International Journal Euro-Mediterranean Studies VOLUME I I 2008 I NUMBER 2 Between Mediterranean Centrality and European Periphery: Migration and Heritage in Southern Italy Mmirizio Albahari Celebrating the Imagined Village: Ways of Organizing and Commenting Local Soundscapes and Social Patterns in South Albanian Feasts Eckehard Pistrick and Gerda Dalipaj Renaissance Architecture in Lviv: An Example of Mediterranean Cultural Import Olha Kozubska Undecided Past — National Identities and Politics of Diversity: The Mount Eytan Commemoration Site Udi Lehel and 7xev Drory Higher Education Internationalization and Quality Assurance in North—South Cooperation Touhami Abdouli ^xxxxxxxv International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies issn 1855-3362 editors [2] Ana Hofman, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia Klemen Klun, University Center for Euro-Mediterranean Studies, Slovenia editorial board Nadia Al-Bagdadi, Central European University, Hungary Pamela Ballinger, Bowdoin College, usa Klemen Bergant, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia Rémi Brague, Panthéon-Sorbonne University, France Donna Buchanan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, usa Julia Elyachar Mastnak, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia Carlos Fraenkel, McGill University, Canada Rune Gulev, University of Primorska, Slovenia Hassan Hanafi, Cairo University, Egypt Joaquina Labajo Valdés, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain Binshan Lin, Louisiana State University in Shreveport, usa David Ohana, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel Stefania Panebianco, University of Catania, Italy Rajesh K. Pillania, Management Development Institute, India Carmen Popescu, Paris-Sorbonne University, France Georges Prevelakis, Panthéon-Sorbonne University, France Andrej Rahten, University of Maribor, Slovenia Franco Rizzi, Mediterranean Universities Union Anthony Spiteri, University of Malta, Malta Ivan Sprajc, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia Greg Woolf, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom managing editor Alen Ježovnik, University of Primorska, Slovenia published by Center emuni, University Center for Euro-Mediterranean Studies, Slovenia Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia editorial office emuni Press Sončna pot 20 si-6320 Portorož, Slovenia Phone +386(0)5 671 36 00 Fax +386(0)5 671 36 05 www. ijems.emuni.si ijems@emuni.si Copy-Editor Alan McConnell-Duff English to French Translations Dejana Đurdević English to Slovene Translations Marjeta Babić Design and Typesetting Alen Ježovnik Print run: 3000 Printed in Slovenia XXXXXXXXXXXX^ ijEMs International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies 139 Preface Ana Hofman 141 Between Mediterranean Centrality and European Periphery: Migration and Heritage in Southern Italy Maurizio Albahari 163 Celebrating the Imagined Village: Ways of Organizing and Commenting Local Soundscapes and Social Patterns in South Albanian Feasts Eckehard Pistrick and Gerda Dalipaj 193 Renaissance Architecture in Lviv: An Example of Mediterranean Cultural Import Olha Kozubska 215 Undecided Past — National Identities and Politics of Diversity: The Mount Eytan Commemoration Site Udi Lebel and Zeev Drory 239 Higher Education Internationalization and Quality Assurance in North—South Cooperation Touhami Abdouli 259 Résumés 262 Povzetki Preface the second issue of the ijems brings into focus arts and heritage as the key issues in the processes of cultural dynamics and negotiations in the Mediterranean, and it reflects on their role as the central concepts in the imagination and representation of the Mediterranean in both official and popular discourses. The narratives of a 'shared intangible Mediterranean heritage' as the most important European 'culture capital' (Bourdieu 1984) are used in the official eu rhetoric of integration and Europeanization processes, particularly in promoting multicultural citizenship and European transnational, cosmopolitan identity. These discourses are often uncritically employed by local and national elites in Mediterranean societies, further leading to specific auto-stereotyping and politics of reduction and cultural inferiority. Such internalization of Eurocentric discourses is a result of center-periphery dynamics, which bring new challenges to Mediterranean societies and to the Euro-Mediterranean idea in general. The present issue aims to speak about these contradictory discourses of the Mediterranean as 'the cradle' of European culture, which at the same time construct the image of Mediterranean cultures as traditional, archaic, and exotic. Together they (re)produce complex narratives, representations and imaginations of Mediterranean art and heritage, which the issue aims to theorize. With transnational mobility, flow of capital, labor, and media, the cultural productions in the Mediterranean can be seen as transnational and global. In a generally volatile economic and political climate, the issues of cultural property, arts and heritage are becoming the main arena for negotiation of identities and imaginary boundaries between cultures. This issue addresses the role that expressive culture and 'material' cultural representations, such as memorial sites and architecture, play in performing 'Mediterraneannes.' The first article thus addresses the intersections between migration and heritage in southern Italy. Beyond offering an anthropological analysis of these processes, Albahari also provides a critical consideration of the Southern Question narrative. Pistrick and Dalipaj's case study is located in the South Albanian regions of Labëria and Toskëria, marked by the coexistence of Mus- lim and Orthodox Christian communities. It reflects the religious and regional diversity as expressed in the collective village feasts that are connected to religious rituals such as Bajram, the commemoration of Bektashi Saints or Orthodox Easter, Christmas and the church patrons' [140] feasts. Kozbuska's article examines the period of the late Renaissance in Ukrainian towns, when the process of reception and adaptation of the Italian architectural model as the Mediterranean heritage, was understood as the influence of the 'real' Europe on the European 'peripheries.' The article of Lebel and Drory presents official Israeli discourses on memory, commemoration, and setting collective boundaries. It explores how memory representations in monuments and commemorations are often used as an interface between collective remembrance and historical representations, and focuses on struggles over 'the valid' interpretations of the past. The last contribution concentrates on dynamics between local-global and north-south using the example of internationalization of Higher Education from a Mediterranean perspective. All contributions are attempting to give multifaceted views on eu cultural politics referring to the Mediterranean and the ongoing global processes within (trans)national heritage policies. Ana Hofman Editor references Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambrige, m a: Harvard University Press. Between Mediterranean Centrality and European Periphery: Migration and Heritage in Southern Italy MAURIZIO ALBAHARI University of Notre Dame, usa THIS ETHNOGRAPHICALLY INFORMED ARTICLE identifies and analyzes contemporary intersections between migration and heritage in southern Italy. Such appreciation of emerging trends seems particularly significant to an agenda that, by challenging simplistic European/Mediterranean dichotomies, may also foster immigrants' inclusion. The southern Italian case is particularly relevant in light of the region's role as an external maritime frontier of the e u and in light of the Southern Question narrative, with its history of massive emigration and disparagement in relation to the rest of Italy and Europe. Alongside this framework, the article identifies and evaluates also a more recent geo-historical and moral framework that on the one hand straightforwardly locates the Italian south 'in the West,' and on the other plays with southern Italy's rediscovery of itself 'in the center of the Mediterranean.' These multiple narratives inform discussions on what counts as southern Italy's intangible heritage. More crucially, they shape emerging engagements of that heritage in projects of migrant reception and broader political-cultural critique. Residents of a Bologna suburb, in central-northern Italy, characterize immigrati [immigrants] as 'too lazy to work and so lacking in willpower that they spawn hordes of children;' as welfare-dependent, illiterate, parochial and violent 'bad people' (Kertzer 1980, 173—4). The immigrants, which the Bolognese surveyed by Kertzer in the late 1970s were referring to, are not foreigners, but southern Italians. Two decades later, soon after September 11, 2001, Lino Patruno, the editorial director of La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, one of the most respected regional newspapers in southern Italy, protests from his column against those persons, especially Muslims and their 'collaborationists,' that 'it is like they want to accuse us for being the way we are. It is like we should ask forgiveness for being Westerners' and for 'our wealth achieved through daily hard work'1 (La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, October 14, 2001). This newly paradigmatic op-ed takes for granted, in quite a simplistic way, that 'we,' southern Italians,2 are now wealthy and hardworking 'West-[142] erners.' The reader, in the director's opinion, should also appreciate that southern Italians are engaged in the global struggle vis-à-vis nonE u and mostly Muslim migration, if not Islam itself. In the first section of the article, I provide an overview of time-honored disparaging understandings of southern Italy in relation to the rest of Italy and Europe. My account is certainly not intended as an occasion to reinvigorate old clichés and simplistic historical narratives of European/Mediterranean dichotomy. On the contrary, it is meant as an analytical tool that turns powerful stereotypes inside out. What I set out to accomplish early in the article is also for the reader to consider and possibly appropriate such an analytical tool when looking at contemporary stereotypical Italian and European understandings of non-E u immigration — especially Balkan, African and Middle-Eastern migration — and of the places of origin of such migrants. The article moves on to identify, analyze and evaluate a competing moral geography that, while on the one hand seeming to straightforwardly locate the Italian south 'in the West,' on the other plays with southern Italy's rediscovery of itself 'in the center of the Mediterranean.' I argue that this complex moral geography is of crucial salience. It deeply informs not only discussions on what counts as southern Italy's intangible heritage, but also the possibly benign manipulation of that heritage in institutional, scholarly and artistic projects of political-cultural critique and migrant inclusion.3 Thus, the overarching research question to which this article contributes asks whether and how the southern Italian heritage of emigration, domestic disparagement, marginalizing moral geography and newly rediscovered Mediterranean centrality affects dispositions toward non-E u migrants and their cultures and regions of origin. A BALL AND CHAIN: MORAL GEOGRAPHY of the 'peripheral' Italian south The 'South' — whether global or Italian — is not a geographically given, bounded, and autonomously meaningful unit of analysis. Rather, it needs to be understood as the product of enduring socio-economic, scholarly, and governmental relations and interventions. In this section I provide a basic account of scholarly understandings that have framed southern Italy as marginal to Italy, and Mediterranean Italy as a whole as peripheral to Europe. It will be evident that there is an [143] unwelcome parallelism between analyses that focus solely on the Italian 'South' as a bounded and a-historical object existing prior to legal, political and representational gazes and regimes, and those analyses that focus on ready-made 'immigrants' and 'Muslims' as non-relational givens. It is estimated that seven million Italians left the south between 1950 and 1975 (Calavita 2005, 53). They literally built the Italian 'boom,' working for low wages and undergoing much of the same discrimination that non-EU migrants face today throughout Italy. As evidenced by Kertzer's account above, southern Italians represented the dirty, provincial and ignorant 'others' within the national body, following an entrenched model. The geographical definition of the Italian peninsula as a whole as liminally situated between 'Europe' and the 'Mediterranean'4 has been intertwined, since the 17th century, with the Eurocentric ranking of the fragmented Italian peninsula as socially and morally ill, politically unstable and culturally backward — even if exotically so. After the political unification of the country in i860, Italian ruling powers intended to follow the model of modernity and centralism of more established European nation-states. 'Backwardness' tended therefore to be governmentally attributed to and localized in southern Italy only, and the 'South' became a bounded object of governmental knowledge, measurement and concern (Moe 2002; see also Carter 1997).5 Historically, and to this day, the drive toward the state's territorial and social control has been paired with the need for modernization and socioeconomic and infrastructural sviluppo [development].6 In summary, the series of spatialized deficiencies, backwardness, differences and socioeconomic and cultural problems commonly attributed to the south constitute what is known as the Italian Questione Méridionale [Southern Question]. Anthropologist Jane Schneider provides a synthetic and effective account of the evocative power of the Southern Question construct (Schneider 1998,1; emphasis added): In Italy, and in Italian studies, the 'Southern Question' evokes a powerful image of the provinces south of Rome as different from the rest of the peninsula, above all for their historic poverty and economic underdevelopment, their engagement in a clientelistic [144] style of politics, and their cultural support for patriarchal gender relations and for various manifestations of organized crime. This tenacious catalogue of stereotypes includes, as well, the notion that southerners, by dint of their very essence, or at least their age-old culture and traditions, possess character traits that are opposite to the traits of northerners. Passionate, undisciplined, rebellious, intensely competitive, and incapable of generating group solidarity or engaging in collective action, they were and are — as the cliché would have it — unable to build the rational, orderly, civic cultures that, in the North, underwrote the emergence of industrial capitalist society. The contemporary criminalization and racialization of non-E u migrants, and of their places of origin, has a telling precedent in the 19th century scholarly production of southern Italians as patriarchal and racially inferior 'delinquents.' 7 More broadly, the Southern Question has long been a focus of multidisciplinary analysis. Yet this corpus of scholarship, often simplistically looking for ultimate 'causes,' until very recently has not been able to direct its gaze outside 'the South' and to recognize the south's dialogical identitarian, economic and political interplay with its northern counterparts and within the construction of the Italian nation-state. Quite typically, Banfield's classic study (1958) suggested that the fault of the south was to be empirically sought locally, and resulted in its 'amoral familism.' Putnam's more recent and equally influential work (1993) similarly traces the roots of the alleged contemporary southern Italian civic fragmentation to its medieval period and to a series of feudal, bureaucratic and hierarchical royal governments. The application of Edward Said's (1979) groundbreaking analytical approach within Europe and Italy aptly informs recent scholarship tackling the issue.8 Attention to Antonio Gramsci's opus (1957; 1971) also provides a more relational analysis of the Southern Question. Gram-sci argued that the socio-economic problems of the south were not accidental, but rather the necessary presupposition for the working of the capitalist nation-state. He attributed much of the responsibility for the Question to the post-Unification conservative alliance between northern industrial and southern agrarian elites, which prevented any serious reform of land property in the south. This political [145] and economic alliance and its economic results had tremendous and long-lasting consequences on the popular perceptions that objectified southern Italians. The complexity of Gramsci's argument is appreciable in a passage of his Prison Notebooks that deserves to be extensively quoted (Gramsci 1971, 70—1): The poverty of the Mezzogiorno [South] was historically 'inexplicable' for the popular masses in the North; they did not understand that unity had not taken place on a basis of equality, but as hegemony of the North over the Mezzogiorno in a territorial version of the town-country relationship — in other words, that the North concretely was an 'octopus' which enriched itself at the expense of the South, and that its economic-industrial increment was in direct proportion to the impoverishment of the economy and the agriculture of the South. The ordinary man from Northern Italy thought rather that if the Mezzogiorno made no progress after having been liberated from the fetters which the Bourbon regime placed in the way of modern development, this meant that the causes of the poverty were not external [...], but internal, innate in the population of the South [...]. There only remained one explanation — the organic incapacity of the inhabitants, their barbarity, their biological inferiority. [...] [I]n the North there persisted the belief that the Mezzogiorno was a 'ball and chain' for Italy. Gramsci's analysis still remains highly significant. Its methodological, descriptive and analytical insightfulness is well shown by its contemporary revival and topicality. In the Italian historical case as in the global arena today, the north's 'economic-industrial increment was [is] in direct proportion to the impoverishment of the economy and the agriculture of the South' (Gramsci 1971, 70). In this perspective, 'impoverishment' — evidently stigmatized by the ones who impoverish others — is not the collateral damage of 'increment,' but its necessary fundament. In other words, the ball and chain of poverty, marginaliza-tion and hierarchy must be inscribed in the bodies, social relationships and affective imageries of potential subjects to produce them into labor [146] that is cheap, flexible and willing to emigrate in the first place. With its modernist moral narratives of backwardness, periphery and stages of progress and development, the Southern Question entails a teleological trajectory.9 Intendedly or not, this teleology has been functional not only to the production of southern Italian cheap labor, but also to the salvational intervention of morally and economically superior subjects — among them, governors, intellectuals, statisticians and investors. In my analysis, this is a dynamic that we continue to witness in geopolitical and moral asymmetries in the Euro-Mediterranean area. By focusing on the southeastern Italian region of Apulia,10 in the next section I explore how these contemporary asymmetries crucially feature a relational 'shifting of demarcation lines,' (Balibar 1993, 128) now involving southern Italians and their new counterparts — foreign migrants and their places of origin. SHIFTING DEMARCATION LINES: ON 'BEING THE way we are,' westerners and gatekeepers [...] French nationalists perceive the Italians to be less European and more exotic and Mediterranean, while Italians perceive their neighbours, the Slovenes, to be the advancing edge of a purportedly undifferentiated Slavic tide, in turn Slovenes feel to be more fully-fledged Europeans than their Croatian neighbours, who in turn feel more Westernized and civilized than the Serbs, who in turn feel immensely superior to the Albanians, who in turn feel more European than the Turks. The trip Eastward from Greece, to Turkey, to Iran, to the Indian Sub-continent and further East is a trip towards ever-deepening Orientalisms — specular images of the advancing tide of Westernization. Its habitual victims are not distant colonies and races, but next-door and 'next-of-kin' neighbours. [...] This points to the fact that we still live in a hierarchically imagined and defined world, where the West is the centre of everything, and everything is measured by vicinity to that model. [Conversi 2000.] A young barber in Otranto, contracted to provide his services in a local refugee 'processing' center, casually told me that just by looking at the way some people sat in queue for his services (i. e., crouching against the wall), 'not like us,' he could easily guess they were 'Orientals' and Muslim. Elsewhere11 I argue that militarized border [147] enforcement and the performance of national and e u sovereignty on the southeastern fringes of Europe is working as a powerful tool in the identitarian creation of two categories of subjects: 'non-Eu/Muslim/ clandestine immigrants' and 'Eu/Italian/Westerner/Christian citizens.' If the former are undeniably 'subject to someone else by control and dependence,' the latter also become new subjects, tied 'to their own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge,' to use Michel Fou-cault's wording and insight (1983, 777—8). Such supposed Western, liberal, hard-working subjectivity stereotypically relegates what lies on the southern and eastern side of the Mediterranean — what a pervasive Orientalism lumps together as 'the Balkans'12 and 'the Middle East' — to a condition of backwardness, archetypical violence and irreducible otherness. The short interviews and lived experiences below synthetically provide paradigmatic articulations of such a view. Luca13 has worked for more than a decade as a volunteer and then as a legal expert on issues of asylum and migration. With regret, he once confided that a visit to Albania in the early 1990s gave him a sense of how late-i8th century France might have looked (personal interview, January 14, 2005). And a tailor, in commenting on a picturesque postcard from Tirana, regrets that 'it is useless that they build these new and nice architectures: sooner or later they are going to destroy everything anyway' (personal interview, August i4, 2004). The words of an Italian high-ranking police officer intend to transcend specific examples, summarizing a trope that I have encountered countless times: 'An imaginary door separates and divides, just as a temporal gate, our civilization and our culture from those of our closest neighbor, Albania' (D'Alessandro 2002, 24). The Strait of Otranto thus becomes the locus of a temporal gate, a virtual time machine. The same emphasis on temporal segregation appears in my interview with Signora Antonia,14 the gray-haired director of a shelter in Lecce (December 9, 2004). She explains she has been a volunteer since 1990, when a priest involved in the reception of migrants prompted her to join in the effort. Since then, she has also visited Albania a number of times. With other volunteers, she would embark on a ferry from Brindisi to Vlorë, from where they would travel to several villages. Antonia is a native [148] of Sicily, and in our conversation she refers to something for her even more unsettling than the images of material misery she saw in Albania: My first time in the port of Vlorë, surrounded by hundreds of begging children, I found myself in my Sicily of 50 years ago. I went back 50 years, with the landing of the Americans [American troops]. [...] My goodness, qui [here, in Vlorë] time has stopped, and nothing has changed. In Antonia's narration, temporal and spatial coordinates are conflated and intertwined. She uses the adverb qui [here] referring to Vlorë, while at the same time she re-experiences her childhood in Sicily as one of the 'hundreds' of children surrounding American soldiers for a piece of chocolate, a cigarette, or small change. Her first visit to Albania, Antonia continues, was 'really traumatic, I was sick for a week because I have seen again what we were. I couldn't eat, or do anything at all.' She continues, emphasizing the relational perception of southern Italian predicaments: 'When you go to these places you realize how lucky we are. [...] We have found terrible things there.' In this honest account, we learn that Antonia has seen in Albania what Italians, and southern Italians in particular, 'were' until recently.15 As shown earlier, southern Italians have been historically constituted as objects of a disparaging moral geography — still pervasive — that denies their coevalness,16 in a dichotomous relationship with northern Italy and Europe. And yet, as we are exploring in this section, they are also agents of a disparaging moral and temporal geography. This hierarchical geography situates them and non-E u migrants and their places of origin on interpretive maps of cultural affinity and difference, poverty and development, religion and civilization. The example of Signora Antonia in particular highlights the relational nature of popular (as well as scholarly and governmental) taxonomies and hierarchies of space and place, culture and modernity. Geographical proximity is therefore to be understood as subject to a larger cartography of knowledge, power relations and economic frameworks. Currently, proximity is partly obliterated by political, social, economic and geopolitical asymmetries, including the Italian and e u militarized regime of border enforcement and migration management. It [149] is this author's belief that if borders are lived as fringes, margins and periphery of a core, and as militarized sites of surveillance, detention and civilizational clash, then southern Italians' role of gatekeepers reinforces the marginality of their lived experience within Italy and the eu. In one example, resignation to the alleged clashes pervading the Mediterranean is evident in a frustrated op-ed by the already mentioned editorial director of La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno (April 18, 2004) the major newspaper in Apulia: The [Mediterranean] sea, the longed-for sea of harmony, is [today] the sea of the most brutal conflicts on Earth. It is the scenery of a disquieting clash of civilizations. It is the sea in which there flows more blood than honey. [...] It seems we are at the exhaustion of the conviction that Apulia is a bridge between Europe and the Mediterranean; the exhaustion of the project of diversities' integration; of the white faces and the black ones; of orecchiette [a typical Apulian pasta] and couscous; of kefiah and blue jeans; of the veil and sexual liberation; of the cathedral and the mosque. Maybe this dream will be definitely betrayed by the 'power of the womb,' [one of polemist Oriana Fallaci's tropes] the demographic boom that submerges, with extra-communitarian [non-E u] children, cities more saddened by the elderly melancholia than cheered by children's voices. [...] But it's a dream betrayed also by the aggressiveness of Islam [...]. And yet, as I set out to explain, this understanding that focuses on the still ongoing peripheralization of the Italian south — first as a dead weight, and more recently as a civilizational gatekeeper —needs to be complemented by attending also to emerging practices and discourses of critical citizenship. In particular, below I illustrate selected trends that are manipulating southern Italian intangible heritage in cre- ative ways, including by appropriating and refashioning the Southern Question narrative. politics, art and heritage in the 'center of the mediterranean' Dominant discursive and political tropes, such as those of the 'western gatekeepers' explored above, fortunately do not reproduce themselves mechanistically: they need to be continuously nourished and sustained in institutional and everyday life, and this may or may not happen. In this sense, shifts in political leadership and trends in artistic production are proving consequential in promoting a normative re-articulation of heritage, migration and the Southern Question. Institutional and artistic ferment is particularly discernable in Apulia, while not being unique to the region. For example, in July 2005 the newly elected Regional Government promptly organized 'Mare Aperto' [Open Sea], a conference and public forum critically debating the restrictive Italian immigration law and contesting the presence in the region of state migrant detention facilities. This conference and the national debate it generated would have hardly been thinkable without the leadership, credibility and charisma of the newly elected Governor, Nichi Vendola, who also involved in the debate the Governors of other Italian Regions. Vendola, elected in 2005, is the first communist Governor of an Italian Region. He is also a poet, a journalist, an expert of anti-Mafia strategies, a liberal Catholic and a leading member of Arci-gay, The Italian Gay Association. The complexity of such a figure certainly embodies southern Italian cultural variation. More significantly, it offers a paradigmatic case of the emerging, unorthodox appropriation of the Southern Question, which I illustrate below. Soon after his electoral success, Vendola built on ongoing social ferment, political activism and scholarly knowledge production,17 articulating his view of the role of Apulia, of its location in the Mediterranean and of the relationship between heritage, emigration, immigration, peace and social justice. The relationship between politicians' statements and public opinion certainly needs to be always extensively investigated. For our purposes, it is safe to note that Vendola, differing from a number of other politicians, speaks to an audience that he does not postulate as inherently xenophobic — a stance that in the opinion of this author would deserve to be fostered. He asks Apulians to remember their own 'history of emigrants, the bitter bread of generations of workers and families uprooted from their land, who have often left in the clandestinity of ship holds' (Vendola 2005,3). He ad- [151] vocates the comeback of the Southern Question not to be intended as the quasi-stereotypical rhetorical narrative presented above, but rather as an extremely real social and popular critique of neo-liberal trends, stemming from the Italian south (p. 5). The southern question, in this understanding without capital letters, is not anymore a tool for the reproduction of a cheap labor reserve of disparaged southern Italians. Rather, it is a permanently revolutionary tool finally in the hands of southern Italians and migrants alike. With due differences, they both face recurrent economic crises, and they are both participants in late-capitalist exploitative practices as flexible and mobile workers. Accordingly, Vendola envisions Apulia 'as a crossroads rather than a frontier, as a territory of hospitality, encounter and mediation' (Vendola 2005, 28). Like many southerners, he is certainly concerned with the enlargement of the eu to the countries of the Baltic and central Europe, for there might be a risk of further 'marginalization of our country [Italy] and especially of its southernmost regions, confined to the role of extreme Mediterranean periphery' (p. 46). But such risk has little to do with geography, as for Vendola it is a matter of political choices and models of integration. In other words, Apulia must find once again its function in the relationship with Balkan, Middle Eastern and North African countries. As 'a crossroads of exchanges' and 'an open frontier,' it must have a role in the creation and implementation of economic integration and unrestricted circulation of people, ideas, goods, services and capitals (p. 46). Such an advocated set of international relations within a Mediterranean framework is not a utopian political model or merely a normative model for sviluppo18 [development]. Instead, it actually builds on historical precedents and actual lived experiences, as I set out to indicate — hence rather approvingly — with the following examples. Papas Nik, the parish priest of the church San Nicola di Mira, a Roman Catholic church of Byzantine rite in the old part of Lecce, offers a particularly complex understanding of the proximity between Apulia and Albania (personal interview, September 20,2004). A fluent speaker of Albanian and Italian, Papas Nik has a privileged access to Lecce's Albanian population, which includes Muslims, Catholics and atheists. [152] Regardless of their religious affiliation, they know that his parish might provide material relief. Additionally, there they meet other Albanians, and organize travel or shipments to their native country. Papas Nik underlines that Albania and Apulia are extremely close, and that several migrants go often back and forth, 'still on speedboats.'19 If they are documented migrants 'the ridiculous amount of 30 Euros' allows them to board a ferry to