In late August 2004, Klodian and I accompanied our friend Gjergji Hoxha to cut fir stanchions in the Guri Nikes and Qafë Panje forest sector. On Gjergji's mules, we crossed the thick coppice and underbrush surrounding Bagëtia to the north until we reached the vast stretch of deciduous forest that extends from Qafë Panje to far beyond the Shkumbin River. By the time we made it through the coppice, we were all soaking wet from the waist down because the branches had brushed the morning dew into our clothes. We rode like this for several hours through the late summer woods.

Gjergji, who was leading the excursion, made sure to stay on barely visible paths and never left the cover of the forest. Klodian and I had become acquainted with him around a campfire one evening at the ruins of Bagëtia's cultural center. Gjergji was twenty-one, muscle-packed, and, except for his older brother, the only man of his age still living in Bagëtia. He worked in Greece for a few months as a teenager, but his Muslim family name kept him from obtaining the legal status his Vlach neighbors enjoyed. Fed up with making a haphazard living abroad, Gjergji decided to return to his family and try his luck in the illegal timber and firewood trade emerging in the Gorë and Mokra mountains. He quickly learned the rules of the game and became an expert logger.

The first pattern of land use change I want to examine is the fragmentation of land use as it is reflected in the dissolution of collective structures since the collapse of socialism. I begin with an analysis of the fragmentation of the collective plot structure (and the lack of subsequent land consolidation), and continue with an analysis of the dissolution of irrigation, land terracing, and waste disposal systems in the focus of collective action. Through the analyses I move from the description of the pattern of land fragmentation in the previous chapter to its explanation through a lens of rent.

The Fragmentation of the Plot Structure

As I have shown in Chapter 3, the collective plot structures in Kodra, Bagëtia and Dardha have undergone extreme fragmentation since the collapse of socialism. The origins of this fragmentation lie in Albania's postsocialist land reform and its peculiar local implementations.

The Postsocialist Land Reform

In 1991, 24 years after the collectivization of agricultural land under socialism, Albania instituted a land reform that sought to re-create private property rights to land. The reform differed substantially from the land reforms in other postsocialist countries (Cungu and Swinnen 1999). Unlike elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, Albania's 1991 Law “Concerning the Land” (Land Law) took into account “neither former ownership, nor the land boundaries and sizes before collectivization” (Article 8). In other words, the Law did not restitute land to its former, pre-collectivization owners.

Introduction: ‘Indian’ Children, ‘Global’ Media?

The media environment surrounding children in a metropolis like Bombay, India has altered almost unrecognisably in the last two decades. Despite the introduction of hundreds of cable and satellite channels and broadband internet into many middle and some lower middle-class homes, however, discourses about children and media have remained surprisingly stagnant. These discourses tend to fall into one of two paradigms. The first is an effects paradigm, which focuses on content in either a negative or a positive manner. Instances include the protectionist stance that sees most Western media products as dangerous and having negative effects on ‘Indian values’, or the argument that the liberalising of the Indian media economy has brought about changes in content that challenge sexist and other negative attitudes. The second paradigm posits content as irrelevant. It views all innovations in the Indian media and communications environment as socially beneficial because they, apparently, make India more modern and competitive. While a host of other positions exist amongst parents and young people, these are rarely articulated publicly. The voices that get most coverage in the public sphere are usually those calling for censorship and/or technological skills development. Complexity is seen as problematic, and hence sidestepped.

Hindi Commercial Cinema and Popular Culture in North-East India

This chapter looks at the impact of the Hindi commercial film industry on ‘peripheral’ cultures in India. The Indian film industry – which comprises both ‘Bollywood’ (as the Hindi commercial film industry is becoming known) and regional film industries particularly in south India – is one of the largest film industries in the world. The industry puts out over a thousand films every year and a staggering audience of fourteen million people watch an Indian film every day (Bose 2006). Bollywood exerts considerable cultural influence in India as it often both mirrors and mocks Indian society. The reception of Bollywood (and of mainstream Indian popular culture which is dominated by the former) among peripheral and under represented cultures in North-East India, is the subject of this chapter. The chapter looks at the love-hate relationship towards Hindi popular and film culture that people in this region have. North-East India is home to diverse ethnic groups, who have historically never felt a part of mainstream India. The region is caught up in several political conflicts with the Indian state. Most of these movements claim political autonomy, arguing that the distinct identities of people in the region entitle them to self-government and cultural freedom. Today, as satellite channels have proliferated in the region, Hindi commercial cinema is becoming extremely popular despite the fact that several political groups have banned such films.

