Gender, Religion and the Person: The 'Negotiation' of Muslim Identity in Rural Bosnia

GENDER, RELIGION AND THE PERSON:

THE 'NEGOTIATION' OF MUSLIM IDENTITY IN RURAL BOSNIA

TONE RAND BRINGA

SUBMITTED FOR THE PH.D IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 1991

But these conflicts which break forth are not between the ideal and reality, but between two different ideals, that of yesterday and that of today - that which has the authority of tradition and that which has the hope of the future.

Emik Durkheim

2

ABSTRACT

The dissertation is a study of the ethnic and religious identity of the Bosnian Muslims Yugoslavia.

In

in

rural

the first part (chapters 1-7) the focus of

analysis is on secular customs and rituals; in the second part (chapters 8-10), the focus shifts onto the religious domain of experience. The two parts are linked by the role of women as both pivots of Bosnian secular identity and the repositories of religious values. The study is centred on the analysis of a rural village, referred to as Dolina throughout the dissertation. Chapter 1 presents the village and its general cultural and ethnic setting. Chapter 2 discusses visiting patterns and social exchange activities among Muslim households. Chapters 3 to 6 provide an analysis of women's different roles and changing statuses within the household and community, by looking at women's life-cycle from 'maiden to wife'. Chapter 7 examines the symbolic aspects of women's unmarried and married statuses, relating those to women's religious and ethnic identity. Chapter 8 examines the role of the Islamic discourse in a pluralist society with an atheist state ideology. Chapter 9 deals with popular beliefs and various customs which fall into the category of folk religion. Chapter 10 looks at the different ritual obligations for men and women and illustrates some of the distinguishing characteristics of Bosnian Islam, with special regard to the role played by women. 3

In the Conclusion, it is argued that women integrate the two official definitions of Bosnian Muslims, the 'secular' one- which ignores religion- on the one hand, and the Islamic one on the other. Women are shown to formulate a Bosnian Muslim identity which transcends both official definitions - through this identity, based on religious discourse, women escape the peripheral role traditionally assigned to them in orthodox Islam.

4

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

9 12

INTRODUCTION The Bosnian Muslims: A Yugoslav nacija 0.1 Ethnic markers 0.2 The theoretical framework of the thesis 0.3 Notes on fieldwork 0.4 0.5 The format of the thesis

13 14

20 23 30 37

PART I: ETHNIC IDENTITY CHAPTER ONE: A BOSNIAN VILLAGE The setting 1.1 1.1.2 Physical and social division 1.1.3 Sources of livelihood 1.1.4 Unit of study 1.2 village administration 1.3 One village, two communities 1.4 The image of Dolina 1.5 Defining self and the "other": Muslims and Catholics as neighbours 1.6 The ethnic boundary: a boundary between two moral worlds CHAPTER TWO: SOCIAL EXCHANGE BETWEEN HOUSEHOLDS 2.0 Introduction Community work 2.1 2.2 Conflict between neighbours 2.2.1 Protracted conflicts between households 2.3 Hospitality and institutionalised visiting 2.3.1 Women's visiting patterns 5

43 43 43 48 52

52 55 57 61 67 74 74

75 79 81

82 84



2.3.2 Ritualised visits



90

CHAPTER THREE: COURTSHIP Courtship in earlier generations 3.1 Courtship today 3.2 3.2.1 The dance 3.2.2 Contemporary attitudes towards courtship The choice of marriage partner 3.3 3.3.1 Restrictions of choice 3.3.2 Criteria for choice CHAPTER FOUR: MARRIAGE Introduction 4.0 The different marriage procedures 4.1 The wedding about 1930-1950 4.2 wedding procedures 1988 4.3 4.3.1 Svadba and Svatovi

100 100 102 103 106 108 109 114

4.4 Elopement 4.4.1 Real elopement, modern style

119 119 120 121 124 124 127 130

4.4.2 Fictive elopement 4.5 The marriage ceremony Conclusions 4.6

134 141 143

CHAPTER FIVE: ESTABLISHING AFFINAL REL2'TIONS 5.0 Introduction wedding prestations 5.1 5.1.1 Oprerna







5.1.2 Pohod Preparing the gifts; a case history 5.2 5.2.1 The visit 5.3 Conclusions

CHAPTER SIX: THE HOUSEHOLD Introduction 6.0 The house and the land 6.1 The concept of ku6a 6.2 The south Slav joint family, the zadruga 6 .3 6

146 146 149 149 151 157 160 162 166 166 166 169 171

The decline of the joint family household 6.4 6.4.1 The bargaining power of junior women



174 181

CHAPTER SEVEN: FROM MAIDEN TO WIFE 7.0 Introduction 7.1 Ideals of female behaviour 7.2 Maidens 7.2.1 Muslim girls and secondary education 7.2.2 Social activities of Muslim girls 7.2.3 Muslim girls and religious identity 7.3 The significance of how a woman dresses 7.3.1 Clothing for maidens and wives 7.4 Wife and stranger 7.4.1 The "bride" 7.4.2 Wives 7.5 Conclusions

213 214 218 221

PART II: RELIGIOUS IDENTITY TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF BOSNIAN ISLAM Introduction

226 226

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE ISLAMIC DISCOURSE IN BOSNIA 8.1 The Islamic Association 8.2 The mosque council for the commune 8.3 Dolina dej'nat 8.3.1 The village mosque council 8.4 Representation of official Islam in Dolina 8.4.1 The mosque 8.4.2 The hoda 8.4.3 The bula 8.5 The influence of Official Islam and secularisation 8.6 Islamic education and Muslim identity 8.7 Muslim identity and the socialist state

7

190 190 191

196 200 202 204 205 209

232 232 235 235 236 238 238 240 245 251 252

255

CHAPTER NINE: COPING WITH MISFORTUNE Introduction 9.0 Diviners 9.1 9.1.1 The "sufi-hod'as" 9.1.2 Choosing a diviner 9.2 Identifying the source of a problem 9.2.1 Evil spirits 9.2.2 The casting of spells 9.2.3 The evil eye 9.3 Remedying the problem 9.3.1 The writing of charms 9.3.2 Name magic 9.3.3 Divination performed by women 9.4 The cult of saints 9.4.1 Visiting the graves of Muslim saints 9.4.2 Collective prayers at the Dolina turbe 9.4.3 The celebration of saints' days Conclusions 9.5 CHAPTER TEN: GENDER AND RITUAL IN BOSNIAN ISLAM 10.0 Introduction 10.1 Rituals performed by men and women 10.1.1 Ramadan: the month of fasting 10.1.2 Meviud Men's ritual obligations 10.2 10.2.1 Dujva, the Friday prayers



Rituals associated with death 10.3 10.3.1 Denaza, the burial ceremony 10.3.2 Prayers for the souls of the dead 10.3.3 The tevhid 10.4 Conclusions CONCLUSION



APPENDIX: THE SUFI PRESENCE BIBLIOGRAPHY

261 261 266 267 273 276



276 281 283 286 286 291 294 298 298 304 306 310 316 316 320 320 326 330 330 332 332 335 338 349 354 362



374

8

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Ethnographic accounts draw on the activities, experiences and thoughts of the people they claim to present. This account is no exception and my greatest debt is to those people in Bosnia who lent their voices to this particular account. Bosnia treated me to her renowned hospitality and there are many to whom I am grateful. There are some, however I would like to mention individually. In sarajevo Jasna iic opened her home to me when I first arrived. My stay in Dolina would not have been possible had not Nusreta and Nurija Handfiá accepted me as a member of their household. Iset Efendija helped by introducing me into the community and to Islam. For teaching me about Islam, and Bosnian Islam in particular, I would also thank Hasim Efendija, azim Efendija, and the Kri6 family. Much valuable information would not have been accessible without Azra Kri6's help. My field research was made possible by the generous assistance of the Zernaljski Muzej in Sarajevo, and by my 'mentor' Miroslav Ni gkanovi who has inspired some of the

ethnographic observation and analysis in this thesis. Gordana Ljuboja at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade encouraged my work in Bosnia and provided the initial contacts. Du g an Puvai at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London taught me Serbo-Croat and gave me first hand information about life in Sarajevo before I 9

went there. My gratitude to everybody in Yugoslavia extends to an intense hope for a peaceful resolution as the country hovers on the brink of violence and possible disintegration. In London I am above all indebted to my supervisor Peter Loizos who supervised me throughout my studies at the LSE. His firm belief in my project was an important source of encouragement. He read and commented on several drafts of my thesis and his suggestions have been of great value. Chris Fuller read drafts of parts of the thesis and his comments, particularly concerning Islam, have been both valuable and constructive. The participants of the LSE thesis-writing seminar have provided useful comments on early drafts of the thesis. Thanks in particular to John Knight for his suggestions. Cornelia Sorabji generously shared with me some of her own experiences and observations from field-work in Sarajevo. In the last phase of my writing-up in Bergen I benefitted from discussion with Karin Ask and Noslih Kanaaneh. Parts of my studies at the LSE were made possible through a British Council Scholarship and a LSE postgraduate bursary. My stay in Bosnia was supported by a Yugoslav state scholarship awarded through the Norwegian NAVF. The writing-up was aided by a grant from the Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Fund. Also in London, I would like to thank Fenella Cannel]. and Katy Gardner for making life in the city a much more 10

friendly experience than it would otherwise have been. In Cambridge my warm thanks to Rita Astuti and to the inhabitants of 'Son of Stoat'; in particular to Lucy Carolan who edited the thesis, but also to Roger, Simon and Mike, who, along with Lucy provided me with a home, and showed tolerance and sympathy towards an often frustrated and tense thesis writer. Throughout my studies my cousin Kari-Anne Rand Schmidt has been a constant source of support. My parents were always there when help and encouragement were needed. This work is dedicated to them.

11

A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

Serbo-Croat spelling is phonetic, that is each letter of the alphabet always represents the same sound. SerboCroat may be written in both the Cyrillic and the Latin scripts. Their geographical distribution reflects the historical division of the South Slav lands between the Orthodox and Catholic spheres of influence. While in Croatia the official script is Latin, it is Cyrillic in Serbia, and in Bosnia, typically enough, both scripts are used. For example, the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodenje will conscientiously print one article in the Cyrillic script and the next in Latin. The following brief guide to pronunciation cites only those letters which have a pronunciation significantly different from English. It is based on the Croatian alphabet, which uses the Latin script. (Both the Cyrillic and the Latin scripts have been modified for the Serbo-Croat phonetic system.)

A

a in father

J

y in yes

C

ts in cats

Lj

11 in million

ch in church

Nj

n in news

a soft 'tch'

0

o in not

j in John

R

rolled

D

roughly 'dj' E

e in let

H

ch in loch

I

e in he

sh in she U

u in rizle s in pleasure

12

INTRODUCTION

In his 1977 paper, Davis argues for an anthropology of the Mediterranean that takes into account comparative considerations of empirical data from both the Northern and the Southern shores of the area. This implies, as Gilmore points out, that the academic barriers between the Europeanists and Islamicists have to be dissolved (1982:176). These "academic barriers" need, however, not merely be dissolved between the Southern and Northern Shores of the Mediterranean, but within the Northern shores: the Balkans and South-Eastern Europe. Not all of these can be strictly defined as part of the Mediterranean ethnographic area (the definition of "the Mediterranean area" is still problematic7(see Gilmore, 1987), but they display many of the cultural traits of that area, 1 and some, significantly, have Muslim ethnic or minority groups living in a predominantly Christian culture. Yugoslavia and particularly Bosnia can be said to be a Mediterranean area in miniature. We find here three "Great Traditions" side by side: the Christian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches and Islam associated respectively with West and East. The present study of Bosnian Muslims focuses on a Muslim people on the Islamic periphery. "Islamic periphery" refers both to the cultural heterogeneity of the area and to the fact that this Muslim people considers itself to be far from the centres of Islamic learning and authority; (see Lambek, 1990:25.) Bosnian Muslims are indigenous 13

European Muslims with the status of an ethnic group in the religiously and ethnically diverse Yugoslav state. But while their ethnic identity has been recognised, their religious identity has not been given the same consideration. And although they represent a majority of the population in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian Muslims are still members of a minority culture, as the two other ethnic groups, the Croats and the Serbs (Roman Catholics and Orthodox respectively), form a vast majority in the Yugoslav state as a whole. In such a context the question of ethnic identity becomes paramount, and religion as the main defining characteristic of ethnicity of central importance. However, the atheist (communist) and western secular contexts add other significant dimensions to Muslim identity in Bosnia.

0.1 The Bosnian Muslims: a Yucoslav nacija The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) with its 22.4 million inhabitants is a complex mosaic of different cultures, languages, religions and ethnic groups. The Yugoslav (lit, south Slav) state today (1990) is a federation of six republics. As a state, it was founded in 1918 under the King of Serbia, but after the Partisans liberated the country from the Germans in 1945, Yugoslavia was declared a Federal Socialist Republic. Yugoslavia today is a non-aligned power characterised by its distinctive creed of "self-managing socialism". Most of its territories, with the exception of Slovenia, were once part 14

of the Ottoman Empire. But while Croatia was conquered by the Austrians in the seventeenth century, and Serbia received her independence in 1830, Bosnia-Herzegovina stayed under Ottoman rule until conquered by the Habsburgs in 1878. The competing claims of the Catholic, central European on the one hand and the Islamic, Anatolian Ottomans on the other have left contrasting imprints on South Slav culture which are still perceptible today. As of 1981 (the latest national census) the proportions of the three largest ethnic groups in Yugoslavia are as follows: Serbs, 8.1 million (36.6% of the total population), Croats, 4.4 million (19.7%) and the "ethnic Muslims", 1.7 million (8.9%). Of these "ethnic Muslims" about 86% live in Bosnia where they comprise about 40% of the total population (Serbs count for 37% and Croats 21%). Bosnia is in fact the only Republic not associated with one nacija (nacija, lit, nation, is the official designation rather than "ethnic group"). The Muslimani u srnislu narodnosti, i.e. the Muslims in the ethnic sense, are believed to be Serbo-Croat speaking Sla ys who converted to Islam during the Ottoman Empire. In addition to introducing their religion, the Turks also brought in the Millet system, an administrative scheme whereby groups were identified according to religion and not nationality. As a result the Bosnian population today is divided into three "nations", separate in terms of religion but not of geography. Affiliation with one of the three religious doctrines, Roman Catholic, Serbian Orthodox 15

and Sunni Islam, corresponds to membership of one particular ethnic group or nacija. Thus Catholics are Croats, Serbs are Orthodox, and Muslims are what in the Yugoslav national census Is called "ethnic Muslims"

(Muslirnani u smislu narodnosti). Consequently, when talking about the Muslims of Yugoslavia, it is important to specify in what sense we want to apply the term, as in the Yugoslav official context it refers both to an ethnic group and to a religious community. Thus there are an estimated 4 million Muslims in Yugoslavia when they are classified as a religious group (1.1 million of whom are Albanian Muslims living in Kosovo), but as we have already seen, less than 2 million of these belong to the officially designated "Muslim ethnic group". 2 The following are the proportions of Muslims in Yugoslavia when presented in official statistics as an "ethnic group": Bosnia-Herzegovina Croatia

1,630,000 24,000

Macedonia

39,000

Montenegro

78,000

Serbia proper Voj vodina Slovenia

151,000 5,000 13,000

(From: Slobodan Stankovi, Radio Free Europe Research Report 172, 26 August 1982.)

16

In Serbo-Croat orthography the potential ambiguity of the term "Muslim" (Muslimani] is avoided by writing the noun designating a person's nationality with an initial capital and the term referring to a member of the religious community with a small letter (Purivatra, 1974:305). Thus official Yugoslav policy implicitly denies that the national category "Muslims" is dependent 'on religious identity. But, as Irwin notes: "there is no basis for distinguishing 'Muslim' other than religious and selfselection, from other indigenous speakers of Serbo-Croat in Bosnia" (1984:438). This paradox is clearly reflected in the twofold debate on the origins of the Bosnian Muslims as an "ethnic group": first, the extent to which the Muslims of Bosnia really do compose a distinct ethnic group, and secondly, the background for the Islamisation of Bosnia. I shall deal with each in turn. Historically, both the Croats and the Serbs have laid claim to Bosnia, and the pressure on the Muslim population to identify either with the Croats or with the Serbs has at times been strong. There has been a constant battle between the two groups for dominance within Bosnia, in order to increase their influence at the federal level. It could be argued that the recognition of a separate Muslim ethnic group was a device initiated by Tito to secure a kind of "buffer" between the Croats and the Serbs and thus "answer forever the Bosnian Question" (Rusinow, 1981:11). The question remains, however, whether the regime "invented" a 17

Muslim nation or merely "affirmed" an existing one (Rainet, 1985:148). It was long the hope among politicians and intellectuals in favour of Yugoslav nationalism that the Bosnian Muslims would become the first representatives of the new Yugoslav national identity. This hope did not inaterialise, however, and between 1967 and 1971 a series of amendments to the 1963 constitution were passed that marked a change in policy towards the "nationality question". These amendments transferred political authority from the central organs of the Federation to its constituent Republics. In fact, this marked a move away from the concept of a Yugoslav national state to one of Yugoslavia as a federation of nations, sowing the seeds for heightened inter- Republic rivalry and the cultivation of ethnic identities. It was during this period that a Bosnian central committee communique "rejected Yugoslaviszn as an acceptable model for internationality relations and stated that: 'it has been shown and present socialist practice confirms that Muslims are a distinct nation'" (Irwin, 1984:444). When the term "ethnic Muslim" was introduced in the 1961 nationality census and the Muslims of Bosnia were officially recognised as an ethnic group (nacija), it could be said that the change was simply from a de facto to a de jure status. For, as Banc notes, by the second half of the

twentieth century the Bosnian Muslims lacked only a national name (1984:373). Indeed, more recent literature stresses the fact that Muslim group consciousness was 18

something that developed over time, and that political niobilisation was initiated from within (cf. e.g. Donia, 1982 and Banic, 1984). The second controversy concerns the Islamisation of Bosnia and the origin of the Bosnian Muslims. Scholars today agree that the Bosnian Muslims are descendants of Slay s who converted during the 400-year reign of the Ottoman Empire. They disagree, however, about the reasons for these conversions. Traditionally, there have been three main theories: first, that the converts were landowners who accepted Islam in order to retain their land (this theory accounts for the alleged class differences between Muslims and Christians during Ottoman rule); secondly, that the conversions were wholesale and forced by the Ottomans; and thirdly, that the converts were members of the Bosnian church associated with the Bogomil heresy, a heretical Catholic movement with a dualist world-view said to be a successor of the Manichees or Gnostics. Recent literature suggests that each of these three arguments is one-sided and has a limited relevance (cf. Fine Jr., 1975, Banic, 1984, Donia, 1981). Fine maintains for instance that there is no evidence that the Turks pressured people to convert (except for specific short periods under particularly fanatical phases), nor did the Christians need to accept Islam in order to retain their land (Fine Jr., 1975:382). He also suggests that although the Bogomuls converted in great numbers, evidence points to a multi-directional change of religion: Catholics accepted Islam or Orthodoxy, 19

Orthodox believers turned to Catholicism or converted to Islam. Islam, however, had the advantage of being the religion of the conquering state, and as the Bogomil heretics were persecuted by Orthodox and Catholics alike, Islam and the Turks offered them protection. It is believed that in its Bosnian form their "heretic" religion was most probably dominated by old Slav and pre-Christian rituals and religious beliefs which some Muslim scholars argue were already influenced by Islam prior to the Islamisation of Bosnia or at least had an affinity with the Islamic worldview. It is this latter contention which in later years has been elaborated by Bosnian Muslim scholars in the fields of history, literature, and archaeology/ethnography, eager to establish a separate Bosnian cultural and ethnic tradition predating the Ottoman conquest and represented by the

Bonjaci, of

whom the Bosnian Muslims are believed to be

descendants (see chapter 9 ftn. 11 for an example of how such links are established). This school of thought should be seen in relation to increasing Serb and Croat nationalist activities and their constant claim on the Bosnian Muslims as ethnically "really" one or the other.

0.2 Ethnic markers While in Sarajevo most urban Muslims blend in with other (generally western-European-looking) citizens, and will only be identified if they have Muslim first names, in rural areas Muslims, particularly the women, can be much 20

more readily distinguished (see chapter 7 for a fuller discussion) from their Christian compatriots by their dress and speech. Although these are conspicuous manifestations of differences and of group identity, they are selfconsciously so and stressed by both insiders and outsiders to the Muslim ethnic group. Even in rural Bosnia differences are becoming less apparent, particularly among the young. Muslims' traditional clothing (baggy trousers and headscarves for women, Turkish fezzes or berets - for men) is either dying out or increasingly confined to specific religious occasions, while the veil for women was actually prohibited by law in Yugoslavia after World War II (see chapter 7). Distinctive traits in Muslim speech are another explicit ethno-religious identity marker. In rural areas the language which the children learn at home and in the village among other Muslims is different from the literate Serbo-Croat often aspired to among urban and educated Muslims. At school, Muslim village children's style of speaking is often considered as archaic and incorrect. Muslims use more Turkish words and their speech is often seen by people outside the Republic as typical of Bosnia. (To the other nationalities outside Bosnia, particularly Croats, Slovenes and Serbs, Bosnia is primarily associated with Muslims and their particular culture.) Names, especially first names, are important ethnoreligious identity markers. There are only a few surnames of Turkish origin, since most Turkish families left Bosnia 21

after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Surnames have generally a common Slav origin for all groups, ending in "i6" or

"vi6". Bosnians

can nevertheless identify certain

surnames as belonging to a particular ethno-religious group, not because there is anything specifically Muslim or Christian about these surnames, but simply because the religion of their bearers is general knowledge. The first and most obvious marker of a child's Muslim identity is its first name, which is of Arab or Turkish origin. These names are, however, often transformed or shortened in everyday speech, and thus obtain their specifically Bosnian colouring. Thus Mehined becomes Meho, Salih becomes Salko, Fatima becomes Fata, Emma becomes Mina etc. (Christians have their specific biblical or saints' names, with sometimes slight differences in form for Catholics and Orthodox.) For the Muslims themselves, however, personal names are not only important as identity markers vis--vis Christians, but closely linked to ideas about the person in Islamic etiology. (A fuller discussion of this topic will be provided in chapter 9.) In addition to Islamic names there are national names, which can be divided into two different sub-groups. The first consists of typical Slav names such as Miroslav, Cedoinir, etc. These names are used by Croats and Serbs alike, but are particularly associated with Serbs, and are not used by Muslims. The other sub-group consists of names which have come into the Serbo-Croat language more recently, often from German,

French or English (e.g. Vilina

22

or Denis). Such names are becoming increasingly popular with Muslims because they are seen as neutral names which do not immediately mark a child as Muslim. This is particularly true for parents who are not religious and wish to avoid the stigma which "muslimness" carries among the westernised "modern" parts of the population. One young, urbanised, non-devout Muslim father wanted his daughter to be called Vilina, so that "she wouldn't get into trouble at school or have Christian children laugh at her". His attitude can only be understood against the background of the marked dichotomy in Bosnia between the "uncultured"

(nekulturan) and the "cultured" (kulturan) members of society. Muslims often find themselves labelled "uncultured" by the wider non-Muslim community and this prejudice has in many cases led to Muslims playing down their identity when interacting in mixed ethno-religious contexts.3

0.3 The theoretical framework of the thesis The literature in English on the Slav Muslims of Bosnia is mostly concerned with the historical and political background of Bosnian Muslim ethnicity, while the key ethnographic literature in Serbo-Croat is mostly historical and descriptive. This "ethnicity approach" does not allow for addressing the role and content of religion per Se. If authors deal with Islam at all, it is merely in terms of its constituting an ethnic boundary (in the Barthian sense; see Barth, 1969) and rather than discussing 23

the content of this ethnicity, they reduce religion to an ethnic badge. In the anthropological study of ethnicity there has been a one-sided preoccupation with distinctiveness at the expense of content and its contextuality. In the case of Bosnia everybody agrees that distinctions and boundaries are important. Muslim women for instance say that they drink coffee with their Christian neighbours, but that they do not marry them (see chapter 1). However, what the distinctive traits (i.e. symbols) should consist of is negotiated in accordance with changing contexts. In Dolina, the Muslim/Croat village which is the setting for this study, the Muslims celebrate

Jurjev,

a

Serb festival, yet Muslims in Muslim/Serb villages would not (see chapter 9). The distinctiveness expressed in terms of the ethnic "boundary" is constantly reproduced in encounters with the "other". By the same token, however, the content of this distinctiveness is constantly negotiated, modified and even innovated. In Bosnia religion defines ethnic identity and an "ethnic approach" to the study of the Bosnian Muslims must therefore espouse a theory for the anthropological study of (practised) Islam which makes the distinction between Islam as a) a social identity, b) a set of formal doctrines and c) actual beliefs and practices, and account for the interrelationship between these elements (see Joseph, 1978:11). In other words, rituals have to be considered both in terms of their symbolic and their pragmatic meaning (see Tambiah, 1979). 24

The only western anthropologist who has published material on the Bosnian Muslims totally ignores the role of Islam as a set of religious beliefs and practices (see Lockwood, 1975). I would like to pay more attention to this neglected dimension of Islam in rural Bosnia. I do not therefore contest that religion has an important function in creating and sustaining ethnic boundaries. Indeed, Islam as an idiom of ethnicity is the framework within which any discussion of Bosnian Islam should be placed. Nevertheless, the absence of a theological dimension in the literature on the Bosnian Muslims often implies the assumption that they are not "real Muslims", or that Islam is merely a badge of ethnic identity. (see Lockwood, 1972, l975a; Geilner, 1983:72). Those who argue the relevance of Islam merely as an ethnic identity also tend to measure religious awareness by the standards of formal doctrines only, rather than within the framework of a specific 'Bosnian Islam': a somewhat reductionist and one-dimensional view of the role of Islam in Bosnia. According to Joseph, religious identity can refer to both

eoLocjcc*.1 t.c&es

ca'tsousss i.e

caL icfr1, and is thus an ambiguous term (1978: ). In

Bosnia, this distinction has, as we have seen, been made explicit as part of the official state discourse on the "ethnic status" of the Bosnian Muslims. Contrary to Joseph's formula, however, where Islam forms the building block in both types of identity, the Bosnian state discourse consciously attempts to keep the relevance of 25

Islam to the identity of the Bosnian Muslims to a minimum, hence the two kinds of Muslims in Bosnia already mentioned: Muslims written with a capital M (i.e. Muslims in the ethnic sense of the word) and Muslims written with a small m ( i.e Muslims in the Islamic and religious sense of the word). The former are the subjects of the atheist, Bosnian state (which accepts differences as long as a person or group does not demand to be different), while the latter are the subjects of the Islamic community and its bureaucratised organisation, the

Islamska Zajednica (which

accentuates separateness but does not dare to deny a basic "sameness", lest it should conflict with the ideology of the former). Nevertheless, the system of values, beliefs and rituals among the Muslims in rural Bosnia is multi-layered and cannot be understood fully with reference to Islam only. While Islam is the main distinguishing factor between the Muslims and their Yugoslav compatriots, and the critical factor in self-ascription and ascription by those of other ethnic identities, and as such is the key to understanding Muslim identity in Bosnia, a complete picture can emerge only by looking at all the components present: traditional beliefs and practices; State atheist socialism; Christianity; and, increasingly, western ideas about individualism and consumerism. I suggest that in real life different value-systems become intertwined through the preferences of persons who negotiate the symbolic repertoire of two ideologies: State socialism and Islam. 26

"Ideology" is a polysemous concept and I shall not here embark on a discussion of different definitions, but shall nerely clarify its present usage. Ideology shall hereafter refer to "the intersection between belief system and political power" (Eagleton, 1991:6). This relatively broad definition will cover both "official Islam" and state socialism, as it does not (like the more common definition which sees ideology as sustaining the dominant political order) state whether "this intersection" challenges or confirms a particular social order. Furthermore, and again following Eagleton, ideology is seen as a matter of "discourse" rather than "language" and the focus is therefore on "who is saying what to whom for what purposes" (1991:9). "Discourse" is here therefore not interchangeable with ideology in the fashion favoured by Foucault (1972), since every ideology is moulded in a discourse but not every discourse is ideological (i.e. concerns interests and power conflicts which are central to the social order). In sum, then, ideological discourse can be thought of "as a complex network of empirical and normative elements, within which the nature and organisation of the former is ultimately determined by the requirements of the latter" (Eagleton, 1991:23). Typically, in a Bosnian Muslim village two ideologies exist side by side. In almost every house the picture of Tito is on the wall next to one of a Muslim girl praying (it is significant that it is a girl and not a boy which thus represents Islam as the moral and ideological 27

counterpart to Titoism) and while the representative of the state ideology is greeted with Serbo-Croat and the secular dobar dan (lit, good day) and dovidenja (lit, see you again), his Islamic equivalent will be greeted with Arabic selam alejk (lit, with peace) and alahemanet (go with God). Here the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds exist side by side, and although this is not an ethnographically unusual context this co-existence may be more pronounced than in other cases. There is for instance a long tradition of official ecumenism and in accordance with this tradition representatives of the clergy from all three religious communities are present at larger public events such as the opening of a new church or mosque. This was the practice long before the Communists came to power, and is mentioned in Edith Durham's High Albania (1909). However, in Bosnia the two official spheres governed by a Communist and an Islamic body respectively present different discourses about what a Bosnian Muslim is or should be. This is the context which prompts Sorabji (1989) to talk about Bosnian Muslims' "double identity", It can, however, only be double at a theoretical and academic level; it is the analyst's conceptualisation. The question we have to ask is whether the Bosnian Muslims themselves experience ambiguity. I suggest that people in Dolina, the village studied, do not have both a "secular ethnic" and an Islamic identity; rather they are Bosnian Muslims who "negotiate" or mediate between different sets of meanings, signs and values pertaining to different ideological discourses. 28

The general theme of the thesis is thus Muslim identity in Bosnia and how individual Muslims and status groups (with gender and age being the significant variables) negotiate between different value-systems and ideological discourses and in this way define what it means to be a Bosnian Muslim. Applying the term "negotiation" in this context may give the impression of something which is rational, conscious and active. This is not necessarily so. The thesis attempts to show how Bosnian Muslims, in changing contexts, individually as well as collectively, define, construct, and recreate their identity through mediating between different value systems. The term does not refer primarily to "negotiation" between actors about what should be the prevailing definition of reality as it is understood in transactional analysis of ethnic encounters. Muslim identity in Bosnia is not a given entity. It is rather an ongoing process carried on by persons who mediate, i.e. negotiate, between value systems within a multi-ethnic, westerriised and atheist state. "Negotiate" covers the need for a more open-ended word which stresses that "Muslim" is not a given entity and also allows for the aspect of conflict and contradiction (which a word such as construct, commonly used in anthropological analyses of identity, would not). This usage has close affinity with the one applied by Rosen (1984:4) and Herzfeld (1985:85-91).

29

0.4 Notes on fieldwork This thesis is based on field research conducted in Bosnia from June 1987 to November 1988. A month's revisit was made in April 1990 at the start of the democratisation process and the run up to the free elections in October that year. The first four months of my stay were spent mainly in Sarajevo. While I was there I attended a month long language course for foreign students and later took private lessons in Serbo-Croat. During this first period I travelled around Bosnia to look for a suitable village to conduct my research in. I spent September reading ethnographic material in the library at the Zemalj ski Muzej in Sarajevo and waiting for my research permit. From then on I was in Sarajevo on a one year Yugoslav state scholarship as part of the Yugoslav-Norwegian cultural exchange program and officially affiliated to the ethnography department of the Zemalj ski Muzej My research interest was in Muslim ethnic identity in Bosnia and how this identity was expressed through practical Islam. The presence of Christian ethnic groups and a doctrinal socialist (atheist) state made a particularly interesting context for such a study. I was looking for a village with a majority of Muslims but with some Christian inhabitants. This, I thought, would give me access to information about how the two groups saw each other and perhaps there would be a richer pool of syncretic practices. Furthermore, I was looking for a village which was close enough to an urban centre to be experiencing the 30

impact of radical social change such as education, wage labour and consumerism. This was particularly with a view to studying the impact such changes had on women's lives. Some villages in Bosnia are characterised by a majority of households having at least one male member as migrant worker (typically in Germany, Austria or the Gulf states). My priority, however, was a Muslim community where its members were permanently resident in the village. The village I worked in had examples of labour migration, but the majority of wage earners travelled to the nearby market towns on a daily basis. My village was chosen in close cooperation with the ethnography department of the Zemaljski Muzej. The department had contacts in a number of potentially interesting villages. One of these was in the region north of Sarajevo where sufism, in which I was interested, was active. Accordingly with the support from my 'mentor' Miroslav Niskanovic, we decided to visit the village, which I shall here call Dolina, to see if it was possible to find a household where I could stay. Before I set of f for Bosnia I had been warned by several scholars familiar with the area that it would be very difficult to obtain a research permit to work in a village. The problem turned out to be largely one of bureaucratic procedures and their unfamiliarity with the needs of long-term field research (Yugoslav ethnographers tend to concentrate their fieldwork into episodic periods of some weeks spread over several years.) When I did 31

receive my permit I was told that this was the first permit for long term research in a village to have been issued in Bosnia. The point should be made here that the political situation in 1988 was very different from today's. Research focusing on religion and Islam was not encouraged and people were wary of talking about such issues to "outsiders". This was one of the reasons why I chose to focus on women. I experienced a radical change, however, in openness on my revisit in 1990. It was only then I realised that talking to informants in the field can also be about asking straightforward questions and being given clear answers, without the anthropologist and the informant both having to 'read between the lines'. Of course this was partly because I was now well known to the people I was talking to and that they had come to trust me; but this was far from the whole story... The recent democratisation process culminating in multi-party elections in October 1990, has fostered a new attitude of outspokenness in Bosnia. People are now willing to talk about Islam in a way which previously had been both rare and potentially risky. This new atmosphere has had the positive effect of giving Muslims a renewed confidence in displaying their rituals and customs. In 1988 I visited Dolina with my mentor five times over a period of six weeks before we finally found a household which agreed to accommodate me. The village Imam had agreed to mediate for us, but we were near giving up on 32

the fifth visit. However, while we were in the mosque discussing what to do after yet another rejection a young girl arrived and said that her parents had Lnvited us for coffee. Miroslav was all smiles, "that's it", he said, "you've got a family". And he was right. I settled in the next week. Travelling to my new home the first t%onday I thought about people's reluctance to include me into their village community - for which no anthropological field accounts had prepared me. It transpired that the villagers were mainly worried about two things: first, my status as an unmarried woman meant that households with adult unmarried sons would not accommodate me, and that they would have to worry about my sexual conduct. As I was later told "you could have been svasVta

(lit, all sorts of things). Secondly, I was a

Christian (in addition to being a foreigner) and a guest. Many women considered the implications for their cooking to be too much of a burden. Would I be able to eat their food? Would they have to cook food specially for me? Did that mean they would have to cook pork? And as a guest there should of course be something extra. With all this initial strong reluctance to accommodate me and my equally strong reluctance to give up I felt a little insecure about the prospect of my stay in the village. I felt that things could easily go wrong and people turn against me. With these thoughts on my mind I got out of the car in front of Nusreta's house, but as soon as I saw her coming smiling and welcoming towards me I knew that everything was going 33

to be fine. Nusreta's kitchen was full of women drinking their coffee, smiling at me and asking me questions I did not always understand. These were the women from Nusreta's neighbourhood (throughout the week there would be visits by villagers who would come to greet me) and these were the women I was to spend most time with during my stay. From this first hectic day I remember two things quite vividly: the woman who said, "we will teach you everything", and the two young girls from next door who took me aside and asked me to come over to their house as they wanted to talk with me too. My ambiguous role as an unmarried woman who spent her time both among married women and unmarried girls was already set. My status was, however, primarily that of a "maiden" who "should not go anywhere on her own". A member of my household or neighbourhood would usually accompany me on visits in the village although the attitude towards me walking on my own became more relaxed towards the end of my stay. The concern with a household member's loyalty to the unit (i.e. the other members) and the fear that I might betray them or gossip about them contributed to a readiness to limit the scope of my activities in the village. How the other villagers related to me and what they told me was also influenced by my membership of one particular household. My status as a "maiden" clearly affected the kind of data I had access to. Although I spent much time at cof feevisits with married women, listening to and participating 34

in their conversations, issues concerning married life and sexuality were generally avoided in my presence. As time passed, however, the women I knew best became much more relaxed about discussing such matters in my presence. Most of the (somewhat restricted) data I do have on such matters were obtained in face-to-face discussions with individual women. The fact that I spent much time with the married women made the young girls insecure about where I stood in relation to them, and this persisted until I started to accompany them to the dances. I was repeatedly told that the married women were gossips and that there were certain things the girls never told them because "they would not understand". The young girls shared with me their most intimate thoughts and feelings about their courtships, hopes for the future and relationship with their seniors. At the dances I experienced for the first time the reassurance of having become an accepted member of a 'moral community'. At any approach from an unknown man, a young man from my village would turn up to ask me if the other man was bothering me, and if he thought he was he would tell him that "she is ours". This demonstration of protection allowed me to walk around fairly undisturbed and to observe and participate as I wished. My status in the village simultaneously restricted me to the world of women and excluded me from the world of men, consequently i only have limited information about the latter - mostly obtained through women. My general approach 35

was to conduct unstructured interviews with my informants and because of their suspicion of outsiders and officialdom I realized that making notes in front of them would create an unwanted atmosphere of insecurity and alienation. I therefore only made notes in front of my informants on the few occasions when I arranged structured interviews concerning 'impersonal' matters; for example the agricultural cycle, or the names of different prayers. Most of the time I preferred that people themselves lead me to the issues which were important in their lives. In a similar vein, I would go to those events and places outside the village where the villagers would themselves go (to a religious gathering; to the market town to shop, to see the doctor or to arrange various permits at the local council; to relatives in another village to visit or to celebrate an event etc.). In this way the village women lead me into the warp and weft of their lives. Although I visited all the Muslim households within the upper part of Dolina (where I stayed) at leastox st once, I found it difficult to visit all the Catholic households within the same area. This was because I had to be clear about my loyalty to the Muslim community. The few Catholic households I did visit all had a member (a young girl or a woman) who was a good friend of my Muslim neighbours; my visits were sporadic and only started after some months in the village. I did the standard household census for all seventy-five households (Muslim and Catholic) but I only obtained my data indirectly; I went through every house 36

(except for those I knew intimately) with a key informant who gave me the data on household composition, names, ages, number of children, education and occupation and family ties with other households. The reasons for doing the survey in this less satisfying way were a combination of the reasons I mentioned for not writing down notes in front of people and my status (as and unmarried woman and a "Christian") which made some households less accessible to me than others. On my return visit in 1990 I stayed with the same family as before, that of Nusreta. The family had however moved to a different part of the village about twenty minutes walk from 'my old neighbourhood'. I made this walk nearly every day and this time I went to visit alone which now occasioned no comment.