Albania, while for 100 Euros they can fly from Bari to Tirana in sixty minutes. He also suggests that Albania materializes in his own parish house as well, with radio programs, satellite Tv and Albanians always around. In either case, he continues, 'qui è vicino,' [we are close, here]. The celebratory tone of his observations resonates with that of another priest who during our conversations routinely made a point of stating that Lecce is closer to Istanbul than to Milan. Geographical proximity to south-eastern Europe is quite obvious when, on clear days, Corfu and the Albanian mountains are visible on the horizon of the Strait of Otranto. Driving around Apulia one can see traffic signs showing the way to Greece, Turkey and Montenegro — to busy ferries, that is. Brindisi, once an important maritime gateway to India, is the port where hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world board ferries to Greece and Turkey. Bari, the head town of Apulia, since 1930 hosts the Fiera del Levante [trade show of the East], one of the most important international trade shows in the Euro-Mediterranean area. For decades Bari has also served as the preferred shopping venue of many Yugoslavs who took advantage of its proximity. During fieldwork, I have frequently noticed, for sale in bookstores, reversed maps of the Italian south. These South-up color copies of 16th century Flemish maps literally turn upside down entrenched geographical conventions, and metaphorically point to a revolutionizing new perspective. This new perspective is indeed epitomized by the charismatic voice of the above mentioned Vendola, but also by in- terlocking instances of scholarship, commercial practices and artistic productions. Such a perspective partly re-orients and complements — yet does not replace — the southern hegemonic gaze that historically has been primarily directed to northern Italy and western Europe in search for higher education, employment and modernity. As an iconic [153] example of this very recent re-orientation, we may mention the 'myth of origin' of Opa Cupa, an Apulian-Bosnian-Albanian music band. The Apulian founders maintain that one day in the early 1990s they finally oriented their parabolic antenna toward Albania, rather than having it set up for mainstream Italian channels as usual, and were tremendously fascinated by the 'Balkan melodies' they heard for the first time. And yet, it needs to be mentioned that such fascination with what lies beyond the Strait of Otranto is often quite shallow and ephemeral. Too often it rearticulates exotic tropes without necessarily implying a serious engagement or critique. It is not uncommon to come across celebratory self-understandings of Apulia as the 'gate to the Orient.' Local intellectuals, politicians, journalists, artists and travel agents deploy several tropes that contribute to this overarching narrative of'Oriental' liminality. For example, they state and restate that some of the pre-Roman inhabitants of Apulia were of Illyrian origin — quite ironically, they immigrated from the Balkan peninsula; or the fact that Apulia was a florid region of Magna Graecia, and later a nodal point of the Roman network of roads and communications toward Asia Minor. Catholic and other local sources point out that the southernmost part of Apulia was the disembarking point of Saint Peter on his way to Rome. Otranto was a valuable crusaders' outpost; and different waves of Albanian, Dalmatian, Jewish, Greek-speaking and Byzantine populations, monks, prelates, soldiers and aristocrats have consistently reached Apulia and settled since antiquity. Dozens of times I have heard the history of Apulia encapsulated in a succession of invasions and conquests by foreign powers, such as the Messapian Illyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Normans, the Swabians, the Anjou, the Turks, the Aragonese and the Piedmontese. At any rate, though, such narratives present Apulian heritage as built in porous layers by these presences. In some local accounts, contemporary immigration benignly adds to such history — selective but essentially accurate — of foreign arrivals and syncretic cultural contributions. Equally often I have encountered the apparently counterintuitive narrative of a pre-immigration situation of essential demographic and cultural unity, homogeneity and immobility, disrupted since the [154] early 1990s by a novel, more problematic situation of diversity and multiculturalism. In this somewhat twisted logic that sees 'difference' only as a recent point of arrival, rather than as a historical constant, 'Italy should be grateful to immigration and to migrants,' for they 'let us understand that there exists a world to discover,' as a speaker claimed in front of the large audience of the Dialoghi di Trani (September 26, 2004), a yearly high-profile series of conferences and artistic performances focusing on the intersections of tourism, heritage promotion, literature and intercultural dialogue. At any rate, his quote well summarizes pervasive journalistic, artistic and scholarly accounts of the post-immigration self-rediscovery of Apulians, Sicilians and other southern Italians as political and cultural Mediterranean actors. In summary, some narratives enthusiastically embrace a heritage of exposure to a variety of cultural influences, foreign dominations and maritime trade; others, simply recognize the inevitability of the contemporary exposure to migration and world commerce. In both cases, the geo-moral location 'in the center of the Mediterranean' is simplis-tically perceived to enable the positive reception of both migrants and tourists, almost by default. This self-rediscovery is certainly reflected, and perhaps stimulated, by political and institutional programs. It is also to be contextualized, together with larger practices of cultural re-vivalisms and tourist-friendly reinventions of traditions, in the contemporary flexible predicament of economies, where the image-building and branding of communities plays a role in the powerful logics of competition^ Finally, this burgeoning sense of southern and Mediterranean centrality is also performed by selected trends in the local performing arts industry, as I illustrate below. Puglia: santi, profughi e musicanti [Apulia: Saints, Refugees and Musicians] is the title chosen by the Italian magazine World Music (1999, no. 39) to promote a cd compilation of music from Apulia. This title provides an effective slogan that in the perception of the publishers encompasses the contemporary predicament of this region, with its religiosity, im- migration and the pervasive growth of music ensembles. The latter increasingly perform local, traditional tunes rearranged in light of North African, Klezmer and Balkan rhythms, such as in the above mentioned case of Opa Cupa. Southern pride and anti-racism, together with the use of dialect and a broader social critique, are pervasively displayed, [155] including in Caparezza's hip-hop and in Sud Sound System's reggae. A very popular and successful example of openness to the Mediterranean is certainly Radiodervish, an ensemble constituted in 1997 by Michele Lobaccaro and Nabil Salameh, born respectively in Apulia and in Palestine. Many of their songs are multilingual — featuring Italian, Griko21 Arabic, Spanish, English and French — and have been intended by the ensemble 'as small laboratories where passages unveil themselves between East and West and between the symbols and myths of the Mediterranean, a border place that unites in the very moment it separates.^ Radiodervish has recently toured a new poetry and music show, Amara Terra Mia [Bitter Land of Mine]. Now also on cd, it narrates the precariousness of contemporary migrant experiences in both the region of origin and the region of destination, and puts forward an open call to peace and interreligious understanding. In its title and substance, Amara Terra Mia references the i973 song by 'Mr Volare' Domenico Modugno, in which the popular Apulian singer evoked the bitterness of southern Italian emigrants. Radiodervish's show debuted on March 31, 2006 in Tricase, a small southern Apulian town. The somber scenery was limited to a dozen thin light poles, tenuously evoking migrants' boats in the pitch-dark Mediterranean. Many in the audience appreciated the ensemble's frank approach and its whispered reflections on emigration, immigration, pain, terror and dialogue in times of alleged cultural clash. The show received a five-minute standing ovation by an audience initially prone to skepticism. Radiodervish also performed in Bethlehem the night of December 24, 2007, as part of Rassegna Negroamaro. Negroamaro is an annual travelling 'Festival of Migrant Cultures' funded by the District of Lecce. Quite significantly, it is named after Negro Amaro, a red wine grape variety native to Apulia. The District of Lecce also sponsored the Italian tour of Palestinian musicians. And Radiodervish's frequent Italian performances with Noa, the American-Israeli singer, are routinely reported as an eminent ex- ample of interreligious dialogue and peace building. Whether these performers are truly enjoying these experiences as cosmopolitan ones is of limited interest here.23 In any event, what they do and sing on stage demystifies in practice pundits' loud belief in conflict as the nec-[156] essary point of arrival of cultural and religious diversity. RESISTING conclusions The southern Italian heritage of emigration, domestic disparagement, marginalizing moral geography and newly rediscovered Mediterranean centrality cannot be taken as a mechanistic guarantor of fixed sets of (good) dispositions toward migrants and their cultures and regions of origin. In particular, the selective recall and manipulation of individual histories and regional heritage needs to be always explored also in light of transnational processes of identification and knowledge production which accompany the governance of borders and immigration. Migrants in Italy, or trying to reach its coasts, increasingly face death, detention and deportation (see Albahari 2006). In such a context, it is certainly not bland multicultural or hybrid practices per se that hold any anxieties for (governmental or other) defenders of the status quo. What is crucial for them, to quote anthropologist Talal Asad, is not 'homogeneity versus difference as such but [their own] authority to define crucial homogeneities and differences' (1993, 267; original emphasis). In this perspective, the problem of north—south boundary demarcation is a time-honored question of Italian nation-building. But how and where the 'North' secures its distinction vis-à-vis a shifting 'South' is also a crucial, unsolved and hopefully unsolvable24 problem of the new Europe's institutional, scholarly and popular quest for identitarian distinctiveness. As Mary Douglas (1966) suggested long ago, it is not only what is being separated that matters, but rather the power, prerogative and practice of order and separation in itself. Hence, uncritical celebrations of diversity, as well as shallow celebrations of heritage, might often constitute just one more tool of ephemeral governance and marketisation rather than of artistic creativity and political-cultural critique. This article has accounted for emerging voices that emphasize a newly rediscovered southern Italian centrality in the Mediterranean. Too often these voices are not exempt from the modernist dictatorship of 'development' and from the late-capitalist quest for authentic hybridity.25 And yet, trying to reverse a contemporary predicament engulfed in economic crisis, nativism and pervasive inequalities, they are also indicative of a welcome shift in perspective, of a gaze no longer [157] merely bound to a south—north directionality. Thus, the case of southern Italy should prompt analysts to look for 'agentival capacity' not simply in those acts that overtly resist norms and established institutions, but also in the multiple ways in which subjects 'inhabit' and manipulate norms (Mahmood 2004,14—15). The case of southern Italy also suggests that any potential solidarity with immigrants is not based on what long-time residents supposedly are — former emigrants; racialized southerners; cosmopolitan artists; Westerners guarding Europe or 'the gate of the Orient.' In other words: rather than focusing on more or less ascribed identities and legacies in the abstract, we need to focus on socially engaged lived experiences, concrete policies and even artistic performances that might concretely interplay with those identities and legacies. In conclusion, in light of the concurrent histories and complex dynamics surveyed in this article, it is important to note that merely shifting the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion still reinforces entrenched models of hierarchical relations. At the same time, we also witness time-honored moral geographies being creatively turned upside down, thus nourishing the subversive potential to reshuffle Italian and European/Mediterranean simplistic dichotomies and exclusionary power relations. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This article builds on my participation in two workshops: 'Mutuality and Memory: Encounters in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Cities,' convened by Julie Scott and Nefissa Naguib at the 10th European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia, August 2008; and 'Everyday Cosmopolitanism: Middle East and North African Urban Settings,' convened by Asef Bayat and Sami Zubaida at the 9th Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting, Montecatini Terme, Italy, March 2008, organised by the Mediterranean Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Stud- notes 1 All translations from Italian newspapers, scholarly literature, personal interviews and conferences are mine. 2 A category in which I include myself, having grown up in southern Italy. Anthropological literature, to which I unhesitatingly refer the interested reader (e. g., Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Bunzl 2004), has convincingly and conclusively shaken the foundations on which the very problematic label of 'native anthropology' has been long based. 3 See, for a comparative perspective focusing on Andalusia, Calavita and Suarez-Navaz (2003) and Driessen (1998). 4 Indeed, within the false dichotomy between 'Europe' and 'the Mediterranean,' it is possible to identify a European and Western hegemony in the broader Mediterranean area. See the recent contributions of Argy-rou (2002) and Chambers (2008). 5 The north—south dichotomy, once mapped into a geography of difference, can count on the apparently commonsensical and scientific nature of maps. Precisely because of its assertion of neutrality and scientificity, cartography is a successful tool for presenting specific values, standpoints and interests as universal, scientific and disinterested. With Harley ( 1988), we may say that certain cartographies tend to 'desocialise' the territory they represent. 6 On 'development,' see the seminal work by Ferguson (1994). 7 On the usage of 'delinquent' rather than 'criminal' see Foucault (1979, 251ft). See Teti (1993) for critical views on Italian Criminology dealing with southern Italy. 8 See, in particular, Schneider (1998). 9 As Kearney points out, teleological time, running from lesser to greater development, is consistent with the binary space ofcenters and peripheries (1995, 550). 10 The administrative Region of Apulia comprises the south-eastern ies at the European University Institute. I am extremely grateful to conveners, discussants, fellow participants and to the eui and University of Ljubljana organizers. My trips to Italy and Slovenia were generously made possible respectively by grants from the Department of Anthropology and from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame. Finally, I am thankful to Ana Hofman and to ijems' anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. peninsular part (the so-called 'heel') of Italy, stretching in the Ionian and Adriatic Seas and facing the Balkan Peninsula. Together with Sicily and Calabria, it is since the early 1990s at the forefront of the reception of maritime migration, largely as a result of its proximity to the Albanian and Montenegrin coasts. While for the purposes of this article Apulia can be considered paradigmatic of the historical and current predicament of Italian southern regions, the reader should also keep in mind the internal distinctiveness of Italian histories, geographies and political cultures. 11 In Albahari (2006; in press) I offer extensive data and references on immigration in Italy, including on Italian colonialism, on the more recent history of border enforcement and militarization, and on migrants' death, 'processing,' detention and deportation. 12 See Todorova (1997). 13 A pseudonym. 14 A pseudonym. 15 Journalist and researcher Gian Antonio Stella's book on Italian emigration (2005) is titled precisely LOrda: Quando gli Albanesi eravamo noi [The Horde: When we were the Albanians]. It is undeniable that southern Italians have now access to the rights and privileges of Italian and e u citizenship, and have dramatically improved their socio-economic conditions. But it is also important to point out that both unemployment and the socio-economic gap with northern Italy are growing again; that a high percentage of households is on the brink of financial collapse; and that mobility to northern Italy and Europe, for labor and higher education, is still one of the main available options. See sviMEZ (2008). 16 On this denial and 'allochronicity' see Fabian (1983). 17 See the seminal work by Cassano (1996). 18 Advocated, for example, by sviMEZ, one of the most influential organizations and think-tanks seeking to promote southern economic development. 19 This account conflicts with official state accounts. 20 See, for example, Raoul Bianchi's convincing analysis of the 'marketi-sation' of culture and heritage (2005). 21 A variation of Modern Greek spoken in parts of southern Apulia. 22 Http://www.radiodervish.com. Last accessed October 15, 2008. 23 I deal extensively with forms, potentialities and pitfalls of 'staged' cosmopolitanism in Albahari (2008). 24 Any 'solution' to the new Europe's quest for identitarian distinctiveness would result, it seems to me, in further institutionalization of a deeply exclusionary, ethnocentric and undemocratic regime of citizenship, membership and belonging. [j60] 25 For another case of'authentic hybrids' see Ballinger (2004), which fo- cuses on the Istrian and eastern Adriatic context. REFERENCES Albahari, M. 2006. Death and the moral state: Making borders and sovereignty at the southern edges of Europe. Working Paper 136, The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California at San Diego. -. 2008. Staging cosmopolitanism. isim Review, no. 22:12—3. -. In press. Charitable borders? Religion, policing, and belonging on the Italian maritime fringe. In Asymmetry and proximity in border encounters, ed. J. L. Bacas and W. Kavanagh. Oxford: Berghahn. Argyrou, V. 2002. Tradition, modernity and European hegemony in the Mediterranean. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 12 (1): 23—42. Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, m d: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Balibar, E. 1993. Lefrontiere della democrazia. Roma: Manifestolibri. Ballinger, P. 2004. 'Authentic hybrids' in the Balkan borderlands. Current Anthropology 45 (1): 31—60. Banfield, E. 1958. The moral basis of a backward society. Glencoe, i l: Free Press. Bianchi, R. V. 2005. Euro-Med heritage: Culture, capital and trade liberalisation — implications for the Mediterranean city. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 15 (2): 283—318. Bunzl, M. 2004. Boas, Foucault, and the 'native anthropologist:' Notes toward a neo-Boasian anthropology. American Anthropologist 106 (3): 435—42. Calavita, K. 2005. Immigrants at the margins: Law, race, and exclusion in southern europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calavita, K., and L. Suarez Navaz. 2003. Spanish immigration law and the construction of difference: Citizens and 'illegals' on Europe's southern border. In Globalization under construction: Governmentality, law, and identity, ed. R. Perry and B. Maurer, 99—127. Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press. Carter, D. M. 1997. States of grace: Senegalese in Italy and the new European immigration. Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press. Cassano, F. 1996. Ilpensiero meridiano. Bari: Laterza. Chambers, I. 2008. Mediterranean crossings: The politics of an interrupted modernity. Durham, n c: Duke University Press. [ï6i] Conversi, D. 2000. Cosmopolitanism and nationalism. In Encyclopaedia of nationalism, ed. A. Leoussi and A. D. Smith, 34—39. Oxford: Transaction. D'Alessandro, A. 2002. La porta d'Oriente. Bari: Uniongrafica Corcelli. Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. New York: Praeger. 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Beyond 'culture:' Space, identity, and the politics of difference. In Culture, power, place: Explorations in critical anthropology, ed. A. Gupta in J. Ferguson, 33—51. Durham, n c: Duke University Press. Harley, J. B. 1988. Maps, knowledge, and power. In The iconography of landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments, ed. D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, 277—312. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kearney, M. 1995. The local and the global: Anthropology of globalisation and transnationalism. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:547—65. Kertzer, D. 1980. Comrades and Christians: Religion and political struggle in Communist Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mahmood, S. 2004. Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton, n j: Princeton University Press. Moe, N. 2002. The view from Vesuvius: Italian culture and the southern question. Berkeley, c a: University of California Press. Putnam, R. 1993. Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Said, E. W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Schneider, J., ed. 1998. Italy's 'southern question:' Orientalism in one country. Oxford: Berg. Stella, G. A. 2002. L'orda: Quando gli Albanesi eravamo noi. Milano: Rizzoli. SVIMEZ — Associazione per lo sviluppo dell'industria nel Mezzo-giorno. 2008. Rapporto svimez 2008 sull'economia del Mezzogiorno. Bologna: Il Mulino. Teti, V 1993. La razza maledetta: Origini del pregiudizio antimeridionale. Roma: Manifestolibri. Todorova, M. N. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vendola, N. 2005. Una Puglia migliore: Dichiarazioni programmatiche per il governo della Regione Puglia. Http://www.astrid-online.it/ Il-bipolar/N_Vendola-Una-Puglia-migliore.pdf. Celebrating the Imagined Village: Ways of Organizing and Commenting Local Soundscapes and Social Patterns in South Albanian Feasts ECKEHARD PISTRICK Halle University, Germany GERDA DA LI PA J Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Art Studies, Albania as the muhabet (verbal discourse) follows distinct patterns and regulations in relation to established concepts of nder (honour) and turp (shame) in Albanian society, toasting, music-making and dancing follow comparable rules. Summer feasts in South Albania play a crucial role in displaying and reaffirming but also contesting this concept of radhë (order). Being marked by the omnipresence of return migrants — they provide a platform to celebrate an 'imagined village' in its social, symbolic and cultural sense. Within these feasts migrants assume a particular role, challenging the local idea of social order. An interdisciplinary approach in analyzing these feasts reveals dynamic interrelations between systems of how to organize soundscapes and social representations. The article presents the dynamics and contradictions involved in constructing such concepts locally, and their visibility in performance. It demonstrates how locals in the orthodox villages of Dhoksat and Selta give social meaning to the simultaneity of instrumental and vocal sounds, dance and muhabet. Furthermore it focuses on how dancing, playing and singing are valu-ated in specific aesthetic terms, referring to the social network of the village, functioning as strategies of inclusion and exclusion into the village community. South Albania, stretching from the Shkumbin River in the north to the border with Greece in the south, is marked by the coexistence of Muslim and Orthodox Christian communities. Two of the main regions of South Albania are Labëria and Toskëria, divided by the Vjosa River. Culturally this religious and regional diversity is often expressed in the juxtaposition of 'insiders' and 'outsiders' or people 'me kulturë' (with culture) versus people 'pa kulturë' (without culture), referring reciprocally to Tosks and Labs or Christians and Muslims. A feature [164] which in some respects unites Orthodox and Muslim villages in South Albania is the organization of collective village feasts, which may be connected to religious rituals such as Bajram,1 the commemoration of Bektashi saints or Orthodox Easter, Christmas and the church patrons' feasts. Some of these feasts were emptied of their original meaning or were forbidden during the communist regime of Enver Hoxha, who in 1967 declared Albania the first atheist state in Europe. After 1991, village feasts were reorganized and revived with new and transformed meanings. With regard to musical practice, South Albania is marked — in contrast to North Albania — by a rich multipart singing tradition with two, three or four part-singing; a tradition that extends from the Skumbin valley southwards and eastwards up into neighbouring Macedonia and northern Greece. In addition, the clarinet-ensemble saze, comparable to the Greek kumpaneia, accompanies local festivities. During the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, himself a native of the town of Gjirokastra, traditional music became instrumentalised as a 'cultural artefact' (Clifford 1988) that underwent a process of 'cultural objecti-fication' (Handler i988) on the stages of the National Folk Festival, held regularly in Gjirokastra. The research for this article was carried out in August 2008 in South Albania, covering an area from the deep South (in Skra-pari, Malëshova, Përmet, Lunxhëria, Gjirokastra and Dropull) to the Shkumbin valley (Shpati).2 We will concentrate on observations in either Orthodox Christian or Muslim villages in the two regions of Lunxhëria (Orthodox) and Shpati (Orthodox, Muslim). The two selected regions are marked by distinct historic, economic and ethnographic characteristics, which need to be outlined first. The region of Lunxhëria situated in the southern part of South Albania, belonging to the district of Gjirokastra, is marked by both internal and external discourse as an Orthodox region, forming the basis of Lunxhot identity itself (de Rapper 2005,178). Only one village (Erind) of the 9 to 20 villages usually associated with this ethnographic region (krahinë) possesses a Muslim majority. Lunxhëria is inhabited, according to de Rapper (2005, 174), by three population groups: (1) Lunxhots, who call themselves 'ethnic Lunxhots' and are called 'villagers' by others, (2) Aromanians, who call themselves 'shepherds' and [165] are called 'newcomers' by locals,3 and (3) Muslims, who trace their origin to Labëria or consider themselves autochthonous. Fluid ethnic boundaries exist between these different groups inhabiting the area (de Rapper 2005,175). These fluid boundaries in reality contrast strikingly with the way locals fix and demarcate their social and cultural space, particularly during feasts. Most of these are dedicated to Orthodox religious events such as the patrons' feasts of Shën Gjergji [Saint George], Shën Ilia [Saint Elias], Shën Llazari [Saint Lazarus] or Shën Maria [Saint Mary4] (Bogdani 1995, 40—45). Furthermore the region may be described as a transitory zone between Labëria and Toskëria. According to the villagers, the cultural division between Toskëria and Labëria is demarcated by the river Drinos, associating all villages on its right side, including Lunxhëria, with Tosk culture/ while the left side of the river (such as Lazarat and other Muslim villages of the regions of Kurvelesh e Sipërm and Kardhiq) is conceptualized as Labëria. The predominantly Muslim villages on the other side of the river are portrayed by Lunxhots as 'others' in social and cultural terms. This affirmation of a local identity based on social compactness resulting in cultural singularity is put forward frequently by South Albanian local intellectuals (e. g. Dedi and Koçi 2006). Nevertheless, depicting Lunxhëria as a mere border region in the ethnographic and religious sense would mean to neglect the historical ties between the Orthodox Lunxhots and the Muslims of Kurvelesh. Because of a lack of local labour, Muslims have come to work primarily as shepherds in Lunxhëria since before the Second World War (Bogdani 1995, 25). And although marriages were traditionally organized within the villages, Muslims in Lunxhëria even arranged their marriages with inhabitants of Lazarat and Picari outside the region (Bogdani 1995, 26). These relations continued to exist during communist times. The region of Shpati is situated in the northern part of South Albania, belonging to the district of Elbasan. It is confined by the Shkumbin River in the north and by Devoll in the south. Shpati is divided into two main parts: Mountain Shpati or Upper Shpati, and Field Shpati or Lower Shpati to the west of the mountain area. Due [166] to the fact that a considerable part of the population in Lower Shpati originates from Upper Shpati, they are also called 'second Shpati' and 'first Shpati' respectively. Upper Shpati is made up mostly of Orthodox villages, which were self-sustaining peasant communities before the communist regime. Lower Shpati is composed of more Muslim than Orthodox villages, which used to live under the çiflik (feudal estates) system. The two sub-regions can be understood only in terms of their relationship and interdependence on one another and in their ways of dealing with and expressing these differences and similarities (Dalipaj 2007). The historical borders of Shpati as a region have been moveable, involving also the groups of villages of Dumreja and Sulova.6 Although classified ethnographically as part of Toskëria (South Albania), the region of Shpati involves also cultural features that are claimed to be typical of both South and North Albania. Hence, like Lunxhëria, Shpati has been dubbed a transitional area. In the region of Shpati, each Orthodox village has its own Saint's Day.7 These religious feasts have a social symbolic meaning in the sense that they could be 'appropriated' by a certain kin, a symbolic connection of kin and a specific religious feast being particularly strong in the region of Shpati.8 The Orthodox feasts in Shpati are visited regularly by Muslims and vice versa. In most of the feasts observed, we were guided by local males, whose families were considered 'indigenous' and 'representative' of local traditions. These collected comments and explanations were confronted with those of outsiders, musicians and singers present at the feasts. This method allowed us to balance three different points of view on the feast: that of the active (local) insider (in terms of a common spatial, religious and/or kinship belonging), that of the active-passive insider-outsider (coming from another South Albanian village or region) and our own outsider-outsider observations 'out-of-their-culture' (in terms of spatial, religious and kinship distance). Due to the lack of reliable literature on the nature and character of contemporary Albanian feasts (with the exception of Sugarman 1997) this article refers to a number of studies carried on about Greek village communities and feasts (Caraveli 1986; Panopoulos 1996; 2003; 2005; Zografou 2007). Taking into account the singularity of each feast as an event of local significance, we are conscious that the results of our [167] research do not surpass the limits of a first case study and require further comparative research to discuss the first hypotheses of this article. Albanian villages9 are marked by families of various sizes and structures and of various economic standards of living, residing as a relatively small social community. The landscape where these families reside can be described as responding to their material, spiritual and social needs (Muka 1992, 69). The village is related to a specific territory with known and firm borders including dwellings, private land around them, and the land owned by the village community (Gjergji 1982, 151). As a rule, these villages are composed of a limited number of patrilineal kindred groups10 organised in quarters which mostly correspond to these specific groups.11 According to Zojzi (1949) and Ulqini (1987) the Albanian villages were historically the smallest administrative units, governed to different degrees by state policies as well as by local customary law and councils of elders. In order to manage common resources, the Albanian village life was expected to be guided by an obligatory cohesion, sharing the same moral code and symbols. Traditionally, marriages