The Blue Monkey Review

On the other hand, the behavior set that causes English people to line up at the least provocation never found its way here. When I made my way to the bank a few days ago to cash a traveler"s check, I looked for the nearest line and took my place in it like a good soldier of commerce. But people kept coming and going (which was strange because I didn"t have a sense that many of them were waited on) and just walked up to the counter. When I finally made it to the counter, people came and stood next to me rather than behind me as God ordained. There are yellow lines in Montenegro that you might assume you should wait behind while previous customers are served, but, like the no smoking logos, they have no meaning here. I don"t think that this is uniquely Montenegrin. I have dim memories from 30 years ago of people crowding around counters to do various kinds of business, and that was in more than one place in the Balkans. Maybe the English contribution to western civilization (like the generally disregarded pedestrians having the right-of-way) is the exception here, and line-standing behavior has to be assimilated just like crude and violent behavior at sports.

But how do I explain the large piles of trash on the street corners? I have assumed that trash pick-up broke down as a result of the snow, and I can only hope that it resumes before we have a thaw here because these piles are impressive. But it is also clear that Montenegrins never had a "Keep Montenegro beautiful" campaign. Whether it was my parents, my teachers, or the TV adds of little girls putting litter into trash cans that shaped my value system, I know that since childhood I have felt an "instinctive" aversion to putting trash anywhere else but into a designated container. Imagine my mild distress, then, when last Friday about midnight I looked in vain around the rail car for a place to dispose of the individual sanitary wipe that Vera handed me as we were all settling into our cramped accommodations. Naturally, I didn't make a fuss about this and just waited to see what my three companions did with their wipes. As the train pulled out of Belgrade station, they all took turns tossing the napkins out the window. I'm ashamed to admit what I did.

Vera, Zenl, and Janko P. are all educated, middle-class people who are clearly well assimilated to European norms. But, faced with a lack of resources, they invoked local custom, one that I've heard about often enough to believe Montenegrins are not overly scrupulous about litter. I hasten to add that they also are good examples of the generosity that I have also heard ascribed to Montenegrins. Of course, I haven't met that many Montenegrins, but 100% of my small sample could easily fit the description "open, friendly, and helpful." Janko A., my department chair, has a slightly jaundiced view of his homeland and often criticizes attributes that he considers "Balkan." But the other day, as I sat with Janko and his girlfriend Zorica, I described how well my traveling companions had taken care of me. Janko agreed that Montenegrins would go out of their way to help people. Then he stopped, obviously bemused, and asked, "Have I said something positive about Montenegro?"

There is yet a third generalization about Montenegrins that I will have time to explore through further observation and study. Even the other Yugoslavian people (Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Albanian) view Montenegrins as lazy. I don"t have much to go on here, though there do seem to be a lot of people out on the streets in the middle of the day. Of course, I"m out on the streets too. But on one of our walks Janko pointed out that the people shoveling snow off the sidewalks were gypsies. "They offer to do it for 5 Euros. Yesterday I heard one say that he made 100 Euros," which is a lot of money in a country where a monthly salary for a professional is 200 to 500. "But the Montenegrins would never consider doing it. They are too proud."

Laziness? Pride? To explain values so obviously contrary to modern trends, I'm tempted to invoke the four decades of Communist government in Yugoslavia. That hardly holds up under inspection, though, since the northernmost former Yugolsav republic of Slovenia is quickly integrating itself into the western capitalist system. Croatia is probably not far behind Slovenia. Montenegro, though, never experienced the formative movements of western culture. Whether you attribute the Protestant ethic to the Reformation or to the commercial revolution that followed hard upon its heels, Montenegro was exempt.

Instead of getting reformed or getting rich, Montenegrins resisted the Turkish invasions of the early modern era. Much of this mountainous country remained free from Turkish rule until the early 18th century, and even then the Turks had a tenuous hold on the land. The warrior ethic bred of endemic warfare and resistance probably shaped the character of people here more decisively than anything else. "A soldier must be vainglorious," an informant explained to Rebecca West in the 1930s "And since the men in front of them were Turks who were often really prodigious fighters, there was no end to the fairy-tales that the Montenegrins had to tell to themselves about themselves." Vainglory, or what Bertram Wyatt-Brown calls primal honor, has only a modest claim on contemporary, middle-class western Europeans and Americans, when it has any hold at all. An alpha-male might take pride in his ability to intimidate other people, but if he doesn't earn a decent living, his status will diverge sharply from his self-love. But in a culture that values primal honor, pride or vainglory "will not permit them to have any other characteristics, except a little cunning...for to be perfectly and absolutely vainglorious you must hold back from all activity, because you dare not ever fail at anything."

The value system of pride and vainglory led to an aversion to labor, or, more precisely, to the kind of systematic and conscientious labor most in demand in modern economies (the kind we call the "Protestant" or work ethic). This is a hilly, heavily forested land, not a place where farming would likely lead to much wealth, and at any rate, "farming used to be done chiefly by their women, since they (the men) were always at war or resting between wars, and no work interests them." When Yugoslavia became a state in 1918, Montenegrins had no clear role in the economy of the kingdom and no marketable skills. "So they pester the government with demands for posts as functionaries and for pensions...(but) there is no need for so many functionaries, and if there were these people could not perform their functions, and God Himself, if He had a knife at His throat, could not invent a reason why they should all have pensions" (quotes from West, pp. 1009-1010).

Well, as you can see, I have an interesting few months ahead of me.