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Tirana Modern
Biblio-Ethnography on
the Margins of Europe
Nashville, Tennessee
© Vanderbilt University Press • For review only • Do not distribute
Copyright Vanderbilt University Press
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First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rosen, Matthew, – author.
Title: Tirana modern : biblio-ethnography on the margins of Europe /
Matthew Rosen.
Description: Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, . | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN (print) | LCCN (ebook) | ISBN
(paperback) | ISBN (hardcover) | ISBN
(epub) | ISBN (pdf )
Subjects: LCSH: Albanians—Books and reading. | Tirana (Albania)—Social
conditions. | Tirana (Albania)—History. | Literature and
society—Albania. | Literature and anthropology—Albania. |
Books—Albania—History. | Albania—Social conditions. |
Albania—History. | Albania—Social life and customs.
Classification: LCC DR. .R (print) | LCC DR. (ebook) | DDC
/.—dc/eng/
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
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Writing the Relationship
between Books and People
The whole question is to see whether the event of the social can be extended
all the way to the event of reading through the medium of the text.
— ,
Has a book ever changed your life? Of course. But how? How does one
account for the dierence a book makes in a person’s life? These appar-
ently simple questions open the way for biblio-ethnography—a writing of
the relationship between books and people. As a genre of ethnography,
biblio-ethnography can describe any book-related account of social life.
The book you hold in your hands is a specific example; it tells a story of
Albanian modernity, written from the perspective of my participation in
the social lives of a community of readers based in the capital, Tirana. But
before turning to the topic of literary culture in post-communist Albania,
I need to say a few more words about what biblio-ethnography is and how
it contributes to anthropology as a discipline.
Biblio-ethnography oers a method for pursuing two basic questions.
What do people do with books? And what do books do with people? The
first question is easy enough to answer. People read, write, translate, pub-
lish, print, transport, display, buy, sell, lend, trade, arrange, store, anno-
tate, interpret, recommend, discuss, debate, censor, smuggle, ban, and even
burn books. The list of things people do with books could go on and on.
But a closer look at any of these actions is sure to reveal a complex bundle
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of relationships that would take more than any one book to unravel. This
is just the sort of puzzle biblio-ethnography was made to consider. Why
do hyper-literate communities, including academic communities, tend to
take books for granted? A big part of the reason has to do with the way
most of us are taught, and have learned, to think about books in terms of
their contents. Thus William Ivins, a pioneer in the history of the book,
in what is probably his best-known work, Prints and Visual Communication,
wrote, “A book, so far as it contains a text, is a container of exactly repeat-
able word symbols arranged in an exactly repeatable order” (Ivins , ).
The ease with which any reader with an internet connection can locate
this quotation reinforces the point Ivins wanted to make about the five-
thousand-year history of books. But as an object, a form of technology,
and a “means to produce the social,” most any book on close inspection can
be found to act, in Bruno Latour’s () vocabulary, not as an intermediary
but as a mediator. That is to say, rather than reliably transporting meaning
“without transformation,” books very often “transform, translate, distort,
and modify the meaning or elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour
, ). When books act as mediators, they do not merely contain and
communicate stories, ideas, or information. Rather, as bibliographers and
librarians have long known—and book historians have shown with increas-
ing sophistication—books themselves can be agents of change and partic-
ipants in the production of endless idiosyncrasies.
This simple claim—
that books act—is the main premise for doing biblio-ethnography. But to
say books make things happen is not to say they cause or determine other
actions or situations. It is rather, as my interlocutors in the field might say,
that books can help people.
People like Klodi Leka, for example: “Your publishing house changed
my life,” Leka said to the publishers Ataol Kaso and Arlind Novi, who
had established a custom of donating a copy of each new book they pub-
lished to the community library of Organizata Politike, a left-wing activist
organization based in Tirana, of which Leka was a member. As a serious
reader who only reads Albanian, Leka can be counted among the group
of people who have benefited most from the work Kaso and Novi are
doing. With a joking manner that nevertheless communicated an underly-
ing truth, Leka continued, “We’ve sort of exploited you,” he said. “We’ve
had the good part of the deal.”
It is telling how Leka moved in this exchange from acknowledging the
publishing house as an agent of change to sympathizing with the challenges
his friends faced as small publishers in Tirana. Reflecting exchanges like
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Introduction
this one, my general argument is that the production, circulation, and con-
sumption of books under diverse and changing circumstances can help to
create and sustain—always through transformations and translations—new
and unexpected relationships and identities that otherwise would not exist.
Because books participate in everything from constructing social rela-
tionships and creating new value systems to mediating individual expe-
rience and motivating collective action, there are perhaps as many justi-
fications for tracing connections between books and people as there are
ethnographers who have seen fit to make something of the books their
informants have read, treasured, discussed, or displayed. Sacred texts such
as the Talmud, the Qur’an, and the Bible, for example, have long enjoyed
a place of prominence in ethnographies concerned with religious practice
and the formation of ethical subjectivities. A wide range of storybooks
and other pedagogical texts have similarly featured in ethnographies con-
cerned with modern education and literacy practices. Novels stored in an
elder informant’s round mud house in Tanzania or read by young subway
riders in Japan have likewise made their way into productive anthropo-
logical analyses. Several book-length ethnographies have even focused on
fans of a particular author or genre of fiction. But considering all the ways
in which books are made to act in social life, I still think—and I hope to
show—that biblio-ethnography has more to contribute.
A Wide-Angle View of Books as Technologies of Imagination
As observable traces of contact between readers, writers, translators, and
publishers of every sort of subject matter imaginable, books participate
in opening up the imaginative capacities of living communities in irre-
ducibly indeterminate ways. Like newer sorts of things noted for their
generative capacities—such as the internet (Humphrey ) and machine
code (Leach )—I count printed books among the “technologies of
the imagination” that David Sneath, Martin Holbraad, and Morten Axel
Pederson characterized as being “particularly good at opening up spaces”
in which “undetermined outcomes” can emerge (, ).
To Sneath, Holbraad, and Pederson, technologies “count” as being “of
the imagination” when “they serve to precipitate outcomes that they do
not fully condition” (, ). Since words like “imagination” and “out-
comes” are so abstract, let me elaborate here with the help of a short story,
a tale from the field, told by Arlind, one of the avid readers I follow in this
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account. In the middle of a broader conversation about “the transforma-
tive eects of literacy and reading,” Arlind related the following narrative
about a childhood friend, who was sixteen or seventeen years old in ,
when the story began. “When I read a book that I find extremely beautiful
or fantastic,” Arlind said, “the first thing I want to do is give it to a friend
and say, ‘You should read this.’”
This is what happened when I read the stories of Karl Čapek. They
were short, riveting, highly imaginative stories. In that epoch [the early
s], reading was a kind of—. It was like converting to a new religion.
Something very special. I first gave the book of Karl Čapek stories to my
brother [Orges]. After me, Orges read it. He also found it was beautiful.
As I had passed it to him, he passed it to his friend. This friend was a thief.
