CHAPTER XI
ETHNIC IDENTITY OF
GREEK-ALBANIAN IMMIGRANTS
MARIANGELA
VEIKOU
. . . not ethnic cultures, but collective contingencies . . .
Edward W. Said, Culture and
Imperialism, 1993
The paper presents some aspects of the ethnographic material that I have
collected studying the identity negotiations of Albanian immigrant families of
Greek origin, who currently reside in a middle-upper-class neighborhood in a
suburb of Athens, Greece. The material is arranged in such a form to place
specific emphasis on symbolic markers which the immigrants selectively use in
shaping an "acceptable" identity for creating a sense of belonging in
the host society. The different ways in which the immigrant families are
actively and currently challenging their specific minority position have been
addressed in an attempt to understand their identity representations. The paper
reflects on the issues of ethnicity and location, focusing on aspects of
cross-cultural identity in reference to place. It examines the relation between
"history" as a determining factor of a people's ethnic identity and
the "practice" of identification as a process having to do with the
conditions of the present.
Studies of immigrant life are largely dominated by the assumption that
the term "ethnic identity" connotes a definite, uniform content and
assumes a timeless, meaning system or status of which people are members.1
The latter entails an absolute association between groups of, is based in a
homogeneous way on a “cultural heritage and tradition.” I would depart from
such a view of ethnic identity which commonly assumes culture to be an entity
with definite, uniform content, firmly located in particular places of shared
tradition and future perspective. As E. Carter, et al., make clear, "the
presumed certainties of cultural identity which housed traditional attachments
to place, although may be reality for some, are increasingly disrupted in the
case of migrating population.”2
Our task here is to recognize people's agency in the process of their
identification before making assumptions about their ethnic identity. I focused
this paper on the adaptive role of immigrants in making sense of their changing
lives, particularly in reference to place.3 Throughout the project I
explore the way that their ethnic identity is being expressed in relation to a
particular place. I would further suggest that the representations of the past
are socially motivated and manifested with markers which are useful and
appropriate to the specific present context.
The immigrant families described herein are engaged in a perpetual
process of ordering their experiences according to their ethnic identity. The
nature of their ethnic identification is crystallized under conditions depending
on the social structure of the neighborhood in a particular city, instead of
being defined solely in terms of patterns of association with common origin.
Interest in the immigrant families' ethnic identity, as perceived in this paper,
focuses on the individual’s attempts to link practices of identification with
specific organizational or affective or ecological aspects of the social
environment and throughout this process actively to represent their past.
The Greek-Albanian families realize their "differentness" in
various social contexts and relate to the natives by rethinking their own
identities and debating and negotiating the meanings of their cultural and past
experiences. In this case, ethnic identification arises from specific patterns
of social interaction. This empirical work finds that the ethnic identification
can be theorized as a reflexive project, but it is still largely relationally
shaped by the institutions of society. The emphasis is on identity as a social
process that shifts according to social context.
Examining social interaction and the immigrants’ “strategies” to
adjust, I saw their efforts to organize their lives along family lines, informed
by their concern and anxiety over how to create a sociocultural place for
themselves in a big city -- a place that would give meaning to their status and
identity.
The fact that immigrants are accompanied by their families is indicative
of the image that they are trying to communicate. Immigration in families
points, according to the Greek cultural values, to an idealized view of the
immigrants' adjustment, with the household organization representing attachment
to stable, traditional, cultural morals, dedication to family, education, work
and social compliance. In these terms, a more “settled face” is perceived
less threatening since the moral quality of the family life is culturally and
socially appreciated as a solid, secure value. Consequently, any analysis of the
families has to take into account the specific experiences that individuals have
in Athens. I found that in all aspects of life they explicitly identify with
what they distinctively saw to be characteristic and essential features of the
Greek societal order and, by applying them, would justifiably make them
“Greek” and, therefore, successfully integrated.
Forms of social interaction among natives and immigrants clearly should
not be expected to have the same features in all societies or among all its
minority groups. In order to understand this configuration of the “social
interaction -- ethnic identification process," it is necessary to note that
it depends on the cultural resources people have and use, on what they hope to
achieve, consciously or not, and on the range of options available to them at
the time. In other words, ethnic identification is their perception of the past,
manifested with markers which are useful in the present and in appropriate
contexts. Hence, an historical description of the immigrants' status in the
Albanian village from where they emigrated could be useful in order to grasp the
multiple processes which affect the formation of their present ethnic
identification.