were preferred to be arranged along lines of regional and religious endogamy and kin exogamy. After the collapse of the Hoxha dictatorship with its policy of rural retention, the consequent demographic changes, while preserving the ideal of kin exogamy, resulted in broader marriage choices. symbolic and social dimensions of the feast The end of summer is the high time for feasts. Particularly the months of August^ and to a lesser degree September are preferred for Saints' feasts, marriages or village gatherings.0 Usually each such public festivity honouring a Saint, re-uniting the village and re-affirming identity and belonging, is termed a 'celebration' (festë,festim). The celebration includes a gathering in a public space, the shared consumption of food, discussion, singing and dancing. Each feast fulfils multiple overlapping symbolic and social functions. The main goal is the achievement of a certain joyful mood (qejfi) and social participation. A feast may be socially successful in two ways: involving as many actors as possible and [168] involving musicians and singers who contribute through their singing and playing to social interaction and the attainment of the goal of qejfi. Feasts reflect, as Rice has observed in the case of the Macedonian sobor, the village as a unit of social structure. For him 'an event like the sobor represents a segment of culture that encapsulates or concretizes some of a society's basic values and structures' (Rice 1980, 126). We follow his line of thought in looking at village feasts as symbolically charged events thought of as intrinsically connected to spatial, temporal and acoustic organization. For us South Albanian village feasts are representative settings for observing the expression and structuring of social acts. Each feast can be understood therefore as a symbolic celebration of each form of social organization: family, kin, village and of regional belonging. At the same time feasts may reflect the social stratification of the village based on the division of sex, age-group or social status. This does not mean that feasts should be treated as occasions for the expression of pre-established social structures or of bounded and named 'groups,' but rather as a forum of social innovation and negotiation 'in which boundary negotiation is an important activity' (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1983, 45). Feasts (and rituals) are not structural frameworks which are continuously repeated, but on the contrary performances in process being changed continuously by different social actors who adapt their actions to an ever-changing social, political and historical framework. According to Boissevain (1992) feasts are social events that are man-made and time-bound, displaying a regulated creativity. The feast itself is, if we follow Boissevain, made up of two contradictory properties: the ritual and the play. While with ritual he names the formal and ordered event, which is characterized by rules, hierarchy and the constraints of time and place, the play is 'associated with the negation of the ritual,' it is disordered, innovative, improvised, disrespectful of authority and potentially subversive (Boissevain 1992, 13). These two dimensions of the feast/ritual maintain a dynamic relation to each other: improvised and playful action becomes framed and organized in order to exhibit local culture up to the point where the established rules become undermined again by improvised action. Although we distance ourselves from Boissevains' terminology of ritual and play, and his view of a strict juxtaposition of these two categories, we nevertheless affirm the double-sided nature of the feast between [169] obligatory planned action and improvised behaviour. In the reality of the fieldwork these different and sometimes contradictory meanings of a feast, considered a unity by the locals, were often difficult to disentangle. In the case of Dhoksat, for example, the feast served firstly as a religious feast honouring Saint Mary, affirming local orthodox identity. Secondly, it served as a social and cultural display. The 'Cultural Patriotic Association Lunxhëria' (Shoqata Kul-turore Atdhetare Lunxhëria) co-organized the collective performance of cultural elements (songs and dances), strengthening social cohesion. Thirdly, the feast served the reunion of the village community, incorporating the migrants that had returned for the event from Greece. Several villagers stated that this feast could be considered at the same time a 'meeting of generations' (takimi i brezave) bringing together different generations and geographically dispersed persons of Dhoksat origin. Despite the fact that feasts are polysemantic they may be also socially closed or more opened towards 'Outsiders.' In Shpati celebrations, village and kin feasts, could be attended by people of other villages or by more distant relatives. This permeability of feasts through networks of affinity, friendship or godfatherhood is counterbalanced by certain conservative traits grounded in local ideology related to the order and the cultural outlook of the feast. Public festivities can be seen as a continuity of the feast's preparation in the family space or as a precursor of the feast's celebration in family space. This results in a social intermingling of private family sphere and public sphere of the village. There are also feasts which attained a status beyond their local dimension as regional feasts attended by large numbers of inhabitants of the whole region. This was the case with the feast of Saint Mary on 15 August 2008 in Dhoksat, which served not only as a meeting point for the whole region of Lunxhëria,M but even assumed a trans- regional character, incorporating people from neighbouring regions.15 These feasts are often accompanied by ritual sacrifices (kurban) (Dali-paj 2007).16 During the dictatorship, village and kin group feasts were celebrated by the villagers secretly, that means in private space. This [170] survival was expressed in the presence of a small sacrifice (usually poultry) and a very limited and intimate lunch or dinner in the house, setting the celebration of religious rites apart from any public display. THE IMPACT OF MIGRATION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS ON FEASTS Recent studies (Boissevain 1992) have shown that celebrations in the rural European context have been re-vitalized, re-traditionalized, and re-invented with the aim of strengthening local identities especially after the 1980s. This revitalization of feasts took place in three basic forms: (1) through the invention of new feasts, (2) through a renewed interest in spring and winter rituals associated with an 'older sphere' of local culture, and (3) through the re-valuation of Saint's feasts which coincided with the holiday return of migrants. The third form of revaluation of traditional feasts took place in Albania before the background of migration movements since the end of 19th century which accelerated changes in the structure and meaning of the feast. This development has to be positioned in a wider reaching multi-layered socio-economical transformation particularly after the fall of the communist regime in 1991, caused by massive internal and external movements of people. Villages have been abandoned since then, economically deprived of their labour force and 'muted' in the musical sense (Pistrick 2006).17 'Traditional' feasts have undergone significant changes under the impact of this mass migration in the last years and due to the continuous alienation of social actors from each other and from village life. Through the presence of migrants and the memory of migration, the feast has become a common screen for the projection of an ideal village, rooted in nostalgia for the past. Village feasts that celebrated social cohesion in the past are invaded now every summer by migrants, returning for vacation from Greece or Italy. Although these migrants are no longer part of the traditional social system of the village they are eager to participate in the feasts. For them, feasting is a form of nostalgia, which is expressed and displayed most prominently through verbal discussions and migration songs (këngë kurbeti). Migrants evoke an idealized village, reconstructed from childhood or youth memories, conceived as juxtaposed to an illegal or 'black migration' (kurbet i zi) characterized through a collection [171] of social deficiencies. At these feasts migrants celebrate primarily their 'origin' (origjin) and their belonging.18 As Lortat-Jacob (1994) argued in a cross-cultural analysis of feasts in Morocco, Sardinia and Romania, feasts are themselves characterized by 'contradictory properties' and possess at the same time a conservative and transforming function (Lortat-Jacob 1994, 7). In this sense the return of the migrants into their villages for festivities can be seen also as a revitalization act of rituals, which at the same time brings forth a drastic change in the social and cultural parameters of symbolic action. This process may be or may not be connected with an increased organization and 'framing' of the feast through cultural organizations or brotherhoods and the hidden shifting from a tradition 'in context' to a folklorized and/or commercialized tradition 'out-of-context.'i9 The social group of migrants accelerates the transforming character of the feast and stimulates discourse about the 'contradictory properties,' questioning at times the very structure of the feast and its intrinsic aesthetic values. The visible and invisible presence of migration was particularly apparent at the feast of Shën Mria (as it is called in the local dialect) in Selta, Shpati. Most of the locals considered the feast held in 2008 as a poor example in terms of the participation of the local population and in terms of the cultural events offered. Among these deficiencies was multipart singing, which was completely lacking at the Shpati feast. The singer of the multipart group from neighbouring Nezhan could not gather enough group members because 'they were dispersed.' This 'poverty' of the feast was related by villagers to the demographic changes in the region caused by migration to Greece and by urbanization flows towards nearby Elbasan. Migration also shaped the place where the feast was held, the construction of the building, a chapel, was sponsored by a villager who earned his money in Greece20 At the same time this person dictated the musical taste of the feast, providing a laptop and speakers from which very loud music was played. Even the church bell, hung in an improvised setting between two trees, was a gift from Greece (Katerini). Clearly the feast was dominated by migrants returning for their summer holidays from Greece. While in the morning the ritual part of the feast took place under participa-[172] tion mostly of the elder generation of the village, the late morning and midday was dominated by the migrant youth, drinking, discussing and eager to dance to the music from the laptop. The feast ended around one in the afternoon, two hours earlier than usual as villagers complained, with people retreating into their family space to continue the celebration. Even to the villagers it was obvious that something in the structure of the feast had changed forever, that something was irrevocably lost. the local concept of order (radhë), time and space All attempts to structure the feast first become visible in the temporal fixation through a date. It is here where the process of negotiation and contestation starts, because the people's attitude towards the dating of the village feasts is ambiguous: at times conservative, at times lavish. The people of Lunxhëria for example celebrate the feasts according to the so called Greek calendar (Gregorian calendar). Saint Mary's, the village feast of Dhoksat, is celebrated on 15 August.21 Meanwhile, in Shpati people still use the so called 'Old Calendar' (Julian calendar), which locally is referred to as the alla turka calendar. That means that the feast of Saint Mary is celebrated on 28 August each year. In Shpati the approach towards the days of the feasts is very much conservative. Here we found the story of a young man from Selta with the surname Ranxha. Almost a decade earlier, after the young man had returned from migration, he insisted that the village celebrate should Saint Mary's on 15 August, as it was done in Greece. The inhabitants of Selta followed his advice. But after this change of date the young man fell accidentally from a mountain and died. The inhabitants interpreted this as divine revenge because of their changing the day of the feast, and turned to respect 'their old calendar.'22 Another temporal order is aspired to within the feast. In Dhoksat the celebration takes place in the late evening, while the preparations for it last all day, or begin even days before. The feast begins around 9 o'clock in the evening, arriving at its peak just before midnight. Afterwards the feast gradually loses its tension. Meanwhile in Selta the feast begins with the collective festivities in public space in the early morning. The festivity arrives at its peak around midday and by one in [173] the afternoon people begin gradually to leave the festive space and to continue celebrating at home. Both upon their climbing up the hill to the chapel and on their return from the feast, they are 'greeted' by the monolith in remembrance of the local who tried to change the date of the feast. Every feast is related to a particular space, which can comprise various symbolic meanings. Such a classical feast setting is the central plane tree of the village, such as in Dhoksat,^ a local grave of a Saint, such as in Kreshova and Tomorr, or a chapel, such as in Selta. The feast in Selta revealed an additional characteristic: the demarcation and 'framing' of (sound)space. Observable was the division between a dancing space 'framed' by banderols wishing well-being and blessings for the participants of the feast, a 'holy' fenced space around the chapel^ and an informal space at the edge of the forest used as a picnic place for families. The division of the spaces was spanned acoustically by the music sounding from the speakers set up in the 'holy space' into the dancing space and the presence of a church bell (këmborë) between two trees in the dancing space (but associated with the holy space), which rang from time to time. A similar 'framing' of space was achieved through tables positioned at the edges of the dancing place in Dhoksat. There the most prestigious places were located opposite the entrance door, the less significant beside the entrance door. The long-stretched table opposite the door was occupied by local officials such as the mayor and the head of the cultural association. The tables at the entrance were occupied by Aromanians, considered by the older local families as 'having come from outside' and as nouveau riche. Instrumental music was coming from a symbolic place in which several meanings accumulated: the plane tree on which was attached a marble plate documenting the creation of the cultural association in 1995^ and a small shrine. Opposite the musicians and in front of the former house of culture26 were two terraces divided by a fence. It was affirmed that on the upper terrace were sitting the old-established families of Dhoksat, like that of the singer Vasil Çuçi. 'Outsiders,'^ like a group from Lazarat who came to the feast late, were positioned at the edge of the demarcated space of the feast at improvised square plastic ta-[174] bles (as opposed to the long wooden tables of the villagers) below the impressive steps of the former house of culture. These stairs were also the favoured place for the local youth for observing the feast. Assigning specific places to locals, 'newcomers' and 'outsiders' and to musicians, dancers and the audience had in this case multiple social meanings, which where understood and respected by the participants of the feast. MUSIC-MAKING AS A SOCIAL ACT Music-making and dancing are acts in which the social order is revealed, contested and negotiated. Sugarman wrote that Prespa Albanians at weddings 'from their gestures and postures to the ways they sing and danced' give an 'overwhelming impression of social and moral order' (Sugarman 1997, 212), an order which she came to understand as a system in process. Similarly, Lortat-Jacob (1994) came to the conclusion that Sardinian circle dances are 'formally and aesthetically institutionalized' (Lortat-Jacob 1994, 76) in the sense that their degree of variation and variability is limited. Panopoulos in his study of improvised singing in Aegean Greece confirmed that in villages of Naxos singing is still used in constructive ways 'which are connected to the constitution of local attitudes, practices, and beliefs concerning gender, community and identity' (Panopoulos 1996, 53). Music-making and dancing relates also to the double-sided character of the feast as being ordered and improvised at the same time. Maintaining the informality of improvised singing in this context has been interpreted as cultural response to the transformations inside and outside the feasts, even as an act of resistance to its 'folklorization' (Panopoulos 2003). Singing is seen by Panopoulos (2005, 250) as a subordinate discourse allowing the construction of an alternative version of local identity based on shared values, symbolic practices and a particular kind of sociability. But singing and dancing at a feast in South Albania means also to behave within a system of rules which is related to the concept of honour (nder).28 To create a 'community in honour' (Sugarman 1997, 213) requires acting with self-restraint but also fulfilling the expectations of others on how to act. A similar 'body of moral, social, and aesthetic rules' defined locally, was examined at Olymbos feasts (glen- [175] dia) in Greece (Caraveli 1985, 263). In this case even the locals themselves considered their feast a ritual (ierotelesteia) (Caraveli 1985, 262), stressing the restrictive character of the feast in regard to (social) order and discipline. Even the juerga (popular feasts) of Andalusian gypsies, which at first sight resemble a joyous tumult, are guided, according to Pasqualino (2008, 203^), by a form of ritual ordering. In this sense music-making during a feast should be understood as a catalyser, a means and indicator for social interaction, not as an accessory to social reality. The feast with its collective implications brings music into being — gives music a social existence in the meaning that it does not 'accompany' social events but shapes and transforms them. Music-making at feasts and commenting on it, is linked intrinsically with the general muhabet. A distinction between 'producers-singers' and one group of 'consumer-listeners' in the Western sense do not exist. For us it is therefore important to observe the processes and interactions during the feast, particularly those between verbal communication, music and dance. In a similar way dance and music-making can be understood as tools for the construction of sameness and otherness, negotiated in relation to time and space.29 Both singing and dancing are competitive cultural fields. Especially dance can become a field of concurrence even between friends through the highly symbolic occupation of space for kin groups or families through the throwing of money to the musicians. Being visible or audible in terms of exhibiting oneself as long as possible seems often to be an aim pursued by dancers and singers/instrumentalists. As every feast has to reach certain emotional standards, which are described locally as qejfi or gëzim (joy), music fulfils a crucial role in attaining this heightened state of mind. Qejfi or kefi as it is called in Greece is a matter of collective interest, achieved through the well-matching of verbal expression and individual sensitivities (Panopou-los 1996, 62).3° Three basic roles of music may be distinguished in this context: (1) it serves as a regulation system, (2) it is the object of (emotional) mobilisation and it serves as a (3) symbolic communication system by means of which cultural identity is built (Lortat-Jacob 1994, 15). Its purpose is above all a social one: to share emotions, col-[176] lectivity and memories. Singing itself resembles the elaboration of a sketch, a musical form which waits to be turned into aesthetic and emotional experience through performance (Lortat-Jacob 2008). Important in every case is the play between collective and individual initiative, guiding both the singing process and the feast as a whole. This interplay is aimed at evoking emotions not only between singers and listeners but also between the performers themselves. Only through shared emotions is received a concord, which includes both a social and an aesthetic dimension. This concord seems to be a precondition for a 'good song' as valuated by performers and listeners alike (Lortat-Jacob 2008). Despite this there are noticeable differences between performers of vocal and of instrumental music. While the former are mostly nonprofessional, the instrumentalists are often professionals — seen as outsiders in the sense of coming from an urban background or having become 'urbanized.' It is because of this distinction made by the villagers that multipart singers are not paid, while the singer of the professional saze group is paid. It is the 'logic of the stage' which is applied here: the one who enters the stage has the right to get paid, the one who acts from within the social group sings for his own pleasure and the pleasure of the others. This staging of music has been introduced in South Albanian feasts in a more or less visible manner. In Dhoksat, for example, there existed no real stage31 but a symbolically charged place near the plane tree (rrapi), marked by the marble plate of the cultural association and a shrine. This symbolic stage led to the division between musicians and audience acquiring a more fragile and temporary meaning, as did the circle of concrete, which, although not elevated like a 'proper stage,' served as a stage for the dancers. SITTING, SPEAKING, SINGING AND THE LOCAL CONCEPT OF ORDER (RADHË) As the muhabet follows distinct patterns, singing and music-making as metaphoric extensions of verbal speech follow comparable structures. These structures are not fixed but are negotiated in the very moment of the feast. The social context which allows singing and music-making is that of male company displaying and confirming friendship through the sharing of food and drink and the sharing of words. It has been argued that this concept of voluntary friendship is perceived as op- [177] posed to that of kinship which is interpreted in terms of obligation and commitment (Panopoulos 1996, 62). In fact also singing can become, according to the circumstances, an obligatory socializing activity which serves the meeting of social expectations. Speaking and singing maintain a reciprocal relationship and are considered locally as outcomes of one another: to produce a bejte (improvised verse) may be the beginning of a song, or a verbal appendix to it, a dolli (drinking toast) can similarly announce a song, interrupt the order of singing or comment on it. Speaking and singing are two alternative ways of commenting the feast and its participants, like the improvised mantinades verses sung or spoken at a Greek feast (glendi) (Caraveli 1985) or the Sardinian verses exchanged at a poetic game (gara poetica) in the mountains of Barbagia (Lortat-Jacob 1994, 68-69). To understand the local ordering and valuation of singing, one has to grasp the moral and social regulations that guide the sitting order at the table and the verbal discourse as a pre-condition of singing. One particular tradition in which social order becomes prominently visible is the toasting (dollia) often accompanied or interrupted by spontaneous singing. The way dollia is organized varies according to the kind of festivity. For example, toasting at a wedding ceremony is not the same as during an engagement. Fiqirete S. from Sulova distinguishes between the huge number of participants at a wedding, where the notion of order is more difficult to apply than in the smaller social circle of an engagement. At a wedding there exists some freedom within a framework of basic rules which are to be followed: the main actors, namely the bride and groom, the father of the bride and her mother, and the best man (krushku i parë) have their specified places. But the remaining guests may sit down according to their friendship or kinship links and are always free to choose with the assistance of the 'head of the house' (zoti i shtëpisë) a place where they feel comfortable. This means that during the wedding they can move from one table to the other and change their sitting and singing place. In another wedding of a couple from Zagoria in the town of Gjirokastra we could observe the same phenomenon: there exists a [178] general sitting order.32 This sitting order influences indirectly the regulation of singing practice. Consequently, three different groups gathered around one table practicing their distinct regional singing styles from the villages of Sheper, Picar or Derviçan. But these singing circles were not completely closed; they were open for people from other tables who might be in the mood to join them spontaneously. The local expression to make space for outsiders is 'hape muhabetin' (open the muhabet). It was no coincidence that the table of Sheper was the most active singing table: it was this kin and local group whose bride was being married. They should therefore be the most joyful group, whose aim should be to meet the highest emotional standards through singing and sharing of joy (gëzim). All groups of singers and the professional instrumental ensemble co-ordinated their activities in a striking manner in order to achieve a good alternation instead of a competition between different soundscapes. An engagement ceremony is in many respects more formal. In the case of Sulova the table is divided into two. On one side sits the host family (for example the family of the future bride), on the other side of the table sits the guest family (the family of the future groom). There is a strict order in sitting within each group.33 The women sit at the end of the table, the reasoning being that for a man to have a woman beside him means that he has no one with whom to communicate in toasting. The women can not make a toast or be dollibash (prime of the toasting). Toasting, singing and discussion is organized around the male space. Toasting itself is a form of social communication like singing, and both activities are combined. In case a person is supposed or wishes to toast, he has to find a male with whom to communicate and clink together his glass of rakia. In an engagement there are two dollia. One is the dollia of the host family and the second the reciprocating dollia of the guest family. Dollia is composed of many wishes for health (shëndete). Each adult male at the table should be greeted. One greeting can be short (shëndet i shkurtër) which means that one person is greeted once and for all. But the 'true greeting' is long. That means that each person should be respected through a number of greetings.34 After finishing with the first representative, the dollia continues to the second male, the third male and so on according to their sitting order. In Sulova it is [179] said 'The true long dollia is an introduction of people to each other'. At the very end of the first dollia, the dollibash asks whether there is anyone left. In case not, the last greeting is for the whole group of in-laws as a unit. After the first dollia has finished, the meat is served.35 Singing follows this pre-established social order. At engagement ceremonies there is no singing before the father of the bride has formally opened the meal. The first to sing are the main representatives of the host family. Afterwards, singing can follow less strict rules. But still it remains important that: (1) no one can sing or even speak publicly without the permission of the head of dollia,36 and that (2) there should be a balance in singing between both groups. This is the purpose behind asking permission to sing as well as to speak. The best way to share the singing among both groups is for the uncle of the bride to sing, but only to sing two verses. The corresponding uncle of the groom repeats these two verses after the first stops. The following verses follow the same pattern. This way of balancing participation can take place for everyone who wishes to sing. Whoever does not know these rules cannot participate in social exchange. SOUNDSCAPES IN SOUTH ALBANIAN FEASTS: COEXISTENCE OR CONTEST? Using the concept of soundscape for the analysis of Albanian feasts means to set sound and everyday lived social experience into direct relation. American ethnomusicologist Steven Feld introduced in his influential collections 'Music of the Kaluli' (1982) and 'Voices of the rainforest' (1991) this notion of an 'active social listening' in anthropological research. For him sound meant not the isolation of ethnomu-sicological 'pure' material, and therefore the division of 'music' from surrounding 'noise,' but rather the contextualization of musical sounds in terms of their human and natural environment, demarcating a specific space (Feld and Brenneis 2004, 465). Focusing on 'soundscape' or a 'sonic ecology' therefore means contextualizing sound. Soundscapes function according to Feld and Brenneis (2004) not as unilateral phenomena but primarily in a dialogical and multilayered manner, which may include historically formed relationships between them. Sound-[180] scapes can be seen in this sense not only as an acoustic indicator of social relations but also as a barometer for clashes in performance, such as between the verbal and the musical sphere or between urban/professional versus rural/amateur musical practice. The concept of soundscapes was applied successfully to the Balkans first among Roma music in Greek Macedonia (Blau, Keil, Keil, and Feld 2002; Feld 2002) then to the animal bells on Naxos, Greece (Panopoulos 2003). All attempts at highlighting the soundscape as a social indicator must be seen as a strategy to break the text-dominated discourse in anthropology, favouring an anthropology of experience (Turner and Bruner 1983) alternatively termed anthropology of the senses or anthropology of performance (Turner 1986). Approaching an Albanian feast means approaching such a soundscape which may consist of different sonic events occurring at the same time, alternating or contesting each other. These soundscapes are directly related to the temporal and spatial experience of the feast. The alternation between different soundscapes, silence and social action follows a temporal structuring. This time is conceptualized as 'musical time' and 'social time offered to the senses and directed at the affects' (Lortat-Jacob 2008). To analyze the interaction between the social sphere and the musical sphere it is crucial to observe carefully the moments immediately before and after a performance, not necessarily the performance itself. In doing so it becomes clear that singing can be initiated by means of social discourse, such as muhabet or by social acts such as dollia. Starting to sing is interpreted as a (social) sign related to certain expectations, while the end of every performance is commented in terms of a constructed local, social and aesthetic order. Most visible is the 'timing' of sounds in the alternation of different soundscapes following flexible structural principles. In addition, each soundscape possesses a certain spatial dimension. Sound demarcates space, particularly the space of the village. As may have become apparent above, the relation between sound- scapes, mainly between the instrumental and the vocal soundscape, has been transformed and distorted since the introduction of amplification. The self-regulation of the contrasting soundscapes of saze ensemble and multipart song through the economic means of each family has been broken. While the hiring of a saze for a feast was a privilege [181] of established urban families able to pay the immense costs into the 1950s, today almost no feast goes without instrumental music/7 This means in effect that the vocal soundscape with which the local social community accompanied its own social events has been displaced gradually by an instrumental soundscape/8 If listening today to 'musical time' in South Albanian villages, one should keep in mind that this musical order (radhë) is an artificial product, related predominantly to the process of amplification favouring instrumental music over vocal practices. Creating a soundscape through singing is a conscious act. Singing serves as a tool to display masculinity and to gain public prestige and honour (nder) (Sugarman 1997). In addition, the regional style (i. e. Lunxhot style) is considered distinct/9 and is interpreted as proof for the 'autochthony' (autoktonia) and particularity of a regional society in general. Locals are therefore highly sensitive towards any contestation of their singing, for which they have constructed an unambiguous ownership related to claims of antiquity and uniqueness. The concept of the 'man from Lunxhëri' (burrë lunxhi) circumscribed in terms such as