Post-socialist Albania Research Articles

Ideological Uses and Management Policies of Archaeological Sites in Post-Socialist Albania: The Case of Saranda Area (Finiq and Butrint)

This article is a sample of the research I am conducting in the wider area of Saranda as part of the wider framework of critical analysis of cultural heritage, this scientific field that is placed at the meeting point of archaeology and anthropology. The two sciences have intersected in many different ways since the 1980s. Archaeology as a science that studies the archaeological remains of the past was confronted with anthropology whose purpose is the cultural analysis of social phenomena and relationships. The result of this partnership is a wide range of approaches, which are called post-process archaeologies . These approaches represent a variety of analyses, which emphasize a contextual, and thus contemporaneous, nature of archaeological evidence, the critique of archaeology as a scientific search for objective truth, its links with history and the contested nature of archaeological data and of the archaeological work. This perspective turns the interest of research from explanation to interpretation and from the positivist tradition of natural science to the tradition of interpretational philosophy, i.e. the preeminent study of meaning.

The impact of rural emptiness on gender relations in postsocialist Albania

AbstractThis article explores impacts of dramatic levels of outmigration from Puka, a remote region of northern Albania. Since 1991 depopulation, economic decline and state withdrawal have created conditions of what Dzenovska calls rural emptiness. Drawing on focus group discussions with women from eight villages, it explores how conditions of rural emptiness have led to a transformation of gender contracts, with women taking on additional responsibilities. However, these changes have been accommodated within a re‐traditionalised patriarchal system through the devaluation of tasks assigned to women, their increased surveillance by male relatives and erosion of women's social life outside the household.

Nationalism, Post-Secular and Sufism: The Making of Neo-Bektashism by Moikom Zeqo in Post-Socialist Albania

This article focuses on Moikom Zeqo’s (1949–2020) work Syri i Tretë (“The Third Eye”, 2001) as a New Age reworking of Albanian Bektashism. The success of this book, and the recognition that Bektashi authorities themselves accorded it, make it highly representative of Bektashi neo-intellectualism and beyond: it is a cross-section that enables us to investigate the complex reworking of Sufi knowledge in a post-secular environment, such as Albania. This article examines this specific work while outlining a history of the Bektashiyya from the Ottoman era to the post-socialist Albanian period and highlighting its doctrinal and practical developments. Syri i Tretë is the expression of a secularist engulfment of post-socialist or even post-secular religion, which Bektashism embodies. Thus, Zeqo’s work expresses a common trend in Albanian society that is beyond the members of the Bektashi community.

Monumentality, Counter-monumentality, and Political Authority in Post-socialist Albania

Abstract This article examines the role that monumentality—and efforts to critique it—have played in shaping the experience of public space in post-socialist Albania. It considers artistic and architectural strategies often labeled ‘counter-monumental’ because they were first developed as a way to challenge authoritarian and nationalist monumental structures from the past, and it argues that in Albania these counter-monumental strategies have become wedded to centralized state power. In the conditions of neoliberal capitalism, projects that aim to undo traditional monumentality can effectively obfuscate political agendas. In Albania, where Edi Rama—the current Prime Minister—is also a practicing artist, the discourses of contemporary art have served to increase the centralization of political authority, and the work of architecture and design firms such as the Brussels-based group 51N4E have reinforced the symbolic power of the state at the same time that they claim to open public spaces up for citizen participation.

Celebrating Sultan Nevruz: Between Theological Debate and Multi-Framed Practice in Contemporary Albania

Abstract This work analyses the historical developments and the acculturation of Sultan nevruz’s rite in post-socialist Albania. The general aim of this work is to examine the intertwining of social and cultural transformations with different religious discourses (native/foreign or Bektashi/sunni legacies) in Albanian society, which is shaped by communist patterns (nationalistic and secularistic heritage) and by post-socialist transformation (pluralisation). Firstly, it analyses public narratives and counter-narratives that Bektashi and other authorities produce about nevruz merging positivistic science, nationalistic rhetoric and ʿAlī’s venerations; finally, the paper focuses on worship diversification and subjectivities by believers that could build their own individual religiosity embodying, recreating or reworking the discourses of “correctness” framed by Islamic authorities.

