Anyone who traveled into the hills surrounding the Red River Delta in the mid-1990s would see that the two Dao villages of Than Con and Ho So had made productive use of their surrounding land.¹ ...Although the villages were some forty kilometers apart, people used the land in a relatively similar manner. Wet-rice fields sculpted the small valleys adjacent to people’s houses into delicate structures of staggered terraces. Rice and cassava fields extended far up the slopes of the Luoi Hai and Ba Vi mountains towering over the villages. The fields and forest at various states of regeneration created a
In 2004, when Stefan walked into the beech, oak, and fir forests surrounding the agricultural fields of Dragomireşti, he could not help but be impressed. One row of solid trees lined up against ...another. Ordered in neat stands of homogeneous age classes, the trees indicated the sound silvicultural practice applied by the Ocolul Silvic (Forest District) Mihăeşti during socialism. Stefan also discovered clearings that dissected the forests. Ranging from a single hectare (ha) to several dozen, the clearings attested to recent logging. The loggers also left tree trunks of approximately one meter in height in many clearings, which was perplexing.
Forests, State, and Custom in Albania Stahl, Johannes; Sikor, Thomas; Dorondel, Stefan ...
When Things Become Property,
04/2017, Letnik:
3
Book Chapter
In 2004, when Johannes visited Dardha, he asked villagers where they obtained their wood. They pointed him in the direction of a degraded forest beyond the large agricultural plain described in ...Chapter 1. However, when he explored that specific area he did not find much more than shrub and coppice. There were a few small oak and beech trees, but otherwise he only saw bushes. Asked about the lack of mature trees, villagers explained to Johannes that there had been mature forest until 1997. In that year loggers had descended on the forest and cut all of the valuable timber
Wheat covered the land around the villages of Bagëtia, Dardha, and Kodra in southeastern Albania in the late 1980s. People planted it in the valley surrounded by rolling foothills that harbored the ...village of Kodra. They cultivated it in Dardha, a village located on the shores of Lake Prespa adjacent to what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Even in Bagëtia, which lies more than one thousand meters above sea level amidst immense old-growth forests and mountain pastures in the Gorë Mountains, people grew wheat. The fields stretched from the plains along the Mediterranean Sea to the mountains
‘Some see countries with borders. We see markets with opportunities.’ This advert for a Western international bank at Amsterdam airport could serve as a motto for neoliberal ideology. New ...opportunities for investment, new markets that have to be conquered, new people to be turned into consumers are certainly the dream of the neoliberal project. That must have been the image the newly postsocialist states conveyed at the end of the 1980s. Where the international media saw countries with inchoate democratic governments striving to find a way out of the socialist planned economy, the neoliberal forces saw totally de-regularized markets, hundreds
Introduction Stefan Dorondel
Disrupted Landscapes,
03/2016
Book Chapter
December 1989. News broke of the spectacular collapse of one of the harshest dictatorial regimes in the world. Images of the crowd surrounding and then ransacking the dictatorial palace, burning ...books and paintings, symbolized the destruction of a highly centralized state and the people’s wrath against a miscreant political regime. The helicopter carrying the dictatorial couple from the central government building roof represented, for most Romanians, the crash of a dreadful state that for years had oppressed its citizens. A few days after being chased from power, Nicolae Ceau.escu was caught, placed before an improvised jury, condemned and executed. The
When the bus turned right off the main road that links Piteşti, the Arge. county capital, to the northern part of the county, a rural landscape opened up before my eyes: a hilly village crossed by a ...small but still lively river, with small patches of orchards and pasture on the left side of the road and agricultural fields on the right. Patches of forest alternating with plots of deforested land still covered the peak of the hill. The bus had to make a slalom between the deep holes in the asphalt which looked ‘like it had been bombed’ as
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