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From shortage economy to second economy: an historical ethnography of rural life in communist Albania

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 05:04 authored by Russell King, Julie Vullnetari
Few accounts exist of the nature of everyday rural life in communist societies, such as those which existed in Eastern Europe between the end of World War Two and circa 1990. In this paper we use oral-history testimonies from older people to reconstruct an ‘historical ethnography’ of rural life in Albania, the most isolated and repressive of the East European socialist regimes. We build our analysis around the dialectical relationship between the ‘shortage economy’, which was all-pervasive and derived from the Albanian regime's Stalinist policy of prioritising mining and heavy industry over consumer goods and agriculture, and the ‘second economy’ which developed as a bottom-up strategy to overcome some of the imbalances and blockages in the official or ‘first’ economy. Fieldwork was carried out in clusters of villages and settlements corresponding to cooperatives and a state farm in four locations in different parts of Albania. Within the symbiotic or ‘lubricating’ relationship between the shortage economy and the second economy, we examine the ‘institutionalised hierarchy of access’ that gave some people and groups privileged access to scarce goods, whilst others remained in a marginalised and partially excluded state.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Journal of Rural Studies

ISSN

0743-0167

Publisher

Elsevier

Volume

44

Page range

198-207

Department affiliated with

  • Geography Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-02-06

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2021-03-04

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