TALES FROM ALBARADO: The Materiality of Pyramid Schemes in Postsocialist Albania

CATALES FROM ALBARADO: The Materiality of PyramidSchemes in Postsocialist Albania

SMOKI MUSARAJThe New School

ALBARADO

Almost all citizens of Albarado inherited from the terribly red dictatorship anapartment, which the happily blue democracy gave to them as a gift.

The value of the red-blue apartment is $25,000. . . . Thanks to a terriblysimple alchemic formula, the villager-citizen, within three months, becomesthe owner of four times $25,000, in other words of $100,000!

—Apollon Bace, Dita Informacion, February 19961

Writing in the economics section of Dita Informacion (Daily Information) inearly 1996, journalist Apollon Bace introduces the allegory of “Albarado”—a punon Albania as El Dorado. Albarado is intended as both parody and cautionary tale:warning citizens against selling their apartments, acquired under socialism andnewly privatized as personal property, for cash to buy into the pyramid schemesthat were all the rage in the early 1990s. Through the allusion to the fabled city ofgold, Bace evokes the euphoria that permeated the everyday reports, rumors, andfirsthand accounts of quick and effortless cash gains from companies that claimedto lead the way to emerging capitalism. Although, since their collapse, they arewidely referred to as “pyramid schemes,” these companies operated more like Ponzischemes.2 Thus, they attracted investors by advertising their expanding economicactivities and by intimating that they had government support. (See Textbox 1.)

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 26, Issue 1, pp. 84–110. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C© 2011 bythe American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01081.x

TALES FROM ALBARADO

Both pyramid and Ponzi schemes offer unusually high returns by paying early investorswith the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from profits earned elsewhere.Such schemes collapse when there are no new investors, when a critical mass of existinginvestors withdraw their money, or when the scheme’s promoter disappears with the money.Participants in pyramid schemes make their money by recruiting new investors whereas Ponziinvestors are drawn in by the promise of high returns on lucrative assets or guarantees ofstate bailout. Charles Ponzi was an Italian immigrant to the United States who swindled over40,000 immigrant-investors in 1920 by promising high (50 percent) returns on the purchaseof international postal coupons, with profits allegedly coming from arbitraging the fluctuatingvalue of different currencies used to purchase these coupons in different countries.

Bace was not alone in making analogies between the Albanian schemes andbroader tropes of capitalist magic. In a couple of reflective pieces on the cultureof neoliberalism at the beginning of the millennium, Jean and John Comaroff(1999, 2000) consider the Albanian pyramid schemes as part of an eclectic list of“occult” practices emerging around the globe in the early 1990s, practices that, forthem, represent the “enchantment . . . of a decidedly neoliberal economy, whoseever more inscrutable speculations seem to call up fresh specters in their wake”(Comaroff and Comaroff 2000:292). The Comaroffs too were skeptical about thepromises of limitless and effortless wealth that this “second coming” of capitalismevoked. Instead, the spectacular rise and collapse of pyramid schemes was anexample of the concrete experience of the “violence of extraction and abstraction”(1999:293) of millennial capitalism.

With “money flowing like a river,”4 the 1990s pyramid schemes in Albania cer-tainly evoked the neoliberal utopia of global “financescapes” (Appadurai 1996:34)in a country marked by 50 years of isolation from world markets and driven by self-sufficiency. Similarly, pyramid and Ponzi schemes had spread quickly across othereastern European countries during the early years of postsocialist transformation.Starting in February 1994, the Russian MMM scheme, for instance, led by SergeiMavrodi, drew up to ten million depositors; it collapsed in July of the same year.Caritas, with four million depositors, drew roughly 20 percent of the Romanianpopulation, combining religious millenarianism with nationalist politics (Verdery1996:187–188). Although the Albanian schemes shared characteristics with theseother eastern European schemes, those in Albania reached an unparalleled level ofpenetration into the fiber of everyday life, and their political and economic effectshave been arguably the most long lasting.5 Following the collapse of the schemes,the Lek depreciated by 25 percent to the U.S. dollar, the country’s gross domesticproduct fell by 10 percent, inflation soared to 40 percent, and 150,000 families

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registered for unemployment assistance within six months (Bezemer 2001). Mostimportantly, the collapse of the schemes marked a drastic turn in the country’seconomic and political prospects. From being singled out as the fastest-growingeconomy in eastern Europe in 1995 (Camdessus 1995), in 2010, Albania is listedamong the least developed and, unlike many of its neighbors, has no real likelihoodof joining the European Union.

The rise and fall of the Albanian schemes was, therefore, at the heart of whatDirk Bezemer describes as “the Albanian paradox”: “the curious fact that a postso-cialist country could implement the standard transition ‘package’ with unrivalledadherence to the prescribed policies and show an outstanding macroeconomicperformance—and simultaneously move closer towards collapse” (2001:2). I takethis correlation between the rise and collapse of the Albanian pyramid schemes,on the one hand, and that of the Albanian national economy, on the other hand,as a starting point for thinking through the nature of pyramid schemes broadlyspeaking as active forces, rather than “bubbles waiting to be burst” (Jarvis 1999;cf. De Goede 2005). How, if at all, did these schemes relate to the broader post-socialist transformations? How did they impact postsocialist economic practices? Iargue that they served to mediate—to “translate”—the transition from socialism toneoliberalism and to actively shape new business practices that combined socialistforms of entrepreneurship with a particular politics of privatization of the state.

Third-party observers and economic “experts” have explained the advent ofthe pyramid schemes in Albania as subject to “mania” and “ignorance of marketlogics” (Jarvis 1999; Wall Street Journal 1997). Moreover, they attribute the highrate of participation in the schemes to a lack of experience or knowledge of theinner logic of capitalism, rather than to the logic of neoliberal transformationsthemselves. These explanations combine a universalizing vocabulary of financialbubbles and crises (whereby mass euphoria and mania disrupt rational markets)with an evolutionary understanding of capitalism (pyramid schemes being part ofan earlier or “primitive” phase of capitalism, hence their prevalence in emergingor “premature” markets). But when I spoke with former creditors of the Albanianpyramid schemes in 2008, a decade after their collapse, a massive global recessionwas doing its part to bring Bernie Madoff’s multibillion-dollar scheme to light inthe United States. In addition to providing comparative fodder for my critique ofthe explanatory tropes of “mania” and “ignorance” (especially as a kind of “denial ofthe coevalness of the other” [Fabian 2002]), this unexpected coincidence presentedmore pressing reasons for rethinking how pyramid schemes work their way intosophisticated contemporary economic frameworks.

