Dalakoglou Dimitris 2010 Migrating-Remitting-building-dwelling House-Making As Proxy Presence in Postsocialist Albania. in JRAI

Migrating-remitting-buildingdwelling: house-making as proxy presence in postsocialist Albania
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D i m it ris D alakoglou 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 house as 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 signicance 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 living permanently in Greece who displayed the photo-albums of their new houses in Albania alongside the photo-albums of their children. More strikingly, when I rst met Marenglen, a key informant of mine, in Athens, during our discussion about his house in his home-country he showed me his land-line in the Albanian Telephone Directory, then called his uninhabited house there and offered me the telephone so that I could hear the constant ring-tone. During the same pilot research a question I commonly asked my informants referred to what they carried with them during their temporary return trips to Albania. One answer I frequently received was: things for me (gjera per mua, per veten or gjera per veten time, or pragmata gia mena or dika mou pragmata1). These things were items such as clothes or cosmetics. However, such items were stored somewhere, usually in a house. 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 the house as being ordinary household and decorative items, or construction materials. However, during my main eldwork in Albania (2005-6), it was apparent that most of these things were in fact available there, usually at the same or only slightly higher prices. 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 my migrant informants building new houses or refurbishing dwellings in Albania while they 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 in their home-countries even though they are not residing there. Although the case of Albanians has its own ethnographic particularities (e.g. the majority of Albanian migrants are living mainly in neighbouring Greece and are hence relatively near to the places of their origin), the phenomenon of houses built by migrants in the country of their origin is very widespread. It is reported ethnographically in various places, from Egypt (Schielke 2009) and Turkey (Berg 2007; Caglar 2002) to Greece (Herzfeld 1991: 41), Jamaica (Horst 2004; Miller 2008), and Albania (Dalakoglou 2009a), to mention but a few. Nevertheless, not only migrants houses, but the house more generally, as we perceive 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 to built domestic materialities and house architecture. Carsten and Hugh-Jones elaborated the point about anthropological neglect further in proposing that [n]otions of process, cycle and development are commonplace in the analysis of households and domestic groups but, in contrast to the people involved, the buildings are often portrayed as relatively xed and permanent (1995: 37). Arguably, since then many things have changed and today we can talk about a social anthropology of the house in its own right. A number of house ethnographies, signied by the new readings of the LviStraussian 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 the Kabyle house, have focused very explicitly on domestic architectural forms. For some indicative examples one might look to Bliers work (1987) on Batammaliba vernacular architecture in Togo and Benin, or later examples such as Buchlis work (1999) on Soviet modernist domestic architecture in Moscow. None the less, it is right to claim that migrants houses and especially migrants houses as dynamic material forms still constitute an under-researched subject, especially in comparison to the ethnographic emphasis on their owners. Bendix and Lfgren have illustrated this gap explicitly by critiquing 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 xing, 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 material culture (Caglar 2002; Lfgren & Bendix 2007; Miller 2008; Petridou 2001; Walsh 2006). The focus here is on the building as such and especially on the ongoing material process of building or, as Albanian migrants themselves explicitly make the distinction, my focus is on the making of these houses.
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Making houses
My informants regularly use the verb make (bj or ftiahno or kano) rather than build (ndrtoj or htizo ) when referring to the construction or refurbishment and extension of their houses. For example, one of my informants suggested:
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 fty 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 book Testimonies of Albanian migrants: Indeed I am always here [Greece], I do not go up there [Albania] any more, if I will go, I will go for ten or fteen 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 rst instance, must be perceived through the prism of migration: the International Organization 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 male Albanian 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 houses for others. The notion of making a house, in contrast, implies a different process. As this article will go on to demonstrate, migrants are making their own houses in Albania materially but they are also coming to terms with a uid transitional and transnational daily existence. The aim of this article is to approach the house as not only a xed spatial and material entity that comprises a proxy presence for otherwise absent migrants, but also as spatially and materially unxed, dynamic, and mobile, akin to the everyday lives of migrants. Nevertheless, I do not simply suggest that Albanian migrants houses are material metaphors of a dynamic, migratory lifestyle or only the material traces of peoples physical absence from the place of their origin; my focus is on the production and reconguration of social relationships through house-making material-spatial processes and vice versa.
