THE INTERSECTIONS OF GENDER AND GENERATION IN ALBANIAN MIGRATION, REMITTANCES AND TRANSNATIONAL CARE

The Albanian case represents the most dramatic instance of post-communist migration: about one million Albanians, a quarter of the country's total population, are now living abroad, most of them in Greece and Italy, with the UK becoming increasingly popular since the late 1990s. This paper draws on three research projects based on fieldwork in Italy, Greece, the UK and Albania. These projects have involved in-depth interviews with Albanian migrants in several cities, as well as with migrant-sending households in different parts of Albania. In this paper we draw out those findings which shed light on the intersections of gender and generations in three aspects of the migration process: the emigration itself, the sending and receiving of remittances, and the care of family members (mainly the migrants' elderly parents) who remain in Albania. Theoretically, we draw on the notion of 'gendered geographies of power' and on how spatial change and separation through migration reshapes gender and generational relations. We find that, at all stages of the migration, Albanian migrants are faced with conflicting and confusing models of gender, behavioural and generational norms, as well as unresolved questions about their legal status and the likely economic, social and political developments in Albania, which make their future life plans uncertain. Legal barriers often prevent migrants and their families from enjoying the kinds of transnational family lives they would like.     

The Legendary Commander: the construction of an Albanian master‐narrative in post‐war Kosovo*

ABSTRACT. The ongoing, post‐war construction of Albanian martyrs, memory and the nation in Kosovo has produced iconic tropes of militant resistance, unity and national independence. This critical interpretive account, based on years of the authors' ethnographic and political engagement with Albanians in post‐war Kosovo, focuses on the making of a master narrative that is centred on the ‘sublime sacrifice’ of the insurgent KLA leader Adem Jashari, known as the ‘Legendary Commander’. It also aims to trace voices of discord with this master narrative, testing contestations in terms of the rural–urban, political and gender divides in Kosovo‐Albanian society. It concludes that the narrow international view of Albanians as either ‘victims’ or ‘perpetrators’ has contributed to the consolidation of this powerful narrative, its celebration of Albanian agency in militant resistance and the closing of public debate within Albanian society.     

Kin state non‐interventionism: Albania and regional stability in the Western Balkans

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of Albanian regional policy from 1992 to 2013. Situated in a conflict‐ridden region and surrounded by co‐ethnics living in Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, Albania has successfully resisted pressure to undertake interventionist regional policies. However, there are no structured accounts as to how Albania fashioned its non‐interventionist regional policy. This article fills this gap and retraces the development of Albanian regional policy as a function of its inter‐mingled domestic politics and regional and international dynamics. The article concludes that the Albanian regional approach has been shaped by its legacy of communist isolation, pro‐Western predisposition and recognition that accommodation of Western interests would overcome its constraints and advance the rights of Albanians living in the Western Balkans. The analysis is important not just for understanding Albania's actions but also for disentangling the relationship between regional policy, nationalism and a kin state's domestic and international constraints.     

Heritage Recycled: migration and tourism as factors in the heritage of vernacular settlements

Since the 1980s Greece has been the destination of many Albanian migrants in search of work and better living conditions. The research on which this study is based examines the case of Santorini, a small Greek island which relies heavily on tourism and is currently in the front line of migration. This paper focuses on the relationship between migrants and space, by considering the interaction between migration, tourism and heritage. Heritage brings tourism flows, tourism generates migration through the demand for labour which cannot be met by locals, and migration helps to keep heritage alive because migrants occupy the old deserted settlements and also provide the means for the revitalisation of traditional ways of production. Through research in three different locations on the island, it is suggested that, contrary to the common public perception that migrants operate in a destructive way towards the spatial, social and economic environments, they actually contribute to their revitalisation.     