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Tropes of irrational contagion permeate oral accounts of participation in theAlbanian pyramid schemes. Former participants in the schemes, who call themselveskreditore (creditors),6 describe the 1995–96 massive flocking to the offices of thesefraudulent companies as mani (mania), as histeri kolektive (collective hysteria), andthemselves as te droguar (drugged). When asked about their own decision toparticipate in these schemes before they were described as pyramid schemes,however, these creditors situate their actions in relation to specific materialities,rather than the abstract productivity of capital. Specifically, they justify their actionsby pointing to the overwhelming presence of bollek (abundance) in cash, and theyrecount the elaborate strategies of the circulation of multiple currencies fromimmigrant remittances. Likewise, in the allegory of Albarado, Bace “translates”the metaphor of El Dorado into the blunt materiality of the sale of recentlyprivatized apartments. I take these accounts of the materiality of the pyramidschemes as a unique vantage point for understanding the particular form thatneoliberal promises of global financial circulations and rapid accumulation took inthe context of postsocialist transformations in Albania.

I use the term neoliberalism with some reservation, wary of its generalizingquality. It is not a term used in Albania. And yet, it is a heuristic device that allows usto see the interconnections of the Albanian schemes with broader transformationsin the global economy. First, I use the term here as a historically specific concept,designating a worldwide shift toward easing global financial flows and promotingderegulation in the financial sectors, limiting government control over the market,and allowing consumption to prevail over production (Comaroff and Comaroff2000:293; Harvey 1989; Storper 2000). In Albania and other countries of theformer socialist bloc, neoliberalism specifically refers to the reforms introducedby international development institutions such as the IMF and the World Bankin the early 1990s; these reforms promoted accelerated privatization, limitedgovernment, and openness of national economies to global capital. Although suchreform varied among these countries, Albania embraced the shock therapy model,which gave precedence to the rapid formation of a financial market at the expenseof a gradual transformation of other economic institutions (Bezemer 2001, 2009).

Second, I use neoliberalism to refer to a process of scale making (Guyer 2004;Tsing 2000), which generates asymmetric subject positions. Neoliberalism canthen be understood in multiple ways, rather than as a singular economic order.Here, I am interested in neoliberalism’s internal constitution and particularity, inthe ways in which, in the Albanian case, new hierarchies and social relations comeinto being in historically specific ways, rubbing up against and transforming older

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social formations. Thus, Albania occupies a position of marginality, a place wherethe postsocialist reform led to further exclusion from global markets.

In my examination of the recollections of former creditors and representationsof the pyramid schemes in public culture during the time of their boom, I focus ona particular type of pyramid scheme, locally referred to as kompani (companies).These entities were registered legally as kompani me pergjegjesi te kufizuara (limitedliability companies) and claimed to take credit from people under provisions ofthe Civil Code (Elbirt 1997). They were started as legitimate businesses in sectorsfrom commerce and food processing to mining and tourism. As I will discuss indetail below, these companies enabled certain “conversions” of values and wealthacross different spheres of circulation and gained their force and popularity throughvarious “translations” of notions of abundance.7

In the Albanian context, the analytic of translation allows us to trace howpyramid schemes mediated transformations in the forms of wealth (from socialistto postsocialist) and generated new sources of power and legitimacy for a specifickind of postsocialist business culture. I argue below that pyramid schemes enabledimportant conversions of forms of wealth by mediating the process of privatizationof state property and by drawing in the unofficial flows of immigrant remittances.Further, these schemes gained strength by being able to “translate,” to “speakfor” multiple registers of abundance—from the neoliberal ideals of spectacularaccumulation to postsocialist forms of conspicuous consumption. Finally, I arguethat the pyramid schemes were active forces that generated new business andpolitical practices. These “translations” enabled two parallel developments: anentrepreneurial culture that impersonated emerging capitalism, generated wealthfrom arbitrage and speculation on the process of postsocialist privatizations, anddeployed networks of redistribution and entrepreneurial skills cultivated duringsocialism; and a political culture that, through its support of the entrepreneurialculture attached to the pyramid schemes, legitimized a form of “privatization ofthe state” (Hibou 2004) under the banner of neoliberal reform.

BOLLEK (ABUNDANCE) IN CASH AND THE MATERIALITY

OF PYRAMID SCHEMES

If one were to pick the most ubiquitous and representative image of theexperience of pyramid scheme participation during 1992–97, it would be thatof the bollek (abundance or plentitude) in cash. For instance, Hektor,7 a formermenaxher (manager) and kreditor for Vehbi Alimucaj’s VEFA Holding—the mostnotorious of these schemes—used exaggerated hand gestures to depict piles of cash

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representative of pyramid scheme wealth: “There was money. There was so muchmoney! I am telling you. I am telling you because I saw it with my own eyes.”

These accounts of abundance seem striking given the subsequent losses in-curred by Hektor and thousands of others, yet they are a peculiar feature of theAlbanian schemes. We can read these persistent claims of stacks of cash as a wayof insisting on the concrete presence of pyramid schemes’ wealth, rather than itsfictitiousness:

Hektor: Look, there was plenty of money.Bardhosh: He [Vehbi Alimucaj] established kapitale [investments], in factories,businesses . . .

Smoki: But, where did you think all this money was coming from?Hektor [speaking with irony]: What did I think? I thought what Vehbiu used totell me: to not give a damn because there is as much money as you want. Andso we came and deposited . . .

Smoki: Did you ask him where the money came from?Hektor: “Stay in your place,” [Alimucaj] would say. “Do you have enough toeat and drink for yourself?” [impersonating Alimucaj’s mocking tone] “Where is themoney? Do you want to see the money? Come along to see the money.” Hewould grab me from my neck and bring me to see the stacks of cash. Just likeyou stack newspapers today, that’s how stacks of dollars filled up rooms then.Yes, there were stacks of cash; I saw them with my own eyes. [interview,Hektor, September 11, 2008]

Looking back at my conversations with former creditors, I notice my own searchfor signs of the “mania” or “irrationality” in these accounts of participation in thepyramid schemes. In addition to describing their experience as a mani (mania) orepidemi (epidemic), former kreditor repeatedly recounted examples of the concretepresence of stacks of cash in the public domain. The magical mechanism of pyramidschemes was thus made concrete in tales of witnessing or hearing about “stacksof cash piled in storage rooms.” Many recalled experiences of carrying “sacks ofcash” from one company to another or seeing lucky friends or neighbors gleefullycount their interest returns “in front of their own eyes.” Likewise, participantsinsisted on explaining the collapse of the schemes not as “the bursting of a bubblethe puncturing of which is inevitable” (De Goede 2005) but, rather, as specific actsof stealing or transporting sacks of cash out of the country. Why such repetitivereference to these stacks of cash?

