dalakoglou dimitris 2010 migrating-remitting-building-dwelling house-making as proxy presence in...

8/22/2019 Dalakoglou Dimitris 2010 Migrating-Remitting-building-dwelling House-Making as Proxy Presence in Postsocialist Al

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Migrating-remitting-building-

dwelling: house-making as

proxy presence in

postsocialist Albaniajrai_1652 761..777

D i m i t r i s D a l a k o g l o u University of Sussex

This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants house-making projects

in their countries of birth. In particular, it examines the houses built or refurbished by Albanians in

their home-country, which is no longer their place of permanent residence. This is a widespread

phenomenon in Albania, but it is also a frequently appearing practice amongst other international

migrants. Why do migrants living outside their home-countries build houses there even though they

do not plan to return? I seek to answer this question in the case of Albania by focusing empirically

on the process of constructing these houses, rather than merely on the material entity of the houseas such. I propose that such house-making by Albanian migrants is not only a simple

house-building process; it also ensures a constant dwelling and dynamic proxy presence for

migrants in their community of origin. These ethnographic observations have further significance for

the anthropological study of both houses and international migration.

What do you carry with you back home?

During my pilot research in Athens, in 2005, I often met Albanian migrants livingpermanently in Greece who displayed the photo-albums of their new houses in Albaniaalongside the photo-albums of their children. More strikingly, when I first met Maren-

glen, a key informant of mine, in Athens, during our discussion about his house in hishome-country he showed me his land-line in the Albanian Telephone Directory, thencalled his uninhabited house there and offered me the telephone so that I could hearthe constant ring-tone.

During the same pilot research a question I commonly asked my informants referredto what they carried with them during their temporary return trips to Albania. Oneanswer I frequently received was: things for me (gjera per mua, per veten or gjera perveten time, or pragmata gia mena or dika mou pragmata1). These things were items suchas clothes or cosmetics. However, such items were stored somewhere, usually in ahouse. So unsurprisingly another answer I often received was things for the house2

(gjera per shtepine or pragmata gia to spiti). At the time, I perceived these things for thehouse as being ordinary household and decorative items, or construction materials.However, during my main fieldwork in Albania (2005-6), it was apparent that most ofthese things were in fact available there, usually at the same or only slightly higherprices. Thus a set of questions was emerging: Why were these migrants carrying the

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 761-777 Royal Anthropological Institute 2010


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building materials all the way from Greece? Furthermore: Why were the majority of mymigrant informants building new houses or refurbishing dwellings in Albania whilethey were explicitly stating that they had no plans to return to their home-country?

Transnational migrants frequently have, or aspire to have built or obtain, a house intheir home-countries even though they are not residing there. Although the case ofAlbanians has its own ethnographic particularities (e.g. the majority of Albanianmigrants are living mainly in neighbouring Greece and are hence relatively near to theplaces of their origin), the phenomenon of houses built by migrants in the country oftheir origin is very widespread. It is reported ethnographically in various places, fromEgypt (Schielke 2009) and Turkey (Berg 2007; Caglar 2002) to Greece (Herzfeld 1991:41), Jamaica (Horst 2004; Miller 2008), and Albania (Dalakoglou 2009a), to mentionbut a few.

Nevertheless, not only migrants houses, but the house more generally, as we per-ceive it today, is a relatively recent subject for British social anthropology.As Humphrey(1988) suggested, in the late 1980s the discipline was not paying particular attention tobuilt domestic materialities and house architecture. Carsten and Hugh-Jones elabo-rated the point about anthropological neglect further in proposing that [n]otions ofprocess, cycle and development are commonplace in the analysis of households anddomestic groups but, in contrast to the people involved, the buildings are often por-trayed as relatively fixed and permanent (1995: 37). Arguably, since then many thingshave changed and today we can talk about a social anthropology of the house in its ownright. A number of house ethnographies, signified by the new readings of the Lvi-Straussian house-based societies of the 1950s and 1960s (Lvi-Strauss 1987; e.g. Carsten

& Hugh-Jones 1995) and an approach to Bourdieus (1990 [1972]) celebrated case of theKabyle house, have focused very explicitly on domestic architectural forms. For someindicative examples one might look to Bliers work (1987) on Batammaliba vernaculararchitecture in Togo and Benin, or later examples such as Buchlis work ( 1999) onSoviet modernist domestic architecture in Moscow. None the less, it is right to claimthat migrants houses and especially migrants houses as dynamic material forms stillconstitute an under-researched subject, especially in comparison to the ethnographicemphasis on their owners. Bendix and Lfgren have illustrated this gap explicitly bycritiquing studies of human mobility from the 1990s:

In the ambition to capture old and new and often transnational mobilities, there was a striking

absence of how the materialities of movement and multi-sited dwelling shaped peoples sensual and

material experience ... Mobility in such studies was seen as a frictionless, more mental than physical

process ... A second home calls for a constant handling of material infrastructure and mundane

routines, it can be a life of constant doing and fixing, planning, synchronizing and worrying, but

it is often the mental and emotional dimensions that preoccupy owners and authors alike ( 2007:

7-8).

