Abstract
This paper shows the first results of a preparatory fieldwork carried out in Zrnosko, a Macedonian-speaking village in the border region of Mala Prespa, Albania. Through observations and interviews collected around the concept of cultural landscape, it offers some insights into the history of the local social economy. Among these, the longue durée role of the forest and Prespa lake in the more general social geography of the region, the heritage of the collectivistic organization under the socialist regime of Enver Hoxha, and the contemporary marginalization of the village.
 The transformations in productive activities (such as small-scale agriculture and husbandry), as well as in the social organization of the local community, seem to reproduce and reshape local cultural landscapes. The widespread narratives about the lack of jobs offer a broader understanding of the village's social geography, its historical transformations and current condition. In a similar way local toponymy, as a result of an identity-building process, seems to reflect the cultural history of the environment, its productive activities and socio-cultural configurations. The participative mapping method, carried out in dialogue with locals, offers further explorations of the influence on toponyms in villagers' spatial practices, and in local identity narratives concerning ethnic and linguistic borders.
 Both productive activities and local geography seem to influence perceptions on the organization of space and time among inhabitants, revealing their cultural forms of appropriation and socialization of the land, as well as the current perception of its increasing abandonment. A synchronic-diachronic research on productive activities and the changings in space orienting elements mutually suggest a problematic, and ongoing, process of transition to an alternative productive model, which alternates subsistence economy with peripheral and ephemeral market-oriented efforts.
Highlights
This article shows results of a pilot ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Zrnosko, a Macedonian-speaking village sited on the Albanian side of the trilateral border region of Prespa lakes
While the sun slowly dips behind the peaks of Suva Gora, the tea gardens on the southwestern shore of Mala Prespa become an unusually pale green
The main village where we conducted our fieldwork, is located on the part of the Prespa lake region which has belonged to Albania since 1924
Summary
This article shows results of a pilot ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Zrnosko, a Macedonian-speaking village sited on the Albanian side of the trilateral border region of Prespa lakes. We explored the villagers’ perception of the local geography, their usage of toponyms, and the history of places and their function, which together yielded some insight into the transformation of the productive activities, the social geography, and the political organization of the village.
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