In the Name of the Daughter – Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro. An Introduction

Gender in Montenegro

In 2012 international organizations warned that Montenegro is one of the world’s leaders in sex-selective abortion, with as a result significantly fewer births of babies recognized as girls.^[1] Initially, that piece of data seemed to attract little attention, but that changed after a few years. NGOs working on women’s rights organized campaigns advocating against the practice of sex-selective abortion; German journalists came to Montenegro and reported on them; the Montenegrin national newspaper Pobjeda stopped publishing information on the genders of new-born children and began reporting births gender-neutrally instead. In dominant media and NGO discourses, sex-selective abortion was interpreted as the result of the patriarchal backwardness of the country, where sons were more valued and, therefore, more wanted than daughters.

The collection of articles in front of you explores how to look beyond the balkanist discourse to understand abortion and other gendered practices in Montenegro.^[2] It articulates anthropological criticism of patriarchy, misogyny, and gender inequality in Montenegro without reiterating the common tropes about ‘backwardness’, ‘modernity’, and the need for the country to ‘catch up’ with ‘Europe’. The authors ask, ‘Is it possible to criticize the clear Montenegrin preference for sons without evoking a retrograde Balkan culture and, if so, under what conditions? How can we talk about gender in Montenegro without implicitly or explicitly comparing Montenegrin lifeworlds to “European” standards’?

Gender is very often used to make (geo)political statements about how progressive or backward, modern or traditional, civilized or primitive, a certain place or group is. Montenegro is a case in point. In its own mytho-poetics Montenegro is a land of men, who are both warriors and poets. Montenegro is the country where blood revenge^[3] was a legal institution and sworn virgins^[4] a third sex throughout the twentieth century; a savage borderland that was surrounded yet allegedly never overwhelmed by Ottoman forces.^[5] Such discourse on the Balkans can and should be criticized as balkanizing and patronizing. Yet, does that mean that any criticism of gender inequality in Montenegro reiterates balkanizing and patronizing standpoints? Not quite.

The thematic section ‘In the Name of the Daughter’ argues that we can understand gendered practices in Montenegro, such as sex-selective abortion, only if we consider the complicated ways in which material and economic processes become intertwined with social and cultural logics, simultaneously reinforcing old stereotypes while creating new spaces for action and change. The special issue presented here suggests that the practice of gender in Montenegro is predicated on specific kinship and property relationships, which it also perpetuates, and that women in the country are neither as oppressed nor as free as they might seem from a liberal feminist perspective. Anyone pondering how to articulate criticism and how to encourage change to gendered practices in Montenegro should take into account how possibilities for individual as well as collective action are shaped by kinship relationality, inheritance expectations, and state and public policy on gender.

Beyond Diagnostic Knowledge Production

Writing about gender practices in Montenegro from an anthropological perspective means going beyond what anthropologist Dace Dzenovska has called the ‘diagnostic mode of knowledge production’. In her study of the projects to promote tolerance in postsocialist Latvia, Dzenovska demonstrated that the hegemonic assumption that Eastern Europe needs to ‘catch up’ with the rest of the continent has made dominant diagnostic modes of knowledge production which ‘assume prior knowledge of the disease’.^[6] In other words, diagnostic knowledge practices involve measuring how particular people and places fare in relation to an already-defined problem. The problems—like the solutions—are defined in advance and are seen as needing to be ‘transmitted’ or ‘transferred’ from the West to the East.

In this diagnostic mode of knowledge production, partners from postsocialist Eastern Europe—including Montenegro—are expected to generate knowledge that evaluates how their countries are performing in relation to given problems. A good illustration of that is the 2019 National Gender Equality Index for Montenegro, authored by Olivera Komar, professor at the University of Montenegro. The Index was developed in collaboration with national and international agencies and ‘in accordance with the methodology of the European Institute for Gender Equality for the European Union Member States’.^[7] The Gender Equality Index for Montenegro was ‘calculated with a score of 55 while the “middle” value recorded for countries in the EU-28 was 67.4; thus, Montenegro was seen to lag behind most of the developed EU countries’.^[8] The sort of knowledge made available by the Index is important for various reasons. On the one hand, it makes it possible to compare the legal, social, economic, and political frameworks of various countries using a transnational scale. On the other hand, it allows Montenegrin NGOs and other local actors concerned with women’s rights to put pressure on the government by claiming the need to change gender-related policies if the country wishes to stop ‘lagging behind Europe’. Furthermore, various members of the Montenegrin public take some pride in the fact that Montenegro has skilled professionals able to produce expert knowledge in the diagnostic mode, and thus to include their country in Europe-wide comparisons.