The current article follows this recent trend that explores not only transnationalism,but also the research potentialities of the relationship between migration and material

culture (see, e.g., Basu & Coleman 2008) and particularly domestic-related materialculture (Caglar 2002; Lfgren & Bendix2007; Miller 2008; Petridou 2001; Walsh 2006).The focus here is on the building as such and especially on the ongoing material processof building or, as Albanian migrants themselves explicitly make the distinction, myfocus is on the making of these houses.

Dimitris Dalakoglou762



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Making houses

My informants regularly use the verb make (bjor ftiahno or kano)rather than build (ndrtoj or htizo) when referring to the construction orrefurbishment and extension of their houses. For example, one of my informantssuggested:

Yes, indeed for me I make the house, I wont sell my house! But I am not going to return ever to

Albania, I was made [succeeded economically] in Greece; I do not go back to Albania to live.Albania

needs fifty years to go forward, but it is not nice to have a bad house, is it?

One could also mention a statement by an Albanian informant quoted in the bookTestimonies of Albanian migrants: Indeed I am always here [Greece], I do not go upthere [Albania] any more, if I will go, I will go for ten or fifteen days, twenty days, but

I still want to make my own house (Nitsiakos 2003: 255, translations mine).Making a house is not the same as building a house. This distinction, in the first

instance, must be perceived through the prism of migration: the International Orga-nization for Migration (Chindea, Majkowska-Tomkin & Pastor 2007: 15; de Zwager,Gedeshi, Germenji & Nikas 2005: 16) has estimated that as many as 49 per cent of maleAlbanian migrants in Greece are active in building and construction. In this context,the notion of building a house emerges as a professional activity: people build housesfor others. The notion of making a house, in contrast, implies a different process. Asthis article will go on to demonstrate, migrants are making their own houses in Albaniamaterially but they are also coming to terms with a fluid transitional and transnational

daily existence.The aim of this article is to approach the house as not only a fixed spatial and

material entity that comprises a proxy presence for otherwise absent migrants, but alsoas spatially and materially unfixed, dynamic, and mobile, akin to the everyday lives ofmigrants. Nevertheless, I do not simply suggest that Albanian migrants houses arematerial metaphors of a dynamic, migratory lifestyle or only the material traces ofpeoples physical absence from the place of their origin; my focus is on the productionand reconfiguration of social relationships through house-making material-spatialprocesses and vice versa.

Remitting and caringFatos, an informant of mine in 2006, used to call Albania a country under construc-tion, owing to the multitude of ongoing public and private building projects that onecould see, and still can see, throughout the country. First, there is infrastructural workbeing carried out, mainly roads (Dalakoglou 2009a; 2010); and second there are newhouses (Dalakoglou 2009b). Around 135,000 urban dwellings, almost one third of thedwelling units in the cities, start being built after 1990 in Albania (World Bank 2006:47).3 Another element which completes the picture of a country under construction isthat the majority of the house-making projects in Albania comprise semi-completedand perpetually ongoing projects.4

Moreover, plenty of these newly constructed or refurbished houses are in fact unin-habited for most of the year. In the case of Gjirokastr in south Albania, the place whereI located my 2005-6 ethnography, the last census, from 2001 (INSTAT 2004: 12),reported a total of34,268 dwellings in the prefecture, while 7,528 of them were referredto as uninhabited (banesave t pabanuara).5 This number of uninhabited houses,

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namely houses with absent owners, indicates the main economic source for the makingof these new houses: migrants remittances.

King and Vullnetari (2009: 385) suggest that almost one in four Albanian passportholders lives abroad today. In 2002, according to a report by the Bank of Albania (2003),international money transfers constituted the main supply of capital to the construc-tion sector of the economy (IMF 2003; de Zwager et al. 2005: 42).6 It is obvious to everyresearcher of Albania that among the first priorities of emigrants, after accumulatingsome cash from their work abroad, is the task of building or refurbishing a house in thecountry of their origin.7 Qualitative social research on Albanian migrants vividly dem-onstrates this practice. For instance, in the biographical survey of Albanian migrants inGreece, the great majority of interviewees refer to aspirations or goals to build a housein Albania (Nitsiakos 2003: 131, 169, 195, 219, 255-6, 277). Other qualitative surveys onAlbanian migrants, such as those of de Soto, Gordon, Gedeshi, and Sinoimeri (2002)and King and Vullnetari in an older publication (2003), emphasize this relationshipbetween the house and migration. The latter two authors state that

[t]he first priority for remittances is the basic survival needs of the family and an improvement in the

quality of accommodation and facilities. This involves various small projects: moving the toilet

indoors; repairing windows, doors and roofs; and buying new furniture and key domestic appliances

such as television sets, washing machines and, less often, small electricity generators (King & Vull-

netari 2003: 49).

