Senior Researcher, Institute for Southeast European Studies, Romanian Academy, e-mail address: catalinavatasescu@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

THE TRADITIONAL ALBANIAN SOCIETY IN THE WORK OF PAUL H. STAHL

Since 1979, when the journal Études et Documents Balkaniques et Méditerranéens was founded, Paul H. Stahl has shown a growing interest in the study of traditional Albanian society. Drawing on an extremely rich body of documentation from 19th and 20th centuries authors, supplemented by studies by contemporary Albanian researchers (which he summarizes in reviews, making them available to the scientific community in the research and teaching institutions to which he sends his journal), he paints a convincing and comprehensive picture of the main characteristics of traditional Albanian society: the structure and organization of the domestic group, forms of property and inheritance, the division of labor, kinship ties and solidarity, the place of spiritual manifestations, and customary law. His studies, constructed with rigor and freedom of investigation, remain indispensable not only because of the information they contain, but also because of his unique method of interpretation, based in particular on a multitude of comparative observations with the rest of Southeast Europe and, more broadly, Europe.

Keywords: Paul H. Stahl, traditional Albanian society, principles of ethnographic research, comparative method in the study of societies in southeastern Europe. 

DOI: 10.59277/RJSoc.2025.5-6.04

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