Linguistic boundaries and geopolitical interests: the Albanian boundary commissions, 1878–1926

Since 1999, there has been much debate within the international community on what the future status of the autonomous province of Kosovo should be. However, there seems to have been little consideration as to why the Ottoman vilayet of Kosovo and the other majority Albanian-speaking areas (now parts of Montenegro, western Macedonia and north-western Greece) did not become either independent or part of an independent Albanian state, despite the legacy of these decisions. Focussing on British policy and perceptions, this article explores the role of the great powers in the delimitation of Albanian boundaries, particularly in two boundary commissions in 1913 and 1914: one determining the southern Albanian boundary with Greece and the other concerning the northern and north-eastern boundary with Serbia and Montenegro. The first part of the article considers the influences and interactions of two sets of factors in the boundary deliberations: the declared rationale of creating nation-states in south-eastern Europe based upon ethnographic criteria (linguistic boundaries) and the competing role of geopolitical interests in their decision-making, focussing particularly upon British interests. It illustrates that the decisions made to delimit the newly independent Albanian state primarily reflected the resulting great power conflicts and compensations, rather than the professed ethnographic rationale. The second part of the article explores some of the consequences of the decisions made to delimit Albanian boundaries, especially in ‘ethnic’ or national terms.     

The Macedonian–Albanian political frontier: the re‐articulation of post‐Yugoslav political identities

Abstract. The article examines the re‐articulation of national identity in Macedonia since its independence in 1992. Both ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian political identities have been engaged in a complex process of redefinition. Two ethnic groups had previously been strongly influenced by the Marxist paradigm and its Yugoslav official interpretation. During the 1990s, the elements of the old paradigm were combined with elements of the new – liberal democratic – concepts of nationhood. While some of the concepts developed within the old Yugoslav framework are still in use, the new liberal‐democratic political paradigm finds it difficult to include them into an official discourse on nationhood. At the same time, introduction of the concepts inherent to the liberal‐democratic paradigm has disturbed the fragile balance achieved through the old Yugoslav narrative. In new circumstances, the ethnic Macedonians transformed themselves from the ‘constitutive nation’ to ‘majority’. However, the ethnic Albanians found it more difficult to accept the status of ‘minority’, which was once (in Yugoslav Marxist narrative) considered to be politically incorrect. Thus, they insist on being recognised as a ‘nation’, equal to ethnic Macedonians. In its essence, the conflict in Macedonia is – to a large extent – a conflict between two different concepts of what is Macedonia and who are Macedonians. The questions posed are: is the minority (ethnic Albanians) part of the nation? Could two nations exist peacefully within one state? The article maps out differences between two different discourses on the identity of the new Macedonian state.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 32, Number 1. February 2016

Front and back cover caption, volume 32 issue 1 Front cover Greece‐German relations The Prussian goose‐step survives in Greek official ceremonies as part of the ‘traditional’ display by the famed Evzones, or presidential guards – a relic of the German‐derived monarchy and its militaristic traditions. It is combined here with a male costume popular in the European parts of the Ottoman Empire, especially among Albanians and Greeks, and nowadays associated in popular imagination with the Greek War of Independence (1821–1833). German cultural influence still lingers in Greece, most visibly in the remnants of 19th‐century neoclassical architecture in Athens and other cities. The brutal Nazi occupation of Greece and Germany's role in Greece's current economic turmoil together represent another side of a tormented historical relationship between the two countries and their peoples. In an essay of which Part I appears in this issue, Michael Herzfeld argues that the mutual stereotyping by Greeks and Germans – a habit deeply rooted in these complex interactions – has become a major cause of Greece's difficulties, perpetuating its ‘crypto‐colonial’ status within the European Union. He suggests that the only possibility for escaping this destructive downward spiral is through a determined attempt to stop the stereotyping, and argues that anthropology could play an important role in that reversal of accumulated hurt and mutual distrust. Back cover FOOD POVERTY IN THE UK If, as Lévi‐Strauss suggested, food is bon à penser, how can an anthropologist interpret a lack of food in a highly developed society? Can an anthropological lens illuminate either the recent rise in food insecurity in the UK or the exponential growth of food banks? In this issue, Pat Caplan reflects on her current fieldwork on these topics in north London and west Wales. She focuses particularly on food banks, making use of interviews and participant observation with clients, trustees and volunteers, as well as local and national media reports. The author poses a series of questions: firstly, she considers who needs food aid and why, which involves a consideration of insecure employment and low wages, as well as changes to the benefit regime which have adversely impacted on food bank clients. Secondly, she discusses who provides food aid and how, by considering those giving to and running food banks and other types of organization, including their motivations for getting involved. Thirdly, she asks what kind of solution food aid offers to an apparently growing problem. Does this form of charity merely depoliticize the arguments? Finally and most importantly, she asks what this tells us about the society in which we live, about the state and its policies and the public discourse around such issues. She notes that there are many well‐honed anthropological concepts which can be brought to bear on these issues, including gifting and reciprocity, shame and stigma, entitlements and blame. Finally, a consideration of voluntarism raises important questions about rights and entitlement, including the state's compliance with the international covenants to which it has signed up.     