It is striking that the great majority of my informants would rather transfer their

money through personalized and non-formal channels than bank and money transferagencies.8 A quantitative survey by the International Organization for Migration (deZwager et al. 2005: 31) estimated that more than 85 per cent of Albanians living inGreece transfer money through informal channels. According to the same research,more than 12 per cent of Albanians living in Greece remit through friends. Even thoseinformants of mine who have bank accounts often keep them for emergencies and notfor the regular dispatch of the allowance to their people. Edi from Gjirokastr, who isbuilding a house on the periphery of the town despite living in Greece, commentedupon his practice of remitting with the following words: Banks keep the commissions;

you give it [the money] and then what? Banks make money out of your money and give

you nothing. I prefer to feel it [the money] in my pocket as it is much safer.This explicit emphasis upon non-formal channels of sending remittances has

further implications for understanding the formation of transnational relationships inthe case of Albanian migration. Vullnetari and King (2008) write about the care drainin southern Albania; in the cases they analyse, older people often live in poverty whiletheir migrant children enjoy relative well-being in Greece. Edis case shows the otherside of the coin, namely how the process of making the house becomes one way to carefor parents who have stayed behind. This point can be demonstrated through the storyof how I first met Edi. Mr Arber, Edis father, was a good friend and helpful informantfor me when I was in Gjirokastr. In April 2006, I told him that I was going to visit my

parents in Athens, and he asked me to take a gift of10 kg of cheese to his son in the city,because he had to go through long and torturous visa procedures if he wanted to visitGreece. Edi picked me up from the bus terminal and politely invited me to his placebecause his wife Mirada had cooked dinner for us. At the end of the night, although hehad met me for the first time that evening, before letting me go he gave me a pack of




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cash to carry back to his father. He explained that the money was for the building workwhich had to be done on his house, because he had not visited Albania since thesummer. On that occasion, I felt very uncomfortable with such a responsibility. Editried to convince me to be relaxed about the situation, explaining that since his fathertrusted me it was enough for him. He also explained why he did not use the account hisfather had with a Greek bank that maintained a branch in Gjirokastr:

It is better if you, as a friend, will carry the money. Oh now, you know elders, I cannot come and it is

not nice to put it [the money] in the bank, it is a gift. I got the account for him because he is afraid

that he may die and I will have to send money urgently for the funeral, but now he is alive and healthy.

I cannot use this bank account, as if he died, and there are tasks to be done for the house.

Edi is building the house on a plot he bought in the late 1990s, next to the house ofhis father. This is a common pattern for a lot of Albanian migrants, who build housesin the settlements of their origin and preferably near relatives,9 and sometimes they addextensions and refurbish the household of their parents where they stay during theirvisits in Albania. Indeed, before buying the plot, Edi refurbished his parents smallhouse, where he and his sister also a migrant in Greece grew up. Almost everysummer, Edi returns to Albania for two or three weeks with his wife Mirada and theirtwo daughters. Occasionally they also return during other holiday periods, but only fora few days. For several years of his life in Greece, Edi was a builder. After working doublethe normal working hours and weekends, he changed his job. He has been jointlyrunning a grocery shop in Athens since 2004. When Edi was a builder, his wife used towork in a restaurant. Today she works in the grocery shop together with him.

The house of Edi and Mirada is under construction gradually and slowly, and so faris only a three-room apartment on the ground floor of what is going to be the largerhouse. It is incomplete partly because they do not have the economic capital to build itall at once, but at the same time the gradual construction helps to prompt their dailylinks between Athens and Gjirokastr. Edi, on the one hand, as an experienced builder,occasionally contributes personal labour to the building of his house, but he alsoappoints other builders to do various projects. On the other hand, when he is not inAlbania, his father supervises and administers the construction projects, remaining incontact all the time to handle related issues. These links are articulated as flows of

money and even of materials, since Edi himself has imported the majority of thebuilding materials from Greece. For instance, in the summer of 2006, he came toGjirokastr with his vehicle filled with materials: I came to bring the girls to theirgrandparents and some things for the house, he told me, while I was helping him tounload the car.

When I asked Edi why they are making this house in Albania, he explained: I do notwant the others to think that I went to Greece and did nothing. Nevertheless, it is notonly a matter of social prestige but also an issue of further social and personal signifi-cance. During a discussion we had that summer, in the sitting-room of his new housein Albania, Edi and Mirada had the following dialogue, which shows an implicit

relationship between remittances, their house and kinship ties:

Dimitris: Why do you send most of your savings back to Albania?

Edi: If you wont send [money] back [to Albania], what will be done [here]? We do not have any other

people [apart from the parents].




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Mirada: Do not say something like this! We have [other people]! How come ... you say that [we dont

have]? Who are you hanging around with in Greece? Are you alone? But, the family is different, your

mother, your father all of them are here. What are you [we] supposed to do? Abandon them and let

them make everything by themselves? No way! Here they have [to look after] the entire house and ahouse has expenses.

Edi: No ... I mean yes ... your family is the most important thing. [As a migrant] you do not vanish,

you do not die! Its only that you went a few kilometres downward [to Greece], you get it?