He also read the stories of Karl Čapek. One day, he was sent to prison, and
he asked Orges for a copy of the book. Orges’s friend, the thief, thought
that book would help him escape from prison. How do I know? From
the prison psychologist. The thief was using literacy, using literature to
escape prison. He was using the stories of Karl Čapek to seduce the prison
psychologist, to help him escape. When I last met him, he was reading
Nietzsche. This is the danger of literature in a country like Albania, where
people are rootless, and one day they read Karl Čapek or Nietzsche. When
this thief got out of prison, he started a business selling pirated books. We
know many people here like Don Quixote, who read Nietzsche, or Heide-
gger. This is the chivalrous literature of our time. This is why I say read-
ing should not be solitary but collective—so you don’t fall into madness.
It is with reference to stories like this that I consider books to be tech-
nologies of imagination. There is not room here to follow all the curi-
ous trails issuing outward from the story of the thief from Elbasan who
believed a book of short stories could help him escape from prison. The
point is to indicate what sorts of capacities books generate in Albanian
social spaces. Arlind’s story (and he has many more like it) also illustrates
the importance of doing biblio-ethnography with a wide-angle lens. As
Debra Spitulnik () has argued for media anthropology more generally,
widening the frame here means allowing more of the scene to be included
in the picture of what people do and say “in relation” to various media
(Couldry , ) and how those media are “incorporated into everyday
communicative and cultural practices” (Bird , ). Most importantly,
as Jens Kjaerul has stressed, this emphatic turn to practice only remains
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Introduction
worthwhile if in our empirical commitment to studying “what people
actually do” (including attempting to seduce prison psychologists with the
help of Karl Čapek stories) we are at the same time “prepared to be sur-
prised and heed what we in fact find” (Kjaerul , ).
Tirana Modern
As an ethnography about the role and meaning of literature in people’s
lives, Tirana Modern belongs to the sub-disciplinary context of a re-emer-
gent literary anthropology, defined here generally as an approach to
studying interactions between literature and social life (Rapport ).
While such interactions can take many forms and serve many purposes,
the coherence of literary anthropology as an academic field is rooted in
the recognition of socio-cultural anthropology as a discipline based on
writing and interpretation. As Ellen Wiles () has pointed out, lit-
erary anthropology’s first branch grew from the insight that literature
made good ethnographic source material. Traveling in the other direc-
tion, from anthropology to literature, a second branch of the subfield
has worked to establish a more literary mode of writing ethnography.
Finally, the third and still least developed branch of literary anthropol-
ogy has grown slowly but achieved definite results by using ethnographic
methods to study socially embedded practices of reading and writing.
With its focus on the real social relationships surrounding a specific
circuit of books, the present biblio-ethnography is a product of this third
branch. It does not, however, take reading and writing to be the “core
objects” of analysis. This is because, like Mark Hobart, who recognized
that the Balinese media practices he wanted to study “only partly overlap
with direct engagement in the medium” (, ), my ethnographic inter-
est in books included the dispersed and everyday practices that surrounded
them—from walking through and browsing the shelves of local bookstores
to understanding, commenting on, and criticizing the contents of partic-
ular books. Using a method I call reading nearby, I thus worked outward
from book-related practices to the wider social lives of a literary commu-
nity based in the capital city of a small country on the margins of Europe.
The country, Albania, seems to attract superlative descriptions of all
kinds. These have often, though not exclusively, been produced by outside
observers. That it was “the first” civilization in Europe was a fiction pro-
moted by the former Communist regime (Bon , ). That it was “the
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last” Balkan state to gain its independence from the Ottoman Empire is a
flat historical fact (Abrahams , ). These also are facts: At the midpoint
between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Albania
was the smallest and poorest of the European Communist nations (Keefe
et al. , ). At the start of its transition to capitalism, in the early s,
it was “Europe’s least developed country” (Zickel and Iwaskiw , ). A
quarter of a century later, in , it ranked as the “most corrupt” country
(tied with North Macedonia) among European Union member and candi-
date states (Transparency International ).
Albania’s legacies of Ottoman domination, harsh communism, and the
everyday forms of violence that have accompanied its uneven transition
to post-socialist late capitalism invite forms of analysis that map well onto
Sherry Ortner’s () categories of “dark anthropology” and “anthropol-
ogy of the good.” By dark anthropology Ortner meant an “anthropol-
ogy that emphasizes the harsh and brutal dimensions of human experience,
and the structural and historical conditions that produce them” (, ).
Ortner’s anthropology of the good, by contrast, focuses on “what gives
life a sense of purpose or direction, or how people search for the best way
to live—even in dire and hostile circumstances” (Walker and Kavedžija
, as cited in Ortner , ). Bringing the two together, Ortner
asks, “How can we be both realistic about the ugly realities of the world
today and hopeful about the possibilities of changing them?” (, ).
Ortner’s response, which I saw reflected in the work of the actors I follow
in Tirana Modern, calls for returning to cultural critique, rethinking capital-
ism, and applying the basic axiom of practice theory. That is, “if we make
the world through social practice, we can unmake and remake the world
through social practice” (Ortner , ). Building on the practice-ori-
ented approach Ortner discussed in an earlier essay (), the main social
practices I trace in this account are those that surrounded the circulation
of books within a part-localized, part-dispersed, and part-imagined com-
munity based in Tirana.
From a Suitable Place to a Point without Surface
My entry into the field of Albanian literary production reaches back to
December , when I spent a memorable afternoon in a Tirana book-
store (fig. .). The store was located on a single-block street in a presti-
gious area of the city. In the first room as you entered, the walls to the left
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Introduction
and right were lined with floor-to-ceiling shelving. There the work of
elite Albanian authors sat spine to spine with a good selection of world lit-
erature in translation. A few steps farther in was a compact coee bar dec-
orated in a style that recalled the city’s Ottoman past. Here a dozen or so
patrons sat working alone or talking together in spirited tones. Between
the books and the conversation, the atmosphere in the shop appealed to
my research interest in the ethnography of reading. At the time I was just
visiting, but I made a mental note of the place for future reference.
That future came in . After securing institutional clearance “to
examine Albanian literary culture from an anthropological perspective,”
I returned to Tirana with an open-ended research question and the idea of
a field site where I could go to collect the empirical evidence I would need
to answer it. The question was, “What can the ethnography of reading
contribute to cultural analysis in contexts of pronounced social change?”
And though the site, as might be expected in a context of change, is no
longer what it was when the research began, the personal relationships I
established there during my first days of fieldwork provided the basis for a
project that would continue over six summers (– and ), result-
ing in this book.
With its coat of pale green paint on the outside and its Albanian books
and Turkish furniture inside, the bookstore in occupied several rooms
.. Exterior of the bookshop E për--shme.
All photos by the author except as noted.
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of a detached house, or shtëpi private, constructed in the Tirana vernac-
ular style of the s. Located on the border between Ish-Blloku (the
once-restricted residential quarter of the former Communist Party elite)
and Qyteti Studenti (the area adjacent to the campus of the University of
Tirana), the building itself dated to the time of Ahmet Zogu, the leader
of Albania from to .
