Notes from the Balkans Green, Sarah F
2016, 2005., 20160926, 2005, 2005-01-01, 20050101, Letnik:
20
eBook
Maps and borders notwithstanding, some places are best described as "gaps"--places with repeatedly contested boundaries that are wedged in between other places that have clear boundaries. This book ...explores an iconic example of this in the contemporary Western imagination: the Balkans. Drawing on richly detailed ethnographic research around the Greek-Albanian border, Sarah Green focuses her groundbreaking analysis on the ambiguities of never quite resolving where or what places are. One consequence for some Greek peoples in this border area is a seeming lack of distinction--but in a distinctly "Balkan" way. In gaps (which are never empty), marginality is, in contrast with conventional understandings, not a matter of difference and separation--it is a lack thereof.
Notes from the Balkans represents the first ethnographic approach to exploring "the Balkans" as an ideological concept. Green argues that, rather than representing a tension between "West" and "East," the Balkans makes such oppositions ambiguous. This kind of marginality means that such places and peoples can hardly engage with "multiculturalism." Moreover, the region's ambiguity threatens clear, modernist distinctions. The violence so closely associated with the region can therefore be seen as part of continual attempts to resolve the ambiguities by imposing fixed separations. And every time this fails, the region is once again defined as a place that will continually proliferate such dangerous ambiguity, and could spread it somewhere else.
Elidor Mëhilli has produced a groundbreaking history of communist Albania that illuminates one of Europe's longest but least understood dictatorships.From Stalin to Mao, which is informed throughout ...by Mëhilli's unprecedented access to previously restricted archives, captures the powerful globalism of post-1945 socialism, as well as the unintended consequences of cross-border exchanges from the Mediterranean to East Asia.
After a decade of vigorous borrowing from the Soviet Union-advisers, factories, school textbooks, urban plans-Albania's party clique switched allegiance to China during the 1960s Sino-Soviet conflict, seeing in Mao's patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Mëhilli shows how socialism created a shared transnational material and mental culture-still evident today around Eurasia-but it failed to generate political unity. Combining an analysis of ideology with a sharp sense of geopolitics, he brings into view Fascist Italy's involvement in Albania, then explores the country's Eastern bloc entanglements, the profound fascination with the Soviets, and the contradictions of the dramatic anti-Soviet turn. Richly illustrated with never-before-published photographs, From Stalin to Mao draws on a wealth of Albanian, Russian, German, British, Italian, Czech, and American archival sources, in addition to fiction, interviews, and memoirs. Mëhilli's fresh perspective on the Soviet-Chinese battle for the soul of revolution in the global Cold War also illuminates the paradoxes of state planning in the twentieth century.
This book provides an important new analytical framework for making sense of return, remigration and circular mobility, conceptualising them as different phases of a wider migration process. Using an ...in-depth case study of Albania and its two main destination countries, Italy and Greece, the book demonstrates that instead of being viewed as a linear path between origin and destination, migration should be seen as a segmented, or cyclical pattern that may involve several localities and more than two countries. Characterised by important previous historical, social, economic and political linkages, geographical proximity but also high migration volatility and sustained flows in either directions, Albanian migration to Italy and Greece offers an optimal case study for analysing complex return, reintegration and mobility processes. While interesting as a unique regional migration system, the lessons learned cast light on important migration and mobility dynamics that are relevant for labour migration in Europe, also from other important migrant origin countries in the EU’s neighbourhood such as for instance Morocco or the Ukraine. This rich theoretical and empirical study will be of interest to researchers within European Studies and Migration Studies, as well as providing a useful contribution to policy debates on how to govern return migration, reintegration and circular migration.
The Austro-Hungarian aristocrat of Transylvanian origin, Baron Franz Nopcsa (1877-1933), was one of the most adventuresome travelers and scholars of Southeast Europe in the early decades of the ...twentieth century. He was also a paleontologist of renown and a noted geologist of the Balkan Peninsula : many of his assumptions have been confirmed by science. The Memoirs of this fascinating figure deal mainly with his travels in the Balkans, and specifically in the remote and wild mountains of northern Albania, in the years from 1903 to 1914. They thus cover the period of Ottoman Rule, the Balkan Wars and the outbreak of the First World War. Nopcsa was a keen adventurer who hiked through regions of northern Albania. With time, he became a leading expert in Albanian studies. He was also deeply involved in the politics of the period. In 1913, Nopcsa even offered himself as a candidate for the vacant Albanian throne. The Introduction also tells of Nopcsa’s tragic death: he shot his Albanian secretary and partner before killing himself. The memoirs themselves reveal some references to his homosexuality for those who can read between the lines.