In most of the cases I studied it was apparent that the main administrator of housebuilding in the place of origin was a close relative in Albania, such as a father, a brother,or even sometimes a spouse or a combination of the above. However, the examples ofEdi and of many other people whom I met during my fieldwork illustrate a less visiblepractice that is entailed in the process. The money that is usually sent or given forvarious construction tasks is greater than the actual cost of the project, a fact that both

parties are aware of. So, in fact, these gradually built houses become a good reason forsending money to relatives who have stayed in Albania, thus taking care of them. Theprocess of the informal despatch of cash for the building and care of the house resultsin a masking of the actual relationship of dependence on the migrant members of thefamily. By extension, since houses form the main materialization of migrants remit-tances, these dwellings arguably obscure Albanias financial dependency on themigrants destination countries.

Dwelling

The story of Mr Arber, Edi, Miranda, and their house implied that migrants can

accomplish a certain type of dwelling in the country of their origin even without beingphysically there. In fact their houses and the house-making process comprise a proxypresence for migrant owners in Albania. This proxy presence is expressed within thehouse-making process in several ways, some of which I will explore further in thissection.

Evil eye

Probably the most characteristic example of house-making as proxy presence invokesan aspect of largely intangible cultural heritage: belief in the evil eye.10 Albaniancounter-evil-eye practices are primarily linked with protection from envy and the gaze

of other people. The more tangible aspect of this practice is manifested in anti-evil-eyedolls (dordolec), which are usually one of the highest priorities in a house constructionproject (see Peterson-Bidoshi 2006) (Fig. 1).

Besides dordolecanother widespread anti-evil-eye practice involves the erection offlags. Those from Albania, the USA, the EU, Turkey, Italy, the UK, and Greece (in thecase of Greek minorities villages) are the most common (Figs 2 and 3). Withoutunderestimating the national and transnational symbolisms involved, the idea behindboth dordolec and flags is the same: they are both supposed to attract the gaze ofpassers-by, so that the house receives less attention and is thus less exposed to the evileye. However, the fear is not only for the house as such but also for the household

group, which may be negatively affected even when its members are not present in thenewly constructed house in Albania. Marenglen, who works in Greece as a constructioncontractor and is constantly expanding and restoring his parents house in Gjirokastrby adding extra floors and refurbishing the current ground floor, explained the long-distance effects of the evil eye:




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Figure 1. A dordolec, one of a number of anti-evil-eye items in a newly refurbished house in

Gjirokastr. (Photo by the author.)

Figure 2. A house under construction in Gjirokastr. On the top one can see an Albanian flag, an

anti-evil eye apparatus found commonly in the houses which are under construction. (Photo by the

author.)




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They say that I became rich and made the house and they envy you a lot if you succeed. I did not steal

for this house, but I worked hard. Greece is near; whoever is not lazy can go there to work and make

a house. But people are evil and gossipers. When I started building the house I put it [the doll] there

from the first brick,yet I almost got killed twice on myway from Greece in two car crashes and I didnt

bother anyone! In Greece they say look, even Albanians can become rich and make houses, here they

envy you even more. People are nasty and you cannot know how to be protected.

Immobile properties

Making houses in Albania often invokes the historical continuity of family tenure orclaims of immobile property. Of course migrants are not residing in Albania in orderto become involved with the complex issue of postsocialist ownership, but their housesare very much implicated in these disputes. Many of the buildings from the socialistperiod were built on land that, before the Second World War, had been private property.The postsocialist privatization of houses took two opposing directions, depending on

which party was in power: the former Communist party or its adversaries.The first elections, after the decline of the single-party state (1991), were won by the

Socialist Party of Albania (Partia Socialiste e Shqipris) the political offspring of theAlbanian Communist Party.11 Amid evident political instability, the Party passed a law(7652/1992) on the Privatization of State Housing which came into force in December

Figure 3. A building under construction which has both an Albanian flag and a dordolec. (Photo by

the author.)




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1992, requiring the privatization of properties by the current occupants. A new series oflaws came into force in 1993, under the government of the anti-communist DemocraticParty of Albania (Partia Demokratike e Shqipris). These included the law on therestitution and compensation of ex-owners (7698/1993),12 passed in April 1993, whichdictated the return of properties to the kinship groups that had owned them in theperiod before the Second World War (Fig. 4). Not surprisingly, these developments ledto a great deal of conflict, creating risks and anxiety in relation to the building andrefurbishment of houses.

A typical case is that of Enver, a 76-year-old Gjirokastrit, a former electrician in afactory, and today a technician for a privately owned electrical goods store. Enver hasconstant disputes with the descendents of the pre-war owner of the plot on which hishouse stands. Envers two children are living in Greece at the moment. Despite theuncertain legal and economic conditions, one of their first priorities was to refurbishthe house where they grew up. The house is spacious, and thus it is where they staywhen they return temporarily to Albania, with their own families. Such house-makingacts within the social topography of reclaimed properties empower the current occu-piers, confirming at least socially though not necessarily legally their rights over the

Figure 4. The copy of an ownership title (tapi) dating from 1924. Regularly people in Albania have to

deal with this kind of document in their effort to claim disputed immobile properties. (Photo by the

author.)




