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

Chapter Three
THE SEA AND THE MOUNTAINS
“Our character is similar to our place and its climate. On the one hand it is cold and
wild such as the mountains while on the other hand it is mild and hospitable as the
sea”.
(Dimitris, field notes)
Especially in the first months of my fieldwork, a number of villagers of Dhërmi/Drimades
used similar words as Dimitris to describe their character and relate it to their natal village.
Later on I realised that this kind of ambiguous mapping of their place, which is claimed to be
coherent with their character is important for the understanding of the process of construction
of spaces and places in the village.
While previous chapter (Contested Histories) presented different “where” of the village, as
seen through viewpoints and interests of local and national historiographers, this chapter will
lead the reader on paths and places, constructed by story-telling, remembrances and
biographical contexts of local residents of Dhërmi/Drimades. Although these oral stories seem
to be less audible than historiographies in the wider socio-political and economic context,
they can nevertheless to some extent – similarly to historiographies – convey roots,
boundaries and belongings. Therefore, as suggested by Bender (2001: 5) the anthropologists
should be alert to the question of “whose stories are being told” as well as to the fact that
these stories “naturalize” particular kinds of social relations (ibid.).
In this chapter I discuss stories recounted by the elderly people (born between 1926 and 1945)
who claim to originate from Dhërmi/Drimades. All the stories were jotted down during the
conversations and supplemented with details later in the day when I was working on my
fieldnotes. I will focus here on the nature of social relations as described by movements of
people in the stories and on networks of connections between individual places which
construct the spatial relations. The question here is how different meanings of space, created
by individual stories, construct the “whereness” of Dhërmi/Drimades.
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