intelligence, cultivated behaviour and seriousness is expressed acoustically through singing. It is argued that Lunxhots demonstrate their values through singing without exaggerated gestures or the intention 'to provoke' ('çirret') each other (Dedi and Koci 2006, 45). Contesting the song in consequence means also contesting the social role associated with it. As in other cases, the feast in Dhoksat followed a progression from a more formal towards an informal character, leading to a heightened state of mind among the participants and to an intensification of social communication. Despite this progression, the dancing order set up by the commission, the spatial order and the musical order (favouring saze over multipart singing) was never abandoned. While singing was considered generally as being an 'insider' musical practice, the playing of the saze ensemble of Jorgo Naçi, born in Dhoksat but living in Tirana today, assumed an ambiguous position between 'insider' and 'outsider' roles. Roughly one hour after the beginning of the feast, singing started within an already more relaxed atmosphere from the table where the [182] local dignitaries were positioned. It was obviously a family singing, led by the mother of the household. This singing, as did the following performances, took place in the sonic shade of the amplified saze ensemble, which did not leave space and time for the locals to sing. Another family, the Bllaci, positioned on the lower terrace of tables, took the initiative to use the scarce breaks that the musicians took 'because they did not have enough fuel' ('pse nuk kanë naftë'). There was no sign of co-ordination between the scarcely intonated singing at the tables and the singer of the saze, who announced the order of songs and dances through his microphone. Only at the very end of the feast, around 02.15 in the morning, did the saze singer comment to the singers: 'just two dances and then you can sing yourself.' It took more than two hours until someone invited one of the most respected and acclaimed singers of the village, Vasil Çuçi, to sing instead of dance. He refused initially, remarking that instrumental music and singing would not go well together this night. Finally, the most active singer of the Bllaci family entered the upper terrace and joined the Çuçi family table to sing 'old Lunxhot songs.' At the same time another group positioned at the edge of the feast between the stairs of the house of culture and the upper terrace started singing. This group consisted of young and middle aged men from several neighbouring villages4° and from the villages of Golem and Lazarat near Gjirokastra41 They were marked as 'outsiders' in many respects: from an aesthetic point of view because they were not singing in the 'right' manner and in a rough, aggressive competitive style, as well as in the spatial sense as coming from another village or even another region (krahinë). They were also isolated socially because they refused to accept the social behaviour regulations.42 The singing of this group, therefore, took place in spatial and social isolation. This led the group to shift even closer together physically, building a circle in this indifferent, sometimes hostile environment. Although this group did not in fact consist predominantly of people from Lazarat, they were immediately stigmatized as 'strangers singing for Lazarat' ('të huajtë që këndojnë për Lazaratin') and juxtaposed to the group of elderly singers perceiving themselves as singing for Dhoksat and local pride. The musical outcome of this contest was a competitive soundscape between saze and the vocal insider and outsider groups.43 This state of disorder was seen by the older singers not [183] only as an aesthetic disaster but also as a personal insult. When the 'outsiders' then disturbed the radhë of the dance, hindering the dancing line of a local family, the situation escalated. Verbal arguments turned into physical arguments — the social and musical order — the harmony of the feast as a whole stood in question. Even the saze ensemble stopped playing at this decisive moment. After the expulsion of a few of the lead troublemakers, the worst was over. The local community tried to reintegrate the 'outsiders' into the feast. In the end, the first singer of the 'Lazarat group' was even allowed to dance as the first in the line. In Dhoksat we could witness reconciliation instead of confrontation in moments when the social and musical order became contested. This example verifies that order may be the subject of negotiation or even attack, but it may be re-adapted to the circumstances in a flexible and successful way. CONCLUSION South Albanian village feasts are socially and symbolically charged events. In local imagination each feast requires external and internal structuring, which relates to a social order that should be understood as a system in process, widely agreed upon and at the same time continuously contested. External structuring is achieved through fixing the feast in relation to time and space. Internal structuring is achieved through an ordering of sitting, speaking and singing, and an ordering of events. This structuring is carried out formally or informally by representatives of the village, but is also practiced unconsciously as a set of inherited rules. Verbal discourse (muhabet) is directed through drinking toasts (dollia). Music, as an extension of this discourse, follows similar patterns: singing and toasting as two forms of codified communication, for example, regulate the power relationships at the table and the feast. Music-making contributes significantly to the structuring of the feasts: the selecting of and commenting on songs and dances bears different social and symbolic meanings and constitutes a significant part of the muhabet itself. Despite these attempts at structuring, every feast's structure is a mere framework for social orientation within which variations are possible. Social and musical improvisation during [184] feasts is often understood not as breaking the rules of the feast, but as enforcing them. The formal, organized sphere of the feast and the improvised, playful aspects of it are therefore in continuous interaction with each other. Each feast has its own dynamic in the social and musical sense. Local imagination relates feasts to the fiction of an ideal village with an ideal social order which may be reflected in the soundscapes of the event. Despite this idealistic view each feast witnesses processes of inclusion and exclusion among its participants. It is a place in which strategies of 'othering' are practiced. This 'othering' refers not only to individuals but also to the village as a whole, differentiating itself from the outside world in religious, social and cultural terms. Especially the juxtaposition of 'insiders' and 'outsiders' is situation dependent and may even include the possibility of integrating 'outsiders' into a feast setting. Such 'outsiders' may be welcomed as contributing to the joyful mood (qejf) and to the prestige of the feast. A precondition for doing so is that these 'outsiders' respect the framework, and are integrated into the agreed upon order of sitting, dancing and singing. They should also conform to idealized local aesthetics and the local singing style. In case this integration fails, as it did in Dhoksat — space, soundscapes and the meaning of the feast itself become contested. Feasts in contemporary South Albania are shaped to a large degree by the impact of mass migration. Migrants as a community attend feasts massively projecting their particular expectations and nostalgia onto the events. Standing outside of the rural social framework, they tend to idealize their home village as representative of inherited traditions and values as contrasting with their current living situation. For them the feast symbolizes a link between their past and their present. At the same time, migrants as a social group also challenge the institution of the feast, stimulating discourses about the structure and the aesthetic features embodied in the celebration. acknowledgments We would like to thank Gilles de Rapper, mmsh, Université d'Aix-en-Provence for his comments and Andreas Hemming, University of Halle for proof-reading the paper. [185] NOTES 1 Bajram, from the Turkish meaning feast, is celebrated by Sunni and Bektashi Muslims in Albania. 2 We refer here particularly to the following feasts: an Orthodox feast Saint Mary in Dhoksat, Lunxhëria 15 August 2008, a Zagorian wedding in Gjirokastra, 16 August 2008, a Bektashi feast at Krëshova, Përmet 17 August 2008, the Bektashi feast of Baba Tomorr, Skrapari 21—22 August 2008, Orthodox feast of Saint Mary Selta, Shpati, Elbasan 28 August 2008. 3 For example, in Dhoksat the members of the kin of Mediaj are even today remembered as having settled later on in the village and that they are of vllah [Aromanian] origin. 4 Celebrated in Saraqinisht and Dhoksat on 15 August. 5 This argument, referring primarily to culture and which is primary for our study, contrasts with Zojzi (1962), who — based on linguistic markers — locates the border between Labëria and Toskëria on the Vjosa River. 6 Documents show that in the 14th—15th centuries the region of Shpati was much larger than it is today. These borders seem to have been valid until the second half of the 19th century, at which time other groups of villages such as Vërça, Sulova and Dumreja were defined as being part of the region of Shpati (Tirta 1987, 11). 7 Selta and Pashtresh celebrate Shmrinë [Saint Mary's], Gjinar celebrates Shmrenën [Saint Marina's], Zavalina celebrates Shëndëllinë [Saint Elias]. 8 The kin of Mufalak celebrate Saint Mihail [Shën Mhillin], the kin of Dedaj celebrate Saint George [Shën Gjergjin] and the kin of Karaj celebrated Saint Nicolas [Shën Kollin]. 9 We use the term 'village' here, conscious of its nature as a culturally constructed category. 10 In the villages under consideration the term 'kindred group' is used to designate a number of nuclear families with a common remembered ancestor. In terms of a patrilineal descent, these families share the same surname and are supposed to maintain contact with each other. The local term in such a case may befamilje (family), fis (kin) or rrënje (root). ii For example in Gjinar in Shpati exists a quarter called Mufalak where families with this surname settled. [186] !2 Regarding marriage and engagement ceremonies, the second half of August is considered 'ters' (vicious); therefore few ceremonies are organized in this period. For all villages under consideration the month of August is associated with the returning of the migrants. Marriages do tend to be organized during this month, while the village feasts celebrated in August (and also at Christmas) seem to have gained more significance for the community than other dates throughout the rest of the year. The fixation on August as a central month of the year is also expressed through the belief that each day of August mirrors the months of the forthcoming year, e. g. in terms of a weather forecast. 13 The same two months are preferred as feasting months in other Mediterranean countries such as Morocco (Lortat-Jacob 1994, 21). 14 Including villagers now living in the nearby town of Gjirokastra. 15 Exemplarily here was the composition of one multipart group incorporating singers from Erind, Valare, Golem and Lazarat. 16 A comparative case of such a trans-regional feast is Shëndëllia [Saint Elias] in Zavalina, Shpati. The unique case of the Bektashi feast of Baba Aliu on Mount Tomorr has assumed a role as a collective pilgrimage of trans-regional, national and even trans-national scope. 17 According to recent sources, the rural population of Albania fell by 15% between 1989—2001, as a result of internal and external migration (Carletto et al. 2004). 18 This became obvious in local interpretations of the feast of Saint Mary in Dhoksat, which was seen also as a 'meeting of generations' (takimi i brezave). 19 Panopoulos (1996, 66—67) in the case of singers from Naxos, made clear that these processes are understood by traditional musicians themselves in terms of a decontextualization and/or transformation of their musical practice. For them the notion of what is 'locally representative' remains an important tool for distinguishing what is 'in context' and what is 'out-of-context.' 20 In a similar manner the chapel of Nezhan nearby was financed by a local who had won a lottery in Greece. 21 The old church of Dhoksat destroyed in 1967 was dedicated to Shën Premte [Saint Paraskevi]; in 2001 the main celebration of Saint Mary's in Lunxhëria took place in Saraqinisht, whose main church is dedicated to Saint Mary (Gilles de Rapper, personal communication). 22 Quite different was the situation in Kreshova, a Bektashi village. Here a day was chosen and accepted for a village feast that had no religious [187] or historical relevance. The villagers choose 17 August with the justification that in August the migrants may come and join the feast. 23 The square by the plane tree as well as the marble plate were only constructed in 2007; in northern Greece the plane tree (platanos) assumes the same role at local feasts for Saints (paneyiri). 24 The laptop and set of speakers were set up inside this space. 25 With the inscription 'Në këtë vend më 8. november 1995 u Krijua Shoqata Athetarekulturore "Lunxhëria"' ['At this place was created on 8 November 1995 the Cultural Patriotic Association "Lunxhëria"']. 26 Built where the main church of Saint Paraskevi of Dhoksat stood before 1967 (Gilles de Rapper, personal communication). The building served as a bar and foods stand on the day of the feast. 27 In the sense of coming from out of the village which may be as close as another village from the same region. 28 For example, in Mallakastra, Labëria and Sulova the conditions for a man to participate in muhabet at the table are: 1. to be able to drink but not to lose control easily; 2. to be able to follow and to keep up the course of discussion and 3. to know how to sing with others. The individuals who are best able to do so have the best chances to be chosen as the head of the table or dollibash. 29 As Zografou (2007) has shown in her analysis of Pontian dance performances, cultural practice even permits to construct 'Sameness' and 'Otherness' in relation to the surrounding population through the same cultural object. 30 Panopoulos (1996, 63) mentions in the case of improvised singing in feasts on Naxos, Greece the local expression: 'Mono ama tairiaxei gine-tai kalo glendi' (Only if it matches well, can a good glendi happen). 31 Although within the Lunxhiot house there existed the tradition of an elevated stage for instrumental music (dhiolixhive) (see Dedi and Koçi 2006, 29), it has no tradition in open spaces; the circular form of the 'stage' in Dhoksat refers to the traditional lëmi (threshing places) of each household, which were used for dancing during feasts and weddings. They are positioned on the same ground level. 32 In this case according to kin association and village association (Sheper, Picar, Derviçan). 33 On the side of the bride: closest sit the uncles (daja, mother's brother and xhaja, father's brother). These places are called 'e ulur në qoshe' [188] ('sitting at the corner:' meaning at the head table). The third is the father of the girl, who is also 'head of the house' (zoti i shtëpisë) but he is not the 'head of the engagement ceremony' (zoti i trapezës). The same structure is found among the representatives of the other side. Then the order of sitting continues respectively, depending firstly on related-ness with the bride or groom, but also on the age of the participant. In such secondary places there can be changes in the order of sitting: those who are older may be respected by those who have a closer relationship with the bride and groom and be allowed to sit closer to the centre of the table. This is called 'retreat from order' ('lëshoj rradhën'). 34 If a male is greeted, also his mother and father, then his wife, his children and at the end his home in total have to be greeted. All this completes a 'true greeting.' 35 Up to this moment only small dishes and meze are served. 36 When dollia is to be made by the opposite side and the power of the table depends upon the head of the guest group, permission should be taken by the latter. 37 Dancing in Lunxhëria, for example, was traditionally accompanied by multipart singing predominantly of women (valle të kënduara), while instrumental accompaniment had remained a marginal phenomenon until the 1950s. 38 Private wedding videos confirm that up to the beginning of the 1990s some ritual parts of the wedding were still accompanied by multipart songs (Guçe 1994). 39 Although local discourse and Shituni (1989,190—1) use the vaguely defined term 'style' for these particularities, it might be better to speak of'variants' of the general mode of Lab multipart singing. 40 Particularly Valare and Erind; It is important to note that both villages were part of the same state farm with Dhoksat at the end of the 1980s (Gilles de Rapper, personal communication). 41 Erind, Golem and Lazarat are Muslim villages. Its inhabitants are referred to as Labs. The presence of people from Golem and Lazarat at the feast can also be understood from the perspective that some families living in Dhoksat originate from these villages, settling there in the 1970s and 1980s (Gilles de Rapper, personal communication). 42 In regard to the dressing code — wearing Chelsea football shirts instead of festive summer dress; in regard of measurement in eating and drinking: they were considered as drunkards; Amstel cans were towering up below their table. 43 This competitive aspect between vocal and instrumental soundscape, which may be termed also 'polymusic', is restricted neither to the occasion of a feast nor to the geographical space of South Albania. Bonini Baraldi witnessed during burial ceremonies in Transylvania a similar contestation of soundspace between an instrumental ensemble and weeping women (Bonini Baraldi 2005). references Blau, D., C. Kiel, A. Keil and S. Feld. 2002. 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In Urban music in the Balkans: Drop out ethnic identities, or a historical case of tolerance and global thinking? Ed. S. Shupo, 176—83. Tirana: asmus. Rapper, G. de. 2005. Better than Muslims, not as good as Greeks: Emigration as experienced and imagined by the Albanian Christians of Lunxhëri. In The new Albanian migration, ed. R. King, N. Mai, and S. Schwandner-Sievers, 173—94. Portland-Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Rice, T. 1980. A Macedonian Sobor: Anatomy of a celebration. Journal of American Folklore 98 (368): 113—28. Shituni, S. 1989. Polfonia labe. Tirana: ashsh. Sugarman, J. 1997. Engendering song: Singing and subjectivity at Prespa Albanian weddings. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Tirta, M. 1987. Shpati në vështrim historik etnokulturor In Shpati i Sipërm: Gjurmime rreth kulturës popullore, D. S. Shuteriqi, 11—27.Tirana: ASHSH. Turner, V W., and E. M. Bruner, eds. 1983. The anthropology of experience. Champaign, il: University of Illinois Press. Turner, V W. 1986. The anthropology of performance. Baltimore, md: paj. Ulqini, K. 1987. Mbijetoja të një organizimi të vjetër shoqëror në krahinën e Shpatit. In Shpati i Sipërm: Gjurmime rreth kulturës popullore, D. S. Shuteriqi, 207—15. Tirana: ashsh. Zografou, M. 2007. The politics of dance: The incorporation of the pontic refugees in modern Greek culture through the manipulation of dancing practices in a northern Greek village. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 17 (1): 1—21. Zojzi, R. 1949. Raport i ekspeditës në Luginën e Shkumbinit në vitin 1949. Unpublished report, Archive of Ethnography in iaksa, Tirana. -. 1962. Ndamja krahinore e popullit shqiptar. Etnografia Shqiptare 1:16—64. [l9l] Renaissance Architecture in Lviv: An Example of Mediterranean Cultural Import OLHA KOZuBSKA Ukrainian Catholic University, Ukraine the aim of this article is to explore the reception of Renaissance style in architecture of Ukraine as a prominent example of far-reaching influences of Mediterranean culture. The main focus of this study is on the Renaissance architecture of Lviv (Polish — Lwow, German — Lemberg; presently a town in Western Ukraine) and the two important agents in the process of reception and adaptation of Italian architectural model in the town: Italian architects working here on the one hand, and upper strata of urban population as consumers on the other. The period taken into consideration (sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries) is the late Renaissance: times when Classical and Italian styles penetrated cultural peripheries of Europe. 'What is Europe really and how far can it spread eastwards whilst still remaining Europe?' (Drakulic 2000). Political developments of the last decades have intensified the process of re-definition and revision of cultural boundaries of Europe, despite the risk that a new definition could still be 'a work of the cultural creation, of intellectual artifice, of ideological self-interest and self-promotion' (Wolff 1994, 4). An answer to the question 'Is Ukraine a part of Europe?' usually depends on who defines Europe and what reasons are taken into account. From the Ukrainian point of view the answer would surely be affirmative, and as an important reason, the political and intellectual elites will emphasize as the common cultural heritage: literature, art and architecture revealing the same stylistic features as in Western Europe. Renaissance became the first 'European' artistic style which penetrated into practically all spheres of Ukrainian cultural life, and has been often used as an important argument for stretching symbolic European boundaries further east. Regardless of current political implications and definitions of cultural boundaries, the aim of this article is to explore the reception of Renaissance style in architecture as a prominent example of the far-reaching influences of Mediterranean culture. The period taken into [194] consideration (sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries) has been regarded as late Renaissance and Mannerism: times when Classical and Italian styles penetrated the 'cultural peripheries' of Europe. One can speak about the process of 'domestication' of the Renaissance, its broad geographical and social diffusion, its incorporation into everyday practices and its effects on material culture and mentalities (Burke 1998, 14). In the Ukrainian case, effects of these 'uses of Italy' (Burke 1992, 6) were the most visible in architecture: stylistic features of the Italian Renaissance could be found in military and ecclesiastic architectural ensembles, in noble residences and private houses of town dwellers. ITALOPHILIA How far Mediterranean influences penetrated this region is demonstrated by the example of two Italian masters — Sebastiano Bracci and Octaviano Mancini — working on the restoration of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv (Aleksandrovych 2002, 631). However, most of the Renaissance monuments are located in the western part of present-day Ukraine. This part of the country roughly corresponds to its historical predecessor Galician Rus' that was incorporated into the Polish Kingdom in the mid-fourteenth century and became an administrative district called Rus' Principality (Wojewodztwo Ruskie) until the first half of the twentieth century. This region has been traditionally presented as a cultural borderland between Western (Latin or Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity. Here, also architectural heritage from the times before the Renaissance revealed the existence of at least two parallel building traditions well represented in stone/brick ecclesiastical architecture: the first was a continuation of building techniques and models of Kievan Rus' in Orthodox churches, while the second was represented by Gothic in Latin churches typically built by architects of German origin. The Renaissance style brought a certain degree of unification and similarity into the architecture of the region, where different building traditions were at work, which is especially evident in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious urban milieu of Lviv. Thus, the main focus of this study is on the Renaissance architecture of Lviv (Polish — Lwow, German — Lemberg; presently a town in Western Ukraine) and the two important agents in the process of reception and adaptation of Italian architectural model in the town: Italian ar- [195] chitects working here on the one hand, and upper strata of the urban population as consumers and active recipients on the other. Although town dwellers received the most attention here, it is necessary to note that in its preferences for Italian models this social stratum followed the example of elites, the royal court and nobility. Studies on the reception of the Renaissance noted a trend of 'Italophilia,' when Italian culture became fashionable in court circles in many parts of Europe: in Poland the trend seems to have been launched by the arrival of Queen Bona Sforza in 1518, and reached its height in the mid-sixteenth century (Burke 1998,172). Receptive to the 'Italian fashion,' lay and ecclesiastic noble patrons invited Italians to build and rebuild castles, residences and churches, or to plan whole towns. It is worth mentioning that Italians were among military architects invited by Polish dignitaries to work in the region. For instance, Bernardo Morando, a military engineer of Italian origin, was hired by the royal chancellor Jan Zamojski for the planning of his town Zamosc. Zamosc was the first settlement in Poland wholly planned according to Renaissance principles. Morando also visited the royal town of the Lviv in 1589 for the purpose of the 'delineation' of the defense system and suggested the use of the bastion system (Vuytsyk 1995,367—68). Later (in 1607) Aurelio Passarotti was sent by the King to examine existing defenses and to create a plan for the new ones in Lviv. Realization of his plan would cost some two millions of zloty, consequently Lviv urban government deemed ideas suggested by Italians as unrealistic (Vuytsyk 1995, 368). An example of a noble family who conducted lively building activities in Ukrainian lands during these times was that of the Dukes of Ostrog (the Ostroz'ki): duke Konstantyn of Ostrog employed Christoforus Bozzano to build a castle in Medzybizh, and Peter Sperendio to work on his other castle in Ostrog; a son of Kon-stantyn invited Italian architects to erect the church of the Bernardine friary in Iziaslav and a castle in Stare Selo near Lviv (Matsiuk 1997,19). Now in deplorable condition, the castle in Stare Selo was built in the late sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries by Ambrosio from Valltellina who settled in Lviv and received local citizenship. During the sixteenth-beginning of the seventeenth centuries, the [196] town of Lviv accepted many Italian architects as citizens: after arrival, they often married and assimilated into the local environment. This town has the best preserved and most prominent Renaissance heritage, and gives — unique for Ukrainian lands — examples of non-noble artistic patronage represented mainly by private buildings. Developing as a centre of long-distance trade already in the first half of the fourteenth century, Lviv had a population that was both multi-ethnic and multi-religious. A royal privilege for Magdeburg law issued in 1356 referred to four main religious groups living in the town: Armeni, Rutheni, Judei et Saraceni, apart from Romani (that is Catholics), (Kapral 1998, 3). Here the King allowed aliis gentibus habitantibus in eadem civitate, videlicet Ormenis, Iudeis, Saracenis, Ruthenis et aliis gentibus cuiuscumque condicionis vel status existent to use their own laws, thus revealing different religious groups living in the town. The market of Lviv contributed to further diversification of the local population attracting picturesque crowds of foreign merchants, so vividly described by Martin Gruneweg from Gdansk (Danzig), who, being involved in trade, lived there between 1582 and 1606. He compared the town to a great port like Venice, where one can find visitors from all over the world and every language one wanted (Gruneweg 2003, 7). The town became a site of interactions between diverse nationalities and religions (e. g., served as the residence for archbishops of three Christian rites: Orthodox, Latin and Armenian) and witnessed intense ideological rivalries between different group identities. Belfries, towers, churches lent concrete expression to the competition between religious and ethnic groups, so that architecture seems to engage in these ideological debates which can be understood only if someone is informed about the complexities of Lviv's political history and turbulent relations among its competing nationalities and religions (Zhuk 2005, 96). Thus, in the case of Lviv, Italian architectural models were applied in the multi-cultural environment where distinct groups (religious communities) had their own architectural traditions, so it is interesting to see how this influenced Renaissance features and what impact the new style had on local traditions; or, in other words, to see how 'the process of appropriation, adaptation and cultural translation' (Burke 1992, 7) worked in this particular geographical, political and social context. [i97] ITALIAN MASTERS New stylistic models were adopted in Lviv architecture starting from the mid-sixteenth century after a great fire destroyed the medieval town in 1527. The town's stabile economic position at this time ensured a sweeping reconstruction according to the contemporary fashion evincing the influence of Renaissance forms (Zhuk 2005,105). These forms were brought by 'labor emigrants' from northern Italy and southern Switzerland, particularly from the regions of Como and Lugano. The first known master was Petrus murator Italus (in the record from 1563 — Magister Petrus Italus de Luugnon, civis Leopoliensis) mentioned in town books (Acta Consularia) under the year 1543 (Lozinski 1901, 24). His most important building project in Lviv was an Orthodox (Ruthenian) church of the Virgin Mary (the Dormition Church) that had to be built anew after the old edifice was destroyed by the fire of 1527. Documents from 1558 informed about the architect complaining about the irregular supply of building materials by employers, Orthodox confraternity (Stau-ropigion), and delays in the building process. Nevertheless, the church was finished and consecrated in 1559 (Nelhovskyi 1967, 90). Unfortunately, the building was destroyed by another fire in 1571, and there are no data left regarding its architectural features, no image or plan of this monument remained. Among other works attributed to Petrus Italus were porches of private buildings. For instance, the porch of building number 20 on Armenian street preserved until the present day despite numerous reconstructions that affected the building itself (Vuytsyk 1996, 15). With ionic columns and heavy moldings this architectural element was apparently too monumental for the modest edifice on a narrow street. Another porch, rich in ornament (spandrels decorated with floral motives) and more subtle in construction, is dated to 1555 according to the inscription on the lintel. The porch was made for the house of rich burgher and town councillor Stancel Szolz, however the building [i98] figure i Portal, 1555 (after Lozinski 1901) was disassembled in the nineteenth century and the porch is known only from nineteenth century drawings (fig. 1). The 1560s brought further records mentioning new Italian masters in Lviv and : Gabryel Quadro Italus magister murator (1561), brothers Angi-olo and Gallacius designated as Itali de Bruzin (the latter died in 1560), Franciscus Roland de Brusimpiano, Peregrinus Bononicus and the already mentioned Christophus Bozzano from Ferrara. Not all these names have any immediate connection to the existent Renaissance monuments (at least there is no evidence for it), but they do give an idea about the origin of these Renaissance masters, who came from Lom-bardy, Ferrara, or Bologna and stayed in the town for a while. This also demonstrates how many masters were coming to the region. Their presence contributed greatly to the formation of the professional organization of Lviv architects: a guild of builders and stone masons was formed at this time and its statue was confirmed by the town council in 1572 (Kapral 2007, 444). Members of the guild were all Lviv citizens [199] called in the document famati et providi magistri muratores et lapidae cives in-frascripti Leopoliensis. Among them also Italian masters were listed, such as Petrus Casmur Italus, Rochus Safranyecz Italus and Franciscus Crotophila (the latter was later mentioned as Franciscus (Quadro Krotofilia Italus murator) (Kapral 2007, 446). We know, however, very little about their works. Well documented activity had Petrus Crassowski Italus Murator Szwan-czar, a master who arrived from Ticino/Tessin and received local citizenship in 1567 (Lozinski 1901, 32). Szwanczar could be understood as Swiss, but his name Crassowski (quite of local character) was more difficult to clarify. A plausible explanation was that