Albania Today: A Portrait of Post-Communist Turbulence

277 Pages·2005·2.05 MB·English

by  Clarissa de Waal

Albania Today

Albania Today
A Portrait of Post-Communist Turbulence
C W
LARISSA DE AAL
in association with
The Centre for Albanian Studies
LONDON
Published in 2005 by I.B.Tauris &. Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In association with The Centre for Albanian Studies, London
www.albanianstudies.org
In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by St Martins
Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © Clarissa de Waal, 2005
The right of Clarissa de Waal to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or
any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior writ-
ten permission of the publisher.
ISBN 1 85043 859 5
EAN 978 1 85043 859 5
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow,
Cornwall
Camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author
Contents
List of illustrations vii
Chapter 1. Introduction 1
Chapter 2. First Impressions: Dropull 20
Chapter 3. Tirana, 1992 28
Chapter 4. Looking for a fieldwork base 45
Chapter 5. Mirdita and Its History 68
Chapter 6. The Kanun in the 1990s 83
Chapter 7. On the ground in Mirdita:Fan 95
Chapter 8. Orosh 116
Chapter 9. Developments 136
Chapter 10. Village Life 158
Chapter 11. Rrëshen 1 180
Chapter 12. Rrëshen 2 203
Chapter 13. Descent to the plain 227
Chapter 14. Concluding 241
Appendices 249
Endnotes 253
Bibliography 261
Index 263
vii
List of Illustrations
1. Orosh,1994 First Easter mass since 1967 143
2. Easter worshippers at the ruined abbey of Orosh, 1994 143
3. Wedding guests 144
4. Women’s burden:wood collecting 144
5. Return at dusk spinning 145
6. Cradle-ties maker drinking coffee 145
“It was a small shabby sort of place. Land was short, jobs were scarce, politics
was unstable, health was poor, prices were rising, and life was altogether far
from promising, a kind of agitated stagnancy.”
Clifford Geertz, 1993, Local Knowledge
1
Introduction
i. Doing Ethnography in Albania
A few years ago, a Greek political scientist on hearing that I was working
in Albania, exclaimed: “That must be an anthropologist’s paradise.” The
implication was that formerly isolated and undiscovered Albania afforded
the sort of fieldwork experienced by ethnographers at the beginning of the
twentieth century; the dissolution of the exotic1 was not after all complete. The
anthropologist George Marcus discussing early ethnography writes:
“Ethnographies as a genre had similarities with traveller and explorer
accounts, in which the main narrative motif was the romantic discovery
by the writer of people and places unknown to the reader. To do this, the
main motif that ethnography as a science developed was that of salvaging
cultural diversity, threatened with global Westernization, especially during
the age of colonialism. The current problem is that these motives no
longer serve well enough to reflect the world in which ethnographers now
work. All peoples are now at least known and charted….” [1986:24]
Marcus was writing before the collapse of communism. Since 1989, Western
ethnographers working in the poorer regions of former Socialist Europe have
been in a situation which in a number of respects echoes that of the ethnographers
working in the colonialist era. In the early 1990s, numerous foreign ‘experts’
converged on Tirana. While they were not colonialists in the sense of holding
government positions, they were ideological colonialists come to teach the locals
how to do things the ‘right way’ according to the tenets of market fundamentalism.
They were extremely highly paid by any standards and stratospherically paid by
local standards. Furthermore, they received supplementary pay as Albania was
officially a dangerous posting. These experts, some of whom were unscrupulous
adventurers, were to assist Albania in the switch from command economy to
market capitalism. Their job was to show the locals how to set up institutions,
financial and legal, to underpin the changes. Within months, institutions which
had taken centuries to build in the West, were to be established in a country