Between Conflicting Systems: An Ordinary Tragedy in Now-Capitalist Albania

Abstract

‘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. Starting from the ethnographic impulse to learn how two local booksellers made sense of the contradictory systems of meaning operating in their everyday lives, the analysis shows how a grinding of discordant value systems produced the more general paradox of an ‘ordinary tragedy’.

Full text

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures Volume 28, No. 2 (2019): 1-22 © Berghahn Books
doi: 10.3167/ajec.2019.280202 ISSN 1755-2923 (Print) 1755-2931 (Online)
Between Conflicting Systems
An Ordinary Tragedy in
Now-Capitalist Albania
Matthew Rosen
AbstrAct
‘Business as usual’ in contemporary Albania takes place between
different and conicting 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 prot. Starting from the ethnographic impulse to learn how two
local booksellers made sense of the contradictory systems of mean-
ing operating in their everyday lives, the analysis shows how a grind-
ing of discordant value systems produced the more general paradox
of an ‘ordinary tragedy’.
Keywords
Albania, capitalism, ethnography, literature, moral economy, postso-
cialism, structures of feeling, value systems
E ka jeta. [So it goes.]
– Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughter-House Five,
translated by AK; edited by AN and EK1
In November 2009, the two booksellers I call AK and AN invested
in a nancially precarious business located in a prestigious area of
Tirana, the Albanian capital. Over the next ve years, the booksellers
brought the store out of bankruptcy and transformed it into a vibrant
cultural institution. Seeing the popularity of the business expand, the
property owner asked for a large rent increase in January 2015. AK
and AN replied with the best offer they thought they could manage.
So began a process of increasingly tense negotiations that culminated,
in July 2015, with the two friends quite literally locked out of the insti-
tution they had done so much to create.
In outline, the arc of this narrative is familiar, even trivial. In capi-
talist societies, leasehold improvements often lead to an increase of
rent. In detail, however, it was devastating for the people involved.
The displaced booksellers appreciated the contradictions of this

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2
situation. They saw their experience as simultaneously ordinary and
tragic.
In what follows, I argue that this paradoxical way of seeing was a
consequence of the shifting social order of capitalist Tirana. In other
words, I approach the image of ordinary tragedy that emerged from
this research as a structure of feeling in Raymond Williams’s sense of
that term– that is, as ‘an intersection’ (of feelings about the past and
expectations for the future) into which ‘an observed present is arranged’
(1973: 78). In contrast to the method Williams used to support his analy-
sis of structures of feeling in English literature and society, however, the
witnesses I summon here are not lines in a poem, passages in a novel,
or arguments in an essay. They are verbatim statements I recorded
through ethnographic operations in a now-capitalist city.
I refer to Tirana as ‘now-capitalist’– despite the compelling reasons
Douglas Rogers (2010: 13–15) has given for retaining ‘postsocialisms’
as an analytic device– to bring into sharper relief the structure of feel-
ing I am tracing in this article. Working in the tradition of ethnogra-
phies that pursue local perspectives on the complex and contradictory
forms of value and valuation found in socialist and postsocialist con-
texts (e.g., Archer 2018; Berdahl, Bunzl, and Lampland 2000; Bura-
woy and Verdery 1999; Fehérváry 2013; Ghodsee 2011; Humphrey
2002; Mandel and Humphrey 2002; Musaraj forthcoming; Verdery
2003), I reach back in this writing to Lila Abu-Lughod’s call to ‘experi-
ment with narrative ethnographies of the particular’ (1991: 153). By
foregrounding the displaced booksellers’ interpretation of their own
experience as lived and felt, I intend to subvert– not to reinforce– the
image of a coherent ‘culture’ of Albanian society. In this, my approach
aligns not only with the work of anthropological imagination that
Alisse Waterson and Barbara Rylko-Bauer have called ‘intimate eth-
nography’ (Waterston 2019; Waterston and Rylko Bauer 2006) but
indeed with the perspective and sentiments of my primary interlocu-
tor, who said, ‘I don’t feel comfortable talking about other people’s
lives and actions. To some degree it would involve a unilateral act
on my part, which is very close to a violent act. It would require me
to speak of other people from a certain point, which is my viewpoint.
And I mistrust that of course’.2
To situate the ethnographic material included here in a meaning-
ful context, however, I not only need to talk about other people’s
lives and actions; I need to refer to people and places that anyone
who knows the major bookshops in Tirana may well recognise. To
balance my ethical obligations to the subjects and the audience of