0.5 The format of the thesis The analytical focus of the thesis moves between different levels of social and cultural identity: the person (gender and age), the household, the village (the ethnic community) the region and the nation state. A division of the thesis into chapters which corresponds fully to these different levels has been neither desirable nor possible, since in many contexts these levels are part of each other or even congruent. Yet the stress on the household as the unit of interaction reflects an indigenous bias. The thesis consists of two distinct parts. The first 37

part focuses on secular customs and rituals and thus deals with the "social" (and secular) aspects of Muslim identity and the Muslim community. The second part is devoted to the Islamic and religious aspects of Bosnian Muslim identity and seeks to define a Bosnian Islam. The two parts are linked by the role of women as both pivots of Muslim social identity and the repositories of religious values. Chapter 1 presents the village and its general cultural and ethnic setting. It should be noted that the material concerning the Croat Catholics is far from being as thorough as could have been wished for. However, two points should be made: first, this account is about the Bosnian Muslims and, secondly, the field-work situation was such that, as a "Christian" and outsider, I was required to demonstrate my loyalty to Muslim households and the Muslim community; my relationship with Catholics were therefore never as intimate. Chapter 2 discusses visiting patterns and social exchange activities as the social 'glue' which forms and defines the ethnic community. (I shall argue that the village Dolina in effect consists of two more or less separate communities.) It shows Catholics as peripheral to such exchanges, but most importantly for the present argument women as wives are identified as the most active in and central to such exchanges which nevertheless link the community to the wider village. In the ensuing chapters 3-6, we shall look in more detail at women's different roles and changing statuses within the household and the community. We shall follow women's life-cycles; their 38

various status changes, from unmarried girl through courtship to bride as a new member of their husband's household and patri-group and ultimately as the female head of her own household. Chapters 3-5 correspond to what I see as the three phases in the process of marrying: courtship, wedding procedures and the establishment of affinal relationship through gift-exchange. Chapter 3 is a description of the introductory stage, courtship or aikovanje, which may or may not lead to marriage. I shall show in what sense courtship has changed and what young people in Dolina value in a potential marriage partner. Chapter 4 discusses the decisive act in the marrying process, when the bride goes to live with her bridegroom in his household. I shall look at the different forms of wedding chosen by young couples who decide to get married. We shall see that very few marriages actually take place according to what is perceived as the wedding custom and I shall point to some possible reasons why this is so. Chapter 5 deals with some of the wider implications of marriage for the households and families which have been brought together in affinal relationship through the marriage of one of their members. I shall focus in particular on the visiting patterns and gift-exchange associated with the establishment of these relationships. We shall find that women through marriage become important links with social networks outside the hamlet (i.e. the patri-group) and the village. In chapter 6 we shall then move with the woman into the household, look at its 39

composition and its developing cycle and her relation with other members of the household and the role she ultimately plays in its division. Chapter 7 will examine the symbolic aspects of women's unmarried and married status and relate these to their religious and ethnic identity. I shall focus in particular on women as the pivots of Muslim identity and how conflicting discourses about Muslim identity are reflected in the conflict and symbolic opposition between married and unmarried women. More generally this chapter brings out a theme which runs through the whole thesis: namely, the relationship between the household and the conununity and the idea that women oscillate between the two spheres occupying a position which may be described as intermediate. Indeed, women are best seen as the mediators both on a practical and a symbolic level between the two worlds (cf. Dubisch, 1986:208). In part two we shall see that this role is echoed in their role as mediators between official and popular Islam. The second part of the thesis (chapters 8-10) is devoted to Bosnian Islam and focuses on the interplay between doctrines (the orthodox version) and actual beliefs and practices. It pursues the argument that women are mediators between different ideologies and their discourses about Muslim identity. By focusing on women as actors and participants in religious practices, I hope to avoid falling into the official, public, male stereotype of Islam according to which the degree of women's subordination is evaluated, and be able to say something about the process 40

that has as its outcome a specific "Bosnian Islam".

41

Footnotes Introduction

1. See Honour and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean, ed. David Gilmore (1987) for a discussion of such common traits. 2. According to Irwin the term for designating the Bosnian Muslims on official national census has had different forms: "The 1948 census contained a choice between three categories: 'MoslemSerbs', 'Moslem-Croats' and 'Moslems unspecified". In the 1953 census "Moslem" was dropped as "Moslem indicates membership in the Moslem religious faith and has no connection with any kind of national question" The 1953 census admitted the problem by dropping any reference to "Moslem" in favour of the term "Yugoslav unspecified". The 1961 census introduced the term "ethnic Moslems" (Irwin, 1984:442-3). 3. This is, however, with the exception of a rather small educated urban elite who to some extent identify themselves with the world community of Islam, and look to Turkey and the Arab world for identification. For a discussion of this particular section of the Bosnian Muslim community see Sorabji, 1989. 4. This issue has, however, recently been observantly addressed by Cornelia Sorabji in her 1989 Ph.D thesis. But her study is restricted to urban Sarajveo, and it is therefore my hope that this present study of Muslims in rural Bosnia will complement hers.

42

PART I

CHAPTER ONE: A BOSNIAN VILLAGE

1.1 The settinci The village of Dolina 1 is situated in a valley about two hours' drive north of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. Until about two years ago, access to the village from the main road going north towards Croatia was a muddy path along a river, running through the village. The new straight, asphalted road was a community project, to which each household in the village contributed financially. The settlements run along each side of the river, the mountain slopes getting steeper and the village narrowing until the valley is swallowed in a forest-covered mountain gorge.

1.1.2 Physical and social division Dolina is a thriving village which the young do not necessarily leave for more urban areas, although they prefer to live on "flat land" in the lower part of the village, as it is closer to the main road to Sarajevo, nearer school for their children, as well as closer to the market town and public services. Both geographically and sociologically, Dolina can be seen to consist of two major areas: the original settlements on higher ground and the newer ones further down the valley. The lower part of the valley is more open, with large flat fields on both sides of the river and the 43

road running alongside it; the mountains are more distant and less dominating. In this area individual houses are scarce and there are relatively large areas of land between each one. Houses are bigger and more modern than in the upper part, the architecture being clearly different. They are mostly inhabited by couples with children, the husband having grown up in one of the settlements in the upper part. Half-way up the village there is a shop which marks the entrance into the second and upper part of Dolina. The hills on both sides become steeper and move closer, settlements are considerably denser, there are two distinct house types, and this part is made up of clearly defined hamlets. By the shop a path to the right leads to hamlets which once, before the current administrative unit of Dolina was drawn up after the war, had status as separate villages. On the top of the hillside, not far from the Catholic churchyard, the forest has been cut down and the land, which was owned by the municipality, sold to young couples from Dolina's different hamlets, where they are building new houses and tilling the land. This settlement is the newest in Dolina, and the patrilineal kinship structure which is the organising principle for other settlements has almost virtually disappeared, even if there are examples of brothers building next to each other. It can no longer be assumed that close neighbours are kin. On the stretch of land immediately beyond the shop and almost as far as the mosque, in the middle of the upper 44

part, most houses are Catholic. A house inhabited by Catholics is easily distinguishable from one inhabited by Muslims by a marked difference in architecture. Muslim houses are square (as is the village mosque), while the Catholic ones are rectangular, with the longest side facing out towards the village. These architectural differences are characteristic throughout Bosnia. However, the differences are becoming increasingly blurred even in the villages, as Muslims tend to build their new houses in a more rectangular shape and of two or even three storeys. Their houses thus look less distinct from the Catholic ones, but are considered more "modern" and urban. A statement of Muslim identity is nevertheless made, since these new houses are built with their short side facing towards the village (i.e. the road). The mosque is situated in the middle of the upper part of Dolina. All the houses in the vicinity are Muslim and houses are in clusters, consisting of between two and four dwellings and a couple of out-houses. Such clusters, which I shall call settlements, are usually inhabited by brothers and their elementary family, the youngest brother staying in the old house with his parents if they are still alive. One dwelling does not necessarily house one elementary family, as it is not uncommon for one dwelling to be split into two or even three household units as sons marry. This is not considered ideal by the young couple, but in many cases they have no choice as they cannot afford to build their own house. Some manage to build a house after years 45

of saving and building, but others never succeed. Dolina is unusual in that Muslim and Catholic settlements are interspersed. In most villages in Bosnia which are mixed (either Musliin/Croat or Muslim/Serb) the two groups are usually settled in different and clearly defined areas of the village, e.g. in each end of the village, on each side of a river (cf. Lockwood, 1975). In Dolina, by contrast, a Muslim settlement is next door to a Catholic settlement throughout the village. However, this diffuse geographical and physical division does not necessarily mean that the two ethno-religious groups are more integrated than is the case in more clearly divided villages. Dolina is composed of the patrilineal descendants of five Muslim families and two Catholic ones, all originally settled in the upper part. However, a couple of families with a surname different from these five have been added as a result of an irregular non-patrilocal pattern of settlement. In one instance a woman and her husband settled on land given by her father in Dolina, in another a woman returned to her native village with her son (whom she did not leave with her husband's group, as would have been the usual procedure). The son was eventually given land by his mother's father and settled in Dolina with his family. (Both these examples are considered exceptional also by the villagers.) Among the Catholics the patrilocal pattern of settlement is clear-cut and there are only two surnames. According to the most recent statistics (1981) the 46

administrative unit of Dolina has 690 inhabitants divided among 158 households, of which two-thirds are Muslim and the

remaining third Catholic. These figures, both the large

population and Muslim majority, are consistent with statistics for 18892, when Dolina, then as now, had a majority of Muslim households and the largest population of any village in the district. Unlike the Austrian governors who were in charge of the 1889 census, the compilers of the 1981 statistics do not specify the ethnic or religious composition of Dolina. There are, however, indications that the Catholic population is decreasing as more Catholics move out or go abroad as migrant workers. While the administrative definition of what constitutes the borders of Dolina is unambiguous, the villagers themselves, as we shall see, operate within more context-dependent definitions. The settlements are often named by the surname of the families inhabiting them. Each of these families would, about fifty years ago, have had its own settlement with two or three houses and fifteen to twenty-five patrilineally related family members. Each house (dwelling) was called a arcIak1ija,

while the communal household (discussed in more

detail in chapter 6) was a

zajednica.

A

.ardak1ija ( the

last one of which had been uninhabited since 1986 and was falling down by 1988) is a large wooden building with open hearths built in the style characteristic of Bosnia. Those sons who broke out of communal living in a

ëardaklija

fifteen to twenty-five years ago, usually with their young 47

wives and children, would not build a similar house, with a view to creating a new household of the same size. Rather, they would build modern houses of concrete which were designed for much smaller household units. These will be described in chapter 6. Since most of the land immediately surrounding the original

cardak1ija

has now

already been built on, Sons (and in some cases their

fathers before them) today usually have to build their house on their fathers' grazing fields further down the valley. However, only the most prosperous families of the upper part have enough land and assets (often gained through migrant work abroad) to build houses further down the village and this is reflected today in a marked difference in socio-economic status between the households in the upper and lower parts, the lower being the more prosperous and urbanised of the two.

1.1.3 Sources of livelihood For reasons of space and analytical focus I shall give only the briefest account of economic life in Dolina. The anthropology of the 1970s, in particular gave great prominence to such matters (e.g. Wolf &Cole, Schneider & Schneider, Davis, Cutileiroa.] but often to the neglect of both gender and religion. Only two households in the village receive their total income from agriculture, while two households are completely landless. The latter grow the most essential vegetables on rented land. The adult male population 48

consists mainly of unskilled or semi-skilled labourers, working in the nearby market towns or in the industrial suburbs of Sarajevo. Some men have been to Germany as migrant workers at some stage, but have later returned to the village. Most households do not own sufficient land to be economically viable, although most have plots of land where they grow vegetables, or if they own larger areas, hay. The majority of households are thus so-called "mixed households", i.e. they draw their subsistence from both agriculture and industry. 3 Those who have livestock, but not enough land to grow hay may also enter into a contract of kesim, as is the case with landless peasants. While I stayed in the village two households were renting land from a widow to grow basic agricultural products, beans, onions, leeks, potatoes and maize; they paid her by giving her a share of the crops which was negotiated in each case. As has happened in many rural areas where wage labour and labour migration have become a income, agriculture has become accounts suggest, however,

significant source

feminized. 4

of

Informants'

that in Dolina the change has

taken place over a longer period of time than may be common in other villages (cf. Jancar, 1985). The change from subsistence agriculture to wage labour is a process which extends over at least three generations (i.e. approximately sixty-eighty years) and may not be as striking as in other, richer agricultural areas. Informants in their seventies and eighties told me how, like the majority of village households, they did not have viable land-holdings when 49

they started their own families, and had to seek wage labour as an additional source of income. About fifty years ago Dolina was a centre for the production of ceramic water jugs

(bardak). These were made following an old Roman

technique and pattern. (During the Roman period Dolina was near the route which went from Rome via Dubrovnik and eastward to Constantinople.) Many men then made jugs which they sold on the market. The jugs were used in the household and also in the mosques when taking

abdest (the

ritual washing before prayers). Since the 1960s production has been drastically reduced, and today demand is poor since most households and mosques have installed water taps. In some older mosques, however, the

bardak is still

used and there is one man left in the village who practises the skill, but he mainly makes miniature

bardaks which he

sells in the market as souvenirs and for decoration. After the war there was seasonal work in the forest, and at one period a majority of Dolina's adult male population was working in a factory about an hour's walk away, producing bricks. This factory was, however, closed down in the early seventies. After the workers had gone on strike to demand higher pay, the management found it would no longer be profitable to run. Many of these semiproletarian villagers have had to put up with unemployment for long periods. Some migrate to the coast for periods of seasonal work, mainly as builders, and some live of f social benefits for periods during which they see their children poorly fed and poorly dressed and are unable to send them 50

to school because they cannot afford books, bus fares and clothes. Those who are unskilled have great difficulty in finding a new job, and if they are landless as well the outlook is bleak indeed. These two often go together as they are self-perpetuating: a landless man is not able to send his children to secondary school, and the child will later have difficulties in finding a job so that the circle of poverty, landlessness, lack of education and unemployment is difficult to break out of. During my stay only three of the unmarried girls and one married woman (without any children) in the upper part were working outside the household. (In the lower part there were a couple of younger married women who continued to work after maternity leave.) Some unmarried and young married women have at some point worked as seamstresses at the clothes factory in a nearby market town, but found it very demoralising to do piece-work on a very low wage. Today this factory, albeit doing well, has a bad reputation among the female work force. Some young girls still work there for a period of time until they marry or have a child. Married women who are not employed may earn some additional money by sewing or knitting on orders from other villagers. Some also knit for a firm in a nearby market town which exports hand-knitted jumpers abroad, or make crocheted decorative items and tablecloths for sale privately or on the market. In summer and autumn, the most industrious women take their children to pick berries in the forest which they then sell to the local co-operative 51

shop. The money they earn will often have been targeted for communal household projects such as the buying of material and clothes for

dar as shown

in chapter 5. The knitting and

crocheting is what women do whenever they visit each other

na kafu (see chapter 2). N

1.1.4 Unit of study Dolina proper, that is, the upper part of the village, with the mosque as its obvious centre, was my main unit of study. My census for this area consists of seventy-five households, fifty-two Muslim and twenty-three Catholic. As already mentioned, this part is divided into several hamlets or settlements which consist of a cluster of two to four houses inhabited by related families, usually a group of brothers with their elementary families. The present study is concerned with the Muslim households in Dolina, although the remainder of this chapter will focus on Dolina as a community of both Muslims and Catholics, in order to give the context for discussions in subsequent chapters which deal exclusively with the Muslim community.

1.2 village administration There are two formal authorities represented in the village: first, the religious authorities through the representatives of the Islamska Zajednica (Islamic Association), the Imam and the village mosque council,

which will be discussed in chapter 8, and secondly, the 52

secular, socialist state authorities through the Mjesna

Zajednica (Community Council). While the community council encompasses both the Muslim and the Catholic communities, the mosque council merely integrates the Muslim community. The village committee has four members, two Muslims and two Catholics (Muslims are in a majority in the village, but on the same principle as at state level, ethnic balance is always attempted). They are appointed or elected for a period of two years. (One of the present members has, however, held the chair for a third period and is now in his fifth year as secretary.) The committee mediates between the villagers and the council of the larger regional opsV tina .

It is responsible for all issues

concerning the village community covered by legal statutes. Any building projects, such as the building of a new house, have to be reported to the committee, who will seek approval from all the relevant administrative bodies involved, such as the water authorities and the health authorities. The committee also inobilises villagers (manpower and money - minimum payment is set on the basis of the individual household's known income) for the building of community projects such as the road or the busstop for the commuter bus to one of the Sarajevo factories. The mosque council, on the other hand, will mobilise money and labour for the building or maintenance work on the mosque. There was a predominant feeling among the Dolina inhabitants that the committee was there only when it needed money from people for different projects and that 53

its demands would often come on top of those already made by the mosque council and the Islamic Association. The attitude towards communal work to assist a neighbour building a house was noticeably different i.e. more positive and it is clear that work for the community as such does not entail the incentives of generalised reciprocity (expectation of reciprocity is left indefinite and unspecified, Cf. Sahlins, 1974). Community projects organised by the community committee are more often than not characterised by direct exchange and do not therefore have the political potential (from a household's point of view) of generalised reciprocity characteristic of social exchange between households (described in chapter 2). Grumbling remarks were still being made about the amount of money some had to pay towards the building of the road through the village two years ago. Similar comments were never made with reference to financial contributions to the mosque, for which such contributions are of a different order since they are considered sevap (meritorious in the eyes of God) and thus may be understood in terms of generalised reciprocity between a household (and its members) and the divine. (For a more detailed discussion of sevap, see chapter 10.) However, although the mosque

council, unlike the village committee, only encompasses the Muslim population, villagers would stress that the Catholics had also contributed money to the building of a new mosque, while, the Muslims had contributed towards the building of a new church. Again, "giving" is based on the 54

idea of sevap and generalised reciprocity. The majority of Muslims or Catholics do not in fact contribute to the building of churches or mosques respectively. It may therefore be better to treat this claim asxpression of an

idealised "solidarity model" rather than the real pattern. However, as there are enough individuals who actually do contribute to the building of the other group's mosque or church, this model is perpetually reinforced and can thus be effectively sustained. The expression of such (idealised) solidarity and tolerance across ethnic boundaries stands in stark contrast to what people believe is an unusual lack of such solidarity within the ethnic group and between neighbours. Paradoxically, such a lack is often implicitly blamed on precisely the presence of a different nacija in the village.

1.3 One villa ge, two communities Although Dolina may in some contexts, or at some levels of integration, be seen to act as one community of which all households, irrespective of ethnic membership, are part, the relative separateness of the Muslim and Catholic communities in Dolina generates in effect two distinct communities within the village, although they are neither geographically nor administratively so. The Muslim and Catholic communities interact and cooperate only in certain areas; the secular activities discussed in chapter 2, unlike the religious rituals discussed in later 55

chapters, are those through which the two groups may interact as neighbours and co-villagers. (However, rather than being arenas for confirming a conunon village identity, they are occasions for pointing out and seeking mutual acknowledgement of differences.) A common village identity is stated and recreated through the constant assertion of collective images and ideas about the village and its inhabitants based on knowledge and assumptions of the wider geographical and sociological contexts of which they are a part. The mutual confirmation of a shared set of images, and ideas about the community based on shared values and stated by the majority, are what shapes a village identity. However, the two ethnic groups share such values only to a limited extent, and this process is carried on mainly within each of the two communities and much less frequently at common Muslim/Catholic arenas of interaction. There are thus not Dolina villagers but Dolina Muslims and Dolina Catholics. On the other hand great importance is attached to traditions (significantly adet, a word of Turkish origin is used rather than the standard Serbo-Croat word obicaj) and the way in which they define a person and the community of which s/he is a part. This implicitly demands a denial of the village as a community of two groups with different traditions. An awareness of the significance of adet is epitomised in several proverbs: for instance, "Better that the village should die than our customs" ("Bolje je da selo propadne nego adeta"); "There are as many customs as there 56

are villages" ("Koliko sela, toliko adeta"). Such sayings reflect the pronounced idea that traditions and customs are what creates the group (the village) and gives a person his or her identity; as we see from the second proverb, customs may even be specific to one village (although there is no proverb which expresses diversity of customs within the village). A common set of customs forms the fabric of village identity. A village thus equals one set of "traditions"; anything else is a contradiction in terms, and this is reflected in the image Dolina villagers invoke of their village as a community of two nacije.

1.4 The image of Dolina Our village is very beautiful, only people here are no good.

The images and ideas people of Dolina have about their village are statements of village particularism (i.e. the inhabitants' notion that their village is different from any other), which is a well-reported phenomenon in many rural communities all over the Mediterranean (see e.g. Herzfeld, 1985). The unusual thing about Dolina, however, is that this particularism is expressed through negative statements. Earlier, Dolina was described as consisting of several hamlets, some of which are considered as a different village. When travelling outside Dolina people will say they are from Dolina, meaning the larger unit; within the 57

village a villager will refer to his village (selo), or hamlet (mahala) depending on whether he interacts within his mahala or outside it. Within these definitions Dolina is limited to the upper part of the village concentrated around the mosque. This is the "real" Dolina, where the original settlements were, and is also the area where Muslim and Catholics live as next-door neighbours rather than in separate mahalas as further down the valley. When people living outside this more densely settled area visit it, they will say they are "going up to the village". Such people consider "the village" to be more traditional and "backward": the inhabitants, it is said, quarrel and gossip

constantly and are ignorant; it is the part of Dolina where "anything goes" (irna svasta). (It should be noted that this expression refers to the moral quality of people's

behaviour rather than to the moral quality of the people themselves.) Younger, status seeking couples usually move out of the village and build a modern house in a hamlet further "down" the village towards the market town, where people are more urbanised and consequently seen to be more "cultured" (see chapter 6). Being "cultured" is associated with having formal knowledge or education, but is also related to speech, behaviour, dress and ultimately to material status. The upper part of Dolina is considerably poorer than the lower part, so a villager from this part moving outside Dolina will more readily gain the label "uncultured" than one from further down the valley. A person can be "uncultured" 58

(nekulturan) in

the way s/he dresses, speaks (by swearing

a lot) and behaves (by being rude). In fact it should be noted that Catholics are not usually included in these judgements. This may be for two reasons: first, they are not part of the Muslim villagers' social sphere and the same rules do not apply to them, and secondly, they seem to be considered by rural Muslims as intrinsically cultured: they are not conspicuous in an urban context, since both their dress and their speech are close to the urban and western standard. One young Muslim girl I knew used to ask her Catholic friend to give her advice on how to dress, and to correct her whenever she used expressions that sounded "old-fashioned" to her (these contain words of mainly Turkish origin). Another opinion, expressed particularly by women who have married into the village (from allegedly more prosperous villages), is that Dolina is

bijeda.

The

word means poor, but also has the connotation of being ignorant, uneducated and miserable. Thus, when used in this context it refers not only to material poverty, but also to a whole set of ideas associated with a lack of education and knowledge: unemployment, fights, card-playing, promiscuity, and (for women) keeping a dirty and untidy home. In general, I was struck by the frequency of derogatory remarks made to me about the people of Dolina by the villagers themselves, particularly since the opposite view was expressed about the village as a place. Comments such as "this is the most beautiful village in the area" were in sharp contrast to the negative remarks often made 59

about the people of Dolina. I suspect partly that such negative statements may have been a gesture towards the anthropologist, whom they saw as a representative of that world which judges rural Muslims and places like Dolina as "backward", "primitive" and "uncultured". (As an "excuse" it was repeatedly stressed to me that it was difficult for a person who had "had no schooling" to be cultured.) Through pointing out the "primitiveness" in other people, individuals would exclude themselves from such a categorisation, apparently identifying with the evaluations of the urbanised majority and, as they imagined, the anthropologist. However, this is only partly an explanation since it does not explain other contexts in which such views were expressed. While nekulturan (uncultured) refers more to a general lack of education and of "social intelligence", the expression narod ovdje ne valja (lit. folks here are of no value) was most commonly aired during discussions on the behaviour of certain villagers (e.g. a quarrel between neighbours, women having lovers, men getting drunk). It has connotations of the moral and religious and refers indirectly to the lack of Muslim faith and devoutness. However, these evaluations often fell short of ascribing "un-Islamic" village behaviour to the presence and assumed influence of another religious group, although the alleged lack of solidarity in the village (also within the Muslim community) is often explained by the fact that the village is of mixed ethno-religious composition. The ideal village composition voiced by Muslim villagers was to 60

have as "few surnames as possible", and preferably Muslim only5 . Dma, a young Muslim girl, reflected such ideas when explaining why people in Dolina are "no good": In Dolina somebody is always quarrelling with somebody else. Take for instance the village where my sister is married, just across the mountain. In that village there are only Muslims, no Catholics, and there are only two surnames [i.e. two families or kin groups]. She has been there for more than ten years and there has never been anybody who has not been on speaking terms with anybody else in the village. Everybody helps each other and supports each other more than people do here. Dma's Catholic friend agreed: Dolina is a beautiful place, but somehow people here do not get along well. Cooperation is bad. For instance when we had the road made, it was very difficult for people to agree, and some refused to pay for it. I don't know what it is However, we think Muslims help each other more, we do not care so much about other people's problems; we are more egoistic.

1.5 Defining self and the "other": Muslims and Catholics as neighbours

The difference between Muslims and Catholics is in the way they pray and what they eat.

(Muslim woman) 61

The focal point for the Muslims' consciousness of themselves as a conuiiunity, the mosque, is situated in the centre of Dolina. The Catholics' focal point, the church, is situated outside the village, about 3-4 kilometres away towards one of the market towns, and their community feeling is directed as much outwards as inwards. And while the Catholics of Bosnia look to Rome for their spiritual leadership, the Bosnian Muslims look only to a limited extent beyond Bosnia: their religious leadership has its seat close at hand in Sarajevo. It could be argued that the Muslims' community identity is more strongly attached to Dolina, and their village particularism is much more pronounced. Thus, it was my impression that the Muslims would be more ready than the Catholics to ascribe certain characteristics of village life as particular to the place. Catholics, on the other hand, would identify these same characteristics as typical of the (uneducated) Muslims. While Muslims would ascribe certain characteristics to the fact that they were villagers rather than townspeople (and usually had less education than townspeople), Catholics would usually see them as a characteristic of Muslim villagers rather than of villagers generally. For instance Catholic schoolgirls would point out that when the Dolina Muslims talked differently from them (using words which most people consider old-fashioned and stressing the second syllable of words instead of giving them an even stress, such as do or do

6 ), "we immediately know that s/he is a Muslim and 62

a villager

(seijak)" and

that school-children who spoke

like that receive comments like: "How do you talk?" "Where did you learn that?" "They learn one thing at school, but when they arrive home their parents talk to them in their way and the kids learn it and carry it on." Other differences were pointed out by a twenty-three-year old Catholic girl working as a nurse: Most Muslims have more children than we do and so are worse of f. They also dress differently, but as soon as they move outside the village they dress so that one cannot say if they are Muslims or something else. We generally dress the same way both at home and when we go out. We could just as well have been from town, nobody can tell that we are villagers. Earlier, when our parents were young, we were also different from those in town, but we have left that and now there is no difference. But Muslims keep more to their ways. I do not know why this is so. It has already been argued that among the Bosnian Muslims the relations between neighbours are at least as important as all others, including kinship (see Lockwood, 1975, Sorabji, 1989). However, the validity of this assertion is modified in cases like Dolina, where Muslims are the nearest neighbours of Catholics. Although the men and especially women who grew up in Dolina next to Catholic families interact more naturally and frequently with their former Catholic neighbours (and as a result know more about the other groups' customs than is usually the case), these relations are usually between individual members of 63

households rather than between household units, and are as a result never formalised or reinforced through any communal rituals. Women in Dolina who Ihave no experience of interacting with members of the other group, either because they come from an all-Muslim village or because there were no Catholics in their immediate neighbourhood, often feel uncomfortable visiting Catholic households. One woman who rarely went to visit Catholics, in spite of her close neighbours being quite friendly with some Catholic neighbours, explained that she did not like to go "in those houses" because they cooked in pork fat (Muslims use oil). It might have got into anything they served her, such as cakes, or residues might have been left on plates or cups. The food in Catholic houses was clearly a major problem for Muslims and was often given as the reason why they would feel uncomfortable visiting them. On the one hand food which had been in touch with pork would be haram (illicit); on the other hand, however, according to Bosnian ideas about giving and receiving hospitality it would be considered rude to refuse any food offered by the hostess. Nevertheless, Muslims and Catholics who are neighbours do visit each other to a limited extent, usually only on special occasions (na slatko and na

ialost; see

chapter 2).

This is particularly the case with a death, when it would be considered shameful not to pay one's respects by visiting "in sorrow" (na

Lalost). (Muslims

would, however,

feel uneasy about visiting a Catholic household during the vigil, and would probably wait until after the funeral had 64

taken place.) These visits are opportunities for the two groups to make frequent references to the differences between them. Whenever I asked a question related to ways of behaving or doing things in the village my informants would almost inevitably begin their answer with "among us..." (kod

nas...). This expression would refer not to the village population, but only to the ethnic community in question. It was particularly noticeable at coffee-visits (see chapter 2) by Muslims to Catholic households or vice versa. The "among us" at the start of a sentence in mixed ethnic company would signal a statement about differences between the two groups. On one occasion I accompanied three Muslim women to visit a Catholic woman who had returned from hospital; other Catholic women in the neighbourhood joined in to have a chat. (All the women were born in the village and grew up as close neighbours.) The conversation revolved around issues common to any coffee-visit: the work the women had done in the house, the last rise in prices, etc. However, friendly acknowledgements of differences in customs between the hosts and the visitors were made throughout. Thus, a Catholic woman told her Muslim neighbours that she had been to the market and seen a good and reasonably priced material for making "your bo5a" (a cloth which the Muslims put on the floor when eating; although Catholics today eat at a table this is a fairly recent practice in Dolina). Furthermore, when putting out coffee-cups the hostess put out one teaspoon for each 65

guest. The Muslim women said they could share one, but the Catholic host answered that "among us" they put out one teaspoon for each person. Although this may have been a display of "cultured behaviour" in honour of the foreign and "Christian" guest, it still illustrates the way in which ethnic differences are stated and group boundaries drawn. However, such statements would inevitably be followed by jokes and humorous comments referring to common experiences as women, thus counterbalancing the statements of differences. Similar comments about differences in allMuslim company might refer not only to the other religious group but also to other socio-cultural units: the town, the region, Bosnia or even Yugoslavia, thereby conveying the idea that other peoples might follow different customs but with the same legitimacy. However, the Catholics' religious rituals and beliefs would fall into a totall'j different category of otherness. Their customs, to the extent they were known (Muslims would usually know when the Christian festivals took place, but not what was being celebrated), would provide not so much a comparison as a tautological legitimation of Muslim customs by way of differentiation: we are Muslim because we do things differently from the Catholics and we do things differently because we are Muslim and not Catholic. Individual villagers would express their approval or disapproval of a specific custom existing elsewhere, but they would never imply that "we-got-itright-and-they-didn't"; rather, they would add: "It is different among them, but we are used to our ways", or, if 66

it was a custom not strongly disapproved of, they would say: "What is valid for her/him is valid for me" ("ta

/njemu vaija meni vaija"). Similarly, Muslims and Catholics would merely state the differences factually and then add: "This is the way they have learnt it" reflecting an ultimately tolerant and pluralist attitude towards the "other". Yet tolerance can have its limits: it is one thing for Catholics to have their own rituals, but another altogether for a Muslim to copy them. At Easter it is the custom for Catholics to paint eggs and give them to those Muslim children who are their immediate neighbours. The children used to be excited about this and told me, "we do it like this", while showing me how they knocked two eggs against each other to see which one was the strongest. The father of two Muslim children overheard this and got very angry, saying "We have never done that until now."