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disputed property. For example, according to Enver, in the dispute he has with Geni(the person who claims his house), it matters whether the house is in good condition.During a discussion in my house in Albania he explained his perception:

I am old, one day I will die, I cannot be here always to protect the house; it belongs to them now [his

children], but I really wanted them to make it,to have something in Albania and I recommended them

to take good care of it and they did, they are good children. I told them that if after my death they will

abandon the house to fall apart they will lose it for real. Geni will have all the right to take it and

everybody will say that he did well ... It is not necessary to be here all the time if they take care of it,

they can be in Greece.

The everyday politics of postsocialism

Through making these houses in Albania, migrants not only deal with property issues

and supposedly Albanian intangible heritage but also dwell within the everyday lifeexchanges and political economy of Albanian postsocialism. Thus, in 2005-6, housesand their extensions or refurbishments were rarely constructed in a manner approvedby formal state regulations in Albania. On the contrary, the tendency has been forpeople to arrange things informally through personal networks, thus avoiding officialframeworks. For example, between 1992 and 1996, at least 60 per cent of houses werebuilt informally (UN Economic Commission for Europe 2002: 10), that is, without thedocuments and permissions required by the state.

Fatos, who has lived in Greece for fifteen years and is building a brand new house innorthern Albania, simplified the building of his house by neglecting the state-

prescribed method of house construction:

Fatos: Everyone knows that this is our building plot; it has always belonged to our grandfathers, so

nobody will ask for it. Hoxha [the Albanian socialist leader] took it for forty years, but we have had

it for a thousand years!

Me: But without title deeds, how did you get the document to build?

Fatos: Everyone knows that it is ours, it is not necessary, and nobody says anything.

Me: The architects had no problem?

Fatos: I am the architect Mitso [common alternative for Dimitris], all is mine, I build 100 per cent of

it with my own hands.

Most of the time, this neglect of the formal state is facilitated by high levels ofso-called corruption within the public administration, a situation which often sim-plifies and personalizes the process in ways that are not unknown in the migratorydestination of most Albanian migrants, Greece. None the less, Albanian corruptiondisplays its own particularities. During a brief field trip to a coastal city, I met a friend13

who was working as a building contractor in the area. He invited me for a drink whilstwaiting for his appointment:

K: I am waiting for a guy to help him with his house.

Me: Are you building it?

K: No, a friend of mine is building it, I introduced him. I am too busy with other buildings at themoment. I just know someone from the urban planning office, he is a friend as well and I will help

them to find a solution ... because it is not correct.

Me: Solution?

K: The friend does not have permission to build [the house] and they gave him a fine. But he had

started the construction [of the house] ten years ago, before the law, so it is not fair, and the other




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friend can rub it out [remove the fine], and because I know him well I [will intervene] ... so that

nobody has a problem and my friend can build his house.

Although only two examples of skipping the official state apparatuses are presentedhere, the situation is as complex as that described by Humphrey ( 2002: 127-46) forpost-Soviet Russia. For instance, in smaller cities like Gjirokastr, where a lot of thepeople know each other, it is common practice to offer an extra gift to others even ifwhat they do for you is formally part of their official duties. This gift might be cash,other items, or just a few drinks in the local coffee shop. However, the extended kinshipand social networks provide unofficial social control over bribery and corruption. Oneof the worst things that someone can do is to accept or even worse to ask for a bribefrom relatives or friends. House-building, as one of the most prosperous economicactivities in postsocialist Albania, involves vast amounts of cash; consequently, bribery

and corruption are frequent phenomena. Nevertheless, some of these cases will surelybring the owners complications in the future, as became apparent in 2006 when effortsbegan to legalize the illegally built houses (Fig. 5). Indeed, for the majority of Albanianmigrants who build houses in their home-country, the informal economy, the variousrelated exchanges, and the 2006 changes to the laws regarding house-building providedthe context for a direct involvement or one through relatives and friends with thepolitico-economic transition of their home country.

Of course another political condition that house owners have to encounter, evenwithout being in the country, is the political instability of postsocialist transitionalAlbania. According to some of my informants, the considerable political instability of

the recent past (e.g. a violent outburst in 1997) often causes concerns:

A lot of people were burnt [had their fingers burnt]. They started making houses, they made shops,

put money [in] and during the war [1997] they lost everything ... The thieves stole even the doors and

the windows from our house, they broke into everywhere in the village and they emptied the

[uninhabited] houses. In Albania nothing had value and nothing was working; we came back and we

Figure 5. Poster publicizing the legalization process for buildings built without permission (in

Gjirokastr, 2006). (Photo by the author.)




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hardly found the walls, they had stolen even the roof tiles. I remade it, but I am still afraid that

something may happen again and this time I wont have the money to redo it.

House-making, dwelling, and proxy presences

From the first paragraph of this article it has been clear that my informants spend muchtime focused on their houses and their house-making activities in Albania. Arguablymy case studies suggest that house-making in Albania transforms the life of migrantsinto what, as we have seen, Bendix and Lfgren have called a life of constant doing andfixing, planning, synchronizing and worrying (2007: 8). Moreover, this process ofhouse-making gets Albanian migrants involved with various situations in their home-country which can potentially cause them trouble. So why did house-making inparticular become the major manifestation of the materiality of migration incontemporary Albania?