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3
this ethnography (Duclos 2019; Jerolmack and Murphy 2017; Reyes
2018), I use the real initials of the main participants– AK and AN–
and common nouns such as ‘the bookstore’ and ‘the property owner’
for the other Tirana people and places I discuss. This is not to pre-
serve anonymity, which neither the research participants nor I think is
possible in this case, but rather to remove the false comfort of pseud-
onyms without inviting inadvertent exposure.
Believing that the effects of large-scale processes– including trans-
formations of postcommunist states– ‘are only manifested locally and
specically, produced in the actions of individuals living their particu-
lar lives, inscribed in their bodies and their words’ (Abu-Lughod 1991:
150), the analysis I offer here conforms closely to the interpretation
AK offered as he concluded the narration I recorded in his ofce in
2016: ‘I don’t know what you’ll make of it’, he said, ‘but I think there’s
a thread going through the bookstore and what happened with the
publishing house and what our intentions were in the beginning and
how it all collapsed’.
Taking that thread to be spun from the conicting social, moral
and economic codes and conventions governing everyday life in
Tirana (g. 1), I see the tragedy of the booksellers’ sudden eviction as
Figure 1: Tirana Street Scene (Photo by the author, 2018).

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an ordinary consequence of the complex interaction and conict of
values in Albania’s long transformation to a capitalist order.
An Ordinary Tragedy
In July 2015, the Tirana bookseller I call AK got a message from the
owner of the property he and his partner, AN, had leased since 2009.
The message said, ‘We need to discuss something very important
about the bookstore’. The important thing was that the booksellers
had to be out by the end of the week. A year later, in the nondescript
ofce where the displaced tenants had relocated, I recorded AK’s nar-
ration of the events surrounding what happened at the bookstore and
why, in his words, it ‘failed so tragically’.
Losing the bookstore, AK said, was just part of what it meant to live
‘in a place like this’. Sensing, correctly, that I was not yet in ‘a position
to comprehend’ (Rosaldo 1989: 7), he went on to explain,
You know Albania some. If you knew it some more, you would probably
understand better. But I think you can fairly understand what I mean.
We live in a place without rules. There are no rules here. It’s a version
of the jungle. A soft version. It’s not complete lawlessness. But in the
end, how this place works is like this: The strongest prevail. If you have
enough money and enough power and if you can exert violence, you
have justice with you. You can do whatever you want. Harm whomever
you want. We live in a place without rules.
While this Hobbesian vision seemed very different from the warm
social world I had come to know in Tirana, the atmosphere of mis-
trust AK described has been well substantiated in Albanian studies
(see, e.g., Abrahams 2015; De Waal 2014; Mëhilli 2017; Pipa 1991;
Tochka 2016). Indeed, the vernacular expression ‘life is war’ (jeta
është luftë), which some readers may know as the title of Shannon
Woodcock’s (2016) oral history of everyday life in Albania during
the period of Communist Party Rule (1944–1991), goes a long way
towards contextualising AK’s vision of living amid violence and
chaos. Smoki Musaraj’s (2018) detailed ethnography of corruption
and ‘the banal intimacies of anti-corruption’ likewise shows that AK’s
views about the rule of law in contemporary Albania were widely
shared and corroborated nightly in the local popular media (for an
analysis of the broader corruption discourse in Albania, see also
Costello, Tracanti, and Bogdani 2014; Elbasani 2017; Jusu 2018;
Kajsiu 2015).

