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‘You can’t eat shame with bread’:

gender and collective shame in
Albanian society
a b
Nicola Nixon
a
The University of Melbourne, Australia
b
Albanian Institute for International Studies, Tirana, Albania
Published online: 13 May 2009.

To cite this article: Nicola Nixon (2009): ‘You can’t eat shame with bread’: gender and collective
shame in Albanian society, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 9:1-2, 105-121

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 Southeast European and Black Sea Studies
Vol. 9, Nos. 1–2, March–June 2009, 105–121

‘You can’t eat shame with bread’: gender and collective shame in
Albanian society
Nicola Nixon*

The University of Melbourne, Australia, and Albanian Institute for International Studies,
Tirana, Albania
(Received
FBSS_A_372514.sgm
Journal
10.1080/14683850902723447
1468-3857
Original
Taylor
9102009
nicola.nixon@gmail.com
NicolaNixon
00000March
and
&ofArticle
Francis
Southeast
??;
(print)/1743-9639
Francis
final
2009version
European
received
(online)
and Black
??) Sea Studies

The impact of the recent totalitarian past continues to structure contemporary

social relations in Albania. In this paper, I examine the remnants of that system
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that contribute to the subordination of women in Albanian society through an

analysis of the normative structure of collective familial shame that was utilized
by the Enverist system as a means of control and coercion. Directing attention to
the dynamics of recent totalitarian social forces, such as collective familial shame,
I argue, allows for the development of a more relevant model for understanding
contemporary gender inequalities that avoids ethnocentrism.
Keywords: Albania; gender; post-communism; tradition; honour

What transpired in Albania, in virtual silence for over forty years, is a collective scar
which will not heal unless a sensitivity to the very processes of oppression and tyrannical
power are discussed and understood… (Blumi 1997)

I stayed married to him for 18 years because of the family, and because of the shame; it
was the idea of shame that kept me there all of that time. (Amnesty International 2006)

Introduction
The Enverist totalitarian system in Albania (1945–1990) is quite rightly credited as
having been one of the most brutal of the European communist regimes (Biberaj 1998;
Fuga 2001). Analysis of this period, however, continues to be largely taboo in Albania.
In general, Albanian historiography focuses on glorious images of historical achieve-
ment during the medieval period or the ‘national awakening’, and these images are
heavily drawn upon in the media. With the public gaze thus directed, there has yet to
be a serious attempt to comprehend the impact of the more recent past on the social
sphere. Where the impact of the communist period is mentioned, it is usually in the
observation of authoritarian tendencies in politics, such as in the inability of prominent
former communist officials to develop a more democratic disposition. Analysis, where
it exists, is therefore limited to conceptualizing recurring authoritarian tendencies at
the apex of political power. Meanwhile, the impact of the totalitarian system continues
to be felt in contemporary Albanian society in a number of ways, in particular in some
of the underlying social norms and values developed and enforced during that period.
These norms and values continue to manifest themselves in often unconscious,

*Email: nicola.nixon@gmail.com

ISSN 1468-3857 print/ISSN 1743-9639 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14683850902723447
http://www.informaworld.com
 106 N. Nixon

habitual social practices, roles, and behaviours. In this paper, I examine one of those
remnant social forces that contribute to the subordination of women in contemporary
Albanian society.
Since 1990, women’s participation in the public sphere in Albania has dropped
dramatically, as elsewhere in the post-communist region. In terms of participation in
Albania’s political life, for example, after the parliamentary elections in 2005 only 10
out of 140 members of parliament elected were women, while during the 2007 local
elections only 33 of 1073 mayoral candidates were women (OSCE/ODIHR 2007, 2).
Unemployment figures suggest that unemployment among women is 50% higher than
that of men, while on average their wages are around 35% less than men’s (UNDP
2007). Discrimination in the workplace also extends to the kinds of work women are
able to find, which tends to be restricted to education, health, and social services. At
the same time, women are generally considered to be primarily, if not solely, respon-
sible for the care of children and the elderly, as well as for domestic labour. This
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situation is considerably more difficult in rural areas in which many basic services,
such as electricity, running water, health, and social services are unavailable. Even
more disturbing are the results of recent research estimating that at least one-third of
women and girls are subject to physical or emotional abuse within the family (AI
2006). Women, therefore, face numerous forms of discrimination and subordination
in all areas of social and familial life.
At the same time, processes of socialization are marked by extremely differenti-
ated gender roles. These roles are enforced by gender discourses that are normative to
the point of reification; there is little or no space for alternative or resistant gender
identities. Gender differentiation is further marked by the clear segregation in and of
public spaces. Indeed, this strict differentiation between gender roles is one of the
most striking and troubling aspects of contemporary Albanian society. As such, orga-
nizations such as the United Nations agencies and the bilateral development agencies,
as well as local organizations such as the Gender Alliance for Development, are
attempting to facilitate change towards greater gender equality in Albania. Their work
aims to bring about change through tactics such as awareness-raising campaigns,
research and policy analysis, and lobbying government, as well as by addressing the
socialization process through training teachers and reforming school textbooks.
Indeed, there is a considerable amount of work being done in this area.
This work tends to focus on the empirical presentation, in detail, of the existing
situation with a focus on future possibilities for change. What I would like to do here
is to contribute to those efforts by offering an attempt to analyse some of the social
mechanisms that underlie gender discrimination in Albania, as to date these mechanisms
have been little explored.