Set in an urban landscape now dominated by socialist-era apartment
blocks and postsocialist high-rises, the property has belonged for gener-
ations to the family of Ervin Hatibi, a poet of local renown whose first
volume of verse was published, when he was just fifteen years old, under
the ideological strictures of the Albanian socialist censors. But though his
writing career began under communism, Hatibi came of age as an artist
in what he later called “the free Albania of the s” (, ). He has
since achieved recognition in the annals of Albanian literature as one of a
dozen or so “contemporary poets of note” (Elsie , ).
In , the poet, then thirty years old, converted the inside hall and
small backyard of his family’s reprivatized home into a bookstore that
became a magnet for Tirana intellectuals. In , he moved abroad. Since
then, the businesses operating from No. Rruga Jul Variboba have changed
ownership several times. Each successive owner made certain changes to
the original conception of the place. But they all preserved its unusual
name: E për--shme.
.. Issue of the journal E për-7-shme.
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Introduction
.. Ataol Kaso and Arlind Novi in Tirana
around . Photo courtesy of Pika pa sipërfaqe.
The Albanian adjective e përshtatshme (or i përshtatshëm, depending on the
gender of the noun it describes) means suitable or fitting. With the number
seven (shtatë) representing the base word, an Albanian reader may appreciate
the added sense of something that recurs “every seven” (as the word ditë,
or day, becomes e përditshme, daily). For another, perhaps smaller subset of
readers, the bookstore’s name will recall the title of the avant-garde liter-
ary journal that Hatibi and fellow Tirana poets Rudian Zekthi and Agron
Tufa cofounded in .
The journal E për-7-shme (fig. .) only went to four numbered issues
but has enjoyed something of a cult reputation in Tirana literary circles.
As Besar Likmeta noted in a feature for Balkan Insight, “the spirit of
the journal, a space where ideas out of tune with the times found a tem-
porary home, continues to live on in a book corner named after it” ().
In a brief account of the relationship between the two E për--shmes, Lik-
meta pointed to a comment, penned by Zekthi and published in the jour-
nal’s first issue, which still resonated with Tirana’s “young literati” twenty
years after the journal folded. That prescient motto—Si të mos mbijetosh,
How not to survive—could well describe the way the two main human
actors in the present account, Ataol Kaso and Arlind Novi (fig. .), came
to think about their future.
Arlind was originally from Elbasan, a city of approximately ,
people located about fifty kilometers from Tirana, due southeast along
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the road bearing its name (Rruga e Elbasanit, lit. Elbasan’s Road). During
communism, Arlind’s father, a plumber, and his mother, a mechanic, both
worked at Kombinati Metalurgjik, a massive (and now mostly abandoned)
industrial complex on the outskirts of the old city. After completing sec-
ondary school, Arlind moved to the capital to study Albanian language
and literature at the University of Tirana. “Living in Tirana was a shock
for me,” he said. “After one year, I wanted to return home. But my par-
ents said give it more time.” Like so many seeking a better life in postso-
cialist Albania, Arlind knew he had little choice. And though he’s told me
he never felt completely at ease in Tirana, what’s made him stay, he said,
was meeting Eli (his wife) and Ataol (his best friend and business partner).
Ataol was born into an artistic family with deep roots in Tirana. His late
father, an actor, and his mother, a singer, are both known to the Albanian
public. He grew up around Estrada e Tiranës, the “people’s theatre” (teatri
popullor) in the center of Tirana, where his parents met and performed.
After a brief experience living abroad (in Switzerland), which he said left
him feeling “uprooted,” Ataol also went on to attend the University of
Tirana, completing a degree in economics. But though he studied subjects
such as banking and finance, the passion for reading and books he cultivated
since childhood only increased as he entered adult life.
It was on the trail of hard-to-find books that Ataol first went to E për-
-shme, where he met Arlind, who was then working there part-time.
Through “endless discussions” about art, politics, religion, and books, the
two formed a friendship and later, the publishing company they called Pika
pa sipërfaqe (Point without Surface). There is also a good story behind that
name, which Arlind and Ataol have been called upon to tell countless times.
“Whenever we encounter a new reader,” Arlind said, “they always ask
us, ‘Why does your publishing house have this name?’”
“Yes,” Ataol said. “It’s a story we have re-told a thousand times.”
In a interview with Nicola Pedrazzi, a reporter for OBC Trans-
europa, for example, Ataol explained (in Italian) that the name could be
traced to a conversation “about cosmology.” The referenced conversa-
tion took place in Elbasan, between Arlind and Rudian Zekthi, the poet
and cofounder of the journal E për-7-shme, who also happened to be from
Elbasan. “I told Rudian we were creating a publishing house,” Arlind said,
“and that we were having a problem coming up with a name. Rudian said,
‘Why don’t you call it pika pa sipërfaqe?’—which was a euphemism for the
Big Bang.”
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Introduction
The name Arlind and Ataol chose for their company thus came through
Zekthi’s translation of the theory Stephen Hawking described in his
book, A Brief History of Time, according to which all the matter in the uni-
verse was said to have originated from a point so small that it possessed no
surface. “We too are small,” Ataol said, rounding out Pika pa sipërfaqe’s
origin story, “and we too would like to be infinitely dense” (Pedrazzi ).
A look through Pika pa sipërfaqe’s catalogue can give a concrete sense
of what Ataol meant.
Between the translation of Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five, which launched their project, and the publication
of The Complete Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (trans. Bashkim Shehu, ),
some of the other notable authors Pika pa sipërfaqe has published in trans-
lation include Hannah Arendt (–), Zygmunt Bauman (–),
Roberto Bolaño (–), Italo Calvino (–), Witold Gombro-
wicz (–), Milan Kundera (b. ), Simone Weil (–), James
Joyce (–), Philip K. Dick (–), and Roberto Arlt (–).
In bringing these and many other literary and intellectual forces into Alba-
nian, Pika pa sipërfaqe has arguably created possibilities “as singular, and as
awesome, as great authors themselves” (Borges , ). Put otherwise, this
small press has created new spaces of imagination where “good readers” (in
the Borgesian sense of that term) can now go to encounter, transform, and
create new ideas, interpretations, memories, dreams, tools, and practices—
each the origin points of new translations and social arrangements.
By my last count in , Pika pa sipërfaqe had added titles to the
Albanian bookshelf. That number includes twenty-eight original works
by Albanian authors and eighty-eight works in translation. To put these
numbers in the local context, one of the larger contemporary Albanian
publishers, Toena, reported publishing more than books per year since
(Toena ). Compared to Toena’s sta of around thirty employees,
however, Arlind and Ataol have managed the operation of Pika pa sipër-
faqe mostly on their own.
“Both of us are doing seven jobs at the same time,” Ataol said. “Trans-
lator, editor, distributor, salesmen, keeping correspondence with the copy-
right holders, negotiating with the translators, keeping track of the whole
process of printing, pagination, book covers. We’re doing all of that. Just
two of us. With some very important help from Arlind’s brother Orges
[Novi] and Eligers [Elezi, a mutual friend].”
