Suchergebnisse

'Business as usual' in contemporary Albania takes place between different and conflicting systems of meaning and value. Drawing from ethnographic material collected in Tirana, Albania, this article examines the complexities of social and economic life in a city where distinct moral economies routinely clash with the capitalist principle of profit. Starting from the ethnographic impulse to learn how two local booksellers made sense of the contradictory systems of meaning operating in their everyday lives, the analysis shows how a grinding of discordant value systems produced the more general paradox of an 'ordinary tragedy'.

This social thought and commentary makes an argument for ethnographies of reading in an age of widespread literacy and global communication. The choice of method I propose is to start with the concrete practices of everyday readers. To situate this proposal in a specific ethnographic context, I draw on material from my research among a community of readers who spend time in a network of "footpath libraries" (vāchanālaya) in Pune, India. I then step back from ethnographic reporting to consider the topic of reading more broadly as an object of anthropology. I begin by situating the ethnography of reading in a range of everyday sites and historical locations. I next trace a condensed history of reading as a topic in anthropology—from its absence by definition in the foundation of a discipline that would study "the people without writing" to its emergence in the 1990s as a legitimate area of research. The discussion concludes with an analysis of the social reading of a "human-interest story" appearing in a Pune newspaper. My aim here is to show how the ethnography of ordinary reading can yield unexpected insights into larger issues—in this case, the changing social fabric of a once-provincial city in western India.