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5
What interests me in this social vision, however, is not its existence
as such but the tension that emerges between AK’s resignation to the
inevitabilities of living in a place without rules and his simultaneous
experience of these conditions as tragic and disturbing. To him this
tragedy was ordinary. But how can that be? How does tragedy become
ordinary? How did he and the other members of his community come
to accept the persistent threat of loss and eviction? How did they come
to believe that ‘it’s not the one who’s right but the one who pays the
judges’, that ‘our loss was unrecoverable’, that ‘we can’t do this’, ‘we
can’t ght this’, ‘it’s pointless’, ‘we’ve lost’?
All these phrases speak to a way of seeing Tirana, to a structure
of feeling permeating a city and a country situated between the real
social history of a harsh Stalinist dictatorship and an uncertain capi-
talist future. This article represents my effort to make sense of the
constant paradox of this social vision, which of course in reality is in
constant ux, and to explicate some of the broader meanings in its
apparent contradictions.
Reading Nearby, Again
The core question driving this analysis– How can something be both
routine and tragic at the same time?– recalls for me one of the more
uncomfortable ironies of classic (salvage) and contemporary (urgent)
ethnography. That is, as I have remarked elsewhere (Rosen 2019), that
what is conceptually or methodologically ‘good for the ethnographer’
is often disastrous for the subjects of ethnography (e.g., see, among
many others, Biehl 2005; Fassin, Marcis and Lethata 2008; Fortun
2001; Petryna 2002; Scheper-Hughes 1992). In the present case, what
was viscerally tragic for AK and AN was for me an invitation for
ethnography. AK’s response to a developed draft of this article made
this clear: ‘It’s still uneasy for me to even think about this story, and
reading about it, although in a “cold” and “analytic” language, makes
the blood rush to my head’.3
In practical terms, the loss of the bookstore also meant the closing
of an ideal eld site. For though a version of the ‘little book corner’
(qoshk për libra) was still open for business when I returned to Tirana in
2016, my days of drinking çai jeshil (green tea) and engaging in muhabet
(conversation) there were now over.
And so, after trying without success to ‘drop in’ at the business
address listed on the Facebook page the two friends had created for

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their publishing company, I texted AN to say I was back in Tirana, to
see if he was available to meet, and to ask for directions to
their new ofce. He replied to say he was away in Elbasan for the
day but that AK would be there and I was welcome to stop by. As it
turned out, their new ofce was a place I knew from the year before
when I helped with an emergency transfer of books. The unexpected
discovery of water damage in a storeroom at the bookstore, which
had induced that cross-town move, was evidently a harbinger of worse
things to come.
‘Do you remember how to get there?’ AN said.
I said I did. But despite being familiar with the main roads in the
area, I lost myself for a good twenty minutes walking in a labyrinth
of small lanes before I nally came to the place. Situated in a row of
shops that included a notary public, a cleaning supply wholesaler, a
medical supply distributor, and a generic café frequented by what
seemed to be no more than three or four regular customers, it was the
kind of nondescript storefront, common in many cities, that would
be secured nightly by downing the shutters. There was no sign and
no number, just three frosted glass panels (the middle one being the
door) set in the drab concrete façade of an old apartment block (g. 2).
Feeling less than certain that this was indeed the place, I knocked
on the door. AK greeted me a moment later and showed me inside.
He and AN had continued to use half of the space as a kind of ware-
house for books. The few hundred we had transported the year before
appeared to have grown to a few thousand, many still wrapped in
paper from the printer, stacked from oor to ceiling on industrial-
grade shelving. By now they had converted the other side of the space
to a minimalist ofce, with two desks positioned lengthwise along the
wall, two chairs, two PCs, and more crammed bookshelves overhead.
Past this was a small lounge area with a comfortable couch, where
I sat down surrounded by stacks of an ever-rotating collection of new
and used books. Instead of engaging in free-owing conversation and
writing eldnotes afterwards, I brought out the outline of the topics I
wanted to go over and asked for permission to record an interview. It
took me about four minutes to run through the questions I had pre-
pared about publishing, audience, readership, and translation, where-
upon AK said, ‘Sure, I think there’s plenty to say about all the points’.
For the next fty-ve minutes I listened with interest as AK walked
me through the past, present and future of the publishing venture
he launched in 2009 with AN. At the fty-nine-minute mark in the
recording I interrupted for the rst time to ask, ‘Are there any other

Between ConfliCting SyStemS
7
models? Other small publishers in Tirana that have been successful
or have been established?’
This elicited a detailed (twelve-minute) response and brought our
discourse to a dead end.
In the slightly awkward silence that followed, AK said, ‘Later, at the
end of your questions, if you want, it will be very interesting for you
to understand the dynamic of how what we did with the publishing
house affected the failure of the bookstore’.
‘Yes’, I said. ‘That seems very important. Let’s go into that’.
Nearly four hours later, as he came to the end of his eviction nar-
rative, AK said, ‘I have spared you some spicy details. But be sure
there are many other aspects to it that might tickle other people into
thinking about their lives, about the meaning of their actions, about
everything’.
Figure 2: Presence. Choices. Re-imaginings (Photo by the author,
2018).

