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

determine the “first” language of the people living in Dhërmi/Drimades and define their place
and their belonging.
Like the language, religious practice with small churches and chapels defines the village place
too. More than thirty small churches and chapels that are scattered around the village place
show the traces of the village past and people’s religion. The latter is nowadays with the flow
of social changes (emigration of young generation and immigration of Muslim families
coming from different places throughout Albania) and political (from communism to
democracy) becoming an important part of the processes of identity formation.
Different representations of the population number in Dhërmi/Drimades as well as different
kinds of counting of the minority members give an insight in how some representations of
people and places are politically constituted and how they shape the ways things are. Besides
the people’s categorizations where some people and places stay undefined or “erased”, the
variety of accounts on population numbers illustrate how the representations of people and
places are constantly negotiated.
The last account about family, lineages and clans illustrates the differences and relations
between what people say and what they do. In the course of social, political, economic and
historical events, different comings and goings to and fro influenced local forgetting,
reconstructing and negotiating of genealogies. The example of Kosta and Andrea illustrates
how in a given political and economic situation (attempts for compensating the outsiders with
the coastal land) people who either live or are continually returning to Dhërmi/Drimades
create their space within which they define their property and belonging.
While the given chapter illustrates how unstable, shifting, but interwoven perspectives
constitute place of Dhërmi/Drimades, the following chapter emplaces them in the historical
context. In such a way it reveals to us something more about the “where” of this place.
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