East and West Kiss: Gender, orientalism, and balkanism in Muslim-majority Bosnia-Herzegovina

Slavic Review

Volumn 67, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 88-119

  Helms, Elissa ^a  

^a CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY   (Hungary)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 40949158442     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/27652770     Document Type: Article

References (164)

1. Dani, 4 January 1999: cover. The original song begins, "Budi se istok i zapad!" (East and west awake!) (This and all other translations are mine.)
2. I take the term pan-Islamist from Xavier Bougarel's description of this group's influence on what became the SDA. Xavier Bougarel, "From Young Muslims to Party of Democratic Action: The Emergence of a Pan-Islamist Trend in Bosnia-Herzegovina," Islamic Studies 36, nos. 2 and 3 (1997): 533.
3. The SDA was formed by pan-Islamists around the late Alija Izetbegović, but its base encompassed urban intellectuals, former Communist Party networks, and more secular minded Bosniacs. Bougarel, "From Young Muslims." Here my concern is primarily the period of the war up until the end of 2000, when pan-Islamists dominated the SDA leadership and conservative (religious) articulations of Bosniac identity. Since that time, the balance between religious and secular nationalists has been redistributed through new political parties and institutions, but debates over the place of Islam continue.
4. In BiH, the term Muslim refers to ethnonational background as much as to (ancestral) religion. In common parlance, as well as in this paper, "Muslim" and "Bosniac" are used interchangeably, the latter being the more official name. But "Bosniac" should not be confused with "Bosnian," which denotes anyone from BiH regardless of ethnonational affiliation.
5. The redefined Deda Mraz and the New Year's Tree (themselves resignifications of older pagan symbols) shifted the focus from a religious holiday to a secular one that could be celebrated by all in the spirit of socialist (multiethnic) "brotherhood and unity." Lydia Sklevicky, "The New New Year: Or How a Tradition Was Tempered," East European Politics and Societies 4 (1990): 4-29.
6. Debates over Turkish authenticity, for example, revolve around women's dress and are frequently expressed in terms of east and west. See especially Yael Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, 2002).
7. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). On western constructions of this region, see Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, 1998);
8. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997);
9. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994).
10. On "local" discourses in former Yugoslavia, see Milica Bakić-Hayden, "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia," Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 917-31;
11. Milica Bakić-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, "Orientalist Variations on the Theme 'Balkans': Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics," Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 1-15.
12. Todorova Imagining the Balkans. See also K. E. Fleming, "Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography," American Historical Review 105, no. 4 (2000): 1218-33.
13. Bakić-Hayden and Hayden, "Orientalist Variations," 3; Fleming, "Orientalism, the Balkans and Balkan Historiography." Fleming also notes the different western construction of Greece, one she calls a "surrogate orientalism." K E. Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali-Pasha's Greece (Princeton, 1999), 151-52.
14. See also Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 1987).
15. Fleming, "Orientalism, the Balkans and Balkan Historiography," 1224.
16. On ambiguity in Balkan symbolic geographies, see Sarah F. Green, Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border (Princeton, 2005).
17. Bakić-Hayden, "Nesting Orientalisms"; see also Patrick Hyder Patterson, "On the Edge of Reason: The Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse," Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 110-41;
18. Maple Razsa and Nicole Lindstrom, "Balkan Is Beautiful: Balkanism in the Political Discourse of Tudmans Croatia," East Eurapean Politics and Societies 18, no. 4 (2004): 628 -50;
19. Marko Živković, "Serbian Stories of Identity and Destiny in the 1980s and 1990s" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001).
20. See, e.g., Susan Gal, "A Serniotics of the Public/Private Distinction," Differences 13, no. 1 (2002): 77-95;
21. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay (Princeton, 2000);
22. Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal, "Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation," in Paul Kroskrity, ed., Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (Santa Fe, 2000), 35-84. For a critique, see Green, Notes from the Balkans, 128-58.
