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INTRODUCTION
I was led to the study of spatial concepts by a long path, grounded in my interest for the anthropology of Melanesia. As an undergraduate student (1996-2001) I conducted a shortterm research in one of the villages of Oro province in Papua New Guinea. I continued with postgraduate studies, completing a bit longer fieldwork on the Goodenough Island of Papua New Guinea. At that time, during the writing of my M.A. thesis, I became interested in the conceptualisations of space and place following the land tenure conflicts that seemed to constitute the most important issue not only in Bwaidoga village but also elsewhere on Goodenough and Papua New Guinea in general. In trying to resolve their disputes over the landownership, people there often resorted to “customary” principles by recalling myths4 and local genealogies, which were, due to the political, economical, social and cultural changes, reconstructed and appropriated anew. These relations between land conflicts and continuous reconstruction of peoples’ identity, belonging and locatedness stimulated my interest in the studies of spatial notions such as place, space, location and landscape. Paths and tracks that a student takes throughout her/his doctoral research often collide with different entanglements and barriers before reaching the final point. The path of my doctoral research met such barrier in its very start, when I was trying to obtain a research visa to conduct a longer fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. In the middle of a difficult period, I shared my worries with a colleague from my student years. She asked me a crucial question: “Is it possible to do fieldwork somewhere else and maintain the same topic of your interest?” and suggested that I could do my fieldwork perhaps more easily in a number of other locations in “Albania, for instance, which was a completely isolated country no more than 14 years ago”. Shortly after my discussion with a friend I went on a preliminary visit (September 2004) to different places in Albania, especially those in its southern part. It was then and there that I decided to follow my interest in spatial concepts and to conduct my ethnographic fieldwork in one of the coastal villages of the Himare/Himara area. Between December 2004 and December 2005 I spent twelve months in Southern Albania. Why did I choose Himare/Himara and, as it turned out, the village of Dhermi/Drimades? There is no straight answer to this question. It seems that a combination of different factors guided my decision. 4 On myths and their relation to decsent group's origins in Bwaidoga village, Papua New Guinea I discussed in Bwaidogan Myths of Origin (2003: 61-87).
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Practical reasons included the vicinity of school that provided me with the opportunity to efficiently learn the Albanian language. Good traffic connections to the city of Vlore and its archives were also important to me. Besides, my first impressions of the social landscape there were favourable, especially after I had met some of the villagers. For example, I could discern different conceptions and representations of place and its relation to the peoples’ selfidentification already during a short conversation with an old woman whom Entela and I met during our first visit to Dhermi/Drimades (described in Preamble). Namely, a discussion between her and Entela showed how the origin and belonging of the people of Dhermi/Drimades are related to language and territory and understood in terms of the nationstate and regionalism. The old woman’s awkward use of the Albanian code and constant switching to the local Greek one provoked disapprobation in Entela and led her to question the woman about her belonging: “Are you Greek or Albanian?” Interestingly enough, the old woman chose none of two options. She declared herself as being a Northern Epirote. While she recognised this as a distinctive identity, Entela did not think of it as a kind of a Greek identity. This early meeting provided me with an example of how the peoples’ way of identification can shift according to their location, which is always set to the background of a wider geopolitical and social context, and how it can be managed and contested in a particular social and cultural environment. The ambiguity of a dual name Dhermi/Drimades already implicates a social complexity that exists in this area. The official, Albanian name Dhermi is mainly used by those inhabitants and seasonal workers who use the southern (Tosk) or the northern (Ghek) Albanian dialect. Many of these newcomers and seasonal workers moved to the village from other parts of Albania either during the period of communism or after it. In contrast to Dhermi, the local, Greek name Drimades is mainly used by the inhabitants who are believed to “originate” from the village and who mainly use the local Greek dialect and partly the southern Albanian (Tosk) one. Spaces and places in which inhabitants live are ascribed with numerous meanings by local people, recent settlers, seasonal workers, local emigrants, historiographers, demographers, geographers, politicians, and others. These meanings are mutually related and continuously change within the processes of the local, regional and national (social, political and historical) construction and reconstruction of spaces and places. Therefore, the processes of ongoing and unstable construction of spaces and places in the village of Dhermi/Drimades became my main concern here.