Representing the Worker in Postsocialist Public Space: Art and Politics under Neoliberalism

AbstractAcross former Eastern Europe, the transition from state socialism toward neoliberal capitalism has been accompanied by a marked reduction in emphasis on working-class identities. Because of the centrality of class to socialist-era identity-construction projects, the recent and relatively sudden ascendancy of various forms of individualist, consumption-oriented subjectivity in postrevolutionary societies has produced conflicts that are often more visible than in societies where capitalism has been the accepted economic paradigm for much longer. This shift can be seen in the realm of art and visual culture: Images of the worker once dominated public spaces under state socialism, competing in number with representations of leaders and communist ideologues, but since 1989 they have often been vandalized, dismantled, or else relocated to decay in relative obscurity. Where new public images of the worker do appear in postsocialist neoliberal conditions, they frequently serve as nexuses of controversy, where generational and ideological conflicts regarding current labor conditions and the legacy of worker solidarity play out. The debates surrounding representations of workers in postsocialism are both part of a global history of postsocialist art and part of the history of labor and its relation to contemporary urban space. This article examines artistic representations of the worker sited in public space in postsocialist Albania, in order to map the political and artistic discourses that animate engagements with working-class identity in conditions of neoliberal social transformation.

Post-Socialist Sufi Revival in Albania

Abstract This work analyses the case of Sufi revival in post-socialist Albania, where the religious field has been fragmented by the competing actions of different actors (local, regional and foreign) and by the critical and individualised religiosity of the faithful. Sufi public life is substantially marginalised by the monopoly of the esoteric Baktashis and Sunni political strategies. Thus, many Sufi faithful prefer to live their religious experience and express their practice in inner, private and virtual spaces. This dynamics has transformed the Sufi path and the charismatic authority of the Shaykhs.

Gender and feminist studies in Albania – a brief state of the art

The aim of this contribution is to identify how gender and feminist studies have positioned themselves within the higher education system in post-socialist Albania. In Albania, the post-socialist context was featured by a negative connotation of the left-wing perspective hindering the development of critical and feminist thinking in academia. There is a lack of feminist debate, and hostile prejudices against feminists stick well, particularly in the absence of a thorough debate about feminism. Gender and women’s studies are present mainly in the public university system in association with the Social Sciences Faculty. The only complete program on gender studies is situated within the Department of Social Work and Social Policy, as a Master program in Gender and Development. Gender or feminist studies are mostly taught as “optional” courses often just for the sake of having them present in the program. In this contribution, we aim at briefly presenting some of the main developments, gaps and challenges regarding gender and feminist studies in the Albanian higher education.

Pyramid Firms and Value Transformation in Postsocialist Albania

Avec leur effondrement, les entreprises nommées « firmes pyramidales » ( firma piramidale ) en Albanie ont englouti les économies de centaines de milliers d’investisseurs et ont mené le pays au bord de la guerre civile. Cet article étudie comment et pourquoi les investisseurs se sont engagés dans ces plans financiers frauduleux. Plus précisément, il analyse la façon dont ces entreprises ont mobilisé les réseaux de parenté, ainsi que les versements opérés par les migrants, quand du fait des transformations consécutives à la chute du socialisme au début des années 1990, l’émigration est devenue massive. Alors que la situation économique était instable et l’accès au financement très limité, ces firmes offraient un « seuil de conversion de la valeur » : elles mobilisaient différentes formes de richesse (relations familiales, versements, travail) et permettaient, ou plutôt promettaient la création de nouvelles formes de valeur financière, sociale et culturelle.

Of Pyramids and Dictators: Memory, Work and the Significance of Communist Heritage in Post-Socialist Albania

The communist regime that governed Albania between 1944 and 1991 has left considerable architectural remains. These however, are rapidly dissapearing, as a result of recent development. This paper explores the perception of the monumental heritage of the socialist regime in current day Albania. In our view, concepts of “unwanted” or “difficult” heritage used in the past to make sense of the heritage of socialist dictatorships, are not able to fully account for the specificities of the Albanian case as aspects other than trauma and pain need to be considered.The perception of the heritage from Albania’s communist past is investigated both through a theoretical discussion, which addresses the relationship between “unwanted heritage” and phenomena of nostalgia for certain aspects of life during communism, as well as through a questionnaire targeted at a sample of the population of the capital city Tirana. As far as this last aspect is concerned, our focus has been on the most iconic communist monument in Tirana, the Pyramid, the former museum dedicated to the dictator Enver Hoxha.In the last part of the paper, we try to make sense of the trends that emerged through the analysis of quantitative data, addressing the role of work and related forms of memory in forging the relationship between Albanians and the material remains of their recent past.

