International advancement, or the essence of emigration: An ethnography of the Albanians of Greece

The paradoxically willed pursuit of social demotion through international migration constitutes the starting point of this ethnographic investigation of the most massive East European emigration since the end of the Cold War. Grounded in fieldwork in the city of Athens in the year 2002, this ethnography of "the emigrants," as the Albanians of Greece refer to themselves, engages with each other a wide range of everyday narratives to produce an expose of the conflicted discursive scape of emigration. The essence of emigration is implicit in what emigrants say: as the enforcement of classlessness by the socialist state had made individual advancement impossible in Albania in the late 1980s, desires for social distinction articulated themselves in popular imaginations of a global hierarchy of countries where material objects would have been freely available. This articulation of individual advancement through the social imagination of a hierarchical world order explains the eruption of emigration in the early 1990s and the paradoxical pursuit of manual employment in the West by Albanian teachers, engineers, and other professionals: they crossed the international borders to advance from a location they envisioned as inferior towards one they envisioned as superior. But while the material objects they possess in Greece may justify emigration in the context of the scarcity of objects in Albania in the 1980s, xenophobia and the absence of legal protection by a state in Greece put emigrants in a position that, through disadvantageous employment, splices their intellectual superiority over bosses and coworkers with an insurmountable condition of economic inferiority. The articulation of the social in terms of the international, which in 1980s Albania allowed social advancement to be imagined as an attribute of international migration, is at present what precludes emigrants from advancing socially---emigrants cannot advance because, in contemporary Greece, membership in society is not defined by actual presence and participation but is envisioned in terms of people's belonging to countries. The ensuing sentience that the experience of emigration cannot be communicated, and the discontinuities between events linked together in individual lives, are explored in this ethnography through a series of portraits of individual emigrants.