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Many people of Dhermi/Drimades travel back and forth not only between and within rural and urban places in Albania and Greece and elsewhere in Europe. When moving through and within different places the people of Dhermi/Drimades reconfigure and redefine their own localities and the meaning of their village. In this process of ongoing reconfigurations the localities and the meanings of the village and its people are often ambiguous and lead to negotiations and conflicts over their belonging and locatedness. When faced with social (migration, depopulation), political (democracy) and economic (liberalisation of the market) changes, people of Dhermi/Drimades situate their village on the geopolitical map, which includes Greece or European Union on the one side and Albania or the Balkans on the other. Peoples’ movements are not something new, although they have been facilitated by a new road system, modern transportation and change in availability of passports. Migrations took place in Dhermi/Drimades for many centuries due to considerable erosion of terrain, the lack of the land suitable for cultivation, and different economical, social, and political changes. While on the one hand these movements brought about multiplicity of connections between people and places, on the other hand the administrative (Ottoman period, from 15th to the early 19th century) and political divisions (formation of the nation-states in the middle of 19th century) brought about divisions of people and places according to different categorisations such as language, religion and territory. The purpose of this work is to show the processes of establishment and reconstruction of meanings of place and space in Himare/Himara area of Southern Albania, and in Dhermi/Drimades in particular. These processes show the cultural, socio-political, and historical dynamics and fractality of the construction of places and spaces, which are always in the state of be-coming. While the meanings of places and spaces are on the one hand perceived through their differences and contradictions, they are on the other hand constructed through similarities and agreements between the national and the local levels. These wider social and political processes help the people of Dhermi/Drimades to define their sense of belonging and locality.
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Theoretical Frames: The Construction of Spaces and Places Spaces receive their essential being from particular localities and not from ‘space’ itself. Heidegger 1977: 332 One of the first (West European)5 studies of spatial concepts in social sciences and humanities dates back to the late 19th and early 20th century when evolutionists and functionalists such as Morgan (1881), Mauss and Beuchat (1979 [1904]), Durkheim (1915) and early structural functionalists such as Evans-Pritchard (1940) studied the interactive relationship between people and their built environment. These earlier notions of space and society that were based on a positivistic approach and coupled with functionalism were in 1970s critically rethought by human geographers (Tuan 1974 and 1977, and Relph 1976) and behavioural geographers (Lowenthal 1961, Brookfield 1969, Harvey 1973, Gould and White 1974, Gold 1980), and later partly also by the “new” archaeologists (Ingold 1993, Tilley 1994). Space and society were no longer postulated as separate and autonomous but as mutually related entities. The neo-Marxist thinker Henry Lefebvre (1991 [1974]) analysed the space and its relation to society. He defined space as being always produced, never separated from its producing forces or the labour that shapes it. In his influential work The Production of Space (1991 [1974]), he conceptualized space as an interrelation between spatial practices (perception of space), reproduction of space (conception of space) and representational space (lived space). Moreover, Lefebvre suggested that space is always produced and representational. Therefore, it can not be viewed as absolute or “a space-in-itself”; nor does the notion of space contain a space within itself (1991: 299). He defined space as being inevitably social and cultural process. There is a dialectical relationship between space and society which merges them into a continuous, contingent and irreversible process. Instead of discussing what social space actually is, he examined struggles over the meanings of space and considered how relations across territories were given cultural meanings. In social relations various meanings are hidden. They define spaces through social contestations, disputes and struggles. Such struggles often lead to contradictory spaces, which were identified by Lefebvre as lacking consistency between different representations of space. The contradictions of space are inevitable and can evolve either into conflicts or may be resolved by “the rational organisation 5 The classical Greeks, the Romans, the Indus peoples and the Chinese developed diverse conceptualizations of space millennia ago.
