Lindja e Albanologjisë sipas shkrimeve Gjermane dhe Austriake
From the Foreigner’s Point of View: The Birth of Albanologie in German and Austrian Writings

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, author aimed to contribute to the debate about hegemonic relations between the West European ‘‘core’’ and southeast European ‘‘margins,’’ by showing the links between mutually challenged and engendered quasi-anthropological traditions in the totalitarian projects of nation-building and empire-building. New aspects of a continuous resonance were addressed between a politically instrumentalized Albanian tradition of ‘‘folk’’ or people’s culture studies (kultura popullore) and a German-speaking tradition of Volks- and Völkerkunde grounded in Herderean Romanticism and the imperial ambitions of the nineteenth century. In the course of discussion the successive German traditions of National Socialist Volkskunde and Communist East German Ethnographie, until the revised tradition of Europaische Ethnologie in the 1990s, are shown to operate from a historicist tradition rather than from a critical tradition as a reflexive successor to former Volkskunde. In the course of this discussion, he paid particular attention to contextualizing the historical and current production of knowledge by the German and Austrian ‘‘West’’ on a Balkan and Albanian culture, which is reduced to its archaic or pre-modern ‘‘traditions’’ and its specific or antiquated ‘‘mentalities.’’

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