However, there are also various problems with that mode of knowledge production. First, its methodology reshuffles everyday life in a way that removes from sight its local historical and sociocultural context, with an aim to make possible a relatively straightforward transnational comparison. The process of reshuffling and attendant ‘cleansing’ of sociocultural and historical layers ends up creating an abstract construct that tells us little about the actual gender practices and forms of gender-related exclusion and inequality that affect the lives of Montenegrin women, men, and others. That becomes a major problem when we take into account that there is almost no systematic support for any other form of production of knowledge about gender in Montenegro, whether locally, nationally, or internationally. Most attempts to produce other empirical and theoretical knowledge about gender in Montenegro such as the various doctoral and MA theses, exhibitions, and published texts, remain incidental and scattered, with at best meagre institutional support and recognition.^[9]

A second problem is that the diagnostic mode of knowledge production usually prescribes the solutions to the very problems it diagnoses. Local and national actors are neither expected to generate knowledge that would enable an in-depth understanding of how gender is practised in everyday life, nor are they provided with the means to do so. As a result, they are unable to deliberate how to pursue changes to such practices in a contextually sensitive and meaningful manner, nor even whether they should do so. Instead, they are expected more or less to ‘copy-paste’ bundles of policies, rules, and values prescribed elsewhere. An example of that can be found in the Gender Equality Index, which mentions sex-selective abortions when discussing gender-related health disparities and emphasizes the campaign against sex-selective abortions called ‘#Unwanted’ as an illustration of a response to the problem. Initiated by the marketing agency McCann Podgorica in cooperation with the NGO Women’s Rights Centre, the campaign ‘#Unwanted’ stressed the misuse of healthcare technology such as prenatal tests.^[10] The campaign also included obituaries for the ‘unwanted girls’, that is for the foetuses aborted due to their chromosome structure. The campaign attracted huge public attention in Montenegro and regionally—prompting responses of the various misogynist voices who also equated foetuses with children and who were inclined to use that same vocabulary to attack women’s right to legal and widely accessible abortion. Yet, as becomes clear from Diāna Kišćenko’s contribution to this issue, the problem with sex-selection in Montenegro lies not in abortion but in the patrilineal system of inheritance and the housing and family-planning practices fostered by it. Echoing Jennifer Zenovich’s sharp analysis of the intersections between gender, property, and patrilineality, I would say that criticism of that practice might well have focused less on abortions and instead preferred to question the hegemonic patrilineal models by which family names and property are inherited.^[11] The subversion of gender norms in the Montenegrin context should include the promotion of alternatives to patrilineality such as husbands taking their wives’ surnames, for example, or children their mother’s surname; brothers could give up their shares of family property in favour of their sisters, and so forth.

Historical Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro

The lack of non-diagnostic forms of knowledge about Montenegro was a major motivation for this thematic section. Montenegro here stands in stark contrast to other former Yugoslav republics that have attracted much attention from many social science and humanities researchers over the past thirty years. There are notable exceptions, especially when it comes to ethnonational belonging, identity, and nationalism;^[12] political history and economy;^[13] political anthropology and anthropology of the state;^[14] religion;^[15] relatedness;^[16] morality.^[17] However, the everyday practice of gender in this former Yugoslav republic remains largely under-studied and under-theorized.

Unfortunately, that is not a new problem. Scarcity of ethnographic and historical sources for the non-binary gender system dominant in Montenegro before the socialist period and which included men, women, and the so-called sworn virgins (tobelije, virdžine, ostajnice), means that much will remain unknown to us about it. What we do know about sworn virgins indicates that they might have been an example of what Herdt calls a ‘third sex/third gender’—people who transcended gender binarism.^[18] According to Šarčević and Gremaux sworn virgins were born female but for various reasons were socialized as male.^[19] Ethnologists assume that during the twentieth century there were approximately 120 cases of sworn virgins living in the mountainous parts of Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Albania. In terms of group belonging they were associated with all the major ethnonational groups living in those areas and were represented in all three major religious confessions (Orthodox Christian, Catholic Christian, Muslim). The last known sworn virgin in Montenegro was Stana Cerović, who died in 2016, while a dozen or so are still living in Albania.^[20]