such a name derives from village of Krasow near Lviv with a stone mine in its vicinity, where the master probably lived for a while (Lozinski 1901, 32). Cras-sowski was not very fortunate in his great projects: he constructed two bell-towers in Lviv, but neither survived. The first one, built for the Armenian Church, burned down in 1778 'until the foundations.' The second was commissioned by the already mentioned Orthodox Confraternity for their church of the Virgin Mary in 1568. Even before the construction had been finished, the tower developed in the masonry and collapsed, still unfinished, in 1570. David Ruthenus, a representative of the Orthodox community, initiated a court case at the town court in his own and the community's name (suo et totius Civitatis vici-norum suorum religionis Rutheniae nominitus) blaming the architect for this misfortune (Lozinski 1901, 33). To defend himself Peter Crassowski asked his colleagues who worked in the region to give an expertise. These were Alberto, Jacopo, Martinus Quadrino and Rochus (a Venetian working in Lviv, mentioned in 1572) — all Italos muratores as court records emphasized. Apparently the presence of the specialists was of little help because Peter lost the case and had to pay compensation to the Confraternity (Lozinski 1901,33). More successful was this architect in private buildings: his 'Black House' on Market Square no. 4 is one of the best examples of local Re- naissance architecture. According to the agreement concluded with the owner, Sophia Hannel, in 1577, the master had to decorate the façade and attic with columns and carved stones (columnas et kabzamszy[?] omnes ex lapidibus sculptis parare) (Gçbarowicz 1962, 81). Sophia personally con-[200] trolled the work and supplied materials for the building. Today it is the most richly decorated Renaissance monument: the façade is all covered with so-called 'diamond' rustication made of limestone. The stone darkened in the nineteenth century, so the mansion received its name 'The Black' much later than it was built. Especially elaborately decorated is the ground floor level: the portal and window frames were covered with floral ornaments; sculptures of saints adorned the architraves (fig. 2). In 1595, this house was bought by an Italian, Thomaso Alberti. Alberti and numerous other Italians who settled in Lviv were not architects: many of them were merchants, some arrived with political missions, still others had to leave their homeland and to seek shelter here, as for instance Urbano della Rippa Ubaldini who found his new home in Lviv. A relative of the Pope Sixtus V and Cardinal Octa-viano Ubaldini, he took an active part in an unsuccessful plot against the Medici and had to flee from Florence. Ubaldini appeared first in Krakow then in Lviv, where he married a daughter of the town councillor Wilczek and received citizenship in 1579. Thanks to his wife's dowry, Ubaldini became an owner of 1/3 of the building on Market Square no. 3, that is next to Sophia Hannel's house (Zubrytsky 2002, 185). He participated in trade and established close contacts with another Lviv citizen of Italian origin Sebastiano Montelupo. Domenico Montelupo, the son of Sebastiano, organized the first post in Lviv (1629). It is worth mentioning that the post office was located in Bandinelli's house — a building situated next to that of Ubaldini's on Market Square no. 2 (Vuytsyk 1984, 98—9). Roberto Bandinelli, a relative of the famous Florentine sculptor Bacco Bandinelli, was a rich Lviv burgher of Italian origin. His house is another late-Renaissance monument of Lviv: unlike in other sixteenth century buildings, here the original inner-planning has been preserved (Vuytsyk 1984). On the southern part of Market Square (no. 14) there is a building of Antonio Massari, a Venetian councilor (bailo) settled in Lviv. [2Ol] figure 2 'The Black House,' doorway (after Lozmski 1901) The façade is decorated with rustication with a Venetian lion on the top of the doorway arch: the lion holds a book with the date '1600' (fig. 3). This building was started in 1589, but not preserved intact (for instance, the fourth floor was added in the nineteenth century). Still, details of the façade with rustic decoration reveal features of the sixteenth century. The house of Antonio Massari was the work of another Italian architect, Paul from Rome (Paulus Romanus murator Italus f igure 3 Element of Massary's house (photo by Yulia Andrusiv) or Paulo Romano as is evident from his signature), who received local citizenship in 1585. He and his older colleague Peter Barbon (Petrus Barbon Italus murator or Petrus di Barbona) were the most prominent artists of Italian origin working in Lviv (Lozmski 1901, 44—5). Peter Barbon (died 1588) worked in cooperation (muratoriae artis socius) with Paulo, as is evident from Barbon's testament; one more member of this team was the already mentioned architect of the castle in Stare Selo Ambrosius Simonis murator Italiae oriundus, as town documents called him, coming from Valtellina, Switzerland (Lozmski 1901, 46—7). The testament implied that Peter Barbon built a new bell-tower of the Orthodox Church of the Virgin Mary commissioned by Kon-stantyn Korniakt, a rich Greek merchant settled in the town (for this reason it was often called Korniakt's tower). The earliest history of Lviv written by its burgomaster Bartolomej Zimorowicz in the 1670s informed that the tower was built in 'ionic style' and was 'covered with silver tin' (Zimorowicz 2002,119). The monument has been appraised by art historians as the best Renaissance tower in the Polish kingdom: the composition of this 60.15 m high construction resembles Italian campaniles and initially stood apart from the church wall. The fourth level and a Baroque helmet were added after the tower was damaged [203] during the Tartar siege in 1695 (Bevz 2008, 92). Korniakt also invited Peter Barbon to build his own house on Market Square (presently building no. 6, belonging to Lviv Historical museum). The edifice is located on two standard plots and therefore it is twice larger than a regular house on Market Square: in fact, Kor-niakt's palace was one of the largest and most splendid buildings of the sixteenth century town. Presently the monument combines features from the sixteenth till the nineteenth centuries. The first reconstruction happened in 1640, when the building was bought by King Jan Iii Sobieski: an attic with figures of knights and a portal with columns were added at that time. The balcony — an absolutely alien element here — was added in the nineteenth century. The inner yard is surrounded with a three-storey Renaissance gallery: it was restored during the 1930s and called afterwards 'The Italian yard' (Vuytsyk 1991, 31). In order to achieve an effect of lightness and grace, the columns of each storey were of different orders: Tuscan order on the ground floor, Doric on the first and Ionic on the second. This principle could be observed in the Roman Colosseum and was widely applied by Renaissance architects, starting from Leone Battista Alberti. After the death of Peter Barbon, his younger partner, Paulo Romano, stepped into the forefront. According to the above mentioned testament, Paulo had to finish some of Barbon's objects, like unspecified works for the Armenian community (apud Armenos) (Lozinski 1901, 45). Most likely these works included an arcade gallery of the Armenian church of the Virgin Mary that survived fires and numerous reconstructions. Paulo's greatest work was the Orthodox church of the Virgin Mary (the Dormition Church). As follows from the agreement concluded between the Orthodox confraternity and Paulo in 1591, the architect agreed to build a church according 'to the form and representation' presented to the members of the Confraternity (Sharanevych 1886, 95). Because of a lack of space, the church does not have a west- ern façade — this part is built into a row of buildings. Still, its southern wall flanked by pilasters of Doric order and pierced with round-arch windows does look magnificent. The round shaped presbytery part was crowned by a mighty dome; the upper part of the walls (below the [204] roof and above the pilasters) is decorated with a carved stone frieze. It has been often emphasized that the architectonic composition of this monument was a combination of elements from Ukrainian wooden architecture and models of the Italian Renaissance: the local tradition was represented by three domes situated along one axis, while Western influences could be seen in the basilical structure and carved-stone decorations (Vuytsyk 2004,36). Paulo created a plan for the building, but was not administering this project for a long time: the Confraternity invited two other architects to continue the construction: Wojciech (Albertus) Kapinos in 1597 and Abrosio from Valtellina. Ambrosio (he received a nick-name Prykhylny 'gracious' after entering the guild in Lviv) became chief administrator of the building campaign thereafter (Vuytsyk 2004, 36). As was mentioned above, around the same time, Ambrosio Prykhylny was invited by Jan of Ostrog to build the castle in Stare Selo near Lviv. Paulo himself switched to another great building enterprise, namely the Church of St. Andrew of the Bernardine (Franciscan Observant) friary. Similarly, here Paulo created an architectural design for the future church, but controlled the building process only until 1613, when he was again replaced by Abrosio (Zimorowicz 1672, 94). The building was finished in 1630, that is, long after Paul's death in 1618. One more monument belonged to this epoch and was associated with the name of Paulo Romano: this is a chapel of the Campiani family, local burghers of Italian origin. The chapel was founded in the late sixteenth century by the head of the family, who arrived in Lviv holding a doctorate from an Italian university. He had some personal relationships with Paulo Romano. Stylistic analysis of the chapel architecture allowed for establishing Paulo's authorship also in this case: its façade had a clear three-level horizontal division (characteristic for Italian models applied in Lviv) and diamond rustication on the basement. The upper level is separated by a frieze adorned with rosettes and lion heads, a favorite type of stone decoration applied in almost all of Paolo's works, figure 4 Element of the synagogue architecture (after Lozmski 1901) [2°5] as in the Dormition church or St. Andrew's church. Stone reliefs with biblical scenes, allegoric images and epitaphs were added later by Johan Pfister, a sculptor of German origin who arrived in Lviv around 1612 (Liubchenko 1981, 139). Paolo Romano was invited to work outside Lviv as for example, in Jesupol, where he built the church of the Dominican friary commissioned by count Potocki in 1598 (totally rebuilt in the eighteenth century) (Vuytsyk 1982, 97). Just to show how many-sided was the talent of Paulo Romano, one has to mention his involvement in issues related to the town's defence system in 1614, when the urban government — being dissatisfied with the ideas offered by foreign engineers —, organized a commission of local specialists. With his death, a brilliant epoch of Lviv Renaissance architecture was practically over. Although after the death of Peter Barbon and Paolo Romano there was no longer any equally talented Italian artist, many masters contin- ued their works in Lviv. Documents mentioned Paulus Italus murator de ducatu Clamensi, called Paul Shchasny 'the Lucky' (again a local nickname received after entering the guild) who in 1585 received Lviv citizenship. This master undertook so many works at the same time that [206] his envious colleagues accused him of being in violation of the rule that no architect should take more than two jobs simultaneously. Such complaints did not deter him from becaming a zechmeister (the head of a guild) in 1585, (Lozinski 1901, 41). The Lviv Jewish community invited Paul 'the Lucky' to build a synagogue commissioned by Israel Nachmanovich: a small structure hidden between houses in the Jewish district of Lviv. The synagogue, popularly called 'Golden Rose,' was destroyed in the 1940s, but some drawings and photos reveal its architectural features, quite archaic and modest in fact. The most interesting element was a kind of a stone altar built in the form of a porch and decorated with carved stone ornaments (fig. 4). Paul's authorship was confirmed in the court case (1604—1606), where he was summoned as a witness: the architect declared he built the synagogue and a house for a certain Mark, and everything that was on the site near the town wall. The litigation was about the place of a Jesuit church and collegium for the newly arrived Jesuit order. The King endowed the Catholic order with the site within the Jewish quarter. Justifying his action with the fact that there was no royal permission for constructing a synagogue, he confiscated the building and gave it into the Jesuits' possession. The Jewish community solved the problem by paying 4000 zloty of compensation. Of some advantage was also the relatively small size of the site, apparently too small to build the impressive edifice planned by Jesuits. A legend existed that tells about a beautiful Jewish girl, Golden Rose (her name was given to this monument later), who sacrificed her life in order to save the synagogue from devastation (Bevz 2008, 99— 100). The Jesuits moved to another part of the town, constructing the first example of Baroque church architecture there during the 1610— 1630s. Giacomo Briano, a learned Jesuit architect, arrived from Rome to supervise the construction of this monument designed similarly to Roman Il Jesu church (Zhuk 2005,106). This three-nave basilica, 41 m long and 26 m high, is the greatest church in the town, and another monument built by an Italian master, though in Baroque style. Starting from the two last decades of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, town documents contained numerous names of masters of Italian origin as for instance Jacobus Italus murator de Regazzolis a civitate Clauina/Claino (1574), Martinus de Muralto (near Lugano) murator Italus (1580), Bernardus Francoson Venetianus murator (1575), [207] Zaccarius Castello de Lugano Nobilis Serenissimi Regis Poloniae Sigismundi III ar-chitectus (1593), Caspar de Casparino (1597), Pietro Caracci (1605), or Dominicus Sol de Vetulis (1608), Nicolaus Silvestri de Bormio Valtellino (1628) (Lozinski 1901, 79). However, their names are all that we know, and there is no source found so far that would help to connect the names to concrete monuments in the town. One can assume that some of them could be architects of anonymous Renaissance buildings, chapels or even architectural decorations still preserved in Lviv, but private houses of urban dwellers represented a particular field of their activity. In sixteenth-seventeenth century Lviv there were two types of private stone building: a standard type marked by a narrow façade with three windows, when the size of a façade was determined by the measure of standard taxed lots; and a palace-type usually twice larger (with six windows) located on two joint lots. The latter type is represented by the already mentioned palace of Korniakt. However, it is known that there were more palaces, such as the palace of the Campiani family and that of the Latin Archbishop, both located on Market Square and not preserved till today; the palace of Georg Gutteter on Market Square 18, built in the late sixteenth century and heavily rebuilt in the eighteenth (Melnyk 2008, 129). Recognizing its value for the splendor and beauty of the town (magno sumptu et impendio pro splendore et ornamento urbis extructam), King Sigismundus Augustus even freed Gut-teter's palace from duties of hospitality (ad hospitacione) in 1553 as is evident from Acta Consularia of Lviv (Lozinski 1901, 82). Among the best preserved 'standard size' private houses built in the Renaissance style and attributed to Italian masters, one can mention the house of Dominic Hepner, a doctor, who built his house on Market Square (no. 28) at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Its structure and the ground floor with curved-stone doorways were preserved in their original forms, despite reconstructions of the period 1763—1765, when buttresses were added to the façade. The façade preserved its clear horizontal division that was typical for Italian models in Lviv, as for instance in Bandinelli's house or Kampiani chapel. Burghers were able to form their own understanding of beauty and were eager to adopt the new aesthetics into everyday life. For instance, [208] Sophia Hannel was very much concerned with the splendor of her new building ('The Black House'), talking proudly about it as the one 'apparently built for eternity because of its decoration' (Gçbarowicz 1962, 81). In another case, town documents contained a report regarding the condition of the house owed by a certain Jadwiga from Tarlo written by a representative of urban government in 1581: an inspector noted that old the doorways and window frames (still in good condition, bona et satis durabilia) were exchanged for new ones, richly decorated and 'fashionable.' He noted that the new architectural details replaced the 'good old ones' only to decorate the building and with no evident necessity (pro speciali ornamento, $iuam pro nulla evidenti necessitate, in locum bonorum antiquorum lapidum impositas) (Gçbarowicz 1962, 81). Here, one can notice a sign of moral criticism regarding excessive luxury and new fashion that was revealed by the trend of rebuilding and reconstructions without real need. With its high number of private buildings constructed during the second half of the sixteenth—early seventeenth century, when practically the whole central part, Market Square, was rebuilt in the Renaissance style, the case of Lviv demonstrated that rich town dwellers were a driving force in the process of adoption of the new style on a mass scale and that conspicuous consumption apparently became a sign of a status. A house in the town created a good opportunity for self-representation, for demonstration of one's social and financial status, while Italian masters gave a possibility to present one's identity in a new style. The magnificence of portals that were often built into quite modest buildings seems to be a wide-used means to compensate for a lack of space and monumentality, and to satisfy aspirations for respectable self-representations. Renaissance churches and belfries expressed the same spirit of competition, though on the collective and not on the individual level. Each of the four main religious groups of Lviv strived to adorn their religious monuments, as great representative objects, with Renaissance elements, restyle or rebuild them in the prestigious style. For instance, the splendid ensemble of the Orthodox church of the Virgin Mary (the Dormition Church) was often seen as an ideological response of the Eastern Rite Christians to the challenge of the Latin West and the religious enthusiasm of counter-Reformation proponents (Zhuk 2005, 105). Moreover, this was also a response to the position of the [209] dominant Latin community that subjugated non-Catholic Christians of the town and reduced the autochthonous Orthodox population to the status of minority. Interestingly enough, the ensemble of the Dormition Church was designed by the same architect, Paolo Romano, who worked also at St. Andrew's Church of the Franciscan friary, seen as 'the most eloquent architectural manifestation of counter-Reformation spirits in Lviv (Zhuk 2005,105). Moreover, as we already know, this master built a Renaissance arched gallery in the courtyard of the Armenian Church. In this way, ideological opponents and competitive neighbors seemed to use the same 'artistic language' in their attempt to impress and make their presence visible. Therefore, Renaissance could be interpreted in this context as an 'international language,' able to adapt to specific needs of different groups of the Lviv population and bringing a certain degree of unification into the 'plural voices' of the town's architecture. It is easy to notice that Renaissance architects worked not only for great representative objects (these were rare occasions), but also in the sphere of 'mass production,' that is architectural details, decorative elements, etc. (such as portals, inner doorways, window frames, etc.). From there on, young masters were tested for their skills and abilities to produce a Doric column. It is worth mentioning that this import introduced new features into the architecture of Ukraine, like the classical order system or decorative curved-stone patterns, etc. Gradually the order system and floral motifs from architecture were transferred into applied arts, in particularly to wood-curved ornaments of the iconostasis and church furniture, penetrating into more provincial workshops and indeed reaching masses of ordinary consumers. Here, one certainly agrees with P. Burke that non-Italians were not passive recipients of Italian fashion but actively 'translated' models and elements of the new style. On the other hand, the talents of Italian 'magisters' working in Lviv differed, but even the most gifted and proficient, as Paolo Romano or Peter Barbon, did not establish a local tradition or a school. There is not even evidence for the adoption of Italian artistic/architectural terminology in the region. For almost a century Italian architects settled [210] and assimilated in Lviv, but no representative of the second-generation (that means their sons or pupils) produced anything significant: Lviv guild masters were soon replaced by architects of German and Dutch origin at the beginning of the seventeenth century, who were invited by Polish magnates to build Baroque edifices in the town. In this way, Renaissance architectural models brought to Lviv from the Mediterranean remained predominantly a cultural import. The 'golden age' of Renaissance culture in Lviv declined in the 1620s and this reflected a general weakening of the position of towns in the Polish Kingdom, their economic and political roles. If there was an element of social rivalry between the nobility and burghers, the latter definitely lost and this was explicitly mirrored in the architecture: after the 1620s, the magnates replaced burghers as artistic patrons in Lviv; equally, primary roles in architecture were played by architects serving the magnates and not masters of the town guilds. conclusion The Renaissance came to this part of Europe as a royal fancy (Da Costa Kaufmann 2004, 207), and the King's court was the center from which the spirit of 'Italophilia' was radiating. Current aspirations and a suitable level of life enabled urban elites of the most important towns to enter the group of recipients of the new style that resulted in the construction of splendid Renaissance monuments in the Polish Kingdom (including also Ukrainian lands) commissioned by non-noble patrons. Perceived as an esthetically appealing novelty and up-to-date 'fashion,' Renaissance architecture appeared to be a suitable means for self-representation of the upper strata of the Lviv population; something to be used for the demonstration of one's status and advance, as became especially evident in the case of private buildings of the Lviv urban elite. Italian masters that arrived and settled in Lviv supplied a possibility to present one's identity in a new style. Their works gave evidence for the spirit of competition that could be perceived on the in- dividual as well as on the collective level, when the magnificence of edifices represented a kind of response to a rival. Comparing Renaissance architecture constructed in Lviv by Italian masters with the prominent models in the centers of Italian Renaissance (such as Florence), one could certainly notice the provincial, 'manneristic' character of [211] Ukrainian examples. One could even assume that a sixteenth-century process of labor migration brought here masters from northern Italy and southern Switzerland whose qualification gave them little chance to find a job at home. On the other hand, from the 'local' point of view (that is not 'from the center' but from the province itself) it is easy to notice how creative were the masters in assimilation and adaptation of imported models to local conditions. The Renaissance style brought by Italian masters represented the 'golden age' of Lviv architecture; similarly the social weight and wealth of the Lviv burghers reached its zenith in the sixteenth century: to be active in the process of reception one has to achieve a significant degree of welfare and be ready to 'renew' the life style. In this regard, the spread of Renaissance architecture was conditioned not the least by the development of towns, their economy and commercial contacts, and consequently by the well-being of town-dwellers. It is symptomatic also, that Renaissance architecture commissioned by burgers was to a great extent limited to the largest and most developed towns in the Polish kingdom like Krakow, Poznan or Lviv. Reception of the Renaissance by the urban population contributed to further dissemination of new artistic elements and for the emergence of'mass production' of Renaissance architectural elements. However, the word 'mass production' in relation to Lviv Renaissance architecture is somewhat misleading and cannot be taken literally: the 'masses' able to indulge in the new artistic fashion belonged to urban elites and represented not at all the numerous strata in the Polish Kingdom. Rich town dwellers emulated the style of life and esthet-ical preferences of the Polish nobility whose 'Italophilia' introduced an eloquent example to follow. It is interesting to note how receptive were the different religious/ethnic groups (nationes) that formed the urban population of the town to the new stylistic trend. The Italian Renaissance, this product of Mediterranean culture, became a form of 'transnational' style in the multi-ethnic environment of Lviv. Its archi- tectural principles and decorations were equally applicable in works commissioned by the Jewish community or by an Armenian merchant, by an Orthodox confraternity or by a Catholic monastic order. Works of the Italian masters were created simultaneously for clients of diverse [212] cultural backgrounds, and Renaissance art could be seen as a kind of 'unifying factor' in the state of cultural diversity. Using the 'linguistic metaphor' one could note that in the broader perspective of cultural transfers and circulation of artistic models in Renaissance Europe, Lviv Renaissance architecture could be seen as 'an example of the dialects of an international language' (Da Costa Kaufmann 2004, 203), thus securing its place in the general European cultural heritage. references Aleksandrovych, V 2002. Architektura ta mistobuduvannia xvi-xvii stolit. In Istoria ukrainskoi kultury, ed. Y. Isayevych, 2:629—53. Kyiv: Naukova Dumka. Bevz, M. 2008. Arkhitektura Lvova: chas i styli. Lviv: Tsentr Europy. Burke, P. 1992. The uses of Italy. In The Renaissance in national context, ed. R. Porter and M. Teich, 6—20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -. 1998. The European Renaissance: Centers and peripheries. London: Blackwell. Da Costa Kaufmann, T. 2004. Toward a geography of art. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Drakulic, S. 2000. Who's afraid of Europe? Opening address at the 14th European Meeting of Cultural Journals. Http://www.eurozine .com/articles/2000-11-15-drakulic-en.html. Gçbarowicz, M. 1962. Studia nad dziejami kultury artystycznejpožnego renesansu w Polsce. Torun: Towarzystwo Naukowe w Toruniu. Gruneweg, M. 2003. Opys Lvova 1601—1606. Ed. and trans. Y. Isayevych. Yi 29:5—17. Liubchenko, V 1981. Lvivska skulptura xvi — xvii stolit. Kyiv: Naukova Dumka. Lozinski, W. 1901. Sztuka lwowska w xvi i xvii wieku. Lviv: Nakladem H. Altenberga. Matsiuk, 0.1997. Zamky ifortetsi Zakhidnoi Ukrainy. Lviv: Tsentr Europy. Melnyk I. 2008. Lvivski vulytsi i kamianytsi. Lviv: Tsentr Europy. Nelhovskyi, Y. 1967. Mystetstvo xiv-pershoi polovyny xvii stolit-tia. In Istoria ukrainskoho mystetstva, ed. M. Bazhan, 2:56—106. Kyiv: Akademia nauk ussr. Kapral, M., ed. 2007. Oekonomica privilegia civitatis Leopoliensis xv— xviii saec.: Privilegia et statuta contubernium et gildiarum. Lviv: Monumenta Leopolitana. -, ed. 1998. Privilegia civitatis Leopoliensis (xiv— xviii saec.). Lviv: Monumenta Leopolitana. Sharanevych, I. 1886. Yubileynoe izdaniye v pamiat joo-letnego osnovania Lvovskogo Stavropigijskogo bratstva Lviv. Vuytsyk, V. 1982. Architektor Pavlo Rymlianyn. Zhovten, no. 8:97—101. -. 1984. Z istorii lvivskykh kamianyts. Zhovten, no. 6:98—9. -. 1991. National Historical and Architectural Preserve in Lviv. Lviv: Ka- meniar. -. 1995. Arkhivni dzerela pro perebuvannia arkhitektora Bernar- do Morando u Lvovi. Zapysky n t sh 2:367—68. -. 1996. Materialy do istorii kamianyts vulytsi Virmenskoi. Halytska Brama [2I3] 21:15—23. -. 2004. Architekturnyi ansambl Uspenskoho bratstva: restavrat- sia ta obnovy. Visnyk instytutu Ukrzahidproektrestavracia 14:36—42. Wolff, L. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The map of civilisation on the mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, c a: Stanford University Press. Zimorowicz, B. 1672. Domus virtutis per patresfraters ordinis minorum S. Fran-cisci etc. constructa. Leopoli. Zubrytsky, D. 2002. Chronika mista Lvova. Trans. I. Svarnyk. Lviv: Tsentr Europy. Zhuk, I. 2005. The Architecture of Lviv from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. In Lviv: A city in the crosscurrents of culture, ed. J. Czaplicka, 95—130. Cambridge, m a: Harvard University Press. Undecided Past — National Identities and Politics of Diversity: The Mount Eytan Commemoration Site UDI LEBEL Sapir College and Ariel University Center, Israel ZEEV DRORY Kinneret College, Israel in 1982 the Israeli government launched a proposal to establish a national commemoration site on Mount Eytan. Despite intensive activity, the project was shelved in 2002. The article presents official discourses regarding memory, commemoration, and setting collective boundaries. It presents the theoretical arguments as well as conflicting processes in politics of memory in Israel, which occurred along a different axis and regarding different variables. Finally we discuss the social and political significance arising from the project's management and in terms of creating consensus in an age of privatization, to the extent that projections can be made from an event of this nature. The museum is a cultural agent acting within national politics to manufacture representation of (subjects of) the past and 'graft' them as objects (Katriel 1997b, 147). Museums are sites where links between memory and history are created, in such a way that the sub-group which initiates the memory aspires, using a unique narrative, for its past to be transformed into the individual memory of each visitor (Katriel 1994, 1). Narratives of the past thus become relevant both for understanding the present and for internalizing recommended ways of coping with it (Katriel 1993, 69). If the process unfolds in a manner approved by the establishment, this sites will become state-supported museums that the public is encouraged to visit (Barena 1989,118). Economic considerations, among others, propel many museums into the heart of consensus. For example, South Africa's Apartheid Museum, engaging with a charged issue, takes tremendous pains to avoid diverging from the social consensus. Efforts are made to avoid conflict-generating narratives or exhibitions. In fact, managing the museum means 'managing consensus,' stressing disengagement from the [216] past and 'legitimizing the present.' Accordingly, the museum has no content addressing apartheid and the contemporary reality in South Africa (Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007, 57). Israeli museums dealing with Judaism avoid emphasizing the different streams of the Judaism they memorialize; instead, projecting the message of 'one people,' they underscore religious-national unity. Differences and distinctions that once characterized varying streams, and still do, are un-mentioned (Fenichel 2005). Museums that are opened to support a dominant narrative, with an element of 'rewriting history' to favour the dominant ideological agenda, are often located beyond the circle of public support. They cannot collaborate with counterpart institutions, due to their competing values and messages (Katriel 1997a, 56). For instance, museums aimed at empowering women within the national narrative are autonomous, since in their state counterparts, women's place does not subvert their marginal status as related in state historiography (Izraeli 1993, 515). The 'most sacred' museums — that attract societal approval but also total alertness to their contents — are those dealing with national commemoration of death in the given society (Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1997, 85). The dead are exploited there for the needs of the living, with attempts to attribute to their lives the legacy, and prescriptions allegedly written or spoken in their lifetime by the dead, and rendering them normatively binding on society (Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1991, 3). The sanctity of national death means placing it above political disputes — which simply enhances societal delegitimization for presenting subversive and extra-consensual narratives in museums engaging with national death (Luke 2002). Drawing on Weber's concept of'social closure' — a process through which social groups seek to increase their advantages by restricting access to political resources and economic opportunities to a limited circle of entitled people — those understandings were adopted within the cultural arena. The arena of memory and museums become instru- ments of the state to design an 'exclusionary closure' with restricted access rights. Museums thus become a 'symbolic border' of political power. Actors and perspectives deemed undesirable by the political elite are unwelcome in state-budgeted museums (Erikson 1964, 9—21). A museum's contents, including people commemorated there, are re- [217] vised at different periods — when the ruling party steps down, or when changes occur in the zeitgeist which influence national memory (Du-verger 1972, 308). All these impact on what is then perceived as the consensual state narrative (Shari 1996), spurring the research community to assess the close ties between type of government, political culture, and changes occurring in national museums in different countries (Bennett 2001, 89). israeli commemoration: the national-building era Most museums in Israel are run and funded by the state, which sees them as a pivotal force for educating the young in Zionism, and a cultural agent for foreign tourism (Carmeli and Vezbit 2004). Commemorative sites for Israel's fallen appeared following canonized events: pre-statehood clashes with the Arabs, Israel's wars, and small-scale military clashes. Many organizations participated in these commemorations, where spontaneity predominated. In that dynamic, groups with stronger public standing have better access to government funding and land allocated for commemoration (Azaryahu and Kellerman 2004, 109; Shamir 1988,13). Commemoration initiatives were financed by the state or private donations, and maintained by various organizations. Monuments and sites were generally designed by associates and relatives involved in the commemorative process. Shamir notes that the state normally recognized spontaneous commemorative acts, marked sites on official routes of school field-trips, and permitted political participation at ceremonies there. Private and spontaneous commemorations thus became part of the landscape and the Israeli calendar (Shamir 1988,15). In 1949, the Ministry of Defence established the Department for Soldier Commemoration. Its brief was to coordinate all commemorative activities and supervise the establishment of monuments. In 1959 Defence Minister David Ben-Gurion appointed the Public Council for Soldier Commemoration, some of whose members were bereaved parents, in order to advise the officials on commemoration policy. Though the state tried to become actively involved via the council, [218] the 'democratic commemoration' pattern of spontaneous memorials persisted. The state established only a few monuments by means of the unit (Shamir 1988,158). Commemorating the 1948 War of Independence — the institutionalized ambiguous interrelations among the many actors in the commemorative arena: the Defence Ministry, the Israel Defence Force (idf), families of the fallen, soldiers' units, and other security organizations that lost members in conflicts (Azaryahu 2000, 89—116). In Shamir's words, the state adopted 'a non-intervention policy,' granting families of the fallen strongest influence over the establishing of monuments (Shamir 1988,16). Throughout Israel, commemorative sites originally dedicated to the war of independence eventually became general remembrance sites. In schools, remembrance walls for graduates killed in the War of Independence became monuments for all the school's fallen. Commemorative sites were visited in daily life, not only during state ceremonies. From the war of independence — Everyone involved contributed different ritual contents and forms of preserving memory, reflected particularly in inscriptions on the monuments: texts derived from Biblical sources, Hebrew literature, or from army and personal parlance. Almost all, however, are couched in mythic/heroic terms, recognizing the contribution of the fallen and acknowledging the parents' and relatives' profound loss: but beyond this, the languages of commemoration — its voices, symbols and ceremonies — are diverse (Azaryahu 1996, 67; Shamir 1988). Notably, many private commemoration initiatives and private museums were launched during the 1980s by the Israeli right-wing, known as the 'Revisionist camp.' Previously, in the pre-statehood period known as the 'Yishuv,' Zionist institutions were led by the socialist Mapai party. Founded in 1930, Mapai was the dominant force in Israeli politics for close to 40 years. Using Eastern European strategies, the party's heads worked to marginalize opposing political discourses (principally those of Revisionism with its anti-socialist ideology) from power and public legitimation. 'The opinion of political minorities was a priori unacceptable, even when professional considerations justified it [...] the words "statist" and "national" became synonymous with the majority opinion, "political" — a minority opinion not taken [219] into account (Kanari 1988).' The situation was exacerbated because Mapai controlled the main underground organization then operating — the 'Haganah' (a Jewish paramilitary organisation founded in 1920, during the British Mandate of Palestine; part of the Mapai Party establishment. In 1948 it provided the foundation of the idf) — versus rival organizations (the Revisionist-controlled Etzel and Lehi) — pre-state organizations which became later the Israeli Defence Force. Mapai described its rivals as 'alien and degenerate,' exercising 'a poisonous influence.' Claiming the state's interest, political violence was justifiable when dealing with them (Ben-Eliezer 1995, 166). Once a democratic state was founded (1948) and physically eliminating opponents became out of the question, Mapai worked to delegitimize the Revisionist opposition by trying to diminish or eradicate their contribution to the state's establishment. Ben-Gurion 'created the association between statism and Mapaism,' generating a situation where Mapai's partisanship was considered less partisan than its rivals' (Shapira 1985, 60). Mapai thus became an Orwellian Ministry of Truth (Orwell 1971). The public was supposed to consider all rival parties anti-statist, and less legitimate for taking office (Rousseau 1990, 273). Mapai was hailed as responsible for the national renaissance project. At that period of cultural nationalization, the names of Revisionist dead and heroes were absent from street-names, state museums, and history-books. The Haganah Museum became a state museum (1956), with school-visits made possible by state budgets. The Lehi and Etzel museums were funded by the rival Herut party, but visits by soldiers, schoolchildren and organized groups of civil servants were banned. This changed following the political turnabout (1977) when Menachem Begin, head of the Likud (Revisionist) party, gained power (Lebel 2005,104). Over time, various entrepreneurs and organizations, mostly non-profits founded by idf veterans, launched museums and commemorative sites. Once founded, they were budgeted by the Defence Ministry. ESTABLISHING A NATIONAL MEMORIAL SITE While many aspects of life were nationalized in the state's first years, informed by socialist and collectivist ideology, remembrance sites were more democratically established. Their content and symbols matched [220] state-approved, hegemonic memory themes. Differences were visible only in their interpretations of the historical-military narrative, related through the commemorated battles, and the emphasis on brigades or units that fought them. With the onset of 'state privatization' (Wistrich and Ohana 1988), the state decided to establish a nationalized memorial site to expound the official version of Israeli military history. Traditionally, the state intervened regarding the public memory of the fallen of dissident underground organizations. Usually encouraging spontaneous initiatives, it was more vigilant with those commemorating the dead of the Etzel and Lehi, hoping to prevent the formative public memory from acknowledging their contribution. The state chose to recognize only the dead of the War of Independence, and exclude battles in which Etzel and Lehi fought, and distance their fallen soldiers from state history books and official discourses. Ben-Gurion decided that official recognition would be granted only to those killed between 30 November 1947 and 1 March 1949. The fallen of Etzel and Lehi operations before November 30 were denied recognition. As for Haganah soldiers killed before then, an addendum to the Law authorized the Defence Minister to declare that if 'the fallen were Haganah members when they died [...] they would be included among the fallen of our war.' This double standard was visible in the commemoration of those killed in the 'Night of the Bridges' operation, a sabotage action during 'The Revolt' when three underground factions — Haganah, Etzel and Lehi — briefly collaborated from October 1945 until Etzel bombed the King David Hotel on 22 July 1946. The combined organizations aimed to disrupt British transportation lines. On 16—17 June 1946, fourteen Palmach fighters were killed blowing up the Achziv bridge. Because of the above-mentioned law, the Soldier's Commemoration Unit could not memorialize the soldiers of this operation, but using his lawful prerogative, the defence minister included them among the official war-dead. In 1955, a monument to the fallen was erected, and in 1968 the Defence Ministry reinterred the fallen soldiers' remains, from a mass grave in Haifa to the monument site. The day after the Achziv operation, eleven Lehi combatants fell while bombing the Haifa Railway workshop, but it took until 1966 for the Association for the Commemoration of the Fallen in Lehi to [221] finally commemorate them. No state or idf insignia were placed on the Lehi monument, unlike Haganah counterparts. In fact, Etzel and Lehi commemorative activities were performed covertly, assisted by the Herut movement which funded a memorial to them in Jerusalem. This and other initiatives, undertaken without state support or funding, provoked official bodies. The Jerusalem district commander wrote a confidential letter to the central district commander warning that 'Etzels Freedom Fighter Fund builds memorials [...] that may [create] the impression those places were conquered by the group which the memorial honours [...] we must prevent historical falsification' (Lebel 2009). Herut's newspaper noted that 'Should the government take the underground's casualties under its patronage, it would indicate recognition of Etzel's war against the oppressor — against its will and contrary to official decisions' (Lebel 2009). In 1978, Menachem Begin, the premier of the first right-wing government after thirty years of the Labour party's hegemony, aspired to rehabilitate Etzel's historical role in the War of Independence. His aim is partly reflected in the events of Israel's Remembrance Day and Independence Day that year. Recalling the first Independence Day military parade in 1949, when Ben-Gurion banned the underground organizations' participation, Begin exploited the state's thirtieth anniversary for a parade in Jerusalem of underground combatants from Haganah, Etzel, and Lehi. The parity between Haganah veterans and those of Etzel and Lehi angered the Labour faction (the historical left-wing Mapai), whose members warned in parliament against 'attempts to reconstruct the period's history' (Davar, 18 October 1977) Haganah and Palmach veterans from the socialist kibbutzim called on their comrades to boycott the parade (Davar, 20 October 1977), though the government went ahead with it (Government session 152, 13 October 1977). In the parliamentary arena, a coalition was created around Mount Eytan that united Zionist forces against postnationalist tendencies. Mount Eytan supporters were marked as a community seeking to preserve its power and dominant ethical status. Unsurprisingly, Begin endorsed the Mount Eytan project in 1981 [222] identifying an opportunity to establish a national remembrance site to officially present the role of dissident organizations and their successors in the Israeli narrative. Israel now had a series of Revisionist prime ministers: Begin, the Etzel's commander; Yitzhak Shamir, a commander of Lehi; and Benjamin Netanyahu whose father was an intellectual leader of Etzel, Betar and Herut. During their terms in office, the project advanced significantly. Begin launched several strategies to improve the underground organizations' status in Israeli historiography and memory. In 1974, when the Public Council for Soldiers Commemoration presented the project to Defence Minister Shimon Peres (Labour), he responded positively to the proposal whose stated aim 'would express Israeli heroism [...] (and be) a frequently visited site for our youth' (ibid). Two years later, the public council's efforts remained no more than a project on paper and Peres did nothing to advance the project (ibid). Under Begin's government, the Inter-ministerial Committee for Symbols and Ceremonies announced on 29 December 1982 'the establishment on Mount Eytan of a National Centre for Heroism and Memorialization.' This decision was meant to implement the government's declaration of 18 May 1980 (Mount Eytan file 1982b). In 1991, pm Yitzhak Shamir tabled the Mount Eytan Bill, which obligated p m Yitzhak Rabin to implement the project and include it in the defence ministry budget in 1993. Half of the cost would be state-funded, with the rest from donations. In 1995, the Peres government reiterated its support for the project, while in 1998 the Netanyahu government founded a special ministerial committee to advance it. On 27 January 1998, Israel's parliament announced 'The Knesset reaffirms decisions by the last four Israeli governments [...] to build a commemorative centre on Mount Eytan,' (Knesset, 27 November 1998) though there was no allocation for the project in the budget. Only in 2001 was the board of directors of Mount Eytan asked to submit a plan: it came with a $20 million budget, and the government undertook to provide 50 percent of the amount (Mount Eytan file 1994c). In 2002, p m Ariel Sharon laid the cornerstone, but without a budget the event was purely symbolic. Considerable tensions arose among members of the project's board of directors. Haganah veterans on the board adhered to the official [223] version, the 'historical truth' of events relating to the War of Independence, which had dominated until 1977. Etzel and Lehi board-members requested parity with the Haganah in relating wartime history, plus removal of the tag 'dissident organizations,' arguments stemming directly from the symbolic and historiographic wrangling that has reflected the sensitivities of Israel's two chief political camps since statehood. Haganah members sought to emphasize the motif of'authority.' In that way, Lehi and Etzel fallen would be represented as deviants and dissidents opposed to the new state. Etzel and Lehi representatives sought to establish the 'revival' of the state 'but not [emphasis in the original] the various forces and organizations' as the museum's central thrust; 'it must be noted that [...] the home front, including much of the Haganah constituency, supported Etzel and Lehi.' Etzel and Lehi veterans wanted the project to show the public that 'Etzel was a national liberation movement,' Their preference was for a display showing that 'Etzel conducted hundreds of important operations, [...] hundreds of Etzel comrades fell, many heroic acts were performed' (Avinoam 1994, 34). In contrast, the Haganah veterans requested that Mount Eytan maintain the dissident theme, portraying the right-wing underground movements as lawbreakers. The board also disputed the date when the War of Independence erupted. Etzel and Lehi veterans refused to accept 29 November 1947, the date when the United Nation approved the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, as the official date marking the war's start. Ben-Gurion chose this date after the war, attempting to disconnect 'pre-war' Etzel and Lehi actions against the British, from the Jewish struggle for independence. Mapai viewed military actions to expel the British as terrorist acts detached from the struggle for independence. The Etzel and Lehi veterans again contended that 'Etzel's struggle against the British was a war of liberation against a foreign regime, but not [...] the continuation of terror against the British af- ter the period of joint revolt' (Avinoam 1994, 34). Presentation of the battles, and Etzel's role in them, caused further discord: Haganah proponents stressed their numerical strength which dwarfed Etzel's and Lehi's combined forces. [224] The Mount Eytan committees argued about the size of the exhibits that would represent each group. An Etzel committee-member requested: 'The Haganah organization was the largest and most important group among the defence organizations and revolt movements [...] I suggest we avoid adjectives [...] and suffice with the term "a large body" — without employing the definite article [...] and omitting the ranking, "important"' (Frank 1994) The argument became heated, and the sides became convinced that their status in the national memory would be directly related to the amount of floor space allocated to each organization in the museum. Haganah veterans wished to preserve their monopolistic status, or at least their seniority, in founding the Jewish state. Etzel and Lehi sought 'insider' inclusion in the collective memory, equivalent to the Haganah's. They supported the project on the understanding that 'this place has importance because all underground organizations are represented: Haganah, Etzel, Lehi, and Palmach — all the underground in one building,' said m k Gideon Ezra (Likud) (Knesset, 27 February 1998). In fact, the various motivations made it impossible to draft a joint proposal for the Independence Pavilion in the new museum. Trying to find middle ground in the polarized debate, the curators consulted historians and suggested changes to the museum's design, then presented their compromises to the board, which ignored them. Preparatory work on the pavilion now halted. In 1994, against the backdrop of the Oslo Accords (Israeli—Palestinian peace agreement led by Itzhak Rabin, 1993—1994) the Mount Eytan board — influenced by the new political atmosphere — resolved to reinvigorate the project's conception. After joint discussions with the board, the museum staff — civilians and army personnel who were strongly identified with p m Yitzhak Rabin's new minority government and who supported the Oslo peace process — decided to alter the original goals which pertained to the Israeli army's battle traditions, military history, and remembrance of the fallen. The new goals would engage with basic human, educational, and social values appropriate for an era of peace (Mount Eytan file 1994c). The curators emphasized that the museum would 'present peace as a central goal of the Israeli people and the idf;' a goal apparently reflecting Israeli public opinion toward peace agreements and territorial compromise. [225] Physically, that perception meant that visitors to the museum would see from every exhibition pavilion, what was termed 'the Peace Pavilion;' it would display peace agreements and cease-fires that Israel signed with its neighbours. Equally, the concept was to convince observers that a strong army was justified and all military activity since the state's founding had sought peace and security. This was undertaken as a response to an intellectual circle closely connected to the government which, after the Oslo Accords were signed, sought to influence Israelis. A military museum would doubly impair the peace process, they held, by transmitting an aggressive message to the world that Israel elevates militarism over values of peace; it might also be an 'educational obstacle' to the public's enthusiasm, especially among youth visiting the museum to support peace, while forgetting the enmity of Israel's neighbours over many years. The museum's central theme, the 'narrative of Israel's military campaigns from the Biblical period until now' (Zilber 1992, 7) threatened postnational Zionism. From its beginning, Zionism's basic assumption was that the Jewish people in the modern era strived for independence and sovereignty. The Oslo Accords appeared to espouse values that sought to dismantle nationalist symbols and institutions. The Israeli left adopted the new European left's ideology. This postna-tional/Zionist position embraced the sociological trend maintaining that peoples and nations are products of social and political manipulation (Anderson 1983). Ben-Gurion held that Israel's struggle was a direct continuation of the Jewish people's struggle since antiquity (Keren 1988). The term 'people' allowed the Mount Eytan committee to decide in March 1982 that 'the period addressed in the National Centre will be Israel's military campaigns [...] from Joshua Bin-Nun [...] to modern times' (Mount Eytan file 1982a). However, the new staff formed in November 1993 overruled the emphasis on war, and the continuity thesis. They maintained rather that continuity existed in the realm of consciousness, in the Jewish people's recognition that this was the land of the Jewish people. That consciousness must be educated toward independence and national freedom. The new staff convinced the board that [226] the museum should remind visitors of the Biblical story in passing, stressing that the Land of Israel is the Jewish homeland. In effect, this would address a direct continuation of Zionism's basic outlook maintaining that Israel is the realization of the vision of generations and that Jewish sovereignty and independence constitute the nation's basic values and historical continuity, but is not, as postnational scholars maintain, just a virtual community produced by manipulative political engineering. THE mount EYTAN PROJECT The Mount Eytan project was meant to complete a trio of Israeli remembrance sites: the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, demonstrating the price paid without Jewish independence; the Mount Herzl National Cemetery, reflecting the cost of attaining sovereignty and continuing struggle thereafter; and the Mount Eytan Museum, exhibiting the continuing narrative of the Jews' efforts for survival. The 'new' historians and sociologists, as well as some voices in the media, undermined this approach: Yoed Malchin claimed it was 'a political manifestation [...] containing outdated rhetoric and historical fabrication [...] there is no historical presence, no historical continuity of battles [...]' (Mount Eytan file 1993). Asa Kasher maintained that 'the connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel could not be a guiding element of the museum[, and] it could only be a background factor' (Mount Eytan file 1994b), while the author Amos Oz stated that 'on no account can an entire war be presented as if it were motivated by memory of the Bible or the Holocaust' (Mount Eytan file 1994a). Approximately 50 advisors presented their views. The 1948 funding generation — those who had fought in the War of Independence — mobilized for action against intellectuals' apparent de-legitimization of the myth of war and rituals for the fallen. Members of that generation served on the Mount Eytan board. Despite their divided opinions, most had participated in the struggle for statehood, and agreed that Mount Eytan should immortalize Israel's rebirth and sovereignty. A 'strange bedfellows' syndrome that emerged among the Mount Eytan pioneers was reflected in the Knesset in 1998, when budget constraints were apparently leading to the project's shutdown. Veteran Revisionist m k Reuven Rivlin (Likud) teamed with General [227] Ori Or (res.) (Labour) to present a joint resolution committing future governments to continue the initiative. The lawmakers who supported the resolution reflected views upholding the traditional Zionist narrative. One influence on post-Zionist thinkers was the delegitimization of Zionism's combatant side, thinking that held Zionist aggression responsible for injustices to the Arabs in the name of national ideology. A consensus in the Knesset expressed aversion to these tendencies. Ori Or challenged it: 'For the Jewish people in Israel, it is easier to commemorate Jews as victims [alluding to Yad Vashem]. We have not yet found a way to memorialize Jews who fought for their country's founding [...] and I fear [...] that our conscience [...] has rendered us unable to truly commemorate our national revival in a place deserving of it [... ]' Or claimed, 'It is unacceptable that there is a museum memorializing Jews as victims but none commemorating the Jewish people's revival from the beginning of Zionism until now' (Mount Eytan file i994b). The Rivlin-Or bill was passed thanks to the Knesset's Zionist factions. The bill resolved that 'The National Centre for Israel's Campaigns [...] will be established on Mount Eytan' that 'the Knesset reaffirms the decisions taken by four Israeli governments [...] [and] requests that the government start allocating funds in i998' and 'that it lay the cornerstone for Project Mount Eytan on Independence Day i998' (Knesset, 27 January i998). Netanyahu set the project aside, and government funding remains frozen at the time of writing. During Mount Eytan's long gestation, the backdrop was gradually changing. The Oslo Accords and post national/Zionist interpretative tendencies, labelled 'historical revisionism' in the academy, were presented as a 'covert narrative' previously hidden from the public: military failures (Nachon 2001), corruption, maltreatment of POws (Golani 2002), and plans to expel Arabs (Morris i987). Research pre- sented Israel as observing its surroundings from a purely 'military perspective' (Ben-Eliezer 1995,34) that created a heroic heritage, and gave political power to those using military power needlessly. The idf seemingly supported Mount Eytan in countering these [228] tendencies. Earlier, the army had used 'combat heritage' as a tool for encouraging youth to enlist. The declared significance of combat heritage was to provide 'narratives of battles stressing values [...] morale [...] esprit de corps [...] loyalty, sacrifice and solidarity [...] a process of selective recollection [which must] include a strict selection of the "memories" supporting the message' (Bar-On 2000). Historical revisionism's impact also affected the Mount Eytan steering committee. Gen. Elad Peled (res.) maintained that 'difficult subjects should not be concealed [...] In another few generations, the truth will be evident and if it becomes apparent that a museum like this was covering up, even the truth won't be believed.' Here, the board's decision to authorize the idf History Department to arbitrate disputed military topics enraged some researchers, who stood behind what Amos Oz called 'the museum's conversion into a propaganda tool' (Mount Eytan file i994b). Various long-standing memorial associations considered Mount Eytan a threat. They competed for minuscule public funding, tourists, state ceremonies, public figures, and media attention, but the proposed national memorial complex aroused joint opposition. To demonstrate the project's superfluity, several strategies were used: discreet meetings with prime ministers, defence ministers, m ks, and media manipulation. Commemorative associations, representing sites that had become state memorials, led the opposition. The boards of these associations comprise senior members, past and present, of the idf and defence establishment, forming an 'old boys' network.' The corps and brigades they represent receive preferred funding, and raise funds independently. The network enabled directors to obtain preferred land and grants for commemorative sites; many of the leaders were part of the military establishment, belonging simultaneously to security and government establishments, often in active positions. Gen. Rafael Vardi, who chaired the committee responsible for allocating security establishment and finance ministry funds to army corps' non- profits, was himself was on the Givati Brigade Memorial Association's board. While associations highlighted their brigades and corps, bereaved families and combatants who had not served in those units became embittered; the collective memory had forgotten them. Mount Eytan [229] was thought to counter that tendency. Knesset Speaker Shevach Weiss claimed that prestigious corps sought to maintain a hierarchy of the fallen. '[C]reating equality among the dead [...] is a central issue,' observed m k Ophir Pines (Labour): '[...] there is no national commemoration site [...] there are some who are not commemorated anywhere' (Knesset, 27 January 1996). Losing control over the future content and historical nuances governing the new site were feared. Many events in Israeli military history can be presented differently, with each interested party stressing its role in battle, such as the battle for Ammunition Hill in 1967, or trying to whitewash mistakes. To appease the associations, the museum team proposed 'not including topics presented in the corps museums, and to refer visitors to them' (Mount Eytan file 1995). Nevertheless, the museum team explicitly wanted 'to present [information] from a more historical and academic perspective, critical, with question-marks.' Steering-committee members generally saw the museum as 'a site for open dialogue' noting that 'in modern democratic society, there are multiple approaches to representing the past, on whose general interpretation full agreement is unachievable' (Mount Eytan file 1995). Founding Mount Eytan would force the issue of coming to grips with official history. The arguments against Mount Eytan, representing most commemorative associations, were drafted by Meir Pe'il, a director of the Palmach association; Pe'il thought another facility was pointless: 'We have a real problem over transmitting our military heritage, but a museum won't solve it' (Yediot Aharonot, 24 April 1995). Requesting that the Knesset cancel the project, Deputy Defence Minister Silvan Shalom (Likud) claimed that 'the major opponent to Mount Eytan is not the Finance Ministry [...] [but] all the other commemorative sites across the country' (Knesset, 17 January 1998). The entities supporting Mount Eytan were principally associations engaged in issues of bereavement, commemoration, and assisting families of the war-dead, among them Yad Labanim, representing bereaved parents of people killed while serving in the idf; the Organization for idf Widows and Orphans; the National Organization for Ha-[230] ganah Comrades; the Alliance for Etzel Soldiers, the Society for Commemorating the Lehi Heritage and its Fallen; Organization of idf Invalids; the Association for idf Pensioners; the Union for Demobilized Soldiers; and the Public Council for Soldiers' Commemoration. This coalition formally asked the steering committee to address the experience of loss and bereavement. Project supporters saw it as 'a national project in which they, the state, and the government, salute the fallen, [and] honour the bereaved families' (Knesset, 18 March 1996). With the threat of the project's cancellation, Shaul Yahalom (Mafdal) exclaimed that 'Israel must seek the fallen and bereaved families' forgiveness for the government's decision [...] to cancel Project Mount Eytan' (Knesset, 18 March 1998). Commemoration strategies and styles reflecting various orientations in Israel were on the agenda of all Mount Eytan committees. A fundamental decision was whether the centre should be solely a commemorative site for Israel's fallen, or assume other roles. This debate coalesced in the 1990s. For example, Asa Kasher, an Israeli philosopher and linguist who helped draw up the idf's Code of Conduct and a bereaved father, opposed Mount Eytan's aggrandizement into a state commemorative project with statist values; instead, he suggested a focus on memorials that commemorate individuals, not the elements cementing them together, emphasizing the individual, not the general level (Knesset, 18 March 1998). Reuven Rivlin (Likud) concurred, pointing out that 'Today young Israelis are more interested in personal stories [...] Mount Eytan must address the Israelis of the 1990s in their language. The Israeli media already do this well. When disasters occur [...] [t]he entire nation mourns with the families and Mount Eytan's importance stems from this' (Knesset, 18 March 1998). Individually-focused commemoration now clashed with traditional modes of Israeli remembrance. After many discussions, the committee decided to define the centre as a 'heritage site' presenting Israel's struggle for sovereignty and security. Commemoration would be closely integrated with the struggle, through architecture, content, the historical narrative of the Israeli people, the state and its military campaigns. The Mount Eytan directorate adopted the position that the proposed museum