The Beautiful Blue Danube and the Accursed Black Mountain Wreath: German and Austrian Kulturpolitik of Knowledge on Southeast Europe and Albania

Communist and Post-Communist Studies

2016

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International audienceIn the standard folkloric and ethnographic tradition of Albanian studies, various efforts to seize an authentic, traditional and popular culture, supposed to have really functioned in a society of official ideology, were devoted primordially to a catalogue of descriptivist and empiricist research, which only served to confirm the ultimate goal of constructing a primarily essentialized national specificity and a particularly antiquated view of national culture. Whereas the long-term continuities in the Albanian studies of people's culture (kultura popullore), which pre-dated and out-lived socialism, together with the ambiguous relationship to anthropology are emphasized elsewhere, in this paper we look more closely at the limited changes and innovations that occurred in the decades of communist regime in Albania. The aim is to uncover how the traditional ethnographic-folkloric studies of people's culture, marked by intellectual isolation and stigmatized by association with moralist and nationalist ideologies, were mobilized to service the shifting ideological needs and state policies towards the cultural hegemony of the communist regime

Section: Sovietization and De-sovietizationmentioning

confidence: 73%

Section: The Folkloric Glorification Of One's Own People's Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sovietization and De-sovietizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The National-communist Project Of Cultural Hegemonymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

From the communist point of view: Cultural hegemony and folkloric manipulation in Albanian studies under socialism

Абази¹,

Communist and Post-Communist Studies

2016

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The past in the present: time and narrative of Balkan wars in media industry and international politics

Абази¹,

2016

Third World Quarterly

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In this article, we explore various forms of travel writing, media reporting, diplomatic record, policy-making, truth claims and expert accounts in which different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars, both old (1912-1913) and new (1991-1999), have been most evident. We argue that the ways in which these perspectives are rooted in different temporalities and historicisations and have resulted in the construction of commonplace and time-worn representations. In practical terms, we take issue with several patterns of narratives that have led to the sensationalism of media industry and the essentialisation of collective memory. Taken together as a common feature of contemporary policy and analysis in the dominant international opinion, politics and scholarship, these narrative patterns show that historical knowledge is conveyed in ways that make present and represent the accounts of another past, and the ways in which beliefs collectively held by actors in international society are constructed as media events and public hegemonic representations. The aim is to show how certain moments of rupture are historicised, and subsequently used and misused to construct an anachronistic representation of Southeast Europe.

International representations of Balkan wars: a socio-anthropological approach in international relations perspective

Абази

Cambridge Review of International Affairs

2016

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This article introduces the socio-anthropological concept of international representations to examine the relationship between a civilizational rhetoric, the West European and the international politics of otherization and containment of Southeast Europe, and an essentialist and timeless bias in international relations theory, including both radical and constructivist trends. We first explore the different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. Their subsequent problematization is aimed at challenging the way they have constructed commonplace and time-worn representations, which international society shares with different consequences in international affairs. This is a limited conception since international representations as a socio-anthropological concept are always socially, culturally and politically constructed, contested and negotiated. They do not neutrally refer to a reality in the world; they create a reality of their own. Moreover, this limited conception ignores the fact that how, by whom and in whose interest international representations are constructed is itself a form of power in international relations. Therefore, the way international representations are constructed can be problematized as an example of political and ideological projects that operate in the West as well as in the Southeast European countries that are the object of Western foreign policy.