1.6 The ethnic boundar y , a boundary between two moral worlds The lack of any clearly defined physical or geographical boundaries is counteracted by drawing boundaries between two clearly defined and different moral worlds by way of symbolic contrast with the customs and values of the other group. Thus customs practised by the Serbs but not by the Catholics, such as Jurjevdan (discussed in chapter 9), are practised by the Muslims in Dolina and in other mixed Muslim and Catholic/Croat villages, but not in other villages to the east with a 67

mixed Muslim and Orthodox/Serb population. In other words, the presence of the other ethnic group is needed in the process of constructing ethnic identity, since it is mainly through its presence that a person is taught awareness (by way of contrast) of his or her own ethnic identity. Differences in dress and style of house are only a reflection of this attitude in everyday life. Without clear geographical divisions, boundaries are acknowledged by drawing up two separate moral worlds which include both the animate (people and animals) and the inanimate (land). Thus the Catholic shepherd would shout to his animals not to trespass onto neighbouring Muslim land when he brought them home in the evening from pastures in the mountains: "Come back, do not go over there, it is Muslim." This was to the great amusement of his Muslim neighbours, who thought he was stupid to think his sheep would understand the difference. (Although this man was very aware of the boundaries of the two groups, he was very friendly with the Muslims and used to say that he was a Catholic with a Muslim heart, while one of his Muslim friends, he argued, was a Muslim with a Catholic heart.) The idea that land can have an ethnic identity came through in the following story. Two neighbouring households, A and B, had entered a situation where none of the respective members were on speaking terms. At a ritual occasion the woman in household A received a gift from the woman in household B on behalf of her household, as is the custom. The woman in household A, however, returned the gift - a serious insult - on the 68

grounds that the husband in household B had made critical remarks to her brother about her son having let the cows walk into "foreign (i.e. Catholic] land" making the milk they drank

haram. Jiaram

(tudflo zemiji),

usually denotes

what is illicit according to the commandments of the Quran, but is here used with the meaning of being damned or cursed. Perhaps the most conspicuous expression of a moral boundary between the two ethnic groups is concerned with intermarriage. In rural areas there is usually a nonnegotiable boundary between members of different ethnic groups wishing to marry. Although the villagers are clearly aware that the boundary is transgressed in more urban settings, this difference in behaviour would be ascribed by devout Muslims to the lack of "faith" in towns. A Muslim mother said: I would never allow my daughter to marry somebody from a different religion. In town I know it is different, more people do marry those from different religions, but that is because in town this is not important; they have no religion. In villages, however, we are all believers. Also, the kids from mixed marriages will not have any friends since they are neither Catholics nor Muslims. Urban areas are not only more secularised but also more influenced by western ideas of individualism. A young couple who are economically independent may more easily act independently of their parents' wishes. Many villagers would acknowledge the differences in attitude between town 69

and country: We are the way our social environment (sredina) is, and here we see things this way, although they see things differently in town... We respect their (Catholic] holidays, their churches, their prayers and we see it as a sin to blaspheme against their sacred symbols..., but we do not marry them! The boundary which still operates among rural Muslims and Catholics is illustrated in the following case-history. A Catholic had brought home a Muslim bride, but the man's mother refused to share the house with her and the bride had to leave. This was the second time his mother had refused to accept his choice of bride. On an earlier occasion her son had brought home a Serb woman, whom his mother had also rejected because: "they cross themselves with three fingers and we with five". She would only accept a daughter-in-law from the same faith. I expressed my surprise at this woman's tenacious opposition to a Muslim daughter-in-law, since she was particularly friendly with Muslim women in the village. Yes, they agreed: We get along well and we have a good time together, but this is one thing, another is to have somebody from a different religion together with you in the kitchen. When two who prepare different foods and keep different holy days share the same house many problems arise. A young, modern Catholic girl echoed these views: I wish everybody was one nacija 7 , that everybody was either Croat, Serb or Muslim. It would have 70

been so much simpler if we were all the same. You may be good friends with those from other religions, but you do not marry them. It is better not to because so many problems occur. He wants you to take his religion and you want him to take yours; and when children arrive, the problem is what name to give them, etc., and then the respective families interfere. This is why it is better to marry somebody from your own religion. Although it might be thought that intermarriage would become easier and more common as the marrying couple increasingly live separately from the man's parents, I do not think this very likely to happen. A common set of customs and traditions

(adet), the

building blocks of group

identity, are to a significant extent defined in relation to those of the other group. The taboo on intermarriage is the ultimate perpetuation of group distinctions. In this chapter we have seen how a village which is ethnically mixed form separate communities and thus village identities. The village does not equal one group and one set of customs, referred to by people themselves as adet. Furthermore, there is a pronounced idea that people are formed by their social environment ("We are the way our social environment is...") and group values and by implication group identity are seen as constantly threatened by different "traditions" and values; it needs S

to be strengthened by constant statements of "what our customs are and are not". While individual differences are condemned within the ethnic group, differences between the 71

two groups are acknowledged, so that individual loyalty to group values is encouraged and group identity enhanced. Although some secular activities (unlike religious activities) can include the "other" group and thus acknowledge the existence of a village community beyond the speaker's ethno-religious group, social bonds are strengthened in particular through different kinds of ritualised social exchange. As we shall see in the next chapter, such exchange takes place primarily between households belonging to the same ethnic group and only to a limited extent between Muslim and Catholic households.

72

Footnotes chaDter 1

1. All names of people and places have been changed in the usual way to protect the integrity of my informants. 2. The Official Statistics of the Austrian Government in Bosnia. Copy of the Zemalj ski Muzej in Sarajevo. 3. See Morokvai6 1986 for a further discussion of this economic adaptation in rural Yugoslavia, and see Franklin, S.H. 1969 for this phenomenon in the wider European context. 4. I shall not go into a discussion of "feminization" here, but see Moore, H. 1988:75-80 for a comprehensive discussion and critique of the concept. 5. Friendly co-existence between Muslims and Catholics in Dolina was brutally shaken 15 years ago when three Muslim youths were attacked by a group of Catholic youths and two of them stabbed to death; the third managed to escape. The Catholic youths were later convicted and sent to prison. Their immediate families moved out of Dolina, but some of the Muslims and Catholics related to those involved have not been on speaking terms all these years. Only towards the end of my stay, my landlord (the brother of the one who escaped) told me that a certain Catholic had started to greet him after 15 years of passing each other in silence. 6. Although this is not a difference only restricted to rural areas, Catholics would also point out that Muslims pronounce the letter H in words more strongly and more often than they do. This impression is probably based on the fact that Muslims use more words with an Arabic origin.

7. Nacija is the official designation of an ethnic group, but since in Bosnia ethnic identity follows religious affiliation nacija would refer to the latter. Thus when the anthropologist was asked what nacija she belonged to the correct answer would be protestant and not Norwegian.

73

CHAPTER TWO: SOCIAL EXCHANGE BETWEEN HOUSEHOLDS

2.0 Introduction In the preceding chapter we discussed how both a common village identity and an ethnic identity are constructed through the constant assertion of oppositional as well as collective images and ideas about the village and its inhabitants. In this chapter we shall look at how the community is integrated and recreated through day-today interaction and communal activities. A central aspect of this interaction is social exchange. Social exchange entails unspecified obligations and is defined as "the voluntary actions of individuals that are motivated by the returns they are expected to bring" (Vinogradov, 1974:2) These can take many forms such as ceremonial gift giving, voluntary work, ritualised hospitality and institutionalised visiting patterns and are often closely interrelated through the cultural ethos of honour and hospitality. As such, "hospitality is the central ritual of secular social relations" (Ortner, 1978:62). In fact "to refuse to give, or to fail to invite is like refusing to accept (...] it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality" (Mauss, 1990: 13). And in the "refusal to give" lies clearly also the seed of animosity and neighbourhood quarrelling. As we shall see, Catholics are part of Muslim social exchange patterns only to a limited extent and significantly Muslims and Catholics are not involved in each others' neighbourhood quarrels. In Dolina 74

social exchange is not through individuals but between household units, and is significantly less between Muslim and Catholic households than between those within each group. Some social exchange activities, like coffee-visits, create social bonds and obligations between households mainly through women and thus integrate the community through women; others, like communal or voluntary work, through men; still others, like evening gatherings (sijelo), engage both women and men. All are activities

which take place outside the household, and the fact that people act as individuals as well as on behalf of the household unit may create conflicts of interest or accentuate already-existing conflicts between members of the household.

2.1 Communit y work Both projects initiated by the village committee and those initiated by the mosque council are based on voluntary work for the community (see chapter 1). The other form of voluntary work is done by neighbours for the individual household. This is a project most people are much readier to contribute to: first, the giver may expect to have his help reciprocated and, secondly, there is the promise of sociability, food and drink at the end of the work. This kind of help includes the building of a house, work on the fields or any other major operation for the benefit of the household which needs to be carried out 75

quickly. The host, or head of the household will feed the workers, who will bring the necessary tools. Such voluntary work was traditionally called inoba, but the most common term today is akcija, a word used by the state to mean communal work, particularly the voluntary mass physical labour performed by young people under the auspices of the Communist youth organisation.' The Bosnian ethnographer Ve].ibor Stojakovi6 suggests that14the moba is understood as a one-way transaction, which means that reciprocity is not expected (1987). This is, however, an idealised model which equals any idea of reciprocity with "direct exchange". I found that reciprocity was an important aspect, although it would be left unspecified, and provided the incentive to lend a neighbour a hand. On several occasions I heard wives encourage their husbands to contribute at a work-party because the person hosting it had helped them with similar work and it would therefore be shameful not to reciprocate. Thus while it would in any case be shameful for a man not to give a close neighbour a helping hand in the construction of his house, the disgrace would be reinforced if the same neighbour had once given him a helping hand. So, in fact, there is a strong moral obligation to help all those who once helped you. This is particularly true for major construction work, and it will be well remembered who came along to help and who did not. During the last ten years the most common form of akcija has been in connection with the building of a house. Collective work projects for 'this purpose are frequent, 76

because more households can afford to build as a result of migrant work abroad, but also because values are changing. Ideas about individualism have contributed to the splitting up of the communal household and the core-family's desire to live alone, but also to the redirection of resources previously spent on communal celebrations, especially lifecycle rituals, into the building of houses. The person hosting the house-building akcija will have announced it a week or two beforehand among his neighbours, relatives and friends in the village; sometimes in-laws or work colleagues may arrive from outside Dolina. Muslims and Catholics who are good friends or nextdoor neighbours will usually give each other a helping hand during the construction work. Nevertheless, the day the roof is laid and the ridge-pole raised and the major "building-party" is held the company is rarely ethnically mixed. There may be several reasons for this: first, Muslims will usually hold the party on a Sunday when the men are not at work. Catholics. too would normally refrain from work, but for religious reasons. Secondly, food is served, and while the Muslim tradition of serving mutton does not pose any problems for the Catholics, the latter's serving of pork (their core ceremonial food) would pose problems for the Muslims and reciprocal obligations cannot therefore be met. A "building-party" is in effect then another activity which stresses the separateness of the two religious communities, and serves to strengthen the solidarity of members within one ethnic group. The event at 77

which the ridge-pole is raised is called sleme (meaning ridge-pole), and the custom is for neighbouring households ("those who wish") to give presents to the household sponsoring it. While the voluntary workers who have arrived in large numbers for the final roof-laying keep working, the craftsman who has been supervising the work will attach all the gifts to a crossbar attached to the ridge-pole. The gifts are thus displayed for neighbours and any passer-by to see. Every time the host (domadin) receives a gift, and this may go on for hours, the "maestro" (craftsman) climbs the roof to shout his verses of thanks for everybody to hear. Thanks are offered to the household (i.e the giver) through its male head while good wishes are given to all its members. The wishes are for the sons and daughters to marry, to have a long life and prosperity, and to be able to go to Mecca. (Only the richest Muslims can afford this, and no one from Dolina has yet been there.) Gifts usually consist of clothes, usually a shirt, towels and money. Below I give an example of the kind of verse the craftsman will shout from his place on the roof. If the giver's name is not included in the verse, the craftsman announces to whom the verse is dedicated.

Ma galah, rna1a1ah, hvala mu,

iveo.

Evo, doneo je dar na novu kudu. Sinovi enio, k6eri udavao ivio sto ijeta imao sto kmeta

i na dabu. otiáztz,. 78

Masalah, masalah 2 thank him and wish him good health. Look, he has brought gifts to the new house. May his Sons marry and his daughters too. May he live a hundred Summers and have a hundred serfs -and may he go to Kaaba.

2.2 Conflicts between neighbours It has already been noted that the moba is a form of generalised exchange. This becomes clear in cases where a household fails to reciprocate (i.e. in the case of the moba, when a senior male household member without any known reason does not turn up at one stage to give a helping hand). Lison-Tolosana, writing about Galicia, identifies a household head's dilemma in that "he must decide in each case whether or not his cooperation and contribution as a member of the village clashes with his commitments as head of the house" (1973:826). Generally, when obligations "to give" are not met this may indicate discontent with the "hosting" household or one of its members. To demonstrate disapproval by failing to "give" or refusing to receive (cf. the woman in chapter 1 who returned the gift) is a serious signal of animosity; if the slight is not already part of an ongoing quarrel, it will certainly now develop into one. The mandate of the village committee, as we have Seen, is limited to being a bureaucratic link between the village and the council in the commune. It has no authority beyond implementing council decisions, and initiating communal work for the benefit of the village community and 79

applying for public funds. Thus, the committee and its members never mediate in conflicts between villagers. In fact, the reduced authority of the senior male in the patri-group and the lack of any clear authority in the village to deal with intra-village conflicts leaves the villagers dependent on bringing in the police. This is done rather frequently to deal with both conflicts between households and violent scenes within the household. The police are always called upon by one of the parties involved in the conflict; co-villagers never like to get involved lest the conflict will develop to include them as well, so they watch and keep quiet. If any of the involved parties attempts to mobilise the support of witnesses, those approached will usually deny that they have either heard or seen anything. If the police fail to obtain any results through mediation the conflict will be brought before the courts. This was what happened to a conflict between two households concerning access to a path. The quarrel had gone from verbal abuse to outright threats and physical attacks. Mediation brought no result, and the conflict entered a deadlock as the parties awaited a court decision. The villagers, who are usually wary of officialdom, whether secular or religious, consider the police as the only body with a legal authority. Such authority is recognised as external and is therefore considered impartial. The Imam and the mosque council (see chapter 8) are seen as limited to the sphere of religious affairs.3 80

Nevertheless, many villagers would argue that if people were more religious the police would never be needed in Dolina. This can be seen as an expression of the idea that the disintegration of traditional values and authority leaves a vacuum which has in more critical situations to be filled with an outside, public authority, namely the police. Villagers are, however, knowledgeable about the different bureaucratic bodies and the scope of their authority, and they are adept at finding their way in the system and knowing about their rights. (This was demonstrated when a young woman was refused her job back after a year's maternity leave. She and her husband went to the local authorities to clarify her rights and her boss was forced under the threat of a court case to accept her back.)

2.2.1 Protracted conflicts between households Although a court decision was finally made concerning the two households who disagreed on right of way, the members of the households and their closest relatives are still not on speaking terms two years after the initial conflict. The hostility between these two households gradually extended to those loyal to household A and those loyal to household B, with the result that, for instance, those related to household A would not talk to members of household B and vice versa. Sometimes the hostility pattern is quite intricate and it is not obvious immediately why members of different households are not on speaking terms. 81

I was told that there had been periods when "nobody in the village spoke to each other". (the speaker was referring to the Muslim community exclusively, for, as already noted, Catholics keep out of Muslim neighbourhood quarrels and vice versa). Referring to contact between households, not their individual members, this statement reflects that it is household units which are seen to interact in the community. These periods were usually the result of several conflicts running at the same time, or more serious conflicts involving the whole village in intricate patterns without two clear-cut camps. Conflicts may go on for years between the main protagonists if they feel so insulted that their pride prevents them from initiating a reconciliation, whereas those who have been involved on the periphery of a conflict will usually normalise their relationship after a shorter period of time. When asked what was needed for the conflict to end, a man who had not been on speaking terms with his best friend and neighbour for a year, after having been reproached by his friend's wife for having turned the water supply off to increase the reservoir, said: "he will have to offer his hand and apologise first, because he was in the wrong, and I will accept it".

2.3 Hosp itality and institutionalised visiting Hospitality is closely related to the reputation of individual households; indeed the verb for offering hospitality (tastiti) has thesame etymology as the 82

word

for honour

(cast).

A household, which is always seen as a

unit and therefore reflecting on men and women equally, gains social standing ("honour") from the way in which it receives a guest. This link between hospitality and honour has also been pointed out in

Greek

ethnography. Herzfeld

notes that in Crete "social worth [i.e.

.filotimo,

"sometimes glossed as honour"] is hospitality" and that the latter is the primary category (1987:87). The serving of food and drink is an important part of treating a guest well. I was told by older informants that the first thing to ask a guest when he or she arrives in your house, whether a stranger or not, should be "would you like to eat or to drink?" However, a deteriorating economic situation, combined with aspirations towards new consumer goods, often makes it difficult (or of lower priority) for people to honour

(astiti)

guests in the way they are

expected to. Nevertheless, there is a sense of shame and inadequacy in not being able to offer guests much in the way of food, as people pride themselves in treating guests lavishly. The more prominent and rare the guest (in terms of being "outside" the village), the more lavishly s/he is treated, and it is important for a household to surpass the generosity displayed by its neighbour or co-villager in relation to the same event or guest (for example when the

hoda

visits, see chapter 8 or when hosting a religious

gathering, see chapter 9). Lavish hospitality is thus an expression of both the moral superiority of the host (who 83

attempts to leave his guest with future obligations that cannot be easily reciprocated) and of the political potential of the guest (who is now indebted to his host) (cf. Herzfeld, 1987).

2.3.1 Women's visitin g Tatterns The most conspicuous activity in Dolina for a newly arrived anthropologist is the coffee visits of the women throughout the year, and the sijelos (social gatherings in peoples' houses) attended by both men and women during (winter) evenings. On a day-to-day basis the most sustained informal interaction between households is through women and the coffee-visits by which they frequently and visibly represent their household in the village community.4 About twice every day, my hostess would say to me: "Come on, let's go and have coffee!" (Hajdemo na kalu). This would be during the day only. In the evening people go

na sijelo; then women do not go on their own, but in the company of their husband, in-laws and close neighbours. When we went would depend on her duties in the house, but the visits had to take place while her husband was at work. He would expect her to be at home whenever he was there and ideally also when he was not there. She, however, felt that what she was doing while he was not at home was not really a concern of his as long as she fulfilled her duties towards him. We would visit close neighbours more frequently than those living further away. A woman is obliged to go and see 84

all her immediate neighbours in turn during the week, while other visits further away have to come second. Frequent visits are seen to reaffirm friendship. If for some reason she goes several times to visit one house consecutively without visiting another, people will start to talk, and the members of the ignored household, particularly the woman, will wonder if they have upset their neighbour in some way. On special occasions when there is some sort of celebration, it is shameful for one of the closest neighbours not to be among the first to visit. Reporting from a Bosnian village in the 1960s, Lockwood (1975) argues that relations between neighbours are more important than those between kin (see also chapter 1), and he quotes the example of a couple who had eloped and were criticised because they were neighbours. In Dolina I did not find that marriage between neighbours was considered bad or incestuous, unless the couple were related (neighbours are often relatives). In any case, such relations are cultivated on a daily basis, and close neighbours (who may or may nor be at the same time relatives) are relied on for help and support when needed. On one occasion, when the senior woman in a certain household felt that a cof feevisit to her on special occasions had not been given priority by her closest neighbour, she told her: "I am your closest (lit, first) neighbour and therefore your most important one" 5 . On being asked, members of both households involved would agree that this is the way it is: when you need help in everyday life, or if you get ill, it is your 85

first neighbours who will be easiest to reach, while your kin may live in a different hamlet or village. The importance of friendship and mutual help between close neighbours is particularly apparent to women who may find personal support and understanding that they will not find among members of their husband's family. However, in discussing matters internal to the household there has to be a fine balance between seeking personal support on the one hand and not betraying the household as a unit on the other. In fact, as we have seen, men often blame women with their gossip as the source of neighbourhood quarrels between households. Women's precarious role in this respect has also been noted in Greece (see e.g. du Boulay, 1974; Dubisch, 1986; I-Iirschon, 1978; for a fuller discussion see chapter 7). Women's daily routines, including the coffee-visits, are very much structured around the timetables of husband and children; the week changes character according to what hours husbands work and children go to school. Children go to school either in the morning or in the afternoon: for a week at a time some classes will attend in the afternoon, others in the morning, with the pattern being reversed the following week. Children will, until they finish primary school, also attend mosque school either in the morning or in the afternoon, depending on when they go to state school. As will be described elsewhere, a daughter is from an early age brought up to assist her mother with household 86

chores, and a mother who has a teenage daughter will usually delegate major tasks to her. A woman's work-load during the day is therefore to some extent dependent on whether her daughter is at school or not. A married woman's daily routines are, however, also affected by the presence or absence of her mother-in-law, or as a mother-in-law (or if she herself is a daughter-in-law), but in most cases most importantly by the presence or absence of her husband. A majority of the men commute daily to work at one of the factories in the industrial suburbs of Sarajevo. They work three shifts: the morning shift, called p.rva smena ("the first week"); the afternoon shift, called drug-a smena ("the second week"); and the night shift, called treáa sniena ("the third week"). What week a woman's husband or grown-up

sons work decides what time she is free to go "cof feevisiting" (ide na katu). Most women prefer to have their husbands away during the day; they feel quite constrained in their activities when their husband is around. A woman is almost inevitably asked by other women what "week" her husband is working whenever she is asked to come around to coffee or when actually there. A negative answer to an invitation is easily justified by the explanation that the

husband is working a certain week and is either at home or due back from work. Likewise, leaving a coffee-visit is acceptable if the husband's arrival is imminent. Women's social activities are in most cases restricted by the presence of her husband, as she is then required to attend to his demands; and in fact some husbands do not 87

approve of their wife "going around in the village"

(hodati

p0 selo) at any time. A husband who behaves too restrictively towards his wife, is, however, not approved

of either, by women or by men (at least not in public and in the presence of women). On the contrary, there was one particular settlement (the Seliuovi6 settlement) where the men were notorious for their restrictive attitude towards their wives and womenfolk. They were said to be like iptars (i.e. Yugoslav Albanians) in this respect. The

first time I heard this was from a eighty-year-old male informant. To be "like a iptar" is usually a derogatory characterisation. On the other hand, there is one woman who was married to a Selmovic but who had formed a new settlement away from his kin. She would stress that even if her husband was a Selmovi6, he was not like them, since he allowed her to go wherever and whenever she liked. This woman is, notably, considered by most villagers, both men and women, to spend too much time "walking about the village", and is often characterised as "devilish" because of her "talk". She is, however tolerated by most people and her conspicuousness makes her a welcome scapegoat. Because she goes around a lot visiting people's houses, she is maybe the most important source of information about household events in the village. In other words, villagers' feelings about her are ambivalent; her company is feared, but at the same time sought since she is a source of information and gossip about others. Indeed, any unfavourable rumours about a 'certain person will almost 88

inevitably be traced back to her, whether she is the actual source or not. The villagers' judgement of her should be understood in relation to their general moral condemnation of "walking about a lot", which is closely connected to the ethos of household loyalty and the fear of women's gossip (for a further discussion see chapter 7). Coffee-visiting is not only the major social activity of married women but is also critical in integrating the Muslim community in the village. These visits enhance Bosnian Muslim identity through the use of a cultural code which is never used in the public, pluralist sphere. This relates to a specific vocabulary (such as greetings) with Turkish and Islamic origins, the serving and eating of specific food, how a person is dressed and comportment generally. As we have noted in chapter 1, Muslims and Catholics do not casually visit each other frequently, although a Muslim household might have a special friendship with a particular Catholic household. The women do, nevertheless, visit each other on special occasions such as a wedding, a birth, or illness. During such visits there are frequent references to the differences between the two groups, with customs being described as specific "among you" or "among us" or being "yours" or "ours" (cf. chapter 1). Coffee-visits, then, whether among Muslims alone or in a mixed group, are arenas for exchanging village gossip and confirming and enhancing Muslim moral values. This is, I believe, why men, albeit reluctantly, accept women's 89

socialising; since men spend most of their time outside the village they rely on women both to inform them about the latest village events and to recreate Muslim group characteristics which they, as proletarianised workers in a pluralist Yugoslav world, can express only rarely. This does not mean that men are completely absent from daily socialising activities. In winter particularly, villagers, both men and women, socialise at sijelo: several household members, often together with members from other households, go together to visit a neighbouring household. They spend the long evenings socialising, drinking coffee, exchanging the latest news about life in the village and talking about the tasks that lie ahead in spring and summer in the fields and in the house. Men who wish to pay their respects or congratulate a particular household with a bride or a child may go to visit na sjielo in the evening with other family members.

2.3.2 Ritualised visits Those occasions in a household's life-cycle involving a change in status of individual members are rarely marked by striking formalised rituals; even marriage is, as we shall see, in the majority of cases a fairly low-key event. They are, however, marked by obligatory visiting which could be seen as a secular ritual. All major events in a person's life (which involve a change of status and will therefore affect the structure of his/her household) are recognised by the community in the form of a visit by at 90

least one representative, usually the married woman who acts as the household manager, from each of the households in the hamlet as well as from many further afield in other hamlets within the larger village. On happy occasions in a household, such as the arrival of a new bride, the birth of a child, or a son returning from the army, neighbours and co-villagers are expected to come and visit na slatko (lit. for sweets) in the days; usually up to a week, after the event has taken place. Some who have not had the opportunity may have to wait longer to visit. The wife of the household does not usually need to invite people, as the rumour that something has happened travels fast. The female head of the household will usually have prepared sweet cakes to be served in addition to sweet fruit juice and coffee. Sometimes a woman prepares cakes and invites her best neighbours and friends to come na slatko to celebrate a major purchase like that of a cow, but this would be more for fun and an excuse for sociability. The "sweet visit" may also be called na radost (with/for joy). This is in opposition to the visit na

a1ost (lit, for sorrow) which takes place in the days after the death of a household member, when neighbours and relatives come to show sympathy with the bereaved. Old villagers would also call the visits which take place immediately after a daughter has left her native household to marry na lalost; others, however, would call this na slatko or na radost. When confronted with this confusion a man in his thirties was quick to answer: "Before, parents 91

were sad when their daughter left them, but today they all mean trouble and parents are happy to get rid of them." (he said literally that they were corrupted, pokvarenc). These occasions when co-villagers come together to share in sorrow or in joy are radically different from other ritualised events which are specific to one religious group, as they integrate the community as a whole; Catholics will visit their Muslim neighbours and vice versa. These coffee-visits are always during the day and are therefore usually only attended by women, who will usually bring a small present of something sweet, usually a packet of biscuits. The packet is discreetly left on a table or a shelf, and the hostess says thanks, if and when she discovers the packet, in an equally low-key manner with the words: "thank you, it was not necessary". The two most frequent visits for joy are those celebrating the birth of a child and the arrival of a bride respectively. The first is associated with the more specific term, babine and the second is called

serbe. Both

are occasions for women to come together to share experiences and to give encouragement to the newly arrived bride or the new mother. The importance women obviously place on paying a visit on these occasions stresses the significance of these two major status changes in a woman's life, her marriage, and her becoming a mother.6

92

Babine Babine is the name both of the woman's forty days'

"lying-in" period after childbirth, and of the gifts presented to her, which are usually sweets, or some material for sewing clothes for the child. (Some also leave money underneath the baby's pillow. I was told by women in Dolina that this is a custom more rigorously observed in other villages in central Bosnia.) The woman, who usually lives with her mother-in-law, will often have one of her own female relatives, e.g. an unmarried sister, to come and stay for a month or more while she is recovering. The female relative will take on the responsibility for all the household chores, serve guests and help to look after the newborn baby. Babine is an occasion for women to come together to remember and nowadays, increasingly, to share their experiences at the hospital in Sarajevo. A hospital stay provides one of the few opportunities for Bosnian village women to experience a close community with women from completely different social and religious backgrounds. (In this respect women's sharing of hospital memories is reminiscent of men's reliving their Yugoslav army days when visiting to celebrate the return of a young man from the service.) As soon as the forty days of confinement have passed (beliefs associated with the vulnerability of women after birth are discussed in chapter 9), the new mother is expected to drop in on those neighbours, family and friends who visited her at babine. She should then in turn give presents to (darovati) the households she visits.7 93

erbe

erbe ( sherbet) takes its name from the sweet drink, either water sweetened and flavoured (usually with rosewater) or sweet fruit juice, which is offered to guests as a refreshment before the coffee at religious or secular celebrations. The

sex-be

plays a

significant role

women visit a household to welcome a new bride to the village. The bride will serve the serbe, which should be

when

drunk immediately. When she comes to collect the empty glasses the guests should leave some money for the bride on the tray. When women go on these visits they satisfy their own curiosity about the new bride, but they also welcome the bride to the neighbourhood and the village, and show the desire to integrate the new member in the conununity. In the absence of a more public and ritualised marriage feast, the

serbe marks the change in status of the individuals

concerned (and therefore the resulting changes in the household to which they belong), but above all it establishes a relationship between the stranger and bride and the community of women. At

erbe the visiting pattern is the same as the one

described for any "sweet visit": close neighbours and friends of the household are expected to visit the household having the

serbe, sooner or later. People will

remember and comment on who came and who did not, who came quickly and who was slow to react. Women may visit on the day immediately following the bride's arrival or in the course of a week or even three weeks if the relationship is 94

distant or there has been no possible opportunity before. A woman who does not have a particularly close relationship with the household in question is more free to come whenever it suits her without upsetting the host, who will anyway be pleased and honoured by the visit. Close neighbours and friends are, however, expected to visit sooner rather

than later. Women will usually go during the

day, whenever they find it convenient, but they will never go alone. Groups of sisters-in-law or close neighbours and friends decide to go together. Men may also go, but never during the day. They will go in the company of their wives in the evening when they are back from work, and when they know that the male head of the household is at home. The first greetings exchanged between the bride and her new co-villagers will be several good-humoured questions: "Have you got used to this place?"; "Do you get along?" (implicitly "do you get along with the other household members, primarily the mother-in-law?"); "Do you obey?"; and

turning to the mother-in-law, they will repeat

the question: "does she obey?" The very shy, young girl can only answer in the affirmative while

concentrating on doing

everything (especially the serving) right, as she knows that all present are observing her critically (albeit with sympathy). In fact to go to

serbe is an opportunity for

women to reminisce about their own arrival in a strange village and household. Memories of this event are rarely rosy: a woman will stress how poor the household was, how she was lacking in everything, food and clothes, how strict 95

and often unpleasant her mother-in-law was, and how her husband came home drunk and never supported her against her mother-in-law. There is much humour and laughter during the exchange of experiences; the humiliation (especially as junior women) and the struggle these women often coped with is never elaborated on, but is nevertheless implicit in short, factual statements. As some guests arrive others may be leaving, and the bride will be busy washing glasses and coffee-cups, mixing the serbe and making and serving the coffee. All of this is discreetly supervised and organised by her mother-in-law. At points where the bride has to leave the room to wash dishes or fetch drinks, the women visiting will take the opportunity to ask the girl's mother-in-law if she gets along with the new member. The mother-in-law may either say that they get along well, or she may already start complaining that the young bride gets up too late in the mornings, and is lazy and does not work as required. The guests may ask the mother-in-law questions like "whose is she?", "where is she from?", who has she got?" (referring to the girl's relatives). Those who know people in that village or area where she is from will ask for news about them. "Does she know A?" or "Is she related to B?" The question may be about people as peripheral as a brother's wife's aunt who is married in that particular village. These are all questions seeking to place the new woman into an already existing network of neighbours, relatives and in-laws and aptly illustrates the importance of women as 96

links with households and a social network beyond the village. Men who do not go to drink erbe are not reproached, whereas women would be. As a household is seen to act collectively in ritual contexts, it is sufficient that one member go on behalf of the household unit. But since the serbe is seen primarily as welcoming the bride to the

village social network, and since her network will mainly consist of women, her incorporation into the village community is seen as the responsibility of women. It is different when a household invites na slatko on a son's arrival from the army; this is seen as a celebration to some extent for the mothers, as a son has returned home, but mainly for the men: their junior member has now been initiated into their ranks (although he is not considered to have attained the full status if he is still unmarried). It is an experience that can only be shared by those who have been through it, namely, other men. By the same token, to go to babine is mostly the affair of women, as only they can understand or share the young mother's experience of birth at the hospital in Sarajevo. In interactions which link the household and the community, women's behaviour is particularly crucial, since women have all initially arrived as strangers in the household they are now representing. Their loyalty is therefore not taken for granted by men and senior members, but has to be reinforced through moral injunctions. On the other hand, as outsiders initially women are able to link 97

households with the outside world and with other households in a network of affinal relations. I shall therefore dispute a common dichotomy in anthropological literature on gender, especially in the Mediterranean area where women are associated with the house and the inside, while men are associated with the outside and the larger community. As noted in the Introduction women can be seen as mediators between the household (inside) and a larger community (outside) •8 Women in Dolina are potentially powerful because they are the link between the household and a wider network of households and contacts, but their freedom to draw on this pool of people and resources is restricted and controlled through moral injunctions expressed by senior members of their household and community. In the next chapters we shall explore in more detail this characteristic of women as at the same time both of the household and extrinsic to it.

98

Footnotes chapter 2 1. There are certain days a year when members of the youth organisation (Omladinska Organicasija) will have akcija, which

will include e.g. clearing a green area. The youth organisation has committees in every commune, but has little influence or relevance at village level. 2. Maa1ah is of Turkish origin and means literally "what God wills will be". It is used to express positive surprise, for instance at the arrival of guests. More specifically, however, it is said by a person when s/he sees somebody beautiful, a child, young man or woman, so that the seer does not, albeit unintentionally, cast the evil eye (cf. chapter 9).

