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

demands for the acknowledgement of the need for a local Greek school, etc. Although more
than a decade has passed since the changes occurred in the political system and globalisation
(or glocalisation) became visible in majority of larger cities like Tirana and Durres, it seems
that the feeling of no control, poverty, uncertainty, and lack of trust in political elite or the
“state” (to kratos) remains. Although political power has dispersed from the singular autarchic
authority to plurality of ruling political elite, the old autocracy is still present in minds and
experiences of ordinary people in the village. There is a feeling that nothing really changed,
although the system itself experienced a radical change from communism to democracy. The
“eye” or the “eyes” of political, economical and bureaucratic control are still “up there” (apo
apano/nga larg), where elderly villagers see the ruling political elite. These panoptical eyes,
to use Foucault’s (1975) expression, linger. They control and “spy” upon their everyday life.
The system has changed. Some people moved out, other came in. But the powers, which
divide and categorize people and places, remain. People of Dhërmi/Drimades have a feeling
of permanent intrusions of different kinds of power into their lives. This is probably the main
reason why stories about communism are still absent at the present. I could notice this myself
when my “eyes” too were considered to be the eyes of the state or perhaps of some other
international institution, at least at the beginning of my fieldwork.
Contested or Related?
The aim of my analysis was to show the process of unstable reconstruction of space and place
in Dhërmi/Drimades, which produces on the one hand differences and contestations and on
the other hand similarities and interrelations. Some authors (Bender and Winer 2001, Low and
Zúñiga 2003) have in their studies of this process of unstable, messy and fragmentised
construction found that spaces and places are inevitably contested, negotiated and subjected to
revolts. As I have suggested in Introduction and shown later on through examples of
remembrances of elderly villagers, demography, religion and kinship, the meanings of spaces
and places are not so much contested as they are ambiguous. In their ambiguity these
meanings are continuously shifting according to the context and those involved.
Contestedness only appears when different forces – political, economical or social – try to
categorize these ambiguities and define them as clear and firm entities. The unstable
construction of space and place is therefore not always contested; its contestedness is not
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