to the Polish creation myth, in which a dragon drunk all the water from a river, after which it burst into pieces. ‘Fortunately I had my own spirit. Otherwise I would go bankrupt in this business. … When I went to Poland by car, I always loaded it up to the ceiling with goods, and I always had gifts for my sister, for her children, for the cousins and for the people in the village. And these people, they were poor but honourable, so they gave me a whole moonlighter installation as a gift of the heart. This was simply brilliant … A simple milk cylinder, you know, Madam, made of metal and a little glass pipe. When I brought it to the UK, the customs officer was very much puzzled. “Why do you bring this crap here?”, he said; we have better, lighter, plastic cylinders in this country. And I was laughing to myself … It made my life so much nicer, and cheaper too! It was almost pure spirit, distilled twice. … I was able to arrange many things. I was diluting it, of course. But not always. Some like it strong. These Irish, for example. But I guess the Spaniards liked it most when it was slightly diluted. They are used to strong alcohol. You see, Madam, bimber (moonlighter) is the best man’s friend’.

Ted’s networks were useful when finding informal employment for the Poles he was inviting to the UK. With the monthly salary of an ordinary person in Poland being the equivalent of less than twenty dollars, they were happy to work in the West for the lowest rates, especially when they were living either at Ted’s – in exchange for performing such services as cleaning, working in the garden, house decoration, doing repairs and cooking – or in case of farm work, when they lived at the farmer’s expense. The money they earned was always multiplied by the profits they made by buying goods and selling them back in Poland – that is, if they decided to go back at all. Numerous Poles who were officially invited by Ted as his family members (not that he knew them) did ask for asylum and then migrated to third countries, such as Canada, Australia, the USA or South Africa. Ted was unable to estimate how many Poles he had invited to the UK under false pretences over a period of almost thirty years. In the beginning it was only the closest family who came, then friends and friends of friends. It was a major hassle for Ted, but it meant ‘killing two birds with one stone’. He helped people achieve better lives and at the same time helped himself both to have a satisfactory social life and to achieve a better economic standard. Ted worked full time, and since their children had grown

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up, so did his wife, though they were both low-qualified workers and, without the informal activities, their combined salaries would be not enough to enable them to visit their family, let alone buy a better house in the UK and a house in Poland with a view to retiring there. And as his wife was keen to spend her time in Spain with her brother, Ted also bought a flat in Spain. In his old age, he therefore felt he belonged in all three countries, or indeed in the whole of free Europe. ‘You see, Madam, you should enjoy your life when you can. Simply enjoy, be happy that you are there. These young people complain that life is hard on them. They can travel wherever they want, and there is no war. They don’t know how easy their life is. Not as it was before. … The borders are open, you can live where you want. Now I spend summer in Poland, and my wife stays in the UK, and then we go to Spain for winter, but I, for example, if I wanted, I could live permanently in Italy or anywhere, that is, in any country in Europe, America or Africa. I do not mind living in any country, except Russia, of course’.

We therefore cannot place Ted within one economic system, nor within a single ethnographic site; we cannot classify him within a single migration category, nor ascribe a single motive to his informal actions. Ted was a soldier, a political exile, a tourist, a trader, a worker and an entrepreneur all in one. In line with the current views on informal activities, he was also a petty smuggler, an intermediary in illegal migration and an illegal employment agent. Today such people are labelled en bloc as human traffickers, but such a judgement of his actions would defy common sense, for Ted was not a trafficker, nor some delinquent villain, but an ordinary person, both hero and antihero. Pursuing his ludic habits, embracing life with its pain and all the problems connected with war, loss of family and migration, Ted achieved what Friedrich Nietzsche called a Dionysian relationship to existence (1982: 10). This relationship was possible through amor fati, or love of fate, the key to Nietzsche’s life-affirming horizontal philosophy, the assumption that, since it is impossible to eliminate all pain and suffering, we must learn to embrace it, for pleasure comes after ­overcoming a difficulty or an obstacle. Case Study 3. Mary, the Immaculately Pure and Clean Ted was not a unique example of the horizontal man, nor were the Polish, Irish or Spanish migrants in the UK, for, as discussed in the previous chapter, their informal networks were not only transnational, transcontinental and trans-systemic, but also trans-ethnic, that is, they involved the cooperation of actors representing numerous ethnicities

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across the globe. Yet another example of a person involved in a chain of transactions ranging across Europe and all the way to Asia and Africa is Mary. I met her on a coach travelling from London to Warsaw in 2003, that is, a year before Poland joined the EU, which meant that officially Poles were not yet allowed to work in the EU, although they could come and stay as tourists. The journey was longer than twentyfour hours, with twenty-minute stops every four hours, during which one could use the toilet and stretch one’s legs (and in my case take impromptu notes, mostly while hiding in a toilet). Mary got on the coach in London and sat next to me on the bench at the back. She was around forty, dressed like most Polish migrant cleaners, which means she sported a fashionable hairdo, full make-up, gold jewellery, a fashionable if not elegant dress consisting of a skimpy skirt and a tailored jacket in a neon colour and the obligatory high heels. She was returning home to her teenage children after half a year as a live-in servant of John, a disabled Englishman of around seventy, and, as it later appeared, also as his fiancé and caretaker, for, as she claimed, ‘He wanted only a Polish woman, since the English women were lazy, dirty and lousy housewives. And us Polish (Polki) were clean and industrious’. However, she was very disappointed with the payment and gifts she had received, and for more than twenty-four hours she kept talking to me, wondering whether she should marry the miser or not. My usual practice was to interview at least ten people on one journey, but because of Mary’s problem all I managed to do was to overhear the two men sitting in front of us. They smelled of sweat and alcohol, for they had been en route for three days without any opportunity to wash, and they joined us in Calais after being refused entry to the UK and returned across the Channel from the border crossing in Dover. The men planned to fly to Ireland, where one of them had an acquaintance, and then to enter the UK in his car by ferry. Alternatively, they were considering going to Spain. ‘Why to Spain of all places?’, I asked, joining in their conversation. ‘Because the Spanish are normal people, and they don’t make a circus on the border like those f… Englishmen (Angole) and life is f… good there, “życie jak w Madrycie”, you know’, said Miguel, the one who was more drunk. ‘But I heard they are poor, irresponsible and don’t pay much’, I said, using the technique of provocation advocated by Georg Elwert, which he had successfully tried in Benin (Elwert 2003). It proved just as effective in Belgium, for the bus was just then passing Antwerp. ‘They pay shit to them idiots that work on a farm. I would not work there anyway’, said Manuel, the one that was less drunk.

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‘So what would you do, open a brothel?’, I asked, continuing being provocative. ‘No f… way, we are serious builders’, said Miguel. ‘We would love to, but we are married men’, laughed Manuel, and explicitly explained what his wife would have done if she learned he were involved in the sex industry, and to which specific part of his body she would have done it. ‘So why don’t you go to Germany? It’s closer, and they pay better’. ‘Perhaps Germany would be good, but we do not know anybody in Germany anymore. All our mates left it for England. But we have connections in Spain’, said Manuel. ‘If we wanted to find connections in Germany, we would find them eventually, f…, but why the f… bother if we can go to Spain and have f… siesta all day long?!’, added Miguel.

Before the men fell asleep, they revealed that they knew a Ukrainian man with whom they had worked in eastern Poland and who in turn knew a Russian man who owned a building company on the coast of the south of Spain and who was eager to employ Poles. Thus, Miguel and Manuel’s informal network stretched from somewhere in Russia, across Ukraine and Poland to Spain and to Ireland and the UK, uniting at least six different ethnic groups in a common goal, which was navigation around the different migration regimes in pursuit of happiness, as distinct from the mere fight for survival. Mary’s network seemed very limited in this context, for it seemed she only knew the old Englishman, and I could not regret enough that through her I wasted an opportunity to interview other passengers. But I was wrong. Soon after the journey Mary contacted me asking for a meeting, to which she arrived in the company of a handsome young man, her former boyfriend Stan, with whom she had got back together after breaking up with the Englishman. She wanted me to provide a written invitation to the UK for herself and her boyfriend. ‘Do you have some work in sight?’, I asked him. ‘Not really, but I know a guy who can organize a blue card for me’, by which he meant a national insurance card, blue with a red stripe, of course a fake. Having obtained a false ID, the illegal worker would pay taxes and national insurance contributions, but he would not claim any benefits, which in fact was very profitable for the state. ‘And then I can work legally. The guys (chłopaki) told me that it is easy to get a job on a building site … One can earn up to £40 a day!’ ‘Can’t the guy who organizes the card give you an invitation?’ ‘No, it would be too dangerous for him to give his address to everybody. He is an Albanian, and he does not want to get into any trouble’. ‘How do you know him?’

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‘Through my friend from Germany, who knows another Albanian from the Asylantenheim. He is his cousin’. ‘Albanian a cousin of a Pole?’ ‘No, not Albanian. That English Albanian is a cousin of the German Albanian’.

It appeared that Stan had previously worked in Germany on a farm, where he was a maintenance man and a heavy machinery driver. It was a medium-size farm, and the owner, Hans, did not pay much per hour, but the stay was all-inclusive, and he could work up to sixteen hours a day, so Stan saved enough money to buy himself a property in Poland. However, after five years of hard work six days a week, but sometimes also on Sunday, which he described as an idyllic life, there was a police raid. ‘Germans are good people, but they are vicious informants and denouncers (kapusie), and they have spying in their blood. A neighbour must have told on him. They must have spotted a black man (zobaczyli kurde Murzyna), and when they see a black man, they know that he is working black (na czarno)’. ‘What was a black man doing on a German farm?’, I asked. ‘Working. Hans was paying him two Euros an hour’. ‘But where did Hans find him?’ ‘Through connections. Well, Hans’s cousin knew his cousin from Hanover. This cousin sent him his passport to Ghana, and Chris came on this passport’. ‘And what happened after the control? Did they send the black man back to Africa?’ ‘No, the bastards didn’t find him. He was away in the fields, and he hid with the other guys. Only I was caught and a woman in the kitchen. All the others escaped. I was caught ‘cos I was in a big crane. I could not run away because they surrounded it, but I shouted loudly to the guys to run away … I was sitting there, up in the crane and shouting “run away, f… run away!” (spier…, kontrola!). And the police with their dogs could do nothing. They were so angry they did not even let me pack my things. They brought me in their car right to the border and gave me a teddy bear (dali misia)’.

A teddy bear in this context was not a cuddly toy, but Polish slang for the deportation (Ausweisung) stamp in one’s passport, confirming that its holder was persona non grata in Germany. This was a German policy aimed at limiting the ‘informal sector’, but actually the ‘teddy bear’ did not appear to be such a big obstacle for the serious migrants. The usual method in such a situation was to obtain a new passport, having claimed that the old one had been damaged or lost. While Stan was waiting for his new passport he met Mary, and having learned that

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he could earn twice as much in a similar job in the UK, he decided to try his luck there. If things went wrong, he could always return to Germany. Mary planned to exploit her image as a clean and motivated Polish woman to go and wash dishes in the restaurant of a Pakistani man whom she met through some Pakistanis who worked for another Englishman, who was John’s friend. Thus, Mary’s informal network extended from London to Pakistan and from Poland to Germany, Ghana and Albania. And since Mary was from a family of re-settlers from the Ukraine, her network stretched there too. Significantly, it was not restricted to migrants: John, the mean Englishman, and Hans, the German farmer, were not migrants, nor criminals or pathological deviants, but ordinary citizens of their respective countries, as were their cousins who had recommended the services of migrant workers. John was a disabled retiree living on a modest pension that barely covered his expenses, so in trying to live a liveable life he chose the cheapest options in obtaining the services he needed, informally employing local people and migrants. Hans in turn was a medium-size farmer who would not have been able to compete with the large industrial farms if it were not for the informal labour of migrants, who in turn were able to secure better lives for their families back in the countries they came from. But most importantly, the relationships in Mary’s network were heterogeneous in nature, mixing purely economic activities with leisure and the search for happiness, including looking for a sexual partner or a spouse. While Mary was not successful in her relationship with the mean Englishman, during my fieldwork I came across numerous examples where informal economic activities led to those involved attaining happiness and a stable relationship with a foreigner, usually an employer or landlord. I have witnessed such relationships in Berlin. This was in the early period of my research, and I interpreted them through a gendered perspective, as a change in the balance of power between the sexes and the way in which Polish migrant women over forty managed to emancipate themselves from what they considered the culturally sanctioned obtrusive, ageist and sexist rules of their home country through relationships with Germany’s male citizens. Although this perspective was not flat enough to include their partners in the description, these cases have shown that, contrary to research by the economist Douglas North (1990), informal networks are not necessarily connected with or ruled by informal institutions (i.e. norms and customs), for the women used these networks to escape precisely these institutions and their traditional, gendered roles (Pine 2003, Pustułka 2012). Barbara’s story is a case in point.

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Case Study 4. Barbara: Escaping Informal Institutions Through Informal Networks While there has been a vivid discussion of the negative influence of migration on family ties, with studies relating the length of stay abroad to the divorce rate, in my fieldwork it was often the case that the family was already dysfunctional before the departure of women like Barbara for informal employment abroad, which they saw as a way to escape from both economic and psychological stress. While men used informal networks to strengthen the traditional male role of family provider, for married women informal work abroad was usually a solution to problems such as the loss of a husband, the husband losing his job, the long-term illness or disability of a family member, or escape from an alcoholic husband. But sometimes it was just because of a lack of emotional ties in a relationship and dissatisfaction with daily life. ‘My life in Poland was so grey. It was ordinary, normal and not hungry. But something was missing. I did not know what it was’, said Barbara, a woman I met on the smuggler train. At the age of 48, by Polish standards she was an unattractive old woman. Yet, she did not dress appropriately for her age, behaved like a teenager and was radiating with joy and happiness. She openly kissed and cuddled an ‘old’ German man (aged about fifty) on the platform, and then in the train compartment. They stopped only when the train was about to leave, and he jumped out at the last minute. The younger women in the compartment looked at her stunned, and we all asked her questions, curious to hear her story, for she broke all Polish rules connected with her sex and age. It appeared that Barbara was a nurse living in a medium-size town in central Poland and that she had great expertise in smuggling, which she gained from her experience as a trading-tourist journeys across the countries of the Warsaw Pact. She came to Berlin through family networks, lived with her cousin, who claimed German roots, and worked informally as the caretaker of an elderly German lady. She was earning a lot (DM 1600 plus food, approximately USD 800 a month), so she decided not to impose herself on her cousin and instead rented a room, which she found through an advertisement in a newspaper. The owner of the flat was a divorced man, the same one who brought her to the station. They fell in love within a month, and she moved into his bedroom. ‘My husband had nothing against it! He was so satisfied that I was bringing home big money that he had nothing against me living with an alien man in the same flat! My cousin said, “He is selling you like a pimp sells a prostitute!” Then I met a woman on a train, who told me how her

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husband had exploited her. She worked hard (abroad) for four years. Everything she earned she brought home to Poland to buy an apartment and a car. One day she returned home, and her husband told her that all this (what she had done) was simply prostitution (kurewstwo) and that he had long ago sold the apartment and the car. He had also found himself a girlfriend and demanded a divorce. Thus she was back to square one. But she was smart and she has found girls and jobs for them. Now she is rich again. I took this story very seriously. I thought it over and turned to my husband, asking him whether he would like a divorce. Imagine, he was not surprised at all. He said he had long been thinking about it and saw it coming’. (Irek 1998: 75–76)

Thus, in a sharp reversal of the traditional roles of male and female, Barbara was providing for her husband, who, before she migrated, ‘had never even had to stir his own tea’, but then he had to take over her daily chores and as a single father learn how to prepare food, do the washing and shopping, how to clean the flat and how to tolerate his partner’s suspected infidelity. When I met Barbara in Berlin sometime later, I learned that her youngest son had a speech impediment – which, in contrast to her sex life, she considered personal information that she was not keen to share in a train compartment – and that she was paying her husband an exorbitant sum a month so that the boy could be treated and achieve a proper education. She was also providing for her daughter and the latter’s extramarital child. Only her oldest son was doing well, for, based on his mother’s earlier experience, he had established himself as an informal trader. Despite her problems with her children and grandchild, Barbara was very happy in her new relationship. She thought her German partner was a good man and an even better lover. ‘He respects me a lot. In Poland I had to work hard without a break (zasuwać bez przerwy). Here, I feel I am a woman’. Thus, although in Germany Barbara was working ten hours a day, six to seven days a week, and in her free time she was managing a network of cleaning women which she had established with the help of her partner, she still regarded this as a happy lifestyle in contrast to the hard work in Poland, where, as well as her three-shift work in a hospital, she had to tend to home, children and the traditional Polish husband. She used her informal networks to escape the roles of aged woman, mother and housewife imposed on her by the informal ­institutions governing age groups and gender roles in Poland. The cases I have described are just a few examples showing not only that the analysis of informal economic activities has to go beyond the conceptual limitation of the three systems, but also that the informal networks that are instrumental in carrying out these activities do

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not always have a transactional character, as the actors may enter into informal relationships for a variety of motives, including ones of an emotional nature. Thus, researching them in terms of their economic aspects alone would be reductionist.

