THE OTHER ALBANIA: KOSOVO 1979 Part II
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1980/No. 6 by Dennison I. Rusinow THE OTHER ALBANIA: Europe [DIR-2-'80] KOSOVO 1979 Part I1: The Village, the Factory, and the Kosovars The aggregate problems of watch "Sesame Street"-- in carpets had been homemade, some nationalism and irredentism, American English with Serbo- woven and some tufted, in bright, population, education, the Croatian subtitles for an Albanian- multicolored Muslim patterns. Now economy, and politics that were speaking audience!--and all of us the central carpet, filling most of the surveyed in Part of this Report (males) could cheer the 3 2 victory room, was a commercial synthetic about the Socialist Autonomous of a Yugoslav (Belgrade) team over fiber one of poor quality and Province of Kosovo do not occur in an East German one in a EUFA Cup atrocious off-orange color. The an abstract vacuum. They happen soccer game played in Dresden. charming narrow open Turkish in, to, and because of peasants and Then, via satellite and somehow fireplace of decorated white plaster villages, workers and managers and incongruous in this setting, we built into the wall opposite the door factories, students and politicians. watched the latest scenes in and was also gone, its function taken By the same token a resident around the occupied American over by a small, peasant-made observer's return to a corner of Embassy in Tehran and Senator Franklin stove that squatted well out "his" beat after nearly a decade's Edward Kennedy's official from another wall, which had a new absence does not consist entirely of announcement that he is a hole in it for the long zinc stovepipe. conversations and interviews with candidate for the Presidency of the Missing from the walls were the "senior Party officials" and their ilk. United States. sheepskin, the old pendulum clock, is too especially in and the traditional musical Kosovo beautiful, The setting, on the third story of the its people are too instruments (a five-stringed Eargija autumn, and old tower house, was the large room for and a two-stringed iftelija) that hospitable and interesting that, that had been reserved for it by a Demush Hadri, then a teen-ager even if were, itself, legitimate ceremonial occasions, as Turkish way of touching base again. enrolled at a pedagogical college, and Balkan peasant traditions had played for us with a piece of of this therefore when had first seen it in Part II Report dictate, broken razor blade. Also missing returns to the village and family 1965. The room and its uses, like was the framed photograph of and from there most other connected with where Part began, things President Tito that had hung to the factory and to a thoroughly atypical the Hadris and Kosovo in general, left of the Turkish fireplace, for a some of the Province's towns, had undergone extraordinary but although the hook was still in place. the glimpse of the ways Albanians, partial transformations since that Had it been put there, like the and Serbs, Montenegrins, Turks, time. photograph of a rich aunt who has form the other Kosovars live and The approach was still the same: up announced that she is coming to of and political habits work, life, two flights of rickety wooden steps call, because our 1965 visit was the attitudes that shape aggregate in near darkness, past an prearranged and we were and reality of the least developed odoriferous floor-level slit in the accompanied by a government of least visited Yugoslavia's eight outside wall that serves as a pissoir, official in Pritina? It seemed less republics and provinces. and through a smaller chamber likely, although possible, that Hadri Return to Skivjani where shoes are removed. The room political views had changed in the The wider world and its problems itself was also basically unaltered: a meantime. A Hadri elder told me, intruded into an evening in the Hadri slightly raised wooden floor privately and with every evidence of household in Skivjani only covered with overlapping carpets, a sincerity, "We love Tito, because he momentarily, and without direct low bench around three of the walls, gave us our freedom." reference to Kosovo, from the similarly covered for sitting or television screen. It had been turned sleeping, and almost no other The room was still sparsely on so that the (male) children could furniture. Then, however, all the furnished, with additions limited to 2/DIR-2-'80 the Franklin stove, a double electric described, in its American meaning, golden-leafed local tobacco for hotplate for making Turkish coffee, as a family room. rolling your own, and listened to the a typically Central and East two eldest Hadris talk about the European regal (combining closed This new use only emerged as evolution of a Kosovar Albanian cupboards for drinks, open ones to evening approached and