23. Outside supporters of Bosnia also attempted to reconfigure balkanist mappings: in arguing that western governments should intervene to help the Bosniacs or a united BiH, they emphasized the war damage done to cosmopolitan Sarajevo, whose inhabitants could be understood to look and behave "just like us" white Europeans/westerners rather than "true" Muslims.
24. Note that "Islam" is often opposed to "Europe" rather than to the analogous religious term "Christianity," implying the association - positive for some, negative for others - of "Europe" with secularism and of "Islam" as a totalizing descriptor of "oriental" culture. Such formulations nevertheless reconfigured even Huntington, moving Orthodox Christian countries to the side of "the west" rather than grouping them with Islamic countries and "the rest." Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996).
25. For examples, see Robert M. Hayden, "Muslims as 'Others' in Serbian and Croatian Politics,"
26. in Joel M. Halpern and David A. Kideckel, eds., Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture, and History (University Park, 2000), 116-24;
27. StefJansen, "'Why Do They Hate Us?' Everyday Serbian Nationalist Knowledge of Muslim Hatred," Journal of Mediterranean Studies 13, no. 2 (2003): 215-37.
28. These formulations were also gendered: Jansen found Serbs who expressed fears that Muslims would lock Serb women into harems and impregnate them with Muslim sperm while circumcising Serb men. Jansen, "'Why Do They Hate Us?'" 219.
29. These metaphors imply different things and have different histories, explorations of which are beyond the scope of this paper. On "crossroads," see Nirman Moranjak-Bramburać, "The Privileged Crossroads: The Metaphor and Discourse of Space," Forum Bosnae 11 (2001): 233-46.
30. On the bridge, see Dušan I. Bjelić, "Introduction: Blowing up the 'Bridge,'" in Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, Mass., 2002): 1-22;
31. Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, "Introduction," in Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, eds., The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society (Aldershot, 2007), 1-2;
32. Green, Notes from the Balkans.
33. Pamela Ballinger, "'Authentic Hybrids' in the Balkan Borderlands," Current Anthropology 45, no. 1 (2004): 31-60.
34. A "multiethnic society" and "ethnic tolerance" do not necessarily overlap. Unlike Serb and Croat nationalisms, most forms of Bosniac nationalism do not advocate secession from BiH but instead support a unified (multiethnic) state. But this does not necessarily imply a deep wish to live with Serbs and Croats or a willingness to sub-ordinate "Bosniac interests" (including the prominence of Islam) to the interests of a secular, multiethnic state. To be sure, many Bosniacs and Bosnians seemed to genuinely seek to preserve the multiethnic nature of Bosnian society, but it was often difficult to distinguish motives, even for the actors themselves. Practical considerations stemming from the Bosniacs' geopolitical position also played a major role: because they lacked a "parent state, " like Serbia or Croatia, carving up the current state would leave Bosniacs with a tiny, fractured fildžan država (demi-tasse state). See Steven L. Burg and Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention (Armonk, N.Y., 1999);
35. Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C., 1995).
36. In a large literature on gender and nationalism, see, e.g., Anne McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family," Feminist Review 44 (1993): 61-80;
37. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985);
38. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London, 1997). On gender as a "naturalizing" framework,
39. see Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1999).
40. For analyses of nationalist representations, see, e.g., Vesna Kesić, "From Reverence to Rape: An Anthropology of Ethnic and Genderized Violence," in Marguerite R. Waller and Jennifer Rycenga, eds., Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance (New York, 2001), 23-36;
41. Maja Korać, "Ethnic-National Conflicts and the Patterns of Social, Political and Sexual Violence against Women: The Case of Yugoslavia," Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 5, no. 2 (1998): 153-82;
42. Dubravka Žarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (Durham, 2007).
43. On orientalist depictions, see, e.g., Vesna Kesić, "Muslim Women, Croatian Women, Serbian Women, Albanian Women ..." in Bjelić and Savić, eds., Balkan as Metaphor, 311-21;
44. Dubravka Žarkov, "Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred in the Former Yugoslavia," in Helma Lutz and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds., Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism, and Gender in Europe (London, 1995), 105-20;
45. and Žarkov, The Body of War.