Travelling Subjects: Looking Beyond States and Sites The need for a site-less ethnography is particularly evident in the case of travelling subjects like the informal traders, smugglers and workers mentioned earlier. They came from the socialist economic ‘zone’ to the capitalist ‘zone’, as well as entering into transactions with travellers from third-world economies. The measurable economic effect of their activities was an alternative, informal ‘stock exchange’ mentioned by the Polish historian Jerzy Kochanowski (2008, 2010), in which the currencies of the Soviet-dominated bloc were valued realistically in gold and dollars. It was the very differences in the price and accessibility of goods between the three systems that powered the informal transactions, while borders constituted desirable thresholds, and crossing them could increase one’s profits. Contemporary ethnographies from that period were written by outsiders from the West and, for political reasons, were limited to single sites and biased by strong anti-communist sentiment. The more objective accounts of that period have recently been reconstructed by historians, such as Borodziej and Kochanowski (2010), Bren and Neuburger (2012), Kochanowski (2010) and Stola (2012, 2015, 2016). And while there exist numerous ethnographies of informal trade in the post-socialist period (e.g. Hann and Hann 1992, Hann and Beller-Hann 1998, Konstantinov et al. 1998, Bridger and Pine 1998, Kaneff 2002, Mandel and Humphrey 2002, Valtchinova 2006, Sasunkevich 2015), as well as re-constructive ethnographies based on actors’ memories (Wessely 2002, Luthar 2006), they also tend to be confined to chosen sites, usually one or two within each system, rather than describing whole routes. The ethnography of informal trade extending across numerous borders and matching the scope of Karl Schlögel’s (2001, 2002) imaginative description of the routes, that created a flat ontology of the Eurasian continent by unexpectedly bringing together places from the endless space stretching beyond Europe, is still missing. Thick Description: Informal Movement of People and Objects As mentioned before, the Iron Curtain did not prevent informal links across the two systems, while the economic threshold it created was a

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powerful motivation for transactional relationships. The countries of the former Soviet bloc constituted an artificial market system in which the economy was fully subordinated to the political needs of the state, rather than being dependent on the international global market and its rules. The functioning of this system was possible due to both the Iron Curtain, which ensured its relative isolation from capitalist markets (though not completely, as shown by the cases described above), and the existence of internal borders between the countries of the bloc, so that any external contacts, whether of an economic or social nature, were controlled by the given state, which in turn was subordinated to the needs of the Soviet Union (Stola 2012, 2015, 2016). And since each country was a separate, relatively closed unit within the system, there were significant differences in the prices of goods, as well as between the variety of goods supplied and demanded in each country (Irek 1998). This was the case not only between the rich West and the poor East, but also between the states of the Eastern bloc itself, where some non-basic needs of the population could not be met through the imports and exports of the inflexible planned economies, which were bound by the limitations of the artificial monetary policies these states pursued (Leszczyńska 2008). On the other hand, certain basic goods, like children’s clothing which, by virtue of being different from what was generally available, were desired by customers in other countries (Campbell and Falk 1997), were subsidized by the socialist states, so that their export was restricted. This situation, combined with the leverage of currency exchange, created the economic basis for informal trans-border and trans-system trade, which was initially developed through existing, albeit narrow communication channels (Stola 2012, 2015), such as movements connected with those in the transport of goods and people (sailors and truck drivers, train drivers and pilots), diplomatic exchanges, family contacts, student travel and the travels of contract workers. The same channels were open in contact with the West and with third-world countries, especially those that sympathized with socialism. The citizens of the countries from the African, Asian and American continents were invited to work in the socialist states, mostly in the GDR, which had notorious shortages of labour, as well as to study in universities across the Soviet bloc, including the USSR. In their turn, highly qualified skilled workers, including engineers and medical doctors, were sent from the socialist countries on limited time contracts to work in the third-world countries. In time these channels widened, and since individual tourist journeys became possible in the Soviet bloc, the masses of ‘ordinary people’ have also been able to participate in and benefit from informal trans-border transactions.3

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Thus, while the destinations remained the same in the trans-system movement, with the visa-free cities of West Berlin and Vienna at the top of the list, the most popular tourist destinations within the bloc were the Black Sea resorts of Romania and Bulgaria, which became centres for the informal trade in foreign currencies, cheap gold and furs. Taking advantage of the relaxation, Hungarian shopping tourists raided the neighbouring Czechoslovak towns, virtually cleaning them out of textiles, while Czechoslovaks in return raided the south of Poland and resorts in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, where they were criticized for ‘selling smuggled goods, avoiding hotels and paid camping places and generally spending no money, unlike Poles’ (Kochanowski 2008: 143). The latter, by contrast, lavishly spent money earned both formally and informally in Hungarian resorts, shops and restaurants. In Poland, Czechoslovaks were known for entering ‘criminal networks’, smuggling industrial amounts of furry textiles (nicknamed misie, ‘teddy bears’) by train deep into Poland and smuggling out folklore toys, cosmetics and other goods, and even live horses and cattle (Kochanowski 2008, 2010). And, the proverbially orderly East German tourists were known for cleaning the neighbouring Czechoslovak and Polish border towns out of food, folklore articles, leather and jeans textiles and electrical goods. Poles, in turn, raided all of them, including neighbouring Russia, selling and buying anything they could. Unlike Soviet bloc citizens, people from Yugoslavia were allowed to travel to the West from the mid-1950s, although initially with restrictions (Repe 2004). Subsequently, from the 1960s, the restrictions were lifted, and they were also allowed to work, which had serious consequences for the whole of the European informal economy. In effect they became the major distributors of goods between the eastern and western sides of the Iron Curtain (Kochanowski 2010, Svab 2002). Moreover, as they specialized in the gold and currency trades, they were largely responsible for the creation of a secondary market system, a parallel ‘stock exchange’ within the bloc based on real market prices and parity with gold (Kochanowski 2008). Other groups who were important players in the currency and gold trades were local ‘Gypsies’, mostly Roma from different socialist countries, and foreign students, mostly from countries in the Middle East and Africa, who, as already mentioned, also enjoyed mobility in both directions across the Iron Curtain. Poles were allowed to travel as tourists to the West only from the 1970s, provided they met certain criteria (Irek 1998, 2011, Stola 2012, 2015), which gave them an opportunity to compete with Yugoslavs in the international informal space.

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Case Study 5: Krzysztof, the Permanent Vacationer The term vacationer or wakacjusz was used as an ironic description of Polish tourists, who were officially coming to the USA for a holiday, but instead were illegally working (Znaniecka-Łopata 1976). Krzysztof, described in Der Schmugglerzug (Irek 1998: 44–46), was on a rather permanent holiday. His business as a small-scale farmer, the family enterprise he had inherited from his father, had gone bankrupt when its official contract with the state for the delivery of vegetables expired together with socialism, accompanied as it was by the sudden competition of cheaper goods from West and East alike, which made local production unprofitable. So, following the economic trend, he took a long holiday from his business and devoted his time to tourism by joining a group of his old friends, who for years had been living well from informal trade. I met him on a train going from Berlin to Warsaw, but this was not his only route, for the group practically lived en route, travelling between different places across Europe. Although the trade was efficient and the cash flow healthy, for the money quickly moved ‘from pocket to pocket’ (in one pocket expenses, in the other profit), in Krzysztof’s opinion Berlin was not a pleasant place. He thought that the whole Berlin journey resembled the wartime encounters with the German army of invaders which Krzysztof had known only from Polish films, for he had been born about fifteen years after the war ended. ‘So, which destination is pleasant for you?’, I asked. ‘Hungary; it’s the best business when we go to Hungary’. ‘How many people?’ ‘As usual six, you know; it is dangerous to travel in small groups, because there are many thieves around. And besides, the more people the merrier!’

He opened a fresh bottle of vodka and offered it to me to drink directly from it (z gwinta), for as a woman I had the right to drink first. Then he drunk a bit himself, and the bottle went on to the other members, who drank in turns. Afterwards, following the golden rule of Polish social drinking, namely that strong alcohol must be followed by an alcohol-free drink (zapitka) so that it is ‘diluted in the blood’, he opened a bottle of fizzy drink. The company also followed another informal rule, whereby it was forbidden to drink on empty stomach, and one of them fetched a pack of Frankfurter sausages as zagryzka. And these seemed to be the only rules, or indeed the ‘informal rules’, they followed on their journeys. It appeared that the group was coming back

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from travelling in Hungary and Yugoslavia, going via Berlin to optimize their profits. And although they had a favourite place in Hungary near Lake Balaton, where they rented a chalet, they never knew the rest of the route in advance, for they acted according to current ‘business’ needs. Places in Hungary like the Balaton resorts, with their entertainment infrastructure, or Tokay, with its good and cheap wine, allowed business to be linked with pleasure, which consisted mostly in drinking extreme amounts of alcohol. The secret of Hungary seemed to lie in the locally produced specialty, not known elsewhere in the Soviet bloc: kiwi juice. ‘Why exactly the kiwi juice?’, I wondered. ‘When we go to Hungary, we drink vodka, but not as now, just a sip – we drink it by the bottle. And then the kiwi juice is necessary to prevent a hangover. … We go to Hungary clean like new-born babies. We have only cash (no smuggled goods). Then we buy things in Hungary and go to Yugoslavia. We sell the goods in the open markets,4 change the cash into dollars, and then, in these markets, buy things cheaply off Romanians, Russians, Turks and some silly Poles passing through on the way from Turkey. We sell these things back in Hungary, and so it goes on, until we get homesick’. ‘Can the Russians travel to Yugoslavia?’ ‘We do not know what they are allowed to do, but they are everywhere, in Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia. And one can make really good business with them. They have no idea of European measures. All they know is a bucket and a fistful’. ‘What on earth is sold by the bucket?’ ‘Kitchen towels, for example. And handkerchiefs. Everything that is small is sold by fists and only for dollars. They only know the rouble– dollar exchange rate, but when in the meantime something changes, they have no idea’. ‘And how come you know it all when you are travelling?’

At this point, my research subject took a small computing device out of his pocket. All the necessary knowledge, including the current exchange rates of the currencies he was trading in, was written in the memory. On this particular trip the group came from Hungary to Poland via West Berlin so that they could go by transit to East Berlin, where they sold all the Turkish textiles bought in Yugoslavia to the Polish contract workers, who lived in a worker’s house, they got to know through the network. The East German marks were then exchanged for West German marks by African students living in a student dormitory. They were described as ‘Czarni’ (blacks), without regard to the country they came from, just like all Asians were described as ‘Żółtki’ (yellows). Then the group crossed the East–West border on foot and went to West

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Berlin to buy food, beer, clocks and wristwatches with a calculator function, then very fashionable in Poland, toy pianos and eighteen massive video recorders. Each of them cost several Polish salaries, but Krzysztof explained this extravagant purchase in the following words: ‘The more you buy, the more profit you make. And the more money you have, the more expensive goods you can afford to buy. And the more expensive the goods, the less work you have to invest (in getting them to the client)’. ‘Who buys these expensive things?’ ‘The nouveaux riches in Warsaw and East German citizens’. ‘How come East German citizens? You are taking all these things to Poland, aren’t you?’ ‘Exactly. Two people (from the group) will get out at the first station after the Polish border. They will spend the night at the train station and in the morning they will go to Słubice. There they will sell the worst things to the East Germans…’.

The ‘legally illegal’ bazaar on the Polish side of the border offered East German citizens a wide variety of goods, some of them smuggled from different part of East Germany, showing that the main motive of tourist shoppers was not pure economic necessity, but the very attractiveness of shopping abroad. The existence of this market was an example of how difficult it is to segregate the formal and informal trade into separate spaces, as described by Ida Harboe Knudsen (2010, 2013) in her ethnography of a Lithuanian open market. Apart from demonstrating that the ethnography of informal trade cannot be restricted to one or more given sites, but has to move along routes, Krzysztof’s case shows again how elusive the boundary between different categories of migration is, for while the goals of his group seemed purely economic, the character of the trips was just as much recreational. Case Study 6: Czesiek, the Goer with the Flow As shown by Krzysztof’s story, although these tourist-trading projects usually went along some established route, the places were not necessarily fixed, so it was impossible to predict a site in advance. Another example of this unpredictability is the story of Czesiek, from a small town in western Poland, who, at the time I met him, was working illegally in Berlin for a week to get himself a new TV and video equipment. Like the majority of inhabitants of the area, Czesiek’s family had been re-settled from what is now part of Ukraine after witnessing the pogroms of Poles in Wolhynia (rzeź Wołyńska), staged by the Ukrainian People’s Army (UPA) during the Second World War and leaving most

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of their family members in a mass grave. Despite gruesome memories, Czesiek’s mother kept in touch with whoever had remained in Ukraine, and she used to visit them regularly to attend the mass grave, remember lost friends and family members, and cry over the past. To recover the travel costs of this sentimental journey, Czesiek’s mother would always take some goods with her that were in demand in Ukraine, then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and that were traded or swapped for goods in demand in Poland. When she wanted to get hold of a colour TV for her son, Czesiek, who was then a university ­graduate, she took him with her on the journey. ‘We went in a group, by Polish-made Fiat (duży Fiat). There were three of us in the car, my mother, another woman from our town and myself. This woman, Kaja, had connections everywhere, and she would travel regularly, but my mother could have only one holiday a year. … After we had visited the grave, we sold some jeans and other crap. The Ruskis (Ruskie) would do anything for a pair of jeans or for nice lingerie, but one had to be discrete. My mother stayed behind to buy some gold and to gossip with her friends. Me and Kaja went by train to Lviv for the TV, but there were none. Kaja said that Kiev is the capital of the Ukrainian republic, so there must be TVs in Kiev, and that it was an easy journey by train, only five hundred kilometres, so we went to Kiev. Of course, when one went to the Soviet Union with an invitation, one was not allowed to leave the place you had declared you would visit. But we had already broken the rule, and Kiev was not as far as Moscow, or Irkutsk, for example. But in Kiev there were no coloured TVs, but then Kaja had friends there, and they told us that apparently they have “thrown” (rzucili) the TVs in Kishinev. We had travelled so far, so we thought, why not? Let’s go there. So, we took a train from Kiev to Kishinev. Mind you, this was the capital of the Moldavian Republic, so we had to travel yet another five hundred kilometres, and we paid for this with the money we got from selling one pack of fancy knickers! … And it paid off, for there were colour TVs in Kishinev – we only said we were Polish, and we got them from behind the counter. We gave a pair of jeans as a gift to the saleswoman, and we paid the usual price in roubles. We took three sets: one for myself, one for trade and one for Kaja. And then, when we stopped rejoicing at our success, we realized we had a problem. The TV sets were enormously big and heavy. We transported them to the train station all right, but how to get them on the train? The train to Kiev came, and we couldn’t even get on to the steps, for it was so crowded. So we waited for the next one. Mind you, it was November, cold like hell, the wind was terrible, and there was nowhere to hide. We waited for two hours, and the next train came. This time we did not attempt to get in with the people but ran to the cargo wagon. A big fat woman … waved at us to wait, but then she just slid the door shut in our faces. The whistle had been blown, and the train was gone. And there was no other train that day … We saw a group

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of local people at the end of the platform. They were heating their hands over an open fire. We went to heat ourselves, and they invited us to their little hut. We just left the TV sets on a platform, for we were desperate just to survive, and we spent the night sitting in this hut. Then, in the morning, the packages were still there. We took the first train that left the station. It went to Odessa, mind you, two hundred kilometres in the opposite direction! But it was simple to get from Odessa to Lviv, it was about eight hundred kilometres, and it took us a day to get there. The trip took us only three days, but my mother thought we were already dead. Then we loaded our three TV sets into our Polish Fiat and went back all the way home. It is another long story how we got the cargo into such a small space’.

