Reactions to Tirana (and Albania)

It has taken me a while to feel I can post something about my trip to Albania.  Well strictly my trip wasn’t really to Albania, it was to Tirana: there is much more to Albania than Tirana, for all that Tirana is undoubtedly Albania’s “primate city”.

Honestly, I didn’t make that term up nor does it mean a city full of apes, hm, though perhaps it does mean that really.  I write of course as a ape who resides very fondly most of the time in London, England’s primate city, the UK’s primate city!

But back to Albania.  Tirana has between 600,000 and 900,000 of Albania’s 2.9M population.  That huge interval estimate of Tirana’s population is because one of my hosts was adamant that the official population for Tirana, of 610k, is way low and misses a continuing and explosive growth.   To be a primate city it has to be more than twice as populous and more than twice as important as the next largest city and Tirana ticks those boxes.  Though this is the situation now, Tirana was only a small town in the late 19th Century when Albania was a collection of Vilayets and Sanjaks: provincial divisions within a faltering Ottoman empire.

Ah, and I’m already into the problem: history, more particularly, Albania’s history.   It’s not that I usually ignore history.  In fact, whenever I go to a new country, or even a large town or area that is new to me, I try to understand a bit of its history.  Everywhere that has been populated by the dodgy human apes has history.  Or, if it has no written history, it will have archeologically inferred history.  Even the very few parts of the world that have never been populated by us have geology and geography that I like to check out.  My mind has a strange collage of rather skimpy, cartoon like, ideas of the geology, geography, prehistory of the many places I’ve been lucky enough to visit.  It also has and a very thin history there for each of them.   All that is there in rather unreliable stored mix in my head and I have no illusions that any places that have been populated by humans have had untroubled histories.  However, Albania has impressed me with something of the stark severity of its history.  That was in my mind during and since my visit more than for any of my previous visits anywhere.  The only close competitor is Vienna: the first time I went to Vienna I walked around on my free day feeling oppressed with a sense of the waves of horror it has hosted.  I’ve been back to Vienna several times since, all on work trips, and the sense of oppression has never been as severe and I’ve even developed quite a fondness for Vienna.  Neither for Vienna nor for Albania was it really fair of me to experience them in this way, but I did. Arguably, so many places, take York or Norwich for example, have arguably as severe historical stains on them as Vienna and Albania.  Humans, surely the least sociably competent primate species, seem to soak so many places in horror, blood, death and oppression as we strive to define our identities.  (Ugh, rereading this I realise I have left out visiting the concentration camp at Buchenwald while at a lovely conference in Weimar as I’m omitting places created purely for the purposes of horror from my comparisons, I’m interested at the moment in how “ordinary places of human occupation” affect me.)

Years ago, when I started working with an Albanian (Arlinda Cerga: thanks again Arlinda!) on the translation into Albanian of the CORE-OM I read up a bit about Albania as I always try to.  I read Ismail Kadare’s “The Successor” and felt it caught brilliantly some sense of what it is like to try to live, and to try to keep thinking, in an extreme and crass totalitarian regime.  Kadare is one of Albania’s considerable number of outstanding human beings and I thought the book stood up well in the comparisons that are made between him and Kafka, Gogol, Orwell and other great writers.  I’m about to read some more Kadare when I’m feeling strong enough.

After Arlinda, Blerta (Bodinaku) has been my main Albanian colleague and collaborator and we, with input from others, finished the Albanian CORE-OM and Blerta has gone on to do an impressive PhD using it and other measures.  Over the last eight years she and I have met a number of times, but never in Albania itself.  (Twice oddly enough, in Vienna.)  This trip to Tirana was my first trip to Albania and the reason was to sit in on the focus group for the Albanian translation of the YP-CORE (Young Persons’ CORE: for 11 to 17 year olds).  I was also doing a workshop and a plenary talk at an international conference which Blerta, with others, and with other collaborating institutions as well as Tirana University, were hosting in Tirana.

In my reading before flying out this time I discovered Edith Durham and started reading her High Albania (1909).  Durham was a remarkable woman, and though she’s no literary stylist, High Albania struck me as a very remarkable book.  There’s a rather thin and perhaps not very sympathetic wikipedia page about her at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Durham and the whole of High Albania is online here.  I  was reading a convenient Kindle edition you can check out here(1), despite my continuing love of “real books”.  I also managed to read Robert Elsie’s Albania in a nutshell while I was out there and, since returning, Marcus Tanner’s Albania’s Mountain Queen: Edith Durham and the Balkans.  That’s quite a lot of reading (I did also read more about Albania and Tirana on wikipedia and a guide to Tirana!), it’s probably twice as much as I’ve done for any other translation trip and it reflects something that developed as the trip approached and through it: a fascination with Albania and its history and also with this amazing woman Edith Durham and with why I’d never heard of her.