All the immigrant families of the study originated in the same Albanian
village, situated almost on the border with the Greek state, called Grava, where
they had the legal status of “Greek minority person.”4 However,
many of the Greek-Albanians of the study and particularly their parents have
vivid memories of the efforts made by the Albanian state, soon after the war, to
form a homogeneous Albanian people. Greeks living in the south had the status of
a national minority, allowing them to use their language, but in reality
everyone, like it or not, was "made equal" to a significant extent.
For instance, soon the minority members were all required to Albanize their
names; a list of approved names was provided in a booklet distributed to every
household by the state. These names were selected on the basis of a Latin
origin, being untainted from any religious or ethnic undertones. So, for
example, Fotis became Filippo, Ageliki became Adelina, Vasiliki became Valentina,
and so forth. This was a significant experience for many Greek families who had
to give different names to their children, so that they could pass for members
of the larger Albanian population, which had, especially under that period,
proved useful. Today, their children, the second generation of Greek-Albanians
in Greece, know little or nothing about the events and the lives of the sizeable
group of their grandparents and great-grandparents who happened to live once in
Greek territory before becoming citizens of the Albanian state. Nevertheless,
this legacy informs and conditions the living memories of the Greek-Albanian
families still presently in Greece.
The name "Greek minority person" was couched ideologically and
emotionally to express the people's orientation towards the "motherland
" that they called Greece.5 However, after 1990, when a large
number of people arrived in Greece from ex-Communist Albania, a significant
number of whom were coming from the "Greek minority zone,” the Greek
state mechanism and society in general were faced with a situation difficult to
handle. Shortly, quite remarkably, the term "Greek minority person,”
previously acknowledging common ethnic origin to the "enslaved brothers,”
was replaced soon enough by the name, “Albanian immigrant,” which assumed
negative connotations. Once the "Albanians" became a social group, it
was only a matter of time before they would become a social problem, with all
the usual connotations of the foreign danger bringing innate criminality. For
example, "the Albanian immigrant" was associated with the young, male,
political prisoner, who escaped confinement and is committing thefts. So these
people's identity has been taken over by that of the invasive, threatening and
parasitic immigrant. The terms “Albanian” and “immigrant,” in their
various formulations, were interchangeable. They described a particular social
caste. They may signal the whole impoverished, noxious mess encroaching from the
East in the liberal imagination who also become synonymous with “victims” or
“refugees”; or they may, also, signal the immigrant laborers as a flexible,
exploitable, atypical and cheap work force.
This latter discourse, in some paradoxical way, implies an ambiguous
ethnic identity which assumes tragic dimensions in the case of the immigrant
families of the study. Their previous marginalization in the Albanian state,
where they constituted a minority with deprived religious and cultural rights
because of the Communist program, is replaced with a new one in the Greek
environment where they are supposed to have joined their wider ethnic community.
In fact, there is a double ambiguity. While these people were in Albania, they
were considered "Greeks" by the Albanians and "the enslaved
brothers" by the Greeks. Now in Greece the terms are reversed, they are
considered "the Albanians" by the Greeks and the
"compatriots" by the Albanians. The immigrants' identity profile as it
is presented in the current "Greek dominant discourse" implies that
these people are "between two cultures,” that is, not "purely and
authentically" Greek, but combining Albanian and Greek cultural elements.
As Baumann suggests, one should avoid contemplating such a slippery
issue, which inevitably raises far-reaching questions. What are the two pure
cultures involved? Is there, on the one hand, a homogenous Greek culture and, on
the other, perhaps some other type of culture which would be neither Greek nor
Albanian in this "authentic" sense, which they shared while in
Albania? Who has the authority to speak for a group's "authenticity"?
What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture, and so forth?6
Sharing his point of view, I would rather refer to them as people who are
seen to reach across two cultures. Their case appears to me as a typical example
of the ways that ethnic identification can be configured by blending different
sources and traditions from different locales. By that it is meant to suggest
that since the lives of the immigrant families have been recently ordered by the
experience of displacement, the relation between the place and their
"previous" identity is seriously challenged. The particular cultural
aspects of the life in the Albanian village become increasingly difficult or
purposeless to maintain in the Greek contemporary city. It is, in fact, the city
which acts now as the place which houses and supports their social or ethnic
identity. Though the families continue to resonate throughout the experience of
where they are coming from, the ways in which their past home and their present
home impact upon their identification are marked increasingly by today’s
challenges. It seems to me that the only way to understand the identity
orientations of the immigrant families and the manner in which they are
restructuring their lives is to address the many and different ways in which
they are currently and actively setting their own agendas and challenging their
specific position as immigrants and poor, displaced people.
