This thesis considers the extent to which decentralisation in the Republic of Macedonia between 2005 and 2012 has been effective in reducing ethnic inequalities that exacerbate social divisions and can lead to conflict. Guided by the concept of horizontal inequalities, it identifies the factors which influenced the decision to devolve responsibilities to the municipalities after 2001. It examines the particular institutional design that Macedonian decentralisation took, and demonstrates how its use of local power-sharing mechanisms was intended to address the concerns of the Albanian and Macedonian communities simultaneously. This thesis takes an integrative approach to studying the political, administrative, and fiscal dimensions of decentralisation's implementation, and considers whether the reform has indeed contributed to the reduction of inequalities between Macedonia's ethnic groups. Where decentralisation's potential has not been reached, obstacles to its successful implementation are identified. While decentralisation alone may be unable to address all of the grievances raised by the Albanian community prior to 2001, this thesis argues that the reform has the potential to address many of the horizontal inequalities that were responsible for raising inter-ethnic tensions during the 1990s. However, decentralisation in Macedonia between 2005 and 2012 has only been partial, and advances in the administrative and political aspects of the reform have been undermined by limited progress in its fiscal dimension. Attempts to solve self-determination conflicts through decentralisation will fail if local self-governance exists only in form but not in substance.

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin presents us both with a theory of carnival, and with an account of the historical decline of the carnivalesque since the Renaissance. This thesis uses Bakhtin's work as a point of departure for an analysis of particular moments in the history of post-Renaissance comic theory. It is argued both Bakhtin's account of carnivalesque decline provides us with a potent framework within which to perform such an analysis, and that this in turn facilitates a thorough interrogation of, and engagement with, Bakhtin's theory of carnival. Chapter One outlines Bakhtin's theory, identifying its historical and utopian dimensions, and exploring some of the problems which it generates. Chapter Two addresses some of the methodological issues relating to a historical analysis of comic theory, and situates Bakhtin's theory of carnival in relation to recent work in the area of comic theory. The remaining chapters focus on particular comic theory texts in the light of Bakhtin's thesis. Chapter Three contrasts Kant's analysis of humour with Schopenhauer's theory, relating the former to its Enlightenment context and the latter to its Romantic context. Chapter Four explores Bergson's discussion of laughter, situating it in relation to modernism, while Chapter Five reviews Freud's theory of jokes, examining the proximity between the structures of carnival and the structures of the Freudian joke. Chapter Six focuses on a Brechtian theory of comedy, assessing its relationship with the carnivalesque tradition, while Chapter Seven attempts to update Bakhtin's thesis in relation to contemporary configurations by exploring recent arguments concerning the comic credentials of postmodern culture. It is argued in conclusion that, if post-Renaissance culture has witnessed a decline in the significance of the carnivalesque, then the trajectory of that decline has undergone' a complex series of historical shifts and reversals.

In this thesis connections between messages on the public wall of the Russian social network Vkontakte are analysed and classified. A total of 1818 messages from three different Vkontakte groups were collected and analysed according to a new framework based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) research into cohesion and Simmons’s (1981) adaptation of their classification for Russian. The two categories of textuality, cohesion and coherence, describe the linguistic connections between messages. The main aim was to find out how far the traditional categories of cohesion are applicable to an online social network including written text as well as multimedia-files. In addition to linguistic cohesion the pragmatic and topic coherence between Vkontakte messages was also analysed. The analysis of pragmatic coherence classifies the messages with acts according to their pragmatic function in relation to surrounding messages. Topic coherence analyses the content of the messages, describes where a topic begins, changes or is abandoned. Linguistic cohesion, topic coherence and pragmatic coherence enable three different types of connections between messages and these together form a coherent communication on the message wall. The cohesion devices identified by Halliday and Hasan and Simmons were found to occur in these texts, but additional devices were also identified: these are multimodal, graphical and grammatical cohesion.

