Volume 44, April 2016, Pages 198–207
- a Department of Geography, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9SJ, United Kingdom
- b School of Geography and Environment, University of Southampton, Building 44, University Road, Southampton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom
- Received 12 September 2015, Revised 7 January 2016, Accepted 17 February 2016, Available online 26 February 2016
Highlights
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- The first study to explore everyday rural life in Albania under communism.
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- Employs a unique oral-history survey to compose an historical ethnography.
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- The shortage economy was informally supported by the so-called second economy.
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- Despite communist ideology, there was a hierarchy of access to goods and services.
Abstract
Few
accounts exist of the nature of everyday rural life in communist
societies, such as those which existed in Eastern Europe between the end
of World War Two and circa 1990. In this paper we use
oral-history testimonies from older people to reconstruct an ‘historical
ethnography’ of rural life in Albania, the most isolated and repressive
of the East European socialist regimes. We build our analysis around
the dialectical relationship between the ‘shortage economy’, which was
all-pervasive and derived from the Albanian regime's Stalinist policy of
prioritising mining and heavy industry over consumer goods and
agriculture, and the ‘second economy’ which developed as a bottom-up
strategy to overcome some of the imbalances and blockages in the
official or ‘first’ economy. Fieldwork was carried out in clusters of
villages and settlements corresponding to cooperatives and a state farm
in four locations in different parts of Albania. Within the symbiotic or
‘lubricating’ relationship between the shortage economy and the second
economy, we examine the ‘institutionalised hierarchy of access’ that
gave some people and groups privileged access to scarce goods, whilst
others remained in a marginalised and partially excluded state.
Keywords
- Albania;
- Communist era;
- Shortage economy;
- Second economy;
- Everyday rural life;
- Oral history
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