The answer lies again somewhere between the explicitness of the physical buildingper se and the implicitness of the less visible and tangible dimensions of the house-making process. The point of departure for this discussion was the vernacular notionof making a house (t bjm shtpine/ftiahno spiti- ). The making ofthe house implies more than simply the technical practice of building the house(ndrtoj shtpine/htizo spiti- ). Building a house consists only of construc-tion from the very first foundation stone to the beams and then the completion of thewhole physical structure. The making of a house includes, involves, and enshrines thevery building of a house.

People put remarkable mental, bodily, and emotional resources and large amounts

of money, labour, and attention into these house projects. Nevertheless, the practicaland explicit function of shelter is only a small and temporary part of these houseprojects. Following Heidegger (1971), one could argue that building these houses shouldbe seen as a material fragment of the many ways that migrants dwell within theirmigratory cosmos. Echoing the notion of the migrant world (Basu & Coleman 2008),I suggest that Albanian migrants build in a transitional and transnational migratorycosmos where they already dwell; the making of these houses and the manners andconditions which dominate such making comprise a way of making sense of thistransnational and transitional world.

However, thehouses andtheir makingare not only material emblems of themigratory

world; they are also agents of such a world they contribute decisively to the formationof the transnational social networks that are necessary for the construction of thesehouses. The making of the house in transnationalism is the process of the gradualre-making of a new ontology of pre-existing relationships.As implied by the dispatch ofremittancestorelativesforthesakeofthesehouse-makingprojects,andbythestoryaboutthe friends who help in negotiations with corrupt civil servants, making these houses issynonymous with the (re-)making of existing social relationships. In the context of thenewfound distances and dislocations experienced by postsocialist Albania, the migranthouse-makingprocessemerges as a catalyticnewagent,assistingthereformationof olderties amongst existing agents.

The making of these houses has characteristics that potentially bridge the physicaldistances and the related ambiguities that may emerge in such an age of spatial displace-ment. The houses we examine in this article are actually flowing gradually into Albaniafrom Greece, in the forms of both building materials and remittances. The making ofthese houses accomplishes the migrants presence and to a certain extent facilitates their




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dwelling in various spheres of private and public domains in their home-country, andthus accomplishes kinship or other social relationships for people who are geographi-cally distanced. However, the migrants distance is simultaneously linked with thesehouse construction projects, because that dislocation is exactly what supplies themoney and even the materials for the long building process that eventually becomesa loud, proxy presence for people who otherwise would be simply absent. The absent-present migrant is the protagonist in the making of the house, with which he or she isensuring a new type of presence in both places. In Albania it is a materialized kind ofpresence, and in Greece it is a kind of double presence, since the material domestic pointof reference for migrants daily transnational life is located in Albania. This situationseems to involve a paradox characteristic of transnationalism: on the one hand, it allowspeople to live at larger geographical distances; but, on the other, it allows them to createnovel practices in order to maintain their associations across those distances. In the caseof Albania, houses seem to be ideal for these novel practices.

Beyond the empirical uniqueness of the house-making process in Albania, the builtaspects of the house and its construction process have some further analytical charac-teristics relevant to discussion of multi-sited migrant experience, transnationalism, andmateriality. The simultaneously fixed and mobile material ontology of these houses canbe juxtaposed with other cases relating to migrant housing, such as the case of Carib-bean migrants house projects (Miller 2008; see also Horst 2004). Similarly to theAlbanian migrants case, house projects emerge from this research as the basic point ofreference for the migratory flow of Jamaicans to England. Several Jamaicans migrate tothe UK in order to materialize their aspiration to build a good house back home; a

home where they will return one day. However, this return rarely happens, not becausethey do not manage to build these houses, and neither because they do not returnphysically to Jamaica, but because it is the aesthetics of these houses as such whichprevent the actual return to the home. The domestic aesthetics of the returnees housesare considered explicitly non-Jamaican. The same house that was supposed to facilitatetheir return home and which was the main goal of their entire migration projectbecomes the materiality of their lack of cultural belonging to the home-country. Suchdomestic materiality and aesthetics position returnees within an ambiguous categoryof people who do not really belong culturally to Jamaica anymore, but do not belong tothe UK either, and hence cannot make a home of anywhere in this world.

This article suggests that the Albanian case displays some fundamental differencesfrom that described by Miller and Horst.14

The houses of Albanian migrants are characterized by a material dynamism. It isexactly their material dynamism, their flowing ontology, the materiality of their open-ness, and their aesthetics of fluidity that make these house-making projects so wellintegrated into the cultural conditions of contemporary Albania. The open character-istics of these houses under construction enable a flexible negotiation with the ambi-guity and fluidity of contemporary socio-cultural conditions in Albania. These house-making projects are therefore very well integrated into Albanias current socio-culturaland aesthetic circumstances, unlike the Jamaican migrant houses, which are actually

out of place in reference to Jamaican mainstream aesthetics. Such houses in Albania even when (and if) they are ever completed are not at risk of being out of place. Asnoted elsewhere (Dalakoglou 2009a), this is because socio-cultural and aesthetic con-ditions in Albania today are so fluid, and these migrant houses are such a widespreadphenomenon, that they are actually two mutually constituting projects. Transnational




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house-making is so widespread a practice that the transition and transnational flowsshape the materiality of migrant houses as much as the houses shape the aesthetics andmateriality of Albanian transition and transnationalism.