Czesiek’s case demonstrates the subjectivity of space and time, which these travelling subjects experience as different from their socially constructed understanding. It also shows that the economy of shortage paradigm is not necessarily the only valid approach to the analysis of the informal economies of the Soviet-bloc countries. As is known, shortages alone do not explain the existence of an informal economy (Carson 1993), let alone informality. Also, the lack of luxury goods such as a colour TV and fashion accessories cannot be described as a ‘shortage’ (Campbell and Falk 1997). But above all, this trivial story proves that the ethnographies of informal activities cannot be restricted to some a priori defined ‘locality’. In researching the informal practices of actors like Czesiek, we should physically follow them along the routes they take, and we also should extend our conceptual framework from a single context situated within a single economic system, sealed off by its real and symbolic borders, into a wider space. In order to prevent the flow of our research from being obstructed by a diachrony of the countless contexts, we should replace it with a reasonably thin version of the Latourian thick description,5 which should provide enough relevant information about informal transactions without our losing sight of their continuity. Thus, reflecting the horizontal nature of informality, the cases presented above belong to ethnography which is site-less rather than multisited (Marcus 1995, 2009, Falzon 2009, 2016), and scale-free (Marston et. al. 2005) rather than multi-scalar (Xiang and Toyota 2013). That is, the ethnography is not confined to a ‘site’ or a number of specified ‘sites’ where the research was carried out, but instead it flows (Irek 1998, Urry 2000, Kirby 2009) freely with the actors, along the routes they have chosen. And this is not some measurable movement to and from definite places, for places are transient: rather than being the endpoints of journeys, they are more like throttles that let the movement go through.

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Different scales are of no relevance here, for the experience of informal actors escapes the ‘global–local’ or ‘micro–meso–macro’ logic of scales used in human geography, understood after Marston et al. as a ‘nested hierarchy of differentially sized and bounded spaces’ (2005: 416–17).

Notes 1. Even the concept of homo apertus itself differs in economics and in the social sciences. See Hoogenboom et al. 2013. 2. None of the authorities knew exactly how many Poles there were in West Berlin. In 1988 the Polish consulate estimated the Polish diaspora at 100,000, not counting the illegal workers and the second generation of Poles. At the same time the German authorities estimated this number at 30,000, not counting those with German roots, nor Polish children born in Germany, nor illegal workers, whose numbers were estimated at 90,000, counting three illegal migrants for every legal one. The problems with the accuracy of statistics are discussed in Irek 2011 and Cyrus 2000. 3. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet regime was relaxed slightly, and the satellite countries started to enter into bilateral agreements on the movements of people across their borders, which also made individual tourist travel possible to other countries within the system. Poland entered into an agreement with neighbouring Czechoslovakia, starting in 1955, which allowed free movement in the border zone and eventually the abolition of visas in 1960; then followed the German Democratic Republic (1961, 1963 and 1972) and subsequently other countries, including the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia (Kochanowski 2010). In 1964 visas for Hungary were abolished, causing a mass movement of Hungarian, Czech and Polish tourists in both directions. 4. For more information on the open markets in post-socialist countries, see Sik and Wallace 1999, Marcińczak and van der Velde 2005, 2008. 5. As discussed in previous chapters, Latour advocates several sets of data, at least one of them created in statu nascendi, of a given event or act, which is technically impossible during fieldwork in open space.

e6 Interfaces between the Formal and the Informal Actors, Places and Routes

The Restricted Verticality Perspective rests on the assumption of a single, heterogeneous social space in which the formal and the informal are not separate realms or sectors, but attributes of social phenomena.1 Since both formal and informal acts occur in the same space, and since every social actor has both informal and formal experiences on a daily basis, the relationship between the formal and the informal has to be mediated on the level of the individual actor. Hence, the interfaces between the two occur in the physical space, the actors’ locus, which makes them traceable. Karl Schlögel’s (2001: 18) poetic metaphor of metropolitan corridors made of light spots, visible in the darkness when observed from a plane at night, could be used here as a starting point. Thus, if we were to visualize these interfaces as short bursts of light visible on the dark map, we would see no corridors, but light pulsating in all human dwellings, though it would be brighter in the knots, the places of transit where numerous egocentric network chains come together and are entangled. But there would be no observable difference between the corporate space operating on CNN time and the area outside the metropolitan corridors that is occupied by ordinary people, nor between the glamour of wealthy areas and the obscurity of the slums, or ‘uncivilized’ rural regions with no electricity, for human life itself does not depend on corporate existence, nor can it be seen as a mere function of wealth or industrialization.

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Non-Places and Yes-Places Writing on the relationship between place and space in his introduction to the anthropology of super-modernity, Marc Augé (1995) used the concept of the Non-Place (non-lieu), introduced by the philosopher and historian Michel de Certeau (1988: 104), as a leitmotif.2 Augé described Non-Places as ‘spaces which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity’ and which are characteristic of the ‘world surrendered to solitary individuality’ (Augé 1995: 77–78). These included hotels, holiday clubs, refugee camps and airport waiting rooms, places in public spaces where anonymous people like the modern businessman Pierre Dupont, in the prologue to Augé’s book (1995: 1–6), are grouped and automatically segregated, meeting and communicating without speaking to each other and without making any significant contact. Seen from the diachronic perspective of historians like de Certeau himself, they are free of meaning, ‘devoid of characterization’ passages, but when described from the synchronic perspective of restricted verticality, the very same locations become the Yes-Places, the points in physical space where de Certeau’s ‘common heroes of the everyday life’ (de Certeau 1988: v) meet, communicate, relate to each other and make transactions. Although they still belong to the fleeting, ephemeral and temporary world described by Augé, these places are no longer meaningless, static objects, nor, as de Certeau would call them, mere intersections of moving bodies, but the greenhouses of informal links, sites where informal space is continuously produced and where human relations unfold. Yes-Places are inclusive and non-hierarchical, and in their flattened social landscape, diachronic terms such as ‘modern’, ‘postmodern’ or ‘super-modern’ have no meaning. They include all actors that happen to be there at a given time, there being no difference between the humblest and the most powerful or between the ‘backward’ and the ‘super-modern’, for even if we call actors like Pierre ‘super-modern’ by virtue of their being an element of globalized and homogenized business structures, these actors are still human. Unless they suffer from serious mental diseases, they are social beings in need of emotional and physical contact with others, hence they are as much involved in the production of informal links as everybody else. Apart from satisfying their basic psychological needs, even in their capacity as entrepreneurs in a globalized world, they cannot afford to avoid informal networking, for this is an integral part of business culture, ‘super-modern’ or not. Another factor in the era of exploded mobility is the convergence of what were known as

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the separate spaces of the rich and of the poor, for the exquisiteness of airports and other Non-Places within the ‘metropolitan corridors’ has been disrupted, and their tunnel effect has been diffused. With the advent of cheap airlines, airports have been colonized by ordinary people, whom Pierre Bourdieu called gens modestes (Bourdieu 1987: 153), people who are no longer willing to accept their modesty and who take to the road in search of their happiness. They also are travelling by plane, with their loud companions, crying children and bulky luggage, crowding out the airports, which in turn intimidate rich and poor alike at security controls, forcing them into a degree of physical proximity that was more characteristic of medieval times. Yes-Places are the equivalent of knots in the informal networks, they are the loci where the numerous informal links are observable in the physical space, where informal actors meet, enter relationships and exchange goods, services, information and emotions, where the informal manifests itself in hundreds of instants at the same time and where it interfaces with the physical space. Yes-Places can be static, like inns, waiting rooms, shops, railway stations, underground stations, gas stations, airports and restaurants, but also mobile, like trains, trucks, coaches, minibuses and planes. Before the IT revolution, if one wanted fast and reliable information on whatever was formal, one had to read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch the news on TV, while to obtain knowledge about whatever was informal, one needed to talk to people in a Yes-Place, which was not some obscure, suspicious den, hidden from the public eye, but a perfectly formal, real place in the public space. After the IT revolution moved the social space into a virtual dimension, apart from the traditional static Yes-Places, one can still find such virtual ‘portals to reality’ existing in physical space, like, for example, internet cafes, libraries, or waiting rooms with wi-fi. But even ‘purely’ virtual meeting places, like chatrooms, blogs, social portals and online games, are not fully independent of physical space. They all rely on some ‘real space’ places where the electronic device is situated, on a landline or a satellite to get a connection, on a socket to get electricity for the loader, be it through electric traction or generated locally; and finally, they all depend on the storage rooms of the servers, where the actual data carriers are kept. These are interfaces between the physical and the virtual, the tangible and intangible, the formal and the informal. Inns in the Border Zone As already noted, the empirical research on which the present work is based started in the era of the Iron Curtain, and the major bulk of the

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data was gathered before EU enlargement in 2004. The research thus includes both the old and the new members of the Schengen area and covers the period before the expansion of virtual networks, when the majority of transactions were still conducted in physical space. At that time the borders between EU member states were not only formally regulated, there also existed physical barriers, and the actual border crossings were bottlenecks slowing the movement of goods and people, as well as simultaneously giving special significance to the Yes-Places of the border zone, where, as one could say using Bauman’s tactical terminology, different actors could re-group their forces before ‘attacking’ the border. These places were the inns on the routes across borders. The inns were not just hotels, but travel centres, usually consisting of a filling station, hotel rooms, restaurants and some shops, with the last opportunity to change currencies, refuel cheaply and get a hot meal, but also to gain invaluable information on all the logistical aspects of smuggling, informal trade, illegal migration and informal work. As one approached the Polish/German border from the Polish side, there were numerous such places, all with grandiose, exotic names, two to five kilometres apart, each offering basically the same facilities, but attracting different ‘stock’ clienteles without using any formal marketing devices. Both drivers and the local people knew from the informal channels that truckers from the former Soviet countries preferred to stop at certain inns, where they could leave their fuel, bought cheaply at home, in lockable containers provided by the inn owner, then go to Germany (where bringing in one’s own fuel was prohibited, due to the road tax calculation) and subsequently refuel for free on the way back. Coaches carrying passengers to the West would stop at other inns, where a free meal and a hotel room were offered to the drivers and cheap traditional Polish food and currency exchange to the passengers. Luxury cars from Germany and Russian coaches would stop at posh-looking places with expensive but tasteless food, while serious businessmen, including local and Russian mafiosi, would stop at a different place yet again. These were not places of historic meaning, natural beauty, cultural heritage or formal significance, but nor were they just the crossing points of anonymous, moving bodies, for they had relational meaning: each day, hundreds of travellers who came to and left these inns entered into informal relationships with the locals and with other travellers.

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Case Study 1. Tomek, the Dyonisian Coach-driver: A Man, a Coach and a Business All In One If any single actor could be called a network factory, Tomek could. He had been a coach driver ever since he left compulsory army service at the age of twenty-one, first on national and then on international routes, travelling to such countries as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and the German Democratic Republic, and later also to France, Spain, Greece and Italy. In the 1990s he added to his repertoire the route between Warsaw and London. He boasted of having acquaintances in all these countries and of knowing all the ‘right places’ for informal transactions, good entertainment and merry company all across Europe. One such place in Poland was an inn close to Poland’s western border, where I witnessed how Tomek spontaneously invited a waitress, a young local girl called Ala, on a joyride to London. ‘Lucky devils, you get to travel to London and other places!’ said Ala, serving the main dish, consisting of schnitzel with fries and sauerkraut. ‘What’s the problem. Just hop on. If you had your passport on you I could take you to England right now’. ‘But I have my passport. I always have it on me’. ‘So come with us if you want! Never enough fun, ain’t it!’

Ala disappeared for a moment, and by the time the drivers had finished their free schnitzels, she had appeared again, dressed in a jacket and all ready to go. ‘How come you just decided to go? You have no toothbrush or clothes to change, but you have your passport on you?’, I asked. ‘I have just bought a toothbrush. And I always have my make-up stuff and my passport in the purse. Everybody has a passport here. Everybody travels. Mostly with fags (z fajkami). You have to have a passport to cross the border, of course only legally. But a friend of mine just returned from Italy. She went with a trucker. She saw half of Europe for free. He just shopped at her place, they have such a nice bakery, and then he asked her if she wanted to go to Rome. They even went to Paris’. ‘But how will you take her through the British controls?’, I asked Tomek, knowing that every passenger going to the UK had to fill in a landing card and go through stringent border security controls, as a result of which up to half of all coach passengers were often not allowed to enter. ‘Well, I shall say she is the bus crew. If it were not for this stupid Channel, she would need no passport at all. When I went to Spain recently, I took a girl from X (an inn in the south of Poland) for a ride. She had no documents, no nothing. Mind you, when a girl is with me, she doesn’t need no nothing. Even no knickers! I took her all the way to Costa

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Brava and back, ‘cos they do not control the coach crew. But the dam Brits (Angole) do, so you have to lie’.

Ala was supposed to go back with Tomek, but she wanted to see more of the UK, so he put her up with the family of an old Polish soldier living near London, for whom Tomek was always bringing current Polish newspapers and magazines. Later I learned that by the time Tomek had come back to the UK again, two weeks later, she already had a job with accommodation in a hotel run by the acquaintances of the old soldier and was not prepared to return to her village. But Tomek did not feel cheated, for in the meantime he was working on a line to Brussels and had met a young woman who was working there. She came to the bus terminal to pick up a small package, which he had been given in Warsaw and which he agreed to carry to Brussels for the usual £10, without checking what was inside it. A driver’s salary was modest, even by Polish standards, hence it was common practice for coach drivers to earn additional income by trading smuggled goods, carrying parcels and selling cheap Polish diesel. This was possible only through the network of people one could trust, so Tomek’s policy was to drink with every man and to charm (and if possible, also to have sex with) every woman. The policy he followed was also common practice on the coach, where passengers would exchange their phone numbers with the greatest possible number of people, such exchanges being informal promises of help ‘in case of…’. Tomek said he never hesitated to call people to ask them for help, even those he never saw himself, so I was not surprised when he called me late one evening. ‘Help me, I am f…ed!’, he shouted. ‘What happened?’, I asked, knowing that the matter must be serious, since Tomek would not normally curse in the presence of a woman. ‘I have got 20 kilos of twaróg [white cheese], and I have nowhere to put it. Just take this f…. twaróg from me, please, or I go mad’.

