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

CONCLUSION
Complexity is intrinsic to both the ethnographic and comparative enterprise. Anthropologists
are concerned to demonstrate the social and cultural entailments of phenomena, though they
must in the demonstration simplify the complexity enough to make it visible. What appears to
be the object of description – demonstrating complex linkages between elements – also makes
description less easy.
(Strathern 2005[1991]: xiii)
The central aim of my thesis was to illustrate and explore the complexity which arises from
continuous construction of space in the village of Dhërmi/Drimades in Southern Albania.
Studying this subject from a close perspective shows that the meanings of the village are
complex, diverse and multi-layered. They depend on historical and political eras, social
relationships, and people’s self-identification within them. The erosive terrain, “uneven”
topography, ambiguous demographical data, numerous versions of names of people and
places, contested historiographies, people’s expression and suppression of memory revealed
through their narratives, their daily practices and frequent movements, all map the village
space in plurality of ways. Local people, historiographers, demographers, geomorphologists,
lawyers and politicians try to resolve many ambiguities and pin down the “facts”. This
“common truth”, however, is soon questioned and seemingly solid entities are either quickly
discarded or strongly opposed by some other, also seemingly solid entities. They spin off each
other like hard and round billiard balls (Wolf 1997:5).
The meanings of notions such as the “local” (horianos) and the “foreigner” (ksenos), the
“Greek” and the “Albanian”, outside (okso) and inside (mesa), in front (brosta) and behind
(piso), “of the place” (apo ton topos) and “out” of it, are changeable, contextual and
contingent. Something that is considered local can in the next moment and in a different
context quickly become foreign and vice versa. Greek can become Albanian and Albanian can
become Greek. What is “of” the place can also be “out” of it. The rhetorical claims of people
living in the village and those returning to it illustrate how the meanings of the village,
defined through their everyday practices, perceptions and conversations, are multivoiced.
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