Methodology and structure

The methodology utilized in this article combines elements of ethnography, discourse
analysis, and in-depth interviewing. During the three years in which I lived in Albania
(2004 – 2007), I was able to participate in numerous detailed discussions on gender
issues with academics and teachers, journalists, university students, development
practitioners, and government employees, as well as with many people I encountered
on my travels around the country. These discussions took place not only in the capital,
Tirana, but also in many of the other main urban centres in the country, as well as on
one occasion in an isolated village outside Krumë in the far north. In addition, I was
 Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 107

involved in devising and teaching a Master’s degree in Gender and Development at

the University of Tirana. Gender relations were also a frequent topic of discussion in
the classes I taught at both state and private universities in Tirana. I am very grateful
for the observations imparted to me in those discussions, and I draw substantially upon
them here.
My analysis also derives from a number of sources of documentary information,
including newspaper reports as well as research reports from international and local
organizations. In addition, I draw upon information gleaned from the initial phase of
an oral history project that I started in early 2007. From January to July of that year,
I undertook a series of 13 in-depth, semi-structured interviews in which interviewees
were asked to reflect on their childhood and adolescent memories of everyday life
under communism. The respondents were chosen in part due to their being over
35 years of age, and therefore able to remember a significant number of years of the
communist system. Due to the fact that Albania’s communist past remains a sensitive
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subject, it was not until I had built up a considerable level of trust within my own
social network that I was able to undertake this research. This is also why the inter-
viewees are referred to here by their initials. The sampling technique I used relied on
a snowball method, in which I identified possible respondents among the parents and
grandparents of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Among potential respondents,
I looked for a variety of past relationships with the Partia e Punës e Shqipërisë
(PPSh)[Albanian Party of Labour (APL)] party structure, and the sample includes
members of formerly ‘declassed’ families, as well as former party members. Finally,
although most of the interviews took place in Tirana, in the homes of the interviewees
or in a local café, the majority of interviewees grew up outside Tirana in places such
as Krujë, Permet, Fier, Erseka, Durrës, and Laç.
In the first section of the article, I begin by challenging the commonplace focus in
analyses of gender relations in Albania, on the post-communist revival of traditional
customary laws. These customary laws, known collectively as kanun, are reiterated to
a certain degree since the end of the communist system, yet the nature of their revival
needs to be examined. Too often, it is assumed that the kanun has been revived in its
original medieval form, which is not only simplistic but forms a corollary to the
tendency to seek an understanding of Albania’s present in its distant past; an arguably
ethnocentric tendency in which, by implication, contemporary Albanian society then
becomes situated in that distant past. The form of this post-communist ‘revival’, there-
fore, deserves more careful examination.
The second basis on which the ‘revival’ of the kanun may be challenged is in terms
of the assumption that it provides the only explanatory structure for understanding
contemporary gender inequalities, in which women face significant levels of exclu-
sion from political, social, and economic spheres. In the second section of the article
I move to a tentative exploration of Albania’s more recent past as being clearly more
relevant to Albania’s present. Here, I look at the ways in which the Enverist regime
utilized traditional family structures as a means of control and coercion that altered
those structures by producing an obsessive subjective focus on collective shame as a
guiding behavioural principle. My aim is to contribute a different perspective on the
ways in which family reputation – and, more specifically, collective familial shame –
has been preserved and continues to structure social relations in Albanian society.
Finally, I turn to the post-communist period in which the ideological strength of
collective shame, I argue, has been maintained, yet the direction of its projection has
altered, to focus now almost entirely on the actions of women. In this sense, we can
 108 N. Nixon

see a qualitative alteration of collective familial shame in which it has become

feminized and thereby contributes to the subordination of women through the policing
of women’s actions and restrictions on their behaviour.
The main argument I put forward is that there are under-analysed social forces that
are highly relevant to understanding contemporary gender inequalities. The one that I
explore here involves the behavioural codes relating to family reputation that were
manipulated during the rather more recent past of totalitarianism. Albania’s totalitar-
ian system produced habits of collective self-monitoring and control that remain
apparent in many ways in contemporary society. Among these habits is one powerful
normative social force that contributes to the subordination of women in Albania: a
preoccupation with protecting the boundaries of the family unit from the danger of
collective shame. Here, ‘collective shame’ is understood as that extension of the
personal emotion into the preoccupation of a collective – in this case, the extended
family – through which it both becomes part of and reinforces a moral code, thereby
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restricting the social agency of some members of that collective.

The significance of collective familial shame as a social force may be briefly
illustrated by the following two incidents reported in the broadly independent daily
newspaper Gazeta Metropol in 2004 and 2006.1 In one incident, a man from a village
outside Dibra, in north-eastern Albania, relocated his whole family to Durrës,
Albania’s second largest urban centre, because of the shame his family had suffered
in their immediate community after his daughter had been trafficked into prostitution
in Italy.2 He told a journalist from Gazeta Metropol that the shame his family felt after
his daughter managed to return was too great for them to stay in their village. In the
second, two female cousins aged 13 and 16 ran away from their home in a neighbour-
hood of Shkodra, just north of Tirana. When a journalist spoke to family members,
they stated that the girls would never be accepted back, since they had shamed their
families. One family member, using a commonplace expression, stated that ‘they have
put us to shame and we can’t eat shame with bread’ [ktë turp nuk mund ta hamë me
bukë].3 In other words, shame can’t simply be swallowed.
These two incidents reveal an aspect of the socio-familial position of women in
contemporary Albanian society. They involve the actions of a woman and the negative
consequences that result, and they either suggest or evidence forms of gendered subor-
dination. What they also reveal is the way in which this subordination is shaped by
notions of collective shame. The family’s honour had been damaged, and extreme
actions were taken as a result. Family honour is a strong social force in Albania; social
values stipulate that the family’s image must be maintained – sometimes at all costs –
in the eyes of the immediate community. Access to employment, education, and polit-
ical power are affected not only by one’s connections but also by the reputation of
one’s fis. In Albanian, fis not only denotes the extended family but also emphasizes
the interconnectedness of the extended family as a unit of identification. The term
‘collective shame’ is therefore used here to denote the way in which the consequences
of individual actions are shared by the collective – in this case, the extended family.
The emphasis on having a ‘good family’ (familje e mirë) can sometimes go so far
as to define the value of the individual. An anecdotal example: shortly after the state
elections in 2005, prime minister Sali Berisha appeared on television to justify the
nomination of Edit Harxhi as ambassador to the United States. In explaining the
reasoning of the Partia Demokratike (Democratic Party), Berisha began by stating
that Harxhi comes from a good family; in other words, her family’s reputation was her
key value as a professional individual. What is striking is the sheer force of family
 Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 109

