In the Name of the Daughter - Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro. An Introduction - De Gruyter

Comp. Southeast Europ. Stud. 2021; 69(1): 5–18

In the Name of the Daughter.
Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro

Čarna Brković*
In the Name of the Daughter – Anthropology
of Gender in Montenegro. An Introduction
https://doi.org/10.1515/soeu-2021-2013

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

1 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) data reveal that Montenegro is one of the top eleven
countries in the world for sex imbalance at birth; that is in the difference between the numbers of
boys and girls. Cf. Christophe Z. Guilmoto, Sex Imbalances at Birth. Current Trends, Consequences
and Policy Implications, UNFPA Asia and Pacific Regional Office, Bangkok 2012, 20.
2 This special issue was made possible through the workshop ‘Anthropology of Gender in the
Balkans’, which was organized in September 2019 at the University of Göttingen and financed
through a DAAD grant. We are grateful to Sabine Hess for her support. For more details, cf. https://
genderinthebalkans.wordpress.com/. All Internet sources were accessed on 16 February 2021.

*Corresponding author: Čarna Brković, University of Göttingen, Institute of Cultural
Anthropology/European Ethnology, Göttingen, Germany.
E-mail: carna.brkovic@uni-goettingen.de

  Open Access. © 2021 Čarna Brković, published by De Gruyter.          This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

6         Č. Brković

‘backwardness’, ‘modernity’, and the need for the country to ‘catch up’ with
‘Europe’. The authors ask, ‘Is it possible to criticize the clear Montenegrin prefer-
ence 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 revenge3 was
a legal institution and sworn virgins4 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 under-
stand 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 stereo-
types 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 perspec-
tive means going beyond what anthropologist Dace Dzenovska has called the
‘diagnostic mode of knowledge production’. In her study of the projects to promote

3 Christopher Boehm, Blood Revenge. The Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro
and Other Tribal Societies, Philadelphia 1991.
4 Predrag Šarčević, Sex and Gender Identity of ‘Sworn Virgins’ in the Balkans, in: Miroslav
Jovanović / Slobodan Naumović, eds, Gender Relations in South Eastern Europe. Historical Per-
spectives on Womanhood and Manhood in 19th and 20th Century, Münster 2004, 123–144.
5 Roy Trevor, Montenegro. A Land of Warriors, London 1913.

Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro          7

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 pro-
duction. 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

6 Dace Dzenovska, School of Europeanness. Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism
in Latvia, Ithaca/NY 2018, 110.
7 Olivera Komar, Gender Equality Index Montenegro 2019, Montenegro 2019, 3, https://
eurogender.eige.europa.eu/system/files/events-files/gender_equality_index_2019_report_
final.pdf.
8 Komar, Gender Equality Index Montenegro 2019.

8         Č. Brković

women, men, and others. That becomes a major problem when we take into ac-
count that there is almost no systematic support for any other form of production of
knowledge about gender in Montenegro, whether locally, nationally, or interna-
tionally. Most attempts to produce other empirical and theoretical knowledge
about gender in Montenegro such as the various doctoral and MA theses, exhibi-
tions, 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

9 For instance, cf. Mileva Filipović, Društvena moć žena [The social power of women], Podgorica
2003; Ervina Dabižinović, Diskursi o ženama Boke Kotorske: rodni identiteti (1815–2015) [Dis-
courses about the women in the Bay of Kotor. Gender identities (1815–2015)], PhD thesis, University
of Novi Sad, 2017; Paula Petričević, Potemkinova sela – neke posebnosti institucionalizacije
studija roda u Crnoj Gori [Potemkin Villages – some specificities of the institutionalization of
gender studies in Montenegro], Pro-Femina (winter-spring 2011), 57–65; Nataša Nelević, ed, Šta je
nama AFŽ? Prilozi za nova čitanja istorije socijalističkog ženskog pokreta 1943–1953 [What is WAF
to us? Contributions to a new reading of the history of the socialist women’s movement], Cetinje
2017; Nataša Nelević, ed, Žensko nematerijalno kulturno nasljeđe Crne Gore: Nove mape, rodne
perspektive [Women’s immaterial cultural heritage of Montenegro: New maps, gender perspec-
tives], Podgorica 2020; Branko Banović, The Montenegrin Warrior Tradition. Questions and
Controversies over NATO Membership, London 2016; Sofija Kalezić, Minervinim tragom: prozno
stvaralaštvo crnogorskih književnica [Following Minerva’s trace: prose literature of Montenegrin
women writers], Cetinje 2018; Maja Bogojević, Cinematic Gaze, Gender and Nation in Yugoslav
Film: 1945–1991, Podgorica 2013; and the virtual Museum of Women, http://www.muzejzena.me/.
10 Komar, Gender Equality Index Montenegro 2019, 34.

Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro               9

attracted huge public attention in Montenegro and regionally—prompting re-
sponses 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 Kišćen-
ko’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 atten-
tion 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

11 Jennifer A. Zenovich, Willing the Property of Gender. A Feminist Autoethnography of Inheri-
tance in Montenegro, Women’s Studies in Communication 39 (2016), no. 1, 28–46.
12 Ulf Brunnbauer / Hannes Grandits, eds, The Ambiguous Nation. Case Studies from Southeastern
Europe in the 20th Century, Munich 2013; Čarna Brković, Floating Signifiers. Negotiations of the
National on the Internet Forum Café del Montenegro, Südosteuropa. Journal of Politics and Society 57
(2009), no. 1, 55–69; Lidija Vujačić, Madonna, Glamour and Politics. Nation Branding and Pop
Concerts in the Promotion of Montenegro as an Elite Tourist Destination, History and Anthropology
24 (2013), no. 1, 153–165; Sofiya Zahova, The Language Issue in the Context of Minorities’ and
Identity Policies in Montenegro, European Yearbook of Minority Issues 10 (2012), no. 1, 667–700.
13 Florian Bieber, ed, Montenegro in Transition. Problems of Identity and Statehood, Baden-Baden
2003; Kenneth Morrison, Montenegro. A Modern History, London 2009; Mladen Lazić, ed,
Montenegro. Capitalist Transformation at the European Periphery, thematic section in Südosteuropa.
Journal of Politics and Society 66 (2018), no. 2.

10          Č. Brković

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 his-
torical 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

14 Klāvs Sedlenieks, ‘And Burn Today Whom Yesterday They Fed’. Citizens and State in
Montenegro, Tallinn 2013; Klāvs Sedlenieks, Buffer Culture in Montenegro. Bratstvo, kumstvo and
Other Kin-Related Structures, in: Predrag Cvetičanin / Ilina Mangova / Nenad Markovikj, eds, A Life
for Tomorrow. Social Transformations in South-East Europe, Skopje 2015, 199–215, https://idscs.
org.mk/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/a-life-for-tomorrow.pdf; Klāvs Sedlenieks, Liquid Crystal
and the A1. Densities of State from the Perspective of a Montenegrin Village, Social Anthropology 28
(2020), no. 2, 496–511.
15 Alice Forbess, Montenegro Versus Crna Gora. The Rival Hagiographic Genealogies of the New
Montenegrin Polity, Focaal. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (2013), 47–60.
16 Jelena Tošić, Travelling Genealogies. Tracing Relatedness and Diversity in the Albanian–
Montenegrin Borderland, in: Donnan Hastings / Madeleine Hurd / Carolin Leutloff-Grandits, eds,
Migrating Borders and Moving Times. Temporality and the Crossing of Borders in Europe, Man-
chester 2017, 80–101.
17 Boehm, Blood Revenge.
18 Gilbert Herdt, ed, Third Sex, Third Gender. Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History,
New York 1994.
19 René Grémaux, Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans, in: Herdt, ed, Third Sex, Third Gender,
241–284; René Grémaux, Mannish Women of the Balkan Mountains. Preliminary Notes on the
‘Sworn Virgins’ in Male Disguise, with Special Reference to their Sexuality and Gender Identity, in:
Jan N. Bremmer, ed, From Sappho to De Sade. Moments in the History of Sexuality, London, New
York 1989, 143–172; Šarčević, Sex and Gender Identity of ‘Sworn Virgins’.
20 Antonia Young, Women Who Become Men. Albanian Sworn Virgins, London 2000. Cf. the
exhibition of contemporary sworn virgins in Albania by photographer Pepa Hristova, http://www.
pepahristova.com/sworn-virgins/1.

Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro                11

      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 genera-
tion.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 un-
clear 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 femi-
ninity 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 prob-
ably never know how Stana and other sworn virgins dealt with such challenges.