The group of translators with whom Ataol referenced negotiating now
includes more than fifty individuals with a wide range of secondary linguistic
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specializations, geographic locations, and areas of expertise. Those who
have regularly collaborated with the publishers include both established
and up-and-coming writer-translators such as Agron Tufa, Rudi Erebara,
Romeo Çollaku, Edlira Lloha, Jonila Godole, Bashkim Shehu, Enis Sul-
starova, Primo Shllaku, Balil Gjini, Erion Karabolli, Elvis Hoxha, Blerta
Hyska, and Arben Dedja. Working in collaboration with Pika pa sipër-
faqe (along with a handful of other Tirana-based publishers), this broad
collective has brought into Albanian a range of books corresponding with
their interests and expertise, written mostly but not exclusively by Amer-
ican, Latin American, and European (especially Central European) authors
who were banned, censored, or otherwise unknown in Albania during
communism.
To secure the rights to publish these works and to obtain the funds to
pay the translators, Pika pa sipërfaqe’s “work-net” has extended to many
international institutions and agencies, including the Polish Book Institute
in Kraków, the Sur Translation Support Programme in Buenos Aires, and
the Wylie Agency in New York. For printing and cover art, Arlind and
Ataol have maintained long-term relationships with fellow Tirana residents
Edi Vathi of West Print, a local printing company specializing in book pro-
duction, and Erzen Pashaj, an independent artist who was a friend from
the early days at the bookstore.
Pika pa sipërfaqe’s main distribution networks start from—and circle
back through—the social media accounts Arlind and Ataol have managed
on Facebook and Instagram. These accounts are now connected to thou-
sands of readers around the world, hundreds of physical bookstores in
the Western Balkans, dozens of online sellers with local and international
reach, frequent book fairs organized with community partners in Tirana,
and the national book fairs held annually in the capitals of Albania, Kosovo,
and North Macedonia.
The book fairs are important not just as opportunities to sell books and
make some money (although they are that too) but also to talk with people
and to be in touch with readers. The publicity the fairs generate also feeds
into each of the preceding circuits—through direct contact with readers
and booksellers and through multimedia exposure in newspapers, maga-
zines, television, and various online media.
To provide a concrete illustration of the publishers’ “global reach,” I
recently searched “Pika pa sipërfaqe” on OCLC WorldCat, “the world’s
largest network of library content and services.” The search returned
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Introduction
a list of twenty-six books, often with
multiple copies, belonging to the collec-
tions of major research libraries located
in the United States, Germany, Poland,
Sweden, and the Netherlands. As a bib-
lio-ethnographer, I wanted to follow the
trail of those books to see precisely how
they made their way around the world.
When I asked Ataol if he knew how
their books ended up abroad, he said
yes and named two book distributors,
Bo timpex and Shtëpi e librit. “The for-
mer specializes in selling academic texts
to university libraries,” he said. “The
other selling anything to anyone, includ-
ing libraries.”
He then showed me a
letter of request, which he planned to
oblige, from Stefan Kreutzchmar of the
German National Library: “We shall be
grateful if you will provide free specimen copies of these [works by Sig-
mund Freud, Niklas Luhmann, and Georg Trakl] and future media works
for our collection.”
Another example I was able to trace reaches back to , when Timo-
thy Shipe, a bibliographer for the University of Iowa Libraries and an asso-
ciate of the UI Center for the Book, traveled to the Balkans “to establish
mutually beneficial relationships with booksellers, cultural institutions, and
individual writers in the region, and to acquire books for the University
Libraries through purchase and donation” (Shipe ). Of his experience
in Albania, Shipe wrote,
Virtually all of my purchases were from Tirana’s only antiquarian book-
store, E për--shme, whose owner Arlind Novi is also a publisher, and is
extremely knowledgeable about the history of Albanian literature and pub-
lishing. Arlind was able to find over fifty volumes by former IWP [Inter-
national Writing Program] participants, including nearly complete runs of
three journals edited by those writers. When he learned that Kurt Vonnegut
had lived and taught in Iowa, he donated a copy of one of his own publi-
cations, an Albanian translation of Slaughterhouse-Five. (fig. .; Shipe )
.. Book cover for
Thertorja pesë, published in .
Courtesy and © Pika pa sipërfaqe.
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On the strength of their editorial choices, the high quality of their
work, and their active involvement with local writers and cultural insti-
tutions, Pika pa sipërfaqe quickly became one of the most respected names
in Albanian publishing. This is not just my opinion but something I came
across many times during fieldwork in Tirana. Beyond fieldnote evidence,
there are plenty of public sources to support this claim. For example, when
Albin Kurti (), now serving as Prime Minister of Kosovo, visited the
annual Prishtina Book Fair in , he posted the following text (in Alba-
nian) on his own social media accounts:
Today we were visiting the Book Fair in Prishtina. There we visited the
publishers’ booths and learned about new publications and reprints. Our
government will intensively support publishers, for the translation of
quality literary and theoretical works, and for the publication of local
authors. The book is an irreplaceable foundation of culture. It was by dis-
respecting books that we ended up with these ignorant and thieving rulers.
We visited with great interest the stands of publishing houses from Kosovo
and Albania and met authors and translators from the publishers “Koha”
[Time], “Buzuku” [the surname of the first attested Albanian author],
“Pika pa Sipërfaqe,” etc. One of the publications worth mentioning is the
second volume of Publikes Shqiptare [Albanian Public], from the publishing
house “Zenit” [Zenith]. There you can find important texts for the ideal
formation of Vetëvendosje [Self-Determination]! (Kurti )
Kurti’s descriptions of books—as foundations of culture, antidotes to
corruption, and mediators of new group formations—anticipate some of
the main themes I trace in the chapters that follow. And though the first
two publishers he mentioned were based in Kosovo and did not come up
in my conversations about publishing in Tirana, the other two seemed
to come up whenever it was a question of who was publishing serious
authors, ensuring quality translations, respecting copyright, using qual-
ity paper, and so on.
The response of Enis Sulstarova, a prolific sociologist and one of Pika
pa sipërfaqe’s frequent collaborators, was characteristic of the sorts of opin-
ions I heard from many in the field. “They’re doing good work,” he said,
referring to Arlind and Ataol. “Educating the readers here. They know
good books, things that are not well known here, and people are reading
that now.” Ylljet Aliçka, a successful novelist and short story writer had
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Introduction
a similar view, though he added a note of concern that was also repeated
by many. “I respect Pika pa sipërfaqe,” he said. “But I’m concerned. They
do excellent work but won’t compromise like the big publishers.”
This was a legitimate concern, which both Arlind and Ataol shared.
Most of the books in their catalogue have been well received. But none
have been financially profitable. In Librari Alba, one of several upmarket
bookstores in the city center, “where all the new publications of local and
foreign authors are found,” there was a dedicated shelf for Pika pa sipër-
faqe. It was not prime real estate, but it was there, and up to date with the
recently published titles. I asked the bookstore attendant if those books
were popular. “No, not popular,” she said. “But good. Some people find
them online or by the title,” she continued. “But it’s a new publisher and
a small publisher.”
As I write this in late , the publishers are facing serious diculties.