46. Lila Abu-Lughod, "'Orientalism' and Middle East Feminist Studies," Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 101-13;
47. Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (New York, 1996);
48. Laura Nader, "Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Control of Women," Cultural Dynamics 2 (1989): 323-55.
49. Fadwa El Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (Oxford, 1999);
50. Said, Orientalism.
51. Nader, "Orientalism, Occidentalism."
52. Neil Macmaster and Toni Lewis, "Orientalism: From Unveiling to Hyperveiling," Journal of European Studies 28, nos. 1-2 (1998): 121-35.
53. Representations of homosexuality also seem to have shifted somewhat: although Muslim enemies are still feminized, as in intimations that some 9/11 hijackers had homosexual tendencies, the Taliban's strict punishment of homosexuality has been held up as evidence of that enemy's barbarity.
54. See, e.g., Lila Abu-Lughod, "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others," American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 783-90;
55. Dana L. Cloud, "'To Veil the Threat of Terror': Afghan Women and the 'Clash of Civilizations' in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism," Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (August 2004): 285-306.
56. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 15.
57. Parallel to western women's roles in constructing orientalism, as Lewis discussed in Gendering Orientalism, for example, western women like Rebecca West and Edith Durham played a significant part in the construction of balkanist images, largely through travel literature. See John B. Allcock and Antonia Young, eds., Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travellers in the Balkans, 2d ed. (Oxford, 2000).
58. For historical representations of Balkan women, see, e.g., Bakić-Hayden, "Nesting Orientalisms," 921;
59. Dušan I. Bjelić and Lucinda Cole, "Sexualizing the Serb," in Bjelić and Savić, eds., Balkan as Metaphor, 279-310;
60. Aleksandra Djajić Horváth, "'Get Armed and Buy Your Women's or What Did the Turn-of-the-Century Globetrotter See in Northern Albania?" Albanian Journal of Politics 2, no. 1 (2006): 26-43. This work suggests that further analysis is needed to determine more precisely how balkanist discourses have historically been gendered.
61. See Bjelić and Cole, "Sexualizing the Serb";
62. Wendy Bracewell, "'The Proud Name of Hajduks': Bandits as Ambiguous Heroes in Balkan Politics and Culture," in Norman M. Naimark and Holly Case, eds., Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford, 2003), 22-36;
63. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans.
64. See Bjelić and Cole, "Sexualizing the Serb";
65. Wendy Bracewell, "Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian Nationalism," Nations and Nationalism 6, no. 4 (2000): 563-90;
66. Elissa Helms, "Gendered Transformations of State Power: Masculinity, International Intervention, and the Bosnian Police," Nationalities Papers 34, no. 3 (2006): 343-61;
67. Dina Iordanova, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media (London, 2001), 197-212;
68. Mattijs van de Port, Gypsies, Wars, and Other Instances of the Wild: Civilisation and Its Discontents in a Serbian Town (Amsterdam, 1998);
69. Marko Živković, "Ex-Yugoslav Masculinities under Female Gaze, or Why Men Skin Cats, Beat up Gays, and Go to War," Nationalities Papers 34, no. 3 (July 2006): 257- 63.
70. As noted by Wendy Bracewell, "Rape in Kosovo," and Dubravka Žarkov, The Body of War, feminists have also contributed to this essentialized image of violent, sexually aggressive Balkan men.
71. Elissa Helms, "'Politics Is a Whore': Women, Morality and Victimhood in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina," in Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings, eds., The New Bosnian Mosaic, 235-53;
72. Žarkov, "Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred";
73. Dubravka Žarkov, "War Rapes in Yugoslavia: On Masculinity, Femininity and the Power of Rape Victim Identity," Tijdschrift voor Criminologie 39, no. 2 (1997): 140-51.