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of production and the equally rationalized management of society as a whole” (1991: 422). Lefebvre refused to differentiate between two notions: place and space. He argued that any kind of differentiation could be misleading as it would reduce the meaningfulness of spatial terms used in a particular local community. While Lefebvre focused on notions of space broadly using Hegelian dialectics, Foucault (1975, 1980) took a different approach, which did not require the existence of an overarching entity or structure such as ‘society’ in order to understand the social construction of space and the power dynamics involved. Foucault examined the way power and control are distributed in space. He apprehended the concept of space through the spatial tactics which contribute to the maintenance of power and control of one group over another. In contrast to Foucault, who focused on the spatial tactics of political power, Michel de Certeau (1984) centred his attention on individual resistance to spatial forms of social power. In his work The Practice of Everyday Life he explored what he called the “tactics” used by groups or individuals who are in some ways “already caught in the nets of ‘discipline’” (de Certeau 1984: xiv-xv). De Certeau stated that “space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it” (1984: 117). He studied space and place through spatial operations, such as walking, storytelling, remembering, writing and reading (1984: 91-115, 194-195). These operations refer to movement, which constantly transforms places into spaces and spaces into places (184:118). Although space and place are always in relation, de Certeau emphasized a distinction between them. While space (espace) is the effect of operations that “orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities”, place (lieu) is the “order (of whatever kind) in accord with which the elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence” (1984: 117). Place is an “instantaneous configuration of positions” (ibid.). Tim Ingold (1993, 2000) looks at the construction of place from a “dwelling perspective”. In defining the concept of dwelling, he refers to the etymological meaning of the term, as it was proposed by Heidegger (Ingold 2000: 185). “To build” or in German bauen comes from the Old English and High German word buan, meaning “to dwell” (ibid.). Dwelling encompasses one’s life on earth, thus “I dwell, you dwell” is identical to “I am, you are” (ibid.). Cultivation and construction are part of the fundamental sense of dwelling. Dwelling thus means that “the
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forms people build, whether in their imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings” (2000: 186). In this view humans “are brought into existence as organismpersons within a world that is inhabited by beings of manifold kinds, both human and nonhuman” (2000: 5). The “social” relations between humans are thus a sub-set of ecological relations. Already in his early work (1996) Ingold presented the notion of environment defined as culturally constructed, being both a “prelude” and an “epilogue” and as such not necessarily involving “explication” or “discourse”. The knowledge – which is defined as the generative potential of a complex process – of the environment is continuously formed alongside movements of a human being in the world (2000: 230). “We know as we go, not before we go” (ibid., italics original). Following the above mentioned authors it could be said that the meanings of space and place are continuously reproduced and recreated through the processes of social relations, namely through perceived, conceived and lived spaces (Lefebvre 1991); through distribution of power that permeates all levels of society (Foucault 1975, 1980); through everyday practices and spatial operations of social agents, who never simply enact culture but interpret and reappropriate it in their own ways (de Certeau 1984); and finally through dwelling perspective, where knowledge about the environment goes along with the movement in the world (Ingold 2000)6. Differently to the above mentioned authors, who used various ways and approaches to discuss the open-ended processes of spatial production and reconstruction, Gupta and Ferguson (2001 [1997]) situate their studies of spatial construction within the contemporary context of migrations and transnational culture flows of the late capitalist world. They focus on the “ways in which dominant cultural forms may be picked up and used – and significantly transformed – in the midst of the fields of power relations that link localities to a wider world” (2001: 5). Gupta and Ferguson put emphasis on the “complex and sometimes ironic political processes through which the cultural forms are imposed, invented, reworked, and transformed” (ibid.). In their edited collection Culture, Power and Place (2001) Gupta and Ferguson critically rethink the relations between space and power, which are intimately intertwined. They discuss 6 There are several other authors who looked at the processes of space construction through different perspectives: cognitions (Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995), sensations (Feld and Basso 1996), identity and locality (Lovell 1998), memory and history (Stewart and Strathern 2003).