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The saturation of the experience of the everyday by this concrete presence ofcash speaks to a broader shift in what constituted value and wealth in the wake ofpostsocialist transformations. Writing about similar pyramid schemes in postsocial-ist Romania, Katherine Verdery, for instance, describes the role that schemes suchas Caritas played in “rethinking money” as a late capitalist economy of the “flex-ible accumulation” (1996:34), which replaced a production- and redistribution-oriented socialist economy. Socialist economies were organized around productionand redistribution of resources, with the factory–state enterprise, the large-scaleindustrial complexes, and the agricultural cooperative being the main sources ofvalue. Although other countries of eastern Europe tolerated some form of privateenterprise, Albania’s socialism maintained a strict ban against private property andtrading activities (Childress 2009:116; Fishta and Ziu 2004).

Anthropologists of eastern Europe have highlighted the shift in the moralityattached to money from socialism to postsocialism. In the Romanian socialistcontext, writes Verdery, “money from ‘commerce’ and from ‘speculation’ waspolluting, unacceptable, tainted with capitalist traces” (1996:182). One could arguethat moral attitudes toward money in socialist Albania went even further, perhapscloser to what Caroline Humphrey’s description of Soviet ideas about economicpractices: “The habit of seeing all ‘economic’ activity as also intrinsically ladenwith political-ideological value is particularly marked and conscious among formerSoviet people. . . . One aspect of this was the glorification of production/laborand the condemnation of commonplace trading for profit, called ‘speculation’in Soviet parlance” (2002:44). Likewise, having cash in socialist Albania was notonly worthless without access to scarce goods but also, most importantly, was aliability; those who had wealth or savings in monetary form were usually formerowners, a social class that was persecuted and vilified under the lufta se klasave

(class war) of Enver Hoxha’s political regime (Blumi 1999). Such “moralities” ofmoney, however, seem to be displaced through the experience of the pyramidschemes. Although evoking Michael Taussig’s accounts of the fetishism of the bills(1980), these references to concrete stacks of cash are not a form of resistance tothe fetishism of the abstract commodity through a noncapitalist form of fetish; theydo not represent two conflicting moralities at play. Rather, these references makethe abstract concrete, all the while embracing the neoliberal promise of capitalreproducing itself exponentially.

In addition to reflecting changing moralities of money, this materiality ofpyramid schemes as stacks of cash also points to transformations in forms ofwealth. As in other socialist countries, in socialist Albania wealth consisted in

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access to services, to education, to jobs. The shift from the command economyto the free-market economy that characterizes postsocialist transitions was not atransformation that happened overnight. As values of consumable goods becameunstable and unaffordable, people engaged in strategies that aimed at making themost profit out of the transformation of socialist forms of wealth (state propertyand networks of favors) into postsocialist ones (newly privatized assets). Thesestrategies constituted “translations” of value in Latour’s (2005) sense, insofar asthey aimed at reframing certain objects (e.g., apartments) from collective propertywith a value to produce, house, or employ into individual property with the capacityto generate money that would hopefully bridge the gap between the salary (or lackthereof) and rising prices of consumable goods.

In understanding this experience of postsocialist negotiation of value, it is use-ful to consider Jane Guyer’s rethinking of Paul Bohannan’s analytic of “conversions”across different value registers. Guyer reframes Bohannan’s notion of conversions“from a structural view of ‘spheres of exchange’ to the historical constitution ofconversions and wealth creation, under turbulent conditions” (2004:30). Ratherthan being bound by “spheres,” she uses the concept of conversions to think about“junctures in transactional pathways” in the processes of negotiating asymmetries invalues (Guyer 2004:30). Pyramid schemes occupied these “junctures” of two typesof transactions taking place across distinct transactional orders (Bloch and Perry1989). One of these pathways was the flow of socialist goods into the private sector;the other was the circulation of remittances from European countries. Often thesuccess of these transactions depended on how much profit one was able to makefrom displacing and recontextualizing these goods.

The process of wealth accumulation of the kompani demonstrates the firsttype of “transactional pathway.” Kompani built their initial assets by buying stateproperties through public procurement. This process involved several conversionsof forms of wealth. The value of the state property in question had to be convertedinto the terms of valuation of a completely different transactional order. Thebuyers used different forms of wealth—capital, privatization vouchers (boughtfrom former employees at low prices), and access to procurement officials—togain ownership over these properties.

Unlike other economic accounts that explain the Albanian kompani as anexample of “ignorance of the market,” Bezemer (2001) uses Heyman Minsky’sfinancial fragility hypothesis to argue that the Albanian schemes were a type of“Ponzi finance,” which Minsky considered to be systemic to capitalist economies,especially in the context of the post-1970s wave of deregulation in financial

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markets. Despite Albania’s remarkably different type of financial market, Bezemermakes the case that the country’s schemes occurred according to Minsky’s model:these schemes were not accidental but systemic to the very form of postsocialisttransformations that encouraged a rapid deregulation of financial markets whileneglecting transformations in the “real” economy.

Following Minsky, Bezemer argues that one of the root causes of the spread ofthe schemes was an overabundance of credit that encouraged speculative behaviors.To make the Albanian kompani commensurate with the Ponzi finance of capitalmarkets, however, Bezemer disregards the fundamental difference in the materi-ality of this excess credit. The credit available in postindustrial financial marketsconsists in highly virtual forms of capital, while that absorbed by the Albanianschemes was purely in cash. To give a sense of the radical difference of the Albanianfinancial markets, it is worth noting that at the time there were no ATMs andmost people kept their savings at home—in drawers and the proverbial mattresses.How, we might ask, were these stacks of cash made available in the first place?

Stacks of cash were made available through a gap between the financial archi-tecture of postsocialism and a number of cash flows that this system was not able toabsorb. On the one hand, the Albanian government abided by the IMF recommen-dation to tighten monetary and fiscal policy, which limited the availability of creditand the possibility of opening up private banks. On the other hand, there was asurge of cash coming from three sources: immigrant remittances; the flourishingof several lucrative forms of illegal smuggling of weapons, cigarettes, and oil toformer Yugoslavia, breaching the UN embargo; and the savings of state employeeswhose salaries were financed mostly by foreign aid (Bezemer 2001; McNeilly andSchiesser-Gachnang 1998:22). From a legal and practical point of view, kompaniemerged in the gaps between the institutions of finance and the flows of cash. Inother words, stacks of cash were not simply symbolic but were constitutive of theschemes in the first place. That said, kompani were not merely symptoms of thesefinancial gaps—rather, they were active forces that “translated” forms of wealthand value across different scales of political economy.