It appeared that on his previous journey, a week earlier, Tomek was given an order for twenty kilograms of fresh twaróg from one of the Jewish delicatessens in London, to be picked up by a trusted person at Victoria bus station. However, when the coach arrived at Victoria, nobody had shown up to pick up the order. Twaróg is an ethnic product, similar to that sold on Lithuanian markets described by Ida Harboe Knudsen (2010, 2013), but also a sentimental Polish object, a basic ingredient of the traditional Polish dish called Russian dumplings (pierogi ruskie). Although Tomek knew the staff of the inn in the town where he stayed overnight in the UK, they were not Polish, and twaróg had no

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meaning for them, unlike the cheap cigarettes and Polish vodka, which they gladly paid for. To prove myself worthy of Tomek’s friendship, I had to free him from his cargo, which I was then supposed to sell on to Polish patriots in need. Tomek gave me about twenty numbers of Polish people living in my vicinity, who I was supposed to call cheaply from my landline the next day to offer them this sentimental food. Interestingly, one of these Polish patriots proved to be a Pakistani man, an owner of a restaurant, who took half of the cargo from me. But according to him, unlike his own countrymen, Polish people in the UK did not cultivate their culture and did not consume enough Polish food, so he had no use for the whole twenty kilograms of twaróg. I bought the rest myself, and instead of the money I owed, I was told to buy two bottles of ‘horrible and expensive’ British alcohol, which Tomek immediately re-invested in fostering his ties with the local population. As already noted, it was the generally accepted practice that the driver’s formal salary was augmented by money from informal transactions. The goods and people alike were usually transported in the special space designed for the driver to sleep in, but sometimes Tomek would use good old smuggling methods, like hiding them ‘na wkręta’, 3 with the help of screwdriver. Fresh food, such as Polish meat or twaróg, was usually transported in a cockpit fridge, which in theory was there for the needs of the passengers. While the coach was not moving the fridge would not work, so as to save the battery and fuel, the reserve of which Tomek had already sold to his acquaintances in the London suburb. Thus, without my help he would have lost his valuable cargo, hence I was entitled to reciprocity. However, the transactions need not be symmetrical – what counted was the feeling of being included in the network of those who were ready to help one in different situations. In return for my services, I was allowed to send parcels for free or to travel to Poland without a ticket if I were ever in need. As a trusted person, I was able to witness some of his transactions and to observe that Tomek had acquaintances among the customs personnel in Dover. He knew the crews of the Channel ferries, with whom he spoke in broken English, largely enhanced by body language, and he was also acquainted with a large number of other regular channel ferry passengers, mostly Russian-speaking truck drivers from the post-Soviet countries with whom he dined during the Channel crossing, speaking with them in the broken Russian he had learned at school. He also knew a few basic words in German, including Scheisse (shit), ja (yes), nein (no) and wieviel kostet? (how much?). And although he knew no French whatsoever and no customs officers in the border town on the French side of the Channel, he knew other residents of the town, for

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every time he went by he used to make an additional, unplanned stop at a shop on the outskirts, where he, the other driver and the passengers could buy cheap French wine, chemical products, food and sweets. The shop manager happened to be the husband of a French friend of his acquaintance from his earlier journeys to Romania. Tomek communicated with him in his very rudimentary, broken English consisting of as many words as his German, with the operative word Scheisse tactically replaced by the equally potent British ‘f’ word. For each busload of clients Tomek got his shopping for free, and his bus became a Yes-Place travelling between other Yes-Places on the regular coach routes. Case Study 2. Stefan, the Man with the Minibus Operating on small margins of profit and even less leg-room than the buses, minibuses forced both drivers and passengers into physical closeness during journeys that could last for up to three days. People had to cooperate and to agree on stops for breaks, on smoking and playing music, so after the journey everybody felt like close friends, sharing with others their own networks of friends, their drinks and their food alike, unless there were several quarrelling parties on board, in which case sharing would happen within a party. Helena, a Polish migrant in the UK whom I met through Stefan after he brought her to my home in Poland, instead of going to her village, which was about ten miles away from the main road, recalled: ‘This was the most exciting journey I’ve made in the thirty years since I was in the Girl Guides. Mind you, I was wondering whether we would all die … the sea was stormy, so we were all scared … Then the cat ran away beyond Antwerp, so we had to look for him, and we lost a lot of time. Mind you, this was a valuable cat with a passport’. ‘Was it yours?’ ‘No, I have no cat. Somebody had it transported to Poland. It was in a cage, but when Stefan was changing his sand and giving him water to drink, he ran away. Good job Stefan knew the people in the inn. He (Stefan) is so nice, everybody likes him. But when they were talking with Grzesiek at night they were cursing all the time. Every single word was followed by the ‘f’ word … They found the cat and brought it to Stefan. But we had a huge delay … Then by night I could not sleep because Milan, this Slovak guy next to me, was snoring terribly. The drivers were smoking, and the side window in the front was wide open, so there was terrible draft. We almost had an accident on the motorway in Germany. Stefan was sleeping and Grzesiek was driving. You know, they have no speed limit in Germany and it was night, but he was texting on his mobile. He was holding the steering wheel with his elbows and he was

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texting! And another car suddenly came on us from the right. It scared me to death’. ‘But why did you choose to go with them? Are you scared of flying?’ ‘No, but this is hassle free. I’ve got three mountain bikes with me and two big suitcases and also three sleeping bags. How would I get it all by plane, or even to the airport? No, this was the best choice’. ‘Why haven’t you sent just the luggage?’ ‘You know how they work. I would send the luggage, and then it would arrive in three weeks, by which time I would be going back to the UK. If they have a passenger they go to the place, but without a passenger it may take them a month to deliver the goods’. ‘Why was the Slovak guy travelling with you?’ ‘They are all friends. Stefan and Grzesiek stay with them overnight when they’re in the UK. He’s a great guy. They have horror there in Slovakia, mind you. Terrible crisis. He lost his company, and he went to work in the UK. He was a boss back home, he employed two hundred people, and now he is working in the kitchen as a help. He must get by (kombinować) like us all. But he saved his house. He’s invited me there for a holiday next winter. Apparently it is a great place in the mountains’. ‘Will you go?’ ‘Why not? I like him a lot. We shall certainly keep in touch’.

It appeared that Milan was coping not only by working, but also by subletting his flat to the Polish drivers and using their networks to advertise his rooms to let informally in Slovakia. In return for sleeping at his place, the drivers gave Milan vodka, cigarettes and a free ride to southeast Poland, and sometimes straight to his door in his Slovak village. Thus, although the tickets were more expensive than a flight, in the competition for clients the minibuses had one major advantage over coaches and cheap planes: they offered a door-to-door service and had no limit on luggage. While the regular coach lines had to fulfil numerous formal obligations, including making the journey even when there were no passengers, minibuses worked according to the charter principle: that is, if there were not enough passengers on a given route, the minibus would stay at home or be used on another route. With a capacity of up to nine passengers, the motorway tolls and costs of the ferry passage were significantly smaller, but because there were only nine people at most, the profit margin was lean, as was the driver’s salary. Additional profit was generated by accepting courier services for goods of sentimental and commercial value, ranging from bicycles to biscuits.4 And although these minibuses were formally registered enterprises, with relatively new vehicles, like the couriers travelling weekly from Milan to destinations in Romania, Moldavia

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and Ukraine described by Maurizio Ambrosini (2012: 281–83), their drivers augmented their main income through these informal services. Also, the popularity and flexibility of minibuses was possible through exploiting the power of the informal networks created and maintained by the individual drivers providing both formal and informal services, which helped to gain the customer’s trust and to reduce possible complaints. I met Stefan through Robert, who had been trained in Poland as a shoemaker but in the UK was working as a self-employed builder. Robert was using Stefan’s services to transport building materials for his house in Poland. Generally, these were significantly cheaper in Poland, so goods like taps, pipes, tiles, kitchen units and windows were transported from Poland to the UK. On the other hand, some specialist materials, like those sold within the European energy efficiency scheme, such as mineral wool or components for voltaic panels, were cheaper in the UK. Using his British friends’ addresses to bypass the system, which only allowed one to buy a few bales per household, Robert bought cheaply, near London, twenty bales of mineral wool, which had been produced in western Poland and imported into the UK, and called his friends asking them if they knew of a cheap but honest transport company. One of them, who was actually working in Germany, recommended Stefan’s minibus service. The whole load was transported to Robert’s hometown in the east of Poland in several batches within three months, total transport costing £50. In the meantime, Robert and Stefan became friends, and the whole international transaction, transport included, was cheaper by half than buying in Poland. Robert recommended Stefan’s services to me and gave me two mobile numbers, one for Stefan himself and the other for the office, which turned out to be Stefan’s wife. I learned from her that it cost £20 to transport a parcel, regardless of size, and that the minibus would pick it up at lunchtime the next day. The minibus did indeed appear at my door the next day, but at dinner time. Stefan just took the parcel and the money, checked whether the address was readable and left without any paperwork. The parcel was not delivered the next day but in two weeks, for, as Stefan’s wife explained when I called to complain, there were no passengers going to the same destination as my parcel, and the minibus was crossing the border a hundred kilometres to the south. The woman was very nice, and we had a long talk during which I learned that Stefan was a business co-owner, driver and mechanic all in one. The other co-owner/driver spoke some English and functioned as a hostess when on board, while Stefan’s wife back in Poland acted as the mobile office, for rather than staying at a desk she did not have, she

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took the orders for parcels, dealt with customer complaints and made ticket reservations on her mobile phone. ‘Don’t you worry, we are not some cheats; people know us. If we were cheating, nobody would use our services. People know us everywhere we go’. ‘And where do you go?’ ‘Anywhere. Last week we went to Italy, but most often we go to Greece. And we go to Germany too. Most often we go to Germany because it’s close. But if somebody needs we go even to Spain’. ‘With tourists?’ ‘No, tourists go by coaches. People go there to work on the strawberry farms. This year we transported such a group, eight women from x. All legal work from the job centre, but what can one do? Such times. People are poor, and they take any work they can’. ‘Do you also go to Sweden or Norway?’ ‘No, people go by plane. They have a connection from Warsaw, and sometimes we take them to and from the airport’.

Thus, although Stefan’s business was a local Polish company from an obscure small town in the economically deprived eastern fringes of Poland, one that made limited use of the internet and modern advertising techniques, it operated on a European scale and was known in numerous countries. This was possible through an informal network of networks created by the drivers as they were travelling across Europe and entering into informal relationships with Poles living abroad and with other nationals. If we wanted to position Stefan’s bus on our map of lights marking newly forged informal links, it would appear as a very bright point of light moving across large distances without a predictable pattern.

Trading Routes and Informal Networks The informal social space itself is by definition free of patterns. As noted previously, we have to look for the patterns elsewhere, namely in the physical space. And if we were to name any distinguishable patterns in the physical space interfacing with informal networks, it would be the trading routes. However, these routes are not just places connected by roads, but also the life practices of mobile social actors, collective projects continuously developing in the natural, geographical space which is measurable in mathematical terms. Theorizing the routes, one could be tempted to call them liminal spaces (cf. Andrews and Roberts 2012), but the category of liminality does not apply here, for the informal

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space is infinite and therefore it has no limes. Thus, when, following Lefebvre (1991), we assume the heterogeneity of the social space, the routes can be seen as the interfaces of the social space with the physical res extensa, and it is through the physical element, through mapping the sequence of places, that it becomes possible to trace certain patterns and ‘rules’ in the unpredictable and chaotic world of informal networks. Any stability here is relative, for the ‘rules’ governing each single route are constantly changing rather than being fixed, and they are passed by oral communication rather than being written down. They are not rules sanctioned by the formal institutions of the state, nor by any informal institutions such as customs or tradition. They are batches of relevant knowledge, freely distributed along network links. Thus, they are not set, but continuously created and updated, adjusting actors’ behaviour and expectations to the ever-changing circumstances. The order they introduce is also relative. The ‘rules’ describe the roads and the places, including information about what type of person one can meet at which place, where can one sleep safely and cheaply, what to buy and sell, and what forms of behaviour to avoid. The information also includes such details as the kind and amount of bribes to be given to state officials, including the police, customs and transport controllers, as well as advice on how to offer bribes and negotiate deals. And even though the routes I travelled during my research were magnets for thieves, con artists and the police alike, thanks to these pieces of horizontally distributed informal knowledge, the Argonauts knew what to expect there and how to manage the situation, while the space outside the routes was even less predictable. Europe’s informal trading routes overlap to a great extent with the formal system of communication, with its roads, bridges, rivers and border crossings, although admittedly they omit some more intensely controlled places and, if necessary, use less obvious ones. And since they share the same communication system with the formal trade, they run along historical routes known since Roman times. In Poland these routes were named according to geographical features or directions. Thus, one spoke of the ‘Carpathian Route’, which went south to the Black Sea coast via Slovakia or directly to Romania via what was then the Soviet Union. It was famous for having been used by the Resistance in the Second World War and infamous for being used by smugglers. Although it went south, it was different from the so-called ‘Southern Route’, which went southwest to Spain via southern Germany, overlapping to some extent with the medieval pilgrimage route, the Via Regia, which connected Kiev to Santiago de Compostela, though before the French border it turned south, towards Montpellier, instead of going

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through Paris. This was the most common motorway route chosen by tourists going to the south of France and Spain, as well as by Ukrainian and Polish ‘pilgrims’ travelling by coach, looking for informal employment on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, by workers seeking informal employment in southern Germany and by Silesian re-settlers to Germany (Jończy 2003, Jończy and Rokita-Poskart 2014) commuting between their two fatherlands. The ‘Northern Route’, by contrast, went from Prague through Szczecin and Świnoujście to Ystad in Sweden and then on to Stockholm, being popular with Swedish tourists coming to Poland to get drunk cheaply and with Polish tourists going in the opposite direction to get a taste of Sweden without getting off the ferry, but therefore being able to buy ‘Swedish’ products, such as radios, Chinese watches and textiles cheaply in the tax-free zone. The ‘Middle Route’, in turn, connected Moscow with Berlin via Warsaw along the proglacial valley and then through Antwerp further to Calais and on to London. Although I have travelled all these routes, for mundane reasons – a lack of funding – the major bulk of my research on informal networks was done on the western part of the Middle Route. The Middle Route across the Eurasian Continent Argonauts of different origins, including Vietnam, Mongolia, Russia, Libya, Nigeria, Benin and Mozambique, travelled by train along the eastern part of the Middle Route up to East Berlin, and if they were of African or Arab origin, further to West Berlin. Mongolian traders would travel by train all the way from Ulan Bator to buy luxury German cars and then drive back thousands of kilometres across Russia to Mongolia. German, Polish, Russian, Byelorussian and Lithuanian truckers would use the Middle Route while shipping goods to Antwerp or Calais and further. Every day the cars, minibuses and coaches carried thousands of informal migrant traders, tourists and workers from different locations in Poland to destinations in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK. The Smuggler Train mentioned earlier, as well as the coaches and minibuses to the UK, travelled on the western part of the Middle Route. Case Study 3. Felix, the Trans-Siberian Diplomat I met Felix on the Middle Route between Warsaw and Berlin. He had been going by train from Novosibirsk to Moscow, from where he took a train on to Berlin. He was an elegant man in his late thirties, dressed in a fashionable long woollen coat and carrying a leather briefcase or

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dyplomatka, a diplomat’s case. Judging by his looks, at first I thought that he was a smuggler in disguise, smuggling goods à la diplomat (na dyplomatę), which was then a very effective tactic, described in Der Schmugglerzug (Irek 1998: 62). The ‘diplomats’ distracted customs officers’ attention from their cargo by wearing very elegant clothes and travelling first class with an elegant briefcase, full of cigarettes bought cheaply in Russia. However, he appeared to be a serious, trans-Siberian businessman. ‘Why do you travel by train? It must be very tiring’, I asked. ‘Perhaps it’s a bit tiring, but still it is the safest way. I could go by truck, but it is even more tiring. And dangerous. You have to wait for days on each border, and the taiga is covered with the graves of truckers. There are no roads as we understand them – you just pick your direction and go. There are also plenty of gangsters. They steal the trucks together with the cargo and kill the drivers like vermin. Whole loads of the most expensive French cosmetics disappear in broad daylight’. ‘So, how come you trade French cosmetics in the taiga?’ ‘No, I trade lumber. It was just such an example, a sample of what can happen in Russia. In the taiga the leverage is out of this world (niesamowita przebitka) – they sell the rarest kinds of wood for peanuts, and I can sell it all hundred times more expensively in the West. But the problem is transport. You know, if you do not pay the right people, the transport will never get there’. ‘Oh yes, I know, you have to bribe the customs’. ‘You have to bribe the customs everywhere. I’m talking about the local gangsters. There are plenty of territories to cross, and on each territory you have to pay the local policemen and the gangsters’. ‘But don’t they do the same on the train?’ ‘The gangs don’t touch foreigners. I always dress like this, and they know I am not theirs (a Russian), and they do not rob me. On the train they leave the foreigners in peace’. ‘So you came all the way by train?’ ‘Yes, I got on in Novosibirsk, then I changed in Moscow and then again in Warsaw. I could go directly from Moscow to Berlin, but I had some errands in Warsaw’. ‘I am sorry; I thought you were a smuggler in disguise’. ‘Well, we’re all smugglers in a sense, only some are ants and some are fat cats. It all depends on how smart you are. Rockefeller used to say that only the second million dollars is made legally, not the first, you know’. ‘And how have you come to the idea of making your first million in Siberia, of all places?’ ‘Well, I was travelling the Trans-Siberian route to China. We got out on the way, and, you know, four young men and so on… We got drunk and missed the train, and we had to wait for a week. Then the guys we drank with, the locals, took us on a trip to Lake Baikal, and I fell in love’. ‘With a local girl?’

