The Politics of Simulation. Fake Repairs in a Serbian Industrial Town

Abstract

The author explores reparations of urban sites in Bor, a copper processing town in eastern Serbia. She looks at recent attempts at reparations carried out by an industrial company in the context of the town’s and the company’s ‘revival’. She explores ethnographically how the reparations were seen as deceptions, temporary, partial, fake, and superficial, but simultaneously praised as ‘at least something’. The author argues that this ambivalence, which consisted of simultaneous positive and negative dispositions towards the promise the repairs held, resulted in people’s involvement in the ‘politics of simulation’ of the town’s and the copper company’s ‘revival’. She also shows how through people’s hope for order, and through their hope of being moral state subjects, the state became an object of emotional investment.