Religion in post-communist Albania: Muslims, Christians and the concept of 'culture' (Devoll, South Albania)

This paper addresses the issue of religion in post-communist Albania. It is based on ethnographic material collected in the southeastern district of Devoll in the mid-90s. Through an analysis of the role of religion within local society it attempts to question the common assumption that religion in Albania ‘does not matter', without, on the other hand, claiming that there is ground for religious conflict or fundamentalism. In this paper, I analyse the relations between Muslims (who are in majority in this district) and Orthodox Christians by looking at local ideas about ‘culture'. This category, which should be understood as ‘civilisation' or ‘education', appears as a way to classify people and religious communities: Christians are generally granted more ‘culture' than Muslims. The aim of this paper is to understand the meaning of such statements about the level of ‘culture' of Muslims and Christians and to explain the use of the category of ‘culture' in relation to the present state of Muslim/Christian relations

'We are not Greek, but...': Dealing with the Greek-Albanian Border among Albanian-speaking Christians of Southern Albania

International audienceThis paper looks at the way Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians from Lunxhëri, in Southern Albania cross the border with Greece. Based on narratives and family histories collected in 2001 and 2002, it relates the specific position of this community in the border area (Albanian but not Muslim, Orthodox Christian but not Greek) to the representations and symbolic perceptions of the border. It shows how the current crossings of the border are related to the maintaining and crossing of the ethnic boundary between Greeks and Albanians, but also between Albanians and Vlachs, and between Muslims and Christians

Visual Culture in Communist Albania: Photography and Photographers at the Time of the Stockmann-Sokoli Expedition (1957)

International audienceThe Stockmann-Sokoli expedition of summer 1957 resulted in the collection of photographs taken before and during the ethnomusicologistsʼ trip in Southern Albania by Wilfried Fiedler, the linguist of the team. This set of several hundred photographs in colour and black-and-white is a valuable testimony of the kind of images of communist Albania that were emerging at that time. In this chapter, I take as a pretext the photographic collection of Wilfried Fiedler, in its content and in its conditions of production, to analyse the situation of Albanian photography in 1957. For this, I begin by presenting the collection and its context, i.e. Albania and its relations with the Communist world before 1961. I then turn to the situation of contemporary Albanian photography to highlight the specificities of Wilfried Fiedler’s photographs and dwell on a determining criterion: colour. I conclude with considerations on photography and modernity

Compte rendu de E. Claverie (2003), Les guerres de la vierge. Une anthropologie des apparitions, Paris, Gallimard

Compte rendu d'ouvrageCompte rendu de E. Claverie (2003), Les guerres de la vierge. Une anthropologie des apparitions, Paris, Gallimar

Famille et parenté dans l'Albanie communiste et post-communiste

Cette communication porte sur l'emprise du politique sur la parenté et pose la question des relations entre un État totalitaire, l'Albanie communiste, et un système de parenté. En l'occurrence, les groupes de parenté, familles et lignages, peuvent être vus comme des institutions intermédiaires que l'État chercherait à affaiblir pour mieux contrôler les individus. Pourtant, il semble que, par sa politique même, l'État contribue à renforcer ces groupes et leur signification dans la population

Better than Muslims, not as good as Greeks. Emigration as experienced and imagined by the Albanian Christians of Lunxhëri

Lunxhëria is located in southern Albania, near the Greek border, in the district of Gjirokastër. Its population is mainly Christian Orthodox and Albanian-speaking, and notwithstanding its strong claims for Albanian identity, it has close links with the Greek minority of Albanian (Dropull and Pogon), most of all through marriage alliances. The area experienced from the 19th century until the Second World War emigration towards Istanbul, Greece and America, while its inhabitants have masively emigrated to Greece in the 1990s. In the meantime, Arumanians settled in most of the villages, and Muslim Labes in some of them, bringing deep transformations into local society. Based on intensive fieldwork research in Lunxhëria, this paper addresses the relationship between local perceptions and categorisations on the one hand (between Albanianness and Greekness, Muslims and Christians, Albanians and Arumanians, Lunxhotes and Labes, etc.), and the present development of identity and migration strategies on the other hand

Entre féminin et masculin. La vierge jurée, l'héritière et le gendre à la maison

International audienceComparing the solutions to the problem of the absence of a male heir in two Albanian regions, one in the north and the other in the south, brings to light, apart from common characteristics, divergent symbolic conceptions underlying Albanian kinship systems. In particular, "blood" is, in the north, a strictly patrilineal principle, whereas, in the south, it tends to be cognate, which reminds us of what can be observed in Greece. Conceptions of the lineage and its perpetuity strongly contrast between north and south.La comparaison des solutions apportées au problème de l'absence d'héritier mâle dans deux régions albanaises, l'une au nord, l'autre au sud, fait apparaître, au-delà des traits communs, les représentations symboliques divergentes qui sous-tendent les systèmes de parenté albanais. En particulier, le sang est dans le nord un principe strictement patrilinéaire, alors qu'il prend dans le sud un caractère cognatique qui rappelle des faits observés en Grèce. La conception même du lignage et de sa perpétuation présente ainsi des formes contrastées au nord et au sud

Better than Muslims, not as good as Greeks. Emigration as experienced and imagined by the Albanian Christians of Lunxhëri

Lunxhëria is located in southern Albania, near the Greek border, in the district of Gjirokastër. Its population is mainly Christian Orthodox and Albanian-speaking, and notwithstanding its strong claims for Albanian identity, it has close links with the Greek minority of Albanian (Dropull and Pogon), most of all through marriage alliances. The area experienced from the 19th century until the Second World War emigration towards Istanbul, Greece and America, while its inhabitants have masively emigrated to Greece in the 1990s. In the meantime, Arumanians settled in most of the villages, and Muslim Labes in some of them, bringing deep transformations into local society. Based on intensive fieldwork research in Lunxhëria, this paper addresses the relationship between local perceptions and categorisations on the one hand (between Albanianness and Greekness, Muslims and Christians, Albanians and Arumanians, Lunxhotes and Labes, etc.), and the present development of identity and migration strategies on the other hand

Les musulmans dans l'Albanie post-communiste : aperçu des croyances et des pratiques dans le Devoll

Cet article montre que la façon dont les villageois albanais pratiquent l'islam et se perçoivent en tant que musulmans est en grande partie déterminée par l'expérience communiste de la seconde moitié du vingtième siècle. Le régime communiste s'est en effet attaqué aux institutions tout en laissant subsister des formes de religiosité souvent partagées par les chrétiens et les musulmans. L'existence de pratiques communes et le respect manifesté envers les croyances et les pratiques de l'autre communauté n'altèrent toutefois pas le sentiment d'une différence irréductible entre musulmans et chrétiens

Culture and the Reinvention of Myths in a Border Area

Long-term ethnographic fieldwork allows the ethnographer to become familiar with what is called 'presentation of the self', i.e., with what people say and do when they meet other people and have to create an image of themselves. A part of the presentation of the self has to do with collective identity, that is, with the presentation of the self as a member of a community, either national, local or religious, whose existence is justified on historical grounds. It is thus possible to have an idea of the impact of the myths, created and used in the nation's claim for existence, on society, especially on local communities which are not directly involved in the process of myth-making. Here we shall examine what happens to those myths in the southern Albanian district of Devoll, on the border with Greece. The argument is that although national myths are widely spread in this peripheral area, through school and media, they are shaped to a specific form by the international border and the way it influences social organisation and local perceptions of the self and the other