Il diritto consuetudinario albanese tra ricerca scientifica, finzione letteraria e rappresentazione mediatica

Abstract

The Code of Albanian Customary Law has drawn the attention of foreign and Albanian scholars for the past one hundred years. Inspired by different interests, scholars have approached this subject in different ways using various studying methods. Such studies range from the ethno-cultural and anthropological approaches of Positivist descent to the politically correct Gender Studies of the present day. At the same time, literature, cinema, and theatre have highlighted specific features of the Albanian Customary Law revealing a taste for the exotic. The most salient are undoubtedly the vendetta and the sworn virgins, upon which novel plots and films have been based. The author analyses in this paper the effects of such approaches and tries to measure the distance between the aesthetical representation of these phenomena and their anthropological aura.