Ideologising language, constructing boundaries: Locality, ethnicity and nationalism in the Greek minority village of Dervitsani, Albania

In our paper we are discussing the ways the residents of a village close to the Albanian – Greek border of Kakavia are negotiating and constructing their identities dialectically with the co-existing Albanian and neighbouring Greek ones. Our main focus is on the role of language and religion as the two most important cultural traits they make use of, in order to claim differences in three parallel levels; the local one as a community, the ethnic one as a Greek minority among Albanians in an Albanian nation state and the nationalistic one as “survivors” of a hazardous communist past in a contemporary capitalist society. Apparently, political trends are affecting and simultaneously being affected in such a process. Therefore, they intervene in several parts of our analysis. Based on our personal observations during fieldwork at Dervitsani, we discuss and correlate already fruitful theories, most of them coming from the fields of Anthropology, Sociolinguistics and History. Our hope is to propose an interdisciplinary approach to modern border minorities, considering that this way we can open up our gaze and observe them through multiple spectrums, challenging as this may seem.