reputation – in particular through the danger of incurring collective familial shame –

to the extent that the individual’s behaviour may be monitored not only by parents or
grandparents but also by cousins, uncles, and aunts.
The significance of family, shame, and reputation in the creation of social bonds
and the organization and re-creation of social structures is not a new theme, and has
been examined in a broad range of contexts. Georg Simmel, for example, argued that
fashion allows individuals to change yet at the same time avoid social isolation. The
avoidance of shame, according to Simmel, was therefore the source of fashion (Scheff
2000, 87); while for Norbert Elias, shame was central to the processes of modernity,
through the development of etiquette (Scheff 2000, 89). Perhaps most prominent among
the sociological analyses of shame is the work of Ervin Goffman (1967), for whom the
work of ‘saving face’ was a key means for the individual to avoid embarrassment and
shame.
Shame, as a social force, clearly has gendered connotations; and this dimension,
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too, has been the subject of numerous analyses. The pivotal work, in terms of Medi-
terranean societies, was Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society
(Peristiany 1966), in which the authors argued that ‘there exists a sex-linked, binary
opposition in which honour is associated with men and shame with women’ (quoted
in Magrini 2003, 12). Although Peristiany’s ethnography was important in the enun-
ciation of the gendered differences in the experience of collective shame, it also
contributed to a tendency to essentialize and portray static social relations in the Medi-
terranean.4 More recent work, utilizing contemporary theoretical models and mindful
of the pitfalls of essentialization, has examined nuances of the relationship between
gender and shame in diverse cultural contexts. For example, in ‘Shame in Korean
Families’, Yang and Rosenblatt (2001) examine the ‘oppressive nature of shame in
Korea for women’ and the ‘relationship between shame and sexuality’. Similarly, in
‘The family, honour and gender in Sicily’, Fazio (2004) critically examines the
concept of honour ‘as a social construct bound up with the sexual behavior of women’
in Sicilian society. Here, the themes of this body of work are drawn upon and
examined within the specificities of the Albanian context (264).

Rethinking the Kanun

When analysts look for the reasons for the stark gender inequalities in contemporary
Albanian society, they tend to perceive their roots to be situated in the distant past in
social protocols such as the traditional Albanian customary laws known as the kanun.
The significance of the kanun in English-language analyses of gender was popularized
by Antonia Young in her highly influential Women Who Become Men: Albania’s
Sworn Virgins (2000). In that text, Young documented the existence of alternative
gender roles for women in Albania’s remote northern regions in the context of
traditional familial roles structured according to the kanun.
What Young is referring to is the complex system of legal codes, some written and
others unwritten, that developed throughout the territory from the fifteenth century.
Differing in their content from region to region, these laws ‘provided a complete
moral and legal framework for social interaction, covering every area of life from
dispute settlement procedure to rules for marriage, division of property, blood feud,
and rights of way’ (de Waal 2005, 65).5 The most well-known of the kanuns is the
Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, codified in 1913 by Shtjefen Gjeçov, a Franciscan monk,
who lived in the north of Albania in the early twentieth century. In Gjeçov’s version
 110 N. Nixon

of the kanun, and reputedly in all other known versions, a highly patriarchal family
structure with strictly distinct gender roles is prescribed.
A common narrative of contemporary gender relations in Albania, in particular in
external observer accounts, therefore goes like this: The kanun structured social and
familial relations before the Communists took power; the Communists repressed the
kanun; after Communism, the kanun has been revived and is contributing to the subor-
dination of women, including the degree of violence perpetrated towards them, in
contemporary society. A 2006 report on domestic violence in Albania by Amnesty
International exemplifies this narrative. In ‘Albania: Violence against Women in the
Family: “It’s not her shame”’, the author of the report writes:

The ancient customary law set out in the Kanun of Lek Dukagjini (Kanuni e Lekë
Dukajinit) was first written down and codified in the early 20th century. The Kanun gave
a man the right to beat and publicly humiliate his wife if she disobeyed him… The
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Kanun also provided that, under certain conditions, a man may kill his wife with
impunity (or leave her) for adultery and for betrayal of hospitality. …Although
observance of the laws of the Kanun was prohibited during the communist period, from
the early 1990s there has been resurgence in the use of customary practices, including
blood feuds and revenge killings, especially in the north of the country… (AI 2006, 16)

Here, we see an ancient and prejudicial tradition, communist repression and post-
communist revival of tradition – the common elements in contemporary narratives of
Albanian gender relations. It is not that the content of the narrative is entirely incor-
rect. The text of the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini does indeed include laws such as those
cited above, for example. What is problematic in this narrative is what is absent: any
clear sense of historical change. An ancient set of customary laws is equated with the
codified version of the early twentieth century which, after an absence of almost
50 years, is said to be operating almost unchanged today.6
This narrative form, in which the ancient past is collapsed into the present, may be
situated more broadly in what was, for a good part of the 1990s, the dominant version
of the story of Eastern Europe’s emergence from totalitarianism in which ‘Commu-
nism’ had kept a lid on ‘irrational passions’ such as ethno-nationalism which, with its
demise, were permitted a kind of primordial resurgence. As Katherine Verdery argued
in What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?, the surprise of Western observers at
the ‘sudden appearance of national movements and national sentiments’ (1996, 83)
throughout the region after the collapse of communist systems tended to be explained
in terms of dormant irrational forces that had been successfully controlled by the
communist system, which had now been unleashed. This perspective became known
as the ‘ancient hatreds’ thesis, and it formed the basis of a common perception of a
‘tribalist Balkans’ that underpinned many explanations of the break-up of former
Yugoslavia. This perception of the Balkans has been widely critiqued (see, for
example, Bakic-Hayden 1995; Todorova 1997; Goldsworthy 1998), as pejorative,
orientalist, and historically determinist. In this Albanian version, we can see a story of
the repression of such ancient irrational passions, the kanun, by the Enverist regime,
and their consequent resurgence.
In analysing this narrative form, Verdery also notes, however, that it implicitly
‘combines with an apparent view of the socialist period as in every respect an aberra-
tion whose end restores business as usual, a more normal order of “irrational tribal”
passions in a part of the world long regarded as backward’ (1996, 83). And as she goes
on to suggest, ‘asserting temporal distance, such as by calling something “ancient”, is
 Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 111