While in Albania, Greece retained for them a symbolic image as the
embodiment of the ideal society to host them. The realization of “the dream of
the return” and life in Athens, however, came to be inseparable from a
constant striving for acceptance and achievement. Their only motivation, which
is to create a place for themselves in Greek society, frames their orientation
of present identity and identification.
Blending in with Greek society is thought to be not difficult to achieve
by constructing a shared cultural identity centered around the Greek
“labels,” rather than the other “labels” of their identity that also
categorize them. In their efforts to define the essence of their Greek heritage,
Greek-Albanians place a formal emphasis on language and religion as cornerstones
of their Greek culture. These elements bind together symbolically
Greek-Albanians with Greeks in important ways, as Yannis explains:
. . . We are Greeks originally from Vorio-Epirus (North-Epirus). This is
what our parents told us when we were born and that's how we know it ever since.
In our villages we spoke Greek and even at the primary school we took some Greek
courses. In our homes we kept up the Greek, Christian customs and traditions. We
were Greeks at heart. We never tried to disguise our roots during communism. And
that was hard to do because there even when you raised your glass to drink a
toast, it had to be to the Party.
It
seems, though, that their assertion of their Greek ethnic background has not
helped them by itself to sustain a positive identity inside the Greek society.
Apparently, their claims to “purity” have not convinced the native
"jury" of authenticity. Perhaps, opposing them are more dominating
alternatives such as what appear to be their different cultural customs and
moral values more suitable to the “Albanian” way of life.
In fact, culture is more subtle and particular in everyday interaction,
and, as it appears, it is likely to be renegotiated and redefined in response to
the shifting set of current social challenges. Although the feeling of being
"Greek" for all of the families was unified and clear in its
significance, in certain cases, where their "Greekness" seems to be
distinguished from the "Greekness" of the Athenians, then the actual
consideration of what their ethnic identity consists of becomes meaningful and
relevant. For these people, who have originally seen themselves as Greeks,
analyzing their vision of Greekness is felt to be so unimportant and irrelevant
even as it is purposeless for a group of people to discuss and analyze its
system of values. However, they can clearly articulate, apart from the
commonalities, some differences between them and their local Greek neighbors.
Being presented with this, I found, Greek-Albanians “choose” with
which version of Greek culture to associate. This is not meant to imply that
their ethnicity is a cultural artifact: the result of social factors and
individual subjective interests which denies any kind of reproductive drives. It
is precisely the field of conceptual and symbolic ethnicity that enables them
constantly to reinterpret their symbolic capital and transform themselves
continually as a result of changes in the cultural domain of the Greek society.
The fact that symbols are invented does not mean that people do not share
any cultural idioms. Within this context, I find it more interesting to analyze
the ethnic group as an "organizational type" that allows its members
improved performance within the wider context in which they interact directly.
In this sense I find their “Greek” identity to be situational, determined
partly by interest and partly by embodiment and cultural association. There is
neither a breakdown from the past nor a cultural-fixity paradigm of their
ethnic-identity manifestations.
H. Moore and various anthropologists of the time made it possible to
depart from a conception of culture as a finished product understandable only
within an historically outlined picture, without reaching the reductionist
approach which perceives the origins of cultural configurations in the
socialization standards. Instead, her paradigm for the analysis of
cultural-identity phenomena suggests some sort of cultural convergence. The
body, she says, is a system of affections not of substance. Transformation of
identity does not have to do with the “mind” but with the “body.”
Therefore, social agents by changing their practices (bodily behavior) are
converting their cultural standards (mind behavior). In the conversations I had
with members of the families, it was implied in several cases that they were
constantly preoccupied with considerations of "what is essential for the
Greek neighbors.” Likewise, appropriating the conventions, the habits, the
appearance of Greeks, they give out certain diacritical signs which should be
seen by others as messages to be decoded, permitting the manipulation of
stereotypes of who the Greek-Albanians actually are. According to R. D. Laing,
"the body is an object in the world of others, it is necessary to dress it
up and act, in effect, in accordance with the attributes these others are
accustomed to, so that it may be recognized as a body."7
Differences do exist but immigrants claim that these have to do with the
families' economic status and social role. As they see it, their image is still
not the appropriate one. The immigrant families are constantly testing this
latter possibility, and it is an issue on which they are focusing their
strategies of integration. Ethnic identity is not the only factor of similarity
or differentiation that counts in the inclusion or the exclusion discourses of
the society as their case is concerned, they figure. Therefore, they often
override their ethnic-identification puzzle by trying to keep up with the
standard social status of the locality, which is the particular neighborhood
where they live. To a certain extent an acceptable social image, according to
these standards, could outweigh or counterbalance the differentiating features.
