Publications

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.

Since 2002, the satirical investigative television show Fiks Fare (“Right On!” or “Exactly”) has aired immediately after prime-time news at a leading national broadcasting network in Albania. Through sting operations and cynical satire, the show tells the raw story of everyday experiences of corruption in Albanian society—from daily interactions with low-level public administration officers to the backroom deals of high-level officials. Over the years, Fiks Fare has endured as an effective whistle-blower in a country notorious for a lack of prosecutions and convictions on corruption charges. In this article, I explore the effects of this unlikely anti-corruption agent by drawing attention to its narratives of corruption, its technologies of investigation, and its genres of representation. I argue that, through its use of sting operations and mass mediation, the show constructs specific publics and subjects—victims, intermediaries, perpetrators—that engage in everyday corruption. Second, through its use of a genre of cynical satire and vulgar aesthetics, the show constructs a political commentary that makes visible the intimacies of corruption and the normalized complicity of ordinary people with figures of power. This genre speaks more broadly to forms of governance and of the state in a postsocialist context. I suggest that Fiks Fare remains effective over the years precisely because of the form of its critique of power, articulated not through opposition or resistance but rather through ambiguity, vulgarity, and complicity.