a classic means of establishing the thing so called as inferior, this and the imagery of
“tribalism” and “irrationality” make the explanation immediately suspect as ideology,
not analysis’ (1996, 83). Similarly, in the Albanian context the narrative of the revival
of the ancient kanun tends to represent Albanians as primitive and tribal, living within
history rather than in a modernist European present. It is symptomatic of a form of
orientalism that plagues representations of the Balkans in general, not only Albania.
Such a vision of Albania sits well with current stereotypes that emphasize an
inherent tendency towards lawlessness and ingrained corruption, and harks back to the
influential writings of Edith Durham, who portrayed Albania as ‘the land of the living
past’ (1985; see also Derek Hall’s analysis of pejorative depictions of contemporary
Albania, 1999). Indeed, it is for this reason that many of my local academic informants
expressed irritation with what they perceive as an obsession with the kanun by foreign
observers. A focus on the kanun produces a form of simple historical determinism that
removes Albanian culture from its contemporary and recent historical contexts and
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tends to actively obscure those contexts from interpretation.

As an antidote to the ideological vision of post-communist transition, Verdery
proposes greater emphasis on the ways in which various ‘traditions’ were utilized,
rather than simply suppressed, by communist systems and the effects of the disman-
tling of those systems in the post-communist period. To that end, in terms of the
Albanian context, I argue that what is better termed neo-traditionalism in Albania –
from which, to a certain extent, contemporary attitudes to gender roles emanate –
needs to be situated much more clearly in the recent communist past and the response
to that past in the post-communist transition period. As Rasmussen (2007, 231)
observes, ‘more nuanced’ analyses of social emotive codes need a clear emphasis on
modernity, in order to detach ‘analysis of shame from some previous tendencies to
associate this sentiment solely with tradition and the past’.
The author of the Amnesty International report, while reiterating the common
narrative of post-communist traditional revival, is not unaware that in its reinstitution,
something about the kanun has changed. The author notes that resurgence of custom-
ary practices is ‘often in a form that has little in common with the rules of the Kanun
[of Lekë Dukagjini]’ and an interviewee is cited who comments that, ‘People do not
use the Kanun as part of their daily life, but if a woman has an affair, or if she leaves
her home and goes back to her own family, then they use the word Kanun without
thinking so that they can justify punishing her’ (AI 2006). In this sense, it is clear to
the author that there is something strangely superficial about the application of an
apparently deeply-rooted series of traditional practices. Yet the alteration of the kanun
that produces this superficiality is left unexamined. In order to conceptualize this
superficiality – a kind of emptying of the kanun as a signifier – more fully, it is neces-
sary to trace its ‘repression’ during the Albania’s communist past.
In terms of its response to the kanunic customary laws, upon coming to power the
APL saw these codes as retrogressive customs that needed to be eradicated and
replaced by state juridical structures. To that end, according to de Waal, ‘reference to
the Kanun was made a punishable offence’ (2005, 65). According to most accounts,
the repression of traditional customary laws by the APL was largely effective even
though adherence did continue in some isolated regions. The most notorious custom-
ary practice; gjakmarrje, or blood-feud, was entirely eradicated by the APL in the
1960s (AI 2006). It is commonly assumed, therefore, that the kanun was largely
eliminated during the communist period. Yet I suggest that this assumption needs to
be reconsidered.
 112 N. Nixon

It is clear that the juridical elements of the kanun were effectively replaced by APL
bureaucratic structures and that open reference to the kanun was restricted. Arguably,
however, what we might think of as the spirit of the law endured; and it did so because
it was utilized by the APL to buttress totalitarian power. According to Artan Fuga, one
of Albania’s most insightful cultural analysts, the spirit of the pre-communist kanun,
beyond the stipulated legal rules, entailed the ‘primacy of the general patriarchal clan
or family structure over each of the individual members’ (2001, 91). Fuga argues that
one way in which the regime maintained its power was by utilizing kanunic familial
terminology in depicting the organization of the Albanian political system (91). He
argues that ‘[p]olitical relations within Albanian society were presented as based on
blood relations’ and the ‘political agents of society’ became in a ‘symbolic fashion,
members of one fis’ (91). While one may belong to two fise (the mother’s and the
father’s), the father’s takes precedence, and as such the fis has a patrilineal character.
According to Fuga, the official propaganda of the regime began to utilize ‘terms
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that refer to parental relations within the patriarchal family or clan relations’ to
describe the organization of the Albanian political system (91). Propaganda was
infused with familial terminology; terms such as ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘sister’ and
‘brother’ were ‘used more and more to denote the different agents of the domestic and
foreign political life’ (92).