If I am "dressed" as Greeks do, I look like a Greek, and I feel Greek.
Adelina, in her early thirties, is very well-adjusted to the new
life-style. She is a mother of two children and works as a nurse for the
elderly. When I asked why her husband calls her “Adelina” and her friends
call her “Elli,” she explained that she changed her name because she had
never heard the name “Adelina” in Athens; instead “Elli” is a name that
a number of Greek women have.
Tilemaxos, in his late thirties, works most of the time as a gardener. He
seemed comfortably adjusted to the life he is leading in Athens and tolerant of
differences in people's behavior. But, at the same time, he sharply perceives
differences in life-styles, “there” and “here.”
Here people are dressed in a different way. You can see how much money
they make just by looking at the way they dress. I always take care of the way
that I am dressed, especially after work because otherwise people in the bus
think that I am "Albanian.”
The problem, then, centers on the relation between the Greek social
structure8 and the socially appropriate acts of the immigrants,9
as well as how this encounter is being realized in practice. Listening to the
immigrants and observing their conduct, I raise the possibility that the current
lack of actual understanding in this encounter between Greeks from Albania and
Greeks in Greece is not due to cultural encapsulation on each part, as the
popular view has it. Rather, it is a consequence of their differentiated social
and economic status, exacerbated by a mutually alienating feeling among Greeks
from Albania and Greeks in Greece, as a consequence of many years of living
apart.
The focus then is on the locality, represented not merely as a locus of
ethnicity but as an important medium through which people's identities are
formed and practiced. For instance, Greek-Albanians are not accustomed to
modern, urban life. Even their Greek accent, as well as their wordy way of
speaking the Greek language, refers more to the idiom that was spoken in the
Greek region before the settling of the borders, at the time of the formation of
the Albanian state. Greeks, on the other hand, look down on them because,
although they recognize some shared sense of ancestral ties, they raise the
issue of divided loyalties since their ethnicity is understood by the Greek
population as some kind of special Greek-Albanian blend. This is very painfully
felt by the immigrants. They have mentioned that "in Albania we were the
dirty Greeks, here in Greece we are the dirty Albanians.”
It is important to recognize how difficult it is to observe ethnicity in
action. Several dislocations and movements in the recent history of the families
have influenced the formation of the Greek-Albanian identity in response to
settlement in Athens. The bigger issue, as I see it, is the asserted duality of
their vision of the Greek cultural order as constituted and orchestrated in two
different social contexts and as lived by the immigrating people.
Greek-Albanians oscillate between two systems of values -- both being Greek to
their minds -- with which they are faced and within which they make choices.
They seem fairly comfortable with their own sense of ethnicity which takes on a
double sense, that does not lessen the specificity of each of its component
regional parts.
Right after the fall of communism in 1989 we became again Greeks. Already
by the end of 1990, in May, there was a general outcry, especially in our
villages (in the South). People rose up against the lousy economic situation.
What the Greeks believe that it was the Greek political leaders that invited us
to come by saying that we are your brothers and we should come to Greece for
protection, it is not the truth. We came here because we lived in a cage for 45
years and then we realized that there is life also elsewhere and it can be nice.
Not only we were poor but we were also isolated. The easiest way out for us was
Greece. Our village is right across the island of Corfu. It is so close that one
can actually see it. And we thought that our parents had been born there (in
Epirus) and we were born in Albania, but this did not mean that we should also
die there. The world is a big place, we knew that by then, we could hear it on
the radio, the TV.
To the extent that the families feel alienated from both societies, how
are they supposed to see themselves when they are asked to give a single answer
to their ethnic identity questions, Who are they? Are they Greeks? Are they
Albanians? In our conversations, they tend to ascribe to themselves an identity
on the basis of who they are and the way they live now, in the present context.
This allows them to present a more fitting image of themselves having more than
one belonging, “we are Greeks from Albania.”