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processes and practices of place making and emphasise the interrelations between the local settings and larger regional structures and processes. People and places are not enclosed homogeneities and their locality does not necessarily relate to the sense of being rooted to a particular place. Locality “is not simply that one is located in a certain place but that particular place is set apart and opposed to other places” (2001: 13). There is a mutual relation between the process of the place making and the process of construction of locality and identity. These processes, according to Gupta and Ferguson, are always contested and unstable and involve discontinuity, resistance and alterity. In parallel to the processes of place making, which are always contested, Gupta (2001: 17) points out the relations between places that continuously shift as a result of political and economic reorganisation of space in the world system. Moreover he argues that “dominant cultural forms” (2001: 5) that are being imposed are never simply enacted by social agents but are always reappropriated and reinterpreted by those agents. As such the notions of place and identity are socially constructed, and always in the process of becoming. Although the scholars talked about the place and space as having different names and meanings, they all considered them as inevitably related. Place and space are not neatly separated by clear boundaries. In my thesis I will explore this relationship between space and place as conceptualized in everyday life of people from Dhermi/Drimades. People do not use the same word when referring to place and space. Therefore, I will consider place and space as different but also related. I will generally use notion of place (topos/vendi) in terms of social interactions, experiences and practices while the notion of space (horos/hapsire) in terms of abstractions and wider social and political conceptualisations of people’s life-world. Fieldwork Frames: Dhermi/Drimades of Himare/Himara Area How are the dynamic processes of construction and reconfiguration of space and place connected to the village of Dhermi/Drimades? What are the relations between the village, migrations, and transnational cultural flows? Part of the answer already stems from the old woman’s identification of being a Northern Epirote. When Entela asks, “Are you an Albanian or a Greek?”, she considers the elderly woman’s identification in national terms. Differently
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to Entela the elderly woman sees herself in local terms or in terms of ethnicity7, placing her identification in Northern Epirus. In this short example the individual identity is, along with other determinants such as language, religion and kinship, defined territorially. The identity is a mobile and unstable relation to difference which always includes the construction of space (Gupta in Ferguson 2001: 13). Therefore I will be mainly preoccupied with identification (a living process) rather than with identity as such (a fixed, often politically defined concept). “Exactly where Northern Epirus begins and ends is another one of those contested issues involving drawing lines on the map” (Green 2005: 15). While for some the Northern Epirus straddles the Greek-Albanian border, for others it also includes a part of the Southern Albania, where predominantly the Greek-speaking population of Christian Orthodox religion lives; and there are also others, especially the Albanian people, for whom Northern Epirus does not exist at all. The widest geographical and historical region of Epirus is considered to consist of Southern Albania and Epirus in Greece, regardless of the Greek-Albanian border (ibid.). After the foundation of the independent Republic of Albania in 1913, Epirus was divided between Southern Albania and Epirus in Greece. According to the mainstream public opinion in Greece the Greek speaking people of Orthodox religion living in Southern Albania are called Northern Epirots (Vorioepirotes) (see Triandafyllidou and Veikou 2002: 191). According to the public opinion in Albania they are often referred to by Greeks or Greku or pejoratively Kaure (non-believers) or Kaur i derit (non-believer-pigs, i.e. Greek pigs). Throughout the centuries people living in Northern Epirus have travelled to and from the area mainly because of trading, seasonal work, shepherding or due to their service in different armies (Winnifrith 2002, Vullnetari 2007). In the early 19th century the area of today’s Southern Albania and Epirus in Greece was part of the vilayet with a centre in Ioannina. For purposes of a tax collecting system Ottoman administration divided all non-Muslim people in special administrative and organizational units, millets, which incorporated people according to their religious affiliation, regardless of where they lived, what language(s) they spoke, or what was the colour of their skin (Glenny 1999: 71, 91-93, 112, 115, Mazower 2000: 59-60, 7 In modern Greek language the term ethnicity derives from the word ethnos which virtually incorporate the entire range of terminology for nationhood and nationalism (Herzfeld 2005: 113, see also Green 2005: 266 fn. 12). Similar meanings the word ethnicicy has among the people of Dhermi/Drimades who predominantly use local Greek dialect and Albanian southern dialect in their day-to-day conversation. In order to avoid this semantic conflation that do not fully reflect the meanig of ethnicity as defined by Barth (1970 [1969], 1994), Eriksen (1993), Coen A. P. (1994), Knezevic Hocevar (1999), Sumi (2000) et.al. in the continuing part of my thesis I do not use this term.