At the time of my first field research in the late 1970s, relatively uneducated Taiwanese villagers used to chastise me with their response to imported ideas of religion. ‘Don't you people know’, I heard over and over, ‘that all religions are really the same? They urge people to do good’. They meant this as a critique of the missionary message of monotheistic Truth, and it reflected the flexibility of their complex, pluralistic, and relatively uninstitutionalized religious context. I agreed with them at the time: religions do share some similar moral messages, and they also generally share a deep involvement in social bonding that can have important implications beyond religion.

Yet, in some ways those villagers were wrong. Moral messages across religions do indeed overlap, but they are not identical. Religions do intertwine with social bonds, but not all in the same ways. Spiritual capital, in brief, cannot be reduced to social capital, especially if we want to understand religion's broader influence on social, political, and economic change. Instead, we have to understand both crucial differences among traditions – levels of institutionalization, forms of socialization, messages and media –and the social contexts in which they evolve.

In this chapter I will discuss the ways that various religions have contributed importantly to Taiwan's market success and eventual democratization, and the evidence that they may play as important a role in the rapidly evolving situation in the People's Republic.

India and the Bank have grown up together. Edward Mason and Robert Asher, in a history of the Bank's first three decades, say simply, “It is no exaggeration to say that India has influenced the Bank as much as the Bank has influenced India” (1973: 675). Catherine Caufield, writing in the mid-1990s, remarked of the then half-century that the Bank and India had traveled together, “As greater and greater sums of money passed between them, the Bank succeeded in putting its imprint on India, but India's imprint on the Bank is just as deep” (1996: 23).

This paper is my latest attempt in a series at comprehending the spirit of new capitalism in Eastern Europe. In contrast to a widespread view according to which this spirit is extremely weak, I will suggest that its real strength cannot be discovered if one a.) looks for it only in the delicate and airy forms of economic culture; b.) focuses exclusively on the anti-capitalist legacy of communist economic culture, ignoring its pro-capitalist heritage; c.) disregards a large-scale borrowing of economic cultures from the West during the past two decades.

First the thesis of ‘spiritless capitalism’ will be discussed. Then, I will introduce the concepts of ‘soft culture’ and ‘implicit spirituality’, as well as sketching up the road that led me to a research project on transnational cultural encounters in the economies of Eastern Europe. In the second half of the paper, one of the project's core empirical studies, which has been made in the heart of the ‘emerging markets’, banking, will be revisited to test the applicability of the notion of spiritual capital in secular societies of the region. In contrast to the assumption of a lack of capitalist spirit, one witnesses a veritable pro-capitalist cultural revolution unfolding in a major field of the post-communist economies, even if its results seem rather fragile for the time being.

Pakistan's first private satellite television station began transmission at the end of the previous decade. Since 2001, 35 stations have begun broadcasting to and from Pakistan, a relative mania of tertiary sector investment that capitalised on the domestic hunger for news in the wake of the events of 11 September. The American invasion of Afghanistan; the meteoric boom of Pakistan's stock market; the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl; a series of suicide attacks targeting Karachi's areas of international investment and tourism; and, the 2002 general elections which secured the military-presidency of General Pervez Musharraf and unprecedented parliamentary gains for the country's Islamist parties: it is in the lack of any coherent connection between local ‘events’ that their shared relation to a wider and complex conjuncture becomes apparent.