should be a living institution, combining commemoration with cultural and edu- [231] cational activities. On 9 September 1997, Netanyahu's government decided to cancel the Mount Eytan project. Finance Minister Ne'eman claimed that 'all the basic work carried out will be preserved in ways enabling its future use.' Nevertheless, the government stipulated that the project's continuation depended on obtaining 'full funding from donations, without a state budget' (Mount Eytan file 1982b). The announcement aroused acrimonious comments from Knesset members, and symbolized the nationalist-Zionist forces' loss of power in setting national values. Others lamented the wasted investment. The cancellation set off debates, some of which are presented here, over lost national values and the government's commitment to commemorate all of the state's fallen. the undecided past: non-decision-making AND mount EYTAN Many politicians claimed that the Mount Eytan project was cancelled only because of budget constraints. We have presented the splits and disputes surrounding the content and symbols of a national commemorative site, at a time when national privatization and erosion of the social consensus are increasing. Examining the project through the prism of the dominant polarization between right and left amply projects the complexity of a challenge aimed at achieving consensus and solidarity. It is doubtful whether any consensus still exists in Israeli society. Mount Eytan's goals, phrased by the Begin government, emphasized 'the commemoration of heroism of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel on behalf of the Land of Israel' in the first clause. The second clause stresses the need to memorialize 'heroic acts in the Land of Israel and for the Land of Israel: defence of the Jewish Yishuv in the Land of Israel, the revolt and struggle against a foreign regime,' from the time of Bar-Giora to the idf. Commemorating all of Israel's fallen in military campaigns is only mentioned in the fifth clause (Mount Eytan file 1982b). The Begin government sought to find a place in the reformulated national memory for the underground organizations and to present them as integral role-players in Israel's rebirth. [232] Against the dominant political background that established Mount Eytan's goals, a social movement emerged in the 1990s from the Israeli public, and grew impressively. Organizations representing bereaved parents, widows and orphans influenced changing goals, starting in 1994 when they advocated 'memorializing everyone killed in military campaigns, or during military or national service.' Where political forces under Begin focused on heroism and rebirth, with commemorative activity only in fifth place, bereavement and commemorative organizations sought to rank it first. In 1994, a left-wing government entirely omitted the underground organizations from Mount Eytan's agenda. In this instance, policymakers hoped to avoid any dispute over historical issues. Heroism again became the leading goal in 1999, while the underground organizations lost their significance in new phraseology stipulating that the site would 'commemorate all the fallen in Israel's campaigns — those who fell in the Land of Israel or for the Land of Israel from the very beginning of Jewish existence in the Land of Israel.' But an additional change to Mount Eytan's agenda for that year was the inclusion of peace, though from its inception the site was conceived as a museum dedicated to the army. The Netanyahu government expunged this same goal of elevating peace as a value among Israeli society and soldiers. The ever-changing goals and disputes reflected the reluctance of successive Israeli governments to finalize the content of the Mount Eytan site. Choosing the visual and pedagogic concepts also reflected an assortment of values and orientations. The museum staff, aware that its discussions and decisions would require approval from many governments, both right- and left-leaning, concluded by the late 1990s that the facility would comprise four central galleries constituting 'the heart of the museum:' (1) Army and Society gallery: stressing links between the idf and society, (2) Man in Battle gallery: war from combatants' perspective, (3) Combatant Force gallery: the i d f's structure and organization, (4) War Exhibition galleries: Israeli war narratives from i948 onward. Suspended over these four galleries would be the Peace Gallery, symbolizing hopes for peace, making it clear that Israelis want peace, and that whatever war Israel is currently engaged in will be the last. [233] The official team that had the role of supervising the planning and construction of Mount Eytan had to constantly reorient its decisions to satisfy the many values and variables in the Israeli arena. As one team-member remarked, they were engaged in an unending balancing act between irreconcilable forces: individuals vs. the collective; inculcating military heritage vs. insistence on 'the historical truth;' perspectives from specific points in time vs. sub specie aeternitatis; and society's longing for peace vs. the need to demonstrate Israel's military capabilities to strike the enemy. The team's proposals avoided one-sided decisions; they tried to please, reflect, and include the range of voices in the cultural arena. From a management viewpoint, non-decision-making was the result. The final decision was indecisive; no single ideological line was found. The facility would function as a commemorative site, but be individualistic; would serve as a museum for military history but also feature a peace gallery; would showcase the experience of war, but not its warlike aspects — rather focusing on the individual soldier's dilemmas in battle. Author Haim Guri, when asked to present his position to the Mount Eytan board, expressed the problematic of creating a site to serve as an agent of memory and culture in an age of shifting values. It was a 'political and social minefield [...] from the point of view of terminology — "the liberation of Jerusalem," "the liberation of the territories," "the Occupied Territories" [...] who has the authority to decide what is right, what is wrong? [...] How [do we] not turn a place which must represent consensus into a place where everything is disputed? [...] The whole nation fights and pays the price of war — everyone is entitled to representation.' Beyond the inherent problem of deciding about cultural and value content, the project failed because of values connected only indirectly to commemoration. When Netanyahu promoted his privatization ideology, the welfare state ideology went into retreat. Conserving memory for the public good was one of many roles simply abandoned by the state. The state showed its citizens its collapse under 'an excessive burden' of tasks and expectations, and the need to curtail its involvement in providing public services, and promoted a political culture of private [234] initiative, which included fundraising for social endeavours once supported by tax shekels. Against this socioeconomic division, the state withdrew from financially underwriting many projects: Mount Eytan was only one of them. The public arena of memory, certainly the state arena of memory and the contents of statist museums, seem appropriate for examining and identifying what Pizzorno (1987, 23) calls 'absolutist politics:' the kind of politics that dictates the rules of behaviour in sites perceived, incorrectly, as extra-political, designed spontaneously and individually with no political-ideological connection. According to Pizzorno, researchers in all fields must identify the dominant actors, the strategies applied by an all-powerful agent, and the reactions of the cast of actors. Issues of bereavement, commemoration and memory are not apolitical. The state museum embodies social power, the ability to reflect, represent, and shape the past, while creating from it a political agenda for the present. And if, as we have learned in this research, state museums can no longer be opened as a result of the inability to compromise between the struggles, narratives, and perceptions of the whole range of political sub-cultures, it is a case of reflecting society's political culture — disputes, lack of consensus, and unwillingness to reach compromise and a consensual formulation (Uriely 1997, 982). The failure to open the Mount Eytan museum reflects the range of tensions characterizing a society that has shifted from a national to a postnational condition, from the modern to the postmodern, and from the hegemonic to the post-hegemonic (Reiner 1992, 761). Public struggles by political subcultures no longer engage with penetrating the public memory, but for creating competing sub-groups of memory-typifying societies in an era when aspirations for distinctiveness supersede aspirations to create a common denominator. It is an era that is no longer characterized by 'managing the consensus' but by 'managing differences' (Ellis and Sonnenfeld 1994, 79; Levy 2004, 29). In such conditions, the past will always remain undecided. REFERENCES Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Avinoam, Y. 1994. Remarks on draft conception for the War of Independence pavilion, 3 October. [235] Azaryahu, M. 1996. State rites. Beersheva: Ben-Gurion University. -. 2000. The Independence Day military parade. In The military and militarism in Israeli society, ed. E. Lomsky-Feder and E. Ben-Ari, 89-116. New York: suny Press. Azaryahu, M., and A. Kellerman. 2004. Symbolic places of national history and revival: A study in Zionist mythical geography. Transactions ofthe Institute of British Geographers 24:109—23. Barena, A. 1989. The museum as a setting for new learning. phD diss., Leicester University. Bar-On, M. 2000. Memory in a book. Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defence Publishing House. Ben-Eliezer, U. 1995. Derech Hakarenet. Tel-Aviv: Dvir. Bennett, T. 2001. The birth of the museum. London: Routledge. Carmeli, A., and A. Vezbit. 2004. Museonim Beisrael. Jerusalem: Ministry of Education. Duverger, M. 1972. Political parties. London: Methuen. Ellis, C., and J. A. Sonnenfeld. 1994. Diverse approaches to managing diversity. Human Resources Management 33:79—109. Erikson, K. T. 1964. Notes on the sociology of deviance. In The other side, ed. H. Becker, 9—23. New York: Free Press. Fenichel, D. 2005. Exhibiting ourselves as others: Jewish museums in Israel. Bloomington, in: Indiana University Press. Frank, T. 1994. Michtar. Letter for the statehood period document. Golani, M. 2002. Tiheye Milchama. Tel-Aviv: Ministry of Defence. Handelman, D., and L. Shamgar-Handelman. 1991. The presence of the dead: Memorials of national death in Israel. Suomen Antropologi 16 (4): 3—17. -. 1997. The presence of absence: The memorialism of national death in Israel. In Grasping land: Space and place in contemporary Israeli discourse and experience, ed. E. Ben-Ari and Y. Bilu, 85—128. Albany, ny: suny Press. Izraeli, D. N. 1993. They have eyes and see not: Gender politics in the Diaspora Museum. Psychology of Women Quarterly 17:515—23. Kanari, B. 1988. Mamlachtiyut. Mibifnim 3:318. Katriel, T. 1993. Our future is where our past is: Studying heritage museums as ideological and performative arenas. Communication Monographs 60:69—75. -. 1994. Sites of memory. Quarterly Journal of Speech 80:1—20. -. 1997a. Moseonim Hostiryim. Dvarim Achadim 2:56—78. -. 1997b. Remarking place: Cultural production in Israeli pioneer settlements museums. In Grasping land: Space and place in contemporary Israeli discourse and experience, ed. E Ben-Ari and Y. Bilu, 147-75. Albany, ny: suny Press. Keren, M. 1988. Ben Gurion Vehaintelectualim. Sdeh Boker: Ben-Gurion Research Center. Lebel, U. 2005. Beyond the pantheon: Bereavement, memory and the strategy of delegitimization of Herut. Israel Studies 10:104—26. Lebel, U. 2009. The blood motif in the struggle for political recognition: Zionist dissidents contest exclusion. In Jewish blood: reality and metaphor in history, religion and culture, ed. M. Hart. London: Routledge. Levy, Y. 2004. Mitzva Haam Letzava shel Amamim. Mifne 44:29—35. Luke, T. W. 2002. Museum politics: Power plays at the exhibition. Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press. Morris, B. 1987. Beayat Haplitim. Tel-Aviv: Am Oved. Mount Eytan file. 1982a. Har Eytan: Vaadot, March. -. 1982b. Har Eytan: Hachlatat Memshala, 29 December. -. 1993. Har Eytan: Yom Iyun, 30 December. -. 1994a. Meeting of the Academic Consultation Committee, 17 August. -. 1994b. Har Eytan: Mifgash im AMos Oz, 14 March. -. 1994c. Har Eytan: Hantzaha, February. -. 1995. Har Eytan: Mifgash Mumchim, 10 July. Nachon, H. 2001. Tail of a bomb-shell. Movie. Orwell, G. 1971. 1984. Tel-Aviv: Am Oved. Pizzorno, A. 1987. Politics unbound. In Changing boundaries of the political, ed. C. S. Maier, 27—63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reiner, R. 1992. Policing a postmodern society. The Modern Law Review 55:76i—98. Rousseau, J.-J. 1990. Mahshava Medinit. Tel-Aviv: Schocken. Shamir, 1.1988. Hantzaha VeZikaron. Tel-Aviv: Am Oved. Shapira, A. 1985. Mepiturey Harama. Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad. Shari, Y. 1996. Moseonim BeMisrad Habitahon. Masters thesis, Tel-Aviv University. Teeger, C., and V Vinitzky-Seroussi. 2007. Controlling for consensus: Commemorating apartheid in South Africa. Symbolic Interaction 30:57—78. Uriely, N. 1997. Theories of modern and postmodern tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 24:982—5. Wistrich, R. S., and D. Ohana. 1988. Myth and memory: The reincarnation of Israeli consciousness. Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute. Zilber, D. 1992. Har Eytan. Principles of the program, The National Centre for Israel's Military Campaigns. Higher Education Internationalization and Quality Assurance in North—South Cooperation touhami abdouli University of Sousse, Tunisia the central idea of this article is that internationalising the higher education (h e) system has to depend systemically on quality assurance and vice-versa. At the same time the success of the two processes, internationalization as well as quality assurance, does not mean necessarily getting rid ofthe local national system or, as some may wrongly think, globalizing by abandoning the local characteristics. It may be, remarkably, relevant and significant to pragmatically use internationalization as a process tool or mechanism to consolidate and enrich the local national system and hence build up the global system by local components. No global system would be attained without being based on the local platform. In fact such a system requires the added value 'quality assurance,' so reaching the internationalization is discovering at first level the local and ensuring its quality. introduction I am local means I am global, but being global is irrelevant if it does not emerge in a social and historical interaction. The perceived need for the internationalization of higher education based on diversity entails conditions, weighs on the running of h e institutions and is correlated with quality assurance. Both, internationalization as well as quality assurance, should be considered as a challenge for h e institutions, but, in my opinion, a rewarding challenge. How do we get so many different systems to function together in harmony, while synchronizing the process of quality assurance in the internationalization process? Should we seek only one global sys- tem of he or should we take on board all the systems' differences and find solutions for compatibility? Although, as experts, we varied in the degree to which process we propose a solution or reconsider it, this extremely delicate issue, inter-[240] nationalization of a system and quality assurance in the North—South cooperation, is to be tackled as wisely as possible.1 Because of different reasons, countries of the South over the decades had never asked questions about internationalisation or even quality, as not only were they structuralizing and regularizing their national h e systems, they were also facing other challenges which were radically different from their counterparts in eu. Their experience should be reconsidered, as it could provide valuable insights into the needs of assisting the he reform in the South. It is not a question of adjusting, harmonising and making a synergy, but it is a unique and complex situation of assimilating new cultural and social norms more or less different. the process of internationalisation The Reform of he announced within the Bologna process principles (1999), then in Prague 2001, Berlin 2003 and Bergen 2005,2 has not, I believe, achieved its goals since it has not reached the stage of 'the transition.' Therefore, it is necessary to realize such a transition and to move to a new advanced stage: the 'internationalization process.' What is internationalization? Is it the building of constructive relations between institutions etc.? Should it be considered as a dialogue of educational life, a dialogue between academics, and a dialogue of different kinds of standards? What are the principles of the internationalization of h e? Are they linked to the mobility of institutions or linked to the tools of reaching out to other continents as was asserted at the London meeting of Ministers. To think, objectively, about internationalization without political obsessions and constraints, it is better to go beyond this fashion of successive declarations which shows the spectacular side of events. It is more important to think constructively. Higher Education as a System If commentators on the contemporary situation of he agree about anything, it is that the educational scene is a very special and delicate kind of world view. Moreover, it is a basic key to thinking and conceiving life. This means that it is also a way of changing the standard of living. If it is so, we have to admit that he is the most variable generating nucleus and, in consequence of that, he is usually in a continuous process of changing. [241] As we know, any conception or any entity is functioning as a cultural social system. Hence, he is a central cultural social system which should be defined as 'a group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole, or an organized set of interrelated ideas or principles' (Foulquié 1962). These elements are formulated in a cultural productive context, and are functioning in a certain culture respecting its values and norms. This harmonized set of elements is also in correlation with different components of culture forming one and only one structure that has its self-regulation (Boudon and Bourricaud 1983), and hence, it is a central nucleus of the 'social engineering.' The h e system is a tripartite functioning system and it consists of these correlated elements: 1 Creators as major forces, who are academics, administrative staff and students. 2 Knowledge, which is the product designed for society and humanity as a whole, based on methods, programs and pedagogical tools. 3 Spheres, which are institutions and conceptions of building, designed to match the educational and creative process. How do these elements function? There are numerous conceptions, since they differ in the way they were set up. However, I maintain that what makes any system successful and different from another is the positive dialectics and the interaction based on necessary correlation. Internationalization as a Process Regarding the world change, internationalization should be defined as one of two aspects of universality, but it is neither globalization nor one of its synonyms. Even if the latter, as a concept, and as another aspect of universality, dominates the first one without any distinction, one should differentiate between the two. Each concept has its self logic, and both have, in some contexts, a certain kind of opposition. Any phenomenon, sector or any system could be less globalized and much internationalized, or on the contrary, it could be much glob-[242] alized and less internationalized (Siroën 2004).3 Internationalization is not the integration of systems. In fact, integration is an aspect of globalization, the interdependence of systems is the very category of internationalization. In this process, systems are interdependent even though they are different. Thus, 'In other words, globalization internalizes the Externalities between nations and eliminates the interdependences' (Siroën 2004). Indeed, 'Internationalization is the process of planning and implementing projects so that they can be easily converted for use in different [...] regions.' This definition completely contrasts with what was taken for granted such as 'Internationalization of higher education is the process of integrating an international/intercultural dimension into the teaching, research and service functions of the institution.' In that sense 'this definition understands internationalization as a process, as a response to globalization ... and as such including both international and local elements'4 (Knight 2003). In any case, I consider internationalization 'as a process of designing a product (i. e., an item of goods or a service) so that it can be localized without major engineering changes.' Internationalization should be cultivated for its own sake, but it can also have ambiguous ideological finalities, and thus, it is possible to avoid being oriented or guided by any kind of authority.5 The major differences between internationalization and globalization to be taken into consideration are presented in table 1.6 Internationalization in Europe In Europe, three decades ago, national universities had started the systemic reform. Such a reform was based 'on national and institutional agendas' (Zgaga 2007, 18). This means that it was a need of the national system itself, or precisely it was a logical and necessary stage for the self-regulation. I have to maintain that every system in a certain stage needs a new dynamism to escape archaism, but more important is the fact that when the system reaches self-sufficiency it could never table i Differences between internationalization and globalization Internationalization Globalization h e equals interdependent institutions. h e equals integrated institutions without self-governance. Process of integration performed by actors from other sectors. Process of interdependence and interinstitutions cooperation. Elements of he systems preserve national Elements of other systems such as multi- specific features. national companies preserve their own specific features. Auto regulation of the system and self- Extra-regulation of the system and extra- sufficiency. sufficiency. In-service of humanity. In-service of groups of interests. regenerate its force and ensure the equilibrium of functioning. In such a situation, other alternatives emerge. It was very important that the Eurydice network made the evaluation and stressed the guidelines for the h e reform in Europe. Eurydice drew attention to the major problem; it is that 'the convergent education policies seem more likely to be a by-product of the economic and social policies which, in the context of European integration, underwent a deliberate harmonization process' (Zgaga 2007,18). It is noticeable that: 1 Initially the harmonization and other marks of internationalization were a tool for the European social integration; never were they destined for an international standard of h e. This is true and objective, especially at the early stage of internationalization. 2 The interaction between institutions and experts had ended by Bologna Process, which is 'quite a recent achievement and hence also a result of coping with the challenges of mass higher education as well as international trends in higher education' (Zgaga 2007,18). Obviously the unsaid is that e u higher education had been facing a crisis of some kind. It should be determined as a crisis of falling into the path of archaism, or the falling out of the current use and need, since the so-called 'National University was a product of the 19th century' (Zgaga 2007,19). 3 The need for synchronizing between the knowledge cognitive time of scientific inventions and the scholastic time of learning had urged e u countries to move to the transnational. Certainly, the gap between the two mentioned times/processes could find [244] effective resolutions at the international level. Such synchroniza- tion is also needed at another level, i. e. that of the compatibility, since 'due to the universal character of science and culture, as well as centuries-long academic traditions, certain compatible elements persisted in the otherwise increasingly incompatible national systems' (Zgaga 2007,19). Our large concern is to be aware that internationalization in eu systems had started in order to tackle the gap between science and learning, to solve the compatibility and find resolutions for the adaptability considering the world change. The south is also concerned with the same issues as national systems since they are subject to such crises and international influences, for the simple reason that the national systems were — and still are — no more than western calqued copies or hybridized systems. For the situation is that both north and south, together, have to remodel their systems. In south and north, recently or previously, alarm bells of higher education have started ringing. Principles of Internationalization The goals of internationalization were determined by experts who made a report on he in different regions. Most of them asserted that (Djanaeva 200i): The main rationale for internationalization is: recognition of diplomas and degrees abroad; improvement of educational quality; equal partnership on the global level (higher education institutions, scholars, research teams, faculties, students, etc.); equal participation of higher education institutions in the world educational arena (education, research, debates); participation in the development of the global educators' community; better adjustment to the market economy in a new political and economic environment; learning from the international experience; provision of better opportuni- ties for citizens in terms of the best world educational standards; and equal employment opportunities. In order to achieve these goals, I propose to build up internationalization on these principles: [245] 1 Giving rise to the logic of necessity of internationalization. It is not a wish, nor is it a slogan, both are not enough. We have to work together and assess different systems to find out this logic of necessity. Precisely, we need the immanent necessity which is derived from the system itself, not imposed, and not artificial. The only assurance of permanent internationalization and its continuity is the logic of necessity. Internationalization is not precarious or casual, but it is a continuous process. Therefore, our determination/intention should be consolidated by logical reasons, so that it can be recognized by all partners and be very effective. 2 Spreading social and economic conditions, as to some extent we ignored before the determination. The term of a complete internationalization has to be linked to the term of the real qualification and promotion of other linked sectors, especially the social and the economic sectors. Both terms should also be parallel with the cultural productive context. Obviously, we cannot dig up for any construction without landscaping. If not 'How can we internationalize in authoritarian regimes, in societies suffering from hunger and poverty, and distinguished by illiteracy?' 3 The institutional interdependence: every institution can act autonomously, but at the same time this autonomy should be based on the interdependence and the inter-linkage between national and international institutions. It is the interdependence of system elements based on the autonomy of governance. Actors decide together after interaction and debate, and even later, at another stage, they should not think about realizing a collective governance as this leads to globalization. The system depends on relationships between institutions and their counter- parts elsewhere.7 Moreover, it is the assumed collective responsibility of the functioning of the system and its regulation. I stress on this principle in order to highlight and ensure the pluralistic and non-hierarchical character of the internationalization of the [246] system. 4 The positive rational secularity engagement. This is not an abstract concern, but it is, only, to draw attention to the complexity of the process, once we do not think scientifically and objectively. One of the central axes to focus on in internationalization is to set aside categories of color, identity and belief. It is a possible system, 'not beyond our reach, in which he and I can jointly affirm our many common identities (even as the warring singularists howl at the gate). We have to make sure, above all, that our mind is not halved by a horizon.' (Sen 2006, 186.) Completely, internationalization depends on how main actors in higher education describe and develop the system and how experts consider what people largely expect to be realized at different various levels. The concept of internationalization and ways of realization may develop concerning the principles, components and bases and even accessibility. In some countries — as it is always asserted in the south — the domains of higher education and scientific fields may be demarcated by the impenetrability of others' experiences and minds, thus experts have a number of serious problems with which to contend. At least the real challenge will be how to change the cultural levels, then, realize a fundamental shift. Conclusion As experts in higher education and academics, our mission of internationalization is not easy, thus we have to start by preparing the platform. It is also worth noting that it is by prudence that we should doubt the effective role of ministers and some life-long appointed colleagues in circles of decision, who should not be deeply involved. That does not mean doubting rationality, but it is just a means to avoid the political utilitarianism, as we know that they are restrained by the interests of their parties. My proposal, simply, considers that academics, students and administrative staff should be the main actors in such a process. Therefore, at this point, the best way towards internationalization is in situations where the 'masters' see themselves more as 'facilitators' and guides to internationalization rather than as 'oracles,' as is often the case. [247] No doubt there is a compelling need for internationalization, thus, every institution should be 'for institutions.' It is not about building up a unique system. In such a case we harm h e, but here, it is a matter of different systems coexisting within an institution. This is the real mobility and interaction, and this is the variety that respects differences. As much as we need to defend internationalization, we must not forget about localization. quality assurance: obstacles and priorities The most important and controversial new reform on the higher education scene is what is now called 'Quality Assurance' which is a mark of internationalization and a tool at the same time. It is important, because higher education has never been reformed at a wide international level which could lead to a standard global system. Before that, the attention of experts was focused elsewhere and was driven by a set of evolutionary assumptions that regarded higher education as a governmental-public sector or, more precisely, as a public company in which every elected political party executes its own reform programmes. In short and limited vision, it was related to a national policy without a precise and calculated universal goal. It is controversial, because the reform in the South (still in the process of development) did not concur with the so-called advanced reform in the North, moreover a certain refusal hidden under some pretexts is not convincing. It may, perhaps, be doubted that this attitude refers to a self-made plan. On the contrary, it is not a tool to refuse, but to protest latently against a lack of ability, which was not taken into consideration by the North. It is inevitable to stress that the South has other priorities; one of the most important being 'combating illiteracy.' So, is it a question of quality? Therefore, quality assurance should be in a postponed plan for many countries in the South. Diagnosis: Obstacles Remarkably, the higher education system in the South needs to function in line with the eu standards and therefore it is now in a challenging situation. I cannot exclude those countries in the process of [248] development that have already started with the implementation of the Bologna process (such as Tunisia and Morocco), since the outcome has not yet been evaluated. For some other countries, the reform is mere ink on paper. Precisely, it is no more than a political card raised during elections, then it falls into oblivion. Obviously, an objective diagnosis of the current situation is too dark, to such a degree that one may not see any 'light at the end of the tunnel:' 1 Enrolment in elementary schools is limited and 20% of students fail. 2 Only 60% of students enrol in secondary schools and only 13% of them succeed in entering higher education. 