3. Lison-Tolosana notes that in villages in Galicia the teacher or parish priest (i.e someone who without being a native lives in their hamlet or parish) takes on the role as mediator in similar situations. Their role is then to "assume the defense of the priority of communal values when opposed to the private interests of each house" (1973:827). 4. But they are increasingly extending their activities outside the village: for instance, at parents' meetings at the school. 5. The significance of being "first neighbours" is also noted among the Basques by Sandra Ott (1981). 6. In her 1978 paper Renee Hirschon points out the similar symbolic character in the status of both bride and mother in her Greek material. Traditionally both the bride and the new mother were strictly secluded from life outside the house (as was the custom in Bosnia), as these were the times when women's vulnerability was at its peak and, referring to body symbolism, their "open" (and therefore ambiguous) character most conspicuous (Hirschon, 1978: 81). 7. The ritual gift exchanged in Bosnia is extensive, and more contexts in which gifts are exchange will be discussed in other chapters (particularly in relation to marriage, but also in the non-secular sphere of religious rituals). Suffice it to note here, however, that gift-exchange in Bosnia is immediate rather than postponed. Gifts that are given for instance on the occasion of birth will not be "returned" when the gift-giving household has an identical occasion; rather gifts should be "returned" as part of the gift-exchange connected to that particular occasion or event. 8. Lison-Tolosana notes with reference to his Galician material that the house "provides the basis for a moral dichotomy of all that lies inside it as opposed to all that lies outside it." (1973:824).

99

CHAPTER THREE: COURTSHIP

3.1 Courtshi p in earlier generations. Courtship is my translation of the word aikovanje. It comes from the Turkish asik, which means to kiss or to love, and is used to describe affectionate talk between a maiden (cura) and a youth (momak)'. Originally, aikovanje was strictly ritualised in Bosnia. Marriageable youths would go to court girls below the window of their rooms, (in towns they would go to the door leading to the courtyard, where there was a special wooden window called a pender). Muslims usually courted on Fridays and during holidays. This specific Bosnian custom is a favourite theme in epic folk-songs (cf. Y. Lockwood, 1983). The etiquette of courtship has changed considerably over the last forty years or so. Informants in their sixties would stress how young people were never allowed to interact directly with the opposite sex; there was always a mediating agent - a friend, a cousin or neighbour - who would act as a go-between in initial conversations between the two. The two were never left on their own and a maiden's virginity was thus protected.

As soon as a girl became sexually mature (srela), she would start attending sijelo, gatherings in private houses during winter evenings, when the house would be full of young people; girls would sit on the sofa, boys on the floor. They would sing folk-songs and sometimes dance the kolo (a Slav traditional circular dance) around the hearth. 100

Older men and women would also gather, but in other rooms. When dancing kolo a boy and a girl were not allowed to touch hands, but held on to each end of a handkerchief. During such a gathering a boy might ask a girl if he could court her. He would never ask the question directly, but through a connection: a friend, sister/brother, or neighbour of the girl. The boy would then go to her house after dark, start knocking softly at her window-pane, asking if he would be allowed to flirt with her, and then duck out of sight below the window. She would not be allowed out; he would be allowed into the kitchen if there were others present. If a girl was beautiful, two or more young men might arrive to court her at the same time; if more than one appeared she would tell the one she was not interested in to go home to bed; the other she would tell to stay. If she could not decide she would remain silent and stay in bed. One evening after a period of courtship the boy might ask her to marry him. If she accepted, she had the choice of marrying him publicly with svatovi (wedding guests or procession) or eloping "in the old way" (ukrasti se; lit. "stealing oneself away") through the window. (For a discussion of these and other kinds of marriage see chapter 4.) When talking about the one fairly recent instance of elopement in the village, informants would excuse the girl's behaviour somewhat on the grounds that her parents were very strict (some would say excessively so) and had not allowed young men to visit their daughters at home. Two 101

other women who had daughters the same age as the girl who eloped "in the old way" had allowed the boys inside the house. They considered this to be a better strategy, because they said they could imagine all sorts of things their daughters might have got up to if they had "run around outside". Their daughters, however, never went to visit a boy's home before marriage, since, as one of the two women put it, what would there be for her daughter to see in a strange house, a house which was not hers?

3.2 CourtshiD today Today, there are many opportunities for young people to meet away from their elders, peers and relatives. They rarely meet at gatherings at houses in the village. The village dance, the coffeehouse bars

(ka.fiáe)

sijelo.

and

(kafana)

and modern coffee

outside the village have superseded the

(For a discussion of the differences between

kafié,

kafana

see chapter 7) For some, the dance has already

become old-fashioned (it was started in the fifties), and the new coffee bars are preferable (Cf. chapter 7). The weekly dance is visited chiefly by the youngest (fourteento eighteen year olds), but is still the main arena for the majority of Muslim village girls, since they are usually not allowed by their parents to go to coffee bars. The dance is an important event which village girls plan and look forward to for the whole week. It may be the only time in the week they have time off and can meet with friends or a boyfriend. The fact that the dance is where 102

most young people in Dolina eventually find a marriage partner (and that this is the main purpose of attending) endows the Saturday dance with a ceremonial importance. A girl will usually be allowed by her parents to start attending the dance as soon as she has become

srela (i.e.

sexually mature): permission is an acknowledgement of

marriageable status. However, it is becoming increasingly common among younger parents to equate "maturity" less with sexual maturity and more with educational maturity.

3.2.1 The dance The dance (iqranka) takes place throughout the year except for summer, when most teenage children are busy helping their parents on the fields and there are other events like the fairs (teferié) taking place. Every Saturday at around eight the young Muslims of Dolina meet their counterparts from other villages in the region at the community centre next to the municipality school. 2 The community centre or zadruqa 3 is a low concrete building with a dance floor and a small stage. The Saturday dance is organised by the youth organisation in the municipality

(oØtina), and is part of the ruling Communist party structure. There are also dances held on Fridays and Sundays in other villages in the municipality, but only Dolina boys will attend these. Each place always holds its dances on the same day. This means that young men often come from far away to attend the only dance in the region on Saturdays. The community centre is situated by the main 103

road to Sarajevo and is therefore easily accessible by bus, car (if you are lucky enough to have access to one) or foot (if you do not live too far away). Most young people go there by foot. Some gir1may be lucky enough to get a lift home; otherwise, they will generally make sure that they walk home in the company of at least one male, usually a cousin. Usually, people hang around a while outside the building: you can see who is arriving, you can walk around more freely, and you can disappear for a while. Some parents only allow their daughters to go to the dance itself, and would never give permission for them to go to any of the

kafanas (traditional cafe with live music)

further up the road. Some girls are obedient, others are more inventive and take risks. The point is that whatever you do you will leave your house for the dance in company with other village teenagers (the boys walking ahead of the girls), and you will return with the same people. In the meantime, if you have friends with a car, you can have toured all the

kafanas on a 20km stretch. Your companions

are loyal; they will be your alibi. Unfortunately, you may be spotted by young, usually married men, who may talk among themselves and at their work-place, where your father happens to work. An eighteen-year-old girl in the village was severely beaten by her father after a young, jealous man had been telling what she at any rate called lies about her. He probably knew that he would be believed, as the girl in question had for several years been challenging her 104

restricted freedom of movement. This girl used the dance as a cover-up for touring

kafanas with her colleagues and

friends. As gossip spread she had to put up with condemnation from women at home ( who somehow secretly admired her), a bossy mother, a violent father and young men who treated her disrespectfully. Village women in particular consider it shameful for a girl to go to

kafanas. Girls and boys usually start to attend the Saturday dance between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, usually in their first or second year of secondary school. Those who do not attend secondary school will start when they finish their eighth and last year at primary school and stop going to Quranic school. Neither male nor female ever walks around on his or her own. They always walk in company of one or more friends of the same sex. The initial obvious contact should be made by the boy. A girl will not approach the boy in the same way, but may show interest in more subtle ways by throwing glances, or by being friendly with a friend of the youth she would like to approach. (Thus it appears that the boys choose while the girls are chosen.) If you do not have a suitor already, the point is to walk around (i.e. push your way through the crowd inside and take small breaks outside) in order to see and be seen. You are communicating that you are searching. You can also dance, as you are not dependent on having a partner: the dance, called

kolo, is a traditional circular one in which

anybody, male or female, can partake at any time. Girls who are morally well behaved 105

(fine), will

sit

down next to each other on two of the few chairs placed alongside the wall, or withdraw to a corner of the room. A girl is supposed to refuse any offers to go to kafana by car or to go somewhere with her boyfriend on her own. Yet few girls comply with the ideal moral behaviour which is propagated by their mothers and senior female relatives. Most of the girls defy these injunctions on the grounds that their mothers do not know anything because they married young and did not experience anything. The few girls who are obedient are often criticised by their more courageous and experienced friends of the same age. Below I quote a discussion between three girls which reveals their different attitudes towards courtship.

3.2.2 Contemporary attitudes towards courtship Three maidens, two of them sisters, aged between seventeen and nineteen were meeting in the latters' house before going of f to the dance. The neighbour of the two sisters criticised the oldest, who was getting married, for the way she was "conducting the courtship" (aikovati): always being obedient, sitting waiting for him in the dancing hall every Saturday for a year. "You do not know anything about him, his behaviour or whether he likes to go around to kafanas and run around with women", she said. The nineteen-year-old girl, however, said shyly that her parents did not allow her to do otherwise. If she did have doubts about him she did not disclose them, but said she thought that since he had come to see her every Saturday 106

night for a year and only asked to hold her hand from time to time, he must be a good guy. It is not uncommon for either girls or boys to flirt (aikovati) with more than one suitor at a time. The rivals are usually from different villages and therefore may not know about each other. A eighteen-year-old maiden explained: "Take for instance Jasna, she is now quarrelling with the boy you last saw her with, and she is now flirting with somebody else whom she has been flirting with on and off for three years; he, however, has somebody else. You see, we usually flirt with several boys at a time, then there is quarrelling, then a break, then someone else and so it goes..." Two twenty-four-year old girls were discussing courtship and how they spent their time dating boys. They have both finished secondary school and are now working, one of them in a hotel close to Sarajevo, the other at a factory in the nearest market town. These girls are considered more "modern", at least by themselves, than most other Muslim girls of their age from Dolina, since they work and would rather go to a coffee-bar than to the Saturday dance. Nevertheless, when they meet they usually express discontent with the many restrictions (embodied by their mothers) they have on behaviour which reduces their fields of experience and forces them and their 'villagesisters' to: "pass (as one of the girls expressed it) our time in nonsense". The oldest of the two and the one who is more independent of her parents, as she is not living with 107

them) said: "If we had listened to our mothers and all their prohibitions, we should never have experienced anything. Going to secondary school, which we did not really take so seriously, provided us with the opportunity to have some fun, to go out to kafice (modern coffee-bars). The second one said with regret: There are so many things I would like to do: for instance, to go to Sarajevo, go out more..., but my mother stops me, she even stops me seeing my boyfriend because he is a taxi-driver and has just divorced his first wife." (For a further discussion of the conflict of values between mothers and daughters see chapter 7).

3.3 The choice of narria ge partner Courtship is part of the process of marrying. During this period, which may last from a couple of weeks to several years, the two young people will use their meeting (which generally take place only once a week, for reasons of distance and cost) to assess each others' qualities as marriage partners. My data show that a greater number of women in the parent and especially grandparent generation married within the village, albeit usually into a different

mahala. Today, however, a majority of young women marry out of the village. There are two main reasons for this pattern. First, the reason given by the villagers themselves is that it is difficult to find anybody from one's own generation who is not a cousin (see next section); marrying within the; village for two or three 108

generations has left most of today's youth with extensive kinship ties throughout Dolina. Secondly, today's young people are more mobile than their parents and grandparents were. Some have cars, there are buses; the young men travel to dances and fairs outside the village. There is thus a larger pool of potential marriage partners spread over a larger geographical area. It is my impression that today's generation of young girls are more calculating and aware of their own demands and requirements than their mothers were. On the other hand, a marriageable girl often has to devise sophisticated ways of getting information about a boy, his family and background in order to know in the case of an eventual marriage what she can expect. This is information to which her grandparents, who mostly married within the village would have had easy access. A girl will never visit a boy in his home before she marries him. Since, as a rule, he is not from her native village, she has to rely on information from a third party about his family's social and economic standing. She will ask: "Is he good?" (Da ii on vaija). A youth will ask his friends the same question: "what do you know about her family? What family does she come from?"

3.3.1 Restrictions of choice Bosnian Muslims are exogamous within the kin-group and endogamous within the ethno-religious group. Among the Muslims as among their Christian compatriots genealogical reckoning is primarily agnatic, but uterine kin are also 109

included in the exogainy rule. Although people generally can list their family links many generations back through the direct agnatic line, knowledge about uterine links is more scanty. Muslims, like their Christian neighbours, have a taboo against marrying relatives (collaterals) within the ninth "generation"

(koljeno). 4

That is, by the number of

generations from ego or alter up to an apical ancestor. If ego and alter are not the same formal generation, the longer of the two descent lines is used to establish the degree of relationship. 5 In addition there is a taboo on marriage between those related through milk; i.e. a person

who was nursed by a woman other than his or her mother cannot marry a person who been nursed by the same woman. Persons nursed by the same woman call each other sister or brother through milk (sestra/brat P0 mlijeku) •6 By contrast, the ideal marriage among the Muslims of

Anatolian Turkey, which is the most obvious example for comparison, is with the father's brother's daughter - a union which the Bosnian Muslims would consider incestuous. Filipovic reports that "the common Islamic practice of patrilineal parallel cousin marriage was unknown in Bosnia and Herzegovina, except among some landowning aristocracy", (quoted in Lockwood, 1972:71). The "ninth-generation" taboo, however, is often broken. First, many Muslims within the cluster of neighbouring villages are usually related somehow or other 7 . Secondly, most people, especially those

of the younger generation, have merely a sketchy knowledge about their genealogies and ofwho their cousins are (this 110

is particularly true for the female links). Most know about their first, second and even third cousins if they are living within the same village, (girls usually have a warm and close relationship with their male cousins, whom they can naively flirt with and use as sympathetic and loyal companions when going out 8 ), but knowledge about relatedness further back is rare. Although attempts are usually made to tell younger relatives about their kinship ties with those of the opposite sex they are likely to meet, two young people often find out by chance that they are related. On asking each other questions upon the first encounter to establish common friends or acquaintances, they may well discover family bonds. Some couples go out together without knowing that they are related, but as soon as family ties are established, often by an older member of the family, the parents usually forbid the two to have any further contact. Some only discover kinship ties after they are married, because older family members who can trace the family tree may not have been told of the courtship. An eighty-year-old grandfather of a man who had married his second cousin without knowing complained: "Nobody asked me, and when I learnt about the marriage i-1 was already too late." On one occasion I overheard three girls discussing a young couple who were in love with each other: "She is a Palalija and he a Deli6". By establishing the identity of the two through family name, the girls were signalling that the family connection was important. The mother of the girl did not permit the relationship because 111

the two families were related. One of the girls, herself a Palalija through her mother, was very surprised at hearing this. The two others could only restate that the two were actually related

(familija) and

familija usually

refers to agnatic ties and implies that

even "close family" (fina

the connection is easily traceable, i.e. second or third cousins). The girl who was surprised at the family connection, because it would ultimately involve herself, claimed that she would not be able to find one single marriageable youth in the village to whom she was not related, both of her parents being natives of the village and both agnatic and uterine kinship ties known and easily traceable. Discussing the kinship ties between the young girls concluded that they were all related, but one of them stressed that this was particularly the case with her and one of the other girls because her father was related both to the other girl's father and to her mother. (The two girls were second cousins on both sides.) This indicates that even if genealogies are primarily agnatic they include all collaterals (fathers and mothers side) in cases where, first, mother's kin are part of the patrilocal context i.e. where ego's relatives on both mother's and father's side are neighbours, and secondly where mother's kin are also ego's affines. The word

prijatelji is

used to designate

both one's own affines and those of one's agnates and the term is thus not only restricted to ego's own generation. (For instance: ego's father's brother's affines are also ego's affines). (Hammel notes that there is no separate 112

term for uterine kin since familija usually refers to agnatic kin.) In fact, the exogamy rule is ultimately weakened by a preference for marrying one's prijatelji (primarily through the agnatic line) since affines in one generation are turned into agnates in the next. I suggest that more distant relatedness through the mother is known and therefore becomes more important as a restriction on choice of marriage partner when these relatives are also agnatic affines. A pattern which will be generated in the next generations if for instance two female first cousins through their fathers marry two brothers. (The paradox is of course that there is a preference for marrying agnatic affines, but an exogainy rule which encompasses both uterine and agnatic kin.) The central role of prijateiji in people's social networks will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5. Another restriction is on marrying Christians. There are only a few instances of marrying across ethno-religious lines in mixed villages. In Dolina, the only mixed marriage was between a Muslim man, and notably, a Serb/Orthodox woman, i.e. from a group which is not present in Dolina. People in the village would still comment on "what a pity" they thought it was that she was a Serb. Young people may fall in love with a girl or a boy from a different ethnic group, but the social cost of an eventual marriage, in terms of opposition and condemnation from family and co-villagers, renders it highly unattractive, and they are usually careful to establish ethnic background before initiating a courtship. Young 113

Muslims and Catholics would agree that when you fall in love with somebody, you always have to consider if s/he is your religion.

3.3.2 Criteria for choice In choosing a marriage partner there are certain aspects a girl takes into consideration. It is preferable for the boy to have built his own house separate from his parents'. A girl is reluctant these days to share a house with her mother-in-law, and would prefer to run her own household from the start of the marriage. Earlier, when material standards were lower, and Sons had no income of their own, or at any rate not enough to build a house, the young bride would have had no choice in the matter. Another preference is for a boy who lives in more urban area, or at least in a village which is close, in terms both of distance and of accessibility, to a market town and to her native village. If a boy lives in the hills strani"),

(Izvive na

his marriage prospects among the girls in Dolina

are slim. It will also be counted against him if he and his family own much land or livestock. 9 This implies that the potential daughter-in-law will have to work very hard, both on the land, milking and looking after the livestock, and in the house, cooking and cleaning for her husband and inlaws. This last factor may be particularly influential if the girl has had much hard agricultural work in her parents' house. Even those men who own much land, are seldom actually full-time farmers. They usually hold jobs 114

as skilled or semi-skilled workers; some are taxi drivers, some policemen. This means that women are left with most of the responsibility for agricultural work. The priorities are such that if a potential marriage partner does not possess the preferred characteristics, he will usually be ditched for someone else who does, even if the girl says she loves the former more than the latter (girls who insist on marrying for love are criticised for being ignorant, especially by older women, who have learned the importance of material standards and the relationship with the mother-in-law). The story of Aida, a nineteenyear-old girl, is typical. She had been "courting" a certain boy for two years. She was very much in love with him, but as she obtained more information about his background, she was increasingly doubtful about his eligibility. He had a good and steady job, and owned a car. (Owning a car usually makes a marriageable youth more eligible; he is seen as hard-working and steady (solidan), and he can provide her with the prospects of "getting around a bit".) However, the fact that he lived "in the hills", had much land and livestock, and shared a house with his parents all went against him. When Aida made enquiries about his mother through a third person who knew his family, she was told that her potential mother-in-law had a reputation for being a trouble-maker, and she was by now very sceptical indeed. In addition to her own reservations she now had to put up with those of her mother, who made a scene every; Saturday when Aida went off 115

to the dance, to see the young man. Aida was getting very tired of struggling against her doubts and handling all the problems at home, so when she eventually met somebody else who lived in one of the market towns and had a house of his own, she married him after a short acquaintance, but without telling her first boyfriend, who she feared would be "blind with rage". Even if Aida did not love the one she finally married, she was sure that she had her priorities right and that she would learn to love her husband. She was happy living in a modern house, with hot and cold running water and a bathroom, and without a mother or mother-in-law to boss her around. She and her husband would often go on trips in his car, and she was happy to have seen more places within a year of her marriage than she had seen in her entire life in Dolina. The majority of girls who seek a marriage partner with a good material background, which usually means that he has secondary education, must in return accept that this category of boys seeks a potential wife with the same qualities. A young female informant put it this way: "When our mothers were young, young men would ask them if they knew how to milk, but today they will ask how much schooling we have had."

116

Footnotes chaDter 3

1. Although I recognise that maiden for a young woman and youth for a young man have archaic connotations in English these cover best the meaning of the Bosnian words which stress the unmarried status of the two. Cura carries the meaning of an unmarried virginal girl which is what is conveyed in the English "maiden". 2. About ten years ago the Catholics in the area had their dance at the same place. Then, Catholics had their igranka on Fridays, while Muslims had theirs on Saturdays. In both cases the organisers were from the Communist youth organisation. I have been told that in those days Catholic and Muslim youths were not supposed either to speak to each other or to greet each other. 3. The building was a joint community project built in the fifties. The municipality contributed money and building material, villagers their labour. The use of the word zadrug-a indicates that the community centre is defined as "social property". For further explanation, see the discussion on the zadruga in chapter 6. 4. See du Boulay (1984:538) for a discussion of a similar system of reckoning in "generations" (zinaria) in Greece. 5. I am using here the definition formulated by Haminel who notes that this is also the method used by the Roman church and that reckoning of relationships through "generation" is common throughout rural Yugoslavia. The Family Law for BiH states the prohibition against marriage between a man and a woman related in lateral line through the fourth degree inclusive. (Hammel explains that "degrees of relationship between persons is accomplished by tallying the number of intervening births. Thus, a parent and a child stand in the first degree, siblings in the second"..etc, (1968:8). This is also what younger Christians in the village will quote, although the older generation will say that they have the same prohibition as the Muslims; until ninth "generation". 6. Holy, referring to the Bert! of Darfur, has noted that the belief about milk as creating the child's substance is supported by reference to the Koranic notion of a special relationship [rida'a] between a child and a woman, other than its own mother, who nursed it, which creates a bar to marriage between those related through milk" (1988:481) 7. Kinship terms especially those denoting kin of second generation are different from those used by Christians in Bosnia. The terms used by the Muslims are derived from Turkish, while those used by Christians are Sla y . Both groups, however, di4vij between say an uncle through ego's mother and 117

one through ego's father. 8. This is accordance with the observation made by Lockwood in a Bosnian village in the l96Oies. (Lockwood, 1975). 9. For a confirmation of this trend in a number of other European countries see S.H Franklin, 1969.

118

CHAPTER FOUR: MARRIAGE

4.0 Introduction Having discussed the first stage, courtship, in a series of three (consisting of courtship, marriage and gift-exchange between in-laws) which have been identified as distinct in the marriage process, I shall now proceed to a presentation of the second stage, namely the marriage procedure. The second stage is when the girl (cura) goes and lives with the boy (momak) and his family and gains the status of bride (mlada). The actual moving of the bride into the bridegroom's house and the implied consummation of the marriage is the main 'rite-de-passage' in the marriage process. As we shall see those who marry after only a short period of acquaintance usually choose a radically different wedding procedure from those who have been courting for a longer period of time. The different words used by the villagers when referring to a marriage reflect how they themselves categorise different ritual units and wedding customs. Svadba and svatovi are used about the wedding celebration. Informants would say that the two words meant the same, but judging from actual usage they referred to different kind of wedding procedures. I shall return to this point; in the meantime it should be noted that svadba is translated as "wedding feast", while svatovi is translated as "wedding procession" or "wedding guests". Another word, vjenàanje, 119

is used to refer to the marriage ceremony, either the one held at the town hail (civil marriage) or the one held in front of the Imam (marriage ceremony according to Sheriat, or Islamic law). The bride is called miada (lit. "the young woman") and the bridegroom is called m1adoenja (lit. "young married man"). The verb "to marry" has a feminine and a masculine form: se ozeniti (of a man), derived from the word for woman or wife, 'ena and se udati (for a woman), derived from the verb "to give", dati. The morphology reflects the fact that post-marital residence is patrilocal and the idea that a girl is given in marriage while a boy gains a wife. (Interestingly, a boy who marries a girl and goes to live in her native village will use se udati to say that he has married.)

4.1 The different marria ge procedures The change in status from unmarried to married is marked in more or less ritualised ways according to the wishes and financial status of the couple and families involved. There are three main choices open to young people in Dolina wishing to marry. The first of these, which is presented as the ideal, is to have what they would call a "proper" wedding (svadba) or a "proper wedding procession" (svatovi). This is a public, planned wedding, which is known to the households involved as well as to the wider village. The second is marriage by elopement, called ukrasti se, which literally means "to steal oneself". This is elopement agreed upon by the couple, but not known to 120

their parents. The third, which is closely related to the second, is what Kajmakovi (1963) calls "fictive abduction" of the girl. This is when a daughter's imminent marriage by elopement is known to her parents, but they pretend not to know, even if the village is buzzing with rumours. It is a strategy which is a mixture of the first and second options. It includes secrecy on the part of the bride's household, but a wedding party or guests in the bridegroom's home. It is in connection with these "fictive elopements" that most confusion about categorisation occurs. For the sake of clarity, I shall call the former and secret "real elopement", and the latter, following Kajmakovic, "fictive elopement". Below I shall give an ethnographic account of all three categories of marriage. Having outlined these categories, however, it should be noted that not all marriages will fit squarely into one category. The distinctions may be particularly blurred between the two last categories, real elopement and fictive elopement, a point which I shall return to in due course. First, however, I shall give a short account of wedding customs for the pre-war generation in the period from about 193050.

4.2 The wedding about 1930-1950 This rough outline of the wedding procedures common thirty to fifty years ago is meant to provide a comparative framework for those of the l9aOs. The account is based on 121

the information from four village women about their own weddings. They all married within the village, like the majority of women in the generation born before 1945. This is significant in as much as it affects the formal procedure of the wedding ritual, and it may help us to understand some of the changes that have taken place over a period when brides have been increasingly married in from other villages. After a period of courtship the boy would ask the girl to marry her, and the couple would agree on a day that he should come and fetch her. (Most marriages would take place in winter, when there was less work to do.) That day the bridegroom would arrive with wedding guests (svatovi); they would be girls and boys from the village, his neighbours and relatives. (Today they arrive by car instead of by foot or horse, and the gunshots have been replaced by the honking of cars.) If the girl had been asked for in marriage, usually by the boy's father, the groom and his wedding guests would enter her house, otherwise they would not. Those of the women who married after the war would have had a senior female relative to accompany, instruct and support them from their native village to their new home. When arriving in the groom's house the bride would first have her hands coloured with henna. She would then be left in

budak. (This

literally means corner, but is used

to denote the corner of two sofas where the bride would sit.) She would be required to sit, completely veiled, on "display", easily seen by anybody, members or neighbours of 122

the bride's new household, who came by out of curiosity. This seclusion of the bride would last for about three days, the duration of the wedding celebrations. 1 The viewing was certainly less significant when the bride was from the village and already known. The women would nevertheless recall this part of the experience with embarrassed laughter, not least on recalling the complete veiling, which was an unusual and awkward state for the young girl to be in. While the bride was sitting on display, there would be music and dance for the wedding guests. The religious wedding ceremony was supposed to take place ten to fifteen days after the bride moved to the bridegroom's house (informants disagreed on the exact number of days, but ten was the most common figure mentioned). During this period the couple were not supposed to sleep together and were given separate rooms or beds. However, some older women would modify this picture considerably: "Well, such was the law, but when we think of it few actually followed the rule, the young couple just went to the cow-shed...". The main difference between the wedding procedures of a woman who married in the 1930s and one who married, say, in the 1950s was in the official marriage ceremony. In the thirties marriage ceremonies undertaken by religious clerks and according to the prescriptions of the religious community (either Catholic, Orthodox or Muslim) were accepted as legal without a civil ceremony. When Vasvija married in 1931, her husband went to see the Islamic legal officer 123

(kadija) in

the market town

with two witnesses and set up a marriage contract according to Islamic law. Rahida, who married in 1952, however, had to sign a secular marriage contract before she could marry "in front of a

hoda". But

she was only seventeen when she

arrived as a bride in her husband's home, and, according to state law, she had to wait until she was eighteen to take part in the secular wedding ceremony, and by implication the religious one also. She married "in front of the

hoda"

in the way it is also done today: in his home with two or three male witnesses, usually the groom's father, father's brothers or male cousins, herself and her husband. After the ceremony about ten people, who were specially invited, from among the husband's closest relatives on his father's side, had supper together. When comparing the wedding rituals which were prevalent about thirty to fifty years ago with today's, the most striking difference is the more compressed character of the ritual today, which means that some practices have been lost. The most significant is perhaps the lack of emphasis put on the consummation of the marriage. This event was earlier marked out as the final stage in the wedding celebrations.

-

4.3 Wedding irocedures 1988 4.3.1 Svadba and svatovi After a period of courtship lasting anything from a couple of weeks to several years the ideal is for the 124

couple and their respective households to start preparing for what the villagers would call a real wedding feast, the svadba. Svadba is used to denote a big wedding feast with many guests (usually including the whole village), food and drink, music and dance. However, although older informants hold it up as the marriage custom which was predominant in their youth, the svadba is actually a rather rare occurrence in Dolina these days. When asked what marriage customs consisted of today, these informants commented on the sad state of affairs by answering "We have no customs any more." (One could say, rather, that the older generation is not prepared to acknowledge the new, unfamiliar customs, and admittedly the multiplicity of different approaches makes it awkward to give an account.) Yet my data on actual marriage procedures thirty to fifty years ago show clearly that a real svadba was a rare event even then. In effect, it was the privilege of the more wealthy families, as it is today. Presenting svadba as "the traditional wedding custom" is thus an expression of aspirations, and indirectly a comment on inequality among the village population. Svatovi (i.e. wedding procession), the most common form of wedding procedure, is used to describe a wedding where the bridegroom arrives with his wedding guests to pick up the bride from her home. A svatovi varies more in scale than a svadba; it is usually much more modest, with fewer guests, less food, and usually no music or dance. It is a wedding which is less expensive to hold than a svadba, thoughalso less prestigious. The 125

approximate date of the wedding celebrations will be known to the villagers weeks beforehand. The feast, which will be held in the bridegroom's village and sponsored by his household, will be attended by at least one representative from each household in the village. During my stay, I did not have the opportunity to observe a "real" wedding feast. For the difference in customs between svadba and the elopement marriages, I therefore have to rely partly on informants' accounts and partly on descriptions from Bosnian ethnographers. However, one "real wedding" did take place a couple of months before my arrival in the village. According to my informants it was the first real wedding feast in at least ten years. The son of one of the wealthiest households in the village was getting married to a daughter of migrant workers in Austria who were equally wealthy because they had money abroad in hard currency. The bridegroom's household, who have the biggest house in the village, owe their wealth to much land, but mostly to the remittance sent back by two sons working and living abroad. Describing what a big wedding party this was, informants would mention the number of cars which were parked opposite the bridegroom's house. Some say there were twenty-five, others thirty. On the evening of the wedding feast the bridegroom's father went around to the neighbouring households and invited them na sijelo (see chapter 2) in other words, he did not explicitly invite them to a wedding party. Those who refused the invitation later 126

complained that they had not been invited to the wedding. Nevertheless, at the party most households were represented by at least one member. There ver . food, drinks, live music and dance. The same kind of party took place in the bride's village a couple of days afterwards, before the couple went abroad. This is an unusual procedure, as the main wedding feast would traditionally be held in the young man's household; it undoubtedly served to underline both families' wealth in the eyes of the villagers. Informants would point out one of the major differences between a prearranged marriage (i.e. one including a big marriage feast) and an elopement: in the case of the former the gifts would be given and displayed immediately. This reflects the fact that svadba is the wedding custom of the financially resourceful, who use the occasion for a blunt display of economic status.

4.4 Elopement I shall now proceed to a discussion of elopements. First, I shall clarify the morphology of the key term ukrasti Se. Secondly, I shall give a short description of

the main, elements which used to define a marriage by elopement. Lastly I shall present and attempt to analyse the new strategies. Ukrasti se is derived from the verb krasti, "to

steal", in its reflexive form. The literal translation would be "to steal (oneself) away", as in the expression "the . child stole out of the house". An immediately obvious 127

translation of ukrasti se in the context of marriage would be "abduction" or "bridetheft". Such a translation, however, would be highly misleading, since the expression in the Bosnian context implies active participation by the girl who is "stealing herself away" from her parents. A more apt translation would therefore be "elopement". Moreover, there is a another word, otmice, which corresponds to bridetheft. Marriage by "stealing away" has changed significantly over the last thirty years. Older informants would deny that today's elopements are "real" "stealing away" marriages. The classic sequence of events for a stealing away "in the old way" (starinski), prevalent twenty to thirty years ago, is as follows. The girl would have been courted in the traditional manner, with the boy standing outside the girl's bedroom window (see chapter 3). One night he might propose. If she accepted, and they wanted to get married "straight away", the girl would simply escape through the window and leave with her suitor for his home to become his wife. This would take place entirely without the knowledge of the girl's parents. Next morning the mother would find her daughter's bed empty, and later in the afternoon male relatives of the bridegroom would come to visit the bride's parent na inir (for peace). The first time the daughter came to visit her mother after eloping through the window, she would ceremonially enter through the window but leave through the door. This is the only kind of elopement considered by my older informants to be 128

"real elopement". 2 Real elopement is defined by two criteria: first, the marriage must be secret and known only to the girl and the young man who have agreed to get married and, secondly, the girl should leave her home through the window. The centrality of this symbolic act is reflected in the saying "I left through the window" which has become a euphemism for "I eloped". (Similarly, women will say "I left through the door" if they have married with svatovi.) Today, neither of these criteria are usually fulfilled by the bride and her parents, although the parents would still insist on characterisirig their daughter's wedding as elopement or "stealing away", for reasons I shall return to shortly. According to informants, the last time a girl "stole away through her bedroom window in the old-fashioned way" was fifteen years ago. In some more remote mountain villages girls still "steal away" in this way. In Dolina today, however, there are two slightly different procedures, both of which are called ukrasti Se. A girl either elopes directly from a dance or a fair, or the groom comes to fetch her from her house, and she leaves through the door, easily observable by parents and neighbours. The first procedure can be seen as an extension of the traditional custom in as much as the girl still elopes in secret. Although she does not leave through her bedroom window she still leaves with her boyfriend from the arena where the courtship has taken place; her bedroom window has been replaced by the dance and the fairs. The second 129

procedure, however, is merely an elopement in name. The bride's departure is not secret and she leaves from her home, through the door; this is the fictive elopement referred to above. Yet although the same term, ukrasti so, is used to describe the two procedures older informants regarded them as different. They would deny that the second procedure was a real elopement, "since everybody knew". It is this second, fictive elopement that has become the most common marriage procedure in Dolina today, although it does not have the status of the svadba or marriage feast, which is still held to be the cultural ideal. These new procedures, which have come about as a result of change in gender relations, social values and the economy, gain their legitimacy from the long memories of elopement. It is a manipulation of an old concept to fit and legitimate new procedures. I shall in the following paragraphs discuss these in detail.