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8
Recalling Vincent Crapanzano’s (1980: 7) characterisation of
‘Tuhami’s tale’– as implicitly carrying ‘Moroccan values, interpreta-
tional vectors, [and] patterns of association’– AK’s recitation was, in
his own words, ‘very telling of the whole reality in which we live’. So
while our discussion never really returned to the questions I prepared
about readership and its relation to issues of translation in the Alba-
nian market for books, in keeping with the principles of the method I
call ‘reading nearby’ (Rosen 2019), I learned more that day listening
to what AK wanted to tell me– about the shared moral codes of hon-
our, respect and concern for community that remained intact through
the tragedy– than I would have gleaned from asking one hundred
more prepared questions.
Moral Economies
AK opened his story by grounding it in ‘the moral economy’ (Thomp-
son 1971, 1991; see also Fassin 2009; Palomera and Vetta 2016) of a
Muslim café in a mostly secular city. When the bookstore rst opened
in 2004, the original owner was a practicing Muslim. But contrary to
what some locals thought– and what I believed for some time– it was
not that the place had any kind of religious agenda. It was just that
the rst owner’s religion was part of the bookstore’s identity from the
start.
The key thing that came out of this identity, which set the book-
store apart from comparable establishments, was the owner’s decision
not to sell alcohol. To clarify the signicance of this point for me, AK
drew a comparison to two similar institutions in Prishtina, the capi-
tal of Kosovo, where we had recently met during that years’ annual
Prishtina Book Fair (Panairi i Librit Prishtina). What their bookstore
was to Tirana, AK said, Dit’ e Nat’ (Day and Night) and Soma were
to Prishtina. But the Prishtina cafés worked on a different business
model. They cultivated a club scene at night that allowed them to
nance the less-protable daytime activity of selling books and keep-
ing the doors open to local artists and writers who used the space as
an informal base of operations.
Since the original owner of the Tirana bookstore was part of a
community of practicing Muslims, however, it was not acceptable
for him to sell alcohol, let alone operate a nightclub (on the broader
revival of faith in formerly atheist Albania, see Elbasani and Puto
2017; Trix 1994). This small difference in the initial conditions had

Between ConfliCting SyStemS
9
major implications for the general outcome of the project. When
AK and AN invested in bringing the bookstore out of bankruptcy in
2009, their main innovation, which proved successful, was to organise
better and broader events– such as lm screenings, literary meetings,
poetry readings and book fairs– that would bring in more people.
Otherwise, they conserved the general structure of the place. Thus,
in addition to keeping the name, they continued the rule of not serv-
ing alcohol.
This was not a decision they took lightly. They knew that serving
drinks made more business sense, but their choice reected a broader
ethical attitude:
By not serving alcohol, we eliminated certain customers outright. Some
people would just not go. ‘They’re not selling alcohol? What are we
doing there?’ This created a more comfortable environment for a lot of
people who were not Muslims or who didn’t have any interest in reli-
gion. It was like being in a library. You could just be comfortable, get
some good advice on books, get to watch some good movies, and hear
about some good poets.
This description t well with my observations. A typical exchange
when someone came in went like this: AN asked what the customer
was interested in. The customer said, ‘This’. AN said, ‘Maybe you
should read that’. They talked some more. AN read out a poem. They
both laughed. The customer left with a book of poems by Zbigniew
Herbert, a Polish writer unknown to her before that day.
An important consequence of their ethical attitude, therefore, was
that it created the conditions for the bookstore to be valued by all
sorts of people (including people like myself) who were not interested
in religion but who were looking for a place to nd and read and
discuss good books. Although there are some aspects of this that may
be familiar to anyone who has spent time in a good bookshop any-
where in the world, it is important here to consider the specics of
the bookstore in question as a business in the postsocialist context of
Tirana (g. 3).
AK and AN’s shared concepts of books as valuable was specically
located in a postsocialist space built on the ruins of a particularly
repressive communist past. The promise of a place where you could
‘be comfortable, get some good advice on books, get to watch some
good movies and hear about some good poets’ here represented an
idealised world of new possibilities outside of capitalism or commu-
nism. But because this space, as a store, had to be capitalist, there was
a crisis of meaning and value between ideologies.

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10
In terms of their own ideals and principles, AK was very clear about
what he and AN were trying to do. ‘We wanted to establish an insti-
tution– institution not only in the sense of a place but as something
coming from human relations established in an ordered way. An insti-
tution that after I was no longer there would still operate according
to the principles of that institution’. This is what mattered most to
AK and AN, and their actions throughout the tragedy were guided
by the belief that creating an institution in harmony with their val-
ues justied nancial sacrices: ‘If we think we are doing something
important and we can also nancially support ourselves while doing
it’, AK said, ‘we should absolutely do it, and we should be careful to
conserve it. This is a treasure we have here. And we have to use it as
a treasure: very carefully and intelligently. This means we have to be
satised with little’.
As it happened, the active pursuit of building a durable institution
that would operate according to this kind of principle led directly
to their loss of the bookstore. ‘The failure with that goal’, AK said,
‘has something to do with the failure of me and my community to
build institutions. We tried to establish something for the good of the
Figure 3: Over-Writing Urban Knowledge (Photo by the author,
2017).