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Duijzings 2002: 60, Green, 2005: 147). After 1913, the Ottoman principle of organizing people and places was replaced with the nationalistic principle, which categorized people and places according to their language and territory. Discordances between the Ottoman and nationalistic ways of dividing people and places led to tensions and territorial disputes, which since then continuously appear, disappear, reappear and blur (de Rapper and Sintes 2006, Green 2005: 148-149). Politically raised tensions, which were mainly provoked by the pro-Greek party, began in different places where both Greek and Albanian speakers lived. In accord with the claims of the Greek speaking people, the autonomous government of Epirus with its centre in Gjirokaster was declared in 1914 by the pro-Greek party, which was in power in the south of Albania at that time. After the beginning of the World War I (1914-1918) the authonomous government soon collapsed (Winnifrith 2002: 130). When the war ended the tendencies to re-establish the autonomy of the territory known as Northern Epirus continued. In February 1922 the Albanian Parliament ratified the Declaration of minority rights proposed by Fan Noli. Declaration recognised the rights of Greek speaking people living in the villages of Gjirokaster and Delvine while to the villages of Himare/Himara area were given some rights such as education in Greek language (Clayer 2006). According to my discussions with the people of Dhermi/Drimades the border between Albania and Greece was quite irrelevant to the people living in Southern Albania and Epirus in Greece as they continued to travel until the end of the World War II. The same irrelevancy was also expressed by the people of Pogoni, in Epirus of Greece (Green 2005: 57). Green notes that for many inhabitants of that area, Gjirokaster or Argyrokastro was considered to be a lot wealthier than Pogoni itself in that time. Many people from Pogoni were regularly shopping in Argyrokastro which was geographically closer than Ioannina (Green 2005: 57). During the communist dictatorship (1945-1990), the road, to dromo, which lead to the state border and which was used by the people living in Southern Albania for travel and trade, was closed following the Hoxa’s policy of suppression of a free movement across the state borders. In the period of Hoxha’s autarky the minority status, acknowledged to the people living in Palasa, Dhermi/Drimades and Himare/Himara in 1922, was revoked with the explanation that there are not enough Greek-speakers living in Himare/Himara area (Kondis
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and Manda 1994: 21). The districts of Gjirokaster, Sarande and Delvine were confirmed as “minority zones” (Kondis and Manda 1994: 21, de Rapper and Sintes 2006: 12). Despite the restriction and control of even the in-country movements, Hoxha’s policy of unification and homogenisation of Albanian citizens forced many Greek-speaking people to move to the places in the northern or central part of Albania (Kondis and Manda 1994: 21, see also Green 2005: 227). Besides that, many of Greek names for people and places were replaced by Albanian ones and it was forbidden to use Greek language outside the minority zones (Kondis and Manda 1994: 21, Clayer 2004). During the period of communism the minority issues and irredentist claims raised by the Southern Albanian pro-Greek party almost disappeared. They resurfaced again in 1990 after the declaration of democracy, opening of the borders, and massive migrations that followed (Hatziprokopiou 2003: 1033-1059, Mai and Schwandner-Sievers 2003: 939-949, Papailias 2003: 1059-1079). Nowadays, because of economic (capitalism), political (democracy, the rise of new nation-states and European Union), social and cultural (individuality) changes, these issues are reflected upon in a somehow different way as they were before. In Dhermi/Drimades and Himare/Himara the main differentiation is advanced by the people who claim to be of the village