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‘Business as usual’ in contemporary Albania takes place between different and conflicting systems of meaning and value. Drawing from ethnographic material collected in Tirana, Albania, this article examines the complexities of social and economic life in a city where distinct moral economies routinely clash with the capitalist principle of profit....
Context in source publication
Context 1
... demands of another projectan independent publishing venture devoted to translating literature, philosophy and criticism into Albanian. Beginning with a translation of Kurt Vonnegut's 1969novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (Thertorja Pesë, 2009, the publishing company has by now brought out more than eighty titles previously unavailable in Albanian (fig. ...
Citations
... This allure of klering needs to be situated within the broader context of a lack of stable and predictable employment opportunities in an economy that is increasingly driven by neoliberal principles of entrepreneurship and laissez-faire economics, combined with a lack of government oversight and safety measures for developers and subcontractors alike. The experience of everyday life for many of these young men reflects a more general condition of precarity and uncertainty in Albania (see also Rosen, 2019Rosen, , 2022. ...
Construction booms have dominated Albania's economy and politics since the late 1990s. These booms continued even during times of illiquidity. One of the sources of financing construction in Albania is the practice of klering (in‐kind payments). In this practice, developers pay subcontractors in (future) apartments in exchange for materials and labor. I argue that, in klering transactions, housing serves as an asset and a means of payment. The practice of klering emerged at the interface of postcommunist transformations, neoliberal reforms, and the fetishization of housing as an asset of more durable and multifaceted economic and cultural value. While grounded in the local histories and values of housing, klering is made possible by a fuzzy property regime, systemic corruption, and widespread informality. At the same time, klering echoes other global patterns pertaining to housing, such as the rise of asset economy, financialization, and money laundering through real estate purchases. The klering economy echoes speculative logics and practices that are prevalent across and that link centers and peripheries, formal and informal markets. These economic logics generate uncertainty and ambiguity; they mobilize social networks and cultural imaginaries; and they thrive on and further reproduce deep social and economic inequalities.
... As I have noted elsewhere(Rosen 2019a), ATA's headquarters in Kamëz housed a small community library that was established with one hundred books the organization received through donations and one hundred books they bought from Pika pa sipërfaqe.2 IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: STRUCTURES OF FEELING IN ALBANIAN… ...
... As I have noted elsewhere(Rosen 2019b), I use the term "ethnographies of the particular" with reference to the approach Lila Abu-Lughod outlined in "Writing Against Culture" (1991). I was first drawn to this approach because the term "Albanian culture" never seemed adequate to the task of understanding and conveying what life was like for Arlind and Ataol. ...
This chapter traces a structure of feeling from the beginning of Albanian literary production in the 16th century to the 21st century formation of the Tirana-based publishing collective Pika pa sipërfaqe. The discussion in the chapter expands the idea of “the small context” of Albanian literature to include the far-reaching work of independent, socially minded publishers who have begun, through networks of transnational actors and institutions, to make a difference in the public life of their community.
Reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities can move scholars of real cities to look at issues of urbanity in new and useful ways (Linder, this volume). This was certainly true for us, two differently positioned ethnographers who have previously approached Tirana, the Albanian capital, from our own distinctive anthropological perspectives. As a Tirana native who has lived abroad since 1995 (Musaraj) and a foreigner with more experience than a casual visitor but less understanding than a local (Rosen), we situate our analysis of the city somewhere between the skeptical resignation expressed by many of our Tirana-based interlocutors and the fetishism of difference often espoused by international observers. Our general argument is that Tirana’s contemporary urban landscape—from the iconic buildings that stand at the historic city center to the concrete-panel apartment buildings and informal markets located along its periphery—can be read as a chronotopic narrative of a city “where time and space intersect and fuse” (Bakhtin 1981, 7). Extending Calvino’s image of a city made of countless visible and invisible traces, our analysis in this chapter reveals an urban landscape that is as layered with names, signs, memories, merchants, wounds, desires, and the dead as anything Marco Polo told Kublai Khan. Like Calvino’s city of Clarice, Tirana’s modern history has been marked by continuous construction and destruction. A succession of different political regimes approached the city as a tabula rasa, seeking to construct a new world from scratch. Yet, as we reflect in the following, the various pasts of Tirana are also still visible and palpable in the present fabric of the city.
The following chapter is an essay that emerged from a thought exercise during anthropological fieldwork carried out in São Paulo, Brazil. Calvino’s Invisible Cities became both a methodology and epistemology with which I could interpret and re-create the city.
Studies have proposed that participatory arts, particularly literature reading, enhance empathy, supposedly leading to enhanced moral judgment. Building on fieldwork in a Literary Empowerment Programme for people with mental vulnerabilities in Denmark, I seek to qualify the role of empathy, the ability to imaginatively put yourself in other people’s shoes, when reading literature in a social setting. I describe encounters with empathy and the limits thereof, as it happened in the reading groups investigated. Taking inspiration from Jarrett Zigon, these encounters are situated within the moral and ethical assemblage of the programme, whose objective was to create ‘literary free spaces’. I connect this objective to Scandinavian and Scottish Enlightenment values of freedom, equality and civil society. These insights are finally used to discuss future pathways for the anthropology of literature and reading, moving beyond a focus on understanding and meaning-making processes.
