Full Description
In seeking to better understand post-communist identity change, this book presents an analysis based on the study of everyday life in two villages in northern Albania. The author describes the villages from the perspective of community, economic activity and relations with the state. The book applies theories relating identity and civil society to the social, economic and political realities associated with post-communist transformation. By describing village life in northern Albania at the close of the 20th century, it aims to complement the anthropoligical work undertaken by Edith Durham in the early 1900s and by Margaret Hasluck in the 1930s. The book concludes that the negotiation of identity is an exploratory and adaptive process rather than a simple transition to the identities associated with market democracies and that there is a need to adapt, reconfigure and improve a range of institutional forms, particularly those of a civic nature, to generate confidence in the new institutional setting.
Contents
Methodological considerations; the theoretical setting; Albania - background; the villages and their administrative context; community; economy; state.