or the area identifying themselves with the term locals (horiani) or “of the place” (apo ton topo). Except for some elderly inhabitants of Dhermi/Drimades, like the old woman with whom Entela and I spoke, declaration of being a Northern Epirot is nowadays rarely used in daily conversation. Following massive migrations to Greece and the stereotypes created and spread through the national Greek media (Vullnetari 2007: 51, Green 2005: 229), which depict Albania as a backward place, filled with backward people, Vorioepirotes are by people in Greece often perceived as being no different from Albanians. Emigration was especially apparent in the places such as Gjirokaster, Sarande, Delvine and Himare/Himara, where the Greek-speaking population lives. In order to control and regulate massive migration of people coming from Albania and other post-communist countries (i.e. USSR), and in order to deal with immigrants claiming to be of Greek origin, the Greek government introduced the immigration law 1975/1991 (Triandafyllidou and Veikou 2002: 198). In one of its sections the law deals with the immigrants of Greek origin, namely Greek
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Albanians or Vorioepirotes and Pontic Greeks8, or so called co-ethnic or omogheneis. According to the State Council 9 the Greek ethnic origin can be granted on the basis of cultural ancestry (sharing “common historical memories” and/or links with “historic homelands and culture”), Greek descent (Greek Albanians have to prove that the birth place of their parents or grandparents is in Northern Epirus), language, and religion (ibid.). By the Ministerial Decision the Greek Albanians are after the recognition and confirmation of their Greek origin granted with a Special Identity Card of omoghenis – Eidiko Deltio Tautotitas Omoghenous (Tsitselikis 2003: 7, Kondis and Manda 1994: 20-21). This provides them with an ambiguous but preferred status. They are people with Greek nationality and Albanian citizenship. Besides the legal status this special card gives them the right to reside in Greece, permits them to work there, grants them with special benefits (i.e. social security, health care, and education), and allows them a “free” crossing of the Albanian-Greek border. While the Greek migration policy defines the Greek origin on the basis of language, religion, birth and predecessors from the region called Northern Epirus, the Albanian minority policy defines the Greek origin according to the language, religion, birth and predecessors originating from the areas once called “minority zones” (i.e. districts of Gjirokaster, Sarande and Delvine). As people who claim to originate from Himare/Himara area do not live within the “minority zones” they are by the Albanian state not considered to be part of the Greek minority. The contestations in Himare/Himara area increased when the post-comm unist decollectivisation of property was made possible by Law 7501 on Land that passed in the Albanian parliament on 19 July 1991 (see Appendix). The law stated that the land, which was once taken from private owners by the communist government and managed by the agricultural production cooperatives, should be divided equally among the members of cooperative. This meant that each member of cooperative should get a portion of the land, with the size depending on the whole size of the land that used to belong to a particular agricultural production cooperative unit. The ownership, which existed before communism, was nullified. This kind of division was considered to be the fairest one by the new 8 In referring to Glytsos (1995), Triandafyllidou and Veikou define Pontic Greeks as “ethnic Greeks who either emigrated from areas of the Ottoman empire (the southern coast of the Black Sea in particular) to the former Soviet Union at the beginning of the 20th century or left Greece in the 1930s and 1940s for political reasons” (2002: 191). 9 State Council (no. 2756/1983) is the Supreme Administrative Court of Justice in Greece (Triandafyllidou and Veikou 2002: 204).