Between ConfliCting SyStemS
11
community we live in, for the good of the people who live here, and
in the end it all collapsed’.
Different Opinions about an Essential Fact
There were several converging lines of problems leading to the ordinary
tragedy at the centre of this narrative. The most obvious concerned
the nancial requirements of the family who owned the property in
question. Indeed, the root of the conict between the booksellers and
the property owner was that the two sides had different opinions about
whether the bookstore was or was not protable. The dispute over this
essential fact brings into focus larger questions about how prot and
money are given value and valued differently in postsocialist Alba-
nia. The main source of the dissonance was that while the booksellers
claimed they were barely breaking even, the work they were doing gave
off every appearance of success. The lm screenings, literary meetings,
poetry readings, and book fairs all generated enthusiastic response, in
some cases drawing media attention. This generated a buzz around
the store and led to noticeably increased foot trafc. More people com-
ing in usually does mean more sales. But this doesn’t automatically
equal more prot. ‘Although we had a lot more people coming in’, AK
explained, ‘we also had additional costs. We had to take on more per-
sonnel. Some other costs went up. So although we had four or ve times
more people coming in, we didn’t have four or ve times more revenue’.
The owners could see the people. They could hear the buzz. Con-
sidered from their perspective, it made sense to imagine that the book-
sellers must be making a lot of money. And if that were true, they
would be justiably upset with their tenants for not wanting to share
some of that with them. So while it would be easy to cast the owners
as a kind of villain in this story, it would also be incorrect.
Though I can only claim partial access to the ‘factual surface’ or
‘horizontal reality’ (Fassin 2014: 41; Nussbaum 1990: 48) of what I
learned through my limited ethnographic operations in the eld, I
can report with condence that the actions of the family who owned
the property were not motivated by greed or other implicit ideolo-
gies of capitalism that many in the West, myself included, may take
for granted. The property owners were a large family, but not a rich
one. They emerged from the era of state socialism nancially precari-
ous, and like many of their neighbours, they depended on the rent
from their reprivatised property to sustain themselves (for further

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12
discussion of this phenomenon in postsocialist Albania, see Dalako-
glou 2017; Musaraj 2011; for analysis of related patterns in postso-
cialist Europe, see Archer 2018; Bodnár and Böröcz 1998; Fehérváry
2013; Harris 2013; Molnár 2010; Tsenkova 2009).
At the same time, the tensions and contradictions around the moral
economy outlined above were born of the property owners’ choices
and continued according to their expectations. ‘It’s not that it was a
request on their part for us not to sell alcohol’, AK said. ‘But it was
implied. It was implied that when we took up [the bookstore], we
would go on doing pretty much what they were doing in the rst place’.
Given that comparable businesses in the area, which was among the
most expensive real estate markets in Tirana, all sold alcohol and
operated nightclubs, this expectation came with an implicit under-
standing that it would be very unlikely for the bookstore to generate
income commensurate with the market value of the property.
‘Keeping in Contact with These Ideas and These Books’
Though it created real nancial pressures for all concerned, AK did
not present the disagreement over what constituted a fair rent as the
key factor in the eviction. The main problem he emphasised in his
narration had to do with the competing demands of another project–
an independent publishing venture devoted to translating literature,
philosophy and criticism into Albanian. Beginning with a transla-
tion of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (Thertorja Pesë,
2009), the publishing company has by now brought out more than
eighty titles previously unavailable in Albanian (g. 4).
Some of the tensions between ethical principles and economic reali-
ties that factored in the operation of the bookstore also surfaced in
their work as publishers, as AK explained:
Whereas there are some other publishers who have chosen this as a way
of life and survival– as a job– my idea of what we do [in publishing] is
like this: We have a concern for the truth. And we want people to gure
out through contact with ideas or other people’s books, to understand,
to see, what the truth is. I’m aware that this truth is very problematic.
No one agrees on what that is or how one should nd out. But anyway,
I think our work contributes to people working toward that goal, what-
ever that might be. And the main reason we choose to do one book and
not another is because we think that people who read it will prot from
it in this sense: of having a clearer idea of what their life means and why
they’re doing what they’re doing.

