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

Many people of Dhërmi/Drimades travel back and forth not only between and within rural
and urban places in Albania and Greece and elsewhere in Europe. When moving through and
within different places the people of Dhërmi/Drimades reconfigure and redefine their own
localities and the meaning of their village. In this process of ongoing reconfigurations the
localities and the meanings of the village and its people are often ambiguous and lead to
negotiations and conflicts over their belonging and locatedness. When faced with social
(migration, depopulation), political (democracy) and economic (liberalisation of the market)
changes, people of Dhërmi/Drimades situate their village on the geopolitical map, which
includes Greece or European Union on the one side and Albania or the Balkans on the other.
Peoples’ movements are not something new, although they have been facilitated by a new
road system, modern transportation and change in availability of passports. Migrations took
place in Dhërmi/Drimades for many centuries due to considerable erosion of terrain, the lack
of the land suitable for cultivation, and different economical, social, and political changes.
While on the one hand these movements brought about multiplicity of connections between
people and places, on the other hand the administrative (Ottoman period, from 15 th to the
early 19 th century) and political divisions (formation of the nation-states in the middle of 19 th
century) brought about divisions of people and places according to different categorisations
such as language, religion and territory.
The purpose of this work is to show the processes of establishment and reconstruction of
meanings of place and space in Himarë/Himara area of Southern Albania, and in
Dhërmi/Drimades in particular. These processes show the cultural, socio-political, and
historical dynamics and fractality of the construction of places and spaces, which are always
in the state of be-coming. While the meanings of places and spaces are on the one hand
perceived through their differences and contradictions, they are on the other hand constructed
through similarities and agreements between the national and the local levels. These wider
social and political processes help the people of Dhërmi/Drimades to define their sense of
belonging and locality.
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