IMMIGRANT REMITTANCES, MULTIPLE CURRENCIES,

AND CONVERTING FORMS OF WEALTH

Of the three sources of cash saturating Albanian markets in the early 1990s,immigrant remittances were perhaps the most visibly entangled with the pyramidschemes’ circulation. Not only was the presence of cash a corollary of deposits fromimmigrant remittances (typically, immigrant remittances circulated in cash given

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the lack of private banks, personal bank accounts, and a general lack of trust in formalfinancial institutions) but also the proliferation of multiple currencies was a keyfeature of the association between the schemes and immigrant money. Thus, Durim,a former sekser (broker), shared his personal bookkeeping notebook, in which hehad listed the deposits, interest, and withdrawals in several currencies: the Albanianlek, the U.S. dollar, the Greek drachma, the Italian lira. Once displayed as objectsof decoration in socialist-style buffets (Laci 1997:9), these foreign currenciespermeated Albania’s family budgets following waves of massive migrations toneighboring European countries in the early 1990s. Immigrant remittances wereone of the earliest and most widespread sources of money for the firms.

In addition to the economic reforms of a “shock therapy” style, Albania’spostsocialism is marked by an explosion of legal and illegal migration towardEuropean states, especially Italy and Greece. Overcrowded boats landing in theports of Italy were soon matched by regular massive border crossings into Greece.The majority of these migrants took on occupations in agriculture, the serviceindustry, and construction. These were usually unregistered jobs, paid under thetable, underpaid, and insecure. In the first years of transition, these migrants becamea primary source of income for thousands of families who had lost their jobs withthe depreciation and eventual closing of the socialist sources of income: factoriesand agricultural cooperatives. Thus, between 1992 and 1996, the years before theescalation of pyramid scheme participation, immigrant remittances accounted for15–20 percent of the country’s GDP (Elbirt 1997).

Flows of cash from immigrants in general and from the Albanian immigrantsto Greece and Italy, in particular, continue to complicate notions of a “nationaleconomy” and of “investment” in the traditional sense. Immigration itself consti-tutes an important kind of investment, a collective investment (whereby the wholefamily takes a profit) into the future. Hundreds of thousands of Albanians wereengaged in movements of people and money, cultivating patterns and networks ofimmigration as alternative “investment repertoires” (Guyer 2004:168), as “othermeans of insertion in the world economy” (Roitman 2004:221).

Access to remittances also provided those back home with multiple foreigncurrencies (dollars, lire, drachmas, marks), currencies that were more durable andstable than the lek, which had depreciated from 50 to 110 to the U.S. dollar withinthe first two years of the transition. Those with immigrant relatives, althoughunemployed, were often better off than those employed locally. In other words,the circulation of immigrant remittances had enabled a parallel economic realm thatprovided a safety net from the unstable and rapidly devaluating national economy.

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Although officially outside the formal global financial flows—remittances circulatedthrough persons, rather than banks—the flows of remittances were (and continueto be) very much enabled by the post–Cold War transformations in demographicand economic distribution in the region; they were enabled by partial inclusions andexclusions from regional scales of economic activity. These flows exemplified theparadoxical simultaneity of integration into and marginalization from transnationalflows.

Thus, the pyramid schemes facilitated what Janet Roitman (2004) describesas “productivity in the margins,” referring to the different but comparable contextof the unregulated economic activities in the Chad basin. Unlike national banks,for instance, the pyramid schemes circulated foreign currencies as if they werenational: “Those depositing in dhrahmi [drachmas] would withdraw their interestin dhrahmi,” said Ermira, a cashier of Cenaj and Co, one of the major kompanibased also in Vlora. In this way, they displaced foreign currencies and made themproductive outside their context of value and worth. This association between theschemes and immigrant remittances constituted a central space for converting valueacross different scales of political economy; the schemes became intermediariesbetween wealth-in-relations (among the family members of the immigrants) andasymmetric “geographies” (Thrift 2000) of currency markets.

Stories of loss of immigrant remittances in the pyramid schemes aboundparticularly in southern Albania, where residents had easier access to both Italy(by sea) and Greece (by land). Among the many creditors with whom I spoke inVlora, Manjola had one of the most telling stories of how immigrant remittancesintertwined with pyramid schemes in the hopes of redirecting and multiplyingwealth across disparate regimes of political economy. Manjola is in her mid-fortiesand had been in migration in the early years of transition with her husband and allher siblings. Manjola was from the village of Narta, which had a high concentrationof a population of Greek minority—that is, a population that claimed Greekethnicity but who had lived in Albania for many generations, including duringthe communist regime. Almost all inhabitants of the village had received legalresidency and employment authorization to Greece thanks to their minority status.At the time of our interview, most of the members of Manjola’s extended family,except for her in-laws and children, were still ne imigracion (in migration). Afterworking for many years in Greece as a cleaning lady for different families, Manjolareturned in 1995 and had become the unofficial manager of her family’s depositsto the pyramid scheme firms. This strategy was not uncommon; many peoplehad hoarded their deposits together to receive higher interest returns. Given the

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number of people and deposits that she managed, we might think of Manjola’soperation as a mini pyramid. At the time, her husband had also returned fromGreece, thinking that they would make enough money to live a comfortable life inAlbania and to rebuild their house. In fact, Manjola had torn down the old house,built by her father-in-law in the early 1960s, expecting to receive a large sum ofmoney with which to build a European-style villa. Needless to say, with the collapseof the schemes in early 1997, Manjola had lost not only all of her money but alsothat of her siblings and brothers- and sisters-in-law. Her husband had returned toGreece to work while she remained home, taking care of her in-laws. She was theonly one from her generation of siblings to have stayed back in Albania.

This strategy—depositing large sums of remittances from multiple investorsinto one account with the schemes—seemed quite sound to her at first. Kompanioffered higher rates of return for larger deposits. Overall, Manjola and others likeher engaged in these elaborate strategies of oscillating between different politicaland economic scales using networks of te njohur (connections; based on kinship,friendship, or by acquaintance) to transform wealth from one context to another.Such movements evince the intricate economic rationalities and calculations de-ployed to create wealth in times of scarcity and economic instability. Creditorsmade use of established networks and practices of reciprocal exchange cultivated inthe socialist economy of favors (Ledeneva 1998; Yang 1994; Wedel 1986). They“translated” these networks and practices onto new geographies of wealth forma-tion. While participating in (and, hence, contributing to) the pyramid scheme logicof accumulation, these practices also filled in the gaps between the institutionalframework of finance and the unofficial financial flows that emerged through otherimmigrant networks. Yet, arguing that the schemes were made possible in thesegaps does not mean that they were alien to the particular logics of neoliberalreform. On the contrary, as I argue next, the schemes gained their legitimacyprecisely through their ability to make particular translations of and associationsbetween neoliberal registers of wealth accumulation and socialist entrepreneurialpractices.