3 10 million students are of school-going age, but they are not able to reach schools for one reason or another, such as poverty. 4 4 million (or even more) graduates and more than 200 thousand who have obtained doctorates and masters degrees are jobless. 5 The average Arab scientific research budget for example, is 0.5% of gross domestic product (g d p). 6 In the Arabic world 70 million people are illiterate, two thirds of them being women (undp 2004; 2005). 7 The poverty map is expanding, as more than 100 million poor people can influence and necessitate a certain policy of reform. 8 There is a disequilibrium of orientation without scientific criteria: 64% of students are oriented to arts, social sciences, and 36% to science. On the other hand, the higher education system itself is: 1 Composed of two different superposed and incompatible systems, one system is traditional and stereotyped (especially in language apprenticing and classics), but the other one is modernized and deracinated from its references. The basic elements of the latter were built up progressively in the process of the development of he European experiences. Such a superposition is noticed in the chosen policy of 'patching up' in the third world countries. 2 Sundered from the social and economic side, this means that [249] Higher Education is actually out of the development process (Aherchou 2006). 3 Neglected in the vision of southern citizens regarding their European counterpart. Consequently, there is no remarkable knowledge 'creativity' among Southern societies but a 'brain drain,' and it is meaningless, actually, to speak about a society of knowledge in the South. It is this situation, or what ever we wish to call the fragile policies in the South, everything turns into obstacles to such a point that it keeps apart even the thought about quality assurance. Thus, how could we find plans for quality assurance implementation? In fact, the rationale is that, in the South, we are on the sill or on the first step of the ladder of reform based on quality assurance. It would be more objective to assert that, for some countries, there is no ladder at all. Mainly and remarkably, these obstacles are: 1 Fragility and petrifaction of the higher education systems in the South. 2 A regressive and conservative social structure that obstructs any reform. 3 The lack of a complementary social project on which a new policy of higher education should be based, since there is no education promotion without a social one. Basically, the promotion of science is one constituent of social promotion. 4 The paradox of a policy of promoting higher education, which was not based on expertise work team, but proposed or imposed by individuals. Higher education, as a basic necessary sector to empower society must rely on a planned methodical institutional policy. (For example, in Tunisia from 1990 we dealt with 7 facets of programmes of reform, which are fortunately ending now with the Bologna reform. In Syria, the reform is based on the caprices of ministers, there is no continuity, and whenever they intend to start a reform, it fails before its commencement.) 5 The restriction of planning the development programmes rests in hands of economists, and on excluding those who are in the [250] central education operation.8 6 The conditioned execution of International organizations reform, often imposed by the wb without taking into consideration the problem of non-compatibility, the local specifications and the history of development process of higher education in the region. Obviously he in different countries has a 'memory,' which is worth being taken into consideration. Up to a certain degree, some plans of the ib are bombarding these fragile systems and, paradoxically, they are leading to the opposite side of the intended targets. INTERNAL COMPLEXITIES In the South, some countries regard the reform of higher education as a necessity. Others see it as one of the European fashions to be rejected. In general, two wings are differentiated: 1 One wing is scratching the past waiting for a divine inspiration. Paradoxically, they are consuming products of modernity without any need to emulate their counterparts. 2 The other wing is in a preparatory phase represented by North African countries (especially Tunisia and Morocco) including Egypt, and recently Lebanon. Experts in these countries are working continuously on the applicability of quality assurance criteria. This is done mainly by supporting 'staff to provide a quality service that meets the institutions needs' and adopting the lmd system. Furthermore, I should draw their attention to two major problems: 1 Until now, they have been focusing on structure (lmd) rather than on contents (programmes). The structure has no meaning without its contents. 2 They are not dealing with the compatibility and the harmonization, which are basic issues of international competitiveness. By adopting different ways, they should not proceed in a climate of confusion. Focusing on the Tunisian experience, as an example seeking to realize the h e reform by being in line with the Bologna Process, it is important to re-evaluate it since other countries should be guided by this model. Basically, they have to gain the positive points and reject [251] deficiency. Generally, Tunisia has a very fragile economy because it is based on tourism and services; therefore building up the society of knowledge is more than a priority, it is a vital strategic plan. h e education, in this plan, is highly considered, therefore, technocrats have determined some essential goals such as: 1 Building up the society of knowledge by realizing the b p principle 'lifelong learning,'9 forming competencies and leaders in management and entrepreneurship. This could be achieved by development of methods, enriching contents and providing new pedagogical tools. 2 At the institutional level, the universities should have their self-autonomy and should also be multi-specialized universities and non-sectarian. 3 Adopt measures and instruments to regularize yearly the he system, by taking into consideration systems in ocde and eu, and using the cite and the European indexes in the evaluation. 4 In 2009, 50% of teenagers are supposed to reach the higher education (around 500.000 students). 5 Improving the index of graduation of engineering and science from 9.5/i000 to ii/i000 in 2009, and continuing this upgrade in order to reach the European indexes. 6 6% of the national budget is for higher education, and 16% for education and training. 7 In 2009, students can choose from among 1000 choices/specialties. 8 In 2009, more than 50,000 students are expected to enroll in IT. 9 By the end of 2008, more than 470 h e agreements were signed with foreign universities concerning joint degrees, accreditation, and joint courses. This is a triangular partnership with Euro-Mediterranean, American and Japanese institutions.10 Needless to say, that some goals are still in shadow, and some efforts are still insufficient, particularly, concerning mobility of the teaching staff and students. In fact, there are no clear programs in this sense, and there is no visibility for the ministerial plan. Even the appreciated [252] individual initiatives of professors and rectors are not structuralized. Tempus and Erasmus projects are not enough, as the national system itself has to prepare projects on its own budget without dependence on external grants. Also notable is the lack of flexibility and creativity of programs, since the central bureaucracy is still obstructing new proposals which should be ratified by perpetual ministerial 'masters.' Recently, the focus in Tunisia started to be on contracting between the ministry and institutions, and this may solve such a problem. Actually the major problem of this experience is that this policy of internationalizing or, precisely, reaching and emulating the eu counterparts is part of an intergovernmental or 'inter-ministerial forum.' It was considered, latently, as a political affair, but on the contrary, it has to be conceived as an educational affair which is by all norms an interuniver-sity affair. Strategically thinking, a very sharp educational policy may help in the social integration in the union for the Mediterranean, as it was for the eu, and even more, this policy should give priority to not being left on the margins of discussions. Priorities Although the South is concerned with bringing quality assurances into line with the h e internationalization, this will never take place unless priorities are determined. In other words, the South has to inaugurate a preparatory phase in the social and political environment by: 1 Reforming the political systems internally: as long as higher education staff does not work in a democratic atmosphere, every reform will not be conceived as a patriotic project that concerns 'the nation.' Never will it be a political card of a mono-party state. Accepting quality assurance should be based on a culture of entente and freedom, since the rule is 'I am not free, so I am not thinking.' This is a collective target to be realized, not an introduction to some political interests. As a rule, also, thinking quality assurance is immanent, a process in itself, and 'Quality is for Quality.' Externally, quality assurance is not in essence an intergovernmental project. Contrary to that, it must be a higher education inter-universities process. If not, any trouble between governments affects the project negatively. [253] 2 Changing the cultural social standards in Southern countries, since before planning to reform higher education experts have to incorporate a preliminary plan in order to change the cultural vision. First, it is by changing the vision of the North and getting rid of the conspiracy idea. In science, the North is neither an enemy nor is it a colonizer, as science is an intrusive phenomenon. Second, it is by struggling against illiteracy. 'Education for all means a society of knowledge.' Third, it is by enhancing social welfare, because individuals in a poor society do not even search for the quality of bread, so how could they care for the quality in higher education? Quality assurance is also not an isolated phenomenon as well. 3 Promoting the infrastructure of the South to apply quality assurance in the institutions, as well as in programmes and by qualifying the staff. It is clear, e. g., that practice is one measure of guaranteeing quality. Labs, computers, and sophisticated machines in medicine are beyond the capability of under-developed countries. I agree with the mobility and flexibility — no doubt about that — but we had better think about funds' transferability allocated to found institutions in the South which function in accordance with e u standards and by respecting diversity. Needless to say — and being based on proofs — the allocated grants given to the South by the eu or by other international organizations are obtained by western companies, institutions and experts in the international tenders, while the South is getting but 'odds and ends.' 4 Within a process of a transnational education and, simultaneously, let us think about promoting higher education in all villages of one country itself, and decentralizing it. We had better join our efforts to work on establishing institutions of higher education in 'shadow areas' or 'distant areas.' I mean that higher education must reach the un-reached. We have to think about Algeria, Syria, Mauritania, Morocco, Libya and different countries of Africa. Proposed Plan Details aside, quality assurance in higher education, was, and is, a response to a changing knowledge order and not, or at least not so much, an economic one. It has consisted of an attempt, or a series of attempts, to come to terms — global terms — 'with a certain and emerging international community.' 1 Enabling the South on the cultural level: this is a North—South mission. In order to introduce the culture of quality assurance we have to work together by forming multinational 'follow-up' teams of experts able to reach every country. Essentially, these teams should elaborate a new higher education strategy that can lead to a different vision for the South of itself, to the 'other,' to the facts and to the future. New conceptions and concepts have to be based on objective perspectives. 2 Forming national teams: Their role consists of planning for the compatibility between theoretical and practical levels in higher education. Participants should be drawn from all social shareholders. The South should also derive benefit from some experiences: 'bibb in Germany, the Australian Training Framework, Progression Roots in the uk and South Korea, jsps in Japan, National Council for Working Forces in Singapore.' 3 Before execution and realization, we 'expect a series of national reforms, possibly being inspired by those countries that have recently reformed their systems in line with the Bologna process' (Hog 1999, 5). Surely, this has to be by European assistance. Experts have to supervise these reforms since there is a risk of non-concerted reform. 4 Promoting and changing methods in education by accommodating them to the 'third modality:' labs, virtual labs, computers, modelling and stimulation... in such a modality, necessarily, we have to understand that the relation in education has changed from the relation man-man to man-machine, as a matter of fact, we are aware of a certain kind of alienation (Mrayaty 2006). 5 Enhancing the level and grades of teaching staff to strengthen the teaching programs and reinforce curriculum development (e. g. in Tunisia only 15% of the teaching staff are able to super- [255] vise students in ma and Doctorate). 6 Considering the diversity, which is another basis of internationalization and quality: the South has to search for new providers from abroad, because students in the process of competitiveness 'have a real possibility to choose from a spectrum of different types of education from inland and abroad' (Hog 1999, 6). If it is so, the first criterion of choice will be certainly that of quality assurance. Conclusion Quality assurance is not a fashion, but it is a new age in international education, in which we have to live. The idea of cooperation nowadays is meaningless out of this age. The South has to intend to live within this age, but intention alone is not enough as there are some constraints to be overcome. The South alone cannot perform and realize such a required quality, as 'It takes two to tango. There are different goals to be reached in this process of world change, the most important being to help create environments that cultivate diversity, create introspection about individuals' often skewed perceptions of others, and inspire appreciations of difference' (Davis and Richards 2008, 259). Thus internationalization correlated to quality assurance is a tool to a world multicultural learning community, when we engage ourselves, as academics, to prepare multicultural programs systems that will be flexible and pluralistic. This will then facilitate the international social integration based on mutual understanding. Being positive, all together, we have to be aware that h e (as well as science) is an authentic means to achieve universality. Given the crucial situation of different institutions, in the south as well as in the north, the Internationalization of Higher Education has now become imperative. It is relevant to assert that major turning points in this millennium are and have to be accompanied by educa- tional reforms and changes. From an analytic perspective I made clear the basic dialectics and relationships between education and social, economic and political development, as I did emphasise that Education at all levels is a world view. With changes affecting positively our [256] life, such a dual process is inevitable. Internationalization and quality assurance have to go hand in hand in the new process considering all levels of dialectics. So, internationalization is guided and shaped by quality assurance, and quality assurance is guided and shaped by internationalization. Internationalization and quality assurance processes should be conceived as 'heads or tails,' or else they will not exist at all. Once this process has been started, as a real step, not an illusory one, the one depending on the other, he teams have to ask not only what internationalization can do for quality assurance, but also what quality assurance can do for internationalization. It is, in fact, credibility based on a rigorous scientific approach which builds this 'core process.' As for systems of h e, we have to come up with a solution, which is evidently no more than what is called 'Pluribus Unum.' This is to state that it is 'out of one many,' 'within one many' or 'system of systems.' We encourage only efficient systems, we promote their programmes as sub-systems and we grant them possible privileges. NOTES i How can we define South and North? Which is the North and which is the South? Does the term 'North' or 'South' designate a geographical, political or even economic reference? Does the North or the South represent one people or several? What distinguishes the one from the other? In my opinion, it is more efficient to use the h e rankings of institutions, as there are pioneering institutions in countries of both sides, and there are also institutions which are not upgraded. Precisely, by North and South I am referring to the Medieterreanean and European Union, but I have to affirm that these terms (north and south) are used by the UN to refer to two categories of countries: countries that are considered developed, and developing countries in terms of economy, industrialization, globalization, standard of living, health, education. 2 It is very important for those who are interested in bp to read the First report of the Working Group on the External Dimension of the Bologna Process (Zgaga 2006). 3 As Siroën had asserted that the international is not the global, we have also to emphasize that the global is not the local. [257] 4 We should ask this question: is the process of internationalisation of higher education in Asia different from other regions or shall we reconsider some specificity? 5 See Bourdieu (1994). It is noticeable that internationalization 'contrasts with localization, which is the adapting of a product to a specific country, region, language, dialect, culture, etc.' 6 Inspired from the table of differences drawn by Jean-Marc Siroën (2004). 7 See this idea in Peterson and Shackleton (2002, 350). 8 In Saudi Arabia, the reform is proposed by the Sheikh of Islam, three years ago Sheikh Salah Kamel, who is an 'oil capitalist,' got the courage to lecture about how the reform of education should be based on an Islamic method, which is ambiguous! 9 It is supposed that the lifelong learning system enables more than 8000 to reach universities. Yet, I have to state that there is a gender balance quite equal to the European. Thus, 57% of students are females, 38% of teaching staff in universities are females. As for the average of success in higher education, it is about 70%. 10 For more details see Lamlumi (2008). See also www.tunichallenge.com. REFERENCES Aherchou, G. 2006. 2003—2005 and the education policy. Paper presented at the 3rd Arab Education Meeting, Beirut. Boudon, R., and F. Bourricaud. 1983. Dictionnaire critique de la sociologie. France: puf. Bourdieu, P. 1994. Raisons pratiques sur la théorie de l'action. Paris: Seuil. Davis, J., and A. Richards. 2008. Fighting for deep change in the quest for diversity: Iowa State University's multicultural learning community. In Education landscape in the 21st century, ed. I. Gruske and B. C. Swaffield, 259—82. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Djanaeva, N. N. [2001] The Internationalization of higher education in Kyrgyzstan. Http://condor.depaul.edu/~rrotenbe/aeer/vi7n2/ Djanaeva.pdf. Foulquiè, P. 1962. Dictionnaire de la langue philosophique. Paris: puf. Hog, G. 1999. Visions of a European future: Bologna and beyond. Paper presented at the eaie conference, Maastricht. Knight, J. 2003. Internationalization of higher education, practices and priorities. IAU Survey Report. Lamlumi, J. 2008. Enhancing and sustaining the quality in the Tunisian h e system. Paper presented at the Workshop of Enhancement of Quality and Patriotic Policies in the Vocational and the Technical Education, Kuwait. Mrayaty, M. 2006. i T and telecommunication in education. Paper presented at the 3rd Arab Education Meeting, Beirut. Peterson, J., and M. Shackleton. 2002. The institutions of the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. 2006. Identity and violence, the illusion of destiny. London: Penguin. Siroën, J. M. 2004. L'international n'est pas le global: Pour un usage Raisonné du concept de globalisation. Revue d'Economie Politique 114 (6): 681—98. undp. 2004. United Nations Development Programme annual report 2004. New York: United Nations Development Programme. -. 2005. United Nations Development Programme annual report 2005. New York: United Nations Development Programme. Zgaga, P. 2006. "External Dimension" of the Bologna process: First report of the Working Group on the External Dimension of the Bologna Process. Http://www.bolognaoslo.com/expose/global/ download.asp?id=28&fk=ii&thumb. -. 2007. Higher education in transition: Reconsiderations on higher education in Europe at the turn of the millennium. Umeâ: Umeâ University. Résumés Entre la centralité méditerranéenne et la périphérie européenne : la migration et l'héritage en Italie du Sud MAURIZIO ALBAHARI Cet article observé du point de vue ethnographique identifie et analyse les croisements contemporains entre la migration et l'héritage de l'Italie du Sud. Une telle appréciation des tendances montantes semble particulièrement importante pour un programme et, en défiant des dichotomies simplistes européennes/méditerranéennes, peut aussi favoriser l'inclusion des immigrants. Le cas de l'Italie du Sud est particulièrement approprié à éclaircir le rôle de la région comme une frontière maritime externe de l'u e mais aussi à éclaircir la question du Sud avec son histoire d'emmigration massive et de dénigrement par rapport au reste de l'Italie et de l'Europe. À part ce cadre, cet article identifie et évalue aussi un cadre géo-historique et moral plus récent qui d'une part localise simplement le sud italien « à l'Ouest » et d'autre part décrit sa propre découverte de l'Italie du sud où elle s'est retrouvée « dans le centre de la Méditerranée ». Ces récits multiples définissent sur quelles bases est posé l'héritage insaisissable du Sud italien. Essentiellement, ils déterminent les obligations ressortissantes de cet héritage dans les projets de réception des migrants et d'une plus large critique politique et cuturelle. Célébration du village imaginé : les façons d'organiser et de commenter des paysages sonores locaux et des modèles sociaux pour les fêtes en Albanie du Sud ECKEHARD PISTRICK AND GERDA DALIPAJ Le sud de l'Albanie, qui s'étend de la rivière Shkumbin dans le Nord jusqu'à la frontière avec la Gréece dans le Sud, est marquée par la coexistence des communautés musulmane et chrétienne orthodoxe. Deux des régions principales de l'Albanie du Sud sont Labëria et Toskëria, divisées par la rivière Vjosa. Culturellement cette diversité religieuse et régionale est souvent exprimée dans la juxtaposition des « insiders » et des « outsiders » ou les gens « me kulturë » (avec la culture) d'un côté et les gens « pa culturë » (sans culture) de l'autre, ce qui réfère réciproquement aux Tosks et aux Labs ou aux Chrétiens et aux Musulmans. Le trait qui unit des villages orthodoxes et musulmans au Sud de l'Albanie est l'organisation de fêtes de village collectives, qui pourraient être liées aux rites religieux comme Bajram, la commémoration des saints Bektashi ou le Paques orthodoxe, le Noël et les fêtes des patrons de l'église. Certaines de ces fêtes ont été privées de leur signification d'origine ou celle-ci a été interdite pendant le régime communiste de Enver Hoxha qui a déclaré l'Albanie premier état athée en Europe en 1967. Après l'an 1991, les fêtes de village ont été réorganisées et ranimées par des significations nouvelles et transformées. L'Architecture de la Renaissance à Lviv : un exemple de l'importation culturelle olha kozubska L'objectif de cet article est d'examiner la réception du style de Renaissance dans l'architecture de l'Ukraine comme un exemple important des influences considérables de la culture méditerranéenne. Le centre principal de cette étude concerne l'architecture de Lviv (en polonais — Lwow, en allemand — Lemberg, actuellement la ville à l'Ouest de l'Ukraine) ainsi que les deux composants importants dans le procés-sus de réception et d'adaptation du modèle architectural italien en ville : d'un côté les architectes italiens qui y ont travaillé et de l'autre les classes supérieures des gens de ville qui y étaient des consommateurs. La période prise en considération (le xvie et le début du xviie siècle) est la Renaissance tardive : l'époque où les styles classique et italien sont parvenus dans les périphéries cuturelles de l'Europe. Le passé incertain — les identités nationales et la politique de diversité : site de commémoration de la montagne Eytan udi lebel and zeev drory En 1982, le gouvernement israélien a lancé une proposition concernant la création du site national de commémoration à la montagne Eytan. Malgré son activité intensive le projet a été mis en suspens en 2002. Cet article présente des discours officiels à propos de la mémoire, de la commémoration et du cadre de frontières collectives. Il L'Internationalisation de l'Education Supérieure et l'Assurance de qualité dans la coopération Nord—Sud touhami abdouli L'idée centrale de cet article est que l'internationalisation du système de l'Education Supérieure doit systématiquement dépendre de l'assurance de qualité et vice-versa. Parallèlement, le succès des deux processus, l'internationalisation aussi bien que l'assurance de qualité, ne signifie pas nécessairement se débarrasser du système national local ou, comme certains peuvent à tort penser, mondialiser en abandonnant les caractéristiques locales. Utiliser pragmatiquement l'internationalisation comme un outil de procéssus ou un mécanisme pour consolider et enrichir le système national local et à partir de là construire le système mondial grâce aux composants locaux semble être important, pertinent et significatif. Aucun mondial ne serait atteint sans être basé sur la plate-forme locale. En fait, comme le système exige la valeur supplémentaire, « l'assurance de qualité », parvenir à l'internationalisation est découvrir le local au premier niveau et assurer sa qualité. donne les arguments théoriques ainsi que les procéssus de conflits dans la politique de mémoire en Israël qui se sont produits à travers les axes différents et au sujet des variabiles diverses. Enfin, nous discutons de l'importance sociale et politique provenant de la gestion du projet et en termes de créer un consensus dans le temps de privatisations dans la mesure où les projections peuvent être crées à partir d'un événement de cette nature. Povzetki Med osrčjem Sredozemlja in evropskim obrobjem: migracija in dediščina v južni Italiji maurizio albahari Ta etnografsko poučen članek identificira in proučuje sodobne preseke med migracijo in dediščino v južni Italiji. Takšno upoštevanje pojavljajočih se trendov se zdi še posebno pomembno za programe, ki bi z izpodbijanjem poenostavljene dihotomije evropsko/mediteransko lahko spodbudili vkljucčevanje priseljencev. Primer južne Italije je še posebno pomemben v luči njene regionalne vloge kot zunanje pomorske meje Evropske unije ter v lucči tako imenovanega južnega vprašanja, z njeno zgodovino masivnega izseljevanja in podcenjevanja glede na ostalo Italijo in Evropo. Clanek določi in oceni tudi sodobnejši geo-zgodovinski in moralni okvir, ki po eni strani italijanski Jug preprosto postavi »na Zahod«, po drugi strani pa se igra z vnovicnim lastnim odkritjem južne Italije »v osrčju Sredozemlja«. Ti številni opisi kažejo to, kar velja za nedotakljivo dedišcino južne Italije. Še pomembnejše pa je, da pojavljajoče se spopade te de-dišcine oblikujejo v projekte sprejemanja zdomcev ter projekte širše politicčno-kulturne kritike. V pocastitev imaginarne vasi: načini organiziranja in razlage lokalnih zvocnih krajin in družbenih vzorcev v primeru praznovanj v južni Albaniji ECKEHARD PISTRICK IN GERDA DALIPAJ Za južno Albanijo, ki se razteza od reke Škumbin na severu do meje z Grcijo na jugu, je znacilno sobivanje muslimanskih in pravoslavnih kršcčanskih skupnosti. Dve od glavnih regij v južni Albaniji sta Laberija in Toskerija, ki ju ločuje reka Vjosa. Kulturno se ta verska in regionalna raznolikost velikokrat izraža z oznacčevanjem ljudi kot »notranjih« in »zunanjih« ali kot ljudi »me kulturë« (s kulturo) v nasprotju z ljudmi »pa kulturë« (brez kulture). Takšno označevanje se vzajemno nanaša na prebivalce Toskerije in na prebivalce Laberije ali na kristjane in muslimane. Dejavnik, ki v nekaterih pogledih združuje pravoslavne in muslimanske vasi v južni Albaniji, pa je organizacija Renesančna arhitektura v Lvovu: primer prevzemanja mediteranske kulture OLHA KOZUBSKA Clanek raziskuje prevzem renesančnega sloga v arhitekturi v Ukrajini kot primer enega od dalec segajočih vplivov mediteranske kulture. Študija se osredotoca na renesančno arhitekturo Lvova (poljsko Lwow, nemško Lemberg; kraj v zahodni Ukrajini) ter na dva pomembna dejavnika v procesu prevzema in prilagoditve modela italijanske arhitekture v mestu, in sicer na eni strani na italijanske arhitekte, ki so tam delali, na drugi strani pa na zgornje sloje mestnega prebivalstva kot odjemalce. Cč lanek proucčuje obdobje pozne renesanse (16. in zgodnje 17. stoletje), torej obdobje, ko sta klasični in italijanski slog prodrla v kulturno obrobje Evrope. Neopredeljena preteklost: nacionalne identitete in politika raznolikosti — spominsko obeležje na gori Eytan UDI LEBEL IN ZEEV DRORY Leta i982 je izraelska vlada predlagala, da se na gori Eytan postavi nacionalno spominsko obeležje, vendar je bil projekt kljub intenzivnim dejavnostim leta 2002 opušcčen. Ta cčlanek predstavlja uradne razprave na temo spomina, spominjanja in postavljanja skupnih meja. Predstavlja tako teoretične argumente kot tudi konfliktne procese znotraj politike spomina v Izraelu, ki so se pojavili vzdolž razlicčnih osi in se nanašajo na razlicne spremenljivke. Clanek govori tudi o družbeni in politicni pomembnosti, ki izhajata iz vodenja projekta, ter — z namenom oblikovanja sporazuma v dobi privatizacije — o tem, do kakšne mere lahko na osnovi takšnega dogodka oblikujemo napovedi. skupnih vaških praznovanj, ki so lahko povezana z verskimi obredi, kot je bajram, s spominjanjem na bektaške svetnike, s pravoslavno veliko nocčjo, božicčem ter godovi cerkvenih zavetnikov. Nekatera od teh praznovanj so bila oropana svoje prvotne vloge ali pa so bila prepovedana v času komunisticnega režima Enverja Hodžaja, ki je leta 1967 Albanijo razglasil za prvo ateisticno državo v Evropi. Po letu 1991 so se vaška praznovanja reorganizirala, vnovic oživila ter dobila novo vlogo. Internacionalizacija visokega šolstva in zagotavljanje kakovosti v okviru sodelovanja sever—jug touhami abdouli Osrednja ideja tega članka je, da morata biti internacionalizacija visokošolskega sistema in zagotavljanje kakovosti sistemsko soodvisna. Obenem pa uspeh teh dveh procesov, tako internacionalizacije kot tudi zagotavljanja kakovosti, ne pomeni nujno, da se lokalni nacionalni sistem zavrže ali, kot nekateri mogoče zmotno menijo, globa-lizira z opušcčanjem lokalnih karakteristik. Uporaba internacionalizacije kot procesnega orodja ali mehanizma se lahko izkaže kot zelo pomembna in pragmaticčna pri konsolidaciji in obogatitvi lokalnega nacionalnega sistema in s tem tudi pri gradnji globalnega sistema iz lokalnih komponent. Noben globalni sistem namrecč ne more biti dosežen, ce ne temelji na lokalni platformi. Tak sistem dejansko zahteva dodano vrednost »zagotavljanje kakovosti«, iz cesar sledi, da doseganje internacionalizacije v prvi vrsti pomeni odkrivanje lokalnega in zagotavljanje njegove kakovosti. International Journal f Euro-Mediterranean Studies information for authors Manuscripts are accepted on the understanding that they are original and not under simultaneous consideration by any other publication. 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Prices include postage. The International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies is an interdisciplinary forum dedicated to examining issues in the intersections of humanities and social studies in the Euro-Mediterranean area. It proposes a scholarly response to the current political actions of making a new 'biopolitical' region and provides further rethinking of the acute questions concerning this area. It does not reflect only on the official discourses and dominant politics, but also on the ambivalent and transgressive cultural production and the performances of identities in order to present the 'polyvocality' of the Mediterranean societies and cultures. Revue internationale d'études euro-méditerranéennes est un forum international consacré à examiner les questions dans les intersections d'humanités et des sciences sociales en euro-méditerranée. 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