Political relations within Albanian society were presented as based on blood relations.
Politics was symbolised by a familial relation; it was ‘transformed’, so to speak, in a
parental relation. In a sense, it was ‘biologised’ and naturalised, taking on an organic and
physical form. Political terms were substituted by gendered terms. On the sociological
plane, the political agents of society ‘become’, in an imaginary and symbolic fashion,
members of one fis or one typically traditional family. (Fuga 2001, 91–92)

Thus, the APL drew upon the existing legitimacy of a kind of authoritarian paternal-
ism that was present in the kanun and that translates into patriarchal power. In this
sense, the APL not only permitted the continuity of what we might term kanunic
patriarchal ethics, while repressing its outer juridical manifestations, but it drew upon
them in a way that gave them more legitimacy.
In a sense, then, the APL facilitated the hollowing-out of the concept of the kanun,
largely removing from it a clear understanding of the stipulated codes of behaviour
such as those to be found in Gjeçov’s version of the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini. This
emptying of the kanun goes some way to explaining why its contemporary usage
appears to bear little in common with such codified versions. Thus, the kanun is some-
times utilized to justify revenge killings that bear little or no relation to the rules for
the practice of gjakmarrje (blood-feud). This is most common in media reports of
violent episodes.7
The patriarchal values inscribed in kanun prescribe a particular form of masculin-
ity that, when identified with and practiced, therefore can be utilized to legitimize
violence. In contemporary society, the term kanun, emptied of much of its juridical
detail, operates as a free-floating signifier that provides a highly mutable sense of
autochthonous and (misrecognized) pre-communist legitimacy to extreme violence by
men, either towards other men or towards women.
It is in this sense – as a form of neo-traditionalism, largely emptied of its prior
content by the communist system – that an understanding of the kanun in contempo-
rary Albanian society may contribute to an understanding of the subordination of
women. From this perspective, it is probably better to conceptualize its current
 Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 113

manifestation as a form of ‘neo-kanunic legitimacy’ for extreme violence. Thus, this

neo-kanunic legitimacy, where it operates, may be seen as simply one among a
number of contributing factors to the subordination of women. Perhaps more signifi-
cant, however, are those social and cultural forces that emanate directly from the more
recent past; Albania’s totalitarian past. It is to these that I now turn.

‘Biografi’
Under the APL, headed by Enver Hoxha until his death in 1985, and then Ramiz Alia
until the revolutions of 1991, a complex and multifaceted system of repression,
control, and coercion existed. In a number of aspects, the Enverist system bears a
direct resemblance to other totalitarian systems in the Soviet orbit. As elsewhere, the
Party represented the apex of a form of authoritarian paternalism. Similarly, compa-
rable with other totalitarian systems, control and coercion were exercised through the
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inculcation of a strict and ‘hyper-homogenous’ (Fuga 2001, 67) ideology through

various state apparatuses. Enverist ideology was fundamentally Stalinist (in contrast
to the post-Khrushchev era in the Soviet Union and its satellites) and utilized large
doses of nationalism to maintain legitimacy. The inculcation of ideology through state
institutions was reinforced, as elsewhere, by mechanisms of surveillance such as the
network of state-employed secret police – known in Albania as the Sigurimi. Minor
verbal transgressions could be deemed anti-government and could result in imprison-
ment or forced relocation as an ‘enemy of the people’ (armik i popullit).
One of the distinctive characteristics of the Hoxhaist system lies in its isolation.
Already detached from Western Europe at the end of World War II, during its lifetime
the APL proceeded to cut ties with Yugoslavia in 1948, the Soviet Union in 1961 and
China in 1978. As is often commented, Albania’s isolation is very aptly symbolized
by the thousands of dome-shaped, defensive military bunkers that punctuate the land-
scape. The APL’s isolation produced economic effects such as arrested industrializa-
tion and the maintenance of a largely agrarian economy. In social and political terms,
this isolation, in combination with other repressive mechanisms, enabled the mainte-
nance of power through sustaining high levels of fear, paranoia, and suspicion among
the population in all aspects of their daily lives.
A key means by which the APL was able to utilize existing familial structures as
a means of coercion and control was through the practice of biography. From the
outset, the bureaucracy of the APL painstakingly recorded each family’s genealogy
and kept a record of the family’s current activities – or at least threatened that they
were doing so – through intense surveillance by the Sigurimi and their many paid
informants. One of the core principles of the system was to facilitate an ongoing ‘class
war’ between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ family units.8 The ideology of an ongoing class war
was one of the means through which the system was legitimized. Genealogies were
therefore used at the outset to divide the society into proletarian or pro-communist, on
the one hand, and bourgeois or anti-communist family units, on the other, with the
latter becoming the persecuted ‘declassed’ (deklasuar).
The initial division between good and bad families began with the family’s recent
history. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, entire families were ‘declassed’ on the
basis that a member of the family had supported the Italian or German forces or the
local opposition movements such as Balli Kombëtar or Legaliteti during World War
II, or that they could be identified as having been part of the pre-war landed gentry or
the small merchant class. These families formed the basis of the ‘persecuted class’
 114 N. Nixon

throughout the entire system.9 On the other hand, those with family members who had
fought with the partisans during the war were automatically favoured by the regime as
‘good families’ and formed a kind of elite.10
The majority of the Albanian population, however, during the early years of the
system, had neither family ties that would find them initially declassed, nor those that
would bring them into a partisan-centred elite. Most families found themselves in the
default position of being a ‘good family’ if they had not been immediately ‘declassed’.
As the system progressed, the division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ families was not set
in stone, however, and fortunes could change. It was, therefore, the threat of being
relegated to the status of a ‘bad family’ that was ever-present in daily life. Families
could incur a stain on their biography for a variety of other reasons.11 In general, even
the most minor verbal transgression would result in the imprisonment of the ‘offender’
and/or the relocation of their family.
The resulting punishment of ‘bad families’ practiced by the APL may be concep-
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tualized as a series of concentric circles with the ‘offender’ at the centre, who – if they
hadn’t escaped the country – would probably serve a substantial prison term in the
brutal conditions of a prison camp such as the notorious Spaç and Burrel camps. The
immediate family would be interned (internuar) to an isolated, regional area that
the Party was aiming to develop. Relocation of the interned family often took place
very suddenly during the night with the arrival of a truck and the removal of family
and whatever possessions could be carried. After the immediate family was relocated,
their punishment didn’t stop there. They were permanently branded as ‘enemies of the
people’ and were likely to face extreme social exclusion in their new communities. In
addition, they faced restrictions in terms of employment – such as to manual labour –
for the parents, and restrictions on education possibilities for children – such as an
automatic removal of any possibility of attending university.12 Moreover, ‘declassed’
families would be continually reminded of their reduced status through incessant
surveillance by the Sigurimi, discriminatory treatment at the hands of local officials,
and a general fear of being associated with them that permeated their local community
and meant that social distance was maintained.13
Beyond the immediate family, the extended family or fis also suffered. Their
punishment might involve increased surveillance, increased restrictions on movement,
demotion or lack of promotion in employment, lack of educational possibilities,
restrictions on access to household items such as refrigerators or washing machines,
etc. In that sense, the ‘declassed’ fis also suffered regular discrimination at the hands
of numerous local Party officials.
Thus, the ever-present danger of incurring a bad biography, through a report of
what one said or did not say, produced a widespread culture of fear and paranoia. This
system-induced fear resulted in the disintegration of social relations in the public
sphere. People ‘distrusted strangers, colleagues, neighbours and sometimes even their
relatives’ (AIIS 2007, 9). Within the family itself, relations between individuals were
therefore severely muted. The former political prisoner, Fatos Lubonja, has
commented upon the effects of the Hoxhaist totalitarian system on the individual
within the family structure at that time:

Relations between parents and children became alienated because the parents… could
not speak openly to their children, fearing that they would not keep their mouths shut and
that the Sigurimi, the notorious communist secret service, would hear about their
thoughts. The idea that the state could intervene at any time in your private life and lash
 Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 115

out at you because your thoughts deviated from the teachings of the party accompanied
people at every step. (Lubonja 2001, 246–7)

The Enverist system practiced an extreme form of collective punishment for an indi-
vidual’s actions.14 When positioned in the context of a system of intense fear and
collective punishment, the importance of maintaining a good family reputation was
enormously heightened. Maintaining appearances – in this context, family appear-
ances – became an essential strategy of everyday existence. Enormous emphasis was
placed on the performance of the family as a stable, harmonious unit to the immediate
community, and therefore through the Sigurimi to the Party. Problems within the
family had to be hidden from public view, lest the state would intervene and ramifi-
cations would be felt.
The communist system built upon already-existing strong family networks. What
it did, though, was to warp those networks by inculcating them with the same kind of
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fear and paranoia that was felt in the public sphere. An extreme sense of collectivity
– in the sense of being constantly alert to whatever others were doing, in particular
members of one’s own family – was enacted through the fear of punishment. Collec-
tive familial punishment collapsed the private into the public and permeated both
spheres with fear. In this context, two particular social values became heightened: the
family’s reputation or honour, and its obverse, shame. The strictures that exist today,
in contemporary Albanian society, relating to familial reputation, bounded by honour
(nderi) on the one hand and shame (turp) on the other, stem from habits of maintaining
appearances – obsessively and necessarily – that developed under totalitarianism.
Such habits provide the basis of the contemporary sense of collective shame, mani-
fested now – in the absence of the APL – in rather more gendered moral codes.

Feminized collective shame

When the communist system collapsed, people sought new forms of subjective secu-
rity in a context of high unemployment, widespread poverty, massive migration, and
general disillusionment. In the absence of any formal religious structures15 and with
the weakening of existing state structures, people turned to the family as their main
source of security. This strengthened the family as a social structure, and unfortu-
nately also intensified its constriction by collective shame.
At the same time, notions of gender equality have been symbolically rejected as
tainted by communist party rhetoric. The negation of the communist past has been one
of the pillars of political legitimacy throughout the region and in Albanian society, as
elsewhere ‘communism’ tended often to be equated with the most superficial elements
of Party propaganda. Throughout the region, communist regimes presented women’s
emancipation as part of their project of social engineering. In Albania, the rhetoric of
women’s emancipation ‘played a central role in Hoxha’s propaganda, and often his
policies’; and while the reality was considerably more complex, the 1946 constitution
‘enshrined equality between the sexes’ (Fischer 1999, 293). This emancipation,
however, usually amounted to little more than an emphasis on women’s participation
in paid employment (Brunnbauer 2000, 152). The rejection of gender equality repre-
sents one element in the attempt to mark a clear break with the communist past. Thus,
‘gender equality’, while never actually achieved in Albania or any other communist
country – and arguably not intended to be achieved in those systems, given the main-
tenance of women’s roles in the family and home – was resoundingly rejected. This
 116 N. Nixon

tendency has been well documented in academic research throughout the post-
communist region since the early 1990s (see, for example, Funk and Mueller 1993;
Einhorn 1993). In Albania, this rejection obviously contributes to the widespread and
palpable subordination of women.
Albania is also very much a part of the process of retraditionalization that has
taken place throughout the post-communist world (Holmes 1997, 280). As in many
other contexts, this process is retroactive rather than retrospective. Traditions are not
simply remembered and revived as they existed prior to communism, but are adjusted
and manipulated to fit the needs and desires of the present. In this vein, retraditional-
ism in Albania was inspired, in part, by notions of a pre-communist kanun, which
derived its legitimacy from the belief that it had been effectively repressed by the APL
and could be revived as a symbol of anti-communist defiance. This is despite the fact
that, as I have argued above, while the juridical elements of the kanun were outlawed,
the legitimacy of patriarchal power that is ingrained in the kanun was utilized by the
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APL in its maintenance of power. The revival of this now rather hollow term, has, as
discussed above, produced a form of neo-kanunic legitimacy for violence that impacts
upon women. This is further exacerbated due to the contribution of the contemporary
notion of kanun to the construction of a post-communist national identity through
which Albania can be portrayed as an ancient and permanent cultural community that
remained historically untouched by outside influence.
A number of factors contribute to the subordination of women in the post-communist
period, most of which in one way or another may be conceptualized as direct responses
to that prior system. At the same time, however, less obvious tendencies that developed
under totalitarianism have been adapted to present circumstances and continue to make
their presence felt. In this sense, the social force of collective shame has been maintained
by its adaptation to neo-traditionalism. Contemporary neo-traditionalism also stresses
the importance of maintaining extended family structures, and it does so all the more
emphatically given the pressure on those structures from rapid urbanization and mass
migration since the end of the communist system. The structure of collective family
reputation, deriving from the communist period, provides the means to maintain the
boundaries of the family unit. In this sense, neo-traditionalism has become interwoven
with social norms and values developed under communism. It is through this inter-
weaving that collective familial shame remains an abiding structural force in Albanian
society. Its widespread significance is evident in the retention of the commonplace
designations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ families from the communist period. Yet it is also
through this interweaving that the character of collective shame has changed.
Under communism, concern was paid to those ideological ‘crimes’ that could
shame a family and tarnish the family’s biography – such as a political opinion
expressed carelessly. It was through these ideological crimes that people were most
likely to become identified as ‘enemies of the people’. Theoretically, anyone could be
identified as such, and in this sense the bulk of actions resulting in collective shame
were not clearly gendered. Yet there were some actions that had the potential to bring
about collective shame in the eyes of the immediate community that were gendered,
and these generally had to do with the policing of female sexuality.16 With the removal
of communist ideological structures, and therefore the danger of incurring collective
shame through ideological ‘crimes’, what was retained was the danger posed by
female actions, and in particular female sexuality. In this sense, during Albania’s post-
communist transition, familial shame began to be projected inwards more towards the
female members of the family than towards the male.
 Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 117