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‘No, with Siberia. First I fell in love with Siberia. We were travelling for a week, and people were telling stories; I met many friends, I was looking and thinking. And I decided to settle there … It is beautiful wild country and the people are marvellous. They treat you like you are their brother. And they are so spontaneous. They do not think too much, you know. They build houses in winter, and they don’t care that you can’t use the concrete in freezing temperatures. And then the summer comes and the houses simply melt, so they start repairing them, but by the time they do half the job winter comes round again. And they do not care, they just accept it. In winter, they sit at home and drink vodka together’. ‘But when you make your million dollars, will you come back?’ ‘No, I stay. My wife is from there’.

It appeared that Felix and company were on a mission of informal trade and adventure. They managed to arrive sober in Moscow, which was a major challenge, but then, while selling ‘guaranteed American’ jeans produced in Poland, they had to fraternize seriously with their local friends and the latter’s friends. During the long journey to the Siberian town where they had to change trains and cross into China, they continued fraternizing with other passengers, telling stories and drinking vodka from big glasses that had originally been mustard jars (musztardówki). In this way, they met several sets of new friends who were travelling in their carriage, some of whom got off the train in the towns along the route, where new people would always be getting on. The stops were long enough to leave the train for a hot meal or to do some trading right in the stations. These relationships proved valuable later on in ensuring a relatively safe journey for the cargo several thousand kilometres across the Eurasian continent, for by the time Felix returned to Poland from his first trans-Siberian journey he had a ‘good friend’ in every oblast (district) along the route. But since selling lumber profitably in the West was as important as sourcing it cheaply in the East, Felix travelled regularly to Berlin to deepen his old friendships and find new ones. ‘Koło’: The Circular Trading Route Mocking the ancient tradition of names such as the Amber Way or Silk Road, the informal traders called their routes by different names, depending on the most popular traded goods, such as the Crystal Route for trading crystal wares, or the Mutton Route for trading sheepskin products (Kochanowski 2008, 2010). The Circle or ‘Koło’ was a circular trading route, mocking the sailors’ name for the route around the world, which started from Poland and went through the Soviet Union

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and Romania or straight through Czechoslovakia and Hungary to some capitalist country in the south of Europe, usually Turkey or Greece, or (less often) to Italy, then back to Poland via Austria and Czechoslovakia or via West Berlin and East Germany. In its first stage it overlapped with the Carpathian Route, while the last stretch from Berlin overlapped with the Middle Route. On its way south, it also overlapped with the ancient Amber Route, which forked in Hungary, one leg going through Vienna to the Adriatic, the other turning towards the Black Sea. The return route went along the northern branch of the Balkan Route (now infamous for drug and people trafficking), across Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany or Hungary to Czechoslovakia and Poland or through Romania and the Ukraine to Poland. Planning each journey, these present-day Argonauts had to possess considerable knowledge of all the geopolitical aspects of the route, the relevant aspects of the numerous local cultures they were crossing and the current exchange rates of several different currencies. They also had to make quick decisions, calculate profit margins, be able to cut their losses, negotiate prices and win new customers. Thus, contrary to what Bruno Dallago observed in Russia, where, after the collapse of the planned economy and its large state-owned enterprises, informal actors were not able to cope in the free-market environment through ‘lacking the tacit knowledge’ (Dallago 2002: 5, Dallago 2005, Blokker and Dallago 2012), Polish informal traders easily turned into capitalist entrepreneurs. Koło was a school of truly capitalist thinking, a greenhouse for the successful businessmen of the future, some of whom openly admitted later to having started their careers by travelling on an informal trading route,5 on which those who had accumulated ‘paracapitalist experience’ of the socialist private sector, as well as the rest, learned self-reliance and the basics of the capitalist economy. The first step in their education was acquiring a passport, the second and third being obtaining money and buying the required goods while waiting for the passport, all three being major challenges demanding initiative, persistence, vision, the creative use of social capital and a realistic calculation of profit and loss – the characteristics of the modern capitalist entrepreneur. After making a passport application and ensuring that it would be responded to positively as soon as possible (usually with a suitable bribe corresponding to the would-be trader’s status, his degree of connectedness with the right official and the overall length of his stay), an Argonaut had to organize money for the trip, either through a loan in the workplace or by mobilizing a network giving him access to a bank employee of any rank. Due to such practices, socialist Poland gained a

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reputation for being ‘the epitome of corruption’ (Dallago 2002: 8), an opinion which interestingly disappeared in the West, right after the fall of the Soviet bloc, which ironically coincided with the peak of serious corruption scandals connected with the privatization of major state-run enterprises in Poland. Having obtained the money for the trip, the would-be trader had to exchange some of it for dollars on the black market in order to be able to ‘organize’, rather than ‘buy’, the required goods. The process, which required bribing and networking, was usually regarded in the West as a practice typical of socialist pathology, described by authors such as Janine Wedel (1986, 1992), or Alena Ledeneva (1998). These barely accessible goods could be then re-sold at a profit elsewhere. Precise knowledge of demand, which was essential for the success of such trading enterprises, was democratically distributed in the trading networks, which also included the local shop assistants, who knew which goods should be taken on which journey. Thus, it was enough to know somebody who knew somebody who was an established trader, or even just a shop assistant, to obtain up-to-date information. The rest came with the experience of learning from one’s own and other’s mistakes. Case Study 4. Anna, a Graduate of the ‘Koło’ School of Entrepreneurship Anna, at the time of fieldwork a prosperous businesswoman, described the process as follows: ‘For the money I borrowed in the bank, I got dollars from a dealer, who lived opposite the police station, above a brothel which officially functioned as a beauty salon. Then I took a box of eggs from my uncle’s farm and went to my friend from work. Her aunt was the manager of our Pewex shop. The aunt herself got a black hen from me – it was worth a lot because I said it was guaranteed straight from the farm. People in town always love it when something is from the farm! … Then we went to the shop. It was late, and there were no people. I was able to choose whatever I needed, without being disturbed. Besides, the woman was an expert. She knew it all. I did not have to ask, and she gave me all I wanted and much more. If I remember properly, I got several bottles of vodka, some packets of Marlboro’ cigarettes, three or four crystal vases, several tins of ham, elegant packets of coffee, chocolate, a bottle of bath liquid, fashionable soap and matching deodorants. I was very happy, for I knew that with such goods, no shop assistant in town could possibly resist me!’

This, however, was just the beginning of the chain of transactions. As Poland was in the midst of an economic crisis, to get at the desired goods a person had to network to obtain access to the right people and

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bribe them. Thus Anna used her husband’s connections plus ‘a packet of coffee, a chocolate and a deodorant’ to acquire from the sports shop the goods she did not even know she herself desired: ‘My friend from school knew her husband – they worked together in a factory – so I asked him to introduce me. First I went to the factory, and there we talked. … We were talking for two hours until his work finished, and then we went to a restaurant, where she came and joined us. Then I told her what I needed, and she invited me to come to the shop the next day. And imagine, I enter this empty sports shop with empty shelves, and I go out with a small tent for two people, two air mattresses, a picnic set comprising four folded chairs and a table with an umbrella, a tourist cooker together with a gas bottle, and a water-resistant sleeping bag. She too was an expert in what one should buy for the journey! All the shopkeepers knew what went well in Bulgaria and what you had to sell in Hungary. Of course I promised her first choice of the Turkish clothes. We Polish women are crazy for clothes!’

Anna recalled that, apart from the big items, she also ‘organized’ small accessories, like whistles for scouts, ping-pong balls, can openers and fishing nets, for which she paid about two dollars altogether, which, after the successful journey on Koło, became one hundred dollars. Although similar leverage could not be achieved with other goods, and not every journey was as successful, Anna learned the principles of the trade, which was simply a matter of exploiting the difference between supply and demand. Case Study 5. Monika, the Well-Connected Monika told me how she started her business in a medium-size town in the southwest of Poland: ‘You have to know people, and you have to talk to them. Go to a party, drink a lot and say that you are going to Greece. And then it just rolls. When word got around that I was travelling, shop assistants started to treat me like a serious partner in trade. Of course I had to bring them some small gifts and I had to invite them over, but then I could get things. And I have more friends, not only in Poland. Basically I’ve got friends all over the world. Everybody knows somebody, you know. For my first trip I bought towels and bed linen, about hundred lipsticks, so many boxes of Nivea cream that I did not even bother to count them and plenty of silver jewellery. And of course, I got the red fox fur for Hungary, but I got it through a relative of mine’.

The towels and lipsticks were sold in Bulgaria for Bulgarian lev, which, together with money for the clothes and tourist equipment, she traded

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for West German marks with the German tourists who were staying in the same hotel and whom she approached during breakfast. She managed to sell the silver jewellery en bloc to a Czech couple she met in a car park near Prague; they exchanged addresses for future reference. It took her two days to sell the Nivea cream, but she managed to do so thanks to a new Hungarian acquaintance whom she met in a restaurant and who also bought the red fox fur from her. If the route went through Turkey rather than Greece, the most lucrative goods apart from spirits, crystal ware and cigarettes were silver fox furs and ready-made stoles. Fox furs were a fashionable accessory and a status symbol in Poland and were hard to get: one had to know somebody who knew a hunter (red fox) or a fox farmer (silver fox), otherwise one had to pay an exorbitant price on the black market, which could cause financial disaster if discovered by the customs. It was not easy to get hold of most desired goods, not even condoms, which were a desirable commodity in Turkey, as well as in Romania.

Informal Trader’s Knowledge As has already been mentioned, one very important part of the informal trader’s know-how was the economic geography of the route. Not only did one have to know which goods to sell and buy in which places, but also which places had to be visited first before going somewhere else. Thus, for example, unless one was a contract worker, before visiting East Germany (the DDR), with its supply of goods desired by Poles and its demand for ‘Western’ gadgets, such as Chinese wrist watches with seven melodies or plastic phones, a visit to a Western country like Turkey, or at least a trip to Vienna, with its famous bazaar at Mexikoplatz, was highly desirable. Equally important was also the direction of the flow of goods, which was known to both the traders and the customs officers. Shipping goods in the wrong direction could create a financial disaster and raise suspicions with customs. Usually the list of permitted goods in each country was memorized, so that it could be flawlessly recited to the customs officer upon entering the country. Of course, due to tiredness or the influence of alcohol, it often happened that a traveller would recite the wrong text – then the outcome of journey was dependent on the customs officer’s fancy. Travelling on the ‘Worker’, a train going to Berlin, I was more than once a witness of how, at the border controls, a customs officer had to shake a sleeping passenger to wake him up. Upon opening his eyes, the latter recited: ‘Ten packs of coffee, ten packs of jelly beans, ten bars

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of chocolate, two pairs of shoes, two bars of salami…’ ‘Stop! That’s the wrong direction!’, the customs officer would laugh, for what the passenger was reciting were the allowable amounts of goods on the journey out of Berlin to Warsaw. Apart from accessing and developing knowledge of what and where to buy and which places to visit in which sequence so that the maximum profit could be achieved, the Argonaut had to know the habits of the customs officers on each border, as well as the best hiding techniques, depending on which vehicle one chose for the journey. Travelling by bus, one had limited opportunities, so goods were carried on the body (‘na ciało’): hidden in bodily orifices, as well as in lingerie, in the trousers (‘na nogę’, literally ‘on the leg’), under the skirt, coat or jacket, under the seats, or simply in the luggage holds. The less obvious places, such as spare tyres or places under the car body, were usually reserved for the drivers themselves. Smuggling by train was much easier: apart from the ‘on the body’ technique, one could deny ownership of the luggage, for a whole train was less likely to be detained than a single bus. Also, one could hide goods in the toilet or in seats, walls and ceilings after removing the panels and then putting them back. The operation demanded technical skill and was hence gendered – if women were in the group, their task was to keep a look out and distract potential intruders (Irek 1998). The equipment of a trader going by train includes a set of screwdrivers, pliers, a small drill, a hammer and a bit of soot… For example, foxes (fox skins) … are packed into ventilation pipes … Once on the train you turn off the heating, take the seat apart and push twenty fox skins into the pipes underneath. Then you put the screw back and soil it with soot so that there is no trace of fresh work. There are only trusted people, the traders, on the train anyway, so nobody complains it’s cold. We keep warm with vodka.6

The smuggling could be quite comfortable if the train had a restaurant car. One could enter into an agreement with the train staff and have the load shipped for one, as described by the same traveller from a medium-sized town in central Poland: To our astonishment, in Bratislava the state-owned shops are full of bananas, … oranges and watermelons. … On one journey, I take by train almost one and half tonnes of fruit. The manager of Wars (a restaurant) takes 200 dollars and two packs of bananas. The cargo comes on a hand-pushed carriage right to the steps of the train, with no camouflage whatsoever.7

The Ten Commandments of a smuggler included the following rules, explained to me by Andrzej, a traveller from Łódź:

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‘If you show fear, you are f…ed. You must look the bastard (customs officer) straight in the eyes and, whatever you say, say it with one hundred percent conviction, even if it is absolute f…ing rubbish. If they ever ask you on the border what are you carrying, your one and only answer is “nothing”, even if you are smuggling a f…ing elephant. “Nothing” ends the whole conversation – and that’s what you want. You must be the master, and the son of a bitch will recognize it. Give him a nice big sausage, and he will wave his tail like a dog and lick your hands; show the slightest fear or hesitation, and he’ll f…ing eat you’.

By a ‘nice big sausage’, he meant a sufficient bribe: the general understanding was that it was better to give a generous bribe than to have the customs officer search one’s luggage, for with each prohibited item discovered, the bribe would go up. But then it was unwise to spoil the current rates. Thus, apart from this basic knowledge of the psychology of the customs officers, one had to have a sound knowledge of their local demand for gifts and the current rates of bribery. Since everything depended on a single customs officer’s discretion, if something went wrong at the border crossing, a commonly used tactic was to withdraw and wait for the next shift at the same border. In the era before the computerization of customs in Europe, there was a good chance that the same people and cargo that had been rejected by one team would be accepted by another team on a different shift. Very often some other crossing, from a few to hundreds of kilometres away, was used instead.

Modern Argonauts’ Journey Case Study 6: Sonja, the Argonaut A successful journey on Koło was described by Sonja, a former teacher and single mother, who started her travels in the mid-1980s (Irek 2014). Like Jason and his companions, who embarked on the ship Argo for fame, adventure and fortune, she had complex motives for undertaking the risky, but potentially profitable journey to the Black Sea. She wanted to regain her kingdom, which she had lost in her failed marriage, plus her self-respect, a feeling that she was a worthy person able to live and support her children on her own. The economic motive was thus important, but secondary. Since she had no travel experience herself, on her first journey she accompanied an experienced Argonaut, Dorota. The two women joined an organized car trip to Istanbul. The twenty-two-day trip cost less than a hundred dollars a person, without fuel, but including hotel costs in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria (but

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not in Turkey), as well as a guide. The members of the trip came from different parts of Poland and had to travel on their own to the meeting point, where they formed a cavalcade. ‘Our journey started very early in the morning. We appeared on the Polish–Czechoslovak border with the car so loaded that its chassis was almost touching the ground. We got a hand-out from the travel agency containing the current customs regulations in all the countries we were going to cross. And, of course, everything we had in the car was on the list of goods that were not allowed to leave Poland and forbidden to bring into Czechoslovakia, unless for one’s “own needs”. The customs officer approached us, and Dorota said that we had nothing! “We have absolutely nothing”, she said, “but camping equipment and some clothes and food! We are going to need all this during our three-week camping trip!”’