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13
Like the bookstore, then, the publishing company operated accord-
ing to ideals that have little to do with conventional economic theo-
ries of value. AK’s expression of an intense feeling for books and the
thoughts within them as valuable– as something people could prot
from– was located in a social world that he and the other members
of his community viewed as fundamentally broken and dysfunctional.
True to Williams’s conception of structures of feeling, this social vision
came out of a socially embedded intersection of historical memory
and collective expectations. The past in question was one in which a
single dictate of Enver Hoxha from the Fifth Party Congress (Novem-
ber 1966) ‘made it obligatory for literature and the arts to become a
powerful weapon in the hands of the Party’ (Pipa 1991: 33). AK and
AN’s shared hope for a better future likewise looked to literature for
new ways of thinking. If what Albania needed was a transformation of
consciousness, they reasoned, literature could have a role in bringing
about that change.
Although there is not space here for a detailed explanation of what
access to books was like in Albania before the fall of communism, it
is worth sketching an outline of the extreme centralisation of book
production and distribution that existed before the nineties. Between
1965 and 1973, for example, the only literary press in the country
Figure 4: The Activity of Publishing (Photo by the author, 2018).

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was Naim Frashëri, named in honour of the Albanian poet and ‘driv-
ing force behind the national Rilindja (Albanian Renaissance) at the
end of the nineteenth century’ (Elsie 1995: 226). In 1973, a second
press, 8 Nëntori (8 November), named after the date in 1941 that the
Communist Party of Albania was founded, split from Naim Frashëri to
specialise in nonction and political writings.
Until 1991, Naim Frashëri and 8 Nëntori held a complete monopoly
over the legal trafc in books in Albania. By the second decade of
postsocialism, with the coming of online booksellers, ‘the world mar-
ket’ of literature nally began to open for readers like AK and AN.
In this kind of market, as Marx and Engels argued long ago, ‘the
intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.
National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and
more impossible, and from the numerous national and local litera-
tures there arises a world literature’ (1998: 39).
Combining their respect for books and their desire to bring about
durable change for their community, their city and their country, AK
and AN formed the publishing company with an explicitly social pur-
pose. As I have described in more detail elsewhere (Rosen 2019), they
wanted to introduce Albanian readers to ‘fundamental works’ (vepra
themelore) that were not available during communism because they saw
in the literature they were then reading in English, French and Italian
the promise, or at least the possibility, of a better future for Albanian
society. In addition to this social ideal, however, AK acknowledged a
second, more personal force driving their actions:
I’ve thought about [why all this happened] over and over. And I think
the main reason is because me and [AN] wanted to keep reading. To
keep reading interesting authors. And the most natural step that came
after that was, you know, ‘I’ve read this great author, so I might as well
show it to other people’. That was a natural, logical step. But the main
concern for me, I have to be sincere, was keeping- in contact- with these
ideas- and these books. [AK punctuated this statement, his st striking
his palm, in time with the hyphenated rhythm.]
If their main problem was only the property owner’s insistence on
a higher rent, AK and AN may well have survived with the bookstore
intact. The more intractable problem was that they couldn’t satisfy the
demands of managing the bookstore without neglecting their passion
for reading. As AK explained,
Losing contact with these books seemed like an immanent possibility. If
we would have started devolving more of our time to the management
of [the bookstore] and getting involved in the day-to-day activity . . . it is