Remitting and caring
Fatos, an informant of mine in 2006, used to call Albania a country under construction, owing to the multitude of ongoing public and private building projects that one could see, and still can see, throughout the country. First, there is infrastructural work being carried out, mainly roads (Dalakoglou 2009a; 2010); and second there are new houses (Dalakoglou 2009b). Around 135,000 urban dwellings, almost one third of the dwelling 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 is that the majority of the house-making projects in Albania comprise semi-completed and perpetually ongoing projects.4 Moreover, plenty of these newly constructed or refurbished houses are in fact uninhabited for most of the year. In the case of Gjirokastr in south Albania, the place where I located my 2005-6 ethnography, the last census, from 2001 (INSTAT 2004: 12), reported a total of 34,268 dwellings in the prefecture, while 7,528 of them were referred to as uninhabited (banesave t pabanuara).5 This number of uninhabited houses,
namely houses with absent owners, indicates the main economic source for the making of these new houses: migrants remittances. King and Vullnetari (2009: 385) suggest that almost one in four Albanian passport holders 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 construction sector of the economy (IMF 2003; de Zwager et al. 2005: 42).6 It is obvious to every researcher of Albania that among the rst priorities of emigrants, after accumulating some cash from their work abroad, is the task of building or refurbishing a house in the country of their origin.7 Qualitative social research on Albanian migrants vividly demonstrates this practice. For instance, in the biographical survey of Albanian migrants in Greece, the great majority of interviewees refer to aspirations or goals to build a house in Albania (Nitsiakos 2003: 131, 169, 195, 219, 255-6, 277). Other qualitative surveys on Albanian migrants, such as those of de Soto, Gordon, Gedeshi, and Sinoimeri (2002) and King and Vullnetari in an older publication (2003), emphasize this relationship between the house and migration. The latter two authors state that
[t]he rst 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 & Vullnetari 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 transfer agencies.8 A quantitative survey by the International Organization for Migration (de Zwager et al. 2005: 31) estimated that more than 85 per cent of Albanians living in Greece transfer money through informal channels. According to the same research, more than 12 per cent of Albanians living in Greece remit through friends. Even those informants of mine who have bank accounts often keep them for emergencies and not for the regular dispatch of the allowance to their people. Edi from Gjirokastr, who is building a house on the periphery of the town despite living in Greece, commented upon 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 in the case of Albanian migration. Vullnetari and King (2008) write about the care drain in southern Albania; in the cases they analyse, older people often live in poverty while their migrant children enjoy relative well-being in Greece. Edis case shows the other side of the coin, namely how the process of making the house becomes one way to care for parents who have stayed behind. This point can be demonstrated through the story of how I rst met Edi. Mr Arber, Edis father, was a good friend and helpful informant for 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 of 10 kg of cheese to his son in the city, because he had to go through long and torturous visa procedures if he wanted to visit Greece. Edi picked me up from the bus terminal and politely invited me to his place because his wife Mirada had cooked dinner for us. At the end of the night, although he had met me for the rst time that evening, before letting me go he gave me a pack of
cash to carry back to his father. He explained that the money was for the building work which had to be done on his house, because he had not visited Albania since the summer. On that occasion, I felt very uncomfortable with such a responsibility. Edi tried to convince me to be relaxed about the situation, explaining that since his father trusted me it was enough for him. He also explained why he did not use the account his father 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 of his father. This is a common pattern for a lot of Albanian migrants, who build houses in the settlements of their origin and preferably near relatives,9 and sometimes they add extensions and refurbish the household of their parents where they stay during their visits in Albania. Indeed, before buying the plot, Edi refurbished his parents small house, where he and his sister also a migrant in Greece grew up. Almost every summer, Edi returns to Albania for two or three weeks with his wife Mirada and their two daughters. Occasionally they also return during other holiday periods, but only for a few days. For several years of his life in Greece, Edi was a builder. After working double the normal working hours and weekends, he changed his job. He has been jointly running a grocery shop in Athens since 2004. When Edi was a builder, his wife used to work 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 far is only a three-room apartment on the ground oor of what is going to be the larger house. It is incomplete partly because they do not have the economic capital to build it all at once, but at the same time the gradual construction helps to prompt their daily links 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 also appoints other builders to do various projects. On the other hand, when he is not in Albania, his father supervises and administers the construction projects, remaining in contact all the time to handle related issues. These links are articulated as ows of money and even of materials, since Edi himself has imported the majority of the building materials from Greece. For instance, in the summer of 2006, he came to Gjirokastr with his vehicle lled with materials: I came to bring the girls to their grandparents and some things for the house, he told me, while I was helping him to unload the car. When I asked Edi why they are making this house in Albania, he explained: I do not want the others to think that I went to Greece and did nothing. Nevertheless, it is not only a matter of social prestige but also an issue of further social and personal signicance. During a discussion we had that summer, in the sitting-room of his new house in 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].