I propose that such house-making is a widespread material practice in postsocialistAlbania because this process connects many elements within one material ensemble:first, the individual experience of mobility, distance, and transnational links; second,the particularities of postsocialist transition such as property disputes, political insta-bility, and new types of state corruption; and, third, flows of global political economysuch as the movements of remittances or building materials from abroad. This dynamichouse materiality ensures a tangible presence for the absent migrant; materializestransnational bonds with people who stay behind in the home-country; and familiar-izes the fluid transitional postsocialist world within the micro-scale of the personal,domestic domain of individual people.

NOTES

I would like to thank my informants for their help and for allowing me to write about them. Pseudonyms

are used for all informants to preserve confidentiality. The Department of Anthropology at University

College London and since January2009 the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex have

been ideal environments for the research which led to the current article. As far as the content is concerned,

I would like to thank Victor Buchli, Danny Miller, Caroline Humphrey, Dimitra Gefou-Madianou, Simon

Coleman, Chris Tilley, Charles Stewart, Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, Martin Holbraad, Rozita Dimova,

and the two anonymous reviewers of the JRAIfor kindly providing comments, corrections, or discussion at

various stages while I was producing this text; and Orvar Lfgren, for our discussion and for sending me the

special issue of Ethnologia Europaea on second houses (vol. 37). Eliana Lili and Rigels Halili provided very

significant help before and during my fieldwork and Antonis Vradis provided very constructive discussionson the current text. I would also like to thank Fereniki Vatavali and Zana Vathi for their comments; and Liz

Abraham, Catherine Baker, and Sarah Keeler for their corrections. My Ph.D. research was supported by the

Hellenic Republic State Institute for Scholarships; the Marie Curie European Doctorate Programme in the

Social History of Europe, and the Mediterranean and UCL funds, for which I should thank the three

organizations. Any errors are solely my responsibility.1 Interviews were conducted in both Albanian and Greek. For the transliteration of Greek, I use Sarah

Greens (2005) tables of transliteration.2 In both Greek and Albanian languages there is no distinction between home and house. The word house

in this text stands for the Albanian word shtepi and the similar conceptually Greek word spiti. Since these two

words include notions of home, both of them often are used loosely in the two languages, referring to other

types of accommodation such as flats.

3 According to estimates by the World Bank, in 2004 Albania contained 237,000 urban dwelling units builtbefore 1990. The same report estimates that, between 1990 and 2004, 135,000 dwellings were built in urban

areas, with or without permission. Obviously since the great majority of these houses are being built without

permission, the accuracy of the World Banks figure is debatable, not least because neither the Albanian

authorities nor the World Bank can provide exact census data. However, this figure provides an index for the

scale of the current house-building in Albania.4 This is a phenomenon which can be observed in various other countries e.g. Greece or Turkey and

merits further ethnographic analysis in order to be understood within the particular cultural contexts.5 However, one could actually claim that the number of uninhabited dwellings in 2001 was much higher.

This irregularity can be explained by the fact that most buildings are under slow construction in Albania; in

fact the making of houses is usually a perpetual process. Even when the houses are being built relatively

quickly, they still have semi-completed sections, or they can have additional rooms or storeys attached. In

such circumstances, some of these houses have a few rooms completed while the rest of the building is stillunder construction for up to or more than a decade. These two or three rooms often make up a completed

small apartment within what is potentially a bigger house, yet are frequently not reported as dwellings in the

census. What is more, the quantitative research tool of the census does not account for qualitative aspects of

the situation: it reports a house as inhabited, for example, even when only one member of the original

household group lives there and the rest are abroad. Thus the figure of 34,000 dwellings in Gjirokastr




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prefecture includes at least 7,500 which are uninhabited, but, as ethnography reveals, probably most of them

are undergoing constant building and refurbishment work.6 Remittances account for large sums of money, especially as a percentage of GDP. According to a report

in 2000 by the United Nations Development Programme (cited in Mai & Schwandner-Sievers 2003: 941),remittances represented one fifth of the Albanian GDP. The Bank of Albania (2004) found that remittances

in the early1990s formed more than 20 per cent of the countrys GDP and were never lower than 10 per cent

of GDP (de Zwager et al. 2005). According to King and Vullnetari (2009), in 2007 remittances in Albania

approached US$1.3 billion.7 As I write in this article, there is some fear regarding the security of these houses, mainly because during

the 1997 revolt gangs of armed men took advantage of the situation and often vandalized houses, regularly

taking away building materials, especially roof tiles, plumbing, or electrical equipment. For example, an

informants house was looted in 1997 and the thieves took the photo-frames, leaving the photographs in a

secure corner of the looted house. This event also explains why houses these days are in fact relatively rarely

vandalized. People, including thieves, share common cultural principles on the significance of the house. At

the same time, it helps that most of the houses are near relatives who look after them.8