I don’t want to get caught up in clichés about Albania: it has undoubtedly had a warred over and at times horrifying history.  It is part of the Balkans and therefore part of an area that it has, as I see it, suited more western, northern and eastern parts of Europe, and suited Russia and the Ottoman empire, to have as a barrier zone into which to locate much of the worst of our territorial warring over some 500 years or more, a phase we’re hardly reliably out of now.  It has a history of blood feuding which, from talking to someone involved in refugee care in London is not completely over yet.  It has had perhaps the worst denigration of women in European history though hardly any of the world can look proudly at our histories there can we?  My refugee service leader said that the men who come to them from Albania are mostly fleeing death threats and the women are mostly moderately feminist, moderately modern and feisty young women from rural Albania who can’t face the options available for them in their home towns.  The most recent challenge Albania has had, under Enver Hoxha, was a particular “socialist” dictatorship and totalitarian regime only outdone by the regime in North Korea for its grip on its population.  Hoxha probably purged more religion and cultural/religious history and architecture out of the country than has happened anywhere in the world.  (IS in parts of the “middle East” and northern Africa and the worst the Taliban did in Afghanistan seem to me to be the only comparable planned destructions of art and ideas.)

Albania is emerging from all of those things and at pretty dramatic speed.  Tirana, this very recently created capital city has grown dramatically.  It’s acquired recent fame for its paint and it felt a friendly and busy place to be.  It shocked me to find I was in the oldest university in Albania but to find that that university is exactly as old as I am (Tirana university was created under Hoxha in 1957).  Tirana has a generally rather unappealing to me mess of a very few early 20th and pre-20th century buildings, many Hoxha era buildings, and a rapidly growing number of generally rather repellant and grandiose post-Hoxha office buildings.  There’s another fascinating juxtaposition of most of the obligatory shops that you see in any major city anywhere in the world now, against street vendors selling vegetables, collected essentials (tights seemed to be particularly common) from a sheet laid on the pavement or a few boxes. Another juxtaposition is generational: younger and youngest in bright colours, particularly technicolour faux fur trim jackets and coats, alongside parents and grandparents in black and very basic, hard wearing clothing. The older people often have a look of years of tough living in their skin, eyes and generally complete absence of any obesity. By contrast the younger and youngest look well nourished, clean and healthy (though nearly everyone seems to smoke and often heavily).

Pehaps oddly, the most similar experience I’ve had was of visiting Shanghai earlier this year where there are similar juxtapositions, particular by generations though Shanghai is so much build in internal migration that I remember few of the adult parent with child couples walking the streets that I saw in Tirana.  I can see that it’s odd to compare a city of 27M people with one of say 900k, in a country of under 3M: you would need nine Albanias to fill Shanghai.  Blerta thought the comparison hugely amusing.  Clearly Albania and Shanghai China come out of different ethnicities, different religions, radically different languages but they do share emergence from communism.

I knolw that I’m still digesting what I made of Albania.  I am keen to build work links there and fairly confident that that will be possible and supported by most people I met. Albania has a long, if sometimes oppressed (Hoxha again) tradition of speaking a number of languages. I found a real mix of people who speak next to no English with many who speak it so well that conversation was no problem at all.  Traditionally people have also spoken Serbian, Italian, Greek, Macedonia, Bulgarian, Turkish, German and French depending on the era and on the part of Albania in which they lived.  That’s great fo me as I’m no linguist.  I will try to add to my “faleminderit” (“Thanks/thank you”), “po” (“yes”) and “jo” (“no”) but I have no illusions that I’m going to learn even enough Albanian to do more than cope in shops without lucking on an interpreter.