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 a house 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 house building 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 of Edi and of many other people whom I met during my eldwork illustrate a less visible practice that is entailed in the process. The money that is usually sent or given for various 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 for sending money to relatives who have stayed in Albania, thus taking care of them. The process of the informal despatch of cash for the building and care of the house results in a masking of the actual relationship of dependence on the migrant members of the family. By extension, since houses form the main materialization of migrants remittances, these dwellings arguably obscure Albanias nancial dependency on the migrants 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 being physically there. In fact their houses and the house-making process comprise a proxy presence for migrant owners in Albania. This proxy presence is expressed within the house-making process in several ways, some of which I will explore further in this section.
Evil eye
Probably the most characteristic example of house-making as proxy presence invokes an aspect of largely intangible cultural heritage: belief in the evil eye.10 Albanian counter-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-eye dolls (dordolec), which are usually one of the highest priorities in a house construction project (see Peterson-Bidoshi 2006) (Fig. 1). Besides dordolec another widespread anti-evil-eye practice involves the erection of ags. Those from Albania, the USA, the EU, Turkey, Italy, the UK, and Greece (in the case of Greek minorities villages) are the most common (Figs 2 and 3). Without underestimating the national and transnational symbolisms involved, the idea behind both dordolec and ags is the same: they are both supposed to attract the gaze of passers-by, so that the house receives less attention and is thus less exposed to the evil eye. 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 the newly constructed house in Albania. Marenglen, who works in Greece as a construction contractor and is constantly expanding and restoring his parents house in Gjirokastr by adding extra oors and refurbishing the current ground oor, explained the longdistance effects of the evil eye:
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 ag, an anti-evil eye apparatus found commonly in the houses which are under construction. (Photo by the author.)
Figure 3. A building under construction which has both an Albanian ag and a dordolec. (Photo by the author.)
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 rst brick, yet I almost got killed twice on my way 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 or claims of immobile property. Of course migrants are not residing in Albania in order to become involved with the complex issue of postsocialist ownership, but their houses are very much implicated in these disputes. Many of the buildings from the socialist period 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 rst 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 the Albanian 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
1992, requiring the privatization of properties by the current occupants. A new series of laws came into force in 1993, under the government of the anti-communist Democratic Party of Albania (Partia Demokratike e Shqipris). These included the law on the restitution and compensation of ex-owners (7698/1993),12 passed in April 1993, which dictated the return of properties to the kinship groups that had owned them in the period before the Second World War (Fig. 4). Not surprisingly, these developments led to a great deal of conict, creating risks and anxiety in relation to the building and refurbishment of houses. A typical case is that of Enver, a 76-year-old Gjirokastrit, a former electrician in a factory, and today a technician for a privately owned electrical goods store. Enver has constant disputes with the descendents of the pre-war owner of the plot on which his house stands. Envers two children are living in Greece at the moment. Despite the uncertain legal and economic conditions, one of their rst priorities was to refurbish the house where they grew up. The house is spacious, and thus it is where they stay when they return temporarily to Albania, with their own families. Such house-making acts within the social topography of reclaimed properties empower the current occupiers, conrming 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.)
