Death and Mourning as Becoming in a Transitional Tirana

Following a long history of "'bare' death: an unmarked and uncelebrated desecration of the person (Simpson, 2018)" during the communist regime when dictatorial politics determined who counted as a person (Carrithers et al 2011: 662), or who did the remembering (Butler, 2015), most of the Albanian population has taken up new spatial and material commemorative practices. The newly found pomposity in cemetery tombs in a constant struggle to appropriate as much space as possible has become a reality. Inscription of space and place, as well as embodiment of a collective knowledge that people are free to mourn their loved ones, have transformed the city into an "[e]mbodied space [that] is the location where human experience and consciousness take on material and spatial form (Low, 2003)." Spaces appropriated by these collective representations of death consequently become new socially designated places of collective commemoration and spatially embedded experiences of death and dying (Low & Lawrence-Zúñiga 2004). In this presentation, I further pay attention to ways that appropriations of space by cemeteries and other public practices of mourning have come to clash with development policies, causing tensions "between the values of community and efficiency in urban development (Tooley, 2017)". New mortuary practices spatially organizing the memorialization of loved ones and as such they transform into social communication strategies, according to Danforth (2004). Referencing ways of constructing personhood, I argue that democratized public gestures of memorialization and embodied knowledge of death make for a collective process of becoming.