4.4.1 Real elo pement. modern style As already mentioned, the ideal is for the couple to go through a period of several months to a year or two of courtship before marrying publicly. It is not uncommon, however, for some girls to go of f with a boy after only a short acquaintance, believing that he will eventually officially marry her. This is often done directly from the Saturday dance, and is the modern version of real elopement. These elopements take place without the knowledge of the bride's and inmost cases the bridegroom's 130

parents, as they are more or less impulsive decisions. These "marriages" as a rule do not last long, and it is usually the girl who decides to leave and return to her parents. Young female informants would say that young men exploit girls who want to get married, by suggesting marriage by elopement. A boy will ask a girl to marry him ("to get her to bed"), calculating that she will soon return to her parents. In some cases boys are put up to these propositions by male friends. Some girls will marry barely knowing the boy, or as an educated village girl put it: "Some girls are naive and only think about getting married. A boy may take advantage of this and ask 'would you like to marry me?' and the girl, who the first evening finds him attractive, and the second finds that he has a car (a symbol of relative wealth and a steady job] will go along with him." Once the girl is in his home he then leaves the responsibility for her well-being with his mother. He may continue his life in the same way as before, going to katanas and seeing other women. The young "wife" is ignored and will soon feel unhappy and homesick. Sooner or later she will return to her own parents; if she is really young her father may come and fetch her if he thinks the place she has arrived in is unacceptable. Independent of the circumstances of the girl's arrival, she will nevertheless be treated by the village women as any newly arrived "bride" (i.e miada) would; they will arrive in her new household na erbe to welcome her into the community of 131

the village women (see chapter 2). But not all girls who marry according to this pattern have been fooled into it by an uncommitted and more or less unknown boy: it may be a conscious strategy pursued by the girl herself. First, she may see marriage as an attractive alternative to the hardships, poverty and lack of freedom in her parents' home. She would like to spend more time with her boyfriend and friends and believes that on marrying she will always be able to do this, as she will no longer have her parents around to refuse her. Yet in most cases she quickly realises that far from winning more freedom of movement, she has to put up with a mother-in-law who in many cases may be even stricter with her than her own mother. More often than not, as I said above, she will find no support in her husband. However, at least these young brides can more easily leave their marriage than their mothers were able to. Secondly, many of my young female informants assumed that a majority of these girls had sexual experience, and that they could have agreed to marry the boy because they thought they might be pregnant. It should be noted that girls who marry in the described fashion are very often under age (a minor between the age of fourteen and eighteen years may only enter into marriage with the permission of the Court). Furthermore, a girl has no legal right to have an abortion without the consent of her guardian if she is under eighteen. She cannot therefore have an abortion without involving a senior person such as her mother. 132

However, she may attain legal capacity as a major through marriage before the age of eighteen and may then have an abortion without the consent of a senior person. There were two clear cases of real elopement marriages (modern style) in the village during my stay there. In both cases, and other cases I have heard of second hand, the girls came from and arrived in households that were poor in every sense. If svadba is the custom followed by the most resourceful villagers, real elopement is a strategy which in most cases is followed by the poorest and least resourceful. In the first case a fifteen-year-old girl arrived from the Saturday dance in the home of a young Dolina man. The youth was in his early twenties, and lived in one small room which was part of the house of his older brother and his family. He was considered to be feebleminded and unattractive. Apparently the room she was offered to live in was so dirty and untidy that she refused to stay there. She stayed with some neighbours until her bridegroom had arranged for his sister-in-law to clean and rearrange the room. Meanwhile the girl had to borrow clothes from a neighbour as she had not brought anything with her and her father had not yet arrived with her clothes. The rumour was that the bridegroom had married (i.e. brought home) the fifteen-year- old girl as a joke, set up by his friends. Allegedly, somebody else who owned a car had asked her to come with him from a dance; in the back seat was the twenty-year-old Dolina youth, and she had apparently consented to go with him instead since the owner 133

was already married. When women went na serbe to welcome the new bride they wanted to verify the story, but since it would have been rude to repeat the rumour to her face, they asked more subtly for how long the bride had been Mcourting with him". She smiled shyly and answered evasively that she had not known him for very long. The other case also involved a fifteen-year-old girl. She was from a poor rnahala

in a large town, and had arrived with her bridegroom

from a fair immediately following his return from the army. In both cases the

miada

left after some weeks, as most

women in the village had predicted, on the evidence of the low degree or total absence of formalised rituals. When a boy asks a girl, "Will you marry me?", the one who asks (the boy) and the one who is being asked (the girl) may well interpret the question and its implication in significantly different ways. The girl may have a strong wish to get married, having been brought up to see this as her main aim, and being bored by her inferior status which is both liminal and peripheral. The girl would often understand the question as an invitation to change her status and life-situation, while the boy may ask knowing that it does not necessarily mean taking on any commitment through an elaborate ritual involvement of the two families or households concerned.

4.4.2 Fictive elopement We saw earlier that a true marriage by elopement is supposed to be known only to the girl and boy concerned. If 134

it is known to the two immediate households involved, it is fictive. This kind of marriage is decided on beforehand and is typically the result of courtship which has lasted over a longer period of time and is known to most villagers. The groom has told his parents in time for them to buy the presents they are required to give the bride when she arrives, and the food that the bridegroom's company of followers and other guests will be served when they arrive with the bride. At this stage, since no one else knows about it, and the intention is to keep it secret, the marriage retains some of the characteristics of elopement. This state of affairs rarely lasts in a village community. All three fictive elopements I observed, were talked about weeks before they actually took place, and the bride and bridegroom would complain after the marriage that it was impossible to keep anything secret these days. But in fact the behaviour of those most closely involved is ambivalent. Hints may be openly dropped by the bride's mother; some may have seen the bride-to-be in town with her boyfriend buying rings; others may have noticed her buying new shoes or at the hairdresser's; all these scarcely concealed clues together with the fact that the girl has been dating a certain boy over several months lead people to conclude that she is getting married. In addition, her sisters or girlfriends usually know and are secretive in a way that is also interpreted in favour of marriage. This kind of behaviour has become an essential element 135

in the ritual procedures pertaining to a fictive elopement. The reasons for the elaborate charade are clearly economic. Whenever a couple's marriage plans are known to the household concerned, the broadcasting of that knowledge and the consequent wedding-feast are seen as the traditional, obligatory next steps. Conversely, a public wedding without conspicuous communal consumption would be considered shameful. But a real wedding-feast costs more than most villagers these days are able or willing to spend. The obvious face-saving solution is simply to pretend that the marriage is an elopement, i.e. entirely without the prior knowledge of the immediate families. By this manoeuvre the event is conveniently pigeonholed into the other traditional category of marriage, "real" elopement "in the old way"; events are officially taken out of the parents' hands, and they are absolved of all financial responsibility. This idea is confirmed by Kajmakovic (1963), who points out that "fictive abduction" is becoming increasingly common, and suggests that this phenomenon is due to economic factors: i.e. the wish to avoid the obligations and great expenses of gift-giving and hospitality. It is significant that fictive elopement, with its motive to econoxnise resources should first appear in the sixties during a time of rapid industrialisation, rising living-standards, work migration to northern Europe, and massive introduction of consumer goods. This pattern ties in with the redirection of household resources away from hospitality and conspicuous consumption shared by the 136

community as a whole, and towards consumer goods and improved housing for the core-family (see chapter 6). Yet, despite their popularity, fictive elopements invite adverse comments particularly from members of the older generation, who would utter critically: "They say she eloped, but half the village knew about it. They only pretended not to know to avoid having to spend money on a wedding feast. 3 As we shall see, this attitude stems partly from the unpredictability of the ceremonies surrounding fictive elopement and the consequent social insecurity of those involved. Three case-histories follow : the first showing the unpredictability of procedures

surrounding fictive

elopement, the second illustrating how rumours of marriage are typically broadcast, and the third a representative "modern" wedding.

Case-history 1. The confusion surrounding wedding procedures was most strikingly illustrated by the reactions of neighbours to a household where the daughter was marrying. This marriage had been talked about for months, and the villagers had expected it to take place every Saturday night for some time. One Saturday

afternoon the rumours

became increasingly convincing. Somebody knew that the girl, 1-Ledija, had been to the hairdresser and had her hair done the day before. Women were debating whether there would be svatovi (wedding guest arriving with the 137

bridegroom) in the bride's home or nothing there at all, or whether she would leave directly from the Saturday dance. Some neighbours of the supposed bride were called na sijelo later that evening to a household in another neighbourhood, where I was also a guest. People began to assume that there was not going to be a marriage that night. Later the company was told that there was going to be a wedding after all. I left with some of the guests to go and have a look. On our way we saw five cars driving up towards the bride's house. It was noticed that the drivers did not use their horns (the modern equivalent of firing a gun). The question onlookers were asking when the bridegroom and his guests arrived in the village was: will they enter the house? If they stayed outside, the marriage would be classified as an elopement, and the neighbours would have to keep away. If, however, the wedding procession did enter her house it would imply a marriage by svatovi rather than elopement, i.e. one agreed on

beforehand and known to the bride's parents, and neighbours would traditionally be invited na sijelo to celebrate her marriage (albeit in a more modest fashion than in the bridegroom's home later that evening). When some of the onlookers realised that the bridegroom and his company had entered the bride's house, they wanted to go over and participate, but an older woman thought maybe it would not be right, since we had not been invited. Besides, she thought it would be the custom to bring a gift (dar) as a guest to a wedding, and she had nothing to give... Others 138

disagreed: two women from the neighbourhood had already come over, so why could not we go as well? However, while this discussion took place and people were trying to decide on what to do, we heard the cars honk on their way out of the village. There was a short silence before a woman commented: "She has left." The wedding procession had lasted less than an hour and we had all missed it. The bride now left with her bridegroom to his home in a village across the mountains from Dolina.

Case-history 2 It was being rumoured that nineteen-year-old Ref ika was getting married, and some thought it was bound to happen on Saturday after the dance. On the Friday I went with a friend to visit Ref ika. When we arrived the mother was doing her hair. My friend asked her if she was going anywhere. The mother answered simply that guests were expected on Saturday. She knew that her daughter was about to get married and that the bridegroom would arrive with wedding guests (svatovi), so she had been washing, baking cakes and had her hair done. On the day she would also make sure she put on one of her nicer

dirnije. The

rumours about

her daughter's marriage had been strengthened by minor events in the previous two weeks. She had been with her two daughters to one of the "tailors" in the village. On handing over the material and giving instructions for the kind of dresses she wanted, she had stressed that the oldest daughter's needed to be finished by Saturday and 139

that this was the most important; the other orders could wait.

Case-history 3 Senada, a nineteen-year-old, had agreed with her boyfriend that he should come and fetch her that Saturday evening. She had spent the day packing her trousseau, which she would come and fetch at a later point, and those clothes she would need in the coming weeks. She had dressed up in a nice skirt and blouse, had her hair done and put on make-up. The time was approaching eight. Senada was

constantly looking

out of her window. She was getting

worried that he might have changed his mind. He arrived some minutes later. There were two cars, as the bridegroom was accompanied by his two brothers and his sister-in-law. Everything went very fast from then on. Senada's mother invited the "wedding procession" (svatovi) into her house, but they refused. This was because the procedure was supposed to be an elopement, albeit fictive. The bridegroom was in a hurry. In the meantime neighbours had gathered outside the house to bid Senada farewell; she embraced all the women, who were crying. She told her mother firmly to stop crying as it made things more difficult for her. Senada's sister-in-law accompanied her in the car to give her support when she arrived in her new home. On leaving the hamlet, the drivers hooted in farewell. After Senada had left, women gathered in the house of her mother na za1ost (for sorrow) to comfort her and share her 140

unhappiness. Senada's marriage procedure is typical of fictive elopement in that it combines elements from the true elopement

(ukrasti se)

and the public wedding-feast. On the

one hand, rumour had it that the bride's mother was grumpy and angry because people in the village had been discussing her daughter's imminent marriage, weeks before it took place. I was told that the mother wanted to insist on it being an elopement because "they (i.e. the bride's household) do not like to spend"

(Oni r.e vole..

troèiti,

refers here mainly to food). On the other hand, the parents

on both sides were informed about what was going to happen, and the bridegroom's parents had already been to visit the bride's closest kin (without, however mentioning their son and his relationship with the daughter). And although there was no intention of giving a wedding feast at the bride's home, there was going to be a wedding procession accompanying the bridegroom on fetching the bride and guests in the bridegroom's home upon the bride's arrival.

4.5 The marria ge ceremony The marriage ceremony or

vjenanje

is the official and

bureaucratic confirmation of a marriage. The ceremony takes place at the nearest town hail (civil marriage) and, depending on the wish of the couple, may or may not be followed by a religious ceremony conducted by a hodza according to Islamic law. The latter may, however, only take place after a marriage contract has been signed at a 141

civil ceremony (Cf. section 4.2). The civil marriage ceremony may take place from a week to a year (or even years) after the wedding. It is not uncommon to postpone registering the marriage until the first child is born and a trip must be made to the town hail to register the child anyway. The ceremony requires two witnesses (who will usually be friends or young relatives of the couple) and the couple may or may not dress up for the occasion. When the ceremony is held during the weeks preceding the wedding it is becoming increasingly common to stress the ceremony as a festive event. The couple and their witnesses (the kum and kuma)will dress up and after the ceremony they may go out for a meal. It may be a low key event with only close friends attending or a big party with relatives and friends of both the bride and the bridegroom. Should the couple want a religious ceremony this should take place within two weeks of the wedding (cf. section 4.2). As already mentioned the ceremony will take place in the bridegroom's home and will be lead by the local hoda. The two or three witnesses required will be the groom's closest male patrikin. After the ceremony the participants will be joined by close male and female relatives of the groom's father for supper. The vjencanje is surrounded with less excitement and receives less attention by neighbours and family of the bride than the wedding - which as we have seen engage the bride's family and neighbours. The vjenanje is in the case of the civil ceremony an event ( and a bureaucratic 142

necessity) involving mainly and often exclusively the young couple and their two witnesses. The religious ceremony involvesthe couple and the bridegroom's close relatives on his father's side. Both ceremonies are restricted in public accessibility and concern the bride's relatives and neighbours as the wedding itself albeit cast as a 'secret' elopement.

4.6 Conclusions The combination of the two traditions (true elopement and public wedding feast) in fictive elopement means in general that the part of the procedures taking place in the bride's village and household is marked by quasi-secrecy and lack of celebrations (as is the case with real elopement), while the events in the bridegroom's household when he arrives with the bride are similar to those at a "proper wedding", albeit on a smaller scale. Individual couples "combine" according to preference, practicality and resources. As a result, there is a general confusion at the lack of predictability in the marriage celebrations. This was clearly shown in the first case-history where there was widespread insecurity about the correct response to this particular wedding. However, uncertainty about procedures at weddings is only one example of how rapid economic development has weakened and fragmented traditional values and customs, Villagers have become disenchanted with rituals, worrying about their lack of knowledge on any public occasion. I would assume that social life in the 143

village has never taken place according to a ritual recipe book, and that there have always been disparities in ritual procedures generally and wedding procedures specifically. The main difference, I would argue, is that today people are questioning even established patterns. Many rituals which were earlier communal have taken on an increasingly private character, pertaining to the household, rather than to the community as a whole. This 'privatisation' leaves the community unsure about corporate actions, while the individual can no longer legitimate her acts simply by referring to what everybody else does. Traditional values and the customs based on them can no longer be taken for granted. The impact of transport facilities, communications and the media (in particular television), has made people more aware of different ways of life. But although they may therefore be readier to accept disparities within their own village society, the individual is left more vulnerable as a consequence. (This vulnerability may ultimately leave the villagers amenable to more doctrinal and fixed structuring principles; a topic I shall return to in the last part of the thesis which deals with Islam.)

144

Footnotes charter 4

1. Campbell reports a similar custom of keeping the bride secluded among the Greek Sarakatsani in the early sixties. He points out that the seclusion "fits the feelings of shyness and shame which a bride is expected to experience (...]"; but that it also protects her from the dangers of the evil eye and the destructive force of envy (1964:62). 2.Usage of the word "real" (which is a translation of pravo and may also mean "correct") by the older generation when referring to traditional rituals and the way they practised them as opposed to the way they are practised today, may deserve some attention. 3. To say "they do not like to spend" (oni ne vo1 troiti) is a negative characterisation of a household and is always uttered in a reproachful tone in contexts where the issue is major communal rituals. It is obvious that "not liking to spend" is contrary to the ethos of conspicuous consumption in connection with major life-cycle rituals.

145

CHAPTER FIVE: ESTABLISHING AFFINAL RELATIONS.

5.0 Introduction We have seen in the preceding chapter that the institutional importance of marriage has changed character with time. There are indications that marriage is now concerned less with the two patri-groups involved and more with the conjugal couple and their individual relationship with each of the households. Yet in spite of the weakened importance of marriage as an alliance, the custom of visits and gift-exchange between the bride's and the bridegroom's patri-group persists. A marriage is only fully acknowledged and established when the gift-exchange obligations, which are conducted according to a set of rules fixing the order and amount of the exchange, have been fulfilled. The custom of gift-exchange is occasioned by any change in status of a member of the community and the attendant necessary reconstruction of relationships and statuses within the village (cf. chapter 2). The most elaborate and extensive gift-giving is in connection with marriage and the establishing of a relationship between inlaws. The particular visit called pohod and the associated exchange of gifts establish a relationship between the bridegroom's household and family, of which the bride is now a member, and the bride's family, which as a rule belongs to another village community. (Marriage is therefore often a welcome opportunity for a household to extend the social network outside the village.) 146

All known relatives of a son or a daughter-in-law are called prijatelj or "friend", but this term has an even wider application, since any two people who have relations connected through marriage will call each other "friends" (prija is used for a woman, prijatelj for a man). "Friendship" is not automatically established upon marriage but has to be confirmed and strengthened through giftexchange and reciprocal visits. The main visits are the na rnir and the pohod. In the case of an elopement marriage, representatives of the bridegroom's household should go and visit the bride's family as soon as possible, preferably the day after her departure, "for peace" (na mir) (see chapter 4). Going na mir is required only in those cases where the daughter has left for marriage without her parents' official knowledge. The bridegroom is accompanied not by his parents, but by male representatives of the family, usually an uncle or brother. 1 The bridegroom's household will bring presents, usually coffee, sugar and cigarettes, and exchange news and wishes for a good "friendship". For the girl's parents, the immediate purpose of the visit is to learn where their daughter is, with what family and in which village. If the bride did not eloper but had a wedding procession or a wedding feast (svatovi or svadba; see chapter 4), her bridegroom and his attendants will present her household with coffee, cigarettes and sugar on the day they come to fetch her. This is the first in a series of visits and gift-exchanges between the immediate 147

families and households of the young couple in order to establish a good "friendship", culminating in the pohod. The mutual visits by in-laws used to have a much more elaborate pattern than is the case today. According to Kajmakovic, who collected her material during the sixties in a region not far from Dolina: "Already two or three days after the wedding the bride's brother will come to visit u

prijatelje. After him, the bridegroom and some relatives will go u pohodu (pohod: see section 5.1.2) to the bride's parents. Then, the bride's mother will go with some women to visit her daughter. The bride will then return the visit with her mother-in-law. Lastly, the bride's father goes to visit his daughter. At all these visits the hosts are presented with gifts." (1964:200) Kajmakovi6 goes on to explain that usually on the fourth day after the bride left her home representatives from her household would come and deliver her trousseau (oprema: see below). On receiving the trousseau those carrying it will be given gifts. The bridegroom's parents will also send gifts for the bride's parents: her mother will receive material for kat (baggy trousers and a blouse of the same material worn on special religious occasions), while the father will receive tobacco, coffee and sugar. (Significantly these items will later be offered to guests who come to visit. They are central to the 'displaying of hospitality' and therefore ultimately to the reputation of the household). Today, the different rituals in association with marriage consist of fewer sequences, and household members 148

do not visit individually over several days, but go together to the main gift-giving event, the pohod. The important fact remains, however, that gifts go both ways i.e. between the bride's and the bridegroom's household and that the gifts given by the two households should match in value. This is with the exception of the oprema which is given to the bride by her native household.

5.1 Weddin prestations 5.1.1 "Oprema" There seem to be two categories of prestations that move between in-laws at marriage: first, dar, which goes both ways between the two households involved and is an integral part of the pohod, and secondly, oprema, which goes to the bride and her future household from her parents. In the villagers' usage oprema is the equivalent of both "trousseau" and "dowry". 2 (The dictionary translation of the word oprema is "trousseau", and the word for "dowry" is miraz. However, I aever heard this latter word used to denote any of the prestations in connection with a marriage.) The "trousseau" may consist of furniture and kitchenware in addition to what the girl herself brings to the house (embroidered and crocheted pillowcases, tablecloths which she has made). The larger items like furniture are not displayed and are rarely given at the same time as the personal dar given at pohod, described below.3 According to informants, large items were not customarily 149

given in Dolina, but were known to be the custom in other regions, particularly west of Sarajevo towards Herzegovina. A mother would often worry that her daughter would marry somebody from that region: parents would feel they had to equip their daughter according to the standards in that area; for some this would mean economic hardship for years. The oprema is, unlike the dar, outside the realm of public gift-exchanges between in-laws. Nevertheless, there are usually rumours about what has been given and villagers will comment on how well certain parents have equipped their daughter in marriage (Oni su nju dobro opremili).

Rheubottom argues, on the basis of his material from Macedonia, that the trousseau "symbolises the exclusion of the bride from her natal household. In giving her compensation for labour and assistance, her family end any claims she may make for shelter and support. (...] In giving the trousseau, the bride's natal household has redefined the boundaries of their membership (1980:234) And he continues: "as the boundaries of her natal group close firmly behind her, and as their involvement in the exchange ends, a complex series of changes is occurring within the groom's group." (1980:243) From now on the gifts that are exchanged are taking place solely within the groom's group; agnatic solidarity and "clan boundaries" are emphasised and affinity indirectly denied. This pattern is significantly different from the one found in Dolina where gifts are exchanged between the bride's and bridegroom's household after the oprema has been handed over to the bride. Here 150

the two households' conunon links are stressed and their equal contribution to the formation of a new productive and reproductive unit acknowledged.

5.1.2 Pohod As we have just seen, Kajmakovic reports on several visits which take place between members of households who have become in-laws. In Dolina today, however, the main visit is the pohod attended by the young married couple, their parents and close relatives. Pohod means literally visit but is in Dolina only used about the specific first mutual visits by the members of the bride's or bridegroom's household with gifts. (This is a different usage from the one Kajamakovic reports.) In fact, the first time the parents of the newly married meet officially in their new status as

prijatelji is when

the bridegroom, the bride and

his immediate family visit the bride's household with gifts within a couple of weeks after the wedding has taken place. Later this visit is returned by the bride's parents and close relatives to the bridegroom's parents' household. The word used for gift in this context is dar (plural darovi). The more standard word pokion, meaning present, is used in Dolina for the kind of present which does not necessitate ritualised exchange. Dar is used exclusively to denote gifts given at rituals which mark the change in status of a village member; such as marriage, the birth of a child, the first hair-cutting of a child, and when a household finishes the construction of a new house.4 151

The most important exchange of dar is undoubtedly in the context of the pohod. The date is agreed on beforehand, and the hosts (the bride's parents) are therefore given the opportunity to invite relatives and neighbours to sijelo, since, they explain, "prije [friends: see section 5.0] are coming". The bridegroom's parents bring dar to the household's members, who are usually the bride's parents and grand-parents, however, some may also extend the giftgiving to collaterals who traditionally would have been members of the extended household but today form separate households; for instance, the bride's father's brothers and their wives (see chapter 6). The number of family members included in the gift-exchange depends on the social and economic standing of the two gift-giving households. The dar typically consists of underwear, nightgown and material for dimije (baggy trousers) to a woman, and underwear, shirt, material for trousers or pyjamas for a man. Rheubottoin suggests that underwear symbolises •th

sexuality and fertility andTtrengthened by the fact that these kinds of gifts are exchanged within the bride's new household (clothing is thus a symbol of kinship). In Dolina, however, such gifts are exchanged between in-laws and we could therefore argue that contrary to the Macedonian case the stress is rather more on the exchange of fertility between the two groups rather than aftexciusive preoccupation with the "fertility" of the groom's group through the new bride. Some clothes like, e.g., shirt (for a man) and headscarf (for a married woman) or dimije cannot 152

be directly associated with sexuality and fertility. They do, however, symbolise intimacy as they are clothes that should not be taken of f in public and they are usually made of better material than every-day clothes so they are also 'display items' usually worn on religious public occasions. A similar idea of equal contribution is seen in the fact that both the bride's and the groom's mother carry food to their respective pohods. In addition to clothes and material, the prijatelji will also bring all the food which will be consumed by the guests: sweet and savory dishes, fruit juice, coffee and cigarettes. This food has been prepared by the senior woman in the household and is brought to be consumed among her affines. A household is a unit of production, consumption and reproduction; the food and the clothing which are exchanged between affines i.e. the household of the bride and the bridegroom respectively represent all of this. Furthermore, offering food is the epitome of hospitality which we have seen (chapter 2) is essential to the reputation of a household. The offering of food in the bride or bridegroom's parents' house which have been prepared and brought by their affines symbolises a merging of the two households through the bride and the bridegroom. The reputations of the two households are now inextricably linked to each other. The guests invited will be family and neighbours of the bride's household. As soon as the bride's parents have managed to collect the gifts for their new in-laws, they return the visit. In addition to clothes and material, they 153

also bring food which will be offered to the guests (i.e. neighbours and relatives of the bridegroom's household). In paying back gifts, the bride's parents have to consider not only what they received from household members, but also what the bride has received separately. It is becoming increasingly common for the bridegroom's aunts to give the bride jewellery, usually gold. This is a move away from giving the bride clothing and linen (associated with fertility) towards giving her 'display items' which will be worn in public. The bride's parents will acknowledge this special gift by adding something extra to that person's dar. In one observed case bed-linen was added. Otherwise, the people who are most closely related to the bride or bridegroom, i.e. parents and grandparents, should as a rule receive more valuable gifts than kin further removed. Grandparents will usually receive old-fashioned underwear and shirts, made of thick, handwoven cotton, sewn and embroidered by hand. These have not normally been bought, but have usually been given in dar to older members of the household, maybe at the marriage of another of their grandchildren.5 In addition to relatives of the groom, the bride's parents should also return gifts to the kum and kuma, the ritual sponsors and witnesses at the marriage ceremony, who will both usually have given the bride a gold ring. The rules for the content of the dar are more or less fixed and known, but highly dependent on the standard set by the household which

initiates the gift-exchange, i.e.

154

the bridegroom's household (parents). There is nevertheless uncertainty about what is correct among the women (the mother of the bride or bridegroom), who are generally in charge of putting together the gifts. They will often ask female neighbours and in-laws for advice. This insecurity has a very real base, in as much as customs vary from region to region, and women in the village are usually originally outsiders (see chapter 3). Even if the main components are generally the same, there is a strong feeling among women coming from other villages that things are done differently in Dolina, and that they have to take care to get things right. The gift-exchanges which have to take place when a son or daughter marries are a major economic endeavour for most households. This is especially true for the bride's household, which on balance gives the most gifts. Less prosperous households may spend months and maybe years saving money and buying dar, while others may choose to be less ambitious and prestige-seeking in the quality and number of gifts given. The bridegroom's household, which visits first, sets the standard: the most important principle in these exchanges is that what is received and what is given

matched in value.

When all gifts to a daughter- or son-in-law's family have been bought and prepared, the mother will go through all gifts, checking that the content of each corresponds to the relative status of the person, and that people of equal kinship status receive gifts of identical value and 155

prestige. Any mistake made will cause shame to the giving household: the gift received will be examined in detail by visiting neighbours and a possible unfairness or flaw will soon be detected and commented on in public; and the report will soon reach the gift-givers. If the two households now connected by marriage are economically unequal, the problem is for the receiver to match the giver when it is his turn to give. If the standard set by the bridegroom's family cannot be met by the bride's, they will do their best to attain a standard according to their means which will not shame them. For the bride's parents to postpone the returning pohod for too long without acceptable economic reasons is seen as shameful, but may be less so if the dar is considerable. One family in the village had 'married off'

three daughters and was marrying of f a fourth during my stay. They had a reputation for equipping their daughters excessively, even buying them furniture. This was an exception, however. Most families settle for the standard mentioned above, and even this is very hard to live up to for some households. During the struggle of a mother in saving up for the dar and worrying that she still had to provide her daughter with the oprema her neighbours showed their sympathy by telling her to be happy that her daughter did not marry a man from across the mountains in Herzegovina, where the gift-giving customs include buying the daughter and son-in-law furniture and gifts to fill a whole house. They knew a certain woman whose daughter had 156

married in that region, and they depicted her struggles and worries with much compassion. I had the opportunity to follow one pohod in detail in connection with the marriage of a friend. This case was interesting for two reasons. First, both households involved were settled in Dolina, albeit in different hamlets; secondly, there was an explicitly acknowledged difference in economic status between the two households. The event is told from the point of view of the bride's parents.

5.2 Preparing the g ifts; a case-history The daughter, here called Amela, married in April by fictive elopement. In July the bridegroom and his immediate family, i.e. his parents and his brother, came u pohodu. The exact day had been agreed on with the bride and her family, the bride going between the two households negotiating the date and the extent of the gift-giving. Her mother-in-law was considering the more difficult economic situation of Amela's parents and wanted to make sure that they as in-laws did not intimidate them by bringing gifts of a value that they would find difficult to reciprocate. The main problem in this case was the question of the exclusion or inclusion of aunts (tetke, i.e. father's brothers' wives), since the bridegroom had many more aunts than the bride. As one of the bride's aunts was sharing a household with her grandparents, the bride and her in-laws felt it would be wrong to give a present to the 157

grandparents (which was considered compulsory, even if they were not sharing a house with the bride's parents), and ignore the aunt (their daughter-in-law). But in that case the bride's other aunts, living in different hamlets of Dolina, would also have to be included. This in turn had repercussions for Amela's parents, as they would then have to give gifts to all their daughter's husband's aunts. The bride's mother-in-law suggested that they should give gifts to Amela's aunts separately, through a visit by Axnela, but that the aunt sharing a household with her grandparents would receive her gift at the pohod. The other aunts would be told that this was the arrangement, in order not to make them upset and jealous and spread a bad reputation about their prijatelji in the village. Since this dar would not

be included in the pohod and its handing over therefore not ritualised or public, this solution would free Amela's parents from the obligation to give gifts to their son-inlaw's many aunts. However, it became a matter of pride for Amela's parents to match their in-laws' 'prestations', and in the end they did not accept any special arrangement. They made it clear that they would need more time to prepare the gifts, but that they would eventually fulfil their obligations. This would include planning and economising and might not be possible immediately after the bridegroom and his parents had visited. It was four months from the

pohod of the bridegroom and his immediate family before their in-laws were able to make a return visit. During this 158

period, the bride's mother had been putting money aside for buying gifts. During the summer months, in intense heat, she picked berries in the forest and sold them at the local cooperative. She knitted jumpers for a firm in one of the market towns, and she sent her husband to chop wood for the local forestry authorities. Whenever a sale or special offer of material or clothes was reported by a co-villager from his or her visit to one of the market towns, Ainela's mother would travel by foot and bus to the town in question and shop for her 'gift collection'. Some of the necessary items Ainela would buy herself with the money she was earning as a waitress. Her mother's friends and neighbours would engage in the project with moral support: advice about where to make purchases, what to give to whom, what would still be needed and how she could best economise on the gift-giving without being shamed (i.e. shaming herself and her household). They would also give her encouraging praise when they saw the purchases. On the day of Ainela's parents' pohod, her mother went through all the gifts for the last time with her sister-in-law to check that everything was there. The gifts were wrapped individually for each in-law in a towel. A close neighbour and friend of Amela's mother, herself born and married in Dolina, recollected her own wedding while admiring the gifts. She remembered that she (sic) had carried gifts only to the household

(U

kuói), and

not, as she said, "to the sides (na strani), like they do now". This might at first glance seem as if the gift-giving 159

has extended to relatives who were not earlier included. It is, however, important to keep in mind that the household earlier this century was a much larger unit, usually consisting of brothers with their wives and parents. (Brothers who were not living in the household would not receive gifts.) Eligibility for receiving gifts was clearly defined by membership of the household. Today, however, only parents, children and possibly grandparent make up the household. To include the father's brothers in the giftgiving exchange is therefore merely to include those who used to be part of the bride or bridegroom's household (Cf. the discussion of the zajednica in chapter 6). The problem today seems to be where to draw the line with those relatives who live outside the primary household. As we have seen in Amela's case with father's brothers' wives who do not live with their husbands in an extended family

household (zajednica, see chapter 6) any more, people are negotiating new procedures in the absence of the old, clearly defined ones. This is only one of several examples in Dolina of how traditional customs are adapted to fit a new social reality, born out of change in the economic situation and the resulting tendency towards individualism and consumerism.

5.2.1 The visit On the agreed evening Amela arrived with her husband and his parents and young brother to visit u pohodu. Neighbours and relatives to Amela also came. The gifts that 160

Amela's parents- in-law brought were displayed among the women, who sat in a room separate from the men. (At a big event like this men and women socialise

in separate rooms.

only displayed among the women.) All the food which was served, including coffee and also cigarettes had The gifts are

been brought by Amela's mother-in-law. At the point when coffee is being drunk it is time for those present to decide on who is "guilty of" the bride's (and bridegroom's marriage). One man and one woman are picked. The woman who is chosen must make a display of protesting fiercely, trying to plead her innocence, but she has already lost her case and will be lifted up from her seat by other women, carried to the doorway and thrown outside. The same thing will take place among the men. On this occasion the uncle, i.e. father's brother, and aunt and closest neighbours of the bride were blamed. The woman who is held responsible for the girl's marriage is called ona koja zabuni, (i.e. "she who confuses") or ona koja odnese ("the one who takes with her"). She and the woman

who lifts her out of the house are given gifts (underwear and a towel). The man found responsible for the bridegroom's marrying is likewise thrown out of the house by male guests, and he and his accuser are both given a shirt and a towel as gifts. The traditional custom of

"blaming" somebody for the

marriage of a son or daughter at the pohod seems to have had more relevance when marriage came about by the mediating skills of a third party. This would have been the 161

case when the young met mainly at sijelos, and a young man would approach a girl, who would always be under the protection of a chaperone, for courtship through the agency of a third person (c f. chapter 3). Today, however, the young couple usually comes together on their own initiative. A go-between may still be used, but he is more often a friend from the same age group, who may be the cousin of the girl in question or know somebody who can approach her. If the friend who has played a role in the coming together of the couple and thus has some indirect responsibility for the marriage is not related to the household or its close neighbours, he or she will not be present at the pohod. Yet even the go-between is present, his or her involvement will probably not have been known to the senior men and women, since this role will have been played outside the neighbourhood/village context. The dances and coffee bars where couples meet are located outside Dolina and attended only by unmarried, young people from the region. At a traditional

sijelo young

people would have

been part of a social occasion in which senior married household members would also participate, although the two categories would usually not mix and would keep to different rooms.