They have paid a high price for their independence. But contrary to the
motto of the journal that brought them together, so far, they have sur-
vived. “Now is a dicult time in terms of money,” Arlind said. “But we
are resisting.”
Story and Theory
What can an ethnographer make from this story of two readers turned
publishers in a postsocialist city? To find out, I pursued the strategy that
Lila Abu-Lughod, in her essay “Writing Against Culture,” called, “writing
ethnographies of the particular” (Abu-Lughod , –). What first
drew me to the approach Abu-Lughod suggested was simply that the heu-
ristic of “Albanian culture” seemed inadequate to the task of understand-
ing and conveying what life was like for Arlind and Ataol. To begin with,
they were living in a world permeated with global flows and an onrush of
postsocialist reinvention. Moreover, they were exquisitely aware of the
dangers of generalization and the violence of abstraction. As publishers
working in a highly politicized field, they cultivated a professional reflex-
ivity and were careful in choosing the words they used to describe them-
selves. By their own account Arlind and Ataol were two friends who met
by chance and went on to cofound a not-for-profit publishing company.
They worked together, they said, not for money or prestige but “to keep
reading and discussing good books.” The solution they devised for this
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purpose was to establish a small press, which they have described as “an
independent, social project dedicated to publishing foundational works of
literature, philosophy, and criticism.”
But what did being independent mean to Arlind and Ataol? In what sense
was their project social? And what, in their view, made a literary work foun-
dational? If I wanted to understand the particular meanings and values Arlind
and Ataol attached to their actions, I would need to assimilate—as much and
as best as I could—their perspectives of Albanian modernity and everyday
life in Tirana. In that regard, Alisse Waterston’s () notion of “intimate
ethnography” provided a helpful model for how to move outward from
immersion in other people’s lives to “being broad, comparative, and holistic;
moving toward understanding; and attending to the conditions and possi-
bilities of human social life” (, ). The notion of intimate ethnography
Waterston first developed with Barbara Rylko-Bauer () was dierent
from the work I did in Tirana insofar as their concept referred to working
with source material that was directly connected to an ethnographer’s clos-
est family relations, such as one’s own mother, father, or grandparent. How-
ever, I think the general idea of looking squarely at a particular “lived life”
as a way to “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two
within society” (Waterston , ) can work well when applied thoughtfully
and rigorously to other kinds of research and writing that demand intimacy
between the participants involved in generating the account.
Much as the dialectic thinking that animates intimate ethnography sug-
gests a way to move from biography to history, Robert Darnton’s “general
model for analyzing the way books come into being and spread through
society” (, ) oers a useful framework for understanding how a net-
work of readers, writers, translators, and publishers interacted with and
influenced one another through the action of a set of shifting social, eco-
nomic, political, legal, intellectual, and ethical norms. Darnton’s model
operated from the premise that “the parts [of a circuit of communication] do
not take on their full significance unless they are related to the whole” ().
Taking a holistic view of books as a medium of communication, Darnton
showed that it was possible for historians to relate activities accomplished
at particular points in a circuit of books to activities accomplished at other
points in the same circuit. Once the related agencies of authors, publishers,
printers, sellers, and readers were seen also to be related to the broader “ele-
ments in society” through which books moved, Darnton argued, “histori-
ans can show that books do not merely recount history; they make it” ().
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Introduction
Together with these perspectives from intimate ethnography and the
history of books, the biblio-ethnography I did in Tirana also drew from
theories in literary, media, and urban anthropology.
Because books are
media and cities are centers of attraction for writers and publishers, I was
able to combine elements from social studies of writing, analyses of mass
media and communication, and the anthropological study of city life into
a single analytical frame. In the spirit of Pierre Bourdieu’s () analysis
of the field of French literature in the Second Empire (based in Paris), and
Sherry Ortner’s () interpretation of the independent film scenes in neo-
liberal America (based in New York and Los Angeles), I brought together
(in Tirana) a social analysis of literary production, cultural research on the
practices of media makers and users, and direct engagement with city life
and urban space.
Returning to the idea of the book as a medium and a technology, one
of the special properties of printed books is their durability. My choice to
italicize the last word of the previous sentence, for example, will stand as
an index of the enduring materiality of book design and typography for
as long as this book stays in circulation. There is a paradox hidden here,
however, which anthropological and literary studies of books as objects
can make clear: The meanings and values people ascribe to books are not
fixed by the materiality (Miller ) or textuality (Warner ) of print.
On the contrary, what books mean—what they say—can change along
with the circumstances in the lives of the people who produce, distribute,
consume, discard, salvage, and repurpose them.
To substantiate this claim, I took up Arjun Appadurai’s broader sugges-
tion to “follow the things” (Appadurai a, ). Tracing the metaphor-
ical life cycle of books through websites, warehouses, coeeshops, book
fairs, street markets, private meetings, public readings, and more, I came
to see the publishing house as a kind of knot or network (Latour ,
–) through which local and global histories, meanings, and imaginaries
intersected, acted on one another, and mobilized new and yet to be deter-
mined ways of being, thinking, and acting. In Latour’s social theory, actors
of any scale (from a small press to the world market) are both “made to act
by many others” (Latour , ) and made up of a series of local “inter-
actions,” “conversations,” “pieces of paper,” “exchanges,” and “arrange-
ments” (Latour , –). In keeping with this perspective, the key
actor in the present account is the publishing house itself.
The image of Pika pa sipërfaqe I want to convey—almost literally a
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point without surface—is thus not a thing but an event, something that
happens, that comes into being and is constituted through the fleeting and
enduring associations of writers, readers, translators, poets, artists, activ-
ists, organizers, and the rest. When I speak of Pika pa sipërfaqe as an actor,
therefore, it is not to collapse all distinctions between the existence and
agency of humans and nonhumans; it is instead to emphasize how social
relations can be sought, created, and transformed through the practices and
equipment of literary production.
So even as I acknowledge that there
could be no books without a long list of mundane things like paper, glue,
ink, and words, I want it to be clear that my biblio-ethnographic interest
in Pika pa sipërfaqe starts from and returns to the same point: the individ-
ual people, living their particular lives, that this small press operating on
the margins of Europe has mobilized within and across Albania’s national
boundaries.
Subject, Informant, Interlocutor, Friend
The present work began from the two generalizable conclusions of my
previous project (Rosen , –). These were, first, that there was
nowhere an abstract reader, readership, or reading public; and second,
that as far as ethnography was concerned, the topic of reading worked
better as a point of entry than as an object or unit of analysis. Carrying
these ideas with me to Tirana, I used the methods of participant obser-
vation and interview to learn from a few people I got to know well how
reading created social contexts and relationships that otherwise would not
exist.
The method I used—talking with Arlind and Ataol about Cervantes,
Dostoyevsky, Proust, Gombrowicz, Kundera, Bolaño, and the rest—pro-
duced new contexts and relationships, mediated by literature, that I would
have been unlikely to access by other means. Even a few questions about
their reading practices opened the way to several hundred hours of partic-
ipant observation. This yielded many more thousands of words of direct
and indirect testimony.