The women got lost on the Czech roads and, while asking for directions, disposed of the ‘silver’ jewellery, bought in Poland for the equivalent of one dollar, for which they earned the equivalent of twenty dollars in Czech crowns, double Sonja’s salary as a teacher. Since they were on an organized trip, they could not waste any more time trying to find Dorota’s acquaintances in Bratislava, who would have helped them turn those into dollars. Czech guards were very sensitive to Czech crowns being taken out of the country, so the women had to get rid of them, otherwise the whole cargo would be placed at risk. They had a meal in a good restaurant and spent the rest of the money from the informal trade on sweets, fruit, alcohol, soap for Romania, baby clothes and some fake jewellery from Jablonex, to be sold in Turkey. After which they still had about ten dollars’ worth of Czech crowns, which Dorota put into her bra. The Czech guards made them wait for hours on the border, but luckily they allowed them to go without any control, taking a packet of cigarettes and a pack of bubble gum from Pewex as a gift. The Hungarians let them through immediately, were very nice and did not ask any questions or demand a bribe. This, behaviour, however, was not the rule, especially for big cargos on the way back. What it looked like from the viewpoint of the Hungarian and Polish authorities is described in the excellent book by Jerzy Kochanowski, under the descriptive title which could be translated as ‘Through the Back Door’ (Kochanowski 2010). The other members of the cavalcade also passed the border, although they had much more cargo placed in containers attached to roofs or in trailers. Some were even towing caravans, and the trip’s guide had a caravan as big as a cottage, despite the fact that they were all booked into hotels. They travelled to Budapest, where they dispersed to sell

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their goods and buy other goods to be sold elsewhere. They knew that trading in the streets was illegal, and there was a narrative of danger, with numerous stories of Polish people getting arrested and fined, circulating in Poland. Therefore, using any personal contacts with the Hungarians was an important element of the journey, increasing both its safety and its profitability. Unfortunately, the numbers were uneven, and there were not enough Hungarians for all the Polish tourists, so misfortunes were not uncommon. On the other hand, the Hungarian policemen were described as quite friendly compared to the Czech or East German police, and the fines were not heavy enough to put the traders off. An experienced traveller would go to great lengths to ensure a personal contact with a Hungarian shop assistant or waiter, therefore the Polish visits to Hungarian restaurants (Kochanowski 2010) and the parties in hotels were not purely recreational: they were meant to increase the chances of meeting a business partner. Sonja used Dorota’s connection with shop assistants in Budapest to sell the goods destined for the Hungarian market, which were crystal vases and Nivea cream. The list of what the women bought in Budapest did not differ from the standard known to all Argonauts. It included the cheapest chewing gum, sweets, food for the onward journey, luxury underwear and fashionable clothes to be sold in Romania and Bulgaria, and several bottles of thick, pearly shampoo with a large neck suitable for hiding gold coins, which could be obtained cheaply in Bulgaria from Russian tourists. They also got several bottles of the local Tokai wine, very popular in Poland to this day, as well as cognac (all brandies were called ‘cognac’ in socialist Poland, just as all sparkling wine was called ‘champagne’) for their own pleasure, as well as a supply of kiwi juice. She explained: ‘Kiwi juice is good for you. It is known to have some magical properties that save people from a hangover or even death by vodka’. Kiwi juice was then completely unknown in Poland, but it became an instant success with the Argonauts. Once introduced, it was used to save numerous lives on the trains and buses of the trading routes. Another Hungarian product said to be good for you was the red wine called Egri Bikaver, translated as ‘Bull’s Blood’. It was believed to raise the level of red blood cells. The women bought several bottles of it, just to keep their blood in balance as they travelled, and since they were not selfish they bought more on the way back from Turkey, to share with the needy at home. The trip was booked for two days in a bungalow on the shores of Lake Balaton, and after shopping in Budapest, the next day was spent on the beach relaxing before the onward journey and discussing

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business strategy before entering Romania, which was the centre of the black market in foreign exchange in the southeast, despite the fact that its regime, as Sonja put it, ‘forbade virtually everything’, as vividly described by Steven Sampson (1986; also Kideckel and Sampson 1984). The rumours said that desperate Romanians were stopping single cars on the roads, robbing everything possible, killing people and throwing them into the river or burning the bodies and cars, therefore the Argonauts usually tried to drive as closely as possible to each other, even if it meant less business. But the most difficult part of the journey was the border, where intimidation was the rule, consisting in forcing people to wait up to ten hours in heat or cold without being able to get out of the car or use a toilet, followed by rude interrogation and often meticulous ‘personal’ control, which involves being stripped naked and sometimes the inspection of body orifices (Irek 2014). The intimidation ritual was entirely separate from the bribe to be paid for crossing the border with one’s cargo intact. In the 1980s, the standard bribe on the Romanian border was ten dollars a car, a bottle of whisky, Kent cigarettes (from Pewex), a box of Czech chocolates and chewing gum, which came on top of a twenty-dollar voucher for petrol, which everybody had to buy, even if the car used diesel – apparently the country’s policy aimed at undermining the black market. The effect was the further stimulation of black-market activities: the vouchers were usually sold informally for five dollars, and diesel was obtained from lorry drivers for desired goods like sweets, the cheapest Polish cigarettes, chewing gum or condoms. The car trips usually proceeded towards Bucharest, for it was generally known that it was the best place to exchange all possible currencies for dollars at very generous exchange rates. Trading with the locals was reported to be a much better experience that in other countries. In Romania it was the buyers who looked for the sellers. There was nothing to eat on the way, as the group had been warned while still in Poland, and they continued their journey right into Transylvania, where they stopped in a little park recommended by one member of the cavalcade, who had contacts with the local Transylvanian Germans, to eat food brought from Hungary and meet the people. The women sold all the condoms they had left after a remarkably pleasant night at Balaton and trading with Romanian truckers, except for ten, which the women saved for themselves ‘in case of emergency’. As expected, the Germans bought en masse all the silver jewellery, fake or not, including the earrings Sonja wore, Polish lipsticks, some fashionable textiles, soap and deodorants, luxury underwear bought especially for them in Hungary, as well as all the remaining Czech and

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Hungarian sweets. The Germans paid for everything in West German marks, and unlike all the other buyers in Romania, they did not even try to bargain. The party invited the Germans to join the picnic, and everybody exchanged addresses, after which the cavalcade proceeded southwards, until it reached Bucharest. The hotels in the Bucharest vicinity were trading and money-exchange centres, as was common knowledge among the Argonauts. The hotel staff, from receptionists to chambermaids and waitresses, were interested in doing business, which was handy for those who had not managed to sell their goods elsewhere, but troublesome for those who wanted to sleep (the staff kept knocking on the bedroom door until midnight) or to have a meal (the waiters were mainly there for the trading). Sonja and Dorota exchanged all their remaining currency into dollars, earning more than a hundred dollars net each, on top of what they already had, not counting the goods and souvenirs. Sonja also had to use her personal safe, the money being rolled up, put into a condom and stuck deep into her vagina. To get safely into Bulgaria they paid $10 plus some souvenirs given to each team of guards. Bulgaria appeared to them as beautiful as Romania, and the economic situation seemed better there. There was food in the restaurants and shops, and the hotels on the seashore had higher standards and were safer. But trading was not as easy as in Romania. The travellers had to make some effort and develop contacts with the locals, rather than being approached by everybody. But Sonja was lucky: ‘It was a great hotel, so we dressed in our best clothes. After lunch, the manager of the restaurant invited us to his office and asked if we had more clothes like this or any other attractive items. His name was Dima – we still exchange letters. We agreed that he would come straight to our room and pick what he wanted … He took twenty towels and six sets of duvet covers, as well as cosmetics and textiles from Hungary … He was especially interested in my made-to-measure clothes. “But I need them myself”, I said, to which he replied that he would wait until I went and then buy them for dollars on the day of my departure. “But I cannot travel without clothes”, I said. He looked at me as if I were abnormal and said “Everybody does it. People leave knickers and socks here. They buy everything later in Turkey”’.

But a short holiday on the Black Sea was not purely recreational. The Polish Argonauts had to meet Russian travellers there in order to buy gold coins to be smuggled into Turkey and to sell their remaining clothes, including those they were wearing, as well as all the tourist equipment, including tents and gas cylinders. Bulgarian currency had to be exchanged into West German marks or dollars. Marks were

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preferred, for the Argonauts believed that in Bulgaria dollars were often fake, unlike in Romania, where it was gold jewellery that had to be watched. It was also generally known that the best currency transactions were with the West German tourists. Since dealing in dollars was risky, it had to be done through the recommendations of friends and acquaintances. Thanks to personal contact with the restaurant manager, Sonja found it easy to sell the tourist equipment: ‘Next morning we couldn’t go to the beach because of the sunburn, so we went to the petrol station, as Dima told us. The guy seemed unfriendly, but we said we had come from Dima, and he instantly became very nice. He said Dima was his cousin … He bought everything … By then we had already earned three years’ salary each, plus we were having the holiday of a lifetime’.

The women exchanged money with some Arab students. For Sonja this was her first contact with Arab men, and it was a shock. The currency was used to buy gold from Russian tourists, reputed for their honesty (cf. Sasunkevich 2015). The women bought two golden five-rouble coins each, which were then sunk into the pearly shampoo, bought in Hungary. On the eve of their departure they sold all their remaining clothes, cosmetics, shoes and suitcases. Sonja recalled: ‘Apart from a toothbrush and two pairs of knickers, a tourist iron and a hair-dryer, my suitcase was empty – the other suitcase was completely gone, so was a nice big bag. I had absolutely nothing: no pullover, no trousers, no pyjamas or dressing gown. Four bras and seven matching knickers were gone, so was my bikini in panther design. All my T-shirts, skirts, jumpers, blouses, made-to-measure dresses, tailored jacket, five pairs of shoes were gone. So were my tights, in which we put the red fox furs before stuffing them into parka sleeves, my cosmetic bag with hairbrush, mirror, used lipstick foundation and mascara, warm parka taken just in case, socks and whatever else I had’.

Unfortunately, on the Bulgarian–Turkish border a female customs officer from Bulgaria took a liking to one Hungarian shampoo with the precious gold coin inside and demanded it as a gift. Then Sonja was approached for quick sex behind the building by the Turkish customs officer, but, instructed previously by Dorota, she said she had her period and offered him a pack of cheap Polish cigarettes instead. Sonja described their stay in Istanbul in the following words: ‘Everybody was rushing about madly, with no respect for lights or signs, the only rule being don’t hit the car in front of you. The streets were crowded and narrow and the signs confusing, so we circled the town for ages … We parked far behind a shop with the familiar name of x (a Polish local town). We saw that along the street there were plenty of other shops

Interfaces between the Formal and the Informal • 189

with Polish names. So we went to the shop that was named after our area. They greeted Dorota as if she were royalty … As we sat on a funny low couch, they asked us what would we like to drink and served us cold water and very strong tea in tiny glasses on a silver tray. Then we started negotiations. First we had to sell our goods, so that we knew how many of their products we could buy … Dorota was the one who negotiated for us both. She started with her four silver fox furs, for which she obtained $30 each, then the man shook my fox fur and proved that it was losing its hair and was therefore of the worst quality, so I got only $20 for it. Then we traded our electrical wares, including the car radio…. For the $160 I had borrowed and had originally invested in the journey, I had by now around $700. The others did much better: they had more cigarettes and better fox furs. I had nothing more, but those who owned a car could still sell such items as car seat covers, spare wheels, car tools, torches and so on. People were stripping their cars of everything: they were even selling the back seats’.

The ‘Turks’ happened to be a family of labour migrants from Yugoslavia. They had worked for some time deeper in West Germany, after which they moved to West Berlin, where their family had another shop and yet other stores in Belgrade and Vienna. They were well informed regarding which type of garments should be taken if one went through Berlin and which were for Poland: those members of the trip who did the full ‘Koło’ bought high-quality sheepskin coats and leather jackets to be sold in the West. The only problem was that such quantities of textiles were strictly forbidden in each country that had to be crossed on the way back, even if one went only by transit, and in Poland they were heavily taxed on the border. Thus, following the best practice of the route, the women asked their hosts to pack the tax-free quantities of textiles into parcels and to send them to several friends back home, called słupy (posts). The rest had to be smuggled across all the borders. Since the informal relations were based on trust and good reputations, the risk that the Turkish shopkeepers would not send the goods was small. Although the contract was oral, breaching it would have cost the trader a loss of business, for news that a certain shopkeeper was cheating would spread fast in the networks. In theory it was possible to return goods to the shop if they were found to be faulty, but in practice it was more profitable to mend them oneself or to sell them more cheaply in Poland than to bring them back to the shop. Therefore, the buyers tried to check the goods in the shop, so each visit could last up to three or four hours. In trying to keep clients for themselves, rather than allowing them to shop with the competition, the shopkeepers went to great lengths to satisfy them.

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‘We agreed to come back the next day, to collect the things and see if they had obtained what we wanted. That day we were just unable to do any more errands, so we drove across the bridge over the Bosphorus to Asia, just to put our feet on the other continent. Next day we drove to the shop, where we got our things. The missing clothes were already there, and everything was nicely packed in big plastic bags doubled up. These bags were very popular in Poland, and for each pair of them I could have bought a new suitcase. We also bought raisins, halva, chewing gum, chocolate and plenty of coffee. Halva was obtainable only in Turkey, but we could buy those other things in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but again it was forbidden to take such products abroad if bought there. Although it would be much cheaper to do so, it was not worth the risk – our sheepskin coats would have been at risk there. Then we went back to the hotel to meet the other members of our cavalcade. But they were not there. The car park was almost empty … Finally we saw our guide. He came on foot. He said he was going to West Berlin, so were the others. The mystery of why they had all come with caravans, although they slept in hotels, was finally solved! Even if all the goods they carried were confiscated … a fully furnished caravan with a washing machine, cooker and fridge was in itself a treasure for sale!’

Thus, the members of the organized cavalcade had to go back home individually and without the guide. The women travelled alone across Bulgaria and Romania, where they lavishly bribed the customs and entered Hungary without problems, then they went to the familiar resort on Lake Balaton. There they met up with the other cars, which also meant that they could leave their cargoes and go out to increase their pool of familiar Hungarians. They also visited the waiters they had met on their way to Turkey and sold several highly fashionable Turkish garments, for which they bought fashionable Hungarian pullovers and colourful ‘jeans’ trousers, as well as some sweets, shampoos, soaps, paprika and fruit to use at home, and of course brandy and wine, taking advantage of the fact that the shops were full and that one could buy everything there without any restrictions. The resorts at Lake Balaton were important meeting places for those who were looking for contacts and bargains, as well for those parties who had been separated because of the border controls or who had got lost on the road. This was particularly significant in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Polish informal trade on Koło was at its peak, before it died out in the mid-1990s. Sonja and Dorota did not need to re-join the cavalcade, since the distance to Poland was not that great, and the roads in Czechoslovakia were safe. Besides, they wanted to visit Dorota’s acquaintance in Bratislava, since they had some Hungarian forints left. The forbidden

Interfaces between the Formal and the Informal • 191

currency was safely hidden in Sonja’s bra and subsequently exchanged for Czech crowns with the familiar people from Bratislava. The prices in Czechoslovakia were lower than in Hungary, so, apart from buying a full tank of petrol, which was very important because fuel was rationed in Poland, the women bought fresh and dried fruit, sweets, rum and cognac in amounts that would not offend the Czech customs officers. However, it was not a happy crossing on the Polish border. ‘We waited about four hours before they emerged from their little hut, and when they approached, we saw our death in their eyes. Everything we had gone through so far seemed like child’s play. We had to get out of the car and unload, after which they touched absolutely everything … We were not allowed to get back into the car, so we sat in the darkness and cold on the edge of the pavement … We had to pay $100 in taxes each, for the cargo was valued according to its black market price. We did not have that amount of money on us’.

After long negotiations and tears, they were allowed to go back to Poland, which cost Sonja the most valuable item in her cargo: a good quality man’s sheepskin coat, or kożuch, as a bribe. Yet, despite all the costs and the loss of two major items (a golden coin and a sheepskin coat), the journey had been successful. Of the approximately $160 invested, Sonja brought home about $30 in cash, souvenirs for her children, sweets, coffee, liquor, fashionable clothes and food for herself and her children, as well as for her friends and family, plus goods for trade bought for about $150 that were to be sold for three times that amount, giving a net profit of around $300. The profit from the parcels sent to her from Turkey was about $900 net, after deducting the costs of delivery and of nice souvenirs to be given to those who allowed their addresses to be used. However, given the hardships of the journey, the effort put into securing the goods and the sheer number of transactions, some of which greatly resemble Tom Sawyer’s complicated plan to free a slave from prison, the final profit of approximately $1200 seems quite modest, especially when seen from the vertical perspective, with its hierarchy of values and institutionally defined positions. By becoming an informal trader, Sonja excluded herself from the Marxist process of production and was demoted from the position of a teacher to being part of the lumpenproletariat. In her capacity as a petty trader and smuggler she would be classified as a delinquent, while as a single mother she was included in the category of ‘pathological family’ in the official statistical data of her country. Also, comparing her trivial trophies with the precious Golden Fleece seems inadequate.