MOLDING POSTSOCIALIST ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Tales of bollek in cash went hand in hand with bollek in consumption. Formercreditors describe a particular culture of conspicuous consumption as characteristicof the pyramid scheme boom. Journalist Bardhi Sejdarasi, writing in Koha Jone

in 1996, captures these similarities between abundance in cash and consumptioncharacteristic of accounts of life during the pyramid schemes: “Vlora is cooking in

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money, people flock toward the city even from neighboring regions. . . . Vlora’srestaurants are full any time of the day and night. Life can be enjoyed even withfajde money” (1996).8 This bollek lifestyle stood in high contrast with decadesof rationing, scarcity, and shortages in consumable goods that plagued socialisteconomies in various eastern European countries (Kornai 1980; Verdery 2002).

One of the defining features of cultures of neoliberalism, according to Co-maroff and Comaroff, is a shift toward consumption becoming the predominantsource of value, “the moving spirit of the twentieth century” (2000:295). In thissense, the bollek associated with the pyramid schemes in Albania embodied thetransformation from an economy plagued by systemic shortages, rations, longlines, and driven by bare necessity to one organized around practices of conspic-uous consumption. Narratives from kreditore abound in examples of specific actsof conspicuous consumption from kompani. The newspapers and memoirs of thatperiod of time also provide ample examples of such acts.

In his memorable recollections of the rise and fall of the schemes, poetand politician Prec Zogaj describes with much irony and excessive glamour hisexperience of attending an exclusive VEFA reception at an inaugural party for IliriaIsland, a center of entertainment built in the Durres harbor during late socialismand acquired by VEFA through public procurement:

Entering the island “Iliria,” grateful to have been invited, Nazarko and I, as welater on confess to one another, feel as though we were part of a burlesqueopera. The waves sway the motorboat “VEFA” near one of the island’s legs; a“VEFA” race car appears a little further as the trophy of national capitalism;the long queue of politicians and beauty pageant winners who eat and smilewith confidence and grace; the speech given with pathos by [minister] Mr.Titani in the name of [VEFA] president Alimucaj “for the government thatwe love and loves us”; the parade of local comedians, their very warm jokesthat not only do not upset the ministers and members of parliament present,but, on the contrary, that entertain them, just like in Europe; contemporarymusic, the sparkling glasses of drinks, the clicking sound of the toasts. [Zogaj1998:35]

The event described by Zogaj mocks Alimucaj’s extravagant display of postsocialistwealth. The celebration of Alimucaj as a leading businessman brings togetherpoliticians, business people, and beauty pageant winners and excessive displaysof gadgets such as ships, yachts, race cars, and helicopters. All these elementsstrengthen VEFA’s image as an icon of emerging capitalism.

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As Zogaj points out, the pyramid schemes known as kompani, such as VEFAHolding, Gjallica, Kamberi, Cenaj and Co., and Silva, presented an image ofcapitalist entrepreneurship, embodying the spirit of postsocialist reform that valuedprivate enterprise and an openness to international capital. This image is crucialfor understanding the credibility of these firms and their promises of guaranteedreturns on creditors’ deposits. Creditors, in fact, distinguished between fondacione

and kompani, with the latter being more credible at the time, given their asete

and kapitale. Thus, in defense of Alimucaj, Hektor insisted that the latter hadcapital, assets, investments, and foreign bank accounts in Switzerland and theUnited Kingdom. Indeed, according to the records of Grupi Mbikqyres I FirmavePiramidale (GMFP, the Investigative Body on the Pyramid Schemes), VEFA Holdinghad investments in trade, tourism, transportation, and the food industry;9 it ownedclose to 200 businesses and employed around 10,000 people (Bezemer 2001). Inostentatious advertisements printed daily in local newspapers across the politicalspectrum, VEFA boasted about its capitalist edge and emphasized its broad rangeof national investment and international business ties. VEFA was the first Albaniancompany to register with the Dow Jones (Babaramo 1996a), and it often madepublic statements about its plans to obtain a license to operate as a bank. The IMFand World Bank pressured the Albanian government to undertake further reform inthe financial sector to allow for the emergence of private banks (Babaramo 1996b).

VEFA’s public image is an interesting means for examining the particular styleof postsocialist entrepreneurship established during the early years of economictransformation. VEFA’s advertisements bring together several aspects of the specificethos of the postsocialist enterprise:

[VEFA is]:The Incarnation of humane capitalismValuing of national prioritiesAffirmation of stability and broad perspectiveDirect investment in the rapid circulation of moneyDynamism and intuitionContemporary tendency in the field of the application of technologyThe accurate planning of pragmatic economics. [Koha Jone 1997]

The “potency” of the list consists precisely in “translating” multiple neoliberal andpostsocialist ideals. Postsocialist entrepreneurship is imagined to embody nationalpriorities, to involve the rapid circulation of money, to impart a particular tem-porality (“dynamism”) and a particular ethics (“intuition”); it is imagined to make

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local economic transactions coeval with other capitalist economies (“contemporarytendency”) in sharing particular techniques (“contemporary technology”) and a par-ticular kind of economics (“pragmatic economics”). Thus, the kompani embodiesinternational discourses of global integration and free flows of capital, while alsogesturing toward contradictory ideals such as a nationalist form of capitalism.

Unlike fondacione bamirese (charity foundations) or the odd firm of Sude10

(which, like the Romanian Caritas,11 promoted the “occult” version of pyramidschemes and backed their promises of high returns through tales of inheritedriches12), kompani aimed for an image of rational capitalists, rather than irrationalrisk takers. Indeed, reading through VEFA’s advertisement and Alimucaj’s regularpronouncements in public media, one notices how these evoked a particular capi-talist ethic with an emphasis on a diverse portfolio of investments and integration inglobal markets, representing, seemingly, accountability and credibility. Kompanipromised high returns on deposits based on the credibility of their investments.