Rent control measures of immediate post‐war period (1944–1952) and their impact on urban development in Greater Athens

The purpose of this paper is first to highlight the importance of the immediate post‐war period in influencing development trends and spatial policy in post‐war urban Greece and Athens in particular. Second in this respect, to stress on the critical impact of rent control measures adopted in response to specific social economic and political issues which emerged at the time. Rent control—together with other exceptional reconstruction measures—contributed above all to the reinforcement of the post‐war development pattern, founded on owner occupation and self‐financed Property development. This in the short run acted against a planned policy rationale and to the various planned attempts formulated during reconstruction. In the long run, it has also acted as a determinant for the consolidation of an ‘non‐planning policy’ situation persistent in Athens and in most urban areas in Greece.     

Chiseling away at a concrete legacy: Engaging with Communist-era heritage and memory in Albania

Abstract

Albania spent much of the 20th century under one of Europe’s most ideologically repressive regimes. In order to justify and ostensibly protect this system, the Albanian Communist regime (1944–1992) constructed a massive array of defensive works, which formed a major piece of the Hoxhaist (after Enver Hoxha) aesthetic. Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Albanians have gained the freedom to travel abroad, but have largely avoided addressing the legacy of this difficult past within their own society. Based on the theory that some aspects of traumatic memory can be addressed through confronting and re-signifying material heritage, we explore some localized cases in order to comprehend the roots of this concrete legacy, combining theoretical analysis with field experiences in collaboration with the Gjirokastra Foundation. We suggest one possible approach to the difficult process of creating open community dialogue to deal with the scars of a traumatic past and thus begin the healing process.     

Alternative Food Economies and Transformative Politics in Times of Crisis: Insights from the Basque Country and Greece

Why and how do alternative economies emerge, how do they develop and what is their contribution, if any, to transformative politics? Alternative economies proliferate in the countries worse hit by economic crisis and austerity, such as Spain or Greece. Yet the existing literature is stuck in a counter‐productive division between celebration and critique. We move beyond this division applying philosopher Daniel Bensaïd's understanding of politics to two alternative food economies, one in the Basque Country and one in Greece. We illuminate the activist strategies and specific conjunctures within which the two alternatives emerged and explain how they develop in the face of political‐economic barriers. Alternative economies, we conclude, can be transformational when they are inserted in activist strategies directed to extend conflict, social struggles and challenge the capital–state nexus.     

Recent discoveries of Aurignacian and Epigravettian sites in Albania

Albania is a possible stepping-stone for the dispersal of Homo sapiens into Europe, since Palaeolithic traces (namely from the so-called Uluzzian culture) have been discovered in neighboring Greece and Italy. After two years of searching for evidence of modern humans in Albania we here report on excavated test trenches representing two time slices: an Aurignacian open-air site from southern Albania and two Epigravettian cave sites in central and northern Albania—areas heretofore archaeologically unknown. The new Albanian data fill a gap in the eastern Adriatic archaeological record for Marine Isotope Stages 3 and 2. Adding current knowledge of Late Pleistocene landscape evolution, a “contextual area model” can be constructed describing the habitats of these human populations.     