74. Elissa Helms, "Gendered Visions of the Bosnian Future: Women's Activism and Representation in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina" (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2003).
75. See, e.g., Akhil Gupta, "Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State," American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 385-86.
76. As Sabina Mihelj points out, balkanist discourses in the media cannot be treated as uniform, even in one community, and are more productively examined together with research into how media is consumed: Sabina Mihelj, "Media and the Symbolic Geographies of Europe: The Case of Yugoslavia," in William Uricchio, ed., We, Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (Bristol, forthcoming).
77. On the ways in which discourses and texts circulate and get incorporated into local meanings in a given place, see Susan Gal, "Movements of Feminism: The Circulation of Discourses about Women," in Barbara Hobson, ed., Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency and Power (Cambridge, Eng., 2003), 93-118.
78. Stef Jansen has catalogued similar effects in the everyday discourses of residents of Zagreb and Belgrade, following Michael Herzfeld in arguing that such preoccupation among ordinary people with their place in the larger geopolitical scheme of things is a reflection of particularly unsettled times. See Stef Jansen, "Svakodnevni Orijentalizam: Doživljaj 'Balkana'/'Evrope' u Beogradu i Zagrebu," Filozofija i društvo 18 (2002): 33-71;
79. and Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York, 1997).
80. In a smaller image inside the magazine, this woman holds what looks like a glass of champagne, appropriate for New Year's celebrations but also a contrast with the Islamic prohibition against alcohol and, for a woman, a clear symbol of modernity and rejection of older gender conventions among all ethnic groups.
81. Senad Pečanin, "Uz ovaj broj," Dani, 1 February 1999, 2. SDA leaders soon gave up their opposition to the New Year after it failed to catch on with the party's supporters among the more secular-oriented public. Although they continued to raise the issue periodically, mostly in religious circles, by 31 December 1999, the local SDA in Zenica was already actively organizing New Year's events. Several years later, the religious newspaper Preporod reported on the appearance of a Dedo Hidžr, a gift-distributing Deda Mraz-like figure for the Muslim New Year (Hidžretska nova godina). "Jesmo li ljudi ili nojevi?" Preporod, 30 January 2007. I am grateful to Xavier Bougarel for calling this to my attention.
82. For examples, see Bakić-Hayden and Hayden, "Orientalist Variations";
83. Susan Gal, "Bartok's Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric," American Ethnologist 18 (1991): 440-58;
84. Nicole Lindstrom, "Between Europe and the Balkans: Mapping Slovenia and Croatia's 'Return to Europe' in the 1990s," Dialectical Anthropology 27 (2003): 313-29.
85. Cf. Jansen, "Svakodnevni Orientalizam."
86. See Elissa Helms, "Women as Agents of Ethnic Reconciliation? Womens NGOs and International Intervention in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina," Women's Studies International Forum 26, no. 1 (2003): 15-33,
87. and "Gendered Transformations of State Power."
88. Such stances are most readily available to those at the bottom of balkanist or orientalist hierarchies, though the forms they take vary depending on which hierarchy is being addressed. On Serbian exhortations against the "Rotten West," see, e.g., Ivan Čolović, The Politics of Symbol in Serbia, trans. Celia Hawkesworth (London, 2002), 39-47;
89. Živković, "Serbian Stories of Identity and Destiny." On more equivocal positionings in Croatia and Slovenia, see, e.g., Razsa and Lindstrom, "Balkan Is Beautiful," and Jansen, "Svakodnevni Ofientalizam," 52. Though seldom analyzed as such, gendered and sexualized representations were also present in such discourses, most dramatically when Croatian writers denounced Europe as "a whore"! Boris Buden, "Europe Is a Whore," in Nena Skopljanac Brunner et al., eds., Media and War (Zagreb, 2000), 53-62.