The image of 'the Jew' in nineteenth-century Russian literary texts is traditionally viewed as a paradigm of anti-Semitic discourse. Critics have typically accentuated the presence and continuity of negative stereotypes of the Jews. Yet anti-Semitic discourse is not the only approach to the representation of the Jews in Russian literature. This study explores the manifold nature of the portrayal of 'the Jew' in the works of three Russian writers of the highest calibre: Gogol, Dostoevsky and Turgenev. Literature at the time was highly politicized and a writer was expected to examine the issues of the day from an ideological stance. This meant that a writer's fictional representation of 'the Jew' was treated by many as an illustration of Jews' qualities in real life. After the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century, Russia acquired a large Jewish population. These new Jewish subjects were confined to the Pale of Settlement, which restricted their rights of residence in Russia proper. That in itself meant that the majority of Jews were invisible to Russian society. Writers mainly used Western literary patterns in describing 'the Jew'. Nevertheless, in using traditional mythic stereotypes of the Jews they not only applied the familiar framework of Western authors but also created images based on specifically Russian culture. Moreover, at different periods of the century 'the Jew' was endowed with traits uncharacteristic of previous myths. The writers' constructions of 'the Jew' thus became complex and flexible. In order to investigate the complex constructions of 'the Jew' the following matters are discussed: (1) the depiction of 'the Jew' by these three writers in conjunction with their understanding of their own identity, events occurring during their lifetime, and stereotypical frames of reference for the Jews; (2) the degree of controversy in their representations; (3) their use of the image of 'the Jew' to define the essential qualities of the Russian.

Cette thèse étudie les désignations des plantes sauvages, du point de vue sémantico-motivationnel, dans huit des cinquante communautés arbëreshe (albanophones) de l’Italie du sud. L’intérêt pour les ethnoclassifications est devenu plus important en dialectologie au moment où la géolinguistique a commencé à structurer sa contribution scientifique autour des atlas multilingues (ALE et ALiR). Ces entreprises internationales attribuent à la motivation sémantique un rôle fondamental dans la création lexicale.Pour l’analyse des données phytonymique arbëreshe, nous avons adopté, la démarche de M. Alinei, centrée sur les représentations culturelles qui sous-tendent les désignations, et celle de P. Guiraud et J. Ph. Dalbera centrée sur les processus de remotivation cyclique du lexique d’un système linguistique. Le fait de ne pas disposer d’un corpus de taille conséquente et de ne pas pouvoir faire appel à des informations diachroniques approfondies, nous a révélé la difficulté de l’application à la reconstruction de la phytonymie arbëresh de l’approche proposée par Guiraud et Dalbera. En revanche, l’approche d’Alinei a permis de mettre en évidence trois typologies de motivations pour les phytonymes de notre corpus : les motivations phytomorphiques ou descriptives, les zoomorphismes et les anthropomorphismes, déjà largement attestés dans la littérature aussi bien en ce qui concerne la zoonymie que la phytonymie et qui témoignent du rôle des éléments culturels dans les classifications ethnoscientifiques. / This thesis studies the names of wild plants from a motivational semantics perspective. This research was carried out in eight of the fifty Albanian minority villages in the south of Italy. The interest in ethnoclassifications has increased since geolinguistics began to structure its scientific contribution through multilingual atlases (ALE and ALiR). These trans-national enterprises consider the fundamental role that semantic motivation plays during the lexical creation.In order to analyse arbëreshë wild plants’ names, we adopted, on the one hand, M. Alinei’s approach, which focuses on the cultural representations underlying the plants’ names and, on the other, the approach proposed by P. Guiraud and J. Ph. Dalbera focusing on the process based on cyclic remotivation of lexicon in a linguistic system. The fact that we did not have a corpus of substantial dimensions and we could not appeal to extensive diachronic information showed us the difficulty in the application of Guiraud and Dalbera’s approach to the reconstruction of arbëresh plants’ names. On the contrary, Alinei’s approach allowed highlighting three types of motivations characterizing arbëreshë plants’ names: phytomorphic or descriptive, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic motivations, which appear already in literature in both

This thesis is an historical and ethnographic account of the postcommunist reconstitution of Albanian Bektashi Sufi practices and community life in the aftermath of a state-based program of radical atheistic secularism. The study is based on 12 months of intensive anthropological fieldwork (9 months in 2007 and shorter research trips between 2005 and 2011) and archival research. The Bektashi Muslims were once closely associated with and supported by the Ottoman state. Since then they have suffered many reversals in fortune. The most severe attack on the Bektashi occurred in communist Albania. Public manifestations of religion and its institutions were entirely dismantled and many spiritual leaders killed or exiled. Nonetheless, survivors now claim that Bektashi devotees secretly believed in and revered the sacred shrines despite efforts by the authoritarian state to do away with all expressions of religious life. Providing both historical and cultural context, the thesis uses ethnographic fieldwork data based on observation, interviews and life histories collected from within the Bektashi community. These document and explore the group's various efforts at community building and regaining legitimacy. In particular, it describes the rebuilding of devastated Bektashi lodges (tekke), the configuration and management of sacred spaces, the ways of becoming Bektashi as reflected in conversion narratives, and the emergence of new saintly authority figures. The penultimate chapter is about religious observance, investigating in depth how the present community of leaders, followers, and guests interact within sacred spaces during pilgrimages, paying special attention to the ambiguities of spiritual authority in the postcommunist setting. The study of present-day religious observance and community building shows that despite their efforts, the Bektashi today are experiencing difficulty establishing order within their own ranks and in winning real support in Albanian society as a whole. The small gains in reclaiming lost authority and access to their now lost economic estates reflects the legacy of atheist secularism and corruption, which coincides with wide spread suspicion of authority figures, including religious authorities. Albanian postcommunist religiosity coincides with a more "Western European" pattern of secularism that is generally characterized by a much diminished level of religious observance. / 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z