Returning Heroes: Greek and Native Interaction in (Pre‐)Colonial South Italy and Beyond

The cultural interaction between the native population of south Italy and the first immigrants from Greece and the Levant in the early first millennium BC has been exhaustively discussed in recent years. In most cases the debate has been focused on the native side of the encounter, on imports and imitations of Greek and Levantine products found in Italy and on the effects that these foreign goods and the ideologies attached to them had on the local population. Only rarely, however, has the question been asked of how the encounter affected the Greek and Levantine participants. New evidence from the necropolis of Francavilla Marittima, a pivotal point in the early trade and exchange network across the Mediterranean, reveals the adoption of Greek drinking and dining customs based on the notion of ritualized guest‐friendship by the local elite as early as the third quarter of the eighth century BC. As Greek xenia functions on the basis of equal rank of the participants involved, it follows from this discovery that Greek aristocrats must have been present in the pre‐colonial world from a very early time. In the second part of the paper the question is raised of the material evidence in Greece and the Aegean world for these early contacts with the native Italic population, focusing in particular on the evidence from Eretria, one of the leading powers in the early Greek exploration of the West.     

Urbanities: Grecanici Migration to the City of Reggio Calabria,South Italy

This paper discusses degrees of urbanity or urbanities using ethnographic data from research conducted among the Grecanici communities in the city of Reggio Calabria, south Italy. Urbanization in south Italy is usually associated with social and territorial mobility, education and natural disasters. It is further discussed in terms of a rural/urban duality that masks rather than reveals possible diversities concerning the social life in the city and the links between rural and urban which in the urban environment follow different trajectories. Following the premise that the effects of urbanization cannot be homogenously felt by the actors, I follow the Grecanici migration to the city of Reggio Calabria in the decade of the 1950s in order to argue that urbanities are directly informed by factors such as kinship, neighbourhood identification, education and socio‐economic status.     

Crisis attack: Impromptu ethnography in the Greek maelstom (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Assailed by mounting debt and increasing economic distress, Greece today is also the target of media representations that emphasize violence and disorder. Michael Herzfeld – who was mugged and tear‐gassed in Athens this past July – argues that these representations are misleading and indeed are part of the problem they seek to explain. The structural violence of an insistent barrage of negative media coverage as well as that of international financial pressures undermines a previously stable and relatively crime‐free country, encouraging new forms – including police and popular racism, physical violence at demonstrations, and acts of petty crime – of what had once been a largely codified and ritualized idiom of aggression. While many Greeks do feel that debts should be paid, increasing economic desperation fuels a different view, and one that can best be interpreted in light of the social values that anthropologists have long studied in Greece: that the country's creditors are violating their own obligations toward Greece and thus deserve to face both default on the massive debt and the public hostility of the Greek people.     

The Saga of the ‘Second industrial divide’ and the history of the ‘third Italy’: Evidence from export data

The idea of the Third Italy has achieved an iconic status in geography. It has come to represent one of the main geographical manifestations of the so‐called second industrial divide between Fordist mass production and flexible specialisation. Yet the idea has received limited critical attention since acquiring its elevated status. It deserves to do so, because it involves confusing a localised model of economic development with the economic character of a larger geographic region. Examining province level export data for the years 1985, 1991, 1995 and 1999 for both total exports and two key sectors using exploratory spatial data analysis, provincial rankings and LISAs (local indicators of spatial association) suggests that the export‐based homogeneity and dynamism of the Third Italy can be exaggerated. Italy's urban hierarchy, particularly the centrality of Milan, continues to play a significant role in the Italian economy. Common use of the term ‘Third Italy’ confuses an economic process with a specific geographical configuration.     

