The Society for Albanian Studies (SAS) has awarded its 2020 Stavro Skendi Book Prize for Achievement in Albanian Studies to Dr. Smoki Musaraj for “Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania”.
The SAS, announced the award on Monday, November 2, in addition to a short description of the book and research behind it.
“Tales from Albarado – Albarado elides Albania and El Dorado – describes a key moment in modern Albanian history: the rise and fall of the so-called ‘pyramid firms’ of the 1990s, when 1.5 million Albanian investors lost upwards of $1 billion to a dozen different, sprawling Ponzi schemes.
This financial collapse led in 1997-1998 to a near-civil war and set Albania’s new, capitalist economy back a decade.
Employing economic-anthropological theoretical frameworks and based on both archival-documentary and ethnographic data, the author concludes that the Albanian pyramid phenomenon was not a result of illogical economic behavior, i.e. a hysteria; rather, such phenomena – and the growth and bursting of financial ‘bubbles’ generally – are predictable outcomes of fast-moving, liberalized economies that allow and encourage multiple capitalist (‘official,’ ‘embedded’) and non-capitalist (‘kin-based’, ‘non-embedded’) wealth-generating strategies.
In fact, Musaraj’s detailed description and analysis of Albania’s post-socialist economy blurs these various dichotomies and demonstrates that traditional economic approaches, which depend on various neo-liberal assumptions, such as rational action, and do not consider socio-cultural contexts, are misguided at best, and potentially tragic at worst.”
The Stavro Skendi Book Prize for Achievement in Albanian Studies is presented every year to the best book making a contribution to, and advancing research in Albanian Studies.
Founded in 1973, the SAS is a scholarly and academic association based in the USA dedicated to promoting the professional study, criticism, and research of all aspects of Albanian culture, society and politics.
Dr. Smoki Musaraj is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ohio University, US. Tales from Albarado was published by Cornell University Press, 2020.
The SAS predicts an impact beyond Albanian Studies for the book, and highly recommends policy-makers in particular to read it. Tales from Albarado can be purchased on Amazon in all formats, or from Cornell University Press.
The SAS also awarded the 2020 Arshi Pipa Best Graduate Student Award to Arbër Jashari for his study entitled “Tradition, Affect, Ethics: A View of Kosova’s Movement of Nonviolent Resistance in the 1990s”.