Although it is possible for a man’s actions to shame the family (for example, in the
case of marrying a divorcee or having an extramarital affair), the response to these
actions is generally far less dramatic than towards the actions of women. What is most
significantly different is the degree of punishment accorded to women; according to
my informants, women’s actions are far more likely to incur a violent or more extreme
response if they shame the family unit. From this perspective, it is argued here that the
intensity of familial shame has been feminized.
It is this form of feminized familial shame that is evident in the two stories
mentioned at the outset, in which women’s actions shamed the family’s honour and
an extreme response, involving the whole family collectively, ensued. These are just
two among numerous examples of the ways in which women may shame their family.
Female behaviour that may violate family honour includes prostitution, adultery, and
premarital relationships, or any assertion of independence that calls into question the
legitimacy of patriarchal power. Thus, today, the social values connected with collec-
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tive shame are used to police the actions of women.

This is most evident in its obverse, through the common usage of the expression
‘vajzë e mirë’ (good girl) to refer to certain characteristics of young, unmarried
women. In Albanian, the term ‘good girl’ is a social value weighted with signification
and implies such things as purity in the form of virginity, appropriately submissive
behaviour towards parents, the maintenance of appropriate social distance from males
outside the family, cleanliness of person and home, quietness, and respect for a
woman’s role in the practices of familial hospitality. There is no clear corollary to
being a ‘good girl’ in terms of male behaviour, which is permitted considerably more
freedom. Moreover, the judgement over whether someone is a ‘good girl’ is made
from outside the family, within the immediate community. Thus, the presence of
externally designated ‘good girls’ in a family is a means by which the immediate
community assesses the overall reputation of a family.

Concluding remarks
The Enverist totalitarian system reshaped existing social forces in Albania, providing
them with characteristics that, despite the end of that system, have been adapted and
continue to make themselves felt in everyday life. By bringing this recent past to the
centre of analytic focus, as I have argued, it is possible to provide a broader and hope-
fully more dynamic explanatory structure for contemporary social issues such as
gender inequalities that considers a number of different contributing factors. This
approach, I believe, avoids the tendency to seek explanations for Albania’s contem-
porary cultural and social formations in the distant past, which has the negative effect
of obscuring those forces which were developed during the communist period. More-
over, this approach challenges an ethnocentric view of Albania in which the country
and its people are portrayed as fixed and unchanging, resident in a medieval and tribal
past. As Rasmussen observes, a ‘[m]ore nuanced analysis yields insights into moder-
nity, thereby detaching analysis of shame from some previous tendencies to associate
this sentiment solely with tradition’ (2007, 231).
As we have seen, the force of collective familial shame that contributes to gender
subordination in contemporary Albania has been produced through a series of inter-
twined social forces: contemporary adaptations of traditions, remnants of totalitarian-
ism, and post-communist modifications. In the case of collective shame, today it
contributes to a reified form of patriarchal power that sanctions the monitoring of
 118 N. Nixon

women’s behaviour by members of the fis, the isolation of women from the public
sphere, and the subordination of women in the private sphere. Understanding
Albania’s immediate historical legacy and the relationship between this legacy and the
post-communist present therefore provides us with the basis to begin to conceptualize
the sheer force of the subordination of women in Albanian society.
Although there are many features of the Albanian case, examined here, that are
unique – not least the extreme isolation the country experienced during over 50 years
of totalitarianism – I have dealt with a number of themes that resonate more widely.
For example, the post-communist (re)invention of ‘traditional’ value systems in the
post-communist period, which underpin discriminatory value systems, is not unique
to Albania. These value systems arise from an amalgam of pre-communist traditions
with habits and values perpetuated during the communist period, reconfigured accord-
ing to the needs and demands of the post-communist context. The confluence of these
characteristics can also be seen in other post-communist and post-totalitarian contexts;
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what tend to differ are the ingredients.