Heretical networks between East and West: the case of the Fraticelli

ABSTRACT

This article explores the links between the Franciscan heresy of the Fraticelli and the Latin territories of Greece in the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. It argues that the early involvement of Franciscan dissidents, like Angelo Clareno, with the lands of Latin Romania played an important role in the development of the Franciscan movement of dissent, on the one hand by allowing its enemies to associate them with the disobedient Greek Church and on the other by establishing havens where the dissidents were relatively safe from the persecution of the Inquisition and whence they were also able to send missionaries back to Italy to revive the movement there. In doing so, the article reviews all the known information about Fraticelli communities in Greece, and discovers two hitherto unknown references, demonstrating that the sect continued to exist in Greece during the Ottoman period, thus outlasting the Fraticelli communities of Italy.     

Albania during WWII: Mustafa Merlika Kruja’s Fascist Collaboration

This essay discusses the fascist collaboration of Mustafa Merlika Kruja, Albania’s prime minister from 1941 to 1943. In textbooks published before 1990, Kruja was called the Albanian Quisling and his very name was associated with treason. Yet even in publications after the 1990s Kruja was seen as Albania’s black sheep and only few sources viewed him objectively. Aiming to unite Albania with Kosovo, he stressed the need to fight communism, which for him was synonymous with antinationalism and, which he believed, would bring Albania to ruin. Thus Kruja used anticommunism and nationalism as his main political weapon to gain support for his collaboration with fascist Italy and with Albanian nationalists.     

Meridionalismo,the crisis of liberalism,and the advent of Marxism in post‐risorgimento Naples

For an ideology described by Marx himself as one that was suitable only for advanced societies, backward Naples ironically served as the point of entry for Marxism in Italy. As theorists and activists, the great Neapolitan Marxists—Antonio Labriola, Carlo Cafiero, Arturo Labriola, and Amadeo Bordiga—completely dominated the initial stages of the movement. For an understanding of the severe socio‐economic conditions that did much to make Naples the incubator of radicalism in post‐Risorgimento Italy, the literature of the meridionalisti (southern reformers) remains indispensable. Under attack on both sides of the Atlantic by a new generation of historians who admirably seek to produce a nuanced history of the South by rising above the stereotypes associated with a one‐dimensional image of the “Southern Problem,” the meridionalisti require supplementing today as historians. Nevertheless, the reaction against them has been too extreme. They remain invaluable eye‐witnesses to the conditions and events that formed the historical context of Marxism's momentous appearance in Italy.     

The Amenity Complex: Towards a Framework for Analysing and Predicting the Emergence of a Multifunctional Countryside in Australia

There is growing consensus among academics, regional development organisations and rural communities that the future growth and development of rural regions is increasingly dependent upon their ability to convey, to both established and prospective residents, the ‘amenity’ of their local physical, social and economic environments. However, little research to date has sought to identify exactly what comprises ‘amenity’ in the rural context, or has examined how this conceptually slippery quality is distributed across rural Australia, or how it influences local demographic, socio‐economic and land use change. This paper attempts a broad scale investigation of rural amenity in the south‐east Australian ecumene, identifying its core components in this context, mapping its distribution and assessing the nature of its influence over in‐migration rates over the past three decades. The paper finds that, at a macro‐scale, amenity tends to follow a general gradient from high to low according to distance from the coast, and that its relationship with in‐migration rates has increased substantially between 1976–1981 and 1996–2001.     

Italian history and gli italiani nel mondo,Part II

Abstract

Italian historians have not yet seriously confronted the emigration of 27 million Italians as an interpretative theme. Part II of this two‐part article studies Italian migrants’ experiences in France, South America, Switzerland and Germany, comparing ‘Latin’ and ‘Germanic’ receiving areas to the English‐speaking world discussed in Part I. A focus on these other sections of the Italian diaspora challenges some fundamental interpretations of historians of Italy about emigration: Italian migrations to these areas were neither limited to the late nineteenth century, sparked by the economic crises of those yean, nor a product of the ‘problem of the Mezzogiomo’. Italian historians have special opportunities to study return migration to Italy, and to interpret Italy's own evolution into a multicultural receiving country, by comparing it to the models of multi‐ethnic nations where Italian migrants once settled around the world.