Between ConfliCting SyStemS
15
sure that we would have lost most of our contact with the books. Living
here, I have seen this many times. You’re very involved in reading litera-
ture or philosophy. Then you have to face this violent environment. You
have to survive. Get a job. Start a family. . . . And the rst thing you’ll
drop is reading books. There’s no more time for that. Unless you’re a
university professor, or your job has to do with reading books. Other-
wise you’ll drop the books. You won’t read. Or you’ll read less and less
as you grow older. And I didn’t want this to happen. I had my mind set
on this. I said, ‘We’ll do whatever it takes not to abandon this’. And the
publishing house came about because of this. It’s not that we woke up
one day and said, ‘Let’s start a publishing house’. No. It was more of a
natural consequence of not wanting to lose, whatever it was, this thing
we had for reading books.
As AK saw it, all that happened– the eviction, the breakdown of
friendships, the money they lost– was a consequence of their deci-
sion to focus on the activity of publishing instead of managing the
store. The activity of publishing here meant reading, translating and
editing books; corresponding with foreign agents; applying for funds
to support translation; going to book fairs; working with designers,
printers and booksellers; managing their social media presence and
much more. To do this all well obviously required a major investment
of time. The same of course was true of running a lively bookstore in
Tirana. In purely practical terms, their work in publishing was not
compatible with the day-to-day management of the bookstore.
But there was more to it than the limits of the working day. (This is
what AK wanted to tell me in the rst place when he said, ‘it will be
very interesting for you to understand the dynamic of how what we
did with the publishing house affected the failure of the bookstore’.)
AK’s vision of the bookstore as a durable institution required a certain
environment, a certain philosophy and a certain way of doing things.
Meanwhile the setup he and AN organised for doing this collapsed.
The main reason this happened, he said, was that at a certain point,
‘what we were trying to do with the publishing house and with the cul-
tural activities at the bookstore somehow became incompatible with
all the other [unsavoury] stuff that was going on at the bookstore’.
This was the essence of the ordinary tragedy as AK understood it.
It was not that they had to relocate or that they lost money; it was the
breakdown of trust that gradually but inevitably corrupted the social
world they built on the foundation of literary principles and ethical
ideals:
I think with initiatives such as the ones at the bookstore, with trying
to publish philosophy and literature, you’re inherently promising

Rosen
16
something very high. It’s not like you’re explicitly promising, it’s implicit.
But what you do inspires people in a way that they’re looking for the
meaning of their lives through what you’re publishing. . . . We wanted
people coming in to get books and to gather the truth. But instead of
nding Truth, they would nd all sorts of crooks.
With respect to the ‘crooks’ AK referred to here, it will need to
sufce to say that human relations between the people whose liveli-
hood depended on the bookstore had become so ‘poisoned’ that even
ordinary bookstore patrons began to feel and suffer the reverberations
of those tensions. It was precisely this normalisation of violence–
through which a space of reading and discussion came to be perme-
ated with suspicions, lies, accusations, denials and threats– that AK
found most disturbing. And though I, as a listener, felt some pangs of
ethnographic guilt for prompting him to dredge up these memories
from his recent past, AK reassured me:
I’m not going to lie. It feels good to talk about it. That’s sure. I’m not
going to lie and say ‘I don’t want to talk about it. It’s all gone. It’s in the
past. We can’t x it anyway.’ I don’t think that. There’s a mysterious
aspect of human nature that feels great satisfaction, even if no benet
may come from telling the story, there is a part of me that wants to tell
this.
Owing perhaps to the temporary therapeutic effects of telling, by the
end of his recitation AK gestured towards a contrasting vision:
What you see here, the publishing house that we’re working with right
now, and the ofce we have here, are some sort of retreat. This is how I
see it. Our work in this ofce as a retreat from the world out there. We
were trying to confront the day-to-day life of people by what we were
doing. But we’re here now. We’re going on with the publishing house.
We had about twelve months of terrible times. But being here now,
being able to keep in contact with these books and with our readers– to
come back to what you were asking at the beginning– that seems worth
it to me.
Conclusion: Making Sense, Intersubjectively
The rst time I asked what happened with the bookstore, AK’s answer
was brief: ‘In a poor and violent country’, he said, ‘it is impossible to
make an institution’.4 Between this pithy statement and the twenty-
ve-thousand-word elaboration I later recorded, my task has been to
make something from the ‘epistemological paradox’ that emerged

