01: John Billingsley: ​Soft Power: the emergence of modern apotropaics in Albania

A talk presented by John Billingsley as part of the Hidden Charms 2 conference in 2018.

In the traumatic political upheavals that followed the overthrow of Albania’s Communist state, Albanians found that traditional apotropaics may have had metaphysical efficacy, but couldn’t protect them from capitalist evils. The result was the creation of a new apotropaic device that cynically reflects capitalist disposable culture as well as universal sentiment, and has an echo in contemporary western culture.