With the foundation of the modern Albanian state in 1912, the Albanian village underwent profound modernization processes thatsignificantly 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 wassubject 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.
The article aims to locate how the concept of race was articulated by the Albanian intellectuals from the end of XIX until mid XX century. Through the problematization of the relation between “race-nation” in the Albanian nationalist discourses, the analyses reflect critically on the webbing of anthropological knowledge within modern ideologies and on the ways they gave legitimacy to collective representations engineered by intellectuals.
The American anthropologist Carleton Coon stayed in Albanian from fall 1929 until the spring of 1930. The anthropometric data gathered during his fieldwork in the northern part of the country were published in The mountain of gaints: a racial and cultural study of the North Albanian mountain Ghegs,in 1950. A quarter-century after this publication, the Albanian 54 Olsi LELAJ Academy of Science, employed a young physician, Aleksander Dhima as physical anthropologist in the Institute of Archeology. Until the fall of communism Dhima would carry out anthropometric measurements in order to “verify” the relation betweeen the living Albanians and their dead ancestors in quest to unfold the nation’sethnogenesis. This article further explores the work of both anthropologists and questions the “naturalisation” or “biologisation” of national identities emerging from the discouse of physical anthropology on Albanians during the XX century.