There are some interesting arguments about the possible role of this form of gender practice in the reproduction of the broader social systems in the mountainous Balkan societies. Certain ethnologists assume that sworn virgins’ social role was to ‘fix’ the ‘structural error’ of the ‘extremely vulnerable’ patrilineal system, by allowing families to pass on their names and property and maintain them for future generation.^[21] From that perspective sworn virgins were a structural attempt ‘to reconcile “anomalies” that originate from the strict respect for ideology that devaluates women, with the fact that the very survival of the community and the whole cultural system in some situations depends on women’.^[22] However, that argument raises the question of what happens after one generation, and what kind of ‘fix’ it was if the family still ended up effectively disappearing after a few decades. Furthermore, it remains unclear what everyday life was like for a sworn virgin, what kind of sexual relations they might have had, if any, and how we are to understand the relationship between that form of non-binary gender expression and those such as trans, or queer, that have become more dominant with the strengthening of LGBTIQ activism in Montenegro.^[23]

The common Montenegrin trope concerning sworn virgins assumes that they were ‘really’ women whom the ‘cruelty’ of tradition forced to give up their femininity and become men.^[24] However, that trope is largely a reflection of the values assigned in Yugoslav socialist modernity to ‘rurality’ and ‘tradition’. Gendered policies of Yugoslav socialism did much to erase sworn virgins; for instance it is clear from one of the last media interviews with Stana Cerović that being prevented from joining the Yugoslav People’s Army (which was mandatory for other men from the village) presented a challenge to Cerović’s understanding of themselves as a gendered person.^[25] However, scarcity of sources means we shall most probably never know how Stana and other sworn virgins dealt with such challenges.

Historical and ethnographic sources from the turn of the twentieth century indicate that sworn virgins had a certain amount of leeway to choose how to live and that they were neither as oppressed nor as free as we might imagine. For instance, while reading local Balkan ethnographies I stumbled upon the following description written by ethnographer Stevan Dučić in 1911:

I know an interesting couple of sworn sisters in Kuči, and both are sworn virgins: Djurdja, the daughter of former captain Ilija Popović from Medun, and Cura Prenk Redžina, a Catholic Arbanas from Koć, who transferred her dowry fifteen years ago to the house of Djurdjina’s father, where they live with their sworn sister in a community and greatest harmony. These sworn sisters rarely separate from one another, they are always working together, and it is impossible to describe in a few words what harmony they live in.^[26]

It is a pity that Dučić decided against spending more words on a detailed description of the family of these two sworn virgins of different faiths. He recognized their situation as an unusual but legitimate example of family cooperative (zadruga, zadružna porodica) because their life was based on sharing labour, assets (dowry), and the everyday, which were the cornerstones of family cooperatives. His recollection also offers a brief glimpse into the possibilities of family and communal life that some sworn virgins in presocialist Montenegro carved for themselves.

Echoing Svetlana Slapšak’s and Marina Matešić’s call to re-read the Balkan past,^[27] we could say that re-reading ethnographies written by Balkan ethnologists at the turn of the twentieth century with a feminist and queer eye might help us catch such glimpses of the everyday practice of gender and sexuality.^[28] For instance, we might discover the existence of people such as Ivo Vrana, a ‘madman-philosopher’ and ‘possibly the first known homosexual and sodomist in Montenegro’,^[29] as well as how alternative sexuality and gender practices were understood at the time. About Vrana, the ethnographer Mićun Pavićević wrote in 1940 that he ‘brought those perversions from Greece and Turkey, where he spent time as a migrant worker while he was healthy’.^[30]

Yugoslav socialism brought profound change to Montenegrin family, kinship, and property relations. Similarly to the case in the rest of Yugoslavia, women in Montenegro won the right to vote and the state created a broad range of public institutions to provide care, while urbanization and industrialization increased the number of nuclear families in towns.^[31] Economic transformation and the related differentiation and fragmentation of large family households in Montenegro had enormous influence on interpersonal relationships too. Inter-family struggles over how to divide family inheritance began to be resolved predominantly by the lawsuits filed in courts. As a result, there is now a saying in Montenegro that every family is involved in a court case about property (svaka porodica u Crnoj Gori se sudi). Although Yugoslav sociologists produced valuable knowledge about such large societal transformations, there are very few ethnographic accounts from that period of gender practice in everyday life.^[32]