90. For an analysis of Bosniac political and religious nationalism, see Xavier Bougarel, "Bosnia and Hercegovina: State and Communitarianism," in David A. Dyker and Ivan Vejvoda, eds., Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth (New York, 1996), 87-115;
91. and Bougarel, "From Young Muslims."
92. See, e.g., Wendy Bracewell, "Women and the Biological Reproduction of 'the Nation,'" Women's Studies International Forum 19, nos. 1-2 (1996): 17-24;
93. Susan Gal, "Gender in the Post-Socialist Transition: The Abortion Debate in Hungary," East European Politics and Societies 8 (1994): 256-86;
94. Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan, "State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality, and Race in Singapore," in Andrew Parker et al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York, 1992);
95. Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania (Berkeley, 1998);
96. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 26-38.
97. Ismet Kasumagić, "Fafaron u rahat-lokumu," Dnevni Avaz, 30 May 1997, 11. The author goes on to link moral character to eating practices: "This is no coincidence. It is known that the kind of food one cats affects a person's character. It is also known that, among the animals, only the pig cannot feel jealousy. That characteristic is then transferred to those who make pork a part of their diet." Pork eaters are, of course, non-Muslims - most Europeans, including Serbs and Croats - but also lapsed or nonreligious Bosniacs, of whom the latter would nevertheless understand the association with pigs as a serious insult.
98. Džemaludin Latić, "Bezbojni," Ljiljan, 10 June 1994, 40. Latić's articles on mixed marriage are collected, along with others, in a booklet, Mješviti brakovi (Mixed marriages), published by the Islamic Community: Mehmedalija Hadžić, ed., Mješviti brakovi (Sarajevo, 1996). It is significant that this official body with close ties to the governing party chose this topic for its first postwar publication in a series on religious issues affecting the Muslim community.
99. For rural areas, see Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton, 1995);
100. for urban areas, see Cornelia Sorabji, "Mixed Motives: Islam, Nationalism and Mevluds in an Unstable Yugoslavia," in Camillia Fawzi El-Sohl and Judy Mabro, eds., Muslim Women's Choices: Religious Belief and Social Reality (Providence, 1994);
101. Cornelia Sorabji, "Muslim Identity and Islamic Faith in Sarajevo" (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1989);
102. and cf. Dževad Karahasan, Sarajevo: Exodus of a City, trans. Slavenka Drakulić (Sarajevo, 1994). All of these bring out both the gendering of familiar oppositions - public/private, political /domestic, secular/religious, multiethnic/monoethnic, west/east - as well as the ways in which they recur fractally and in nested patterns as discussed above.
103. Cf., Chatterjee, "Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women"; McClintock, "Family Feuds."
104. Džemaludin Latić, "Osmi Mart i Talibani," Ljiljan, 18 March 1998, 46-47.
105. This fear is interesting, given the portrayal in classic orientalist discourses of rampant male homosexuality in the Orient as part of the feminization and therefore denigration of the east. Similar sexualized representations were reproduced in Serb and Croat discourses about Muslims in the Balkans. See Dubravka Žarkov, "The Body of the Other Man: Sexual Violence and the Construction of Masculinity, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Croatian Media," in Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark, eds., Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict, and Political Violence (London, 2001), 69-82.
106. Ismet ef. Spahić, deputy Reis ul-ulema of the Islamska Zojednica of Bosnia, in Bosanski Petrovac, 26 July 1997. This rhetoric mirrors statements by Serbian and Croatian nationalists that assailed women who did not conform to models of "traditional" rural (heterosexual) families because they were educated professionals, single divorced mothers, had ties to westerners, or did not have children at all. See, e.g., Slavenka Drakulić, "Women and the New Democracy in the Former Yugoslavia," in Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, eds., Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (New York, 1993), 123-30;
107. Julie Mostov, "'Our Women'/'Their Women' Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers, and Violence in the Balkans," Peace and Change 20 (1995): 515-29.