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Yet, when we restrict the verticality of our perception and consider her journey from the perspective of informality, she eludes all these hierarchical criteria. We can place her in the same horizontal category as the countless ordinary people who lived on the journey, who glued Europe’s social space together, evading the restrictions imposed by the Iron Curtain and bureaucratic institutions on both sides. For Sonja the outcome of the journey on Koło was not only more than ten years’ worth of salary, it was also a symbolic escape from the limitations of her locality. Her own Golden Fleece was her self-awareness as a person who can overcome hardships and control her own life. In the perspective of restricted verticality, her actions are no longer judged by the degree of their adherence to local behavioural norms and the hierarchy of statuses produced and reproduced in a small town in a poor country cut off from the world by the Iron Curtain. Their outcomes are no longer measurable in mathematical terms, just like the chains of informal networks extending far beyond the limits of her small town, indeed, extending beyond the Koło route itself, across the whole of Europe and beyond; for each of the actors she related to on the route was also constantly producing his or her own network links, going in different directions, to different Yes-Places. While for Claude Lévi-Strauss the journey to the site was lost time, for Sonja and other Argonauts alike, the journey became a part of their everyday practice and, by contrast, it was their lived time. As we learn from Tristes Tropiques, having formerly travelled as an exile from the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss had all the reasons in the world to hate the journey as such. On his journey he was subjected to all sorts of denigrating and humiliating experiences and life-threatening hardships, which he had to endure; but above all he was despondent, disheartened, not sure whether he would ever return, whether there would be a world to return to, or indeed whether he would survive the journey at all. The Argonaut Ted, the Yes-sayer, travelled for pleasure, although initially he shared a similarly tragic fate: forced to fight an uneven battle for his country, captured, imprisoned and transported across Siberia in a cattle carriage, having to join yet another army and having to risk his life and to kill in order to survive. By contrast, Sonja’s first journey was her own choice, and it was not life-threatening. She travelled both for necessity and pleasure, but admittedly it was not an easy journey for a single woman. She had to leave her children, risk her job and all her belongings, was exposed to sexual harassment and the intimidating practices of the customs officers, and had to endure all the hardships of the long journey, including humiliation, extreme cold and heat, a lack of drinking water and the fear of losing all her cargo, being

Interfaces between the Formal and the Informal • 193

cheated, being attacked by burglars or being discovered by the police. Thus, although their approaches to the time spent on travel are different, the famous scholar, the brave ex-soldier and the single woman, when faced with the hardships of their journeys, whether caused by natural forces or by bureaucratic machinery, share the same fate and the same vulnerability, which they all have to overcome, even though they are not heroes endowed with super powers. Whether we call them Argonauts or not, they are all amechanos, like Jason portrayed in the epic story of Apollonius, simply ordinary people who have to use their common sense and the help of their friends to navigate their lives, until ‘with joyful hearts they step ashore’.8

Notes 1. This chapter includes certain passages originally published as part of Irek 2014. ‘Circular Travels: A Site-less Ethnography of an Informal Trading Route’. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online, 6(1): 1–34. I am grateful to the editor of the journal for permission to reproduce these passages here. 2. Original  wording: ‘c’est-à-dire qu’ils imposent une injonction venue de l’autre (une histoire) et qu’ils altèrent l’identité fonctionnaliste en s’en détachant, ils créent dans le lieu même cette érosion ou non-lieu qu’y creuse la loi de l’autre’ (de Certeau 1988: 158–59). 3. From wkręcać (to screw), referring to a method involving unscrewing panels, hiding cargo beneath, putting the panels back and tightening the screws. 4. For a description of the circulation of goods in transnational families in Europe, see Ambrosini 2012, Burrell 2016. 5. One of numerous examples of such entrepreneurs is a Swedish millionaire, born in Poland as Iwona K., who started her business by going on a school trip to Russia, where, according to her own words, she sold all the clothes she was wearing, including her own underwear, so that she could buy two golden rings and smuggle them back to Poland: http://biznes.onet.pl/ polska-alexis-milionerka-prawie-nieznana-w-polsce/ksxc9h 6. Post by Robert, in Bazarowy Słownik, p. 5. 7. Ibid., p. 3. 8. Cf. the last words of Apollonius’s text: ‘and with joyful hearts you stepped ashore at Pagasae’ (1971: 195).

e Afterword

In April 2013, a student from Kraków created a Facebook event and invited her friends and their friends to join her at a bonfire outside town. She never expected that well over 20,000 friends of friends would arrive for the party, therefore she failed to register this informal meeting as an organized mass event. However, when she was subsequently prosecuted by the city authorities for disturbing the public order, only a small group of her closest friends came to testify in court.1 This event not only illustrates the difference between informal networks, understood as open chains of informal, egocentric relationships, and closed personal networks, but it also offers a glimpse of how extensive and ephemeral the former can be: they can appear spectacularly without any apparent pattern or internal logic and just as suddenly dissolve, leaving only a trace in physical space. Thanks to virtual technologies, in entering social relationships people are no longer bound by the geographical and biological limitations they share with primates – ‘Dunbar’s number’ restricting primate brain capacity to managing 150 contacts (Dunbar 1993) has no consequences for social media, which can manage infinite numbers of contacts for actors. But then, the endless chains of informal networks are not derivative of the virtual revolution, nor are they entirely dependent on communication technologies. Such networks of networks already existed before the expansion of the new technologies and the ‘communications revolution’, for even if it is assumed that the majority of people have limited personal networks, this is of no consequence for the whole chain: the scope of an individual person’s (ego’s) network is not a limitation on the size of the whole.

Afterword • 195

In the case of the ludic extravaganza in Kraków, the informal network chain dissolved after one day, leaving behind tonnes of litter, while in the case of the London riots, for example, the physical traces left behind by the materialization of similar network chains were burned houses, injured people, plundered shops and surprised scholars of the social. It appeared that while we have a sophisticated analytical apparatus for the theorization and investigation of the vertical dimension of the social space, perfectly suited to researching patterns in relatively closed networks, we are not as good at researching amorphous network chains, for we do not know how to investigate the horizontal dimension of social phenomena. In theorizing social relations, we tend to conceptualize them through the vertical lens, excluding the very possibility that the links between actors might be created ad hoc, independently of their previous experience and life orientations, and without a structure of any sort. Indeed, there is very little conceptual space for social organizations that are devoid of form, lack borders or patterns and spontaneously appear, rather than developing over a period of time as a result of processes of structuration. Thus, we do not know how to research something that is not a group, and yet it is some sort of grouping – something that has no form, no structure, boundaries or direction, but that still can manifest itself in social action. And yet, such amorphous phenomena can be increasingly observed in the empirical world, appearing in connection with entertainment, human solidarity and charitable events, or human rights demonstrations (Castells 2015), but also with destructive actions like the riots of 2011 in Britain just mentioned, when, despite the considerable bulk of research on social networks and their relationship to social movements,2 scholars could not have predicted what happened, nor could they satisfactorily research these events by using the analytical tools developed to study social relationships in the hierarchically constructed reality. And although we are aware of the technological revolution that has changed the direction of knowledge and power transfer from the vertical to the horizontal (Hinds 2003), we are still reluctant to embrace horizontality and grant even relative autonomy to social phenomena that might be devoid of form and that cannot be valued and then pitted against one another to construct a hierarchy. But then that is not our fault: verticality is an inherent feature of human perception and human language. We tend to construct our reality in a hierarchical way (Dumont 1980), with values ordered from the smallest to the largest and with hierarchically conceptualized sets in mathematical logic. We also communicate through language, which is vertical by virtue of lexical units being forms based on sets of binary oppositions (Chomsky 1957).

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In searching the horizontal dimension of the social, we therefore have to fight against our own habitus of perceiving the world through hierarchically ordered forms. And even if we agree with Friedrich Nietzsche and reject the subject–object distinction together with all static forms known to humanity – even if we agree to create the world anew every time we think – as scholars of the social, we still have to produce texts and to express our thoughts in language, which is itself a form. Perhaps that is why all social phenomena, including informal ones, which are form-free and thus horizontal by definition, are still being researched by forcing actors, their relationships and their actions into vertical categories, groups and positions that are conceptualized a priori and encrypted in our language, then analysing this artificial construct by means of mathematical abstraction, characteristic of statistical methods, and hierarchical by virtue of natural numbers growing incrementally from minus infinity to plus infinity. These methods have led us to build up an impressive body of knowledge about society, and yet, in the face of the virtual revolution, it appears that in our neatly ordered system, with its levels of analysis graphically pictured as three circles ranging from macro to micro, we have not left enough space for phenomena like the horizontal chains of informal networks. Unlike the familiar structures described by commonly used analytical concepts, these social relationships lack form, boundaries or set patterns ­expressible as numbers, graphs or matrixes. As has already been mentioned, such informal relationship chains are not restricted by the physical limitations of the human mind, nor by the accessibility of communication technologies, for they existed even before the virtual revolution started. They can expand without limit, linking actors across different types of organization, across administrative units and vertical categories like statuses, positions and class. To research the content and scope of these amorphous social relationships, we need to trace their horizontal dimension, which cannot be done when we are obliged to move within the vertically defined discursive space and forced to make long diachronic excurses, providing a historical background for every event and an intellectual genealogy for every idea. We have to solve the contradiction between the horizontal nature of informality and the vertical method of its investigation. Since absolute horizontality in the Nietzschean sense is impossible to obtain in academic practice, the pragmatic solution proposed in this book is to restrict verticality. In the theoretical framework I have presented here, called the Restricted Verticality Perspective, this is achieved by changing the axioms governing research into social space and controlling the use of the vertical categories. In researching social relations

Afterword • 197

that are described as informal, we assume a heterogeneous social space which is not split into separate, mutually exclusive sectors or spheres but accommodates both forms and amorphous phenomena, with no priority of form over not-form. Thus, rather than viewing form-free phenomena as a subcategory of formal phenomena, imperfect forms or deviations, we assume that the forms are continually reshaping and dissolving within the amorphous universe. This is a perspective in which there is no observer–observed distinction, the boundaries are permeable, and identities are not fixed, all being subject to common-sense negotiations. And since form-free phenomena cannot be investigated by formal methods, as proposed by Bruno Latour’s (2005) Actor Network Theory, which is a method and theory all in one, the Restricted Verticality Perspective is the theoretical approach for research on amorphous phenomena, as well as being the method of their investigation. This method allows the horizontal character of informal social relations, which have to be observed and described without destroying their informality, to be preserved. And although the present book does not describe virtually augmented informal networks, since it was developed on the basis of empirical investigations conducted just before the virtual revolution, when it was still possible to observe informal social relations in slow motion, it offers a conceptual framework for their analysis, granting relative autonomy to the horizontal dimension of the social. The empirical observations were made during longitudinal fieldwork using participant observation, mostly covert, when I was travelling together with the subjects of my research along Europe’s trading routes, investigating what I was then defining as the informal economy. Most of the time it was not project-based research with a formal framework and a vertical perspective chosen a priori, but it was still not ‘horizontality-specific’, that is, free of the faults connected with the vertical approach to informality. Obviously, my own fieldwork has not benefited from the RVP, so, despite trying to keep an open mind, in my cognitive process I was still biased by the vertical categories I was used to and by the imperative to provide diachronic information. By the force of habitus I was looking for patterns, statuses, power relations, diachronic developments and historical backgrounds for each type of social behaviour. But even when I was able to identify such patterns in the situations I observed, they were elusive, and the social relationships did not remain in vertical order, but somehow were always going sideways. I felt as if I was herding fleas, for the actors I initially classified into Wellman’s (2002) ‘little boxes’ of closed networks did not follow my classification but kept wandering off, constantly changing their

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positions, negotiating statuses, neglecting power relations, changing occupational sectors and moving locations. In making their choices, they were driven as much by economic as by emotional motivations, and they did not necessarily follow a rational logic, nor any logic at all. When, having finished the empirical research, I looked again at my fieldwork data, I realized that the ‘little boxes’ of networks constituted by the actors’ participation in the informal economy were always open, since no actor was confined to a single set of relationships. Whatever vertical structure was in the box, it was continually being modified by the egocentric relationship chains that went across this pattern, were not necessarily connected to an economic activity or transaction and were devoid of any structure. Moreover, in contrast to the relationships within the ‘boxes’ I was describing in the early phase of my research, these horizontal chains were extremely extended in space and went on without me being able to establish where they ended. The vertical subcontractor chains in the informal economy were thus different from these horizontal chains of informal egocentric relationships, although both types of social organization were called ‘informal networks’ and occurred in the same social space, which was also shared with the formal organizations, to make it more complicated. The complexity encountered in the empirical world is reflected in the selection of case studies chosen to illustrate the methodological and theoretical considerations in this book. To make it clear that different types of social organization, whether formal or informal, do not occur in some separate spaces, among the cases showing mobile actors engaged in horizontal relationship chains extending across large distances and freely moving across real and conceptual borders, I also presented several examples of vertical subcontractor chains in the informal economy. These cases have shown that activities grouped under the currently used label of informality can create both closed and open networks at the same time. Although the social relationships of the subcontractors were relatively closed and patterned, with a clear patron–client power structure, at the same time the actors were also included in non-patterned, open chains of egocentric networks that extended beyond these relatively closed groups and eventually led to the erosion of the observed power structures. Admittedly, if I were doing my research now, I could have traced these horizontal links better, for I would have used the Restricted Verticality Perspective and would have known from the start what to look for and how to look for it. I would have observed the social without the vertical lens. But since the RVP was developed on the basis of field research that had already been done, in my own work I was only able to remove the

Afterword • 199

prism of vertical categories at the text production stage and to describe social relations with little or no reference to the value-based, hierarchically structured notions conventionally used in the social ­sciences – without quantifying different types of ties or looking for forms, but trying to describe the content. Following the horizontal dimension of informal phenomena, this book has been written ‘across’ the social, with no chronology, without linking actions to structure(s), but also avoiding the limitations of any given site. The text is composed according to the Latourian requirements of synchrony and the ‘flatness’ of the social landscape, that is, without intellectual genealogies or discussion of the work of other authors, and with the historical context being replaced by a thick description of raw human agency. Such ‘flatness’, however, was not intended as a mere rhetorical exercise in following the Nietzschean idea of horizontality, but as a pragmatic effort to facilitate the investigation of horizontal network chains, which are becoming increasingly visible in the contemporary world. This book has been written in the hope that my theoretical considerations and methodological advice will benefit those scholars who decide to undertake the difficult task of researching informal phenomena in the future.

Notes 1. http://www.tvn24.pl/krakow,50/zaprosila-na-impreze-przez-internet-przys zlo-22-tysiace-osob-uslyszala-zarzuty,369598.html; http://www.tvn​24.pl/kra kow,50/pewnego-dnia-kliknelam-inicjatorka-imprezy-na-20-tys-osob-nieczuje-sie-winna-rusza-jej-proces,374566.html. 2. See, for example, Diani and McAdam 2003, Mische 2003, Davis et al. 2005, Escobar 2008, Della Porta and Diani 2009.

