Books and Edited Volumes by Smoki Musaraj
Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania, 2020
Tales from Albarado revisits times of excitement and loss in early 1990s Albania, in which about ... more Tales from Albarado revisits times of excitement and loss in early 1990s Albania, in which about a dozen pyramid firms collapsed and caused the country to fall into anarchy and a near civil war. To gain a better understanding of how people from all walks of life came to invest in these financial schemes and how these schemes became intertwined with everyday transactions, dreams, and aspirations, Smoki Musaraj looks at the materiality, sociality, and temporality of financial speculations at the margins of global capital. She argues that the speculative financial practices of the schemes were enabled by official financial infrastructures (such as the postsocialist free-market reforms), by unofficial economies (such as transnational remittances), as well as by historically specific forms of entrepreneurship, transnational social networks, and desires for a European modernity. Overall, these granular stories of participation in the Albanian schemes help understand neoliberal capitalism as a heterogeneous economic formation that intertwines capitalist and noncapitalist forms of accumulation and investment.
Remitting Restoring and Building Contemporary Albania copy, 2021
The edited collection is a fresh contribution to the anthropological, sociological, and geographi... more The edited collection is a fresh contribution to the anthropological, sociological, and geographical explorations of time-space in Southeast Europe and Albania in particular. By delving into various levels of people’s daily lives, such as literature, relation to the environment, the urbanization process, art, photography, trauma and remembering, processes of modernity, the volume vividly portrays various realms that are lived and perceived. It largely builds on the premise that structural resemblances of the past continuously reappear in particular social and cultural moments and seek to restore and build the individual and collective lives in contemporary Albania.
Articles by Smoki Musaraj
American Anthropologist, 2023
Construction booms have dominated Albania's economy and politics since the late 1990s. These boom... more Construction booms have dominated Albania's economy and politics since the late 1990s. These booms continued even during times of illiquidity. One of the sources of financing construction in Albania is the practice of klering (in-kind payments). In this practice, developers pay subcontractors in (future) apartments in exchange for materials and labor. I argue that, in klering transactions, housing serves as an asset and a means of payment. The practice of klering emerged at the interface of postcommunist transformations, neoliberal reforms, and the fetishization of housing as an asset of more durable and multifaceted economic and cultural value. While grounded in the local histories and values of housing, klering is made possible by a fuzzy property regime, systemic corruption, and widespread informality. At the same time, klering echoes other global patterns pertaining to housing, such as the rise of asset economy, financialization, and money laundering through real estate purchases. The klering economy echoes speculative logics and practices that are prevalent across and that link centers and peripheries, formal and informal markets. These economic logics generate uncertainty and ambiguity; they mobilize social networks and cultural imaginaries; and they thrive on and further reproduce deep social and economic inequalities.
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2022
By its very nature of extended ethnographic research, funding, academic cycle, and publication pr... more By its very nature of extended ethnographic research, funding, academic cycle, and publication process, ethnographic works are slow; they cannot respond quickly to current events. Yet they can provide invaluable context and depth of knowledge about contemporary issues through the lens of anthropological theory and thick description of everyday experiences. In this brief editorial, we provide a glimpse into the current field and the range of themes that political and legal anthropologists are working on. While we cannot do justice to the vast literature on these topics, we highlight just some of the important contributions that anthropologists are making to contemporary conversations around key political and legal issues of our time. Here we discuss how legal anthropologists tackle climate change and environmental politics; authoritarian and illiberal democracy; war, violence, and conflict; courts, legal proceedings, and bureaucratic entanglements; and human rights and global activism.
Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 2019
International media accounts of the spectacular collapse of the pyramid firms in Albania in 1997 ... more International media accounts of the spectacular collapse of the pyramid firms in Albania in 1997 centre on the story of Maksude Kadëna, the head of the notorious firm, Sude. These accounts depict Kadëna as a 'gypsy fortune teller who claimed to look into a crystal ball'. In this article, I return to these various accounts of Sude/ Kadëna as a way to explore ethnographically the broader set of cosmologies and repertoires of credit and speculation that informed the decisions and strategies of participation in these firms. I suggest that the activities of the firms were, on the one hand, an extension of practices and ideas about the free market during the communist regime and, on the other hand, a manifestation of postsocialist cosmologies or risk and speculation and repertoires of credit and investment that extended well beyond the firms.
Current Anthropology, 2018
2. The piracy theme dominated the stage design and opening credits of the show in the first decad... more 2. The piracy theme dominated the stage design and opening credits of the show in the first decade of its broadcasting. The set has since been changed into a sleek urban setting with the skyline of the capital, Tirana.