If uncertainty is a governing feature of political and social existence in Pakistan, the craving for official and unofficial news is one of its most apparent symptoms. As such, the growth of private television stations has been a largely news-driven phenomenon, while soundings of praise and disquiet about the effects of this ‘new media’ on the political consciousness of the ‘average Pakistani’ is underscored by the lack of information on the changing opinions and preferences of consumers of this media. Despite the current lack of marketing and audience-based research, the country is awash in 24-hour news cycles, on-the-spot reporting, and a diverse array of talk shows covering politics, health, religious affairs, and the private lives of political and cultural celebrities.

Introduction

Lollywood is the nickname given to the Pakistani film industry, predominantly based in Lahore, one of Pakistan's most historic cultural centres. A career in Lollywood is glamorous yet it lacks prestige. This chapter examines Lollywood actresses as star texts, concentrating broadly on the intersection of gender, class and ethnicity, and specifically on Reema, one of Pakistan's most famous female celebrities. Like a number of film actresses, Reema allegedly hails from the Kanjar ethnic group, a community of prostitutes and dancing girls – a detail which overshadows her public persona.

Beginning with a brief history of cinema in Pakistan, the chapter will consider notions of morality in Islam, and how these affect the Kanjar community. It will then examine the ways in which the Kanjar taboo influences how Lollywood actresses are publicly perceived, before exploring some of their strategies to ‘sanitise’ their own star texts. The chapter explores the extent to which financial success helps Lollywood actresses to renegotiate notions of honour, shame and morality. Given its avowed interest in public perception and the scarcity of official material, the research in this chapter concentrates on newspaper articles, internet chat room discussions, and talk show interviews from Pakistan. Pakistani cinema has received barely any attention, particularly in English publications. Only one book exists, which covers 50 years of cinema since partition (Gazdar 1997) and a handful of Urdu books written by journalists and scriptwriters may be found, featuring personal reflections rather than academic analysis.

In this book, I used rent as an analytical lens to examine patterns and causes of land use change in southeastern Albania. I have argued that the fundamental political and economic changes that occurred in Albania since the collapse of socialism profoundly affected the mechanisms through which rent from land and other productive resources was created and distributed among differently positioned social actors. The shifts in rent creation and distribution changed rural people's incentives and decisions about land use and caused land use change. Thus, I demonstrated both that rent is an aggregate force shaping society and environment, and that using rent as a lens to examine environmental change is a powerful analytical strategy for understanding human-nature interaction in postsocialist countries such as Albania and beyond.

Shifting Rent Dynamics and Land Use Change

Throughout this book I used rent dynamics to explain how broader political and economic processes affected social and environmental change in Albania. I identified four distinct patterns of land use change in Albania. The patterns must be understood as reflections of the country's broader political and economic transformation. The first pattern, the fragmentation of land use, is characterized by the dissolution of large physical structures – terraces, irrigation and drainage systems, the collective plot structure, etc. – which had been in place under socialism. The dissolution of these structures resulted from shifts in the creation and distribution of rent available to collective action.

In an interview conducted with members of the editorial board of Time magazine in relation to their naming Vladimir Putin the 2007 ‘Person of the Year’, Putin quoted scripture when asked about his attacks against corruption, responding that ‘thou shalt not steal’. When asked further about his faith, Putin confessed to being a religious person, saying that he read the Bible and kept a copy of it on his plane. Putin further elaborated by stating that society needs a moral foundation, and that in his opinion the church can provide this. Indeed, in a de-secularising Russia, recovering from seven decades of forced secularization under Communist rule, many are turning to the nation's spiritual heritage both for a sense of identity and answers to how to live in post- Communist society.With more than a thousand years of history in Russia, many have a deep cultural attachment to the Eastern Orthodox faith. As they attempt to integrate this faith into their daily lives, Orthodoxy may provide significant spiritual capital that may facilitate Russia's transition from Communism to democracy and the free market.

Before one jumps to the conclusion that Orthodox spiritual capital is the answer to Russia's prayers, however, one must also consider the fact that this very same faith tradition is being drawn upon in ways that clearly could derail Russia's reform efforts.