The albanian village and modernity: an outline of a relation

Abstract

With the foundation of the modern Albanian state in 1912, the Albanian village underwent profound modernization processes that
significantly changed peasants’ way of life. The “great transformations” motivated by the idea of progress and evolution articulate a specific relation between modernity as a state-led project and peasant life. The latter, however, had already become subject to the modernist scientific discourse mostly as a linguistic and ethnographic curiosity through the writings of romantic Western travellers, diplomats, curious philologists, and adventurous ethnographers of the 19th century. Both historical moments demand attention and dedicated analysis to understand the ways that modernity transformed rural Albania over time. For this dedicated volume, we offer an outline of the nature of such encounters that rural Albanian had with modernity by specifically observing a) how rural life was
subject to ethnological/anthropological discourses, and b) in what ways the modern state and its modernization processes impacted the Albanian village during state socialism and afterwards.