Behind Stone Walls, Within Socialist Frames: Ethnography, Documentary Film, and the Albanian Extended Household in Kosova

This paper brings Besim Sahatçiu’s observational documentary 117 (1976) into dialogue with Berit Backer’s ethnographic monograph Behind Stone Walls (1979/2003) in order to examine how film and ethnography produce knowledge about the Albanian extended household in socialist Kosova. Rather than presenting the 117-member household as a timeless survival of patriarchal tradition, Sahatçiu’s documentary situates it as an exceptional but nevertheless revealing social formation shaped by kinship, migration, education, labor, domestic architecture, and Yugoslav socialist infrastructures. Whereas Backer’s ethnography explains the household through kinship cycles, authority, gendered labor, and social change, Sahatçiu’s film produces meaning through silences, framing, spatial movement, duration, and the sensory density of domestic life. The paper argues that both works reveal a vernacular socialist modernity: a simple opposition between tradition and modernity is not revealed but rather the process through which new institutions, technologies, educational aspirations, and forms of mobility are absorbed into existing household structures.