The vocabulary affiliated with kompani constituted the vocabulary of early1990s business culture. The owners of the kompani are described in the newspaperKoha Jone as going by names such as president (president), kopetent (the competent),bosi (boss), and shefe (chief) (Godole 1996), titles that are indistinguishable fromthose of business culture at the time. The title of the Koha Jone article—“Boset eFajdeve” [The bosses of fajde]—hints at this new business ethic. The title takes afterthe novel Boset e Dollarit (The Bosses of the Dollar) an Albanian translation of ArthurHailey’s The Moneychangers (1976). Hailey’s novel tells the story of Wall Streetcorruption and greed. Published during the era of socialism in Albania as an exampleof why capitalism was morally bad, the book unintentionally fetishized the life ofabundance and greed. The frequent allusions of local newspapers to Boset e Dollarit

in their depiction of kompani are yet another indication of the schemes’ status aslegitimate capitalist enterprises with the potential of becoming future banks.13

As mentioned earlier, these kompani defined the very meaning and formthat capitalist entrepreneurship would take in the postsocialist context. First, thekompani, especially VEFA and Gjallica, initiated the business strategy of generatingprofit through practices of arbitrage and speculation with the value of former stateproperties undergoing privatization—a practice that continues to plague businesspractices today. Both VEFA and Gjallica acquired their assets through letra me

vlere—privatization vouchers distributed among former workers of state-ownedfactories. The primary purpose of these vouchers was to buy state property beingprivatized. However, given the dire economic situation of most of the laid-offworkers, most of them exchanged these vouchers for cash on the black market.

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The value of letra me vlere was subject to market fluctuation and soon becamecompletely worthless. The strategy for privatization was first introduced in theCzech Republic and replicated in a number of other eastern European countries.The strategy has since been criticized because of its practice of favoring an elitegroup of connected officials (Childress 2009). The first kompani benefited fromthis type of privatization, buying both letra me vlere and state property at lowprices. Thus, most of the assets and capital that Hektor and others still hold assigns of the kompani’s credibility—including, for instance, Iliria Island—werebought with letra me vlere. In other words, the very formation of kompani wassymptomatic of the ways in which private enterprise was born in the early yearsof postsocialist transition; those with government access bought state property atlow prices and used privatization vouchers also purchased at low prices, given thevouchers’ depreciation in the market.

In addition to these strategies for procuring assets to start up businesses, thevery personas of kompani owners played into the particular entrepreneurial culturethat is characteristic of postsocialist businesses. Presidents of kompani were a mix ofVerdery’s (1996) entrepratchiks and Yurchak’s (2002) postsocialist entrepreneurs.Like Verdery’s entrepratchiks—a pun between “entrepreneur” and “apparatchik”(functionaries of socialist parties across the former Soviet bloc)—kompani presi-dents used the political connections gained in the socialist system to obtain accessto contracts and assets available through for public procurement. In addition, likeYurchak’s small business owners of the “last Soviet generation,”14 the owners of theAlbanian kompani also “translated” entrepreneurial skills gained during socialismto run their postsocialist enterprises. The owners of kompani were all of a partic-ular generation15—born in the 1950s, educated during socialism, working in thesocialist economy for most of their youth—and held midlevel managerial positionsin the socialist system—in addition to having family connections to former orcontemporary officials.

A brief biographical sketch of the socialist past of some of the leading kompaniowners evinces these “translations.” VEFA’s president, Alimucaj, was a magazinier

(warehouse manager) first at the army and later on at the state electric corporation inTirana (Godole 1996). One of Gjallica’s presidents, Fitim Kerxhalliu, was an armycaptain (interview, Isuf, September 12, 2008; see Godole 1996). Both Alimucajand Kerxhalliu made use of their access to former structures of authority and“translated” the entrepreneurial skills gained during socialism to the postsocialistcontext.

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In the case of Alimucaj, for instance, being a magazinier during socialismenabled particular “entrepreneurial” skills that were not necessarily labeled as capi-talist pre-1990s but that worked well in the post-1990s free-market context. Thesepractices included managing budgets and inventories, organizing the distribution ofgoods to state enterprises, and the unofficial practices of redistributing state mer-chandise through kinship-based networks, or te njohur. The position of magazinierwas officially unremarkable, but unofficially, it was one of the most privilegedoccupations given the access it provided to otherwise scarce resources. In Pallati

176 (Shanaj 1985) for instance, a popular socialist comedy, the central character ofridicule, Jovan Bregu, is an employee of nderrmarrje e shtetit (state enterprise) andis characterized as someone who “vdes te behet njehere magazinier!” (“is dying tobe a wholesale manager, for once!”). A magazinier had access to scarce goods andmediates between key state authorities and a broad network of people who enteredthe socialist economy of favors. Because of these characteristics, a magazinier likeAlimucaj possessed the skills and the networks to adapt quickly to the postsocialisteconomy.

In addition to the translation of socialist modes of entrepreneurship, Alimucajand Kerxhalliu were engaged in a form of “translation” specific to Albania’s andeven more to Vlora’s social makeup. As former army employees, both had accessto a large population of recently unemployed army officers, following the armydownsizing in the early 1990s. In my interviews I was surprised to encounter somany former army officials turned menaxher or sekser. Both Hektor and Durim,for instance, were former army officers who had no professional skills to transferto specific areas of economic activities. Yet they had access to a whole network offormer army officers, especially in Vlora. Albania’s socialism was distinguished byan obsession with self-defense, resulting in an extreme militarization of the spaceand society. Thus, given Vlora’s allegedly precarious proximity to the coast andthe southern border, the city was “protected” by two of the most important armybases (the island of Sazan and the submarine base in the peninsula of Karaburun),and thus housed a large number of army employees.

Hektor and Durim worked for the schemes in the capacity of recruiter,gaining additional interest for every kreditor they enlisted to kompani like VEFAand Gjallica. The recruitment of these “surplus” officers to draw in creditorsconstitutes the third element of postsocialist entrepreneurship pervasive in thepyramid schemes and even now shaping business practices: the transfigurationand deployment of the networks of te njohur—combining kinship relations with

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relations of obligation and reciprocity among friends, colleagues, superiors, andsubordinates—as a constant resource for wealth making.16

POLITICAL IMPERSONATIONS OF BOLLEK

I have tried so far to show how the Albanian pyramid schemes were not justa symptom or a product of neoliberal postsocialist transformations but were alsoactive forces, or actants, defining new business practices. And yet, the role ofthese schemes as actant is best understood, in Bruno Latour’s words, as a “gain [of]strength by association with others” (1988:160), rather than intrinsic strength. Inother words, the schemes became important actors by association with other actorsfrom the political sphere. Most importantly, however, this “association” contributedto a general political indifference toward market regulation and practices.

I repeatedly asked former participants to explain their actions, their decisionsto borrow money from others, to use immigrant remittances, or to sell theirapartments to deposit in these firms, decisions that seem absurd today both to themand to third-party observers. In addition to (or, often, instead of) recalling thebollek of the firms, when making sense of their actions and decisions to participatein the schemes, former creditors repeatedly point to a number of iconic acts frompolitical figures bestowing legitimacy on these schemes.

