Remitting Restoring And Building Contemporary Albania

The edited collection is a fresh contribution to the anthropological, sociological, and geographical explorations of time-space in Southeast Europe and Albania in particular. By delving into various levels of people’s daily lives, such as literature, relation to the environment, the urbanization process, art, photography, trauma and remembering, processes of modernity, the volume vividly portrays various realms that are lived and perceived. It largely builds on the premise that structural resemblances of the past continuously reappear in particular social and cultural moments and seek to restore and build the individual and collective lives in contemporary Albania.

The edited collection is a fresh contribution to the anthropological, sociological, and geographical explorations of time-space in Southeast Europe and Albania in particular. By delving into various levels of people's daily lives, such as literature, relation to the environment, the urbanization process, art, photography, trauma and remembering, processes of modernity, the volume vividly portrays various realms that are lived and perceived. It largely builds on the premise that structural resemblances of the past continuously reappear in particular social and cultural moments and seek to restore and build the individual and collective lives in contemporary Albania. Nataša Gregorič Bon is a social anthropologist and Research Fellow at the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). Since 2016, she has been an Assistant Professor at the Postgraduate School, ZRC SAZU. Her long-standing research in Albania revolves around spatial anthropology, (non)movements and (im)mobility, border dynamic, anthropology of water and environmental anthropology. She is the author of the Spaces of Discordance: Ethnhnography of Space and Place in Dhërmi/Drimades in Southern Albania (2008) and co-editor of the volume Moving Places: Relations, Return and Belonging (2016). Smoki Musaraj is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Ohio University, USA. She is a cultural anthropologist with a specialization in economic and legal anthropology. Her research focuses on the anthropology of money and value; informal economies; speculative bubbles; anthropology of corruption; postsocialist transformations; and societies of South Europe and the Mediterranean. She is author of Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania (2020) and co-editor of Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Inclusion, and Design (2018).

Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials. The dispensation of justice during communist rule in Albania, East Germany, and Poland was reliant on legal propaganda, making the visual a fundamental part of the legitimacy of the law. Analysing photographs of trials, this book examines how this message was conveyed to audiences watching and participating in the spectacle of show trials. The book traces how this use of the visual was exported from the Soviet Union and imposed upon its satellite states in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It shows how the legal actors and political authorities embraced new photographic technologies to advance their legal propaganda and legal photography. Drawing on contemporary theoretical work in the area, the book then challenges straightforward accounts of the relationship between law and the visual, critically engaging entrenched legal historical narratives, in relation to three different protagonists, to offer the possibility of reclaiming and rewriting past accounts. As its analysis demonstrates, the power of images can also be subversive; and, as such, the cases it addresses contribute to the discourse on visual epistemology and open onto contemporary questions about law and its inherent performativity. This original and insightful engagement with the relationship between law and the visual will appeal to legal and cultural theorists, as well as those with more specific interests in Stalinism, and in Central, East, and Southeast European history.

Guided by the thesis that literature can transform social reality, Tirana Modern draws on ethnographic and historical material to examine the public culture of reading in modern Albania. As its starting point, this book asks: How has Albanian literature and literary translation shaped social action during the longue durée of Albanian modernity? Drawing on material collected through fieldwork with a community of readers, writers, and translators attached to the independent Albanian publisher Pika pa sipërfaqe (Point without Surface), Tirana Modern provides a tightly focused ethnography of literary culture in Albania that brings into relief the more general dialectic between social imagination and social reality as mediated by reading and literature.

In 1972, Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities, a literary book that masterfully combines philosophy and poetry, rigid structure and free play, theoretical insight and glittering prose. The text is an extended meditation on urban life, and it continues to resonate not only among literary scholars, but among social scientists, architects, and urban planners as well. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Invisible Cities, this collection of essays serves as both an appreciation and a critical engagement. Drawing from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts, this volume grapples with the theoretical, pedagogical, and political legacies of Calvino’s work. Each chapter approaches Invisible Cities not only as a novel but as a work of evocative ethnography, place-writing, and urban theory. Fifty years on, what can Calvino’s dreamlike text offer to scholars and practitioners interested in actually existing urban life?

Annotation During the ten years of reform, Albania has been buffeted by set backs which led fully 40% of respondents to indicate that socioeconomic conditions have worsened during that period. While informal coping mechanisms have been developed in many communities, these are under stress and threaten to give way.

International migration, the movement of people across international boundaries to improve economic opportunity, has enormous implications for growth and welfare in both origin and destination countries. An important benefit to developing countries is the receipt of remittances or transfers from income earned by overseas emigrants. Official data show that development countries' remittance receipts totaled 160 billion in 2004, more than twice the size of official aid. This year's edition of Global Economic Prospects focuses on remittances and migration. The bulk of the book covers remittances.

Mobile money, e-commerce, cash cards, retail credit cards, and more—as new monetary technologies become increasingly available, the global South has cautiously embraced these mediums as a potential solution to the issue of financial inclusion. How, if at all, do new forms of dematerialized money impact people’s everyday financial lives? In what way do technologies interact with financial repertoires and other socio-cultural institutions? How do these technologies of financial inclusion shape the global politics and geographies of difference and inequality? These questions are at the heart of Money at the Margins, a groundbreaking exploration of the uses and socio-cultural impact of new forms of money and financial services.