Building the rapport this kind of research required was not eortless or
inevitable, but it helped that I could mobilize a side of myself that enjoyed
talking about the kinds of books the “subjects” of the ethnography pub-
lished. That I genuinely respected my “informants” also helped. Subject,
informant, interlocutor, friend. Anthropologists use many terms—all of
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Introduction
them problematic for dierent reasons—to refer to the people they depend
on to write their ethnographies.
In the following pages, I often call Arlind and Ataol interlocutors. This
is because what we did together most was talk. The focus of our conversa-
tions was the publishing house. In that regard, my interest was shared by
many Tirana observers. But for a long time now, I think the more accurate
term for me to use would be “friends.” What else do you call someone you
have known and liked for many years, who you think of fondly and care
about, whose words and actions would seem to reciprocate your expres-
sions of concern and aection? This is the definition of a friend, and though
writing ethnography complicates any simple designation, this is how I see
Arlind and Ataol. As I wrote in one of my notebooks on June , :
Despite the fieldwork angle, I think genuinely at this point, these are my
friends, and I interacted with them as such. We did get to some discus-
sion of their work. And I learned some basic facts. They have been busy.
Published twelve books in and are on pace to publish at least as many
in .
The proximity here of the personal (these are my friends) and the pro-
fessional (they published twelve books) underscores my dual attachments:
first, to Arlind and Ataol; and second, to their work. Re-reading my note-
books I can recognize how invested I have been in seeing them succeed. My
decision to construct a field around our initial encounter stemmed from
the value I immediately and viscerally ascribed to their editorial vision.
And though I do not wish to overstate the significance that reading the
likes of Borges and Bolaño may have for an abstract Albanian public, I do
hope to show that tracing a network through this field of literary transla-
tion is worthwhile—not least for what it can make visible about the role
of publishing and reading in the major processes of Albanian modernity—
including urbanization, modernization, nationalism, capitalism, socialism,
and globalization.
But before proceeding with the account, I want to say a few more words
about my positionality and access.
In her own methodological remarks on
(attempting to do) fieldwork in Hollywood, Sherry Ortner wrote, “There
are really two distinct issues of access for the anthropologist. One has to
do with the possibility of participant-observation; the other with obtain-
ing interviews” (, ). As a contribution to the wider field of media
production studies, Ortner introduced the term “interface ethnography”
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to describe doing participant observation “in the border areas where the
closed community or organization or institution interfaces with the pub-
lic” (). To characterize what it was like trying to obtain interviews from
Hollywood filmmakers—who Ortner saw as being “not that much dier-
ent from anthropologists and academics”—she used the term “studying
sideways” ().
Like Ortner, I did some productive interface ethnography for this proj-
ect—for example, at book fairs and book talks. But in contrast to the expe-
rience Ortner described, it was not very hard for me to access the inner
spaces of book publishing in Tirana. Indeed, the community attached to
Pika pa sipërfaqe was remarkably open to the intrusions of my practices
of participant observation. As for the question of studying sideways, there
was no doubt that the members of the publishing collective and I shared
mutual intellectual interests. This was apparent from my discovery—at
the book fair where I met Arlind and Ataol for the first time—of Pika pa
sipërfaqe’s translations of foundational works by Pierre Clastres (Society
against the State), Hobsbawm and Ranger (The Invention of Tradition), and
Tzvetan Todorov (The Conquest of America). But I’m not sure it would be
accurate to say that the members of this community were “very much part
of the world that we as academics inhabit” (Ortner , ). Rather than
studying sideways, then, I would characterize my project as studying side-
ways with a dierence.
Yes, my interlocutors knew anthropology very well. And yes, they
were as interested in my take on Malinowski and Lévi-Strauss as I was in
their views of Migjeni and Kadare. All else being equal, I would assume
that an assistant professor based at a public university in small-town Amer-
ica who was researching respected book publishers in a European capital
was probably studying up. Yet, in Albania, where the average wage in
was less than one hundred dollars a week (Laurenson ), that assumption
breaks down fairly quickly. So while I was able to secure research funds
by convincing grant makers that Pika pa sipërfaqe mattered, the ones who
were doing the work I said mattered were facing mounting financial stress
and uncertainty. I knew because I had the wherewithal to spend one to
two months with them every summer.
But it is possible, I think, for fieldworkers to get away from the whole
question of studying up, down, or sideways—with or without a dierence.
In my own ongoing eort to cultivate an “ordinary ethics” of ethnographic
practice, I take my cues from the anthropologist Michael Jackson. In the
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Introduction
preamble to his exploration of the life stories of Emmanuel Mulamila,
Roberto M. Franco, and Ibrahim Ouédraogo, Jackson explains (b, ):
Methodologically, then, an anthropology of ethics seeks to locate ethics
within the social. ... This implies a focus on ... the extraordinary stories
of ordinary people ... whose experiences bring into sharp relief the ethi-
cal quandaries, qualms, and questions that all human beings encounter in
the course of their lives.
As Jackson’s work suggests, we all would do well to “dissolve our con-
ventional concepts of the social and the cultural into the more immediate
and dynamic life of intersubjectivity—that is, the everyday interplay of
human subjects, coming together and moving apart, giving and taking,
communicating and miscommunicating” ( Jackson b, ). More specif-
ically, as a matter of methodology, these everyday ethics “eectively rein-
scribe the role of ethnography as a method for exploring a variety of actual
social situations before hazarding generalizations” ().
In this spirit of ordinary ethics, there is one last side of myself I want to
disclose. When I first traveled to Albania, in , it was not for research
but for love. It was Smoki who brought me to E për--shme in , and
Smoki again who facilitated my introduction to Arlind and Ataol in .
At that first meeting I remember marveling at the way the young publish-
ers seemed to read a whole life history into her family name. And though
I later noticed that it was not uncommon for Tirana people to try to place
someone based on a few quick questions about their mother’s or father’s
name or where their relatives lived before migrating to the capital, in the
case at hand, the story was more legible.
Smoki’s paternal grandfather, Shevqet Musaraj (–), emerged
as a writer during Albania’s National Liberation Movement (–).
He was probably best known as the author of the satirical poem Epic of
the National Front (), which he wrote when he was the editor of the
anti-fascist magazine Exercising Freedom (Buda and Lloshi , ). The
layers of meaning behind this association followed me through the project.
When Arlind or Ataol introduced me to other members of their commu-
nity, for example, they would often present me in roughly these terms:
Meti, foreign anthropologist, husband of the granddaughter of Shevqet
Musaraj. Generally, I thought the connection helped me to establish a little
bit of social capital among a network of people who respected writers and
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books. But given the extreme politicization of the literary field in Albania,
there were likely also times when it had the opposite eect.
Organization of the Book
Tracing associations between people, places, objects, ideas, and institu-
tions, each of the following chapters explores a set of related questions
about what people do with books and what books do with people.
The first chapter, “One Hundred Years of Transformation,” provides a
concise overview of Tirana’s social and urban development—from a small
town with an Ottoman past to a modern capital with a European future.