Ethnologie Francaise, 2017
When they collapsed in 1997, the so‑called pyramid firms (firma piramidale) in Albania swept the ... more When they collapsed in 1997, the so‑called pyramid firms (firma piramidale) in Albania swept the savings of hundreds of thousands of investors and led the country to a near civil war. This article considers how and why investors participated in these fraudulent
financial schemes. More specifically, it traces how these firms mobilized kinship networks and migrant remittances at a time of massive migration abroad, following the postsocialist transformations of the early nineties. I argue that, in a time of economic instability and lack of access to financial resources, the firms constituted “thresholds of value conversion”; they mobilized different forms of wealth (kin relations, remittances, labor) and enabled (or promised) the creation of new forms of value (financial, social, and cultural).
Cultural Anthropology, 2011
"ABSTRACT
The Albanian pyramid schemes (1992–97) drew in almost two thirds of the country's popu... more "ABSTRACT
The Albanian pyramid schemes (1992–97) drew in almost two thirds of the country's population with the promise of sure financial returns. When the schemes collapsed, many thousands in Albania lost their savings, remittances from immigrant relatives, even their recently privatized apartments. How might we understand such widespread involvement in this high-risk economic activity? Moving beyond explanations that stop at “mania” or “ignorance of market logic,” this article looks to accounts from former participants (kreditors) that emphasize the materiality of the schemes—especially the presence of stacks of cash and the circulation of immigrant remittances in multiple currencies—for a more grounded understanding of how the pyramid schemes actually took hold. The central argument of the article is that the schemes came to fill the gaps between the liberalization of financial markets after socialism and the coeval flows of cash coming into the country beneath the regulatory frameworks of formal financial institutions. The rise and collapse of the Albanian pyramid schemes may then be viewed not as an abstract financial “bubble” but as the result of historically specific “translations” of the wider neoliberal push for rapid and unregulated privatization. As such, these schemes, which were embedded in the particularities of postsocialist transformations, were also active forces that contributed to processes of wealth and value transformations and to the formation of a specific kind of business culture that combines conspicuous consumption with networking and entrepreneurial skills established during the socialist years."
Anthropology of East Europe Review, 2009
Book Chapters by Smoki Musaraj
Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination, 2022
Reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities can move scholars of real cities to look at issues of ur... more Reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities can move scholars of real cities to look at issues of urbanity in new and useful ways (Linder, this volume). This was certainly true for us, two differently positioned ethnographers who have previously approached Tirana, the Albanian capital, from our own distinctive anthropological perspectives. As a Tirana native who has lived abroad since 1995 (Musaraj) and a foreigner with more experience than a casual visitor but less understanding than a local (Rosen), we situate our analysis of the city somewhere between the skeptical resignation expressed by many of our Tirana-based interlocutors and the fetishism of difference often espoused by international observers. Our general argument is that Tirana’s contemporary urban landscape—from the iconic buildings that stand at the historic city center to the concrete-panel apartment buildings and informal markets located along its periphery—can be read as a chronotopic narrative of a city “where time and space intersect and fuse” (Bakhtin 1981, 7). Extending Calvino’s image of a city made of countless visible and invisible traces, our analysis in this chapter reveals an urban landscape that is as layered with names, signs, memories, merchants, wounds, desires, and the dead as anything Marco Polo told Kublai Khan. Like Calvino’s city of Clarice, Tirana’s modern history has been marked by continuous construction and destruction. A succession of different political regimes approached the city as a tabula rasa, seeking to construct a new world from scratch. Yet, as we reflect in the following, the various pasts of Tirana are also still visible and palpable in the present fabric of the city.
Remitting, Restoring and Building Contemporary Albania, 2021
Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion, and Design, 2018
A rotating credit-association meeting fi lled with food, music, laughter, and community spectator... more A rotating credit-association meeting fi lled with food, music, laughter, and community spectators. Migrants who negotiate state borders by foot and sim cards. Traders creatively swapping between international and socialist currency spheres. A complex semiotic world of visual bargaining cues in a busy street market. Creative technology uptake and adaptation among visually impaired members facilitating participation in a women's savings group. Such are the types of lively stories that animate this volume on technology, inclusion, and design-stories drawing on everyday practices around money, value, storage, savings, and transfers among oftentimes marginalized communities across the Global South.