Composing on Commission: Entrepreneurship and the Changing Social Basis of Popular Music Collaboration in Postsocialist Tirana, Albania

Since the 1990s, economic reforms in postsocialist Albania have reorganised the social basis of popular music production. Administered within a state-subsidised economy during socialism, production has been transformed by the penetration of economic capital into relations between composers and singers. This essay analyses how composers conceptualise and manage their careers in order to examine more broadly how neoliberalism contributes to the reshaping of artistic subjectivities in one postsocialist context. Celebrated locally as a withdrawal of government, the postsocialist state's desubsidisation of popular music has, I argue, shifted new obligations for self-government on to agents. In pursuing entrepreneurship, composers selectively adopt socialist-era ideas and practices in order to manage their conduct within the postsocialist music economy. Composers' cultivation of entrepreneurial strategies in neoliberalising Tirana demonstrates how market logics do not simply efface preexisting aesthetic dispositions, but rather repurpose them toward new ends.

Voicing freedom, sounding dissent: Popular music, simulation and citizenship in democratizing Albania, 1991–1997

Between 1991 and 1997, Western-style rock and popular music in postsocialist Albania came to be targeted for processes of democratization and de-communization. In this article, I examine how efforts to imaginatively locate and musically voice ‘freedom’ and ‘dissent’ through popular musicians’ performances articulated to a nominally democratic order that necessitated ‘free’ citizens. Starting from Nikolas Rose’s notion of ‘freedom as a formula of power’, I explore how particular musical performances, commentaries and received ideas about the ‘power’ of popular music in democratic and nondemocratic contexts helped to shape and promote an ideal kind of agent, a ‘free’ Citizen–Subject. In approaching ‘democratization’ as an aesthetic and cultural process rather than ‘democracy’ as an ideal political condition, I outline popular music’s significant role in the cultural construction of conceptions of liberal democracy and ‘good’ citizenship in one postauthoritarian context. The historicization of commonsense notions about the relationship between popular music and democracy, I conclude, provides a potential means to more critically examine the emergence – and normalization – of contemporary politics of citizenship pursued under the sign of ‘freedom’ in democratizing states.

Elite capture in local fishery management - experiences from post-socialist Albania

Local governance based on institutions for collective action can help overcome social dilemmas in natural and agricultural resource management. A common path towards local governance is decentralisation, and within this context, a transfer of property rights from central government to local resource users. Yet, despite the successes of many decentralisation policies, the phenomenon of elite capture remains a risk. Our paper investigates elite capture in Albania’s Lake Ohrid fishing region. We aim to contribute to the state of knowledge by identifying determinants for elite capture. Our empirical case shows how ‘blueprint’ approaches, top-down implementation, and weak institutions led to further empowerment of privileged locals, who realise personal gains at the expense of distributional inequity within the community. Specifically original insights are derived from our analysis of implications from the post-socialist context, which we show to facilitate capture due to a common susceptibility for destructive leadership and lacking confidence in collective action.

Trans-border mobility and integration in border regions: Albanian migrants in Epirus and the Ionian Islands in Greece

The emergence of a new economic and political system in post-socialist Albania strongly affected the neighbouring regions of Greece, particularly by successive waves of migration. This paper explores three key aspects of Albanian migration to Greece. First, it investigates the basic factors that determine Albanian migrants' decision to settle in middle-sized Greek cities close to the border with Albania. Second, it examines the main patterns of trans-border mobility between Albania and Greece. And third, it looks at the possible interconnections between integration into Greek society and trans-border mobility. The role of geographical proximity and other factors that define migrants' integration are also discussed. The paper concludes that frequent mobility produces important trans-national activity and discusses whether this mobility corresponds to an emerging type of ‘trans-migrant’.

Migrating-remitting-‘building’-dwelling: house-making as ‘proxy’ presence in postsocialist Albania

This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants' house-making projects in their countries of birth. In particular, it examines the houses built or refurbished by Albanians in their home-country, which is no longer their place of permanent residence. This is a widespread phenomenon in Albania, but it is also a frequently appearing practice amongst other international migrants. Why do migrants living outside their home-countries build houses there even though they do not plan to return? I seek to answer this question in the case of Albania by focusing empirically on the process of constructing these houses, rather than merely on the material entity of the house as such. I propose that such 'house-making' by Albanian migrants is not only a simple house-building process; it also ensures a constant dwelling and dynamic 'proxy' presence for migrants in their community of origin. These ethnographic observations have further significance for the anthropological study of both houses and international migration.