People were pretty much all very welcoming and I had a great time in my six days there, culminating in one particularly splendid meal in a small restaurant where the chef is an artist by day and the food he served up was wonderfully diverse, fresh and tasty.  Through that meal the conversation with my hosts was full of laughter but we covered a huge range of topics that were often grim.  We talked about the challenges to art, creativity and empirical exploration of our world.  We shared worries about Trump in the States, Putin in Russia, Brexit in the UK and grim prospects of the rise of the right in Europe and about the the seeming total control of neoliberal profiteering everywhere.  We talked about how in Albania they are in many ways building research and academic work pretty much from scratch.  That was a state of affairs that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else. That was not my experience in Croatia or Slovenian, the only other parts of the Balkans I know a bit, nor in former “Iron Curtain” countries I have visited like Slovakia, Lithuania, Poland or the Czech Republic, nor was it true in China.  Of course, no academic community is ever immune from pressures from its political surroundings.  What is happening the UK frightens me as I think it challenges independence of thinking and freedom to investigate things empirically and seeks to make sure that as little as possible in research, teaching and academia could challenge neoliberal ideas. However, in the UK and in many countries there are traditions of research and thinking located in a set of buildings, in jobs, in teaching and researching opportunities and these go back far more than 60 years in most countries I have visited. It’s easy to underestimate how such longevity has helped nurture moderately resilient traditions of survival, often perhaps more impressively than in the UK. I felt what I saw in Tirana and more generally in the delegates at the conference, suggests the growth will be good if having to grow on penuriously little funding.  It would be great to be alongside that in some small way.

More selfishly perhaps, I hope I will also get a chance to go back with some holiday time as well, get on a bike perhaps and see more of the country.  It’s clearly geographically diverse and beautiful, with a wealth of mountains, lakes and bird life to keep me very happy.  Ah, a cycle ride through the Balkans, Albania and down into Greece before I’m too old?!

Afterthought (19.xii.16): if you are Albanian or work with Albanian speakers and want to know more about the CORE-OM and YP-CORE in Albanian, go to the Albanian translation page on the CST web site.  It was work around that which took me to Tirana.  

Moving from clouds, and through clouds, to psychotherapy research

I have still not really managed to digest my brief trip to Tirana, or is it too that I am still digesting my return to the UK, if I think about the challenge more evenly?  Anyway, that’s still work in progress, so one or more posts that seem to be brewing in my head out of that trip and my return must wait another few days (sorry Blerta!)  I’m sprinkling this post with some ‘photos, spread over some years, of Mont Blanc “calving” clouds.

15/01/2014 08:35

However, that extraordinary and wonderful cloud I saw in Tirana took me back to something that’s been with me for some years now since I read a fascinating book: Hamblyn, Richard. The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.  The book is about Luke Howard (1772-1864).  Howard was a hard working Quaker and pharmacist from East London who invented the core of the naming system for cloud formations that is still in use today, first describing it publicly in 1802.  There’s a typically useful Wikipedia page about him and an Amazon page about the book here.  Howard invented the names cumulus, stratus and cirrhus and combined names, e.g. cirrostratus, for their intermediate forms.  He got this sufficiently right for it to have survived as a system for over 200 years despite there being very little then known about how and why clouds form, or even about meteorology.  He did it entirely through observational data, much of it simply qualitative descriptive data in the form of sketches and narratives.

I liked the book which seemed itself to have been carefully done and well written.  I admit that I have a weakness for biographies of brave eccentrics, particularly of the many who pretty much developed modern science and for works about and by the many who still do push forward the “hard sciences”.  However, what grabbed me on reading the book was not just the human story and the emerging science of clouds but also a metaphorical message: that this was probably a better model for where psychotherapy research needs to be than the models we currently worship.

22/08/2004 19:06

Howard could conduct no formal experiments, no randomised controlled trials, he didn’t even have any real chance to take temperature and humidity readings or to collect water droplets or ice crystals from clouds.  He understood that one could have powerful reactions to clouds and he had a correspondence wtih Goethe and they admired each other’s work and Goethe wrote a short celebratory verse in honour of Howard.  However, he could put his feelings aside except perhaps for how much they helped him keep working.  He could put them aside because metereorlogy has the huge advantage over psychotherapy research that we can ignore our emotional reactions as meteorological observers. Our feelings and reactions are not cloud shaping forces.  In radical contrast, when there are two or more people in a room communicating (even if only non-verbally), then they always affect one another and this does shape the interactions that take place. That means that only “computer delivered psychotherapy” and “bibliotherapy” (reading therapeutically intended books) can ignore observer impacts on the process.

I am not saying that psychotherapy research just needs us to watch and describe.  I’m clear that we do need tools, measures and reductive, quantitative ways to describe things and I do believe the neuroscience has a bit to tell us about psychotherapies. (Though I suspect that it’s currently oversold and part of the “neurodolatry” afflicting late 20th and 21st century attempts to understand the mind).  However, the psychotherapies are, like cloud formation and weather, in formal mathematical terms, probably both chaotic and complex system phenomena. Despite their phenomena being chaotic and complex, the meteorologists who came after Howard could not only ignore their own rections but could also assume that regular laws of physics (and a bit of chemistry) will determine the processes that create clouds.  As we understand more about the mind it seems increasingly unlikely that any such linear or regular laws drive human minds in communication.  That shouldn’t stop us seeking simplifications, measurements and explanations, even guides as to how we might make psychotherapies more helpful*.