The preference for unofficial channels of remitting in the case of Albania should be linked with the 1997events, the so-called war. In the mid-1990s, several pyramid pseudo-banks emerged. These institutions were

providing interest to the investors that could reach up to50 per cent in some cases. Today it is clear that there

were close links amongst pyramids, high-ranking politicians, and organized crime; however, at the time the

majority of Albaniansinvested their savings in these pseudo-banks, which eventually collapsed, losing about

US$2 billion. That situation led to a revolt that lasted for months, during which period the crowd looted army

and police magazines and clashed with officers. As an informant claimed: Either pyramid or normal ... every

bank is the same: thieves!The mistrust of official banking institutions also explains why the mortgage market

in Albania is so limited today, although building houses is such a widespread practice.9 I would like to make two comments for the sake of clarity. Despite the efforts of the socialist regime to

transform the dominant patrilineal practices of pre-war Albania, generally Albanians today follow a patri-

lineal kinship structure and have patrilocal residence patterns (although it is common for both spouses to

come from the same or neighbouring settlements). So most of the informants are males, as they wereconsidered the heads of the household, at least in its public manifestations. Women have significant power

within the domestic sphere, but this is not a situation which comes out in public, and more importantly

women have little to do with the building works. The house as building is considered to belong to the male

spouse. Both partners usually work and contribute economically, but women are considered part of their

husbands kinship group after marriage.

A second comment regards the newer migratory patterns and their relationship with house-making. In the

early 1990s, Albanian migrants were almost exclusively migrating to Greece and Italy. During that period

several of them started refurbishing and building houses. Later migratory trends led some Albanian migrants

to other European countries or to other continents. However, these latter migrants start refurbishing or

building houses in Albania and they continue after their intercontinental migration, though the relatives who

administer or look after the building and the house-making process have more responsibilities in comparison

to the cases of migrants who live in Greece and Italy, which still comprise the two main destinations of

Albanian migrants.10 The evil eye is frequently mentioned in ethnographies of the Mediterranean (e.g. for Malta see Mitchell

2001 and for Greece see Herzfeld 1981; Roussou forthcoming; Veikou 1998).11 The Albanian Communist Party, which monopolized Albanias government between 1944 and 1990,was

renamed the Party of Labour of Albania (Partia e puns e Shqipris) in 1948. The Socialist Party of Albania

emergedinJune1991duringtheTenthCongressofthePartyofLabourofAlbania(seeDalakoglou&Halili2009).12 Amended by Law No. 8084/1996.13 Because, for understandable reasons, I use pseudonyms in this text, I cannot reveal the details of this city.

Most cities in Albania have only one town planning office and extensive informal social control.14 For example, one of the main reasons why Albanian migrants in Greece do not consider a permanent

return to Albania is because they are able to visit their home-country very regularly. Every informant of mine

who was an Albanian migrant in mainland Greece visited Albania at least twice a year for short periods of

between two days and three weeks. Most of the Albanian migrants who reside in mainland Greece live only

a few hours drive from the sites of their origin. Thus for Albanians who live in Athens and come originally

from the southern prefectures, their return journey normally takes no more than one hour on top of what it

would take for Greeks who live in Athens to return to their own villages of origin near the Greek-Albanian

borders. Most of this extra time will actually be spent at the border checkpoints. Indeed, when it comes to




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Albanian migrants who come from south Albania and live in northwest Greece, the ambiguity of the migrant

experience may suggest that we should talk about a special type of proximate transnationalism.

These kinds of ambiguities amongst other aspects of the socio-spatial particularities of the region under

focus were analysed by Green in Notes from the Balkans (2005).

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Migration-remises- construction -rsidence : la construction de maisons

comme prsence par procuration dans lAlbanie postcommuniste

Rsum

Lauteur examine la culture matrielle de la migration en attachant une attention particulire aux projets

de construction de maison des migrants dans leur pays natal. Il examine en particulier les maisons

construites ou rnoves par des Albanais dans leur pays natal, qui nest plus leur lieu de rsidence

permanente. Ce phnomne, trs rpandu en Albanie, apparat galement souvent chez dautres migrants

dans le monde. Pourquoi des migrants vivant en dehors de leur pays construisent-ils des maisons dans

celui-ci alors quils nont pas lintention dy revenir ? Lauteur cherche rpondre cette question, dans le

cas de lAlbanie, en se concentrant empiriquement sur le processus de construction de ces maisons et nonsimplement sur lentit matrielle que constitue la maison. Il suggre que faire une maison nest pas

seulement la construction dune maison pour les migrants albanais : cest aussi un moyen de sassurer un

lieu de rsidence permanent et une prsence par procuration dynamique dans leur communaut

dorigine. Ces observations ethnographiques sont galement riches denseignement pour ltude

anthropologique des maisons aussi bien que des migrations internationales.

Dimitris Dalakoglou is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex.He received his Ph.D. from UCL

(2009) and the title of his thesis is An anthropology of the road.

University of Sussex, Department of Anthropology, Arts C224, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9SJ, UK. [email protected]



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