5.3 Conclusions When the gifts have been presented and displayed and

the food consumed among prijae1ji and neighbours at the 162

pohod, the gift-giving obligations have been fulfilled by the bride's parents. A good "friendship" has now been established and the marriage process may be said to have come to an end. In chapter 2 I argued that a central aspect of the day-to-day

interaction which

integrates the community is

social exchange. Ritual gift-giving is part of this social exchange. Such exchanges create bonds of alliance and commonality. The degree of strength and intimacy of these bonds are reflected in the types of gifts given on different occasions. The gifts exchanged between affines symbolise commonality relating to the household as a unit of reproduction, production and coinmensality and thus a high degree of intimacy. I suggest that the gift-exchange which takes place between affines stresses the common interests of the bride and bridegroom's household and their equal contribution to the 'creation' of a new reproductive (and productive) unit. (Cf. Rheubottom [1980] who argues that "wedding prestations" symbolise the denial of affinity and the drawing of boundaries between the two household.) It has already been pointed out (chapter 2) that Catholics are only to a limited extent part of Muslims' social exchange. The gift-exchange pattern between Catholic affines is similar to that described for Muslims, but since intermarriage between Muslims and Catholics Is rare in the village such exchanges are equally rare between Catholic and Muslim households. Indeed, I would argue that the prestations exchanged between affines rather than 163

emphasising clan boundaries as suggested by Rheubottom (1980) for his Nacedonian material, stresses common identity and ultimately ethnic boundaries. In the last three chapters we have discussed the different stages in the process of marrying. We have seen that individuals choose different strategies according to economic means. It is clear that the young today act more individualistically than their parents' generation did, although their involvement in the wider community (i.e.the ethnic community more generally), is still reflected, first, in their reluctance to marry outside the ethnic group and, secondly, in the importance of gift-exchange and the establishment of a "good friendship" (i.e. affinal relations). The continued emphasis on affinal relations is furthermore an indirect acknowledgement of women (or wives) as the vital links between the household and a wider social network of relationships entailing mutual obligations (cf. chapter 2). A woman may mobilise her kin in support of her household and her affines (e.g. in terms of financial help), but she may also mobilise their support for herself and her children where she is in a conflict with her husband's family. From the point of view of her husband's family a wife's role is therefore seen as ambiguous and her loyalty may be seen as spurious. In the next chapter a wife's role as both an insider to and outsider of the household dominated by her husbands' family will be examined in more detail.

164

Footnotes charter 5

1. According to Hangi (1906), the father of the bridegroom would also visit, but in Dolina I found this was never the case. This may indicate (as suggested at the beginning of the chapter) that marriage is today seen less as the concern of the agnatic group of the household and more as a matter between the bridegroom and the bride's household. The same trend is reflected in other marriage procedures: for instance, the bridegroom's father will not accompany his son when he goes to bring the bride home with him. It should be noted, however, that the bride's father still has a role to play, as he is usually the one who brings the bride's trousseau. 2. Thus, Rheubottom (1980) notes on the basis of his material on marriage in Macedonia that what is the equivalent of dowry is not a prestation from her household to the bridegroom's household, but rather gifts to the bride and therefore ultimately to her household. 3. Rheubottom argues that the "bridal furniture" are not displayed because they are associated with the bride's productive and reproductive capacities. The bride's future role as a mother is seen as ambiguous as it represents both a threat to the stability and unity of her new household as well as a hope for the continuity of the lineage (1980:247-48). 4. The ritual gift-exchange in Bosnia is extensive, and is also common in the sphere of religious rituals (see chapter 8). Suffice it to note at this point, however, that gift-exchange in Bosnia is immediate rather than postponed. Gifts that are given for instance at a birth will not be 'returned' when there is a birth in the gift-giving household; rather, gifts should be 'returned' as part of the gift exchange connected to that particuiar event. Thus, a mother who receives gifts during the forty days' confinement after birth should immediately afterwards drop in on those neighbours who visited her and in turn give them gifts (cf. chapter 2). 5. I would follow Jane Schneider in arguing that these hand-made objects represent seclusion and virtue and the properly domesticated within-the-house labour of generations of honourable women (1980:350).

165

CHAPTER SIX: THE HOUSEHOLD

6.0 Introduction A radical change in the composition and organisation of the patrilineally based household as a result of wage labour and modern education over the last ten to thirty years has been reported widely from rural areas in SouthEastern Europe and the Middle East. 1 In this chapter we shall look at the structural and organisational changes within the patri].ineal joint family household, the zajednica, in Dolina over a period of three generations.

The first part of the chapter will discuss the basic social unit in the village, the household or ku6a, and will focus on how both the unit's structure and organisation have changed over a period of fifty years. This change can only be explained by looking at the changing relationship between the members of the kuca and the gradual division of the communal household. The second part of the chapter deals with the change in status of its junior women and examines their role in the division process. First, however, there will be a short presentation of the form of the house and its physical and economic context (see also chapter 1).

6.1 The house and the land The modern house typically has two or three rooms of which the central one is the combined kitchen, lounge and bedroom. This is the room where the stove is situated and 166

in older houses also the banjica ( a small space in the corner with a cemented drain for washing by pouring water from a jug). Along the walls are placed mattresses and pillows which serve as beds during the night and sofas during the day. Guests are always received in the kitchen. Other rooms serve as sleeping-rooms for the bigger children, but are never heated in winter. Most have pictures of family members, school photographs of their children, a portrait of Tito and a picture with an Islamic religious motif, like the Kaaba in Mecca or a praying girl in a beautiful headscarf. 2 Some houses have their living quarters situated above the cellar and the stable, others will have separate buildings for this purpose. The area immediately surrounding the house is cleared for access to neighbouring houses, with a bench to sit on, study village life, and drink coffee; there are sheds for tools, etc., stables, piles of wood left out to dry, and the characteristic egg-shaped haystack. The basca or patch of land where all sorts of vegetables for household consumption are grown is usually just beyond this area. The basca is tended mainly by women, but they may be joined by

their husbands for more major tasks like clearing the fields, ploughing or harvesting potatoes. If the household possesses additional land, the whole family will be engaged in clearing, planting and bringing in the crop (the staple food is potatoes, which have replaced the more labourintensive maize). If the land is on a slope, it will be ploughed by a horse, but on flat land a tractor will be 167

used. Only a small number of households in Dolina proper, however, possess a horse or a tractor; two Nuslim households own a horse each and two Catholic households have a tractor each, and whenever major agricultural work like ploughing needs to be done, a household will pay the owner of a horse or tractor to do the job. Some households have cattle and households which have more land will normally also have several cows (the two richest landowners in the village, two brothers, have five cows each). Villagers with a small landholding will have to buy hay for winter feeding or arrange for a

kesim, a

contract between a landowner and a tenant. The possession of a cow (or even more so) several cows is still a reflection of the economic standing of the household and thus source of pride and renown. The milking and processing of cheese is a woman's work, and where there is a daughterin-law she will traditionally be allocated the job. Surplus milk and sour cream (poviaka), and more rarely cheese not consumed by the household will be sold to households in the village that do not have a cow. The woman running the household which has no production of milk will approach the female head of a household which is believed to have a surplus production and the two women will strike a deal for the delivering of milk daily. The former may have to find new suppliers when the original one has a decrease in production, or decides to sell cheeses and sour cream in the market, where she may obtain a better price. To sell at the market the villager need a permit issued by the 168

council in the market town. Every market-town in the region has its particular day for the weekly market when peasants from the surrounding villages come to sell their dairy products, vegetables or handicrafts. Some households also keep sheep; this, I was told, was much more widespread some fifteen to twenty years ago when living in

zajednica

provided more labour, and children and unmarried household members would herd the sheep. It was common for households to provide their own wool. Women would weave and knit. Today only two elderly women in the village know how to weave. Those who own sheep and cannot herd them themselves, because of lack of labour, will leave them with one of the two full-time herdsmen; one is a Catholic, the other a Muslim.

6.2 The concept of kuca There are several terms in Serbo-Croat which are translated as household. They convey, however, different organisational and membership patterns. Domadinstvo or dom is the technical term used in official statistics and papers to refer to those who share a house, but, as we shall see, it does not always correspond to the local definition of what constitutes a household, since kin who share a house do not necessarily constitute one household. The emic (i.e the villagers' own) definition of kuca (lit, house) is not clear-cut. It is used in the village to refer to both the building and the unit which inhabits it. Generally, it is taken to mean those people who share a 169

household economy, the yield of the land and eat together. Only the people who eat together from the same pot are then defined as a kuca. There are nevertheless inconsistencies within and exceptions to this general definition. This is due to a quite recent development where one household divides into two, yet continues to live under one roof so in effect there are 'two houses living in one house'. This is usually only a temporary solution until a new and separate house can be built. A ku6a may consist of several porodice (lit, families), but the development is towards a kua or household being made up of a core family, while the zajednica would usually consist of a group of brothers, their parents, wives and children. To illustrate this point, I shall later look at the developmental history of one settlement through three generations. Zajednica ( lit. community) is the term used to refer to an extended family unit. Thus, one house in the village was inhabited by an old man, and his wife, their youngest son, and his wife and two children. The old couple and the young family cooked and ate separately. They gave me the following clarification of their household organisation: "When we live in the same house but do not eat together, we are two families (porodice). But when we all eat together and give the old man money, then it would be zajednica." Commensality and a shared economy are clearly stressed as the defining criterion of a household unit, with zajednica being a household unit consisting of more than one porodica. 170

6.3 The south Slav loint famil y ; the zadruga The extended household, termed zadruqa in most of south Slav ethnography, is perhaps the most discussed and analysed institution within Yugoslav (and Balkan) ethnology. (See e.g St.Erlich, 1966; Byrnes (ed.), 1976). It is a term with a complicated history and multifaceted connotations. Although it has been paid a disproportionate amount of attention (compared to its relevance at the village level) it cannot be disregarded, and I shall therefore review some of the controversies surrounding it and suggest some clarifications. The term zadruga is used with mainly two different meanings. Firstly in the sense of the communal living of more than two generations (or a group) of kin. This is how it is understood in the ethnographic literature. Secondly, in post-war Yugoslavia zadruga referred officially to a state-collective. I shall

deal with both usages in turn. The zadruga has, in Mosely's words, been recognised as one of the basic forms of social organisation within the societies of south-eastern Europe. He defines the institution as a "household composed of two or more biological or small families.., owning its means of production communally, producing and consuming the means of its livelihood jointly, and regulating the control of its property, labour and livelihood communally" (Mosely,1976:19). Although there has been an attempt to present the zadruga as an institution unique to the south 171

Slav peoples, scholars today agree that the use of a specific Slav term instead of a more abstract one has obscured the fact that "the joint family household" has been reported from many regions (Cf. M. Mead, 1976 p. xxii.) A substantial part of the ethnographic literature is devoted to a discussion of the disintegration of the zadruga. St. Erlich (1966) reports that already in the late 1930s, when she conducted her survey, the zadruga was in different stages of disintegration. However, she further notes that in Muslim districts the zad.rug'a never flourished as it did in other areas. Fi1ipovi, who studied the communal household in Bosnia in the sixties (Filipoviá, 1976) came to a similar conclusion. The disintegration of the extended family unit is often explained in terms of the "requirements" of modern industrialised society. This view has been criticised by Davis, who argues that membership in the zadruga was not genealogically ascribed, but that "people were recruited ad hoc to provide a sufficient labour force for however much land was taken in tenancy, and the family was thus created after negotiation - with the landowner on the one hand, and with potential members on the other" (1977:172). In post-war Yugoslavia zad.ruga was used to denote a state collective. When the collectivisation program for agricultural land was abandoned in the fifties, zadruga was incorporated in Yugoslav property law as a form of ownership, together with private property, state property 172

and "social property", and defined as collective family ownership (cf. Chioros, 1970). In fact this usage and definition may be the closest to the zadruqa's original meaning as also indicated by Davis. The concept therefore now has strong associations with Communist policies and rationalisations) Indeed, the only known meaning of zadruqa in Dolina was that of a co-operative or "social property" run according to the Yugoslav self-managing system. Thus the council (i.e. Communist party) run a community house, which would be referred to as a zad.rug'a. 4 The extended family household would be referred to as a zajednica. This usage is also reported by contemporary Yugoslav ethnographers for other areas of Bosnia (see e.g. Stojakovi6, 1987). Older Dolina informants who lived in extended household units preceding the collectivisation program after the war would insist that these were and are called zajednica. 5

At this

point it is difficult to say which usage is the original. Have informants been so successfully indoctrinated that they have erased zad.ruga as the term for communal households from their minds, and redefined it as communal property and co-operative in the Communist sense of mode of production? I doubt it. A more likely reason is that the zadruga was a rather restricted phenomenon, confined to certain areas of Yugoslavia. Furthermore, the term zadruga, as has later been shown, was not originally a word used by peasants locally; the terms most commonly used by the peoples themselves vary from region to region, kuca being 173

the most common. (Zajednica or velika kwia (i.e. big house) which were the two terms used to denote the extended family household in Dolina, are also reported to have a wide distribution. (See Filipoviâ, 1976.) Indeed the Serbian

linguist Vuk Karad was the first to use it when

introducing it into his dictionary of the Serbian language in 1818. Zadruga is thus an academic term which has become widely known and used through the influence of schools, literature, and legal documents. Having played a part in nineteenth century discourse and arising Serbian and south Slav nationalism and cultural awareness, the term zadruga was later adopted by the state and by Marxist academic writers to argue for the inherent co-operative and communal (i.e. Communist) attitude of Yugoslav peasants. Evidence suggests, however, that zadruqa originally referred to a particular kind of joint ownership of land typical of areas with rich landowning clans (very different from Dolina), and a means of organising work on that land. The zadruqa is therefore not necessarily identical with the extended family unit, and its applicability is more restricted than is often the case in ethnographic literature.

6.4 The decline of the loint famil y household In Dolina the joint household never seems to have reached the sizes that have been reported for areas of Serbia. I would infer from the relative poverty of land in Dolina that the popularity anc size of the joint family 174

household would be dependent on the quality and size of the landholding. In Dolina, the older generation remember zajednica with twenty to twenty-five members. 6 The houses then had a different lay—out from the newer ones. The changing composition of the household is thus aptly reflected in the change of architecture in the dwellings, and therefore in the structural lay out of the hamlets and ultimately of the village. The expression used when describing this form of household organisation is "to live in community" (Eivjeti u

zajednici). There

are frequent references to how life

used to be when families were living in zajednica. Women who had experienced living as a bride in a communal household, as most over thirty would have done, used to say that as long as they lived in zajednica they did not own

anything. They would then quote a proverb: "zajednica jadanica" (i.e. living in a zajednica means poverty and misery). This refers both to the fact that the custom of living as large joint families belonged to a time when living standards in rural Bosnia were much lower than today, and to the experience of being in a junior position with no property rights within such a household. On the other hand, older women who had experienced life in a communal household in a senior role would talk favourably about the labour organisation in the house. These two opposite ideas about what living in a communal household entailed clearly reflect its hierarchical character and the different experiences of individuals in different positions 175

in this hierarchy. While a senior couple would benefit from having power over the labour of sons and daughters-in-law, the latter would aspire to be in control of their own labour and household. The eventual disintegration of the communal household has been subject to much theorising in the literature, ranging from the impact of industrialisation and capitalism to a general change in traditional patriarchal values. However, on the basis of my material from Dolina, it is clear that it is not division of the kuca per se which demands an explanation, as the household would inevitably have divided into smaller units at some point (on the developmental cycle of the household and the inevitability of the short-term break-up of the joint family, see Parry, 1979 and Stirling, 1963). The question we have to address is why the division happens at a much earlier stage than in the past, since over a three-generational period, i.e. about sixty to eighty years, the trend has clearly been towards an earlier division of the communal household. For example, Rheubottom reported from his field-research in Macedonia in the sixties that while in the previous generation it had been the custom for Sons to continue living together after their father died, it was becoming common for brothers to split up when their father died. In Dolina thirty years ago a son and his wife would start out living in

zajednica, but

would eventually build their own

house and move out with their children, so that only the youngest son and his family would as a rule remain in his 176

parents' house. Today, however, the youngest son, too, increasingly tends to leave his father's house when he marries, or at least starts to build his own house as soon as possible after he has married. The situation is therefore often that all Sons move out before their parents are dead. This means that there is a development towards the domestic group being concomitant with the core family, i.e. the conjugal couple and their offspring. Today, a division of the household is not a division of the brothergroup, but rather a division and reduction of the threegeneration household, with married couples living separately. However, a young couple may share house with his parents while they are saving money and working on finishing a new and separate house; often built on family land and therefore next to the "old house". Out of 20 househoidsof which I have good data 10 households consisted of a couple and their children (seven of which had children of school and pre-school age; 3 with their children between the ages of 17-23); 7 households consisted of a couple, their children and a daughter-in-law (in four of them there were also grand-children); 3 households consisted of a couple only (their children having moved out). In those cases where more than one son is married and one son and his wife (and children) share with his parents this is always the youngest son. The above data do not account for children who have moved out of their parents household. However, counting the number of children of twenty couples heading their own household (ten of the pre-war and ten of 177

the post-war generation), I found that the pre-war generation had 5 children on average while the post-war generation had 3. Below I give a case history to illustrate a typical course of events when a joint household splits into smaller units in Dolina.

Case-history The Smajic settlement consists of two houses, called here A and B. House A is inhabited by Atif (80), his wife, and youngest son with his wife and two children. Atif used to share a house with his four brothers and their families, but as his own family grew he had a separate house built in front of the original one. (His brother also had a house built next to this one, on the spot where house B now stands.) Atif's oldest daughter says: "We grew up in the old house which was on the same spot as this new one (built ten years ago). We were twelve people living in one room; mother, father, six children, my grandmother, and father's brother with his wife and children. Father was working very hard, simply for us to be able to eat and drink". The old house consisted of several rooms with an open hearth, and every family unit had its own room. It was demolished fifteen years ago, and on top of the old foundations a new house was built of concrete, with a kitchen stove. The second house, house B, is inhabited by Atif's next youngest son with his wife, their daughter, and their son with his wife. In this household both the father and the 178

daughter have paid work and contributed to the household economy, whereas the son and daughter-in-law were unemployed. Until recently this young couple was part of a communal household. They split up after a series of disputes about the son's financial contribution to the household after he and, somewhat later, his wife got regular jobs. The father complained that the son should give more of his wages towards the communal household, and the quarrel ended up with the father threatening his son with a knife. The son escaped and within a couple of days the young couple set up a separate household in their room (situated on the first floor of the son's parent's house), which they turned into a traditional combined kitchen, bedroom and lounge. The division means that now the daughter-in-law is cooking separately for herself and her husband. For the household in question the splitting up of the household economies, which involves cooking and eating separately, was the most viable solution. This family is in possession neither of the land required nor of the financial means to build a new house. The two couples in house B are now considered to constitute two kuca. This is (among other things) evident in the visiting pattern of neighbouring women. They consider coffee visits to the mother and the daughter-in-law as separate occasions. As we shall see below, this is not necessarily the case with house A. The domestic group in house A has much the same history as the one in house B. sThe difference is that even 179

if this house also consists of two households, they are not generally perceived as separate by co-villagers. This house consists of three rooms: two kitchens and a third room which is used as a storage room, for guests, and for sleeping in the summer. Atif and his wife live in one combined kitchen, sitting- and sleeping room, while his youngest son with his wife and two children live in the other. They have separate economies, and produce, cook and eat the food separately. After the son in the house A got a regular job, his wife initiated the

construction of the new house, and she

insisted on having her kitchen separate from her mother-inlaw's. Ten to fifteen years ago this would have been quite a radical action, and not justifiable in the same way as today. This may be the reason why this house, unlike house B, has never been accepted as consisting of two households, at any rate not by the older population in the village. Thus, if visitors to the house go to the older couple's room and are invited by the daughter-in-law to come to her next time, they usually answer: "Your place and their place (next door) are one and the same thing". The daughter-inlaw is always eager to stress that her household is separate from that of her mother-in-law whom she disliked strongly. Her mother-in-law, however, still likes to think of it as one household, with her as the head. The disparity in how the

kuc'a

is perceived by the two generations of

women manifests itself in recurring quarrels concerning the management of common property To give one example: the 180

mother and daughter-in-law used to co-operate (but only with difficulty) in milking and looking after a cow. When they had to sell the cow, the daughter-in-law refused to share the workload with her mother-in-law when a new one was bought. For six months the mother-in-law looked after the cow on her own, but the workload was too heavy for her, and finally the cow was sold to the son and daughter-inlaw. The son and daughter-in-law in this house are now building a new house in a different mahala approximately fifteen minutes walk away, and the old couple will stay behind. "I want a place of my own", says the daughter-inlaw.

6.4.1 The bargaining power of junior women The increase in the availability of wage labour and migration abroad have secured the economic independence of Sons, who are no more totally dependant on income from agriculture and land-owning fathers and lead to a shift of authority from fathers to sons. This i turn has resulted in a shift from the extended family unit to the conjugal couple as the focal point of the household, and thus represents a radical change in the situation of women and how they perceive their own role within the household. This change in the economic power within the household has facilitated realisation of junior members' aspirations, particularly in this case, the desire of young women to have a separate household from their mother-in-law. The main incentives are the conflict inherent in the 181

mother/daughter-in-law relationship, as well as junior women's increased sense of being justified in their demands for independence from the husband's family, embodied to a large extent in the mother-in-law. The division of the communal household is usually initiated by the person or persons who have been most dissatisfied and have most to gain in status from a breaking up of the

zajednica, namely

the junior woman or

daughter-in-law. The impact of new values favouring the consumer society and the nuclear family have given her a wider ideological legitimation for her demands and initiatives. One of the options for a junior woman who is suffering under the authority of her husband and his family is to leave them and return home. This is a strategy commonly followed by women in Dolina who wish to break away from their mothers-in-law. It is often used as a way of bargaining over the division of the joint household, and has been made possible by the reduced importance of the joint family and the shift towards the conjugal couple as the unit of reference, i.e. the unit around which both the moral and the organisational worlds of the household revolve. Conflicts in such households between a daughter-in-law and her mother-in-law are often frequent and become part of the drama in everyday village life. The centrality of the household in village life makes it most frequent topic of conversation between neighbours at coffee visits and 182

evening visits (sijelos), relations between a cohabiting mother- and daughter-in-law being of particular interest among women. In cases where the daughter-in-law finally leaves, village women discuss the circumstances, what the mother-in-law has said or done, who is to blame, and the husband's reaction. A conflict-ridden communal life with a mother-in-law is something a young woman today does not have to accept. There were several cases of women in the village who, at one point during their marriage, had left their husband and parents-in-law and returned to their own parents for one or several periods. A separation may not be permanent, and the woman may leave her husband for various reasons, the most common being her relationship with his parents, as we shall see. For the bride or young woman to return to her parents, the expression for which is ona je se vratila (lit, she turned back), because of an unhappy

life with her husband and his family, is condemned in principle by both men and women as shameful. On the other hand, they comment that it used to be a really "big shame" (velika sramota) before. The shame would, however,

primarily fall on the girl's parents. While today the husband will usually go and ask his estranged wife to come back to him, women told me that not more than fifteen years ago the unhappy woman, "if her family was of any worth", was returned by her brother or father, who would refuse to welcome her. A woman in her thirties said that when she returned home at eighteen and one year of marriage her brother refused to let her stay in her native home and sent 183

her back with the words: "You belong to your husband now, and your place is with him". When people comment on known women and events, however, there is less of a condemnation than an interested and lively discussion as to why she left and who is ultimately to blame. Usually, her husband and/or mother-in-law is/are blamed, though not to their faces, for being the cause of the young woman's inability to stay on in the household. Since all married women have experienced a period as a junior woman under their mothers-in-law's command, usually fraught with conflict they usually consider the "bride's" decision to "go back" to her parents' home with sympathy. During my stay two young women in the neighbourhood left their husbands and, indirectly, their mothers-in-law and went back to stay with their own mothers. Both instances were commented on in detail by women in the neighbourhood (who had not yet become motherin-laws themselves) and proved to be welcome opportunities for them to relive their own experiences as low-status, young daughters-in-law. Unlike today's young women, they had to stick it out. Depicting the difficulties of sharing a household with one's mother-in-law, women would stress the lack of freedom under her authority: they would have to ask her permission for even the smallest thing, such as helping themselves to a piece of bread. These women would agree that today's young women are more clever then they were, as they do not put up with as much subjugation. Most importantly, however, the economic standard and independence of young couplesi (and even of the wife) is 184

much better than, say, twenty years ago, and for a woman to return home to her parents actually presents itself as a viable alternative. Her parents nowadays usually have both the economic means to support her, and the extra room to be able to welcome her back, and she can often support herself by taking paid work. A particularly critical period of a marriage where the couple shares a household with the man's parents seems to be after the young wife has given birth to her first child. On one occasion a young woman was so unhappy with her mother-in-law and all the work she demanded from her, that she was actually advised by neighbouring women to leave her nine month-old baby behind, when she said she wanted to leave and go back to her mother. They suggested it would be good for them to see what she had to cope with, and besides, they continued, "the child is theirs" (i.e. it belongs to the husband's patri-group). Leaving the child behind, however, also means that she is more likely to return. In fact the woman was away for two months, but said she could not bear it because of the child; if it had not been for him, she insisted, she would never have returned. This was also the outcome predicted by the women in the village. I suggest that the period after a bride (miada) has given birth and become a mother, and by implication fully a woman (iena), is most critical in a two-generational and patrilocal household, since the important change in status of the daughter-in-law can threaten the position of her 185

mother-in-law. The daughter-in-law now feels she has more rights and will more readily stand up for herself. She may also assume that her position and bargaining power with her husband are considerably strengthened. One young woman who to everybody's knowledge had very good relations with her mother-in-law and behaved in a respectful manner towards her changed after giving birth to a son. It was ruinoured that she was not respectful any more, but angry and rude

(bezobrazna, lit, without manners), as it was said she used to be towards her own mother. Her change in behaviour was ascribed to the fact that now that she had given birth to a son, she believed that she could get away with anything, and that she could do no wrong towards her husband as the mother of his son. Although a strong code of mutual help and obligation, and the idea that the relationship between in-laws is valued as friendship (cf. chapter 5) have always been stressed in Bosnian society (as shown in older ethnographic literature and in folk-history and songs, see e.g. Y. Lockwood, 1983 and Hangi, 1906), there are indications that the woman's kin are adopting a more central role in the conjugal couple's life and that of their children. The pressure for the woman to give up her native village and her relations there and replace them with an exclusive commitment to her husband's is weakening. There are even indications that the relationship between a woman's relatives and native village and her husband and children is becoming more central, which may be another effect of 186

the weakening of a patrilineal ideology.7 The different perceptions are also dependent on gender however. While the older generation of men will claim that a woman's native village is not important to her, and that, unlike a man, she may put down roots anywhere, women will dispute this. Younger men will acknowledge this fact but appear to reduce its threat to their own patri-kin's superiority by jokingly saying they are going back to "my village", when it is clear from the context that they are going to visit their wife's village. The relationship between a husband and his wife's brothers is often warm, and sometimes more relaxed than that with his own brothers. The change in socio-economic structure since world war two has, I would argue, most markedly affected women whose position as a junior member of a patrilineally structured household was traditionally weak. While the last generation of women slowly gained influence in decision-making in household affairs as their children grew older, they still had to obey the mother-in-law as long as she was there. Husbands normally sided with their mothers. Today, the young bride may refuse to go and live with a mother-in-law, or, if she does go, she will not silently put up with adverse conditions. As we have just seen, she may well make her point by returning to her parents, often leaving her children behind, and only coming back when her husband promises to fulfil some of the conditions she sets, such as separating from his parents' household. Among most villagers (certainly among the women) it is considered 187

acceptable for a young woman to refuse to live communally with her husband's family. Such an attitude is seen as "modern", or "cultured". Furthermore, for a young couple to be able to have their own house, separate from the husband's parental home, is a sign. of economic success and therefore increased status, the implication being that now only poor people live in large groups. Thus alongside an improvement in living standards goes a change in the values of the younger generation, encouraged partly by the official discourse of socialism and economic progress for both men and women, as well as by the values of the western consumer society and the ideal of the nuclear family. Lastly, I would argue that the relatively weak influence of the patrilineage in contemporary village life (an influence already modified by the relatively strong emphasis traditionally laid on affinal relations) has facilitated the impact of these new socio-economic elements. In sum the improved material situation in most households, not least the young woman's native household, together with the weaker authority of the patri-kin, has made a young wife's bargaining power noticeably stronger.

188

Footnotes cha pter 6

1. The literature is extensive, but see for instance Brink, 1987 on Egypt, papers by various authors on Turkey in Mediterranean Family Structures, ed. Peristiany, 1976 and several authors on central and south eastern Europe in Communal Families in the Balkans: The Zadruqa, ed. Robert Byrnes, 1976. 2. Thus summing up aptly the legacy of a Socialist, Yugoslav identity on the one hand and an Islamic, Bosnian Muslim one on the other; or what C. Sorabji would call the Bosnian Muslims' "double identity". (Sorabji, 1989). 3. Nyerere's Tanzanian socialist collectivisation settlements

vjarma villages, were rationalised as being based on African kinship cooperation.

4. Among other events the Saturday dance, described in chapter four takes place here. 5. Most claim not to have benefited from this collectivisation, as they indicated that land was redistributed to the benefit of party members. 6. But see Rheubottom, 1976 on the difficulty of assessing household size from informants' reports. 7. This phenomenon is well reported by Olga Supek 1986, Transformacija patriarhalnih odnosa: od zadruge do neo-lokalnosti u Jasnskom prigorju" (The transformation of patriarchal relationships: from zadruga to neo-local household in Jaskansko prigorje) in: Etnoloki Pregled, 22 Beograd 1986.

189

CHAPTER SEVEN: FROM MAIDEN TO WIFE.

7.0 Introduction One of my earliest realisations of life in the village was that there were different categories of women: the maiden (cura), the bride (miada), the wife ('ena), the divorcee (pustenica) and the widow (udovica). The maiden, however, had a status which was radically different from all the others, the chief distinguishing factor being her assumed ignorance of sexuality. The main opposition is thus between maidens and wives and it will be argued that this categorisation is a key to understanding women's social life and is indeed crucial to the analysis of Muslim ethnic identity generally. This chapter will explore why these two categories are stressed and how they relate to each other. First, it will look at what it means to be a cura and zena respectively: the ideas, values and symbols implied as well as the different tasks and social activities. Secondly, it attempts to show how a maiden is socialised and eventually turned into a wife via the liininal stage of "bride" (mlada). Lastly, I shall argue that women are the pivots of ethno-religious identity and thus that a successful transition from maiden to wife is considered as crucial to the persistence of ethnic group identity as perceived by the group itself. Throughout this chapter I have translated cura (plural cure, lit, girl) as "maidens" to convey the importance of the girl's unmarried status (cf. chapter 3, ftn. 1).1 Zena 190

(plural ene) is the word for both "woman" and "wife". I have chosen to translate it as "wife" because in the rural context it has to be understood in its opposition to cura.

7.1 Ideals of female behaviour There seem to be at least four key issues related to the moral behaviour of women: how a woman dresses, where she goes (especially when unaccompanied), whether she is hard-working and keeps her house clean, and how she behaves towards men. It should be noted, however, that in the eyes of 'the moral few' a woman can counterbalance, say, dressing indecently by being meticulously clean and industrious. Thus, certain acts or kinds of behaviour may be judged by some as shameful, but that does not mean that the person is shameful, since her behaviour in another situation may comply with moral ideals.2 Moreover, the category to which a woman belongs in terms of marital status defines her in terms of how she should behave, dress and speak. This comes out clearly in the change of behaviour, especially towards the opposite sex, and style of dress a girl is expected to adhere to when she is married and a "wife". Central to the assessment of women's behaviour are two expressions which categorise them as more or less moral, but also reflect the critical role of women as both outsiders (in the household and the village) and the ultimate sustainers of ethnic boundaries and of the recreation of Muslim group identity. We shall see that 191

these concepts are expressions of the different status of married women and unmarried girls. The expressions in question are puno hodati ("to go about") and voic raditi ("to like working"). The word hodati (see chapter 2) comes up repeatedly in conversations evaluating women's moral behaviour. The dictionary translation is the straightforward "to walk". In everyday speech in the village, however, it is a concept which harbours a whole set of moral values. (To express the neutral action of "walking" they would use the expression iái pjeke, i.e. go by foot.) To say about a woman that she "goes about a lot" (puno hoda) is a negative assessment and entails moral condemnation; "liking working" (vole raditi), obviously enough, has positive connotations. Puno hodati and vole raditi are often presented as opposites and mutually

exclusive. The condemnatory content of puno hodati, however, varies according to whether the woman is a maiden or a wife. Wives may walk around alone, but maidens must always ask a female relative or, failing that, a child to accompany them. For a maiden, therefore, "going about" may imply that she is not honourable, while for a wife it implies that she goes visiting a lot (the men would say "goes around gossiping a lot") and therefore cannot be industrious (vole raditi) which is one of the ideals for a woman for "moral untidiness and an untidy house go hand in hand" (Dubisch, 1986:200). Furthermore, she will probably have potential power from knowing more about what is going on in the village and most people will therefore 192

be wary of such a woman (Cf. chapter 2). The same opposition and moral ideal have been noted for several Greek communities (cf. du Boulay 1976; Hirschon 1978;) and Dubisch comments: "By spending too much time outside the house, a woman is not only neglecting her domestic duties, but also may be engaging in polluting and destructive behaviour such as illicit sexual activity or gossip [...] (Dubisch, 1986:200). I found, however, that there was a marked difference in stress on what kind of behaviour was considered 'destructive' depending on whether the woman was a maiden or a wife. Hodati conveys two ideas which are of

significance.

First it implies that a person is going about beyond the household and immediate neighbourhood, and is thus outside the moral control of her household, neighbours and relatives, and potentially dangerous to the reputation of the household, Secondly, it suggests that the action is aimless . I would argue that although the control of young girls' sexuality may be partly behind the moral connotations, the central issue is whether a person is acting in the interest of the household, or more individualistically. It could be argued that the moral condemnation of women who are "going about a lot" by those who comply with expected role behaviour reflects ow women have internalised men's control of female sexuality. Although a classical Mediterranean ethnographic theme, this argument falls into the trap of seeing women as defining 193

themselves through men. Furthermore, this argument depicts women as reacting rather than acting, as complying rather than replying and as re-creative rather than creative. I suggest that this analytically biased and, indeed, ethnographically incorrect presentation can be challenged by also looking at women's control of men and the moral restrictions women put on men's behaviour. Indeed, the moral condemnation of "going about a lot" turns out to apply to married men equally strongly. Since married men in this respect are mainly condemned by women and there are men (like there are women ) who comply with behaviour which women see as in the interest of the household (i.e. working and being a responsible provider rather than "spending" (trositi] and visiting coffee-bars) it could equally be

argued that married men have internalised women's control of their labour, time and ultimately of their sexuality. It is significant, however, that this is only true for married men, as bachelors are expected to puno hoda. They will go to coffee-bars, dances and fairs, meeting friends and dating girls. This is their privilege, because they must seek potential marriage partners. Upon marriage, a man's lifestyle is, however, expected to change. From the women's point of view it is seen as undesirable for him to continue behaving like a bachelor (momak) - just as a maiden should change her behaviour to be like a wife's, so he should change his to that of a married man's. This point was made particularly clear on one occasion. A young man had married. A girl had come withhim to his home; members of 194

his household had visited her parents with coffee and sugar, and now it was her parents' turn to visit their daughter's household with presents

(dar).

