By Carlo Nicoli Aldini and Gian Luca Traverso
In this blog post we recount an incident that recently occurred to us, regarding our tenancy agreement in Tashkent. Before narrating the events, however, we consider it necessary to clarify the reason why this story is worth sharing, that is, we deem it to be an excellent example of the blurry lines that separate formal law and informalities. While we admit that, throughout the entire incident, we felt an uncomfortable sense of fragility regarding our rights as tenants, we feel it important to clarify that we have not decided to write this post to vent these feelings out and thus criticize Uzbek legal culture. Rather, we believe that what occurred to us was a thought-provoking experience that, once again, enabled us to reason over the sociology of law and its analytical value. Let us now turn to the story.
A couple of weeks ago, during an ordinary day at the Academy, we received a call from our landlady’s son. He wanted to let us know that he needed the apartment we are renting in Tashkent, saying that he got covid and therefore he needed the flat to isolate himself; he would have given us four days to leave. Considering that we have a regular contract, such an unexpected call was a bit awkward to us, and we informed our supervisor at the Academy. As soon as we informed him about our situation, we had the impression that he was not particularly surprised but, at the same time, immediately wanted to help us out and thus asked us to provide him with the written contract. Once at home, we found the agreement and we sent it back to our supervisor. After a quick translation from Russian, with the help of our supervisor’s assistant, we found that the contract clearly stated that none of the parties have the right to terminate it unilaterally. The day ended with a slight sense of precariousness, but also with curiosity about what was happening beyond our sight. Thinking that we could have possibly left our flat in three days, we went to bed. The next day, we found out that the landlady instructed the real estate agency to provide us with a new apartment. We got a call from the real estate agent who explained to us that, despite our efforts to enforce the contract, we had to leave the apartment. The quarrel seemed closed and, to our bewilderment, it seemed that we had to find a new home. We called our supervisor to inform him about this development, but he communicated to us that discussions over our tenancy were still open. After less than an hour, our supervisor called us again saying that the situation unravelled in our favour; immediately afterwards we received apologies both from the landlady and the real estate agent. Thankfully, then, we managed to keep our suitcases unpacked and Gian Luca’s Netflix account signed-in on the smart TV in our living room. However, while this incident did not alter the social and legal arrangements between us and our landlady eventually, we argue that this positive outcome was the result of the interplay between multiple socio-legal phenomena, which we briefly describe in the following.
To begin with, when the landlady’s son called us to claim the possession of the apartment, he relied upon his social position and condition (i.e., son of the landlady, physically ill with covid) to provide a justification to his request. This behavior seemed to us an example of a with the law practice, to use Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) terminology. As they argue in their seminal work on legal consciousness The common place of law, Ewick and Silbey claim that individuals can consider the law as a game, and accordingly play with it by relying upon personal capital. Individual resources (social, cultural, economic) can in fact help to stretch the law’s boundaries to blend them to one’s personal goals. In this case, the landlady’s son used his social capital as a means to sustain his right to terminate the contract.
On the other hand, we too engaged in this game, by means of using two essential tools. First, we immediately relied upon our social capital as well. As two foreigners in Uzbekistan, our first instinct was to seek the help of those people who had helped us adjusting to the country, i.e., the supervisor and staff at the Academy. Subsequently, however, we also resorted to the written contract as a tool to claim our rights as tenants. During our phone conversation with the real estate agent, in fact, we constantly mentioned the fact that, since we had signed a written contract, the landlady did not have the right to terminate it so abruptly. We therefore “played the law game” using a diverse set of tools, both social (our connections at the Academy) and legal (the letter of the tenancy agreement).
Considering that we were not present during the conversations among our supervisor, the landlady and her son, and the real estate agency, we do not know what kind of strategies they employed. In other words, we are not in the position of offering an ultimate answer surrounding what enabled us to remain in the apartment. Was it the formality of the law (i.e. the written tenancy contract) or, rather, the informality of our social connections?
Regardless of the answer, this incident testifies to the fact that legal and social phenomena are in a constant, and mutually changing, interaction. It is only by acknowledging and appreciating the nuances existing in our lifeworld, that we can indeed have a grasp of how normativity works.
References:
Ewick, Patricia, and Susan S. Silbey. 1998. The common place of law: stories from everyday life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.