The “Greek-Albanian” identity in spite of its constructed character,
is an embodied, internalized feeling. The immigrants have constructed a symbolic
bridge between the past and the present. How can this happen? It is the bond
created between people and place in the construction of culture. Locality is
there to create a physical and social place for cultural performance.
Of course, these people neither demonstrate nor experience self-identity
conflicts or suspension between two cultures. Instead, the families continue to
illustrate actively what their ethnic identity means for them, rather than being
stereotypically stamped by it. I do not mean to say that the past is not a
crucial factor for identity, as it is a mark of habitat; indeed, reference to
the past is necessary in order to delineate a group's unit. However, identity
between spaces can also be “natural.” It is J. Clifford's well know argument
that people identify themselves in a continual process of ordering their
experiences.10 “Greeks from Albania,” the identity which they
have chosen for themselves, does not suggest any disruption or abrupt alteration
of identity; on the contrary, their identification expresses the dilemmas that
the families face and the dialectical process through which they experience and
act out these dilemmas. The name they have chosen symbolizes the selection of
Albanian and Greek cultural elements: it is an active process whereby people
attempt to control their lives through a multiple identification and within
negotiation. It also symbolizes their desire not to be considered the “poor,
uncivilized Albanians.” The very name "Albanian" sounds like an
insult for the contemporary Greek public. They are taking on a social image
which is accepted by the Greeks and which will grant them the rights that they
think they are entitled to, as hardworking residents and as
"returnees" to the Greek community.
The statements -- "I am Greek from Albania. We are both Greeks. I do
not understand why you are considered to be more Greek than I am just because I
was born in Albania and you, here" -- do not specify whether, or not, they
conceptualize their ethnic culture alternatively as a heritage, as a mentality
and/or as a locality. Yet, in each of the three possibilities, ethnic identity
has the effect of “same origin,
different life opportunities,” and this is what attributes different
characteristics to the two groups, the Greeks and the Greek-Albanians. Cultural
differences and variations are distinguishable among them, but they are
evaluated as a result of the different life-styles that the two groups had
experienced.
The assertions on their identity are context-specific, rendering
meaningful factors which correspond to their aspirations and suppressing those
markers which define them as a population of a degraded status. This is quite
clear from the activities and social relationships to which immigrants attribute
meaning and importance. I take an incident to give a specific indication for
such a practice. Since they are very concerned about their public image, they
seek to associate socially with their Greek neighbors, co-workers or sometimes
even employers, rather than with other immigrant families in the neighborhood
(although this selection practice would not include the members of their kin who
happen to live in the same area). They even, to a certain extent, copy the
life-style of their Greek neighbors. They feel it is essential to provide their
children with private schooling in addition to regular school attendance, to
take them to the gym or other sorts of social activities, frequently taken up by
Greek children, even if the money they make, working very hard, is not always
enough. Working does not mean solely security; it also means additional money to
make their life more comfortable and, hence, “presentable” which is of equal
importance to the families.
It seems to me that their special position rests on the two-dimensional
view of their identity. They perform and negotiate their identity in two
different ways in a process of making sense of themselves and of others. They
feel as members of the "wider Greek culture" which, for them, has two
places of reference, one in the country of origin and one in the country of
residence. So they are shifting between the two in an attempt to make meaning of
their lives, negotiating the two as one. Whether they are called --
"Albanians" or "Greeks" or "Greeks from Albania"
-- all these terms designate categories of association that the families might
use or not in one context or the other. In this way, they demonstrate their
identification process as negotiating agents but not as passive recipients of
the circumstance.
Much has been written about ethnic identity and is largely centered
around the issue of culture as a portable heritage, determining life-styles, as
if culture was a baggage that people carry around. The empirical suggestion in
this case is that culture is not a baggage, neither can it be seen as a
"tool kit"11 out of which one may use whatever markers are
suitable in the current condition. One of the principal attempts of this work is
to expunge the single concept of ethnicity as an exclusive category. Rather, the
term ethnicity is based on diverse forms of spatial identification, each of
which have different implications about the process of articulating identity by
locality.
