1,720,957 research outputs found
Musaraj, Smoki. 2020. Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. 216 pp. Pb.: $25.95. ISBN: 9781501750342.
No full textMusaraj, Smoki. 2020. Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. 216 pp. Pb.: $25.95. ISBN: 9781501750342
Following the Bodies of Enver Hoxha: An Illumination of Albanian Post-Socialist Memory Politics
Full text linkThis research traces Albania’s post-socialist transition through the lens of Katherine Verdery’s dead-body politics and Anne Stoler’s imperial ruin(ation). I follow the dead body of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s former communist dictator, from its animations during Albania’s late socialist period – his grand burial ceremony in April 1985 and the construction of the Enver Hoxha Pyramid Museum in 1988 – to those in the following post-socialist period – his exhumation from the prestigious Martyr’s Cemetery in 1992 and the later attempts of Parliament to completely remove his memorial museum. I demonstrate two points: that Verdery’s framework of dead-body politics remains a useful analytic alongside that of imperial ruination to examine contemporary politics in post-socialist Eastern Europe and that “dead bodies” can take other ruined forms, such as monumental buildings like the Pyramid museum. The ruin expands our notion of what constitutes the dead body and its different forms in post-socialist Eastern Europe.Master of Art
Translational Justice: Facing the Past to Take on the Present in Albania
Full text linkThe 1990s was a time of significant change for post-socialist nation-states in the former Eastern Bloc. Aspiring towards Western-style democracy, young republics like Albania focused on political, social, and economic reform. Transitional justice mechanisms, such as providing reparations to former state prisoners, became an important means of signaling change, both internally and externally. While Albania began enacting justice reforms in the early 1990s, such initiatives remain a concern three decades later. My research focuses on this issue, namely how international, state, and local actors in Albania imagine and enact transitional justice through projects that “deal with” the socialist past. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in 2017-2018 and an analysis of public media, I document and analyze the projects of two local nongovernmental organizations who focus on youth, democracy, and the past: Cultural Heritage without Borders (CHwB) Albania and the Institute for Democracy, Media, and Culture (IDMC). Further I track the livelihoods of Albanians born in the 1990s, who are often the targets of such past-facing initiatives given their lack of experience with the communist period and their perceived role in shaping Albania’s future. While ongoing calls to confront the past would suggest that Albania is stuck in what Mariella Pandolfi (2010) calls a “permanent transition,” the efforts of my interlocutors suggest otherwise. Drawing on their experiences, worldviews, and desires, staff at IDMC and CHwB Albania transformed international transitional justice mechanisms into interactive workshops where youth could consider democracy as not just one of Albania’s futures but its present. As part of this process, sites like Spaç Prison became infused with simultaneous potentials: a link to the past, a reflection on human rights in Europe, and/or an economic resource. Young adults further transformed such initiatives in light of their own needs to “go with the flow” or live in the present. Drawing on the work of anthropologists such as Marisol de la Cadena (2015), I argue that an anthropological approach to cultural translation is imperative for understanding how transitional justice works on the ground, what I call translational justice. Such a reframing can help us move past the notion of permanent transition.Doctor of Philosoph
An Anthropologist Adrift: A Story on Care, Grief, and Becoming in a Pandemic
Full text linkThis autoethnographic‐style fiction piece is based on my experience of losing my mother to cancer during the pandemic. Written in a format akin to the entries of a ship’s log, it captures the significance of intersubjective connection in ongoing turbulence. Through these logs, the product of an anthropologist’s world interrupted, the narrator as ethnographer comes into being as categories like home and field are blurred during the stormy experience of the COVID‐19 pandemic
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The Stories that Make Us: European Holocaust Narratives and the Promise of Albanian Cosmopolitan Memory Practices
Full text linkIn this paper, I explore how Holocaust memorial narratives are utilized in the contemporary Albanian context – to engage the country’s direct relationship with that history as well as debates over how to count, mourn, and represent those lost during the country’s socialist regime, from 1944 to 1991. In particular, I focus on post-1991 efforts by local historians and
politicians as well as foreign amateur and expert historiographers to exemplify Albania as a safe haven for the Jewish community during the Second World War and more recent efforts to commemorate the socialist era Tepelena Internment Camp, which took on the unofficial name of Albania’s Auschwitz during my fieldwork. I approach these narratives through the lens of memory appropriation (Subotić 2019) to understand how Albanian narratives contribute to the de-territorialization and de-contextualization of what Levy and Sznaider (2002) call a cosmopolitan memory culture. I argue that both appropriations, while different, ultimately speak to the intersection of the following tracks: Albanian efforts to participate in broader European memoryscapes through the reproduction of their own nationally specific narratives and broader European efforts to secure memory narratives through the inclusion of southeastern European ones
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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