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

with their movements, story-telling, remembering, and management and manipulation of
different issues such as land ownership or rubbish disposal. The biographies of most of my
interlocutors show rich itineraries of migrations to different places, firstly in Albania and then
in Greece or elsewhere. Chapter Three shows how movements and migrations of story-tellers
are in many ways a duplication of their ancestors’ movements. Through their remembrances,
which are in Ingold’s (2000) words forged with words and embedded in the perception of the
environment, people constantly reconstitute the environment and at the same time their own
memories. Ingold defines the environment as “the world as it exists and takes on meaning in
relation to me [the human, NGB], and in that sense it came into existence and undergoes
development with me [the human] and around me [the human]” (2000: 20). In his view the
stories reveal the story-tellers’ perception of the environment and themselves in it. Stories are
constituted in this interrelation and “find their way” (develop) together with the environment
and the story-teller.
Referring to de Certeau (1984), Ingold suggests that story-teller maps the process of
(be)coming in the very act of recounting the story. I tried to exemplify this process of
(be)coming through the stories told by the elderly villagers. To show the continuity and
irreversibility of the process I analysed them according to de Certeau’s theoretical perspective
of continuous transformation of places to spaces and vice versa. I also tried to analyse the
process of (be)coming and the construction of places and spaces through Green’s (2005)
conceptualisation of spatial hierarchy and its interrelation with “whereness”. The figures were
drawn in order to illustrate the ways of mapping the village and other places in time and
space. The figures show different variations of “whereness”. The “whereness” of places
appears changeable, with borders and boundaries being porous and fuzzy. This goes for local
boundaries which map the landscape, as for the state borders, which divide Albania, Greece,
Italy, United States or Yugoslavia. Story-tellers consider mountains as the boundary between
the village and Albania and the sea as the boundary that opens and leads towards Greece.
They condition the national understanding of borders with the spatial understanding of
boundaries and vice versa.
The interweavement of space and place in relation to hegemonic understanding of the nationstate
is illustrated in Chapter Four. I focus on younger generation comprised of local tourist
facilities’ owners, emigrants, and tourists, who come to the coast of Dhërmi/Drimades in
summer months. The social and spatial boundaries here are constructed around the practical
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