However, too much psychotherapy research wastes time and money applying tools that are fine where their logic applies but which have no epistemological coherence applied to psychotherapies.  The paradigm example is the randomised controlled trial (RCT). The RCT is brilliant and completely appropriate in the shape of the double blind randomised controlled trial in pharmacology but it becomes the at best single blinded, or frankly unblindable, RCTs of psychotherapies.  We know from much empirical work in pharmacology that even the prescriber knowing whether the trial participant is getting a supposedly active drug or a placebo, even when the participant doesn’t know this, makes a difference to outcomes. We know that on balance it makes the outcomes better (though almost certainly also creating some “nocebo” negative effects**).  We even know that this appears to have effects not just on how people feel but on their mortality.

22/08/2004 19:07

All that tells us that psychotherapy in its simplest form works: the client sensing that that the therapist knows or believes something might help, is, on balance, better than doing nothing.  We can never separate that effect from “true psychotherapy” as we can never double blind the delivery of psychotherapies.  Sadly, at least in the UK and North America, and I think mainland Europe, psychotherapy research funding is overwhelmingly directed at RCTs.  Can we shake off this mad pursuit of pseudo certainties and trappings of “true science” and recognise that many “true sciences” came from, continue to come from, purely descriptive work and theory building?  Is Luke Howard’s story of what one dedicated person managed to do by observation and quiet persistence an inspirational story for us?  I think so!

Footnotes!

*  Where helping is a legitimate aim: arguably some therapies, say full psychoanalysis, or some other analyses (Dasein analysis, Jungian analyses) and some humanistic psychotherapies, rightly avoid any commitment to help and only offer to make self exploration possible and more thorough.

** Etymology and a little communicative recursion: “placebo” is Latin for “I will please”, I think “nocebo” is Latin for “I will harm”.  A little Latin or Greek goes a long way to make things sound erudite and impressive, particularly usefully for medicine.  Latinate terms are linguistic placebo ingredients.  And sometimes irritating nocebo ones too of course.

A cold weather funnel cloud in Tirana

I was walking down one of the main streets in Tirana, as you do, well no, that’s silly.  Anyway, let that go, the whole experience of visiting Tirana has to have a post of its own and I don’t seem ready to do that justice yet.

So there I was, walking (not really a cycle friendly city though quite a few people do cycle, though about 10% seem to stick to the pavements) and I looked ahead and saw this:

p1050520

Hm, perhaps this is one situation in which I should upload full sized ‘photos. I switched lenses (I was doing the real rubbernecking tourist thing with a “proper camera” and even multiple lenses) and got this:

p1050517

Honestly, that’s what it was, no “photoshopping” or trickery here.  I’d never seen anything like it before in my life of gawping at pretty much anything. I wondered if there was a chimney I could see but it’s way too far away and too high.  I got back to the hotel and googled.  I put in “tornado between clouds” and, as almost always, wikipedia was offered me and had the answer.  It’s not a tornado as it’s not coming down from a supercell cumulonimbus cloud, it turns out it’s a “cold air funnel cloud”.  The page in wikipedia is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_cloud

I found it oddly disturbing as I have a few times when I’ve seen quite remarkable cloud formations.  I can understand why people read grave omens in the skies and some of the repeat nightmares I’ve had over my life have involved dramatic shearing open of the skies.  I guess it, and tornados, are iconic cinematic sequences, are they memes?  Never quite sure when I can use that word. I do have a sense that that nightmare image goes back so far it may well antedate my having seen such things in a cinema or on a TV screen.  Goes right back to the recurrent nightmare of greasy white snakes with square section bodies. Ah now, there’s a grand blog post some day.

By the way, if you’re walking around Tirana, don’t walk and gawp upwards at once: the pavements are pretty damaged and occasionally have gaping holes or trenches you could disappear in if you gawped up too much and neglected your footing.  Fortunately, formative years gawping more down than up up, looking for fossils on the beach in South Wales seems to mean that I am immune to that danger.  Now tramlines though, they’re a different enemy, but that too will have to wait for another time!

Afterthought (19.xii.16): if you are Albanian or work with Albanian speakers and want to know more about the CORE-OM and YP-CORE in Albanian, go to the Albanian translation page on the CST web site.  It was work around that which took me to Tirana.