The Quite Power of Indicators: Measuring Corruption, Governance and Rule of Law. Eds. Sally Engle Merry, Kevin Davis, and Benedict Kingsbury. Cambridge University Press, 2015
The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance. Eds. Malito D., Umbach G., Bhuta N. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
Recent work by an interdisciplinary community of scholars has brought attention to the politics a... more Recent work by an interdisciplinary community of scholars has brought attention to the politics and economics of the production and deployment of indicators on a wide range of issues—from human rights and the rule of law to health care and climate change. Working alongside this literature, this chapter looks into the production and circulation of corruption indicators as powerful sources of expertise and as means of global and local governance. The focus of the chapter is a corruption indicator produced in Albania, a country that over the past 25 years has depended on international development aid and has eagerly (but to this day unsuccessfully) tried to join the European Union. The chapter traces the production and circulation of this indicator among a heterogeneous network of actors—governmental bodies, international organisations, local research centres, and global consultants—and its intended and unintended uses by various political actors on the ground. More specifically, the chapter traces the uses of this indicator as a source of expertise in discussions and decision-making around key court cases of alleged high-level corruption and on the ongoing judicial reform.
Special Issue by Smoki Musaraj
Book Reviews by Smoki Musaraj
Anthropological Notebooks, 2022
Anthropological Notebooks, 2022
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Books and Edited Volumes by Smoki Musaraj
Articles by Smoki Musaraj
financial schemes. More specifically, it traces how these firms mobilized kinship networks and migrant remittances at a time of massive migration abroad, following the postsocialist transformations of the early nineties. I argue that, in a time of economic instability and lack of access to financial resources, the firms constituted “thresholds of value conversion”; they mobilized different forms of wealth (kin relations, remittances, labor) and enabled (or promised) the creation of new forms of value (financial, social, and cultural).
The Albanian pyramid schemes (1992–97) drew in almost two thirds of the country's population with the promise of sure financial returns. When the schemes collapsed, many thousands in Albania lost their savings, remittances from immigrant relatives, even their recently privatized apartments. How might we understand such widespread involvement in this high-risk economic activity? Moving beyond explanations that stop at “mania” or “ignorance of market logic,” this article looks to accounts from former participants (kreditors) that emphasize the materiality of the schemes—especially the presence of stacks of cash and the circulation of immigrant remittances in multiple currencies—for a more grounded understanding of how the pyramid schemes actually took hold. The central argument of the article is that the schemes came to fill the gaps between the liberalization of financial markets after socialism and the coeval flows of cash coming into the country beneath the regulatory frameworks of formal financial institutions. The rise and collapse of the Albanian pyramid schemes may then be viewed not as an abstract financial “bubble” but as the result of historically specific “translations” of the wider neoliberal push for rapid and unregulated privatization. As such, these schemes, which were embedded in the particularities of postsocialist transformations, were also active forces that contributed to processes of wealth and value transformations and to the formation of a specific kind of business culture that combines conspicuous consumption with networking and entrepreneurial skills established during the socialist years."
Book Chapters by Smoki Musaraj
Special Issue by Smoki Musaraj
Book Reviews by Smoki Musaraj
financial schemes. More specifically, it traces how these firms mobilized kinship networks and migrant remittances at a time of massive migration abroad, following the postsocialist transformations of the early nineties. I argue that, in a time of economic instability and lack of access to financial resources, the firms constituted “thresholds of value conversion”; they mobilized different forms of wealth (kin relations, remittances, labor) and enabled (or promised) the creation of new forms of value (financial, social, and cultural).
The Albanian pyramid schemes (1992–97) drew in almost two thirds of the country's population with the promise of sure financial returns. When the schemes collapsed, many thousands in Albania lost their savings, remittances from immigrant relatives, even their recently privatized apartments. How might we understand such widespread involvement in this high-risk economic activity? Moving beyond explanations that stop at “mania” or “ignorance of market logic,” this article looks to accounts from former participants (kreditors) that emphasize the materiality of the schemes—especially the presence of stacks of cash and the circulation of immigrant remittances in multiple currencies—for a more grounded understanding of how the pyramid schemes actually took hold. The central argument of the article is that the schemes came to fill the gaps between the liberalization of financial markets after socialism and the coeval flows of cash coming into the country beneath the regulatory frameworks of formal financial institutions. The rise and collapse of the Albanian pyramid schemes may then be viewed not as an abstract financial “bubble” but as the result of historically specific “translations” of the wider neoliberal push for rapid and unregulated privatization. As such, these schemes, which were embedded in the particularities of postsocialist transformations, were also active forces that contributed to processes of wealth and value transformations and to the formation of a specific kind of business culture that combines conspicuous consumption with networking and entrepreneurial skills established during the socialist years."
Book Review of "Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania" by Smoki Musaraj, Cornell University Press, 2020