The Shkodra Archaeological Project (PASH) took place in northern Albania, particularly in the Shkodra region. PASH focused on analyzing human settlements and social behaviors, from prehistory to modern times. This thesis focuses on the study of grinding stones collected by this project during excavation and survey. This study incorporates macroscopic, petrographic and chemical analyses to source these grinding stones and compares them with sourced samples collected in South Albania to answer questions about raw material selection and social interactions. It was found that, based on their chemical and petrographic properties, grinding stones collected by PASH are different from those collected in southern Albania. Evidence obtained by chemical and petrographic analysis strongly suggests that samples from PASH are likely made of local material. Hence, it was concluded that inhabitants of the Shkodra region were self-sufficient in grinding stone production and did not need to import them from elsewhere.

Pottery, as an artifact, is often used as evidence of exchange patterns among groups during prehistory. This research incorporates paradigmatic classification and petrography to answer questions related to provenience, production mode, and exchange patterns of handmade prehistoric pottery from Gajtan, Zagorë, Kodër Boks, Tumuli 088 and 099 in Shkodër, in Northern Albania. Pottery samples analyzed in this study were collected from test excavations by the Shkodra Archaeological Project (PASH). The results yielded evidence that the area has sufficient local clay sources and other easily accessible natural resources to produce pottery in a domestic mode. Gajtan and Zagorë appeared as two distinct entities, but the former settlement seems to have played a dominant role as a production and distribution center within the region. Results from this study indicate that pots appear to have played an important socio-economic role in northern Albania, across time and space.

This study explored the relationship between the use of motivational strategies by Albanian and Japanese teachers and the observed and reported motivation of missionaries at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Provo, Utah. The aim of this study was to collect baseline data about the motivational strategies already employed by teachers in the Albanian and Japanese areas of the MTC and to explore the relationship that the teachers' use of these strategies has with the motivation of the respective missionaries. The data for this study was collected from seven teachers and 28 learners during a series of observations using a modified version of the Motivation Orientation of Language Teaching (MOLT), a classroom observation instrument developed by Guilloteaux and Dörnyei (2008). The MOLT is used to record the observable motivated behavior of learners as well as the motivational practices of the teachers according to Dörnyei's (2001) foreign language classroom motivational strategy framework. Each participating class was observed using the MOLT three times during the missionaries' nine-week stay in the MTC. The data from the observations was supplemented with teacher and learner surveys administered during the first and final weeks of the study period. Not only was this study useful for collecting valuable information about teaching practice at the MTC, but it also adds a new dimension to the empirical research that has been done in motivation in second language acquisition by expanding the research to English speakers being taught in foreign languages, whereas most research had been focused in ESL and EFL contexts. It is the first study to combine surveys with an observation component in target languages other than English. The results of this study support previous findings that teacher use of motivational strategies does indeed correlate significantly with learner motivation.

This thesis considers the extent to which decentralisation in the Republic of Macedonia between 2005 and 2012 has been effective in reducing ethnic inequalities that exacerbate social divisions and can lead to conflict. Guided by the concept of horizontal inequalities, it identifies the factors which influenced the decision to devolve responsibilities to the municipalities after 2001. It examines the particular institutional design that Macedonian decentralisation took, and demonstrates how its use of local power-sharing mechanisms was intended to address the concerns of the Albanian and Macedonian communities simultaneously. This thesis takes an integrative approach to studying the political, administrative, and fiscal dimensions of decentralisation¿s implementation, and considers whether the reform has indeed contributed to the reduction of inequalities between Macedonia¿s ethnic groups. Where decentralisation¿s potential has not been reached, obstacles to its successful implementation are identified. While decentralisation alone may be unable to address all of the grievances raised by the Albanian community prior to 2001, this thesis argues that the reform has the potential to address many of the horizontal inequalities that were responsible for raising inter-ethnic tensions during the 1990s. However, decentralisation in Macedonia between 2005 and 2012 has only been partial, and advances in the administrative and political aspects of the reform have been undermined by limited progress in its fiscal dimension. Attempts to solve self-determination conflicts through decentralisation will fail if local self-governance exists only in form but not in substance.