The Edi Rama–Sali Berisha tandem will remain the subject of ongoing studies in communication, and perhaps in the future also for scholars of political philosophy. Able to say the opposite of what is openly seen and routinely unfolds in the country, impossible to dislodge even when morality shows no path to salvation, they run the country in government and opposition without being disturbed by anything.
This politics is not made only through acts, election results or the laws produced, but also through the way politics speaks. This is an area that the study of the ethnography of communication illuminates clearly in the Albanian case. To understand this, one must start from the concept of the ethnography of communication itself, developed by linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist and folklorist Dell Hathaway Hymes.
With an anemic party law and the great power of the 2008 Agreement, this tandem stands all-powerful and extremely effective against any kind of challenge. This includes what happened with the “Flamingo Revolution”, which has since been channeled into the Student Revolt. In this situation, the two not only took over the protest, but now also direct the rules of communication.
Hymes’s merit is that he first laid the disciplinary foundations for the comparative and ethnographic study of language use, with research based on phenomena observed in the languages of the Pacific Northwest. The idea came as a challenge to Chomsky, who equated language with grammar, so that if one had a good knowledge of it, a person had the ability to learn languages.
Hymes argued that knowing grammar is not enough, because one must also know and clearly understand the concept he named communicative competence: knowing when, where, with whom, how and about what one should speak. In short, the ethnography of communication studies not what is said, but how, who, where and what a word implies at a given moment.
Thanks to this concept, one understands how perfectly Rama and Berisha have mastered their art of communication, since it always follows their interests and pays no attention whatsoever to the moral norms that limit, demand or express ethical boundaries. To understand why this way of doing things works, one must also look at the old tradition of Albanian political communication.
Before the Albanian parliament functioned in the 1920s, the Albanian conducted his politics in the Oda and in the Assemblies of Men, where a set of laws sanctioned in the Kanun, but also in popular memory, set the canonical order of speech. Priority belonged to the first of the clan, often the first representative of a family that held a bajrak; the friend spoke, and the one who sought or gave the oath (besa).
So canonized was this order that deviating from the rule was severely penalized, most often by shame, the principle of preserving honor. Today, the ethnographic code in our politics is led by the primacy of the PS or the PD, since it is they who have priority in parliament, in the studio and everywhere, and often even the guests are chosen by them.
In our parliament the given word is still abused, but not the program document, the basic contract that is demanded of politicians. Besa, although used wearily, has been pushed into the background, because the system causes politicians to routinely eat their own word, the very thing that was once sacred when there were no institutions.
In Albanian culture, especially in the North and the South but even more so in the Labëria area, direct criticism, and especially criticism aimed at a specific person, is considered insulting. This led former Socialist Party MP Mazreku to shoot the late Azem Hajdari in parliament in 1997. Slaps, insults and beatings of politicians are commonplace, while for years, since the language became harsher, people have commonly spoken in terms of stigmatization, village anecdotes, metaphors and symbolism, which usually share a common denominator: “do you understand who I mean?”
Berisha and, at times, Rama do not spare anyone. They use epithets and insults rather than names, and to no small extent this is a national pastime, although foreign and local scholars call it offensive. In the media, the battle is over the louder voice, over who most often calls the other a spy or a traitor, and who gets the last quip.
Another phenomenon is added to this: some politicians come prepared with ready-made quips, so that they can serve the reels produced specifically for social media platforms. Rama and Berisha are masters of this phenomenon and therefore receive the most coverage. This is precisely the problem faced by those who watch our politics from the outside: they want to judge the programs, but we, quite persuasively, vote for the way Rama and Berisha speak.
The respective heads of the parliamentary groups, Balla and Bardhi, and the other MPs act in the same way. The two masters of the Albanian tandem have best understood the fable that the ethnography of communication explains clearly: in our Albania, the one who is right on the program is neither respected nor wins. Rather, the one who wins is the one who says it the way the public likes, where and to which audience, and in front of whom he says it.
## Ethnography of Communication and the Management of the Student Protest
Prime Minister Rama, exploiting the students’ anger when they received a negative response about a venue for dialogue and the format of representation, since the students’ demand was his resignation, moved the dialogue outside, right in front of the Prime Minister’s Office.
On chairs taken out of the institution, he placed a “Dialogue” label and, in the model of ethnographic communication, sat down and told the students that he was waiting for them in their own environment, on the Boulevard. The symbolism went even further when he placed the labels himself, showing no ridicule toward the teachers and giving a kind of guarantee, while at the same time drafting a list that shook the protest with harsh punishments and that was entirely asymmetrical.
The students were caught off guard and did the simplest thing: they overturned the chairs and broke them, while Rama reaped the victory of the communicative type, since he was for dialogue and they were violent. Berisha did something more subtle within communicative ethnography, which suited his position: he could not lead the protest, because the protesters rejected him just as they rejected Rama, but he backed his camp, the teachers, by supporting it from the outside.With his parliamentary group of the convinced, he continued their cause in parliament and, since his press conferences, shifted it from a “student protest” to a “protest for a technocratic government.” In this way he seized the protest right in the middle of the road and now manages it carefully. It cannot be said indirectly that there is no kind of dialogue, but there is no common language about what the dialogue is for.
The conclusion of the EU Progress Report, dated 5 November, expressed this most clearly: “All parties must make sincere efforts to engage in a constructive dialogue.” Today, when people are somewhat calmer and scholars have the first basis of evidence from the standpoint of political science, the Rama–Berisha tandem is using “dialogue” as a tool, not as a goal.
Rama sought dialogue only after the protest erupted demanding the resignation he opposes, but on his own terms: dialogue happens when there is no pressure, while to the demand for resignation he responds with a blacklist. The ethnography of communication places this in what is known as dual persuasion, that is, it gives two contradictory messages at the same time, so that whatever the students do, they remain at fault. If they approach, you submit to his rules; if they do not come, they are “violent.”
Berisha, on the other hand, did one small but essential thing: he backed the “Flamingos” not when the protest was small and rising, and his resignation was being demanded in unison, but when the international press placed them at the center of its arguments and chronicles. He turned the students’ demands into his own genuine demands, while the students are demanding dormitory conditions, scholarships and answers to their requests.