Infrastructures, borders, (im)mobility, or the material and social construction of new Europe

This final chapter summarises the previous work suggesting some links between the mass contraction projects that took place in Europe after the end of Cold War and the border securitisation processes that the book described and how these are linked with contemporary phenomena.

Domesticating the road

The flows of remittances and artefacts are centred upon the material entity of the house. New or totally refurbished houses in Albania emerge as the major materialisation of migratory remittances in the country of origin. The Albanian houses under research are perpetually undergoing construction, while their building materials are brought gradually from Greece, most of the time by the migrants themselves and of course, via the major cross-border road - namely the Kakavijë–Gjirokastër road. The material fluidity of these houses shows their integration into the prevalent cosmology of flows while it signifies an ontological link between the house and the roads. None of the two categories has static materiality; both are inflowing from Greece and represent simultaneously a wanted and an unwanted gain of postsocialist globalised experience. Migrants’ houses and roads are two aspects of the same process but with very different perceptions.

The road to Albania

This chapter locates the importance of the anthropology of road and infrastructures at this stage of European history in order to understand the phenomena that are ongoing in the region and the importance of studying roads but also postsocialist migration and flows in the case of Albanian-Greek borders.

The state(s) of the road

This chapter departs from the first highways built in Albania during WWI and passing through the Italian fascist’s regime’s road project of the 1930s, focuses on the socialist period. I propose a view of socialism from the aspect of infrastructure construction and usage and an understanding of notions of manual labour as a measure of creating socialist subjects. Moreover, in this chapter I suggest a methodological division important for the historical understanding of network infrastructure: the division between the physical disposition of the infrastructure and the flows within the network, as one does not necessarily imply the other.

The road of/on transition

This is the key ethnographic chapter of the book: According to local mythology, danger influxes via the road and wealth outflux. It is by no coincidence that all these oral discourses in Gjirokastër locate their action on this particular road section. In postsocialism the Kakavijë–Gjirokastër road section has become a material and physical continuation of the Greek road system. The mythology of this road section comprehends three phenomena: the motif of the old hostility between Greece and Albania; the politics of international aid, but also the practices of transnationalism.

Fear of the road and the accident of postsocialism

This city which centralizes spatially inland mobility infrastructure it also centralizes spatial mobility socially as almost one third of its pre-1990 population lives in Greece. So unsurprisingly in the city and on the road one hears many narrations which locate their action is the 29km cross-border highway. Some of these stories are well known to a lot of Gjirokastrits and were repeated many times during my stay there. They are tales of car crashes, supernatural events, assassinations which occurred on the motorway during the violence of 1997 and of the ‘dangerous’ inhabitants of Lazarati village who are supposed to commit their various criminal activities on the highway. I suggest that in the case of Gjirokastër the highway and the related practices signify the novelties of postsocialism. These novelties combine simultaneously positive and negative implications, although the informants seem to focus on a number of negative incidents which occurred on the road, in fact the Kakavijë-Gjirokastër road emerges as the scene on which the various episodes of an uncertain daily life are located. This is the uncertainty of the entire Albanian postsocialist transitional project.

From dromocracy toward a new critical dromology

This is a discussion of the relationships between roads and their links to notions of culture and material culture in anthropology and other social sciences today. Theoretically, departing from Boas’ spatially fixed cultural areas and reaching Auge’s ‘non-places’; passing through Lefebvre’s, Situationists’ and Virilio’s critiques of motorways to Baudrillard’s fascination for freeways; going through Latour’s and Castells’ analyses of culture as networks and arriving to recent questions about the ontology of culture, this chapter examines the significance of roads for the anthropological study of cultural formations. Fusing this discussion with road ethnographies including Evans-Pritchard’s and Levi-Strauss’ ‘road-less anthropology’ and the histories of motorways, available in the history of technology literature, this chapter aims to open up a new discussion among anthropologists.

The city and the road

The urban topography of Gjirokastër city, where part of the current ethnography was based, is under a continuous process of change during the last two decades. The city has in fact been relocated around the traffic infrastructure, centralising the road which leads to the Albanian-Greek border since the borders opened, in 1990. This appears to be a somewhat predictable spatial transformation for a city which has one third of its population living as migrants in Greece and consumes almost entirely imported Greek products since 1990. However, this transformation of the urban formation is a complex process. This chapter enlightens on how the postsocialist city is enlarged dramatically and how it is reconfigured spatially in reference to the road infrastructure. It will address two main processes, the postsocialist introduction of the car-related spatial practices and the relocation of the urban centre around the road.