The chapter also provides a basic orientation to the field of contemporary
book publishing in Albania and a condensed history of Albanian literature.
Chapter , “Miracles of the Street,” approaches the observable circuit
of books in Tirana as both a literal (semiotic) and figurative (back-of-the-
book) index of Albanian modernity. The account starts from a ground-
level description of Tirana’s layered history as it is made visible in the old
books that are sold on the city’s streets. Through an analysis of books as
commodities, anthropological traces, and technologies of imagination, the
chapter establishes the social and material situation in which book pub-
lishing in the Albanian capital occurs. Adopting the term mrekullitë, or
miracles, which one of my interlocutors used to describe the best and rar-
est treasures to be found in Tirana’s outdoor book markets, I look to the
movement of books in this chapter as a way to get at theories of action
proposed by ordinary actors—that is, what Latour (, –) called
“practical metaphysis.” Following lines of connection from the books on
the street to those in Pika pa sipërfaqe’s catalogue, the chapter shows the
publishing house to be a point of dense intersection, bringing together
local and global histories, meanings, and imaginaries.
The third chapter, “In the Public Interest,” traces a structure of feel-
ing from the very beginnings of Albanian literary production in the six-
teenth century to the twenty-first century formation of the publishing
collective Pika pa sipërfaqe. Drawing on a variety of historical and ethno-
graphic sources, the discussion in this chapter considers the publishers’ cri-
tique of past and present social conditions, their vision of a better future,
and their belief in publishing as a means of social transformation, both in
the contemporary context and in conversation with other socio-literary
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Introduction
projects—especially the Albanian Rilindja (lit. rebirth) in the nineteenth
century and the twentieth century’s Albanian Socialist Realism.
Chapter , “Reading Nearby,” advances the book’s core argument that
literary activity is always also social activity. The chapter builds up a the-
ory of reading as a form of collective action that is driven by social rela-
tionships and social objectives. To substantiate this perspective, empiri-
cal examples drawn from fieldwork in Tirana show how specific acts of
co-reading contributed to the emergence of a new literary community.
The broader intention of this chapter is to demonstrate the application of
the general approach I call reading nearby.
The fifth chapter, “Between Conflicting Systems,” shows how a grind-
ing of discordant value systems produced the more general paradox that I
describe as ordinary tragedy. The analysis in this chapter reaches back to the
structure of feeling that runs through the history of Albanian literature
to make sense of my interlocutors’ decision to hold onto values and social
ideals that they understood to be at odds with what people must do to
survive in contemporary Albania. Starting from the impulse to learn how
two local booksellers made sense of the contradictory systems of meaning
operating in their everyday lives, the chapter examines the complexities of
social and economic life in Tirana at a time when old and new moral econ-
omies routinely clashed with the capitalist principle of profit.
In the outline I included with a proposal for this book, I left room for
unexpected outcomes to emerge from the dual trials of writing the eth-
nography and “registering the eects of the written account on the actors”
(Latour , ). I described my plans to return to Tirana in summer ,
where I imagined I would have the opportunity, in conditions similar to
the ones in which the fieldwork took place, to enroll Arlind and Ataol in
some “dialogic editing” (Feld ). That was in December , a time that
coincided with the outbreak of a new virus that “engulfed an unprepared
world” (Yan et al. ). The present account was thus mediated by the
pandemic that continued into the time of writing. And though this was not
part of the original research design, the conversations-at-a-distance (con-
ducted via WhatsApp and Gmail) that I was able to bring into the conclu-
sion, “A Good Time to Read,” serve to underscore the situated, empirical,
and intersubjective—that is to say, ethnographic—truth and reality of the
social situation that this biblio-ethnography made visible.
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Notes
1. AnunabridgedrepublicationofthefirsteditionofPrints and Visual Communication has
beendigitallypreservedandmadefreelyavailablebytheUniversalDigitalLibrary,a
searchablecollectionofmorethanonemillionbooks,availabletoeveryoneoverthe
Internet.
2. Forexamplesoftheideaofthebookasanactorinhistory,seeFebvreandMartin(1976),
Eisenstein(1983),Ginzburg(1992),Chartier(1994),Johns(1998),Sherman(2008),and
Blair(2010).
3.
Iwas notpresent forthe exchangebutamreporting itas toldby thepublishers,in
responsetomyquestionsabouthowreadershaverespondedtotheirwork.
4.
Foradiscussionoftheneglectofethnographicresearchonbookreading,seeFabian
(1993).Forexamplesofethnographiesthatexplorebookreadingamongchildren,stu-
dents,religiouscommunities,andfansof specificauthors andgenres,see Cochran-
Smith(1984),Sarris(1993),Boyarin(1993b),Mahmood(2005),Griswold(2000),Halvorson
andHovland(2021),Reed(2011),Radway(1991),Sadana(2012),andWiles(2015;2021).
Foranthropologicalreflectionsonbooksintransitandtransitoryspaces,seeLukacs
(2013)andMalkki(1997).
5.
FollowingupwithArlind,Iaskedhowhecameintocontactwiththeprisonpsychologist.
“Shewasaclientat[thebookstore]Epër-7-shme,”hesaid.“Andapoet.”
6. InterviewconductedinTirana,July23,2021.
7. Forcomprehensivetreatmentsofliteraryanthropologyasasubjectarea,seeDeAngelis
(2002)andRapport(2012).Foracloserlookatwhatisnewandemergentinthesubdisci-
pline,seeFournierandPrivat(2016)andNicCraithandFornier(2016).
8.
Theessentialreferenceswhenspeakingofanthropologyaswritingandinterpretation
areGeertz(1973a;1988),MarcusandCushman(1982),CliffordandMarcus(1986),and
BeharandGordon(1995).
9.
MiningthepagesofEnglishnovelsforperspectivesthatcouldenhancehisfieldwork
inEngland,forexample,NigelRapport(1993,1994)providedearlyandinfluentialargu-
mentsforapproachingliteratureasabridgetoanthropology.Forotherexamplesofusing
literatureasethnographicsourcematerial,seeSpradleyandMcDonough(1973),Handler
andSegal(1990),andCohen(2013).
10.Forexcellentandinstructiveexamples,seeAugé(2013),Jackson(2013a),Narayan(2007;
2012),PandianandMcLean(2017),WaterstonandVesperi(2009),andWulff(2016).
11. Inadditiontotheworkslistedinnote4,thekeyreferenceformehasbeenthe1968col-
lectionLiteracy in Traditional Societies,editedandintroducedbyJackGoody,withcontri-
butionsfromMauriceBloch,JackGoody,KathleenGough,I.M.Lewis,M.Meggitt,R.S.
Schofield,S.J.Tambiah,IanWatt,andIvorWilks.
© Vanderbilt University Press • For review only • Do not distribute
Notes to pages 5–15
12.
Oneverydaypracticesandtacticssuchas“readingaspoaching”and“walkinginthecity,”
seedeCerteau(1988a;1988b).OndispersedpracticesingeneralseeSchatzki(1996);for
discussionofdispersedpracticesrelatedtolivinginmediasaturatedworlds,seeHobart
(1999),Ardévoletal.(2010),andBird(2010).