108. See, e.g., Louisa Schein, "Multiple Alterities: The Contouring of Gender in Miao and Chinese Nationalisms," and Carol A. Smith, "Race/Class/Gender Ideology in Guatemala: Modern and Anti-Modern Forms," both in Brackette F. Williams, ed., Women Out of Place: The Gender of Agency and the Race of Nationality (London, 1996), 79-102 and 50-78.
109. Joanne B. Eicher, ed., Dress and Ethnicity: Change across Space and Time (Oxford, 1995).
110. E.g., Mustafa Cerić, "A Declaration of European Muslims," speech given in Zagreb, 24 February 2006;
111. Enes Karić, "Is 'Euro-Islam' a Myth, Challenge or a Real Opportunity for Muslims and Europe?" Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 22, no. 2 (2002): 435-42.
112. Alija lzetbegović, Islam between East and West (Indianapolis, 1984). In this work, Izetbegović offers a much less radical vision of political Islam, with more stress on democracy and the merging of "eastern" and "western" values than in his earlier Islamska Deklaracija (Sarajevo, 1990), published in English as "The Islamic Declaration," South Slav Journal 6, no. 1 (1983): 55-89.
113. Note also the postwar SDA campaign slogan, "We are supported by East and West" (Nas podržava Istok i Zapad), which alluded to financial and moral support from governments in Europe and America, as well as from the Muslim world.
114. On the public/private dichotomy, see e.g., Gal, "A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction"; Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender after Socialism, 37-62;
115. Louise Lamphere, "The Domestic Sphere of Women and the Public World of Men: The Strengths and Limitations of an Anthropological Dichotomy," in Caroline Brettell and Carolyn Sargent, eds., Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective, 3d ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ., 2001), 100-109.
116. Sorabji, "Mixed Motives," 116.
117. More devout Muslims, though, especially but not only the neo-Salafists, stressed continuity and connection among all Muslims throughout the world, dismissing unique regional differences as vestiges of folk practices, not "true" Islam. Sorabji noted this orientation among the more committed Muslim revivalists during the 1980s in Sarajevo. Sorabji, "Muslim Identity and Islamic Faith"; see also Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way.
118. Polygyny has in fact been practiced since Ottoman times among the Bosniacs of the remote northwest corner of BiH.
119. Cornelia Sorabji made these observations based on her fieldwork in Sarajevo, ongoing since the mid-1980s. Sorabji, e-mail communication, 17 October 2002.
120. Xavier Bougarel, "The Role of Balkan Muslims in Building a European Islam," European Policy Genter Issue Paper 43 (2005).
121. Many women in and from villages, typically the older ones, wore dimije (baggy trousers) and head scarves (worn with a range of hair coverage) that marked them as both Bosniac and rural. Some Croat and Serb village women also wore ethnically marked clothing, but Muslim dress was the most distinctive. Based on her research in a Bosnian village in the late 1980s, Tone Bringa identified this as a source of orientalist prejudice toward Muslim villagers, to which few men were subject. Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way, 60-65.
122. Senija Penava, "Izvori i literatura o problemima emancipacije Muslimanske žene u Bosni i Hercegovini," Prilozi Instituta za istoriju 17, no. 18 (1981);
123. Radmila Radić, Verom protiv vere: Država i verske zajednice u Srbiji 1945 -1953 (Belgrade, 1995), 216.
124. Jelena Padovan, "Ko i kako, obrezuje žene? Nema toga u Bosni?" Start Bosne i Hercegovine, 7 November 2000: cover and 32. The female circumcision case was reported in a small town in northwest Bosnia by the young womans mother who said her daughter had had the procedure done at the request of her husband, a follower of "orthodox Islam." The mother complained, "This is the twenty-first century, not the stone age!"