Producing Anthropological Knowledge through Sets of Translations

As mentioned earlier, critical research on gender as well as more general anthropological research in Montenegro after the fall of Yugoslavia have been done more or less incidentally and with little to no institutional support nor even conversation among researchers. That is because there are effectively no ethnological-anthropological institutions in Montenegro other than ethnographic museums, while the only programme of critical gender education is offered by the NGO ‘Anima’, in Kotor. That lack of sustained conversation, which can come only out of institutionally supported frameworks, was one thing that motivated me to put together this thematic section. Another thing was my wish to generate a platform for discussion of what it means to write critically about gender in Montenegro, a platform that I hope will bring together various perspectives of researchers who work on similar topics but usually contribute to different knowledge communities. This special issue has prompted conversation among gender studies scholars and social anthropologists from Montenegro and abroad on what a critical anthropology of gender might look like; discussion of what questions are relevant, what topics; and suggestions for analytical approaches.

This conversation, published here in an English-language journal based in Germany, has taken shape through a series of translations of various kinds. First, for all authors either during their fieldwork or during the writing-up and peer-review stage there was the need for literal translations between Montenegrin, Latvian and English. Two of the authors, Klāvs Sedlenieks and Diāna Kišćenko, were part of a Latvian research team awarded a grant to conduct long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Montenegro.^[33] This meant that, in the process of producing their articles, they had to translate from Montenegrin to Latvian and English. The two Montenegrin authors, Ervina Dabižinović and Paula Petričević, wrote the first versions of their articles in Montenegrin and so during the course of peer review had to deal with translations to and from English.

Second, the thematic section was made possible through translations between disciplinary canons and methodological expectations of gender studies and social anthropology. It should be noted that Sedlenieks and Kišćenko are trained social anthropologists; another author, Dabižinović, is a gender studies scholar, while Petričević is a feminist philosopher. They all therefore employed related but different methodologies: the social anthropologists relied on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the gender studies scholar utilized mixed methods including oral history interviews and personal experiences, while the philosopher relied on a historical archive.

Third, a conceptual translation was needed among the four articles so that all of them could contribute to one and the same special issue. More particularly, the articles discuss the two vastly different topics of women’s activism and the so-called ‘traditional culture’. With this, they reflect a broader division in the anthropological literature on former Yugoslavia between the ‘anthropology of the good’ which focuses on resistance and activism, and the ‘anthropology of suffering’ which looks more closely at the social reproduction of regimes of oppression and domination.^[34] All the same, the articles in this issue have managed to overcome a simplistic opposition between ‘resistance’ and ‘social reproduction’. All the authors have illustrated the complex and messy ways in which gender in Montenegro is practised in a knot of social, cultural, economic, and political relationships within which social reproduction is interwoven with possibilities for action and change.^[35] In doing so, all of us have emphasized the importance of a material perspective although strictly speaking not that of Marxist-feminist theory. Instead, we are developing an ethnographic approach that looks at how the material, the cultural, and the social are brought together in the knots of everyday life. By presenting these four studies together, this issue aims to demonstrate what non-diagnostic forms of knowledge about gender in Montenegro can look like.

Freedom and Coercion within a Knot of Social, Cultural, and Economic Relations

‘In the Name of the Daughter’ provides an ethnographic and historical analysis of how gender practices have been reconfigured in Montenegro in the postsocialist period, with an eye on the effects of experiences of Yugoslav socialism. Each of the articles demonstrates that the everyday practice of gender takes place within a knot of social, cultural, and economic relationships that are messily and unevenly interwoven with one another. The articles explore what makes gender-based oppression possible in everyday life and how possibilities for emancipation and freedom are articulated within such tangled knots of relationships.^[36] This special issue therefore demonstrates the inadequacy of distinctions between ‘constraint’ and ‘freedom’, or ‘tradition’ and ‘resistance’, for any who wish to understand everyday lifeworlds in Montenegro. Women in Montenegro are neither as constrained by ‘tradition’ nor as liberated by ‘progress’ as might at first appear.