21 Karl Kaser, Die Mannfrau in den patriarchalen Gesellschaften des Balkans und der Mythos vom
Matriarchat, L’Homme. Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 5 (1994), no. 1, 59–77.
22 Predrag Šarčević, Tobelija. Female-to-Male Cross-Gender Role in the 19th and 20th Century
Balkans, in: Miroslav Jovanović / Karl Kaser / Slobodan Naumović, eds, Between the Archives and
the Field. Dialogue on Historical Anthropology of the Balkans, Graz 1999, 35–46, 43.
23 Cf. Jovan Džoli Ulićević / Čarna Brković, Montenegro Is the Place of Revolutionary Trans
Struggles. A Conversation between a Trans Activist and an Anthropologist, Kuckuck. Notizen zur
Alltagskultur 20 (2020), no. 1, https://www.kuckucknotizen.at/kuckuck/index.php/1-20-handeln/
196-1-20-handeln-leseprobe.
24 This view is reflected in the well-known 1991 Yugoslav dramatic film ‘Virdžina’, directed by Srdjan
Karanović. Cf. Edmond J. Coleman / Theo Sandfort, From Sworn Virgins to Transvestite Prostitutes.
Performing Gender and Sexuality in Two Films from Yugoslavia, in: Aleksandar Štulhofer / Theo Sandfort,
eds, Sexuality and Gender in Postcommunist Eastern Europe and Russia, New York 2005, 79–94.
25 Miomir Maroš, ZAPIS: Posljednja virdžina Stana Cerovic na katunu na Sinjajevini, Radio Tel-
evizija Crne Gore, 13 January 2004, available on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Wb7k53FDvrQ.

12          Č. Brković

    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

26 Stevan Dučić, Pleme Kuči. Život i običaji [The tribe of Kuči. Life and customs], Podgorica 1998
(orig. 1911), 235–236.
27 Svetlana Slapšak / Marina Matešić, Rod i Balkan [Gender and the Balkans], Zagreb 2017.
28 Mišo Kapetanović has a new and exciting research project, ‘Looking for Historical Queerness in
the Slavic-Speaking Dinaric Mountains’ at the Austrian Academy of Sciences where he re-reads
written historical sources about gender and sexuality in the Western Balkans before the socialist
modernization.
29 Mićun M. Pavićević, O crnogorskom folkloru [On Montenegrin Folklore], Etnolog 13 (1940), 93–
106, 94, https://www.dlib.si/details/URN:NBN:SI:doc-XR8VYLBQ.
30 Pavićević, O crnogorskom folkloru, 95.

Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro           13

     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 ethno-
graphic 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 per-
spectives of researchers who work on similar topics but usually contribute to
different knowledge communities. This special issue has prompted conversa-
tion 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.

31 Anđelka Milić / Eva Berković / Ruža Petrović, Domaćinstvo, porodica i brak u Jugoslaviji
[Household, family, and marriage in Yugoslavia], Belgrade 1981.
32 But cf. Bosa Đurović / Zoran Lakić / Bosa Vuković, Žene Crne Gore u revolucionarnom pokretu
[The women of Montenegro in the revolutionary movement], Podgorica 1960.

14         Č. Brković

     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 ethno-
graphic 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 fo-
cuses 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

33 See the research report produced by the Latvian team, Klāvs Sedlenieks / Ieva Puzo / Diāna
Dubrovska, Informal Institutions in Everyday Life. Montenegro, Riga 2018, https://ec.europa.eu/
research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e5b98bfe3e&appId=
PPGMS.
34 Sherry B. Ortner, Dark Anthropology and Its Others. Theory since the Eighties, HAU. Journal of
Ethnographic Theory 6 (2016), no. 1, 47–73.
35 Cf. Sarah Green, Anthropological Knots. Conditions of Possibilities and Interventions, HAU.
Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2014), no. 3, 1–21.

Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro               15

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 con-
strained 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

36 Building upon the anthropology of ethics, we understand freedom as the socio-historically
situated ability to deliberate on how to pursue a better life, cf. James Laidlaw, For an Anthropology
of Ethics and Freedom, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8 (2002), no. 2, 311–332.
37 Nanette Funk, A Very Tangled Knot. Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s
Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism, European Journal of Women’s Studies
21 (2014), no. 4, 344–360, 349–350.

16         Č. Brković

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 Petri-
čević’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

38 Cf. Chiara Bonfiglioli, Women and Industry in the Balkans. The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav
Textile Sector, London 2019; Chiara Bonfiglioli, Becoming Citizens. The Politics of Women’s
Emancipation in Socialist Yugoslavia, Citizenship in Southeast Europe, CITSEE Story, 24
October 2012, http://www.citsee.eu/citsee-story/becoming-citizens-politics-women%E2%80%
99s-emancipation-socialist-yugoslavia.

Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro            17

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 dem-
onstrates 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 mean-
ingfully 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, anthro-
pological 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 pos-
sibilities of intervention and reproduction, as well as critique.

Bionote
Čarna Brković is Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at the University of
Göttingen. After completing her PhD at the University of Manchester she began the development of
two projects. One explores what happens with humanitarian effects and practices in the East
European semiperiphery and how the fall of socialism transformed humanitarianism in the

18         Č. Brković

successor states to Yugoslavia. The other looks at the experience and practice of freedom among
gay men in Montenegro. Čarna Brković is the author of Managing Ambiguity. How Clientelism,
Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Berghahn, 2017;
paperback 2020) and has written about care, favours, refugee camps, and histories of
anthropology.