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 life exchanges and political economy of Albanian postsocialism. Thus, in 2005-6, houses and their extensions or refurbishments were rarely constructed in a manner approved by formal state regulations in Albania. On the contrary, the tendency has been for people to arrange things informally through personal networks, thus avoiding ofcial frameworks. For example, between 1992 and 1996, at least 60 per cent of houses were built informally (UN Economic Commission for Europe 2002: 10), that is, without the documents and permissions required by the state. Fatos, who has lived in Greece for fteen years and is building a brand new house in northern Albania, simplied the building of his house by neglecting the stateprescribed 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 of so-called corruption within the public administration, a situation which often simplies and personalizes the process in ways that are not unknown in the migratory destination of most Albanian migrants, Greece. None the less, Albanian corruption displays its own particularities. During a brief eld 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 whilst waiting 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 the moment. I just know someone from the urban planning ofce, he is a friend as well and I will help them to nd 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 ne. But he had started the construction [of the house] ten years ago, before the law, so it is not fair, and the other
friend can rub it out [remove the ne], 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 ofcial state apparatuses are presented here, the situation is as complex as that described by Humphrey (2002: 127-46) for post-Soviet Russia. For instance, in smaller cities like Gjirokastr, where a lot of the people know each other, it is common practice to offer an extra gift to others even if what they do for you is formally part of their ofcial duties. This gift might be cash, other items, or just a few drinks in the local coffee shop. However, the extended kinship and social networks provide unofcial social control over bribery and corruption. One of the worst things that someone can do is to accept or even worse to ask for a bribe from relatives or friends. House-building, as one of the most prosperous economic activities in postsocialist Albania, involves vast amounts of cash; consequently, bribery and corruption are frequent phenomena. Nevertheless, some of these cases will surely bring the owners complications in the future, as became apparent in 2006 when efforts began to legalize the illegally built houses (Fig. 5). Indeed, for the majority of Albanian migrants who build houses in their home-country, the informal economy, the various related exchanges, and the 2006 changes to the laws regarding house-building provided the context for a direct involvement or one through relatives and friends with the politico-economic transition of their home country. Of course another political condition that house owners have to encounter, even without being in the country, is the political instability of postsocialist transitional Albania. 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 ngers 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.)

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 rst paragraph of this article it has been clear that my informants spend much time focused on their houses and their house-making activities in Albania. Arguably my case studies suggest that house-making in Albania transforms the life of migrants into what, as we have seen, Bendix and Lfgren have called a life of constant doing and xing, planning, synchronizing and worrying (2007: 8). Moreover, this process of house-making gets Albanian migrants involved with various situations in their homecountry which can potentially cause them trouble. So why did house-making in particular become the major manifestation of the materiality of migration in contemporary Albania? The answer lies again somewhere between the explicitness of the physical building per se and the implicitness of the less visible and tangible dimensions of the housemaking process. The point of departure for this discussion was the vernacular notion of making a house (t bjm shtpine/ftiahno spiti- ). The making of the house implies more than simply the technical practice of building the house (ndrtoj shtpine/htizo spiti- ). Building a house consists only of construction from the very rst foundation stone to the beams and then the completion of the whole physical structure. The making of a house includes, involves, and enshrines the very 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 practical and explicit function of shelter is only a small and temporary part of these house projects. Following Heidegger (1971), one could argue that building these houses should be seen as a material fragment of the many ways that migrants dwell within their migratory cosmos. Echoing the notion of the migrant world (Basu & Coleman 2008), I suggest that Albanian migrants build in a transitional and transnational migratory cosmos where they already dwell; the making of these houses and the manners and conditions which dominate such making comprise a way of making sense of this transnational and transitional world. However, the houses and their making are not only material emblems of the migratory world; they are also agents of such a world they contribute decisively to the formation of the transnational social networks that are necessary for the construction of these houses. The making of the house in transnationalism is the process of the gradual re-making of a new ontology of pre-existing relationships. As implied by the dispatch of remittances to relatives for the sake of these house-making projects,and by the story about the friends who help in negotiations with corrupt civil servants, making these houses is synonymous with the (re-)making of existing social relationships. In the context of the newfound distances and dislocations experienced by postsocialist Albania, the migrant house-making process emerges as a catalytic new agent,assisting the reformation of older ties amongst existing agents. The making of these houses has characteristics that potentially bridge the physical distances and the related ambiguities that may emerge in such an age of spatial displacement. The houses we examine in this article are actually owing gradually into Albania from Greece, in the forms of both building materials and remittances. The making of these houses accomplishes the migrants presence and to a certain extent facilitates their
