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The Vjosa, a relatively well-known river of South East Europe, has been a subject of numerous attempts of infrastructural interventions such as the construction of hydropower plants for more than a decade. This “pearl” of the Blue Heart of Europe, as the river is often called by various activists, scientists and media, is now also referred to as a “dynamic equilibrium” and “geological continuum”. The article explores the dynamic and uneven character of the Vjosa, which is embodied in the lives of its people as much as their lives are spatialized in its riverine environments. While activists, scientists, and the media praise the Vjosa’s continuous dynamism, local people have an ambivalent relationship to it. On the one hand, they fear the Vjosa’s “wild” character, as it floods their fields and “eats up” their soil, whereas, on the other, they appreciate its vitality because it provides their fields with water and minerals. By delving into this ambiguous nature of the Vjosa, this article seeks to rethink the meaning of dynamics, continuity, stability, fixity, and rupture at the brink of the modern quest for control over changing environments. By intersecting different scales—social, geographical, hydrological, historical, political, and economic—it explores the mutuality of entanglements, disentanglements, and transformations that configure the Vjosa’s riverine environments. We argue that the dynamic, wild, and ambiguous nature of the Vjosa is part of the structural continuity or so-called “landscape structure” that seeks to resist the contemporary quest for fixity, stability, and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive 'brain-drain' which has afflicted Albania after 1991 in almost all cultural fields affected also to a large respect the folk culture. A state-sponsored system of cultural houses spread all over the country collapsed. State-supported folk culture ceased to exist for a transitional period. Villages with a once vibrant tradition of multipart singing became emptied and muted, without songs. The cultural landscape had to reorganise itself. Within this process of the reorganisation of cultural institutions returning migrants played a decisive role. Money from returning migrants resulted in the creation of mostly privately sponsored shoqeritë, promoting regional cultural heritage. The social absence of the migrants became culturally felt. The folk repertoire of songs turned into a tool for responding and commenting on human loss as well as on tragic events such as the drowning of Albanian migrants in the Strait of Otranto 1997 or the hijacking of Flamur Pisli 1999. The leading figures of this culturally highly innovative practice were local intellectuals called rapsods who tried to relate the nostalgic mythistory of kurbet before the 2nd World War with the actual mass migration through a shared emotionality. Through a highly effective use of metaphors and performance devices taken from oral folk poetry and the repertoire of death laments they show the ability to react and comment on the present migrations and to fix them in the memory of the community. Based on fieldwork in South Albania 2004-2009 this paper will try to evaluate how migration has contributed in the cultural realm to the identity-building processes in post-communist Albania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]