Albania’s president at the time, Sali Berisha, seemed to embody images ofbollek, making explicit and implicit correlations between his political authority andthe cash flowing from the pyramid schemes As recalled by many of the participants,in popular discourse Berisha was often referred to as Sali-bolleku.17

At the time Berisha enjoyed the image of the honest (albeit authoritarian)politician (Pettifer and Vickers 2007). Although he has not been directly involvedwith the schemes, he was able to use the different forms of bollek and a particularform of casino capitalism to establish his political authority and, more generally,his style of governance. In the 1996 elections, just six months prior to the collapseof the schemes, the incumbent party, Partia Demokratike (PD), under Berisha’sleadership, led the campaign with the slogan “With Us Everybody Wins” (Me ne

fitojne te gjithe). Just like in English, the Albanian word for “winning”—fitoj—meanswinning a game or an election as well as gaining money. The PD slogan intentionallyused the double meaning of fitoj to suggest that gains from the schemes were alsomade possible by the government. By appropriating the merit for rapid enrichment,PD justified its ongoing onslaught on the media and free speech. Bollek in moneywas offered in exchange for the rigged elections of 1996.18

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Creditors recall Berisha’s public appearances alongside Alimucaj or otherpyramid scheme owners. PD’s whole electoral campaign had been sponsoredby many of the firms. Perhaps the most remarkable of these acts was Berisha’spublic statement released right after the IMF’s pressure to close the schemes inNovember 1996. Berisha came to kompani defense with the infamous line, “Parate eShqiptareve Jane te Ndershme” [Albanian money is honest] (Hazizaj 1996). Berishacountered what had been one of his main supporters, the IMF, to save face withwhat he called the avant-garde of Albanian capitalism. Berisha’s famous statementwas part of a longer public response to the IMF’s threat to cancel its next loan ifthe pyramid schemes were not shut down by the government. Berisha did not denythat the kompani are pyramid schemes, but he defends them on the grounds thatthey were private enterprises:

Unlike in other countries, this phenomenon in Albania is entirely privateand without excluding the possible chance speculations, we can say that theAlbanian money is the most honest that can be. The big firms of the informalsector have important investments in the lucrative sectors of the economysuch as retail, commerce, food industry, tourism, mines, and so on. [Hazizaj1996:7]

As is usually the case in Berisha’s style of discourse, this statement makes a numberof counterintuitive associations between different domains of political life. Forexample, he suggests that the kompani money is identical to Albanians’ money,which enables a number of mistranslations. First, it implicates the depositors asco-owners of the companies. The statement also implies that the depositors areequally under attack from the IMF. On a broader level, the equivalence betweenthe kompani money and Albanians’ money makes the wealth of kompani identicalto national wealth. The development of private enterprise is here considered as anational project.19

These (mis)translations create a space of exception from political ques-tioning for the private sector on the basis of its postsocialist morality: privateproperty is good (honest) and a national treasure. Kompani are honest becausethey are “purely private” and are, therefore, a sacred institution of postsocial-ist economies. While defying the IMF’s special consultants, Berisha deploys theparticular ethic of privatization as a moral good, introduced through the IMFpackage for reform and reinforced in praise of the country’s macroeconomic per-formance. This peculiar articulation of the legitimacy of the kompani defines apolitical practice similar to what Beatrice Hibou describes as “the privatization

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of the state” (2004:2–3),20 a reconfiguration of state power that outsourcesmany domains of social and economic life to the private sector, thus increas-ing the “indirect forms of government” (2004:4–5). It is an ethic that continues todominate local politics into the present and has been consistent across the politicalspectrum.21

LINGERING MATERIALITIES

At the end of our conversation about the schemes, right before parting nearSkela, the plaza marking the end of Vlora’s main bulevard and the beginning of itsbeachfront, Isuf made a passing remark in reference to a question I had asked earlierabout the legacy of the schemes in the present. Pointing at the high-rises liningthe waterfront and built after the collapse of the schemes, he said with absolutecertainty: “That’s where all the pyramid schemes’ money is.”

The bulk of economic growth in Albania over the last decade is the product ofa construction boom taking place especially in urban areas, mainly in the capital,Tirana, and the coastal cities of Durres, Vlora, and Saranda. With their wide wavybalconies, spacious rooms, and gorgeous views of the sea, the high-rises in Vloraaim at fulfilling the city’s aspiration for becoming the next Mediterranean touristdestination. Although the apartments are an extension of the city’s urban area,their target market is middle- and upper-class families from outside the city andin search of vacation homes. Next to immigrant remittances, which continue toconstitute the main source of income for local residents, the construction industryprovides perhaps one of the few opportunities for employment in a city plagued byhigh unemployment rates and low living standards.

Isuf’s conjecture implied two ways in which the legacy of the pyramid schemeslingers in present. First, Isuf implied that there were winners in the pyramidschemes who invested their spoils in the next jackpot: the construction industry.All those kreditors selling their communist apartments (despite Bace’s warnings)would eventually seek new apartments. In a sense, explaining “where the moneywent” in this way suggests a certain symmetry of the circulations through thepyramid schemes—selling a house to buy a house. And yet, these circulations alsoredistribute materials and reorganize social asymmetries and hierarchies; after thepyramid scheme collapse, there emerged a new contingent of renters and credit-seeking buyers on the one hand and few owners of the new apartment buildings.

Second, Isuf also suggested an analogy between the logic of accumulation inthe construction industry and that of the pyramid schemes—a logic of speculativeaccumulation through a pyramidal network of investors. I encountered this second

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analogy on multiple occasions during my interviews and recorded several referencesto this in public culture and even political debate during my research. An impendingcrisis of vacancies and shortage of liquidity seems to haunt the construction industrytoday. For many years builders expected a high demand for new housing. Oftenbuilders would not pay subcontractors up front but promised to pay them oncethe apartments were sold. In the early years of this boom, eager buyers paidbefore the apartments were built. Over time, the market has reached saturation,and the builders receive fewer prepayments and have more vacant apartments.As construction firms face a shortage of liquidity, including dwindling need forbuilding projects, many fear a spiraling effect—much like the unwinding of thepyramid schemes—for many smaller suppliers.22

The analogy between the mechanism of these construction firms and thepyramid schemes of 1992–97 echoes Heyman Minsky’s claims that Ponzi types offinance are systemic to market economies, rather than alien to them. In Albania, theanalogy also foregrounds the specificities of postsocialist privatizations. Specifically,such an analogy alludes to the ways in which construction permits were distributedthrough similar practices of biased privatization and favoritism as those used by thekompani to procure their assets. On a more general level, Isuf’s commentary seemsto suggest that the experience of pyramid schemes has become a template throughwhich to gauge the present and the future “horizons of expectations” (Koselleck2004). These analogies, thus, operate with multiple scales of comparison and begfor further exploration of the lingering materiality of the pyramid schemes, bothas concrete transfers and transformations of wealth and as sediments in business-political cultures of accumulation.