125. In a National Public Radio piece on Saudi influence and radical Islam in Bosnia, Sylvia Poggioli reported seeing women in "burqas" outside the newly built, Saudi-financed King Fahd mosque in Sarajevo (described as resting "in a forested Balkan valley" [my emphasis] though it is on a small hill amid socialist-era high-rise apartment buildings). She could only have meant women in nikab veils but the burqa was perhaps a more familiar term to American audiences given the media attention to the Taliban. Poggioli also interviewed a "typical Slav - tall, blond, blue-eyed " who praised Osama bin Laden and blamed "the Americans" for bringing Ukrainian and Romanian prostitutes, drugs, and other kinds of - gendered - "evil" to Bosnia. "Bosnian Islam," Weekend Edition, 14 July 2002.
126. See also Cloud, "To Veil the Threat of Terror."
127. Dani, 30 March 1998, cover; Vildana Selimbegovi,́ "Budučnost pod nikabom," Dani, 3 October 2000, cover and 38 -39. Both these photos in fact show a form of womens dress that was in the minority for its time period: whereas the number of women wearing the nikab in 2000 was extremely small, in 1900, for Muslim women at least, the norm was precisely a heavy face veil covering even the eyes.
128. Čarkov, "War Rapes in Yugoslavia," 147.
129. Helms, "'Politics Is a Whore'";
130. Žarkov, "War Rapes in Yugoslavia" and "Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred."
131. Jansen, "Svakodnevni Orientalizam," 48;
132. see also John B. Allcock, "Constructing the Balkans," in Allcock and Young, eds., Black Lambs and Grey Falcons, 234-38;
133. Pamela Ballinger, "Definitional Dilemmas: Southeastern Europe as 'Culture Area'?" Balkanologie 3, no. 2 (1999): 73-91;
134. van de Port, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild.
135. As has been the case in other postsocialist central and east European societies, the term feminism (understood as a western import) has been much maligned, stereo-typed, and rejected in Bosnia, including by many women's rights activists, though some do embrace it. See Cynthia Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London, 1998), 189-92;
136. Helms, "Gendered Visions of the Bosnian Future," 155-96.
137. Medica Zenica, To Live With(out) Violence - Final Report: Violence against Women (Zenica, 1999);
138. see also Helms, "Gendered Transformations of State Power."
139. See Christopher Boehm, Blood Revenge: The Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies (Philadelphia, 1984);
140. Bette Denich, "Sex and Power in the Balkans," in Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture, and Society (Stanford, 1974), 243 - 62;
141. Ian Whitaker, "'A Sack for Carrying Things:' The Traditional Role of Women in Northern Albanian Society," Anthropological Quarterly 54, no. 3 (July 1981): 146-56.
142. Cf. Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy;
143. Jansen, "Svakodnevni Orientalizam"; van de Port, Gypsies, Wars, and Other Instances of the Wild.
144. See Helms, "Gendered Transformations of State Power"; Žarkov, "Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred," 111.
145. Helms, "Gendered Transformations of State Power," 353-54.
146. The women's NGO Medica Zenica found that domestic violence was equally distributed among all economic classes, professions, and places of origin. Medica Zenica, To Live With(out) Violence. Nevertheless, when a local journalist reported on Medica's violence hotline, his editors chose to illustrate the article with a photograph of a peasant's horse and cart. Selvedin Avdić, "Pozivi puni straha i nade," Start, 25 February 2000, 26 - 27; Selvedin Avdić, personal communication, Zenica, 28 February 2000.
147. See Cornelia Sorabji, "Managing Memories in Post-War Sarajevo: Individuals, Bad Memories, and New Wars," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12 (2006): 1-18;
148. Anders Stefansson, "Urban Exile: Locals, Newcomers and the Cultural Transformation of Sarajevo," in Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings, eds., The New Bosnian Mosaic, 59-78.