dwelling in various spheres of private and public domains in their home-country, and thus accomplishes kinship or other social relationships for people who are geographically distanced. However, the migrants distance is simultaneously linked with these house construction projects, because that dislocation is exactly what supplies the money and even the materials for the long building process that eventually becomes a loud, proxy presence for people who otherwise would be simply absent. The absentpresent migrant is the protagonist in the making of the house, with which he or she is ensuring a new type of presence in both places. In Albania it is a materialized kind of presence, and in Greece it is a kind of double presence, since the material domestic point of reference for migrants daily transnational life is located in Albania. This situation seems to involve a paradox characteristic of transnationalism: on the one hand, it allows people to live at larger geographical distances; but, on the other, it allows them to create novel practices in order to maintain their associations across those distances. In the case of Albania, houses seem to be ideal for these novel practices. Beyond the empirical uniqueness of the house-making process in Albania, the built aspects of the house and its construction process have some further analytical characteristics relevant to discussion of multi-sited migrant experience, transnationalism, and materiality. The simultaneously xed and mobile material ontology of these houses can be juxtaposed with other cases relating to migrant housing, such as the case of Caribbean migrants house projects (Miller 2008; see also Horst 2004). Similarly to the Albanian migrants case, house projects emerge from this research as the basic point of reference for the migratory ow of Jamaicans to England. Several Jamaicans migrate to the 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 because they do not manage to build these houses, and neither because they do not return physically to Jamaica, but because it is the aesthetics of these houses as such which prevent the actual return to the home. The domestic aesthetics of the returnees houses are considered explicitly non-Jamaican. The same house that was supposed to facilitate their return home and which was the main goal of their entire migration project becomes the materiality of their lack of cultural belonging to the home-country. Such domestic materiality and aesthetics position returnees within an ambiguous category of people who do not really belong culturally to Jamaica anymore, but do not belong to the UK either, and hence cannot make a home of anywhere in this world. This article suggests that the Albanian case displays some fundamental differences from that described by Miller and Horst.14 The houses of Albanian migrants are characterized by a material dynamism. It is exactly their material dynamism, their owing ontology, the materiality of their openness, and their aesthetics of uidity that make these house-making projects so well integrated into the cultural conditions of contemporary Albania. The open characteristics of these houses under construction enable a exible negotiation with the ambiguity and uidity of contemporary socio-cultural conditions in Albania. These housemaking projects are therefore very well integrated into Albanias current socio-cultural and 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. As noted elsewhere (Dalakoglou 2009a), this is because socio-cultural and aesthetic conditions in Albania today are so uid, and these migrant houses are such a widespread phenomenon, that they are actually two mutually constituting projects. Transnational
house-making is so widespread a practice that the transition and transnational ows shape the materiality of migrant houses as much as the houses shape the aesthetics and materiality of Albanian transition and transnationalism. I propose that such house-making is a widespread material practice in postsocialist Albania because this process connects many elements within one material ensemble: rst, the individual experience of mobility, distance, and transnational links; second, the particularities of postsocialist transition such as property disputes, political instability, and new types of state corruption; and, third, ows of global political economy such as the movements of remittances or building materials from abroad. This dynamic house materiality ensures a tangible presence for the absent migrant; materializes transnational bonds with people who stay behind in the home-country; and familiarizes the uid 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 condentiality. The Department of Anthropology at University College London and since January 2009 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 JRAI for 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 signicant help before and during my eldwork and Antonis Vradis provided very constructive discussions on 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 ats. 3 According to estimates by the World Bank, in 2004 Albania contained 237,000 urban dwelling units built before 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 gure is debatable, not least because neither the Albanian authorities nor the World Bank can provide exact census data. However, this gure 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 still under 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 gure of 34,000 dwellings in Gjirokastr