13.IdiscussthismethodofreadingnearbyinmoredetailinChapter4.
14.
See,forexample,DeWaal(2014),Lelaj(2015),Musaraj(2018;2020),andSchwandner-
Sievers(2002;2004a;2004b).
15.ReaderswhoareinterestedinmyethnographyofreadinginIndiacanseeRosen(2015;
2018).
16.
IdiscusstheearlydaysoffieldworkforthisprojectinmoredetailinChapter4.The
conclusioncontainsadiscussionofhowtheprojectwasreshapedbytheCOVID-19pan-
demic.Thepresentaccountalsoincludescorrections,clarifications,andnewinsightsI
gleanedfromareturntothefieldfordialogiceditinginsummer2021.
17.
AhmetMuhtarZogollichangedhissurnametothemoreAlbaniansoundingZoguin1922,
declaredhimselfkingin1928,andwentintoexileatthestartoftheItalianoccupation
in1939(Halili2013,177).
18. IdiscussthechangesinownershipinmoredetailinChapter5.
19.
Inkeepingwithdisciplinaryconventionsregardingmaskingandtransparencyineth-
nographiesthatdealwithpublic-facingactorssuchasartistsandwriters(Duclos2019;
JerolmackandMurphy2019;Reyes2018),Idonotattempttodisguisetheidentityofthe
publishers,authors,ortranslatorsIdiscussinthisaccount.Ido,however,refertosome
oftheotheractorsIdiscussusingpseudonymsorcommonnouns.
20.InterviewconductedinTirana,June18,2018.
21.InterviewconductedinTirana,August9,2019.
22.
OBCTranseuropaisathinktankbasedinItalythatreportsonsocio-politicalandcultural
developmentsinSoutheasternEurope,Turkey,andtheCaucasus.
23.InterviewconductedinTirana,July21,2021.
24.ReaderswhoareinterestedinthefulllistofworkspublishedbyPikapasipërfaqefrom
2009to2021canseetheAppendix.Asanempiricalresourceforbiblio-ethnography,a
closerlookthroughthecataloguecanrevealavarietyofmeaningfulpatternsandrela-
tionsthatraisequestionsforfurtherresearch.What,forexample,explainstheoverrep-
resentationofwriterswhoweredisplacedbypoliticalviolenceduringtheperiodEric
Hobsbawm(1994)called“theshorttwentiethcentury”(1914–1991)?Andwhat,forthat
matter,accountsfortheunderrepresentationofwomenandnon-Westernwritersandof
textsthatprovidecritiquesofpatriarchalandracializedstructuresofpower?
25.ThisratioofdomesticandforeignfareisconsistentwithcurrenttrendsintheAlbanian
bookpublishingindustry(Bedalli2013).
26.InterviewconductedinTirana,August9,2019.
27. InterviewconductedinTirana,July23,2021.
28.Asmallcorrection—Epër-7-shmein2012wasthemostaccessiblebutnottheonlyanti-
quarianbookshopinTirana.
29.InterviewconductedinTirana,June24,2018.
30.InterviewconductedinTirana,June17,2019.
31.InterviewconductedinTirana,July22,2017.
32.InterviewconductedviaWhatsApp,May15,2021.
© Vanderbilt University Press • For review only • Do not distribute
Notes to pages 16–24
33.
See the About section of the press’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/
PikaPaSiperfaqe.
34.Forexamplesofintimateethnographycenteredonpersonalfamilynarratives,inaddi-
tiontoWaterston(2014),seeRylko-Bauer(2014),Chawla(2014),andPandian(2014).For
intimateethnographyinthebroadersenseinwhichIamusingtheterm,seeCrapanzano
(1980),Behar(1993),andJackson(2013b).
35.Frommediaanthropology(Ginsburg,Abu-Lughod,andLarkin2002;Rothenbuhlerand
Coman2005;WilkandAskew2002),Ihavedrawnmostfromthecontributionsofmedia
practice,mediaproduction,andcultureindustrystudies(BräuchlerandPostill2010;
Abu-Lughod1997;Ginsburg1995;HorkheimerandAdorno2002;Powdermaker1950;
Mayer,Banks,andCaldwell2009;Ortner2013).Fromliteraryanthropology(DeAngelis
2002;Rapport2012;NicCraithandFournier2016;Wiles2020),Ihaveengagedmainly
withapproachesthatapplyethnographicmethodstothestudyofsociallyembedded
practicesofreadingandwriting(Boyarin1993a;Cochran-Smith1984;Goody1968b;Gris-
wold2000;Radway1991;Reed2011;Sadana2012;Wiles2015;Wiles2021;Wulff2017).
Fromurbananthropology(Sennett1969,Hannerz1980;Low1999;PardoandPrato2016;
PardoandPrato2018),thekeytextformyanalysiswasEngaged Urbanism: Cities Method-
ologies(CampkinandDuijzings2016).
36.
HereIammindfulofthewarningAlfHornburg(2021)issuedinabroadercritiqueof
“postdualist”socialtheory.Intheefforttodistributeagencytoobjects,Hornburgargued,
wemayendup,contrarytotheintentionsofmostpostdualists,naturalizinganddepolit-
icizingtheveryhumaneconomiesandtechnologiesthatareresponsibleformakingthe
neocolonialasymmetriesofglobalcapitalismandthecurrentclimatecrisis.
37.
BypositionalityImeanhowmy“choicesofsettingandrole”(Yanow2009,287)built
onmyearlierinterestsandexperiences—asareader,asajuniorscholarinvestedinthe
anthropologyandethnographyofreading,andassomeonewithanintimateconnection
toAlbania.Asforaccess,ImeanhowI“establishedandmaintainedrelationships”over
alongperiodoftime(Yanow2009,288).ForafullertreatmentofwhyIthinktheseissues
aresoimportant,seeYanow’s(2009)discussionof“thethirdhermeneutic,”whichadds
theeventofreading/listeningtoCliffordGeertz’sinfluentialperspectiveofethnographic
writingas“constructionsofotherpeople’sconstructions”(Geertz1973b,9).
38.Indevelopingthisanthropologyofordinaryethics,Jacksontookhiscues,inturn,from
Levinas(1987)andSartre(withLévy1996).
1.
AlbaniaappliedforEUmembershipin2009andreceivedcandidatestatusin2014.In
2020,thebloc’stwenty-sevenmemberstatesformallyconsented“tostartmembership
talks”(Baczynska2020).
2.
AstheTirana-basedwriter,translator,publisher,andlibrarydirectorPiroMishahas
shown,the“national idea”ofAlbaniawasaproductofthenineteenth-centurysocial
andliterarymovement—RilindjaKombëtare (NationalRenaissance).Themovementwas
initiallyrestrictedto“ahandfulofintellectualslivingabroadwithlimitedrealimpact”
(Misha2002,39).Bythe1870s,themovementestablishedpoliticalaspirationsinsidethe
country.Thesewererealized,in1912,whenAlbaniaachievedindependenceaftermore
thanfourhundredyearsofOttomanrule.
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