Between ConfliCting SyStemS
17
from our intersubjective communication (Fabian, Jarvie and Kloos
1971; West 2007: xi).
I began with a classic ethnographic contradiction. The eviction,
which the booksellers experienced as acutely tragic, was at the same
time in no way sensational to them. But how can I represent some-
thing as tragic that the participants viewed as ordinary? This was
my initial problem. Working through this apparent contradiction, I
came to see a series of related oppositions: personal values against
controlling forces, socialist dictatorship against capitalist uncertainty,
atheist past against resurfacing faith. All these binary representations
provided a kind of dissonance that I believe is productive and, ethno-
graphically at least, good to think.
As a kind of ethnographic artefact, the image of ordinary tragedy
appeared right on the surface of AK’s narration. Losing the bookstore,
he said from the start, was a sad but routine part of life in a society he
experienced as violent and unjust. But beyond the immediate social
vision of Tirana as a place without rules, the analysis here reveals
a complex structure of feeling that is not outside of laws but rather
between them. The booksellers wanted to create an institution in a
capitalist city that would allow them to survive outside of the narrow
logic of assigning value through money. The decisive clash here was
not between law and lawlessness but between the capitalist principle
of prot and the value the booksellers ascribed to community and
institutions, people and books, knowledge and truth.
According to this interpretation, the very qualities that made the
bookstore a vibrant institution– the booksellers’ ethical attitude, their
attachment to the law of honour between business associates and the
value they placed on creating a safe and welcoming atmosphere– con-
tributed directly to its failure. As such, the ordinariness of this tragedy
transcends the boundaries of Albania. AK’s critique of Albanian soci-
ety, in other words, can also be read as a critique of capitalism. Maybe
in places where landlord-tenant law is more rmly embedded, the
displaced get more time to leave, but the result is the same. The rent
always goes up, and eventually the leaseholder gets pushed out. The
problem, then, was not the apparent dysfunction of Albanian society
but the actual functioning of Albanian capitalism (g. 5).
I return in closing to that fateful message from July 2015. Within
hours of hearing that the property owner wanted to discuss ‘some-
thing very important about the bookstore’, AK knew the business was
lost. He immediately set a meeting with the owner to explain that he
and AN needed at least a month (rather than just one week) to pay

Rosen
18
what they owed to the vendors and publishers, to close the wages for
the workers and to get their stuff and nd somewhere to put it. The
meeting did not end well, but the owner agreed to meet a few days
later so they could try once more to broker a deal. The second meet-
ing didn’t go any better than the rst.
How could it? The bookstore was built on the ruins of a situation
that was tragic at birth. Tragic in ways that require a fuller treatment
than I can offer here of the bookstore as a palimpsest of history in
a city that has been transformed– in little more than one hundred
years– from a sleepy town under Ottoman rule, to the capital of a
modern secular state, to a city under Fascist occupation, to the politi-
cal centre of a Stalinist dictatorship, to a frenetic neoliberal city (Aliaj,
Lulo and Myftiu 2003). It was precisely with this kind of layered,
archaeological vision of his city that AN– who read an earlier draft
of this article and offered suggestions for revision as we rode bikes
through Tirana trafc– said, ‘The details [which I have mostly now
deleted] don’t matter. They only matter to us because it happened to
us. They wouldn’t be interesting to the wider public’.5
Figure 5: Near the Market of Old Things (Photo by the author, 2017).

Between ConfliCting SyStemS
19
‘Okay’, I said as we stopped behind a municipal bus at a red light,
‘But what about what AK said– that this story is telling of “the whole
reality” in which you live?’
‘Yes’, AN said, ‘but it isn’t interesting. It happens all the time’.
My argument has been that the reverse is at least as plausible. This
tragedy is interesting because it happens all the time. Though the specic
details of any ordinary tragedy will, of course, depend on the time and
the place of its occurrence, as a general social phenomenon, tragedies of
this kind require only that people accept the unthinkable as a matter of
course. My position, therefore, is that the paradox of ordinary tragedy
that mediated AK and AN’s vision of their city can be found not just
in Tirana, Albania, or the former socialist cities of Europe; they can be
found wherever durable systems of meaning are suddenly devalued,
contested and rendered confusing– that is, wherever people are trying
to manage their lives between conicting systems of values.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank AK and AN for their friendship, for sharing their
experience with me and for their feedback on earlier drafts of this
article. For helpful insights, comments and suggestions, I also thank
Jessica Symons, Nigel Rapport, Mirco Göpfert, Anni Raw, Francisco
Martínez, Rachel Broughton, Smoki Musaraj, the editors, and the
anonymous reviewers. Research for this project was supported by the
Ohio University College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Research
Fund and the Ohio University Research Committee.
Matthew Rosen, Ohio University. E-mail:
rosenm@ohio.edu
Notes
1. While the Albanian idiom ‘E ka jeta’ (like the English, ‘So it goes’) resists literal
translation, it means something like, ‘These are things that happen in one’s life’
or ‘This is how life is’ (AK 2019, pers. comm., 4 Feb).
2. Unless otherwise noted, the direct speech quoted in this article comes from the
narration I recorded with the Tirana bookseller I call AK in his Tirana ofce
on 20 June 2016.
3. Interview with AK, via email, 15 January 2019.
◆
◆

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20
4. Interview with AK and AN in Prishtina, 10 June 2016.
5. Interview with AN in Tirana, 4 July 2018.
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