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democratic government of the right Democratic Party of Albania (Partia Demokratike e Shqiperise). In the period between 17th and 18th century, except for some areas such as isolated mountainous places of northern Mirdita area and strategically important open coast of Himare/Himara area, most of the places throughout Albania were governed according to the rules of the ciftlik system which was based on the existence of few large landowners, while the majority of population were peasants (Jacques 1995: 164-177). In these areas decollectivisation went smoothly, while in Mirdita (de Waal 1996: 169-193) and Himare/Himara area, this was not the case. Here the land used to be owned by small proprietors whose successors nowadays object to the governmental distribution plans and claim back the land of their fathers (Bollano et.al. 2006: 217-241). According to the official population registration from 2005, the village of Dhermi/Drimades conjoins approximately 1.800 residents, one half of whom lives in the emigration in Greece or elsewhere (mainly United States and Italy). Because of the massive emigration of youth, mainly the elderly population (born before 1950) and only a couple of young families live in the village of Dhermi/Drimades. Besides them, the village is nowadays also inhabited by a growing number of families and seasonal workers from other parts of Albania. They moved to Dhermi/Drimades after 1990. While most of the year the place is rather desolated, in summer months it bustles with tourists, among whom prevail the emigrants originating from Dhermi/Drimades and other places throughout Albania. Tourists arriving from Vlore and the capital Tirana, from Kosovo and sometimes from other parts of Europe, however, can also be seen. Dynamic Processes of Construction and Reconfiguration of Dhermi/Drimades and Himare/Himara Area The previous section outlined peoples’ movements which beside different social, political and economic relations and divisions refigured different locations (locatedness) of Dhermi/Drimades and its wider area. Within such a dynamical process (see Lefebvre 1974, de Certeau 1984, Ingold 1993 and 2000, Gupta and Ferguson 2001) various “where’s” were constructed (cf. Green 2005). The locations of Dhermi/Drimades and Himare/Himara were defined in a relation to other places and people with whom local people got in contact during their movements. People travelled across the whole area of Ottoman vilayet and later across
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Southern Albania and Epirus in Greece. While the state border did not present a real barrier in their life before communism, it became practically impassable after 1945. To the people living in the area a barb wire fence clearly defined its meaning. Migrations of people, however, nevertheless continued. The movements on the road leading across the border were replaced with the movements on the roads that connected Dhermi/Drimades with places in Central and Northern Albania. Movements thus continued; only the directions have changed. While the movements before communism were free in their nature and spread across the whole area of Southern Albania and Epirus, Hohxa’s policies controlled their directions. In the name of unification of people of Albania, the relocation of Greek speaking people to the places with Albanian majorities was stimulated. The movements of people from Dhermi/Drimades and Himare/Himara area could according to de Certeau (1984: 118) be interpreted as ongoing traversals from place to space and back again. Individuals mapped the space with their movements from one place to another. This phenomenon held together the space called the region of Epirus until 1945. The movements towards particular destinations were then blocked and redirected to places in Northern and Central Albania. After the fall of communism and subsequent massive migrations to Greece and Italy, the spatial map changed its nature again and connected places in Albania with places in Greece, Italy and elsewhere. All these movements, which took place in different historical periods, constituted and defined various locations of Dhermi/Drimades in its wider geopolitical and social space. When the local people, national and international policies, or local and national historiographers try to “stabilize” and determine the “absolute and truthful” meanings of village’s location, they come across oppositions, discontinuities and alterations. Many attempts to establish the boundaries in order to secure the “whereness” of Dhermi/Drimades and to locate it either in Albania or Greece may be seen as attempts to establish a fixed location, bringing to a halt the processes of its ongoing reconstruction and re-appropriation. The processes of shifting the meanings of people and places involve the ambiguity in names. Already the name of the village, Dhermi/Drimades, discloses one of these ambiguities that constitute the “whereness” of the village. On the one hand, from the perspective of the legal policies and the mainstream public opinion in Greece, Dhermi/Drimades and Himare/Himara
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area are located in the region of Northern Epirus; on the other hand, however, from the perspective of the legal policies and the public opinion in Albania they are located in Southern Albania. These ambiguous locations lead further to the ambiguities in peoples’ identification, where the Northern Epirot can mean both the Albanian and/or the Greek; and where the Greek speaking Christian Orthodox can be identified as the Albanian citizen of Greek nationality and/or the Albanian citizen and/or the member of the Greek national minority. According to Sarah Green (2005: 12) the ambiguity “can be as hegemonic and subject to disciplinary regimes as clarity; confusion, lack of means to pin things down”. She maintains that amongst the people of Pogoni these ambiguities are generated “as positive assertions and constructions of truth: ‘This is the Balkans Sarah; what did you expect’” (ibid.). Contrary to the people of Pogoni the people of Dhermi/Drimades do not explain the ambiguities, lack of clarity and confusions with a common place such as the Balkans, but ascribe them to Albania. Fluidity and indeterminacy of Albanian places are often described with the following words: “Edo einai Alvania. Monoha pseumata. Simera lene etsi kai avrio anapoda” (“This is Albania. Only lies. Today they say this and tomorrow the contrary”). In everyday conversations of local people Albania is defined in opposition to European Union. The latter is thought of as a cluster of countries of the Western Europe, where people of Dhermi/Drimades locate Greece, Italy, Germany and Austria. In contrast to European Union, which is seen as ordered, fixed and stable, Albania is defined as disordered, mixed and unstable. The term “Balkans”10 is used more in a political and media discourse than in the everyday talk in the village. Compared to the “ordered” Western Europe it carries rather a pejorative meaning (e.g. “turbulent Balkans” - cf. Todorova 1997: 45) Today, following their emigration to Greece and regular returns to their natal village during the summer, the people of Dhermi/Drimades redefine their place and map it onto a geopolitical map as the predominant way of organizing the space. They see the village side by side with Greece and European Union. For them the Albanian border is situated north of Himare/Himara area. This kind of mapping continually produces a hierarchy of places, where power and place dynamically constitute each other, depending on historically contingent and politically shaped social context. I will question this kind of hierarchy throughout my thesis. 10 More on the notion of the Balkans and its discursive meanings see Norris (1999), Bjelic and Savic (2002), Todorova (1997, 2004); and for thr Balkans as hegemonic concept see Green (2005).
