The Tribes of Albania: History, Society and Culture

The Tribes of Albania: History, Society and Culture forms a remarkable, insightful and sorely needed addition to the field of ethnic studies in general and the oft-neglected field of Albanian studies particular. Indeed, it should help to overcome the “glaring lack of knowledge and scholarly information about the tribes of northern Albania”. 1 This is all the more important once one realises that particularly the region of Northern Albania has contained, like Montenegro, one of the few truly tribal societies on the European subcontinent that survived more or less intact at least up to the mid-twentieth century.

For decades, Dr Robert Elsie has been one of the most prominent specialists on Albanian poetry and literature. His untimely death in late 2017 leaves a gaping hole in the mentioned disciplines for years and even decades to come, that few if any non-native scholars would ever be able to fill given his in-depth knowledge and vaunted mastery of the Albanian language.