Out of albania King, Russell; Mai, Nicola
2008., 20081015, 2008, 2011-02-15
eBook
Analysing the dynamics of the post-1990 Albanian migration to Italy, this book is the first major study of one of Europe’s newest, most dramatic yet least understood migrations. It takes a close look ...at migrants’ employment, housing and social exclusion in Italy, as well as the process of return migration to Albania. The research described in the book challenges the pervasive stereotype of the “bad Albanian” and, through in-depth fieldwork on Albanian communities in Italy and back in Albania, provides rich insights into the Albanian experience of migration, settlement and return in both their positive and their negative aspects.
This volume brings together unpublished Italian and Albanian archaeological reports and new archaeological studies from recent fieldwork that throw new light on the archaeology and history of the ...Pavllas River Valley, the Mediterranean alluvial plain in the territory of Butrint, ancient Buthrotum, in southwestern Albania. It gives prominence for the first time to two important sites, Kalivo and Çuka e Aitoit, which are here reinterpreted and shown to have played major roles in the early history of Butrint as it evolved in the later first millennium BC to emerge as the key city of Chaonia in Epirus. Butrint 7 also presents the full excavation report of the Late Bronze Age and Hellenistic fortified site of Mursi, in addition to other Butrint Foundation surveys and excavations in the hinterland of Butrint, including the Roman villa maritima at Diaporit, the villa suburbana on the Vrina Plain, and Roman sites on Alinura Bay and at the Customs House, as well as new surveys of the early modern Triangular Fortress and a survey to locate the lost Venetian village of Zarópulo. The volume also features a new study of the Hellenistic bronze statuette of Pan found on Mount Mile and of his sanctuary at Butrint. The volume concludes with a comprehensive reassessment of the Pavllas River Valley in relation to Butrint, from the Palaeolithic to the modern eras, examining how dominion, territory, environment and the 'corrupting sea' reshaped Butrint and its fluvial corridor diachronically and particularly brought profound territorial, economic and social alterations under the Roman Empire.
Tales from Albarado revisits times of excitement and loss in early 1990s Albania, in which about a dozen pyramid firms collapsed and caused the country to fall into anarchy and a near civil war. To ...gain a better understanding of how people from all walks of life came to invest in these financial schemes and how these schemes became intertwined with everyday transactions, dreams, and aspirations, Smoki Musaraj looks at the materiality, sociality, and temporality of financial speculations at the margins of global capital. She argues that the speculative financial practices of the schemes were enabled by official financial infrastructures (such as the postsocialist free-market reforms), by unofficial economies (such as transnational remittances), as well as by historically specific forms of entrepreneurship, transnational social networks, and desires for a European modernity. Overall, these granular stories of participation in the Albanian schemes help understand neoliberal capitalism as a heterogeneous economic formation that intertwines capitalist and noncapitalist forms of accumulation and investment.
This is the second volume arising from the 1994–2003 excavations of the Triconch Palace at Butrint (Albania), which charted the history of a major Mediterranean waterfront site from the 2nd to the ...15th centuries AD. The sequence (Butrint 3: Excavations at the Triconch Palace: Oxbow 2011) included the development of a palatial late Roman house, followed by intensive activity between the 5th and 7th centuries involving domestic occupation, metal-working, fishing and burial. The site saw renewed activity from the 10th century, coinciding with the revival of the town of Butrint, and for the following 300 years continued in intermittent use associated with its channel-side location. This volume reports on the finds from the site (excluding the pottery), which demonstrate the ways in which the lives, diet and material culture of a Mediterranean population changed across the arc of the late Roman and Medieval periods. It includes discussion of the environmental evidence, the human and faunal remains, metal-working evidence, and the major assemblages of glass, coins and small finds, giving an insight into the health, subsistence base and material culture of the population of a Mediterranean site across more than 1000 years. The findings raise important questions regarding the ways in which changes in the circumstances of the town affected the population between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. They illustrate in particular how an urban Roman center became more rural during the 6th century with a population that faced major challenges in their health and living conditions.
In the early 1990s, Albania, arguably Europe's most closed and repressive state, began a startling transition out of forty years of self-imposed Communist isolation. Albanians who were not allowed to ...practice religion, travel abroad, wear jeans, or read "decadent" Western literature began to devour the outside world. They opened cafés, companies, and newspapers. Previously banned rock music blared in the streets.
Modern Albaniaoffers a vivid history of the Albanian Communist regime's fall and the trials and tribulations that led the country to become the state it is today. The book provides an in-depth look at the Communists' last Politburo meetings and the first student revolts, the fall of the Stalinist regime, the outflows of refugees, the crash of the massive pyramid-loan schemes, the war in neighboring Kosovo, and Albania's relationship with the United States. Fred Abrahams weaves together personal experience from more than twenty years of work in Albania, interviews with key Albanians and foreigners who played a role in the country's politics since 1990-including former Politburo members, opposition leaders, intelligence agents, diplomats, and founders of the Kosovo Liberation Army-and a close examination of hundreds of previously secret government records from Albania and the United States. A rich, narratively-driven account,Modern Albaniagives readers a front-row seat to the dramatic events of the last battle of Cold War Europe.