ABSTRACTThe Albanian pyramid schemes (1992–97) drew in almost two thirds of the country’spopulation with the promise of sure financial returns. When the schemes collapsed, manythousands in Albania lost their savings, remittances from immigrant relatives, even theirrecently privatized apartments. How might we understand such widespread involvementin this high-risk economic activity? Moving beyond explanations that stop at “mania”or “ignorance of market logic,” this article looks to accounts from former participants(kreditors) that emphasize the materiality of the schemes—especially the presence ofstacks of cash and the circulation of immigrant remittances in multiple currencies—fora more grounded understanding of how the pyramid schemes actually took hold. Thecentral argument of the article is that the schemes came to fill the gaps between theliberalization of financial markets after socialism and the coeval flows of cash cominginto the country beneath the regulatory frameworks of formal financial institutions.The rise and collapse of the Albanian pyramid schemes may then be viewed not as an

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abstract financial “bubble” but as the result of historically specific “translations” of thewider neoliberal push for rapid and unregulated privatization. As such, these schemes,which were embedded in the particularities of postsocialist transformations, were alsoactive forces that contributed to processes of wealth and value transformations and to theformation of a specific kind of business culture that combines conspicuous consumptionwith networking and entrepreneurial skills established during the socialist years.

Keywords: pyramid schemes, materiality, wealth transformations, anthropol-ogy of translation, postsocialist transformations

NOTESAcknowledgments. I would like to thank Janet Roitman, Bruce Grant, Hugh Raffles, Claudio

Lomnitz, Matthew Rosen, the editors, and two anonymous reviewers of Cultural Anthropology fortheir insightful questions and comments on drafts of this article. In addition, I am grateful to theformer–pyramid scheme participants from Tirana and Vlora for participating in this research. Thisarticle is based on research conducted with the generous support of the Social Science ResearchCouncil, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council andthe New School for Social Research. Parts of this article were presented at the Council for EuropeanStudies Conference (Montreal 2010). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

1. See Zogaj 1998:105.2. These companies were considered as pyramid schemes only after their collapse.3. Interview, Ermira, September 13, 2008, Vlora.4. Estimates on pyramid scheme participation vary from one sixth to half of the population

(Bezemer 2001; Jarvis 1999). These estimates are difficult to make given that often peoplepooled money from relatives and deposited under one name to gain higher interest returns.

5. Former participants referred to themselves as “kreditor” (creditor) taking after the terminologyused in the contracts they received as proof of their deposits.

6. I use the term translations after actor-network theory, which defines it as “all the negotiations,intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes,or causes to be conferred on itself, the authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor orforce” (Callon and Latour 1981:279). The analytic of “translation” describes a displacement ofconcerns and questions from one realm to another (1981:34). It thus allows us to understandaction as distributed among different actors, discourses, and associations.

7. On the request of interviewees, all names are pseudonyms.8. The word fajde derives from the Turkish fa’id (loan with interest; see Cabej 1996). The term

was used with a negative connotation both in the context of Islamic ethics and in that of thesocialist ethics. When it was used in the early 1990s to refer to the pyramid schemes, the termheld no negative connotations.

9. An internal audit produced by Grupi Mbikqyres, lists the following values of financial assetsof the kompani that were put under its administration: VEFA Holding, $7 million; Silva, $2.7million; Kamberi, $0.2 million; Cenaj, $0.2 million; Leka, $0.6 million.

10. One of the first pyramid schemes, Sude was run by a former factory worker based in Tiranawho transformed her socialist “llotary” into a pyramid scheme. Sude claimed to know abouther future returns by looking into a crystal ball. Although extremely interesting in its ownterm especially because of its singularity, I have excluded this case from the current discussionas it calls for a different set of questions and comparisons.

11. Note the similarity in the language: Caritas means charity.12. Comaroff and Comaroff also note “speaking of the neoliberal spirit, occult economies have

close parallels in the spread of new religious movements” (2000:314).13. See, for instance, Koha Jone 1996 regarding VEFA’s announcement that it would obtain the

license to become a bank.105


14. Yurchak argues that these entrepreneurs used the entrepreneurial skills gained as Komsomolmembers to organize and manage groups and resources to open up businesses in the free-marketeconomy.

15. Note however, that that this generation is not the same as Yurchak’s “last Soviet generation”but one before last. The generation in question was one that had already worked for a decadeor so under the socialist system.

16. This phenomenon is also reminiscent of a similar engagement of former military personnel inthe “economy of the bush” in the Chad Basin (Roitman 2005).

17. The collapse of the schemes cost Berisha the loss of political power, which he fought hardto regain again in 2005. For many years following the anarchy of 1997, Berisha strove todissociate his name from the pyramid schemes. Yet, recently, having secured the seat of thePrime Minister in 2005, in defense of his economic policies, he reminded the members ofparliament “I was once called Sali-bolleku” (Shqip 2008).

18. The 1996 summer issue of the journal Perpjekja (Struggle) focused its outrage about the riggedelections entirely on the authoritarianism of Berisha toward the press and freedom of speech.

19. A similar use of nationalist politics is noted in Katherine Verdery’s (1996) analysis of theRomanian Caritas.

20. Note that despite the schemes’ legal status as LTDs or as charities, Berisha uses the terminformal. Yet, informality is not a liability as long as their activities are “private.”

21. In 2008, for instance, during his reelection campaign, Berisha released a television advertise-ment that justified progress on the war on corruption by listing the number of privatizationsand public procurements completed that year. The logic behind this advertisement very muchreplicated that of Berisha’s support for the schemes in 1996–97.

22. See, for instance, the economic magazine, Revista Monitor on the crisis of “klering”—a crisis ofa shortage in liquidity and overaccumulation of debts in the construction industry (Cela 2008,2009; Revista Monitor, 2009; Rabeta 2010).

Editors’ Note: Cultural Anthropology has published a number of articles on postsocialism, in-cluding Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak’s “American Stiob: What Late-Socialist Aesthet-ics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West” (2010), NancyRies’s “Potato Ontology: Surviving Postsocialism in Russia” (2009), and Paul Manning’s“Rose-Colored Glasses? Color Revolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Postsocialist Georgia”(2007).

Cultural Anthropology has also published articles on investment. See, for example, Julie Liv-ingston’s “Suicide, Risk, and Investment in the Heart of the African Miracle” (2009), PeterS. Cahn’s “Consuming Class: Multilevel Marketers in Neoliberal Mexico” (2008), and KarenHo’s “Situating Global Capitalism: A View from Wall Street Investment Banks” (2005).

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Documents

TALES FROM ALBARADO: The Materiality of Pyramid Schemes in Postsocialist Albania