The date for the

visit (pohod; see chapter 5) had been set and the hosts had invited all relatives (i.e. those with the same surname) to attend the event. When we arrived we were met with embarrassed apologies; the daughter-in-law had gone back to her parents, who therefore had no reason for turning up with presents to their new in-laws. We were served coffee and cakes and the event was discussed in a very low-key

manner. The "bridegroom" was out on his usual kafana-round (see section 7.2.2). In front of their hosts, my company expressed that the "bride's" behaviour was no good, (ne valja), but on our way back the same women, who were relatives, through their husbands, of the young man's household, criticised the young man for still "running about a lot" like a bachelor, leaving his wife at home. The young man's mother was also criticised for seeming to accept her son's behaviour. A married man who is "going about a lot" would not act in the interest of his household, he would spend household money on drinks and kafa.nas,

money that should have been spent for the

household's common good. A husband who was unfaithful would only be unambiguously condemned if he was having an affair with a woman in the village as he was then risking good neighbourhood relations and the reputation of the household; women would say that "all men are alike" but believed that if a man absolutely needed to take another 195

woman he should go to Sarajevo where it would be his own business. (Similar observations have been made in a Greek village; see du Boulay, 1986:152.) Having said this, however, I should stress that women are condemned more readily than men if they are "running about a lot", and while it is seen as bad behaviour for a married man to run around in kafanas spending household money, he is usually only condemned by the women. A woman who moves more freely in the public sphere, going to the market town, visiting other villages, and is often seen on the path through the village, will be condemned by both sexes and easily qualifies for the derogatory label of kurva (lit, whore; the male equivalent is kurvar and the verb is kurvati se, "to whore around"; kurvetina is even more derogatory and is used about a woman who is considered a big whore, there is no equivalent for the male).

7.2 Maidens Being a maiden is seen as a transitory state in which one should not remain for too long. It usually lasts from the age of fifteen until marriage (which generally takes place at twenty-two to twenty-three, at the latest). If a girl's maidenhood is prolonged beyond the age when it is seen as natural for her to start her own family (i.e. into her late twenties), her status is ill-defined. "She is alone", ona je sama, is said about an unmarried woman and a woman should not be alone; it is a sad and dangerous state for her to be in. Dangerous because she is not 196

protected from untrustworthy strangers (i.e men), and sad because a woman obtains status through being married and having children - and this is the real meaning of her life. For an adult female not to be married means that she has not yet become fully a woman. Her status is ambiguous, since according to her age she should be a woman, but in terms of marital status (i.e. sexual experience) she is considered to be a maiden. If in addition she behaves quite independently, i.e. like a wife, there is no category for her. Thus, I was usually categorised as a maiden according to my unmarried status, but because of my knowledge of the outside world and my ability to move around freely I was also seen in some respects to be like a man. To some older villagers, categorisation became impossible and they told me with sadness that I was neither "male" (muko) nor "female" (ensko). A girl becomes a cura when she reaches puberty; a girl below this age is called a curica (i.e. a little cura). However, this general rule is modified by age and has in more recent times (the last ten years or so) been influenced by education system. Thus a girl really becomes a cura in her last year at primary school (i.e. towards the end of compulsory education) at the age of fourteen, when she will be allowed to fairs and maybe to the Saturday dance. Already as a curica, the Muslim girl is taught about her role as a female. From early on she is expected to help her mother with household chores, and is encouraged with the words "you are a real little girl" (ti si prava curica) 197

whenever she performs typical female tasks like knitting or serving coffee. Her younger and older brothers are, neither encouraged nor expected to do much work for the household. They are served by their mother and sisters and spend most of the time playing or "walking around". "I am not allowed" (ne smijem) is an expression a young girl often uses when explaining why she cannot do certain things: for instance, coming along to kafiá (a modern coffee-bar, see section 7.2.2) from school, visiting somebody after dark. These are all restrictions imposed on her by her parents, who represent village morality. Even if it is not specified in these examples that the girl is prohibited from doing certain things because she is a girl, there are several contexts in which gender is given as the reason for certain moral commands. A girl is soon to learn that her younger brothers have privileges which she should respect because they are male. This inequality is most typically expressed in the comments "do not upset him, he is male" (nemoj ga sekirati, on je muko), and "shut up, you are female" (uti ti Si zensko) - a girl should not speak unless she is spoken to. These sayings are central to an understanding of the ethos behind the socialisation of male and female children respectively. As girls grow older they are continually told to "be silent", "work" and "be honourable" (uti, radi, and budL potena), and as they grow into puberty and start going to the dance and the summer fairs, flirting with and dating boys, there is an increasing pessure on them to conform to 198

this ideal behaviour. This is the time when girls experience most conflict and frustration in relation to opposing value-systems and codes of behaviour, namely between those of traditional Muslim village society and those of the wider, urban consumer society encountered through the media, through school, and through friends with a different socio-cultural background. This is particularly the case if they go on to secondary school and have to travel into one of the market towns. It is worth noting that married women (i.e. mothers and female relatives as well as neighbours) rather than fathers and brothers are the ones who control and sanction unmarried girls. Girls, then, grow up with clearly defined rules about what is allowed and what is not. They internalise prohibitions at an early age: any offence will be punished, sometimes by caning. For boys rules are less clearly defined: what was not allowed at one point may be allowed at the next; while for a girl 'no is no'. Boys thus become less worried about "correct behaviour"; they find that other people (particularly women) adapt to them and their needs, and that any external constraints may be ignored without severe consequences. Girls, however, learn that they have to negotiate conflict-ridden situations to create some freedom of movement and choice for themselves. These are skills they later apply in the everyday negotiation between the expectations and moral values of their Muslim village on one hand and of the Yugoslav (poly-ethnic), westernised public world on the other. Becoming a woman is 199

also acquiring the subtle skills whereby what you appear to have done or said is more significant than what has actually taken place. "Impression management" becomes an important part of the negotiating skills. A woman will learn to deny fiercely any unfavourable gossip about herself or any of her household members, and to take any opportunity to present herself as hard-working (vrijedna), good (I ma), clean (óista) and honourable (potena).

7.2.1 Muslim g irls and secondar y education The increased willingness among Muslim rural families to send their daughters to secondary education has given new meaning to the status of maidenhood. Among the fourteen-year-old girls of today, two categories have crystallised: the "modern" (kulturne) girls who take secondary education on the one hand, and the more traditional girls who finish school after eight years on the other. When a girl finishes her eighth school year, her family will decide whether she should go on to secondary education or stay at home. Some parents do not send their daughters to secondary school because they cannot afford the books, clothing and bus fares. Some mothers simply prefer their daughter to stay at home and help them. Others are worried about the diminished control over their daughters, who would have to go to one of the market towns to get secondary education. Those who do send their daughters to secondary school think that education is important both for the sake of increased knowledge in 200

itself (which, they say, will enable them to conduct more intelligent conversations than the uneducated wives in the villages) and to increase the possibility of getting a job. Under the extremely difficult economic situation (with

inflation rates

running very high) most parents see the

value and necessity of their daughters taking employment. When kmra started at secondary school I asked her where her classmates from Dolina had gone. I was particularly struck by one girl who had not gone on to secondary school. Her parents were relatively prosperous and she was bright. I was told that her parents would not let her, but Ainra was unable to tell me the reason. Her parents, however, explained that it was because they were worried that she would get married. The answer puzzled me, since my data showed clearly that those girls who do not attend secondary school, and/or get a paid job, marry at a younger age than those who do. It is generally accepted that a girl should not marry before she has finished school. Furthermore, the boredom of working at home for their mother makes the girls see marriage as the only way to "get away", to experience something. I was later told that the worry was not so much that the daughter would marry, but that she would marry a Christian. In the school context, a girl is more likely to interact with non-Muslim boys. State education tends to de-emphasise religion and to stress the common Yugoslav identity of the children. Since women are generally left with the primary responsibility for perpetuating Muslim customs and values, men and senior 201

women see it as desirable that women are shielded from exposure to the values of ideologies other than the local form of Islam. School is seen as atheist indoctrination (see chapter 8). This may explain why many Muslim girls (this is not true to the same extent with Catholic girls) are discouraged from attending secondary school, even if their parents can afford it.

7.2.2 Social activities of Muslim girls The main arena for a maiden to meet other young people if she does not attend school will be, as I said in chapter 3, the Saturday dance or summer fairs, all of which are attended almost entirely by young Muslims. Most Muslim girls in the village are not allowed by their parents to go to either of the two types of cof feebars, katana (the traditional cafe) or katid (the modern, western version), even if the two are perceived as different by most villagers. While a katana is seen as being Muslim dominated, a kalid is regarded as more of a modern urban phenomenon, and predominantly attended by Catholics (Croats). At kafide, they play recorded pop music, both Yugoslav and Anglo-American. In kafanas the music is often live, and the style is what is called 'novokompovano', i.e. traditional Bosnian folk music with Turkish roots which has been modernised with synthesizers, etc. All parents allow their daughters to go to the local dance every Saturday, and some parents allow their daughters to go to kafanas if they have trusted male company, but 202

most parents do not approve of them going to kafide. I was told that the reason for this was that in cafes generally and there will be young men from other faiths, but that this was specifically the case at kafiée (the modern

coffee-bars), since Catholic youths prefer to identify with the western European, and 'modern' pop music and coffees like espresso and cappuccino.4 In the village there were two seventeen-year-old girls who were close friends and neighbours. One of them went to

kafanas twice a week with her boyfriend, while the other had never entered a coffee-bar and used to go to the dance every Saturday. The first girl was a Catholic, the other a Muslim. When I asked the latter why her friend was allowed to go to coffee-bars when she was not, she said: "Their girls are freer than ours, they may go to coffee-bars." Those girls who are kept away from school also tend to be forbidden to go to coffee-bars. Girls who go to secondary school are more familiar with coffee-bars, and think their mothers do not know what they are talking about when they condemn them. "They haven't got a clue, they maybe went to a dance and a fair a couple of times and then they married at fifteen or sixteen, so what do they know? What have they seen? Besides, they are stupid to have fears about coffee-bars; much more can happen at the dance. At a coffee-bar you sit nicely at a table and everybody can see who you talk to and where you go, while at the dance (see chapter 3) people are constantly moving in and out and it is always crowded, so it is easy to leave the dance for 203

somewhere else with a boyfriend and come back later without being noticed." Even if a mother considers it to be shameful for a maiden to go to coffee-bars, her daughter soon learns that the act is only shameful from the moment when it becomes publicly known. The point is, in other words, not so much to avoid shameful behaviour as to prevent one's behaviour becoming an excuse for village talk.

7.2.3 Muslim g irls and reli g ious identity I would argue that girls are brought up to become more aware of their Muslim identity vis a vis Christians than are boys. Ultimately, women ,not men, are given the responsibility for maintaining ethnic boundaries, hence the stricter control of young, unmarried Muslim girls compared to both Muslim boys and Christian girls. The logic behind this control, of which one example is forbidding daughters to attend secondary education, is to avoid the possibility of intermarriage. Intermarriage between members of different ethno-religious groups is generally seen as undesirable (cf. chapter 3). It is clear, however, that marriage between a Muslim girl and a Christian boy is seen as almost unthinkable, while there are examples of Muslim boys marrying Christian girls. 5 There are two obvious reasons for these differences. First, it is assumed that a

woman and her children will be under influence of her husband's family and their social and religious values (as women upon marriage in most cases go and live with their 204

husband's family or in a separate house in his hamlet); thus a woman will not be able to practise her Muslim customs and retain her Muslim identity, and consequently pass these on to her children, while a Muslim man might well be able to do this within a mixed marriage. Indeed, and this brings us to the second argument, it is seen as sevap (i.e. a good deed) for a man to marry a Christian

woman as her children will then as a rule be brought up as Muslims in their father's home.

7.3 The significance of how a woman dresses The fact that women rather than men are the guardians of traditional values and customs, and thus of a distinct Muslim identity, is quite clearly seen in the way they are expected to dress. The traditional dress for girls and women is

dimije, baggy

trousers that look like a long, wide

skirt when worn. 6 It is customarily worn in the village, but would be worn only by older women in town. Women in

dimije outside the reluctant to wear dimije

their thirties are reluctant to wear village, while young girls are

even in the village outside the house. (This is, however, not true for religious ceremonial occasions when the young women and girls wear their best

dimije and

headscarf with

pride.) It is becoming more common to wear a long skirt instead, even if this is definitely less practical, as you have to take more care how you sit or move than when wearing

dimije.7

The veil is not seen worn by any women, and the 205

headscarf is only worn by older women or by everybody when attending a service in the mosque or any other religious ritual. The veil was prohibited by law in Yugoslavia after World War II. When I asked informants why, they usually told me that during the war spies against the partisans had disguised themselves in the chador or full veil, the prohibition was to prevent this from happening again. This was the partisans rather diplomatic way of justifying the prohibition. Before the raise to power of Tito's Communists the complete veil (zarovi, terede) was customarily worn only in urban areas, or by rural women when leaving the village. 8 While working in the fields rural women would wear headscarves as usual, but no veil. Instead they would pull their big headscarves across their faces if they met strange or Christian men while walking through the village. Since the veil was prohibited by law the big headscarf has superseded the veil at ritual occasions also for urban women (cf. chapter 10). Although it has never been the custom for unmarried women to wear a headscarf, some older women in the village feel a married woman should wear one. In practice, however, headscarves are rarely worn by women under the age of forty, even though a young girl's parent generation will encourage her to wear the headscarf when she marries and goes to share a household with her mother-in-law. A young bride who is eager to please and who follows the advice of older women will maybe wear a headscarf for the first few weeks in her new home. A young bride whose mother-in-law's 206

mother died shortly after she had arrived was firmly reminded by women in her mother's neighbourhood (this girl had married within the village) to wear a headscarf at home. This was especially important when having women visiting na lalost (see chapter 2). The one time when all women wear

dimije and

headscarves is during religious

rituals in the mosque or at home, or when reading from the Quran. Muslim males distinguish themselves less in clothing from Christian males. During religious ceremonies or when attending Mekteb they should wear a black or dark-blue beret (French style). Some middle-aged men would also wear FE whenever they go for a social visit in the village or to the market town. Hodzas should always wear it, theirs is a bit different in style, some young Kodas, though, do not wear it 'of f duty'. This the older generation can find upsetting. There are a few old men who still wear the Turkish fez, but they are a ridiculed by the young for being old-fashioned. The

dimije has

a strong symbolic value; it epitomises

"Muslimness" and is seen as sign of backwardness and "Orientalism" in the minds of Christians and urbanised Muslims. It has become such a powerful symbol of Muslim group characteristics, I would argue, because it is the only conspicuous expression of Muslim identity in Bosnia today; and it is significant that women, not men, display their H Muslimnessn in this way. 9 The beret can be seen as the male equivalent of the baggy trousers, but, although it 207

is less conspicuous, it is, as we have seen, rarely worn by younger men except at prayers in the mosque. Women are thus less able than men to escape the prejudices held by westernised parts of the population in Bosnia. Prejudices about Islam and backwardness, i.e. a whole set of ideas covered by the western concept of "Orientalism", are so pervasive that Muslims have generally internalised a feeling of being culturally inferior, the outcome of which is often a negative self-image, confusion and insecurity about traditions and Muslim identity. (On a negative selfimage, see chapter 1.) Women, especially maidens and the younger wives, perceive themselves as caught in a dilemma between the requirements of decent dress for Muslim women and the wish to comply with a style of modern, western dress. Most younger women change their form of dress markedly when they go out of the village, and they are especially careful to dress according to urban standards when they go into town. Generally, when moving outside the hamlet, a young girl's preoccupation is with being welldressed and urban-looking. I often overheard daughters instructing their mothers on how to dress when going into the more urban areas. Thirty-three-year old Fatima summed up the Muslim woman's dilemma: "These days it is difficult to be a proper Muslim woman. It is also difficult to be a proper Muslim man, but still it is more difficult for women; men dress in trousers, the way they have always dressed, while women have to cover themselves and always worry about how they 208

dress. It is for instance a sin (g'rehota) if the neck or hair of a Muslim woman is laid bare. It is also said that to lay bare the armpits would be the same as if a woman exposed her groin. 10 As a proper Muslim woman (prava muslimarika) you should cover yourself. However, when I go to Sarajevo I do not dress in

dimije

and headscarf, it

wouldn't look good, would it?"'1 Generally, how women dress could be expressed as a continuum, ranging from the traditional practice of covering themselves completely (not wearing the full veil, but a shoulderlength headscarf, dimije and long-sleeved shirt buttoned all the way up), to the latest fashions. As expected the over-sixties and under-twenties seem to place themselves at opposite ends of the scale. Although it could be argued that there is a common youth culture which unifies preferences in clothing among both uslims and Christians, young Catholic informants would stress that there were differences. On one occasion when Catholic girls were commenting on the Muslim Saturday dance, I was asked: "Have you noticed how they dress?" They assured me that there were obvious differences: "You can see them wearing socks and high-heeled shoes, would you ever do that? They go over the top in dressing up and adorning themselves. We like to dress more sportily."

7.3.1 Clothing for maidens and wives The transition from maiden to wife is marked by a change in style of dress. When consummation of the marriage 209

has taken place, a woman is seen to be no longer ignorant about her own sexuality and as a consequence about the possible sexual undertones in interaction with men. Even if there are concepts, held by most mothers, about how a decent maiden should dress (e.g. she should not wear shorts or 'revealing' T-shirts), her choice of clothing is greater than that of married women. There is a kind of humorous tolerance towards a maiden on part of older women. After all, she should attract men, even if she should not openly be seen to seek contact or initiate conversations with them. This all changes when a girl marries and becomes a woman. She will have to take more care how she dresses.12 How the different roles of maiden and wife should be expressed in the way you dress was brought to the fore when a newly-married daughter came to visit her mother for the first time after she had left. As she walked up the path towards her house neighbouring women greeted her good heartily with the following words: "Are you wearing jeans? But you are not maiden any more." "And where is your headscarf?" - But by then they were laughing... In this specific context the word cura was used with the stress on its connotation of virgin. (The women were embarrassed by the word djevica, which has the unequivocal meaning of virgin in standard Serbo-Croat, without necessarily the connotation of unmarried girl.) But the change in status from maiden to wife is not only marked in a change in the way of clothing, also 210

general behaviour and "way of thinking" is expected to change as will be illustrated in the following two casehistories:

Case-history 1 Sakiba had come back to visit her mother's household and hamlet for the first time since marrying a man further down the village. As soon as she sat down to drink coffee with her mother and mother's sister-in-law, they started to advise her about how to behave in her new status: "Remember, you are a wife now, you are no longer a maiden so be clever. You may no longer joke and have fun with the men at work like before, when you were a maiden. Men are angry as only men can be [mukar/ci su ljuti kao

ljudi],

and jealous. So you must be serious and shut up and just do your job. Do not give anybody a pretext to gossip about you or make hints that you are not honourable." I suggested that maybe standards of behaviour were not as strict as when they were young and that things had changed, but they rejected this completely, because "men are always the same, they never change". Then it was Sakiba's turn to give advice to the daughter of the house, a fourteen-year-old girl. She told her to take her secondary school seriously, and not run around in cafes. "If you do not intend to take it seriously from the start, you make your parents spend money for no use. "The girl, her cousin, said: "You are saying this to me, you who never cared about schoolJ' Sakiba then showed herself to have changed not only her 211

status, but also her way of thinking, as she answered: "Yes, this is true, but I was a fool. I did not understand then and I had nobody to tell me how to conduct myself, but now I know better."

Case-histor y 2 Dma, a seventeen-year-old wife, works in the kitchen of a cafe in one of the market towns. Some days she travels home quite late in the evening by bus, and then walks for about fifty minutes to reach her house. Dma was given instructions about how to behave by the women closest to her (i.e. immediate neighbours and in-laws of her husband). She was told to come straight home and not hang around talking to customers, and whenever possible walk home with a male relative (related through her husband) if travelling on the same bus. One night, however, she had walked home chatting to a neighbour who had also been her neighbour in her native village (he was renting a house in Dolina). Her husband's father's brother had also been on the same bus, but she had instead been chatting happily along with her neighbour. Her husband's and husband's uncle's household were terribly upset with her. Her case was aggravated by the factt '&he particular neighbour in question and her husband's uncle were not on speaking terms at the time. Her husband's uncle felt insulted and his wife, mother and sister-in-law all condemned her behaviour. In conversations with neighbours they kept repeating that Dma was behaving and thinking like a maiden, even if she was now a wife. 212

The women agreed that after having married they had immediately changed their behaviour and way of thinking from that of maiden to that of wife. A wife should take care that her reputation as someone who is .fina is established early. For a woman to be fina means that she works for the good of the household (i.e. that she is hardworking, clean, does not gossip or walk about a lot, dresses decently and behaves seriously when interacting with men). The women stressed that if you obtain a good reputation from the start when you first arrive in the

village as a wife, it will stick to you for the rest of your life, but if you get a bad reputation you will also have to carry this all your life.

7.4 Wife and stranger

Women are like a seed, you can plant them anywhere and they will bud. (Dolina men)

Post-marital residence is as a rule patrilocal, and exceptions to this rule are few. As was discussed in chapter 3, Muslims have a taboo on marriage between two who can trace kinship, and marriage between neighbours (i.e. within the village) is rare today, since the majority born in the village can trace kinship. Married women are thus usually strangers in the village, a fact which made older 213

male informants conclude that "Where women are born does not mean anything to them, their native village is not important to them. Women can, contrary to men, go anywhere and be at home." In this way they were also legitimating their patriloca]. residence pattern. Women, on the other hand, did not agree with the men's view. Although they accepted having to move to a strange village as their destiny, they often referred to their native village, saying that theirs was a strange life, since they at one point in their lives had to change both village and "mother". Even older women who had lived in Dolina for more than thirty years would still refer to the customs in their native village (which would be different from those in Dolina) as the customs "among us from where I am from". The assumptions made by men about women's unproblematic adaptability and lack of any solid roots are contradicted repeatedly by women's expression of their own feelings and experiences about their native village and about the often traumatic move to a new village and home when they married.

7.4.1 The "bride" The two most significant stages and statuses in a woman's life are those of maiden and wife. Although the main transition from maiden to wife is when consummation of the marriage has taken place, a cura does not become a zena as soon as she has married; first she has to pass through the liminal period of being a bride, miada. Miada literally means young woman, but is also the word used to denote

214

"bride". A daughter-in-law will be called miada for at least a year after she has arrived, but usually until she has had her first child. Village women will then start calling her by her first name as an acknowledgement of her status as a wife. 13 When a woman marries she changes her social network to a larger extent, as well as her social activities. On marrying, a woman gains more freedom of movement in the sense that her whereabouts is not always regarded with suspicion (although as we have seen, too much "going about" means that she is not hard-working). Yet, even if married women generally are less suspicious of a woman's whereabouts after she has married, the new bride, as a stranger to the village, is continuously assessed by neighbouring women on their daily coffee-visits which the bride attends together with her mother-in-law. The young woman is always under the control of her mother-in-law when interacting with other women. She keeps her eyes and her mind on her needlework while her mother-in-law answers most questions on her behalf. Thus the mother-in-law controls all information about the household and its members. Again we see the emphasis placed on loyalty to the household (discussed in chapter 2). Furthermore, the period during which a new member (usually a daughter-in-law ) is in the process of being incorporated into a new household is obviously very critical for the household in question. As she has not gone through the natural socialisation process a child born into the household would have, the new 215

member is actually made, at least symbolically, to change allegiance - from her parents' to her husband's parents' household. One manifestation of this change is seen in the form of address used for household members. Upon marriage it is considered good practice for the bride to address her husband's closest relatives, including lateral ones, with the same terms as he uses. 14 He may address her relatives in the same way, but the moral pressure is less: I never came across any examples of the practice, and I certainly never heard anybody complaining about a man not using his wife's terms for her relatives. He will most commonly address her parents as pun/punica (father-in-law/mother-inlaw), while a woman when talking in the third person about her parents-in-law will call them svekr/svekrva (when addressing them directly she uses the word for mother and father). More generally, he addresses her relatives either by their first names or by the terms for specific in-laws. Nevertheless, even if it is desirable and seen as honourable for a bride to address her husband's relatives with his terms for them, e.g. calling his mother mater ("mum") and his aunt tetka, women will remark on it if she does so; it is a custom which in fact not many women do follow or expect their daughters to follow. Thus, when a young bride visited her native hamlet for the first time after she had married, and at one point during a conversation with neighbouring women referred to her husband's aunt as tetka, the women smiled and commented with a touch of surprise: "You say tetka ?" The bride 216

answered that this was showing respect (potovanje), whereupon the omen reassured the bride that this was fine and the way it ought to be. This practice has elsewhere, particularly in Yugoslav ethnography, been explained by the presence of a patriarchal ideology, an explanation which is easily seen to be tautologous. I believe a more fruitful analysis would be to centre on the primary social unit, the household, and the strict code of loyalty demanded by its members. I suggest, furthermore, that the often strong control by a mother-in-law of her daughter-in-law is not so much because the latter is a junior woman within the household, but rather because she is a stranger whose loyalty has hitherto lain elsewhere, and is therefore a threat to the ideal of loyalty between household members. By the same token, I would argue that a woman on becoming a mother gains higher status, because she becomes less of a threat, less liable to betray her household (which would ultimately upset the whole village through gossip, quarrels and changing alliances), because she now has the responsibility for the successful socialisation of new household members. She has become less of a stranger. Gradually, as her children grow older, the responsibility for preserving a certain image of the household is increasingly with the daughter-in-law; the mother-in-law is marginalised. Both women speak more freely about conflicts between them when socialising separately, although the sympathy now seems to be largely on the daughter-in-law's side. In the absence of 217

her husband, who may go on labour migration or work long shifts in the factories of Sarajevo, she is the de facto head of the household and often the main link between this and other households.

7.4.2 Wives A woman's life-cycle can be seen as several stages towards the status of a mature wife, with daughters-in-law. Having achieved the status of wife, a woman becomes powerful, and in charge of her own and other household members' lives. She has obtained her reputation, and needs to worry less about how her subsequent acts may affect it negatively. Her experience and knowledge of sexuality is now stressed; more or less direct references are made to this effect among equals (i.e. wives). Jokes about mens' and women's sexuality are common currency when some of the liveliest women meet at coffee-visits. (This is one of the most important reasons why women forbid their unmarried daughters to attend wives' gatherings.)'5 While being a Muslim maiden is, as we have seen, defined largely in terms of what she should not do, being a wife is defined by what she should do. One of the rituals a woman should perform is particularly essential in defining her womanhood as a Muslim. The gusul or ritual washing after sexual intercourse is one of the key rituals distinguishing maidens and wives. Significantly, however, it also distinguishes Muslim wives from Catholic wives. Performing gusul is a statement of being sexually active 218

and thus a statement of womanhood. (How this relates to pollution beliefs both for men and women will be discussed in chapter 9.) No wonder then that this is one of the favourite topics in more humorous conversations among married women. In fact "to take a bath" (this is done by pouring water over your body from a jug), has become a metaphor for having had sexual intercourse. The physical structure of a house in a settlement makes it difficult for a woman to take a bath in secret. Her closest neighbours will make loaded remarks, the frequency of bathing being commented on as an allusion to the frequency of sexual intercourse. Although women appear outspoken and open about sexuality in their jokes and humorous chats, they rarely talk about contraception or abortion. They usually know about artificial methods of contraception, including the pill (which they hear about from female relatives living in town or from doctors at the health centre in town), but they are hesitant to use them, and instead practise coitus interruptus; its unreliable character is only too clearly demonstrated in the high rate of abortions. If a woman becomes pregnant when more children are not wanted, women always blame the man for not taking more care. It is his responsibility, and a man who cannot 'control himself' is ridiculed. Thus every time the man who had five children from the ages of one to five, was observed passing on the road by neighbours, joking and sometimes condemnatory remarks were made about hiss 'apparently' uncontrolled 219

sexuality. Remarks were made by women and men alike and everybody would join in the laughter. Women complain that it is when the husband has been drinking and he "has no control" that they become pregnant. Contrary to what is the common attitude in northern European societies where women are seen as primarily responsible for birth control, it is here seen mainly as the man's responsibility. To have no control is seen as unmanly. On the other hand, however, this implies that ideally men, not women, should have control over reproduction and the reproductive forces and thus ultimately over women. Women do not wish to have many children because, they say, many children means increased poverty. Most women prefer to have two or three children, in order to be able to

maintain a certain standard of living. Abortion is

common and most women have several during their reproductive years; it is legal and carried out at the

hospital in Sarajevo. Although the young idealistic clergy preach to village women about the

sinfulness of having

abortions, and women are aware of the health hazards of having one, they still prefer this as the ultimate method of birth control when coitus interruptus fails. They have not taken on board the "sinfulness of abortion"; rather they find this 'rule' quite out of touch with the realities of life. In fact, having an abortion is not something the women are ashamed of or feel is sinful in any way. On the contrary, a woman always includes her abortions among her pregnancies in conversations. 1 These are all part of the 220

fertility record and also proof of how desired she is by her husband. 17 The following dialogue between two women illustrates my point; "A" told a young pregnant woman visiting from another village: "I have been pregnant seven times, I have two children and have had five abortions." "A" said this jokingly and was obviously satisfied with the reaction she got from the other woman, who exclaimed not entirely unimpressed: "You are crazy".

(Budala, which was

the word used here, is used to characterise behaviour which is seen as excessive.) Then they both laughed.

7.5 Conclusions In a society such as Yugoslavia, experiencing rapid social change (i.e. recent industrialisation and urbanisation), a marked disparity in world-view between the older and the younger generation will be expected. My argument is, however, that the disparity in values between married women and unmarried girls is not merely a question of generation differences, but has to be related to a discussion of the role of women in maintaining a distinct Muslim group identity. Views among the Muslims, both men and women, within the village on what is 'good' and appropriate behaviour are seemingly more divergent than views on appropriate male behaviour. There are two reasons for this. First, there is more actual variation in female codes of conduct. Women have to relate to new and challenging role models, and a rapidly changing moral enviromnent under the influence of 221

western consumer values. Secondly, women's behaviour seems to be much more of an issue than that of men. I ascribe this to the fact that the ultimate responsibility for demarcation of ethnic group boundaries is with women. Women are, in other words the pivots of group identity. The role of women is thus a critical one, since, as the main bearers of Muslim group characteristics, change in women's expected role behaviour may eventually threaten what is perceived as Muslim identity (both as seen by members of the group themselves and by outsiders). As I hope to have shown, the women themselves acknowledge their critical role, and realise that as Muslim women they have more dilemmas than men when non-Muslim sphere.

In

interacting in

the secular,

my view, men have already made

compromises between their Muslim identity and the requirements of a secular, atheist state, encountered through the public world of work, while for women this encounter is of a more recent date and the conflicts are therefore felt more strongly.

222

Footnotes chaTter 7

1. Cura is a word more loaded with meaning than the standard Serbo-Croat word djevojka which is more widely used in the urban context. Young village girls often preferred to use djevojka rather than cura because they believed the former to be more "cultured". While djevojka is also used in the sense of an unmarried woman it does not seem as loaded with ideas about behaviour, or it conveys merely a status, rather than a quite rigid set of ideas about behaviour appropriate to this status.

2. This is accordance with what Unni Wikan suggests on the basis of her Omani ethnography (see Wikan, 1982) 3. I have chosen to translate hodati with "going (or walking, depending on context] about" as this best conveys the ideas contained in the local usage of the term. 4. Jane K. Cowan (1991) reports a similar distinction between more traditional "coffeehouses" and modern "kafeterias" and the "moral geography" implied in her study of a small town in Greek Macedonia. 5. This is not always the case in towns. The villagers themselves acknowledge this, but point out that towns are a different matter. 6. Dimije was a Turkish fashion, brought in during the Ottoman Empire and influenced Muslims and Christians alike. Colour was not initially a distinguishing factor. Muslims and Christians were almost certainly dressing in similar fashion before the advent of the Turks. It has, however, been documented that a certain Bosnian vizier in 1794 introduced measures to ensure that Muslims and Christians could be distinguished according to the colour of their clothes. Thus green, white, yellow and red should be worn by Muslims, black and blue by Christians and Jews. In 1827 the Pasha, eliminated the option of blue for the latter group (cf. Balagija, 1940).

7. Christian Catholic women mostly wear knee-length skirts. A couple who are in their late seventies wear black dimije and black shirts. 8. A Dolina woman in her sixties was proud to tell me that she was the first woman in the village to stop wearing the veil when going to the market town. 9. P. Loizos, personal communication reports that the headscarf and long skirt is now common among Turkish Muslim women in Western Thrace (Greece) where they live close to Greeks. 10. She added that it is even more difficult for women in other Muslim countries, where they always shave to cover themselves up completely, because there State and religion are one, and it 223

would have been easier for women in those countries if State and religion were separated. 11. This statement also reflects the fact that in the village Muslim women wear dimije to differentiate themselves from Catholics. In Sarajevo, where they are not known, however, such identification is irrelevant. Dimije and headscarf would nevertheless be worn by rural women to visit a mosque. 12. In Dolina there were no example of "pious girls" who rejected all "modern" clothes and none that I knew of who even aspired towards such an attitude. But there was a teenage girl who complained that her mother, who herself had worn a miniskirt when she was young (in the seventies) would not let her daughter wear either a miniskirt nor shorts. 13. In this respect I was very much treated like a inlada. As a stranger, woman and new member of the household, I was seen as a threat to the reputation of the household. Interaction between me and any member of another household was therefore strictly supervised by my hostess, at least until the loyalty to 'my household' had been understood and firmly established. She never let me visit alone; she was always there to answer women's questions. Once at the beginning, after I had been visiting some women on my own, she told me firmly that it was not a good idea for me to go on my own, since I didn't know anything yet, including the language. "They might ask you unpleasant questions. They are very clever, you see." I might say things I didn't mean, etc. Her control became a problem. But my loyalty was expected, and in complying I gained acknowledgement and trust.I had to work within these restrictions, but I probably benefited from having the loyalty of fellow household members in return. In any disagreement between villagers concerning the character of my stay or my whereabouts, members of my household would always defend me in order to protect my good reputation which, of course, was ultimately also the reputation of the household of which I was a member. 14. A similar pattern for the term of address between the bride and her husband's relatives is found in Greece. Thus Campbell notes: "She follows her husband in his modes of address to all senior relatives, father, mother, uncle, aunt, and so on. The family and kinsmen address the newcomer simply 'bride" (1964:64). 15. At such coffee-visits the women would be cautious about talking about sexuality or making rude jokes in my presence. They would often censor each other while referring to the presence of the cura. However, their attitude became more lax towards the end of my stay when they acknowledged that I was "grown up", "serious" and "needed to learn everything". 16. Marokvai6 notes more generally that an ambivalent attitude towards unplanned pregnancies is "deeply rooted in the significance of procreation and maternity for Yugoslav women and their perception of women's sexuality, indeed femininity, as 224

being closely related to procreation" (1981:200). 17.In their 1991 paper P. Loizos and E. Papataxiarchis offer an explanation for the high rate of abortion in Greece and suggest among others that "From the women's point of view what makes sex "natural", pleasurable, and desirable is that it leaves the door to conception open" and that "sexuality in itself, sealed off from the prospect of pregnancy by contraceptive devices, is seen as undesirable" (1991:225).