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 fth of the Albanian GDP. The Bank of Albania (2004) found that remittances in the early 1990s 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 signicance 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 unofcial channels of remitting in the case of Albania should be linked with the 1997 events, 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 to 50 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 Albanians invested 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 ofcers. As an informant claimed: Either pyramid or normal ... every bank is the same: thieves! The mistrust of ofcial 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 patrilineal 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 were considered the heads of the household, at least in its public manifestations. Women have signicant 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 emergedinJune 1991 duringtheTenthCongressof thePartyof Labourof Albania(seeDalakoglou&Halili 2009). 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 ofce 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

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). REFERENCES Bank of Albania 2003. Annual report 2002. Tirana. 2004. Annual report 2003. Tirana. Basu, P. & S. Coleman (eds) 2008. Migrant worlds and material cultures. Mobilities 3, 3. Bendix, R. & O. Lo fgren 2007. Double homes, double lives? Ethnologia Europaea 37, 7-16. Berg, M. 2007. Generations and transnational houses. Ethnologia Europaea 37, 39-43. Blier, S.P. 1987. The anatomy of architecture. Cambridge: University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1990 [1972]. The Kabyle house or the world reversed. In The logic of practice (trans. R. Nice), 271-83. Stanford: University Press. Buchli, V. 1999. An archaeology of socialism. Oxford: Berg. Caglar, A. 2002. A table in two hands. In Fragments of culture: the everyday of modern Turkey (eds) A. Saktanberg & D. Kandiyoti, 294-307. London: I.B. Tauris. Carsten, J. & S. Hugh-Jones 1995. Introduction. In About the house (eds) J. Carsten & S. Hugh-Jones, 9-46. Cambridge: University Press. Chindea, A., M. Majkowska-Tomkin & I. Pastor 2007. The Republic of Albania migration prole. Ljubljana: IOM & Republic of Slovenia. Dalakoglou, D. 2009a. Building and ordering transnationalism: the Greek house in Albania as a material process. In Anthropology and the individual (ed.) D. Miller, 51-68. Oxford: Berg. 2009b. An anthropology of the road: transnationalism, myths and migration on the Albanian-Greek cross-border motorway. Ph.D. thesis, University of London. 2010. The road: an ethnography of the Albanian-Greek cross-border motorway. American Ethnologist 37, 132-50. & R. Halili 2009. Socialism in Albania. In The international Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (ed.) M. Ness, 29-33. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. de Soto, H., P. Gordon, I. Gedeshi & Z. Sinoimeri 2002. Poverty in Albania: a qualitative assessment. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. de Zwager, N., I. Gedeshi, E. Germenji & C. Nikas 2005. Competing for remittances. Tirana: IOM-Tirana. Green, S.F. 2005. Notes from the Balkans. Princeton: University Press. Heidegger, M. 1971. Building, dwelling, thinking. In Poetry, language, thought (trans. A. Hofstadter), 141-60. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Herzfeld, M. 1981. Meaning and morality: a semiotic approach to evil eye accusations in a Greek village. American Ethnologist 8, 560-74. 1991. A place in history: social and monumental time in a Cretan town. Princeton: University Press. Horst, H. 2004. Back a yaad: constructions of home among Jamaicas returned migrant community. Ph.D. thesis, University of London. Humphrey, C. 1988. No place like home in anthropology: the neglect of architecture. Anthropology Today 4: 1, 16-18. 2002. The unmaking of Soviet life. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. IMF 2003. Albania: selected issues and appendix. Country Report No. 03/64. INSTAT 2004. Popullsia e shqipris: Gjirokastr/2001. Tirana: INSTAT. King, R. & J. Vullnetari 2003. Migration and development in Albania. DRC Working Paper C5, Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty (DRC), University of Sussex. & 2009. Remittances, return, diaspora. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 9, 385-406. Le vi-Strauss, C. 1987. Anthropology and myth (trans. R. Willis). Oxford: Blackwell Lo fgren, O. & R. Bendix (eds) 2007. Double homes, double lives? Ethnologia Europaea 37. Mai, N. & S. Schwandner-Sievers 2003. Albanian migration and new transnationalisms. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29, 939-48. Miller, D. 2008. Migration, material culture and tragedy. Mobilities 3, 397-413. Mitchell, J. 2001. The Devil, Satanism and the evil eye in contemporary Malta. In Powers of good and evil (eds) P. Clough & J.P. Mitchell, 77-103. Oxford: Berghahn. Nitsiakos, V. (ed.) 2003. M A metanast n (Testimonies of Albanian migrants). Athens: Odysseas.
Peterson-Bidoshi, K. 2006. The dordolec: Albanian house dolls and the evil eye. Journal of American Folklore 119, 337-55. Petridou, E. 2001. The taste of home. In Home possessions (ed.) D. Miller, 87-106. Oxford: Berg. Roussou, E. forthcoming. Challenging perception: evil eye in Greece. Ph.D. thesis, University College London. Schielke, S. 2009. Ambivalent commitments: troubles of morality, religiosity and aspiration among young Egyptians. Journal of Religion in Africa 39, 158-85. UN Economic Commission for Europe 2002. Albania: country proles on the housing sector. Geneva: United Nations. Veikou, C. 1998. K m ti (Evil eye). Athens: Hellinika Grammata. Vullnetari, J. & R. King 2008. Does your granny eat grass?: On mass migration, care drain and the fate of older people in rural Albania. Global Networks 8, 139-71. Walsh, K. 2006. British expatriate belongings: mobile homes and transnational homing. Home Cultures 3, 123-44. World Bank 2006. Status of land reform and real property markets in Albania. Tirana: WB Tirana Ofce.
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 non simplement 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. D.Dalakoglou@ sussex.ac.uk

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