A case in point is Paula Petričević’s discussion of the Yugoslav women’s mass organization, the ‘Women’s Antifascist Front’ (Antifašistički front žena, WAF). The WAF and similar organizations in other communist countries have provoked heated debate among feminist scholars on whether it is possible to talk of women’s agency within the framework of an organization initiated and supported by a communist state. According to certain feminist scholars the claim that women’s emancipation or freedom was pursued from within a communist state apparatus is revisionist. From their perspective the official women’s organizations under state socialism ‘were not agents of their own actions’; instead they implemented the ‘will of the state’.^[37] Others disagree, indicating that women’s emancipation was in fact a feature of socialist modernization. They outline complicated intersections between women’s activists and state officials, and the ambivalent position of women within overarching postwar social change in socialist Yugoslavia.^[38] Petričević’s discussion of Naša žena (Our Woman), the key WAF publication in Montenegro and the Bay of Kotor, contributes to that conversation. Petričević argues that ‘the opposition between a subject who actively emancipates themselves (that is the liberal, Western notion) and a subject who carries out their own emancipation in an allegedly passive manner by replicating the state and social order (that is the socialist, and conditionally speaking Eastern way) is substantially false’. Effectively, that opposition prevents us from seeing and understanding the conditions under which women expressed their political subjectivity under state socialism, the complexity and ambivalence of which Petričević analyses in detail.

Petričević’s study of the work of the WAF in the Bay of Kotor provides an informative historical background for Ervina Dabižinović’s discussion of different forms of women’s activism in the same area after the fall of Yugoslav socialism. Dabižinović’s study is a response to the lacuna in the academic literature, which has largely overlooked the antiwar and peace activism of women in Montenegro during the 1990s. Dabižinović discusses the different responses of two women’s organizations to the challenges posed by nationalist and war-mongering voices during those years. In doing so she demonstrates that women at that particular sociohistorical conjuncture in the Bay of Kotor during the 1990s had a range of options to organize themselves to become social and political agents in accordance with their ideological and political perspectives.

The above-mentioned practice of sex-selective abortion provides another good example of how a knot of economic, social, and political relations shapes gendered practices and simultaneously is shaped by them. Diāna Kišćenko, to counter the diagnostic model of knowledge production, argues that the distinction between ‘backwardness’ and ‘progress’, or ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ does not help us understand the practice of sex-selective abortion. Sex-selective abortion actually demonstrates that scientific and technological progress is not inherently opposed to misogynist values; in order to understand how and why Montenegrin women use new reproductive technologies to abort foetuses marked as female, we must consider practices of inheritance, housing, and family-planning. Furthermore, Kišćenko illuminates complicated processes of moral reasoning and negotiation that women engage in when deciding whether or not to undergo an abortion, as well as the pressure of family expectation, which sometimes amount to outright coercion.

Klāvs Sedlenieks looks at family life in sparsely populated villages in the mountainous parts of the country. His focus is on ‘brother–sister’ households, that is households inhabited by unmarried or widowed women and their married brothers whose spouses and children live in nearby towns. He demonstrates that the material (gendered practices surrounding family property), social (gendered inheritance customs), and cultural (gendered ideas on home) aspects of everyday life become interwoven in complex ways, creating possibilities for men—and for some women—but forestalling others. For instance, married women and their children find more freedom of movement and presumably better lives in nearby towns. On the other hand, the whole cluster of expectations regulated through practices of inheritance, property maintenance, and home-making keeps men bound to family property, which provides them with material security but denies them the chance to sample a different life elsewhere. Their sisters, the unmarried or widowed women who return to properties belonging to their fathers or brothers, seem to have the fewest options in such a cluster of gendered expectations and practices of property use and inheritance.

The four articles in this thematic section illustrate that gender-based inequality and oppression in Montenegro can be neither understood, nor meaningfully transformed if the primary focus is placed on the individual and her right to choose. I would argue that on its own such a liberal feminist focus can offer no help in untying the knots of social relationships in Montenegro. Instead, anthropological analyses of gender practices must simultaneously consider the cultural and symbolic as much as the social, material and economic realms. It is essential to look at how gender, kinship, inheritance and property, and paid as well as unpaid labour are interwoven in everyday life into particular knots that tie together possibilities of intervention and reproduction, as well as critique.