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

What I would like to propose is that we begin to think of the configuration of cultural
forms in today’s world as fundamentally fractal, that is, as possessing no Euclidian
boundaries, structures or regularities. Second, I would suggest that these cultural
forms, which we should strive to represent as fully fractal, are also overlapping in
ways that have been discussed only in pure mathematics (in set theory, for example)
and biology (in the language of polytechnic classifications). Thus we need to combine
a fractal metaphor for the shape of cultures (in the plural) with a polytechnic account
of their overlaps and resemblances (1996: 46).
In my focus on the processes of construction of spaces and places I do not take these
processes to be one-way oriented, leading, for example, from the core to the margins, but as
processes that go both ways. A similar method was used by Ballinger (2003), who focused on
reconstruction of history and identity in the Julian March. I am interested in complex and
fractal 11 processes of construction of space and place in the present day Dhërmi/Drimades. I
therefore describe different perspectives on and representations of the village and its people
(Chapter One), place them in a historical context of historiographers, who use a similar
discourse but follow different interests in their attempts to reconstruct the history of the
village (Chapter Two), analyse peoples’ narratives about the sea and the mountains through
which they voice and reconstitute the meaning and location of their village (Chapter Three),
and present contestations and negotiations which nowadays take place around the question of
rubbish disposal on the coast (Chapter Four). It was the latter issue that emerged as one of the
most important subjects around which the people of Dhërmi/Drimades not only construct their
coastal place but also locate their belonging.
11 For deatailed exploration of the fractal phenomena in ethnographic and theoretical treatments in anthropology
see also Strathern (1995 [1991]), Wagner (1991), Green (2005).
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