university of nova gorica graduate school contested spaces and ...

Kosta and Andrea decided to call their brothers and discuss the compensation which could be
paid to their brothers after they earned enough with their business on the coast. In 2005 they
both arranged the documents on land ownership at the Municipality of Himarë/Himara. Until
now their case is settled but they are both aware that the future is uncertain. They know that
they can be left without property on the coast either because the government is going to use it
for compensation or because one of their brothers’ heirs will claim the property back.
1.10. Summary
This chapter led us through various kinds of shifting of people and places, their names, selfdeclarations,
languages, religions, population numbers, social relations, lineages and heritage
systems. All of them relate to a “single” place – the village of Dhërmi/Drimades. Different
perspectives on and representations of the village are continuously formed and lived in the
junction of social, political and historical events. The latter constitute meanings of places that
appear sometimes as opposing and contested, sometimes as related and sometimes as blurred.
As many scholars (Lefebvre 1974, de Certeau 1984, Ingold 1993 and 2000, Gupta and
Ferguson 2001, Green 2005) who studied unstable construction of space and/or place
suggested, people and places are always constituted in a dynamic interrelation with other
people and places. Or in terms of Green: “People are never alone with their places anywhere
in the world; they never constitute places as places on their own” (Green 2005: 90, italics
original). Throughout the history of spatial studies it has been shown that places are not
characterized by their homogeneity but by a set of relations with various people and places.
This chapter provides an insight of how the village of Dhërmi/Drimades is represented
through various perspectives – official, local and even anthropological – that shape stories
about the village and its people. These stories are formed around different perspectives
through which the meanings of Dhërmi/Drimades are continuously reconstructed and rearranged.
The chapter begins with the story of Himarë/Himara area, which has continually changed in
size throughout the centuries. For example, from 15 th to 18 th century it conjoined 50 villages,
in the middle of 18 th century 16 villages and in the 19 th century only 8 villages. Besides the
number of places, their names and population changed too. In the story about geomorphology
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