younger family. display glassware or books, and a Hadris came home. Meanwhile, stepped-down top to accommodate sitting Turkish style on the low The three new houses in the the television), and the television bench, the honored returning visitor compound (described in Part I) were itself, a large black-and-white set from America and his companion not being built merely or primarily with a 24-inch screen. One suspects from the Provincial Secretariat for because the family had grown from that the introduction of this last item Information in Pritina sipped 26 to 60 members since 1965, began the transformation of the Turkish coffee and homemade rakija although this by itself would have room's function, from traditional distilled from plums or wine, required some measures. The main ceremonial to what is best received gifts of cigarettes and reason was that younger adult Hadris, with cash incomes from jobs in Djakovica, the family trucking business, or other sources, had become increasingly reluctant to turn over their earnings to the extended family's common pool, where decisions about its use had traditionally been made by the senior Hadri or his deputy. Instead, younger Hadris now wished to control their own earnings and thus the welfare of their own nuclear families themselves. Rather than have endless squabbles, it had seemed better to break up the common household by building the additional houses and subdividing even these. Thus even the Albanians of Kosovo, with some Montenegrin clans virtually the last people in the Balkans to cling to the extended family whose Serb form, the zadruga, is so beloved and studied by anthropologists, are abandoning it in the face of inroads by a cash economy and "modern" values. One suspects, however, that a residual allegiance to traditional values as well as obvious economic considerations are responsible for the new houses being built within the old family compound. They could, after all, have been built on Hadri agricultural land, now no longer of pre-eminent economic importance, if that were not contrary to traditional rural settlement patterns as well as too radical a break with traditional family ones. Skivjan/: The tower house of the Hadri fam/ly /n 1965. Photo credit, Mary Rusinow. DI R-2-'80/3 In 1965 the Hadris were still primarily one to teach in a secondary school. 1965, smiled deprecatingly and subsistence farmers, living off their Meanwhile, he has also acquired a changed the subject to ask who 10 hectares of land (wheat, corn, wife, three daughters, and a son would win the American presidential vegetables, and fruit) and their named Bekim, an extraordinarily race, how thought the drama of livestock (20 cows and calves). Cash attractive and bright lad of 10 the hostages in the American income was then provided by apples summers who stretched out on the Embassy in Tehran would end, and and melons-- the only farm off-orange carpet after the soccer whether the European members of products to reach the market--and match to do his arithmetic NATO would agree to upgrade their by the family mill just outside the homework from a fifth-grade nuclear arsenal to match that of the compound and the four Hadris textbook that would have taxed the Soviet bloc. working as artisans in the village. abilities of an American eighth- This, too, has changed. Only the grader. Demush, reminded of his By the time the Yugoslav team two old men who supervised the eager and talented playing of scored its first goal against the East traditional ritual of our reception are traditional musical instruments in Germans, the one-time ceremonial still engaged full time in agriculture. Even their engagement is largely indirect, they said, primarily a matter of overseeing hired labor (!) and leasing arrangements. The mill, once an important source of wealth, stands idle for lack of peasant customers, who now find it more economical to sell their grain to the cooperative and buy milled flour. In place of these sources, most family members are earning more, even in this land of staggering unemployment rates, from employment or self-employment in enterprises in Djakovica, as village middlemen, or by services performed by the Hadri trucks and limousines, resources bought by earlier family thrift. As the afternoon progressed, children and younger adults joined the group, driven by curiosity or drawn by television. Among them was Demush, who had told us in 1965 that his life's ambition was to finish pedagogical college and return to the village as a school- teacher. He had done this and had stuck to it for three years, until interrupted to do his obligatory military service. Now, instead of teaching in the village school, he is in his final year at the Faculty of Law of the new University of Pritina and is looking forward to a legal career in government or industry, in Pri,tina or in the wider world.