The nature of the ethnic identification of the immigrant families, is
crystallized under conditions of the ecological and social structure of the
specific neighborhoods in the city and, to a lesser degree, on conditions
defined by frequent patterns of association and identification with common
origins. As S. Wallman eloquently phrased it, ethnic-identity formation and
immigrant behavior are basically manifestations of the way people are organized
in terms of interaction patterns, personal aspirations, life-styles and a
presumed consciousness of belonging.12
“Ethnic identification has a lot to do with the exigencies of survival
and the structure of opportunity in the country of residence. The cultural
heritage of the immigrant groups is taking shape in this country.” This idea
refers to the current state of debate which acknowledges the formative power of
“place” in the process by which identities are constructed.13
Ethnicity works to differentiate and identify groups and to mobilize their
symbolic resources to particular ends. Cultural change is recognized, and the
need to find some sort of modus vivendi is acknowledged. Perhaps we would like
to consider ethnic identity as something positive and unshakable, but to the
immigrant families the context-specific identity negotiations mean confirmation
of the success of adaptation. Their form of identification applies to the
contemporary concerns on the theory of identity. This theory proposes that
instead of searching for lost “authenticities” based on nostalgia and false
memories, places should be looked at as the distinctive factor of social
relation to cultural production.14
Is it then simply a matter of positioning and strategy? That is, all
potential identity markers are mobilized only where it suits the purposes of the
particular encounter. Although it seems as if people are using identity markers
in a strategical way for a purpose, in my opinion, identities combined and
recombined in the course of real life are not changing specifically and
deliberately. I would argue instead that ethnic identification, as an emergent
phenomenon, continues to develop with the changing positions of the individuals
within society. Old forms of ethnic identification may die out, and new forms
may be generated.
Nikos describes that, when he first arrived in Athens, looking for a job,
without a place to stay and no money, people frequently asked him where he was
from in Albania and what was his religion.
I soon realized that who you are in Athens is matter of attitude. The
policeman does not stop you if you look at him in the eyes, mind your own
business and dress in the appropriate way. Now I drive my own car, I behave like
Greeks do and other Albanians are often mistaking me for Greek boss, and they
treat me with respect.
(Re)-constructing the past is an act of self-identification and must be
interpreted in its authenticity, that is, in terms of the existential relation
between subjects and the constitution of a meaningful world. What about the
authenticity of past identity? This is rather a question of the existential
authenticity of the individual's engagement in a self-defining situation since
the past is envisaged as a constantly changing product of current circumstances.
Greeks and Albanians, were all the same, they were all people, we were
living under the same conditions. Only the language and the religion was
different. And another thing, for us Greece was the homeland (patria) of our
parents and grandparents.
Sahlins in his Islands of History
argues precisely this: "Identity" is the organization of the current
situation in the terms of a past.15 Clearly, not only the present
situation, he says, but also the past builds our identity. He is referring,
however, to a past which is practiced in the present, not because it imposes
itself on it, but because the individuals understand the past in the practice of
their present identification.
Inevitably in the families' claims about identity, images of "roots,” language and religion are central to their imagination. These are basic categories people refer to when they talk about social relatedness; but, their interest in belonging is much more circumstanced and focused on the variable of place.
Ethnic bonding is an emotional attachment which is based on the
conviction of group members who are ancestrally related. An appeal to arguments
-- which link this bonding with a set of apt criteria that would explain how a
community of people claims definite standing in the past -- can be rather easily
discharged as misleading. Should we then agree that the boundary process is
reactive and not independent? Yet still, if culture is not definite but
negotiable, what is it that commands people's loyalty, and how do we defend the
cultural content of the past? An answer was given by Gerd Baumann in his book, Contesting Culture. Ethnicity is not about differences and social
boundaries, but it refers to the sense of differentness which can occur when
members of particular cultures interact. The key phrase which explains this
admixture of reason and emotional attachment is how people feel about their
history. It is not "what is," but what people perceive as
"is" that influences their attitudes and behaviour.16
According to Friedman, in like manner, the past signifies the project
constructed by selectively organizing the events in the lives of individuals in
a relation of continuity and, thereby, creating an appropriate representation of
a life leading up to the present.17
Therefore, what could the "Greek-from-Albania" identity be
indicating? Even if it seems that the immigrant families refuse to identify
themselves according to the two faces of the dominant discourse and accordingly
to be either Greeks or Albanians, it is empirically visible that they are marked
by the fault lines of the dominant discourse which are affecting their way of
thinking and acting. A very characteristic example of this two-dimensional
identification are the words of an immigrant man. defending his
"Greek" origin to me. “Why should you have every right in this
state, and I am not entitled to any? Just because when they were settling the
borders they cut us out, did this make you more Greek than I am?" Taking an
example from the other point of view, an immigrant father defending his
background in Albania, told me: "I do not want my children to play in the
street, not because I am afraid that something should happen to them, but
because, with whom should they play, with the "Greeks"? This means
that the Greek children would not want to play with the children of an Albanian
immigrant family!