Alexandra Hrycak provides an example of such a confluence in her analysis of the
tribulations of women’s political parties in post-communist Ukraine. Here, she exam-
ines the popularity of a notion of ‘Mother Heroine’, developed during the communist
period and reformulated in the post-communist period as the basis for a modernist and
more individualist women’s movement based on a form of ‘maternalist activism’, thus
adapting pre-communist and communist notions of femininity to the present context
(2005, 71). Such biologized notions of gender roles were a common ideological
underpinning of many of the communist systems in Eastern Europe. Today, in
contrast, they are often adjusted to provide the basis for anti-communist discourses
that aim to address ‘alienation’ of women under communism from their ‘natural roles
as mothers and housewives’ (Haukanes 2001, 12).
Post-communist social patterns are never, therefore, simply the ‘resurfacing’ of
‘traditional stereotypes of women’ in post-communism (Grapard 1997), as has so
often been suggested. Indeed, the portrayals of ‘revival’ or ‘resurfacing’ tend to give
the impression of traditional value systems having been repressed under communism,
simply re-emerging unchanged in its wake. Ironically, this is precisely the depiction
of traditionalism that underpins contemporary nationalism in many post-communist
states. In their broad overview of the ‘epochal’ transformations of post-Soviet and
Eastern Europe, Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery challenge, as I attempt to
do here, ‘conventional portraits’ that account for the shortcomings of transitional
processes through notions of culture or tradition (1999, 1). They argue that repeatedly,
what appears as ‘restorations’ of familiar social patterns are actually responses to the
new post-communist conditions, produced by those conditions, ‘rather than remnants
of an older mentality’ even though these responses ‘employ a language and symbols
adapted from previous orders’ (1–2).
By taking the present as a point of departure for understanding contemporary
appropriations of ‘traditionalism’, seen through their reconfiguration during the
communist period, it is possible, therefore, to provide the basis for more dynamic
analyses of post-communist social patterns that avoid the pitfalls of historical
determinism – of either the pre-communist or the communist past. It is this process of
adaptation, of both pre-communist and communist ‘traditions’ – their specificities, as
well as those characteristics they share in common with other post-communist
contexts – that perhaps requires greater attention in South-Eastern and Eastern
European sociology and anthropology.
 Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 119

Notes
1. Unlike the bulk of daily newspapers in Albania, Gazeta Metropol is a tabloid newspaper
that is not identified with any particular political party or group, nor does it explicitly
advocate a particular political or ideological line.
2. ‘E vraftë buka që I kam dhënë, më shkatërroi familjen’ [May the bread that I have given
him kill him, he destroyed my family], Gazeta Metropol, Wednesday 15 December 2004,
Tirana.
3. ‘Kushërirat e larguara ‘leçiten’ nga familjet për koritje’ [The cousins that escaped from the
families are ‘banished’ for shamefulness], Gazeta Metropol, Wednesday 24 May 2006,
Tirana.
4. Particularly critical of this tendency is Michael Herzfeld (for example, Herzfeld 2005).
5. The references to Clarissa de Waal’s text come from an electronic version, and therefore
may not accurately reflect the page numbers in the published version.
6. The reference here to the kanun being practiced in the north of the country is also trou-
bling. Certainly, since the end of communism there has been a reoccurrence of the
kanunic code of ‘blood feud’, in particular in some isolated northern areas. At the same
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time, however, there is arguably a popular regional prejudice in Albania towards those
from the ‘north’, considered to be more ‘backward’, ‘traditional’ – even ‘barbaric’, etc.
– from those originating from central or southern regions of the country. The perception
that the kanun is being practiced in those regions contributes to negative and prejudicial
images of ‘northerners’. In this sense, the representation of the kanun as being a
phenomenon largely restricted to the north has the danger of playing into regional preju-
dices, and the veracity of this ‘northern’ tendency is difficult to separate from those
prejudices.
7. Examples of such references usually utilize the terminology of kanun, originating directly
from the perpetrators of violence, or overlaid as a sensationalist explanatory discourse by
journalists. In terms of the former, an article in the daily Gazeta Panorama in January
2008, for example, reported on a self-confessed murderer, in Tirana, who justified his
actions as revenge for the killing of his two sons in 2004, on the basis that the kanun is
above state law (Dashamir Biçaku, ‘Motër e vëlla, i vrava për Kanun’ [Sister and uncle; I
killed them for the Kanun], 5 January 2008). In another incident, in Peshkopia, in north-
east of Albania, in October 2007, Shpëtim Ziza raped and killed 10-year-old Bekim
Çenga. Ziza was, at the time, suffering from mental illness, and as a result was institution-
alized. In response, in September 2008, Çenga’s father attempted to kill one of Ziza’s
cousins. The daily, Gazeta Shqiptare reported the claim of members of Çenga’s family
that by the rules of kanun a revenge killing is necessary and will be carried out in the
future (Trendafile Visha, Gazeta Shqiptare, ’Daja i Zizos: Më prenë në besë, do të marr
gjak’ [Zizos’ uncle; the oath was broken, I will take blood’]). At other times, the mystique
of the kanun is provided by journalists. For example, in October 2008, the daily newspaper
Gazeta Korrieri reported on two murders, occurring 10 years prior, involving two differ-
ent families. Since the members of the two families would not identify the perpetrators or
discuss the incidents with the media, the journalist took this as evidence of the application
of kanun (Elona Elezi, ‘Gjakmarrja 35-vjeçare’ [Blood feud, 35 years ago], 5 October
2008).
8. Interview with ‘Ibrahim’, 24 April 2007.
9. Interview with ‘Anita’, 13 June 2007.
10. Interview with ‘Agron’, 8 June 2007.
11. Interview with ‘Agron’, 8 June 2007.
12. Interview with ‘Mustafa’, 9 July 2007.
13. Interview with ‘Ibrahim’, 26 March 2007.
14. Collective familial punishment was also utilized in other communist regimes; commonly,
for example, in Romania, and occasionally in East Germany. I hope to make the
comparative study of collective punishment under communism the subject of future
research.
15. Albania was officially proclaimed an atheist state in 1967, after which religious leaders
were persecuted and religious buildings were either destroyed or used for new state-
sanctioned purposes.
16. Interview with ‘Jonida’, 3 July 2007.
 120 N. Nixon

Notes on contributor
Dr Nicola Nixon is an Honorary Research Fellow with the Contemporary European Research
Centre and the Department of History at the University of Melbourne, and is Senior Associate
Researcher with the Albanian Institute for International Studies. She lived in Albania from
2004 to 2007.

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