Change of Sight, Sites of Creativity: The Visual Arts in Albania after Socialism

This dissertation examines Albania’s fine art world after the end of state socialism in 1991. Drawing on two years of anthropological fieldwork (January –August 2006 and January 2010-August 2011) in Tirana, Albania’s capital city, this study investigates how the withdrawal of state support and oversight on the arts, the introduction of a market economy and efforts toward European belonging have been reflected, responded to and challenged in the discourses and practices of aesthetic production. Viewing art as a productive site of social meaning, where people perform and struggle over their identities, their pasts and futures, this dissertation explores the social imaginaries that art is employed to construct as Albania navigates European Union integration and tries to tame its socialist past. Central to this study is analyzing the increasing prevalence of discourses on art’s social relevance, which have crystallized only in recent years. Whereas in 2006, most artists in this study were primarily concerned with producing art for art’s sake and its commodity potential, by 2010 and 2011, informants frequently declared that an important aim of their work was to produce art that could have some relevance for society. Such claims about art’s social relevance are being made in a context where local and transnational cultural flows and processes are complexly negotiated in light of both new and old knowledges. These negotiations are indicative of the cultural politics of the postsocialist transition, where art producers: react to socialist-era perceptions on art and the role of the artist; engage with and respond to the influence of international institutions and foundations; and incorporate the universal vernacular of contemporary art which they infuse with local histories, experiences and subjectivities. Looking at artists are key agents of globalization, this dissertation also examines how Albanian artists negotiate the forces of the local and the global in their work in an effort to illuminate processes of cultural and economic globalization in postsocialism. Lastly, this study focuses on Albanian artists’ recent engagements with the [socialist] past. In their work, the symbols, forms, histories and memories of socialism had been gaining momentum, doing significant cultural work in current battles over remembering, documenting and erasing the past

TEMPORALITIES IN ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK: DEALING WITH PAST AND FUTURE IN THE EUROPEAN CRISIS

The panel addresses the theme of the “familiar/strange” from the spatial and temporal perspectives as it emerges in crisisridden Europe. Many people in Europe had incorporated the expectations of economic growth and welfare as the political expression of a postWorld War II expansion of citizenship entitlements superseding violent confrontation between nations and classes. The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the intensification of structural adjustment policies have resulted in an ambivalent understanding of the present experience. While some perceive it as a breakdown of political, social and economic promises and expectations, stressing the “strangeness” of the new situation, others perceive it as the continuation of past relationships that have never disappeared, stressing their “familiarity.” The latter may refer to the memories of past job loss, national humiliation, repression, corruption, etc. This panel focuses on the temporalities of the crisis. Presenters explore the modes in which the past and the future are interpreted and used in order to make sense of continuity and change, and as discursive weapons by European social actors in the wake of the crisis. Particular practices of resilience or accommodation are often justified in terms of remembrance of “familiar” past events and actions. Conversely, some forms of mobilization and social creativity stress their total rupture with past political practices and present themselves as exclusively oriented toward a future, willfully different. Often we observe this happening simultaneously. How can we understand these tensions? What structural and lived incoherencies are they pointing at? This panel also seeks to address ethnographic encounters as they select to stress one or the other of these realities. It poses reflexivity at the center of the understanding of crisis in Europe. Why do we choose to focus on the “familiar” or the “strange” aspects of people’s practices and discourses? Why do our informants and collaborators choose to underscore breakdown or continuity? Is it a matter of methodological choice on our part or of ideological positioning on theirs? Or is it, rather, the inescapable presence of historical facts? As we penetrate the spaces of crisis through the concrete ethnographic experience we are driven to embrace the logics and reasons of the people we share our lives with, for the time being. How do we need to negotiate them as we pause to analyze and explain?https://scholarworks.umass.edu/chess_panels/1001/thumbnail.jp

Reading Nearby: Literary Ethnography in a Postsocialist City

© 2019 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved The solitary reader, sitting quietly surrounded by her thoughts, is a powerful image. But reading is also a deeply social practice. From learning to read to deciding what to read next, a significant amount of literate activity takes place within specific social relationships. Drawing from ethnographic research I conducted between 2015 and 2018, this essay shows how the act of co-reading has contributed to the emergence of a new literary community based in Tirana, Albania. The broader intention of the essay is to demonstrate the application of the general approach to literary anthropology I call reading nearby