It is clear then that in pursuing their various commitments the
immigrants themselves question who they are and what this may signify in this
particular place, depending upon their judgments of context and purpose.
Unfortunately, the dominant discourse represents the language of authority
through which the families must explain themselves and legitimate their claims.
Hence, the name that they use for themselves, "Greeks from Albania,” is
their way of resisting such views that assert people's distinct natures
conditioned irreversibly by the past.
Social & Political
Sciences Dept.
European University Institute
San Domenico di Fiesole
1. Gerd Baumann, Contesing Culture:
Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), p. 11.
2. E. Carter, J. Donald and J. Squires, eds. Space
and place: Theories of Identity
and location (London: Lawrence
& Wishart, 1993), p. vii.
3. According to Doreen Massey, "place" should be understood as
porous networks of social relations, constructed through the specificity of
social interaction; D. Massey, Space,
Place and Gender (Cambridge Polity Press, 1994), p. 153.
4. The term prevailed after the final border definition following the Balkan wars which cut across long-lasting communities of people. A large number of Greek-speaking people found themselves in the southern part of the Albanian state where they occupied some villages and a few towns.
5. At the time, Greece appeared as a “Promised Land” in comparison to
Albania where people were suffering material deprivation, the crisis of the
political system, social and religious oppressions, and so on. The dream for an
eventual return to the "homeland,” the occasional Greek political
promises for reception, together with the picture that these people retained of
Greece as an ideal consumer society, all contributed to the visualization of a
potential mass exodus from Albania to Greece after the collapse of the Communist
regime, as a good fortune for the population of the Greek minority villages. A.
E. Gotovos, Research on the economic, social
and cultural integration
of Albanian immigrants to Greece,
1990-91, (published by the University of Ioannina, Greece, 1994), pp. 2-6.
6. As Gerd Baumann subtly phrased it to describe somewhat similar
ambiguities in the cultural identification of people in Southall, a multi-ethnic
ghetto of London. In this community study, Baumann argues that by stereotyping
people as “belonging to” a predefined community, one runs the risk of
tribilizing people and falsely fixing boundaries between groups in an absolute
and artificial way. G. Baumann, Contesting
Culture, Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), pp. 1-8.
7. He goes on to make the point that this game of signs, that is the
representation of oneself based on the prevailing cultural model, arises from
the need of people to construct social subjects that organize themselves to
claim visibility and social action. In this process, the differences within each
of the groups in the society are apparently “effaced,” thus permitting the
construction of this “collective us” as a macrosocial structure. R. D.
Laing, Self and Others (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, London, 1990), pp. 33-43.
8. By “social structure,” following the definition of Sahlins, I mean
the symbolic relations of cultural order in a specific historical context which
indicate the, at times, different scope of the political rhetoric of a nation.
For further reference, see M. Sahlins,
Islands of History, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp.
vii-xix.
9. Sahlins having in mind the Hawaiian case very convincingly asserts
that social morphology can be produced by performing acts: “In Hawaii one may
become a native by right action; an act of a given kind can signify a given
status as much as the two have the same final sense”; M. Sahlins, op.cit.,
in note 2, pp. vii-xix.
10. In Clifford's own words: “Interpreting the direction or meaning of
the historical record always depends on present possibilities”; J. Clifford, The
Predicament of Culture, Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 341-345.
11. As A. Swidler describes it in "Culture in Action: Symbols and
Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 273-286.
12. S. Wallman, ed., Ethnicity at
Work (London: Macmillan Press, 1979), pp. 1-14.
13. J. Friedman, "The Past in the Future: History and the Politics
of Identity," American Anthropologist 94 (1992): 854-856.
14. Daniel Miller, Shopping, place
and identity (London:
Routledge, 1998), p. 19.
15. Sahlins, op.cit., in note
2, p. 155.
16. Baumann, op.cit., in note
3, pp. 188-204.
17. The argument in Friedman's analysis is that “cultural realities are
always produced in specific sociohistorical contexts and that it is necessary to
account for the processes that generate those contexts in order to account for
the nature of both the practice of identity and the production of historical
schemes”; Friedman, op.cit., in note
8, p. 837.
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