149. Helms, "'Politics Is a Whore.'"
150. Foreign writers also used miniskirts and gendered behavior to make such comparisons. A Frenh journalist writing during the war about Islam in Sarajevo wrote, "Judging by its streets, Sarajevo is clearly a European city, not a Muslim capital. Women are more likely to wear miniskirts than head scarves;
151. men drink alcohol." Remy Ourdan, "The End of a Dream," World Press Review 42, no. 1 (January 1995): 29, reprinted and translated from Le Monde.
152. Tone Bringa with Debbie Christie, We Are All Neighbours (Disappearing Worlds series, documentary film, 1993).
153. "Žene su ravnopravne," Oslobodenje, 15 March 1998, 11 (emphasis added; capitalization in the original). The Oslobodenje opinion survey was part of an extended polemic that ran in the Bosnian press after an incident in March 1998, at a roundtable organized by local women's activists for International Women's Day (8 March), on the subject of "Women, Society, and Religion." A petition was being circulated at the gathering, which was part of an international feminist campaign to call attention to the plight of women under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, symbolized in posters by women in burqas. The appearance of a group of neo-Salafists, the men in short pants and beards and the women totally veiled and gloved, caused quite a stir. The group claimed that women in Kabul were perfectly protected and respected under Islam, while women in the west were the ones who needed help because of high divorce rates, low birthrates, pornography, and sexual objectification of women.
154. This flag was deliberately chosen for BiH by the High Representative, head of the pseudo-protectorate governing the country, to offer a unifying symbol that could be accepted by representatives of all political (i.e., ethnonational) forces. Not surprisingly, it gained acceptance more among those favoring a united BiH than among those favoring ethnonational autonomy or separation. See Robert M. Hayden, "Intolerant Sovereignties and 'Multi - Multi' Protectorates: Competition over Religious Sites and (In)tolerance in the Balkans," in Chris M. Hann, ed., Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Practices in Eurasia (London, 2002), 170.
155. "Bosna se vraća sebi! " Dani, 7 July 2000, cover.
156. N. Dž, "Cardea je ozbiljna pojava," Dani, 31 March 2000, 60.
157. A lesbian interpretation would never have occurred to the vast majority of Bosnians, as was apparent from the puzzled looks I got when suggesting such a possible perspective in relation to the "East and West Kiss" image.
158. This followed the scandal in November 1999 involving the winner of the Miss BiH contest, Alisa Šišić, a would-be model from Zenica, who was stripped of her crown after nude photos of her surfaced. Like Fetić, both the dethroned winner and her supporters bemoaned the "backwardness" and conservatism of Bosnia. One commentator, citing the rhetoric of Islamic leaders, wrote: "Crucified between the ideology of the Near East and the normalcy of the even nearer west, Alisa, like most of her generation, chose the latter." Mile Stojić, "Ljepotica i zvijeri," Dani, 12 November 1999, 37.
159. A member of the jury, fed up with the many other injustices and open questions in Bosnia, told a reporter, "We're not between East and West, we're in the center of the Bermuda Triangle. BiH is something like a hole in the ozone." "Svi znamo šta imamo ispod odjeće," Dani, 12 November 1999, 38.
160. Interview with Nadina Fetić by Edin Avdić, "Zeničanke nisu valjale dok su bile 'pokrivene,' ..." Slobodna Bosna, 8 June 2000, 30-33.
161. For such critiques of balkanism, see Patterson, "On the Edge of Reason"; Mihelj, "Media and the Symbolic Geographies of Europe";
162. Fleming, "Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography." On the diversity of balkanist representations among "Balkaners" themselves, see Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis, "South-Eastern Europe: History, Concepts, Boundaries," Balkanologie 3, no. 2 (1999): 47-66;
163. Maria Todorova, "Introduction: Learning Memory, Remembering Identity," in Maria Todorova, ed., Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (New York, 2004).
164. Helms, "Women as Agents of Ethnic Reconciliation?" and "Gendered Visions of the Bosnian Future."