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Many scholars (Herzfeld 1991, Henry 1994, De Soto 2000, Bender and Winer 2001, Gupta and Ferguson 2001, Ballinger 2003, Low and Zuniga 2003) argued that the dynamical construction of spaces and places involves instability and contestations. As this was anticipated to be the case in Dhermi/Drimades, I focused my study around the question of contested spaces and places. Contested Spaces and Places Quite a large body of literature emerged in recent years dealing with contestedness of spaces and places. Different authors approached the problem from different viewpoints within different social and cultural contexts. Let me give some examples, even if only in a condensed form. Based on her fieldwork in Kuranda of Northern Australia, Rosita Henry (1994) studied contested spaces by focusing on identity, which is just like space actively constructed, communicated and contested. Herzfeld (1991) focused on the history of the Rethemnos on the Island of Crete in Greece and showed how the materiality of this history is negotiated. De Soto (2000) studied competing discourses of two strategic groups in postsocialist East Germany. They promote different ideas for reconstructing the region by confronting its environmental problems. In their edited book Bender and Winer (2001) discerned five interrelated contexts of contested landscapes: promotion of tourism and management of cultural resources; landscapes of opposition, subversion, contestation and resistance; multiple forces of modernity that rework the landscape of particular place; voicing an ideological relationship with the landscape that is critical to group identity; and landscapes of movement and exile. Similarly to Bender and Winer, Ballinger (2003) too focuses on the landscape of exile and displacement in the region of Istria, which lies between Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. Ballinger analyses discourses of displaced people, as well as those of politicians and scholars of regional institutes and other associations, which are in various ways trying to constitute a singular “historical truth”. Shifting truths were entangled in discourses of purity and diversity “with the latter having often restated fairly exclusive notions in autonomist or regionalist guise” (2003: 266). In their edited book, Low and Zuniga (2003) identify five interrelated contexts where the contestations might appear. These contexts include: language of sites or symbols that are communicated through condensed meanings and activated particularly during dramas of political events; production of urban sites of contestation; state hegemony and the memory of sites; tourist sites, which similarly to urban spaces “lie at the intersection
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of diverse and competing social, economic, and political influences” (2003: 23); and the strategic construction of social identities articulated in terms of places or sites and represented in various discourses. Most of the authors ground their discussions of contested spaces in particular social and cultural contexts situated in urban cities, tourist sites, places and landscapes of development, migration, displacement, exile or places that are subjected to postsocialist or postcolonial changes. They study the process of construction of place and space by focusing on the spatial representations of two or more social groups or communities which reconstruct and redefine their place through the negotiation of their identity, history, and power relations. In several studies authors describe social groups as homogeneous (e.g. Henry 1994, De Soto 2000, Bender and Winer 2001, Low and Zuniga 2003) and only rarely (Herzfeld 1991, Ballinger 2003) do they expose the differences and contestations within a particular social group. Besides, in their studies of contested spaces (Low and Zuniga 2003) or landscapes (Bender and Winer 2001) the authors query mainly about the contesting “nature” of their meanings rather than about “nature” of social practices and relations. In many cases they see contestedness as preordained and inevitable (Low and Zuniga 2003). In my study of construction of space and place in Dhermi/Drimades I am interested in both the contexts that generate contestedness and those in which the dynamic reconstruction of space and place does not lead to disputes. I look at diverse and contested meanings from the perspectives of politics, law and demographics (Chapter One), historiography (Chapter Two), local people, emigrants, newcomers, and tourists (Chapter Four). I also focus on related meanings, which are disclosed in local people’s stories about the movement through and within various places over the sea and across the mountains (Chapter Three). Finally, I deal with the hierarchy of power, because it defines some spaces and places as being more salient and contested than others. While analyzing my data I was faced with a question of how to analyze the processes of dynamical construction of space and place when they are not fixed and stable but unstable and porous. Following Appadurai (1996: 46) I decided to use the fractal metaphor of shaping cultural forms. He wrote the following about the transition of study from highly localized, boundary-oriented, holistic and primordialist images of cultural forms and substances to shifting, porous and complex images of cultural forms and substances:
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What I would like to propose is that we begin to think of the configuration of cultural forms in today’s world as fundamentally fractal, that is, as possessing no Euclidian boundaries, structures or regularities. Second, I would suggest that these cultural forms, which we should strive to represent as fully fractal, are also overlapping in ways that have been discussed only in pure mathematics (in set theory, for example) and biology (in the language of polytechnic classifications). Thus we need to combine a fractal metaphor for the shape of cultures (in the plural) with a polytechnic account of their overlaps and resemblances (1996: 46). In my focus on the processes of construction of spaces and places I do not take these processes to be one-way oriented, leading, for example, from the core to the margins, but as processes that go both ways. A similar method was used by Ballinger (2003), who focused on reconstruction of history and identity in the Julian March. I am interested in complex and fractal11 processes of construction of space and place in the present day Dhermi/Drimades. I therefore describe different perspectives on and representations of the village and its people (Chapter One), place them in a historical context of historiographers, who use a similar discourse but follow different interests in their attempts to reconstruct the history of the village (Chapter Two), analyse peoples’ narratives about the sea and the mountains through which they voice and reconstitute the meaning and location of their village (Chapter Three), and present contestations and negotiations which nowadays take place around the question of rubbish disposal on the coast (Chapter Four). It was the latter issue that emerged as one of the most important subjects around which the people of Dhermi/Drimades not only construct their coastal place but also locate their belonging. 11 For deatailed exploration of the fractal phenomena in ethnographic and theoretical treatments in anthropology see also Strathern (1995 [1991]), Wagner (1991), Green (2005).
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