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Index

e Index

Abbott, Andrew, 44 Actor Network Theory, 8, 10, 11, 31, 40–1, 76, 197 agency, 24, 25, 34, 38, 40, 49, 63, 199 Albania, Albanians, 120, 131, 150 Amazonia, 23 Amber Route, Amber Way, 177, 178 America, North, 42 amor fati, 37 Anders Army, 143 anthropology, 22–3, 36, 43, 48, 64, 73–4, 76, 105n2, 109 holistic, 23 anthropomorphism, 40 Antwerp, 103, 148, 170, 175 Apollonius of Rhodes, 1, 193, 193n8 apriorism, 76–7 Argentina, 144 Argo, 1, 183 Argonauts, 1, 174, 175, 178, 182, 183–193 Assemblage Theory, 11, 39 Augé, Marc, 164 Ausfuhrkarte, 54 Australia, 23, 146 Austria, 4, 103, 178 Baffin Island, 49 Baikal, Lake, 176

Balaton, Lake, 158, 185–6, 190 barbarism, 25 Barnard College, 57 Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan Niecisław, 36 Bauman, Zygmunt, 11, 26, 166 Bazar Różyckiego, 53 Beijing, 5 Belgium, 148, 175 Belgrade, 189 Benin, Beninese, 88, 136, 148, 175 Berlin, 2, 4, 5, 48–54, 56, 59, 78nn6–7, 84, 88, 93–4, 96–7, 100, 114, 117–18, 120, 125–7, 131, 132n9, 136, 138–42, 151–3, 156–9, 162n1, 175–8, 181–2, 189–90 Berolina, 54, 59 binarism, 45n10, 195. See also dualism Black Sea, 1, 174, 183, 187 Bloomfield, Leonard, 45 Boas, Franz, 9, 36, 45n5, 49, 57–8 Boissevain, Jeremy, 16–17, 21–2 borders, 30 Bosporus, 190 Bourdieu, Pierre, 165 Bratislava, 182, 184, 190–1 Brazil, 132n7, 139 bribery, 174, 176, 178–80, 183–4, 186, 191

222 • Index

Brussels, 168 Bucharest, 186–7 Budapest, 184–5 Bulgaria, 4, 66, 71, 156, 158, 162n3, 167, 178, 180, 183, 185, 187–8, 190 Calais, 148, 175 Canada, 103, 144, 146 capital, 43–4, 114 accumulation, 113, 118, 123–4, 132 n. 8, 134 cultural, 28, 105 n. 2 social, 105 n. 2 capitalism, 17, 26, 111, 119, 124, 133–4, 142, 145, 155, 178 Carpathian Route, 174, 178 Cartesianism, 34–5, 37–8, 41 cartography, 33 caste, 108 Castells, Manuel, 5, 11, 13–3, 17, 25–6 Charlottenburg (Berlin), 51 Chicago, 5 China, 176–7 choice, rational 8, 33, 44 Chomsky, Noam, 9, 36, 42, 45n4, 45n6 Chrystal Route, 177 civilization, 25 class, 5–6, 9–10, 16, 25–6, 29, 43–4 cleaning women, 120–3, 125–7, 148 Clifford, James, 10 CNN, 163 Cold War, 1, 136 communism, 19 corridors, metropolitan, 163 creolization, 21, 45n3 crime, 16, 27, 34, 62, 109, 120, 131, 150, 156 organized, 7 culture(s), 20, 22, 43 Czechoslovakia, 4, 156, 162–3, 167, 178, 184, 190–1 Częstochowa, 145 Daimler-Benz, 132n5 Darwin, Charles, 18 Davis, John, 111 De Certeau, Michel, 164

De Saussure, Ferdinand, 36 deception, 73–4 DeLanda, Manuel, 11, 39 Deleuze, Gilles, 11, 23, 38–9 description, thick, 8, 31, 41, 45n4, 161, 199 diachrony, 8, 10–11, 24, 33, 35–7, 154–6, 164, 197 digging, 10 Dover, 148, 169 dual labour market theory, 109, 111, 113, 134 dualism, 18–19, 32. See also binary opposition Dunbar, Robin, 194 Dunbar’s number, 194 Düvell, Franck, 105n7 economics, 108, 112 economists, 7 economy, 108–9 forms of, 16 informal, Ch. 4 passim. Also 133–5, 197–8 of shortage, 135 planned, 134 Elias, Norbert, 8, 11, 25, 44, 77, 87, 135 Elwert, Georg, 3, 48–9, 148 Emirbayer, Mustafa, 25 empiricism, 50 employment, informal, 27 Enron, 132n5 ethics, 61–4, 73–5, 77 n. 1, 78nn8–10 ethnicity, 5–6, 21, 29–30, 43, 88, 104, 108, 118–20, 131, 147 ethnography, 154 multi-sited, 10, 83, 135, 161 siteless, 10, 12, 136, 154, 161 ethnology, 48–9, 56 ethnosurveys, 47 etiquette, 25 European Union (EU), 68, 148, 166 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 57 Facebook, 194 Falzon, Mark-Anthony, 5

Index • 223

fieldwork, 3, 5, 9–13, 22, 48–9, 61, 64, 76, 81–3, 105n1, 124, 197 covert, 73–5. See also methods, research, covert flat, flattened perspective, 10, 20, 29–30, 34–5, 39, 44, 77, 83, 135–6, 151, 164, 198 Florida, 96 flows, 45n3 formality, Chs. 1, 6, passim. Also 7, 9, 11, 13, 15–16, 46, 60–1 Foucault, Michel, 100 fractals, 31, 76 France, 167, 175 Frankfurt am Main, 4 Friedrichstrasse (Berlin), 88, 91 Frobenius, Leo, 20 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 35 Geertz, Clifford, 45n4 Gellner, David, 23, 78n2, 83 gender, 108–10, 128, 182 geography, 35, 37 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 53, 59, 68, 155, 162n3, 166–7, 181 Germany, 3–4, 50, 66, 71, 84, 96, 103, 115, 127–8, 138–43, 149–51, 172–5, 178, 189 Gershuny, Jonathan, 110–111 Ghana, 150 Gibraltar, 144 Giddens, Anthony, 11, 24–5 Girtler, Roland, 76 Golden Fleece, 1, 191–2 grammar, generative, 42 transformative, 9, 36, 42, 45n6 Greece, 4, 167, 173, 178, 180–1 grounded theory/ies, 28 Guattari, Felix, 39 habitus, 9, 11, 25, 197 Hamburg, 68, 71, 143 Hanover, 150 happiness, 8, 33, 149, 165 Harboe Knudsen, Ida, 159, 168 Hart, Keith, 7, 134

Hawthorne Effect, 9, 64 Hegel, Georg, 36 Heraclitean river, 17, 21 hermeneutics, 33, 35, 43 hierarchy, 5–6, 10, 12, 16, 18, 26, 28, 30–2, 35, 40, 43, 45n13, 49, 123, 191–2, 195–6, 199 holism, 23 home-working, 117 homo apertus, 8, 15, 25, 44, 135, 162n1 homo clausus, 20 homo economicus, 8, 113 homo sociologus, 12, 113 homo sovieticus, 134–5 honour, 1 horizontality, 3, 5–10, 13, 15, 119–20, 135–6, 147, 161, 192, 195–9 Hungary, 4, 156–8, 162n3, 178, 180, 183, 186–8, 190–1 Hurston, Zora Neale, 57–8, 96 Husserl, Edmund, 78n4 hybridity, 21, 45n13 India, 138–9, 143 Indo-European languages, 36 informality, Chs. 1, 6, passim. Also 3, 5, 7–13, 46, 60–1, 63, 77, 81, 84, 100, 107, 109–112, 118, 128, 161, 192, 194–9 information age, 13n3 information technology, 17 Ingold, Tim, 23–4 interfaces, 13 International Organization for Migration, 67 intersectionality, 21, 30, 45n3 interviews, 4–5, 22, 48, 61, 64, 66, 97 Iran, Iranians, 88, 143 Ireland, 144, 148–9 Iron Curtain, 1, 95, 145, 154–6, 165, 192 Istanbul, 183, 188 IT revolution, 165 Italy, 103, 145, 147, 167, 173, 178 ius sanguinis, 139 ius soli, 139

224 • Index

Jakobsen, Roman, 45n7 Jason, 1, 183, 193 Junggrammatiker, 36 Kadushin, Charles, 18 Kant, Emmanuel, 49 Kantstrasse (Berlin), 51 Kazakhstan, 143 Kazan School (of linguistics), 11, 35–6, 45n7 Kenya, 143 Kiev, 160, 174 kinship, 29, 43 Kishniev, 160 Kochanowski, Jerzy, 154, 184 kolkhoz, 39 Koło trading route, 13, 177–80, 183, 189–90, 192 Kraków, 194–5 Kruszewski, Mikołaj, 36 Kulturkreis, 20–1 Kutno, 57 labour, 108–111 language, 31–3, 36, 41–4, 88, 195–6 Latour, Bruno, 5, 8, 11, 31, 35, 45n4, 60, 76–7, 83, 161, 162n5, 197, 199 Lefebvre, Henri, 174 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 10, 36, 38, 45n6, 192 Libya, 96, 175 Lichtenberg station (Berlin), 54, 88 liminality, 173–4 linear development, 23–4 lines, 23–4 linguistics, 36 structural, 36, 42 liquid modernity, 26 Lithuania, 159, 168 Łódź, 182 London, 2, 4, 13, 100, 121, 136, 142–3, 148, 167–8, 175, 195 Lviv (also Lvov), 160 mafia, 16, 34, 62–3, 66, 68–9, 75, 120, 123, 132n8

Malinowski, Bronisław, 36, 50, 56, 74, 78n5 Marcus, George, 23, 83 markets, Polish, 51 Mars, Gerald, 4, 111 Marston, Sallie, 5 Martins, Herminio, 30 Marx, Karl, 26 Marxism, 24, 38, 119, 123, 191 mathematics, 37 methods, Ch. 2, passim mathematical, 8–9 quantitative, 64–5 research, covert, 9, 61, 63, 78n10. See also participant observation, covert Mexico, 132n7 Mexikoplatz (Vienna), 181 Middle Route, 2, 4, 13, 175, 178 migrants, 1, 110–112, 117–18, 124, 141, 150, 152 migration, 18, 27–9, 67–8, 105n2, 147–9 Mische, Ann, 25 Misztal, Barbara, 19–20 Mitchell, J. Clyde, 33–4, 119 mobility, 27, 114, 164 Moldova, 160, 171 Mongolia, 139, 175 Montagu, Ashley, 45n13 Montpellier, 174 Morawska, Ewa, 25 Moscow, 2, 5, 13, 71, 96, 143, 160, 175–7 Mozambique, 54, 96, 104, 136, 175 multiculturalism, 21 Murcia, 4 Mutton Route, 177 nation, 43 nationalism, 5 methodological, 10, 20 Nazis, 78n8 Needham, Rodney, 39 Netherlands, 175 network society, 26

Index • 225

networks, Ch. 4, passim. Also 81, 83, 88, 100, 163–4, 168 informal, 3, 5–7, 11–13, 16–17, 24–25, 39–40, 45n2, 48, 74–5, 120, 135, 153–4, 173, 194–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 7, 9, 11, 13n1, 25, 34–40, 135, 147, 196, 199 Nigeria, 136, 175 Nigerians, 88, 131 non-groups, 17, 22 non-places, 164–5 Northern Route, 175 Norway, 173 Novosibirsk, 175–6 Nuer, 57 Odessa, 104, 161 ontology, 39 Pahl, Ray, 109, 111, 132n2 Pakistan, 131, 150 Paris, 167, 175 participant observation, 3, 9, 22, 48, 61, 64, 66, 78n2, 82, 99–100, 197 covert, 197. See also methods, research, covert Pas de Calais, 2 philosophy, 37 physics, 49 Poland, 2–4, 10, 50–1, 53, 59, 60, 66, 71, 85, 88, 96–7, 100–1, 104, 114, 116, 118, 120–2, 127, 129, 136–53, 156, 159–60, 162n2, 167, 170–2, 174–5, 177–82, 184, 186, 189–91, 193n5 Polenmarkt (Berlin), 88 polythetic classification, 39 Pomerania, 51 Popper, Karl, 31 Portes, Alejandro, 110 power, 9, 11, 16, 25–6, 42–3 Poznań, 57 Prague, 175, 181 Prague School (of linguistics), 45n7 programming, computer, 42

prostitution, 12, 62, 65–9, 75–6, 79nn12–13, 79nn15–16, 79–80n17, 81, 97–99. See also sex work Przemyśl, 4 Przemytnik, 53 quasi-groups, 22 quasi-structures, 17, 22 questionnaires, 54–5, 61, 64 race, 108–9 Radin, Paul, 58, 96 religion, 109 Restricted Verticality Perspective (RVP), 7–13, 31–44, 81–3, 105, 113–114, 163–4, 192, 196–8 rhizome, 11, 23, 38–9 Robotnik, 54 Roma, 100–4, 131, 156 Romania, 4, 71, 142, 156, 158, 162n3, 170–1, 174, 178, 181, 183–8, 190 Rome, 5, 167 Ruhr, 2 Russia, Russians, 66, 96, 102–4, 131, 136, 141–2, 147, 149, 156, 175–6, 178, 193n5 St Adalbert, 51 sampling, purposive, 47 respondent-driven, 47 Santiago de Compostela, 174 Sapir, Edward, 45n5 Schengen, 166 Schlögel, Karl, 154, 163 secret societies, 34 sectors, Ch. 4, passim. Also 12 segmentation, 109, 111–113 sex work, 66–7. See also prostitution Siberia, 143–4, 176–7 Silk Road, 177 Simmel, Georg, 22 slavery, 42, 75 Slovakia, 103, 170–1, 174 smugglers, smuggling, 1, 12, 27, 50–1, 53–7, 62, 65–6, 75–6, 81, 123–4, 141, 147, 152, 154, 182, 191 human, 69–73

226 • Index

snowballing, 83 social network analysis, 31 socialism, 19, 28, 54, 56, 124–5, 133–4, 136, 142, 145, 155, 157, 178–9 sociology, 43, 76, 105n2 South Africa, 146 Southampton, 103 Southern Route, 174 Soviet Union, 155, 162n3, 174, 177 space, discursive, 6–7, 40, 44, 196 social, 6–8, 13, 18, 20, 29–34, 38–9, 46, 83, 108, 113, 135–6, 163, 173 Spain, 4, 131, 147–9, 167, 173, 175 Sri Lanka, 137–9, 141 Stack, Carol, 111 Stalin, Josef, 162n3 state, 7, 16, 19, 32–3, 43–4, 46, 61, 107–8, 112, 133–5, 155, 174 nation, 7, 9, 15, 20, 22, 29–30 statistics, 47, 67, 79n13, 162 n. 2 status, 42–4 Stocking, George, 48 Strathern, Marilyn, 45n8 structuralism, 24, 36 structure, 5–7, 16–18, 24–5, 34, 38, 43, 61, 107, 195, 198–9 foggy, 22 super-diversity, 21, 45n3 super-modernity, 164 surfing, 10 sweatshops, 110 Sweden, 173, 175 Świnoujście, 175 synchrony, 8, 11, 24, 26, 33–7, 198 Szczecin, 175 szmuglerka, 54 textiles, 114–118, 123 Thais, 130–1 Third World, 112, 133–4, 142, 155 time, 8 Tokay, 158 Toronto, 5, 104 tourism, 157

traders, informal, 1, 3, 50, 61, 154, 178, 191 transethnicity, 30 translocality, 21, 45n3 transnationalism, 29, 45n3 Transylvania, 186 Tristes Tropiques, 36, 45n6, 192 Turkey, Turks, 4, 52, 88, 96, 98, 136, 139, 141, 158, 178, 181, 184–5, 187, 190–1 Übermensch, 37 Ukraine, Ukrainians, 66, 71, 120, 131, 149–50, 159–60, 172, 178 Ulan Bator, 175 Urry, John, 44 USA, 96, 136, 139, 142, 146, 157 vacationers, 157 value, 42–3, 45n13 verticality, Ch. 1, passim. Also 5–9, 11, 13, 50, 81, 113, 118–119, 123, 128, 135, 191, 195–9 Via Regia, 174 Vienna, 156, 178, 181, 189 Vietnam, 54, 88, 96, 104, 105n4, 175 virtual revolution, 196 Warsaw, 2, 4, 53–4, 78n7, 93, 96, 142, 148, 157, 159, 167–8, 173, 175–6, 182 Warsaw Pact, 152 Wellman, Barry, 21 witchcraft, 1 Wolhynia, 159 world systems theory, 23, 119 World War Two, 159, 174, 192 Wouters, Cas, 25 yes-places, 13, 164–5, 170, 192 Ystad, 175 Yugoslavia, 4, 139, 141, 156, 158, 167, 189 Zoo Station (Berlin), 51, 54, 59, 91, 125