Constructing locality and property in Dhërmi/Drimades, southern Albania
Keywords:
migrations, return migrations, locality, property, land tenure, postcommunism, southern AlbaniaAbstract
The paper concentrates on the meaning of “rootedness” or locality in one of the southern Albanian villages, Dhërmi (official, Albanian name) or Drimades (local, Greek name) and question its relatedness to land and property. Nowadays with the process of privatisation which often involves land conflicts the meaning of locality is becoming conditioned with individual claims for land ownership. The paper illustrates how the villagers who are “on the move” negotiate, manage and contest their locality through which they seek to ensure their ownership and property and vice versa. Based on the fourteen months of fieldwork in the mentioned village I particularly focus on the returnees who own the tourist facilities on the village’s coastal plain and the emigrants who continue to regularly return to their natal village Dhërmi/Drimades. I argue that when expressing their feelings of locality and belonging, people continuously reconstruct their past in order to reassure their present, reconstitute and corroborate their ties to the land, create order to control their own labour, products and income and negotiate their sense of mastery.
Downloads
References
Abrahams, Ray (ur.) (1996). After Socialism: Land Reform and Rural Social Change in Eastern Europe. Providence in Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
Clifford, James (1997). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge in Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Creed, Gerald (1998). Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Creed, Gerald (1999). Deconstructing Socialism in Bulgaria. Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life in Postsocialist World (ur. Michael Burawoy in Katherine Verdery). Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield: 223–244.
de Certeau, Michael (1988 [1984]). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cungu, Azetain Johan F. M. Swinnen (1999). Albania's Radical Agrarian Reform. Economic Development and Cultural Change 47 (3): 605–619.
Foucault, Michel (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.
Gerschiere, Peter (2009). The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago in London: University of Chicago Press.
Green, Sarah F. (2005). Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gregorič Bon, Nataša (2008a). Prostori neskladij: etnografija prostora in kraja v Dhërmiju/Drimadesu, južna Albanija. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC.
Gregorič Bon, Nataša (2008b). »Where are We? In Europe or Albania?« Regionalism as Seen by the Local People in Dhërmi/Drimades of Southern Albania. Dve domovini/ Two Homelands 27: 83–105.
Gupta, Akhil in James Ferguson (ur.) (2001 [1997]). Culture, Power and Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham in London: Duke University Press.
Hagedorn, Konrad (2002). The Political Economy and Institutional Evolution of Privatisation and Restructuring of Agricultural Land in Central and Eastern Europe. Paper presented to the Regional Conference on Land Issues in Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS in Budapest, Hungary, April 3–6.
Hann, Chris M. (1993a). From Production to Property: Decollectivization and the FamilyLand Relationship in Contemporary Hungary. Man 28: 299–320.
Hann, Chris M. (1993b). Property Relations in the New Eastern Europe: The Case of Specialist Cooperatives in Hungary. The Curtain Rise: Rethinking Culture, Ideology and the State in Eastern Europe (ur. Hermine G. De Soto in David G. Anderson). Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press: 99–119.
Hann, Chris M. (1998). Introduction: The Embeddedness of Property. Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition (ur. Chris M. Hann). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1–47.
Kaneff, Deema (1998). Private Cooperatives and Local Property Relations in Rural Bulgaria. Replika, special issue: Central European Hysteria (English edition) 3: 161–171.
Kaneff, Deema (2000). Property, Work and Local Identity. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Papers 15, Halle, Germany.
Kaneff, Deema (2009). Property and Transnational Neoliberalism: the Case of British Migration to Bulgaria. Accession and Migration: Changing Policy, Society and Culture in an Enlarged Europe (ur. John Eade in Yordanka Vakanova). London: Ashgate: 59–74.
Kideckel, David (1992). Peasants and Authority in the New Romania. Romania after Tyranny (ur. Daniel Nelson). Boulder: Westview Press: 69–83.
Kideckel, David (1995a). East European Communities: The Struggle for Balance in Turbulent Times. Boulder: Westview.
Kideckel, David (1995b). Two Incidents on the Plains of Southern Transylvania: Pitfalls of Privatization in a Romanian Community. East European Communities: The Struggle for Balance in Turbulent Times (ur. David Kideckel). Boulder: Westview: 47–64.
King, Russell in Julie Vullnetari (2003). Migration and Development in Albania. Development Research Centre on Migration, Glabalisation and Poverty. Sussex: Sussex Centre for Migration Research.
Lampland, Martha (2002). The Advantages of Being Collectivized: Comparative Farm Manangers in the Postsocialist Economy. Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia (ur. Hann C. M.). London in New York: Routledge: 31–56.
Lukšič-Hacin, Marina (ur.) (2006). Spet doma? Povratne migracije med politiko, prakso in teorijo (zbirka Migracije 11). Ljubljana: Založba ZRC.
Mai, Nicola in Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers (2003). Albanian Migrations and New Transnationalisms. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29 (6): 939–948.
Meurs, Mieke (2001). The Evolution of Agrarian Institutions: A Comparative Study of Postsocialist Hungary and Bulgaria. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Müller, Daniel in Thomas Sikor (2006). Effects of postsocialist reforms on land cover and land use in South-Eastern Albania. Applied Geography 26: 175–191.
Navaro-Yashin, Yael (2002). Faces of the State. Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pine, Frances (2004). Reproducing the House: Kinship, Inheritance and Property Relations in Highland Poland. Distinct Inheritances: Property, Family and Community in a Changing Europe (ur. Patrick Heady, Hannes Grandits, Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, Shingo Shimada). Halle studies in the anthropology of Eurasia No. 2. Münster: Lit Verlag: 279–295.
Rusha, Spiro (2001). Himara ne stuhitë e shekujve. Tiranë: Shtëpia Botuese »ARBRI«.
Seremetakis, Nadia C. (1991). The Last Word. Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Toplak, Kristina (2004). »Dobrodošli doma?« Vračanje slovenskih izseljencev v Republiko Slovenijo. Dve Domovini/Two Homelands 20: 35–51.
Verdery, Katherine (1994). The Elasticity of Land: Problems of Property Restitution in Transylvania. Slavic Reviews 53: 107–109.
Verdery, Katherine (1998). Property and Power in Transylvania’s Decollectivization. Property Relations. Renewing the Anthropological Tradition (ur. Chris M. Hann). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 160–180.
Verdery, Katherine (2003). The Vanishing Hectare. Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press.
Vullnetari, Julie (2007). Albanian Migration and Development: State of the Art Review. IMISCOE Working Paper 18, September.
Winnifrith, T.J. (2002). Badlands – Borderlands: A History of Northern Epirus/Southern Albania. London: Duckworth.
de Waal, Clarissa (1996). Decollectivisation and Total Scarcity in High Albania. After Socialism: Land Reform and Rural Social Change in Eastern Europe (ur. Ray Abrahams). Oxford: Berghahn Books.
de Waal, Clarissa (2005). Albania Today: A Portrait of Post-Communist Turbulence. London in New York: I. B. Tauris and Company.
Werbner, Pnina (1999). Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds. Social Anthropology 7 (1): 17–35.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors guarantee that the work is their own original creation and does not infringe any statutory or common-law copyright or any proprietary right of any third party. In case of claims by third parties, authors commit their self to defend the interests of the publisher, and shall cover any potential costs.
More in: Submission chapter