‘BËRJA’ DHE ‘ZHBËRJA’ E DIASPORËS SI DIALOG
‘DOING’ AND ‘UNDOING’ DIASPORA AS A DIALOGUE

Summary/Abstract: People tend to move from their homelands for various reasons, sometimes by force and sometimes by will. However, keeping ties with homeland and people left behind remains an issue of big interest in order to avoid that “fearsome” assimilation. One of the ways keeping the ties is by practicing holidays back home. These holidays are filled with differrent activities, like meeting family members and friends, carrying on with the most important family rites (marriage/wedding), building second houses, going to the seaside with homeland family members, etc. that could be understood as a dialogue between them and homeland, mostly concerning the issue of who they are, thus their identity. In this paper I will try to elaborate the holidays practiced by Kosovo Albanian Diaspora by using as a tool ‘transnational social field’ as conceptualized by Levitt and Glick-Schiler. I will describe what they do while they are on holidays, and then try to interpret them also in the frame of ‘identity negotiation’, as defined by authors William B. Swan, Jr. and Jeniffer K. Bosson. Moreover, by borrowing the terms ‘doing gender’ (i.e. going on with their “prescribed” role) and ‘undoing gender’ (changing gender prescription of roles) from the feminist theory, I will try to determine their activities as struggles in order to be accepted as equals within homeland community, and what about the changes that they adopt in the process. It is worth noting that first generation is more prone to engage in ‘doing diaspora’ while second generation tend to be more tenacious in ‘undoing diaspora’.

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