225

Part II: TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF BOSNIAN ISLAM

Introduction In the main introduction it was pointed out that the fact of the presence of both Christianity and Islam in South-Eastern Europe (and the Mediterranean) calls for breaking down the academic barriers between the Europeanist and the Islamicist. Yet, this barrier often seems like an artificial one, as they display close affinity in theoretical approach. In the anthropological literature on both Islam and Christianity there is often an analytically rigid dual opposition between on the one hand formal, public, male religious practices and on the other popular, private, female religious practices. This set of oppositions has at its base Redfield's distinction between the Great and the Little Traditions, between the orthodox literate tradition and the illiterate folk-tradition seen to be heavily influenced by non- or pre-Islamic practices. Equating Islam with the official doctrine only, however, or discussing the "anthropology of Islam" (cf. el-Zein, 1977), along the dichotomies originating in the distinction between the Great and Little Tradition, miss out the empirical fact of a co-existance of univers/alistic with particularistic elements in religious practices (cf. Tapper & Tapper, 198?). So-called 'popular-Islam' which may be more aptly described as "Islam as it is practiced" also contains orthodox practices. The dynamic processes between these two types of elements make it difficult, if not 226

impossible to talk about any "one Islam" (cf. el-Zein, 1977). This is incident,2?ally why I use the term 'Bosnian Islam' henceforth. Furthermore, what is defined as 'official Islam' has changed with political changes through the history of Muslim peoples (cf. Waardenburg, 1979), and thus so has the content of 'popular Islam'. In fact, "the dichotomization of Islamic practice is a statment about the distribution of power within society rather than an empirical description of on-the-ground behaviour or organization" (Johnson, 1980:28). The distinction between popular and orthodox Islam is in other words itself part of the official discourse on Islam. With increased general literacy and professionalisation of the clergy, this is a discourse which in Bosnia is becoming part of the villagers' own. Local discourse on Islam is reflecting an increased opposition between "non-Islamic" and "Quaranic" practices; those increasingly seen to pertain to the former category the older generation would call adet (custom or tradition) and see them together with the doctrinally based practices as an integral part of the cultural knowledge and identity of a Bosnian Muslim. They would refer to both as Muslim custom (Muslirnanski obicaji). Indeed, the two categories of practices and beliefs are complementary. Among the younger and devout Muslims, however, what is considered "Muslim" is increasingly associated with what is "Islamic" while adet is associated with what is considered "non-Islamic". Among younger more devout Muslims a clear distinqtion would be made between 227

Muslim customs which are according to Islam (po Islamu) and those which are not. They would frown at traditional beliefs or practices which are still followed and saying "this is not Muslim custom". 1 These same people would be unappreciative of my staying in Dolina, where they argued I would not learn anything, because people there do not read books and thus do not know anything, but only "do things the way they think it should be" and their religion is "mixed up with Christianity and all sorts of things". Bosnia is on the northern fringe of the Islamic world, and in fact represents the northernmost area inhabited by 'indigenous Muslims'. Furthermore, rural Bosnia is itself on the periphery of this marginal community, and as such, rural Bosnian Islam displays several of the traits characteristic of "peripheral Islam" discussed in much of the anthropological literature on Islam. (See in particular Lewis, 1986). A key characteristic of "peripheral Islam" as described in the African ethnography on the subject is the presence of three competing ritual or belief systems: Islam, Christianity and the traditionally 'pagan'. In Bosnia there are likewise three ritual systems which compete in some areas and converge in others, but mostly the traditional, illiterate practices are challenged from two fronts: Islamic orthodoxy and state socialism. Western consumerism and ideas about individualism are also part of the context, but unlike the former two, do not constitute a coherent discourse and are not institutionalized. Even if some non-orthodox rituals, and 228

traditional Slav beliefs and customs are, as we .shLL see still found, their popularity is decreasing. At the same time they are being dismissed as illiterate superstition. While state socialism presents a challenge to traditional values and rituals as, to an increasing extent, does western consumerism, it does not directly oppose them, even if it does so indirectly by labelling them as superstitious and primitive

(nekulturni),

and people who seek prestige in

the public world (outside of the village) will want to disassociate themselves from such practices. However, it is my contention that more direct opposition comes from "off icial Islam", through its agent the

Islarnska Zajednica.

Its local representatives have contributed to an increasing awareness in the villagers' minds of a distinction between Islamic and non-Islamic practices. Thus at least two processes can be identified which affect religious life in the village. The first is Islamisation, through its representatives, the Medressa educated

hodIas and

bulas. As we shLL see villagers are

encouraged to give up customs and ritual practices which are regarded by Muslim scholars as non-islamic. The second factor influencing religious life, secularisation, takes two forms: state socialism and western consumerism. The process of secularisation, which, rather than being seen as a separate phenomenon, should be understood in conjunction with the process of Islamisation. Rather than dealing with two self-contained processes, we are dealing with an increasing polarisation of value systems. The loser in 229

this process of polarisation is the third component, namely traditional village rituals and beliefs. The second part of the thesis will shift focus away from individual behaviour in the secular sphere and the construction of social identities to collective behaviour

and the construction of a Muslim religious identity. It will discuss religion and belief in Dolina, particularly with a view to the role of orthodox Islam and its encounter with local practical Islam. I shall argue that women both are more involved in the rituals of Islamic orthodoxy than is suggested for much of the Islamic world, and at the same time mediate between local Islam and official Islam. The first chapter (chapter 8) iiL examine the role of the Islamic discourse in a pluralist society with an atheist state ideology. Chapter 9 will deal with popular beliefs and the various customs which fall into the category of "folk-religion" i.e. those which according to an orthodox

yardstick are classified as 'popular' and even non-Islamic. Many of these customs and beliefs are found throughout the Islamic world such as the writing of charms and the visiting of saint's graves for healing. Others are more specific to the Bosnian Muslims and a result of their historical and cultural background such as the celebration of St.George's day (Jurjev). Lastly, in chapter 10 I shall look at the different ritual obligations for men and women throughout the main events in the Muslim ceremonial calendar and point to some of the distinguishing characteristics of Bosnian Islam. Discussing popular 230

beliefs and orthodox Islam in separate chapters may indicate that they are considered as separate beliefsystems. This is, however, true only on a theoretical level as it is only recently that villagers have been "made aware" that there are beliefs and practices which are not compatible with Islam and included this distinction into their own discourses. Elements from both systems have been integrated in villagers' minds and lives. However, the influence from a socialist materialist discourse and orthodox Islam, have made the villagers wary of practising what from the first's point of view is condemned as superstition and primitiveness, and from the second's judged as superstition and un-Islamic, and usually ascribed to pre-Islamic traditions, both, however seeing them as illiterate practices which will only 1ose ground through increased education, either secular or Islamic respectively.

231

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE ISLAMIC DISCOURSE IN BOSNIA

This chapter will examine the role of the Islamic discourse in a pluralist society with an atheist/Communist state ideology and discuss the role of official Islam at village level and its encounter with local practical Islam. It will be argued that the state approved Islamic Association

(Islamska Zajednica), representing official

Islam, is both challenging the local forms of Islam where women play a vital role and, interestingly, encouraging women to take a more central role in official Islam.

8.1 The Islamic Association The Islarnska Zajednica ( lit, the Islamic community or

association), hereafter referred to as I.Z., is the stateapproved body responsible for all matters concerning the Muslim community in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Croatia and Slovenia). It is a highly bureaucratised, stratified organisation which operates on three geo-adminstrative levels. The I.Z. is led by the Starjenstvo (i.e. the council of elders) in Sarajevo, and its head, the

Reisul-

ulema. Then there are councils encompassing all mosques within a commune (optina; a secular administrative unit centred on a market town and including surrounding villages) and attended by each mosque's

hoda and elected

lay representatives. Lastly, there is the village mosque council encompassing one

demat ("parish") and led by 232

the

mosque's hoda. It is usally called the dematski odbor, but seo/ski odbor (village council) is also used. The Starjeinstvo is supervised by (the official rhetoric is "in contact with") a government committee for religious affairs. It has to report to this committee every time it holds a meeting. The committee will intervene if they feel challenged by delegates who are "too political" in their views. An informant put it like this: "The committee will intervene if young people bring politics into religious affairs, and do or say something which is not good; they will be criticised and then everything will be all right." 2 We see in these words the delicate balance Muslim clerics have to tread and the extent of its accommodation to political authorities on terms set by the latter. The Bosnian state is wary of any expression of anti-state and pan-Islamic ideas propagated by the clergy.3 It is interesting to note that my informant stressed that it is the young who are inclined to create problems. Indeed, it is the young clerics who challenge the accommodating attitude of the I.Z. The older clerics are understandably more restrained, since their cautious attitude and/or Communist sympathies brought them to their present position in the restrictive post-war years. In effect, the leading Muslim clergy have accommodated themselves to the Communist authorities to the extent that they encourage the Bosnian Muslims to put their obligations to the state before their obligations as Muslims. (Cf. similar attitudes in Algeria reported by Johnson, 1980.) 233

The presiding Reisul-ul.ema was quite clear on this point in a speech he gave at a ceremony to mark the opening of a new mosque in a small Bosnian town. 4 He stated that during Ramadan (see chapter 10), whenever a person was faced with the dilemma between fasting or working, s/he should work, because this benefits the wider community and the country. To illustrate his point about the value of work, the Reisul-ulema criticised in sarcastic terms a dervish who allegedly would consider work beneath his dignity and consequently starve to death (sic]. The representatives of official Islam in the region where I did my field-research are opposed to two of the main characteristics of local Islam: first, the mystic orders and their "unorthodox" practices, and secondly, ideas and practices that they judge as un-Islamic, e.g. as Christian or Slav (see chapter 9). At the same time, their rhetoric is also directed against Western ideas. The state ideology restricts the scope of an Islamic discourse and overt challenge to the state ideology is punishable by law. However, the leaders of the I.Z. may also use the Socialist state discourse to reinforce their own power base. They would for instance oppose any groups or individuals which could mobilise followers and thereby threaten the virtual monopoly of their organisation on "Muslim ideology" (cf. their negative attitude towards the dervish orders

discussed in

-f

tcA).

234

8.2 The mosaue council for the commune The Islamic council for the commune (optina) to which Dolina belongs is responsible for all the village or mosque councils in that area. It is led by the Imams of the two mosques in the administrative township of the commune; members are elected from among the male household-heads within the dzemats in the same way as for the village council. The Islamic council for the commune decides on matters concerning all the nine mosques or dzernats under its jurisdiction. More important decisions on religious learning and administration are taken by the Starjesinstvo in Sarajevo. The role of the Islamic councils on commune and village level is mostly to implement decisions taken by the I.Z. in Sarajevo, and to function as a mediator between the local and central levels.

8.3 Dolina demat Dolina has its own mosque and is therefore defined as a demat, with its own mosque council. Dolirta demat is, however, not a strictly defined or constant entity. First, although it is the local residents who together comprise the demat, the geographical borders between two different congregations (vjerski skup) may be vague. Th question of who belongs to which demat is therefore a question of personal choice, particularly for those who live close to the border with another demat. The hoda mentioned two examples: a man who lived in Dolina wanted to be buried at the new mosque in a neighbouring village which had earlier 235

belonged to the Dolina demat, while a resident of the new demat wanted to be buried beside his relatives at the old mosque in Dolina. Secondly, the size of each particular vjerski skup is reckoned in households (doma6instvo), and the number of members is officially calculated on the basis of those who pay annual fees to the I.Z. These are paid by the household head, but owing to the division of the communal household and its intermediate forms (described in chapter 6), counting households may not reflect actual membership. A house inhabited by two conjugal couples and their children who eat separately and have separate household economies may be counted as one household when they in actual fact form two. Furthermore, not all Muslim households situated within a demat do pay the annual fee. The village Imam therefore found it difficult to give me an exact number of members.

8.3.1 The villa ge mos que council The Dolina mosque has its own council consisting of four or five men elected annually by and from among the male household- heads in the demat. The village mosque council or dematski odbor, is always led by the hodEa. The council will meet when needed, often to discuss specific cases that have come up and usually at the request of the hoda. The village council is responsible for matters concerning the running of the mosque and for organising its members whenever necessary. The council would for instance arrange for the building of a new mosque if the dzemat 236

decided on this, and organises and finances maintenance work. When it is agreed that a new mosque should be constructed, the council also decides on how much money each household should be encouraged to give. It is responsible for collecting the annual membership fees to the I.Z from all the demat's members, and determines on the hoda's wages, within the framework laid down by the I.Z. It also elects the muezzin, the man who calls the faithful to prayer from the mosque's minaret. The council is furthermore responsible for collecting the annual zekat ("alms" given by each household). The money goes to a charitable purpose decreed on by the I.Z. in Sarajevo. The money was formerly given directly to a needy person in the community, but since the I.Z. integrated the zekat into its bureaucratic procedures and decreed that it should be redistributed through the organisation the tendency is to earmark the money for organisational and educational activities within the Islamic community under their jurisdiction. Last year, for instance, the money went to the Nedressa. 5 Another responsibility of the village mosque council is the daily running of the Quranic school (mekteb), though the curriculum and general organisation of the Quranic Schools are decided by the Starjeinstvo in Sarajevo. Finally, the village mosque council is responsible for implementing decisions made at higher levels, i.e. by the regional (commune) and state (republic) bodies.

237

8.4 Reiresentation of official Islam in Doling 8.4.1 The inoscue The official presence of Islam in Dolina is represented first and most obviously by the mosque, and secondly by a

hoda

and a

bula.

Their duties will be

discussed in more detail below. The mosque is situated in the upper part of the village, but would at the time of its construction 6 have been the lowest building in the settlement. In those days there would have been dwellings clustered above the mosque along the river, some opposite the mosque and others on the surrounding hills. Nowadays, those who live further down the river can go to a mosque which has recently been built in a nearby village, and which is closer. The village is very much defined as the settlement immediately surrounding the mosque (see chapter 1). Thus when referring to this part of the village, people living further down the valley talk about

gore u selu,

("up

in the village"). In addition to defining the village geography, the mosque is also the most important institution in the integration of the Muslim community in the village. In most traditional mosques in the rural areas of Bosnia both men and women enter through the same door, and the women sit downstairs with the men. (The main mosques in larger towns, as well as the ones recently designed, built and paid for by Middle Eastern countries, are built with two separate entrances, one for men leading into the main room at ground level and another for women which leads up 238

to a large room at the back of the mosque (the musandara) over-looking the main area where the men sit.) However, this does not mean that boundaries are not marked or expressed; rather, the lack of any clearly defined physical segregation causes women to be all the more conscious about not trespassing. Thus, the men always make up the front rows closest to the mihrab (a niche in the wall at the front of the mosque, facing kibla, from where the Imam leads the prayers), while women sit in the back rows towards the entrance and always make sure they enter the mosque last (i.e. just as the congregational prayers are about to start), allowing the men to enter before them. Again, when the prayers are over the women get up hurriedly, and make sure they leave the mosque before the men. They should never look at or talk to the men while on their way from or to the mosque; that would be shameful. The older male clerics would argue that during prayers in the mosque as well as on other ritual occasions men and women ought to be separated, but that since the advent of Communism they have been sitting together. The orthodox practices in this respect have been more strictly adhered to in urban centres. The presence of a mosque, hoda and bula in the village may account for the fact that the Muslims, at least in the upper part of the village, seem to have a much stronger sense of local identity than the Catholics do. (There is no official Catholic institution in Dolina.)

239

8.4.2 The hoda Hoda is the local word for the Arabic Imam and comes from the Turkish hoca. The use of the term Imam is, however, becoming increasingly fashionable among the devout urban Muslim elite. A bodza will be adressed by his first name and the honorary etendija (lit, master) preceding it. Before the war (in what older people would call stara Jugoslavija i.e. old Yugoslavia 7) only young men from families who owned much land could become hodas. First, they needed someone to finance their studies at the Medressa in Sarajevo. Secondly, they had no salary when working as a hoda, only a symbolic pay from their dlemat. The teachers at the Medressa were paid from the income of the vakufs (i.e. property belonging to the Muslim religious community). Today the hodas are paid a salary decided on by the local mosque council according to guidelines given by the I.Z., while the head of the community and the teachers at the Medressa are paid by the secular Bosnian state. Furthermore, the I.Z. has in later years established a system of scholarships and assisted places for young men and women from the villages. This is part of a policy to target rural areas for better religious instruction. 8 Since the Medressa is a boarding school it also provides accommodation, meals and from many parents' point of view, protection. It is therefore an attractive and prestigious option for clever students from rural areas. In addition to their monthly salary the hodas are paid separately when they take on obligations such as 240

teaching at meviuds or tevhids, and teaching hatma (see chapter 10). However, there is some resentment among villagers towards the growing "professionalisation" of religious ritual services, illustrated by the everincreasing practice of paying anyone who recites at them. One hoda expressed his disapproval of all the "envelopes" (with money) which were handed out at burial ceremonies to the men who recite. "What is the point", he asked, "of poor people handing out their money like that and for what? When a person is dead nobody can help him anyway." His last remark stressed his critical attitude towards a whole set of practices in this region associated with praying for the souls of the dead. Younger and more orthodox trained Muslim clerics often consider these as un-Islamic and influenced by Christian ideas (cf. chapter 9). In Dolina most villagers are not opposed to the practice of lay people reciting at religious ceremonies per Se, but they are critical of the practice of giving money to the reciters and sometimes also presents to the clergy. It is a practice which reinforces class distinctions: poorer people will not be able to call upon more than one hoda, bula or lay reciter for fear of shaming themselves if they cannot live up to the paying and gift-giving standards. As we shall see in chapter 10 class distinctions are already present at tevhids and mevluds, reflected in the amount and quality of the food served and the number and status of the hodas and bulas invited to lead the event. The hoda typically lives in a house next door to the 241

mosque (although this is not the case in Dolina) and his (and his wife's) obligations are extensive. He will call for prayer the prescribed five times a day, even if he is the only one attending (this often happens, especially in the case of the early morning and afternoon prayers). In addition, the

hoda teaches children every day and

should go, whenever he is summoned, to recite at: (memorial service for the dead);

tevhid

mevlud (recitals

commemorating the prophet Mohammed's birth); and

denaza

(burial ceremonies). (These rituals are discussed in more detail in chapter 10.) He also conducts wedding ceremonies for those couples who wish to marry according to Islamic law or sheriat. He and his wife have social duties too: visiting households in the

demat and entertaining guests -

hospitality is expected to be lavish, and a cooked meal should be offered. The

hoda in Dolina does not actually

live in the village, but in a village about an hour's drive away. This means he is not always there to lead all five daily prayers. He will, however, be present for all the prayers during Ramadan, and he will always arrive in the village on Fridays to lead the

duma prayer in the mosque.

While teaching children at mekteb (i.e. from September to June), he stays with different households in the village, at their invitation. He has Mondays and Tuesdays of f, when he goes back to his own village to stay with his wife and children. Where he is staying, when and for how long, is usually organised before he arrives in September. In some households where facilities are better he will stay for 242

longer, but in poorer households with few resources he will not stay at all. He starts at one end of the village and moves on as the year progresses. As the hoda approaches one particular neighbourhood, his movements become the main topic of conversation among the local residents. They talk about those people who have invited him to stay lately, those who have not invited him, the reasons for that, and how long it has been since last he stayed in a particular house. The visit of the hoda is a major event in a household, and the female members have to do a lot of work to get everything ready, including a thorough cleaning of the house and the preparation of food. The hoda is served the best traditional food, and for dessert and with coffee there should be sweet pastries (slatko), which are only served on special occasions. There is a saying that "hodas like sweet things" (vole slatko), and another: "He is not a hoda if he does not like sweet things". This saying probably originated in the fact that a hodza makes many visits and as a guest of honour is always served sweet cakes and pastries, and has to like what he is served. Although some villagers would say that since the boda did not drink alcohol (cf. chapter 10, ftn. 2), he liked slatko. However, the saying also has sexual connotations (women love making teasing hints about the often charismatic hodas and their erotic life). Someone who "likes sweet things" (usually said about men) is someone who needs surplus energy because he leads an active sexual 243

life, so that "liking slatko" often becomes synonymous with liking sex. There are plans for the hoda to move to Dolina on a permanent basis, and a house is under construction as a community project. One of the wealthier farmers (whose wife is the local bula) has provided land next to his own house, people in the village have donated money for buying building materials, and men in the village have been doing construction work. Minor jobs still remain, such as putting in windows, etc., but I witnessed no progress on the house as long as I lived in the village. Informants told me that there was no more money, and that those who had contributed most were getting annoyed at having so little support in the village as a whole. Some intrigues were obviously taking place behind the scenes, but as these were matters for the five-member village mosque council, I had little access to the processes of decision-making. The limited information I have on this matter was from women who had heard the menfolk talking. It is probable that many villagers feel that it is just as well that the hodza does not live permanently in the village. This is the way it has always been; even if this hoda is very friendly with the people, modest and fairly conservative, he is still a figure of authority, and the villagers do moderate their behaviour in his presence and make an effort to present themselves as good and upright people. This is particularly true for the women, who also tell their husband how to behave when the hoda is present. The men, however, are 244

fairly relaxed about the matter and are not prepared to pretend. They know that the hoda is aware that they drink, do not fast and do not go to the mosque as often as they should. They also seem to believe that the hoda is more tolerant and understanding of their lack of piety than he would be towards the women. (The hoda of course gets to hear about what is going on when he is not around. He knows and understands his people very well, but because his position in the village is ambiguous, his relations with the villagers have to be conducted with great diplomatic skill.) As a representative of "official Islam" the hoda is surprisingly unintrusive and tolerant of unorthodox local practices. This is because he identifies with the local scene himself, but has been put under pressure from the regional mosque council which is pushing for the village hodas to intensify their religious activities in the

villages. The hoda in Dolina was for instance instructed to extend his teaching year, which normally lasted nine months, by two months. This is, however, only one example of how the representatives of official Islam tend to take over more and more and to direct "folk" religious life. (I shall return to this point in chapter 9.)

8.4.3 The bula Female religious instructors can be grouped into two different categories according to their age and educational background. First, there are the old generation of bulas 245

who were generally trained by the village

hoda (in

recitals of the Quran) and a senior bula in the region (in how to conduct the ritual washing of a female corpse). She was often the daughter or wife of a

hodza. Whenever she was

called to a household to perform a certain ritual, she would be paid a symbolic sum of money (sergija) by the person who summoned her. This kind of bula always had an informal status compared to that of the

hoda, and was

never under the employment of the I.Z. Second, there are the young bulas who, for the last ten years, have been educated at the Medressa in Sarajevo. This institution offers to both sexes the religious equivalent of secular education at secondary level. Yet although a bula's Medressa eduacation is almost identical to that given to

hodas, there are still marked differences in the kinds of work the two sexes perform after graduating. Only male students will be instructed in the leading of prayers in the mosque and in chairing the mosque council, all components of the subject called

ponaanje ( conduct). Young

bulas argue that the Quran does not prohibit women from

leading the prayers;

hodzas would, however, explain that

all prophets (pejqamber) since Adam had been men, and there had been no female messenger throughout the history of Islam. An older male informant, who was member of a mosque council, said that women were never members of an Islamic council because "this is not a religious custom" (i.e the idea of having women as council members was one pursued by the secular state and based onsa different value-system).9 246

His argument was, however, challenged by a young bula, who said that a female colleague of hers was member of the mosque council in the town where she was employed. She emphasised that the lack of female representatives on the Islamic council for her own commune (optina) did not imply that women cannot be members, • but rather that the male representatives there were opposed to the idea.

However, the local Islamic council for the area where this particular bula worked is not only opposed to the idea of a female representative (i.e. a bula) on the council, but also to employing a Medressa-educated bula in its region. There was an obvious candidate for the job, a twenty-one-year-old woman from the area and married to a hoda. She was upset that the council refused to grant her a dekret, i.e. authorise and formally employ her as the bula for this commune. (An un-educated older bula is working within this region, but she is not formally employed and does not receive a salary.) Instead, she now performs individual assignments, together with the other, established bula in the area, (mainly reciting at tevhids) which are paid for directly by the person or household which has called for her. This particular bula's situation is not unique. 10 Women graduating from the Medressa often have difficulties in finding a job, and while the I.Z. centrally are eager to include women in the clergy, the problem seems to be at the level of the individual village, where the mosque council is often against employing the new generation of Medressa-educated bulas, often attempting to 247

justify its decision on financial grounds. The local clergy and the village mosque councils (which are dominated by men with traditional patriarchal views) no doubt perceive these women who refuse the marginal status of their female predecessors as a challenge to male hegemony in local religious life. One particular commune was considered by many of these younger bulas to have introduced an ideal system whereby hoc1as and bulas are employed and paid directly by the

Islamic council for the commune without going via the village mosque councils, and bulas of the older generation who are without formal education may only perform their tasks in the presence of a Nedressa-educated bula. To date, however, only a few communes have made the Medressa-educated bulas indispensable by passing a decision saying that any official rituals including women only, cannot take place without a medressa educated bula's presence. Furthermore, the traditional bulas are opposing what they perceive as a threat to their own authority within the village community. Some of the less literate traditional bulas are often ridiculed by the young, educated clergy for their lack of formal knowledge and especially for their lack of fluency in Arabic when reciting. These older bulas in turn disapprove of some of their younger colleagues, who, they say, are unwilling to wash the dead in preparation for burial, but only too eager to display their knowledge through teachings and recitals at

tevhids and mevluds. 248

The distance between the theoretically-based moral world of the "official" bula on one hand and the practically-based one of the village bula on the other is apparent through how they see their role as religious instructors for village women. In general the villagers themselves are often sceptical towards the young, educated clerics, who want them to change their customs, and who make them feel inadequate as Muslims. A traditional bula is usually from the village where she lives and works (this is less often the case with a hoda). She knows all the

families, their histories and how they are related; for this reason the villagers trust and respect her and they prefer their own bula, not a young stranger, to recite at a relative's memorial service. Women generally feel that their own bula understands and accepts behaviour that the younger bulas do not. While the young bulas instruct women on moral issues, as they have been taught to do at the Medressa, the traditional village bula will advise women according to her knowledge of every-day life, without preaching. Young bulas tend to make didactic speeches focusing on issues relevant to women: their role in marriage as mother and wife; abortion; appropriate behaviour when considered ritually impure (i.e. when menstruating, after child-birth and after sex); what to do about husbands who drink or do not go to the mosque; and their responsibility in supervising their children's religious instruction. Abortion in particular is condemned as a great sin (see 249

chapter 7). Women are often told that contrary to what they may have heard from other sources there is no such thing as equality between the sexes since men are the masters. (This is obviously a strange sentiment coining from a young women who is 'threatening male hegemony' and who to a large degree owe her own position to the influence of an ideology which argues for the equality between the sexes. Indeed, many young

bulas themselves

acknowledged this

and at one occasion I was told by a young

contradiction

bula who had just

preached on the above issues that these were things she was required to say by her instructors at the Medressa.) Women have become accustomed to hear these arguments from representatives of the Muslim clergy and usually take them lightly,

knowing well that the reality of their lives is

one thing, the repeated moral injunctions something else. After having attended a talk given by a young female Medressa student on the usual "women's issues", I asked

unwilling to give their opinion, but finally they gave the young bula credit

what the village women thought. They were

for having spoken so openly about these issues and acknowledged that the situation had been awkward since the

bula was unmarried (and by implication sexually inexperienced) and they added: "What she is saying, she has to say (echoing what the young bula had told me) and that is fine, but we have heard this so many times and we are sick of it". You know, we comply with what we can and the rest we have to leave to be written on the bad side."

250

8.5 The influence of official Islam and secularisation In Bosnia in recent years the traditional beliefsystem have been challenged by two competing discourses: orthodox Islam, and the officially atheist and communist state discourse. While state socialism presents a threat to traditional values and rituals as, to an increasing extent, does western consumerism, secularisation in its various forms opposes them only indirectly. It is my contention that more direct opposition comes from "official Islam". Islamisation (through the auspices of the I.Z.) means that villagers are encouraged to give up customs and ritual practices regarded by Muslim scholars as non-Islamic (i.e. showing either Christian or primitive influences). As a result there is an increasing awareness in the villagers' own minds of differences between Islamic and non-Islamic practices. Among the villagers themselves, however, there is a clear feeling, especially among the older generation, even if never overtly expressed, that the Muslim clergy interferes with local life and customs. This became particularly clear when I asked questions about the forthcoming celebration of Jurjev (discussed in chapter 9). My informants told me somewhat reluctantly what was happening on Jurjevdan, then a woman in her late seventies added: "But there is little of that nowadays; some say

Jurjevdan is not a Muslim custom, they say it is "gypsy" (ciganski' 1 ), but it is also ours, we have celebrated it

for as long as I can remember." She disapproved of the 251

hoda, who does not like them to celebrate the day, and added that the old hoda (who is now retired) was nicer, as he did not mind ("He never said anything, while this one says we should celebrate the Muslim new year instead."). The second factor influencing religious life, secularisation, takes two forms, as we have said: state socialism and western consumerism. The most powerful agent of secularisation and socialism (i.e. Titoism) is probably the state educational system.

8.6 Islamic education and Muslim identity Between the ages of seven and fourteen, village children participate in two different educational systems: one religious (the mekteb) and one secular (the state school). Both boys and girls attend mekteb, ideally every day, either in the morning or in the afternoon depending on when they have to go to primary school (see chapter 2).

Mekteb runs parallel with primary school, i.e. a child starts at the age of six or seven and goes on to the age of fourteen or fifteen. Most children, however, drop out at an earlier age, and some children never attend. This is a constant topic of debate between the hoda and parents of those children that attend mekteb regularly. The common judgement of those families whose children are not sent to

mekteb is that the parents are "useless" (ne valjaju). During the week, fewer children attend, while on Saturdays the classroom on the first floor of the mosque is almost always full with about thirty children in each of 252

the two classes given that day. Children learn to read and recite by heart from the Quran in Arabic (although they mostly do not understand what they are reading: some younger hodas with better training arid more modern educational theories stress understanding of the text, rather than learning by heart through repetition, which is the more traditional method). They also learn the technicalities of praying: how, what, and at what time of the day, as well as the ritual washing and recitals taking place before the prayers. At the end of each mekteb-year, which in this particular village was in May, a children's

mevlud is held. On this occasion the children sing religious songs in praise of the Prophet Mohammed. 12 The Christian children in the village have a parallel to mekteb in their Sunday school. But as the name suggests, children only attend on Sundays, and the school is not located in the village. Furthermore, these children read the Bible in their own language. This is one of the reasons given to me by Bosnian scholars to explain why the illiteracy rate among the Muslims in rural areas is higher than among the Christians. Before the war, when education generally in rural areas was taken care of by the religious institutions, Christian children learnt to read their own language, while Muslim children learnt to read Arabic first and had to learn Serbo-Croat, written in either Cyrillic or Latin, separately. Attending mekteb is an extra work-load for children as it comes on top of primary school duties. It can also be 253

rather unpleasant: in winter, when temperatures may be as low as minus 20'C, the child has to get up at 6 a.m. and go to a freezing cold mosque. Girls in the last years at primary school have a particularly busy time when also attending mekteb. With increasing age, a girl is expected to take on more responsibility for the running of her mother's household, cleaning, cooking and looking after younger siblings. At the same time school becomes more demanding and the pressure to finish with good enough marks to get into a an attractive course at secondary school increases. Such pressures are no doubt partly responsible for the high drop-out rate. An additional reason may be the old-fashioned and authoritarian teaching methods. Teenage girls who dropped out before finishing primary school were particularly adamant about how much they hated the Quranic school and the hoda's caning, in spite of which, they said, "I still couldn't get all that Arabic into my head." The local hoda repeatedly told the children that he wanted them to be as dedicated to

inekteb as

they were to

their state school, and that it was just as serious to miss

mekteb as miss school. Teachers at school, however, would complain that Muslim children were tired and had less time to spend on homework because of their other commitments to the Quranic school during week-days. The two educational systems clearly see each other as rivals. Although it could be argued that the two institutions complement each other (state schools do not have religious instruction), this is generally not how the representatives of the two see the 254

matter; indeed, in an important sense, the two cannot be complementary, as they offer competing definitions of Muslim identity. While children are taught at

rnekteb

that

to be a Bosnian Muslim is first and foremost to be a Muslim in the religious sense, they learn in school that to be a Muslim is first and foremost to be a member of a Yugoslav ethnic group, a category which is politically rather than religiously defined and thus in accordance with the official Titoist doctrine.

8.7 Muslim identit y and the socialist state As I indicated chapter 7, there is a widespread idea among parents and especially grandparents that children are taught at school "not to believe". Some parents who are concerned to bring up their children as good Muslims may keep them away from school when there are special events stressing the children's Yugoslav Communist (and by extension, atheist) identity. During their first years at school pupils have to learn patriotic songs and poems in which Yugoslavia's now deceased leader Tito is honoured as the great father who loves all Yugoslav children. When they have learnt these the children get a diploma, a red scarf and a bright blue beret with the Yugoslav red star on the front; they have now become Tito's "pioneers". (At mosque school children learn songs and poems revering Islam and its prophet Mohammed whose images and symbols are very similar in kind to those used to revere Socialist Yugoslavia and its founder Tito..) On the days commemorating 255

the independence of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the foundation of the Yugoslav Federal Republic, the schools celebrate by putting on a show in which the children perform the kind of songs and poems described above. The youngest children wear their pioneer outfits. Some Muslim mothers do not approve of their sons wearing the pioneer berets in particular and do not take good care of them. On one occasion a mother refused to allow her son to wear his beret at a school performance. This made him very upset, and he said that in that case he could not go at all, so his mother told him to stay at home. It seems likely that the pioneer beret was particularly frowned on because Bosnian men wear a dark blue beret as a sign (the only outward one-a powerful symbol, therefore) of their Muslim identity. The pioneer beret was clearly seen as a challenge to the Muslim beret. The Muslim mother who refused to let her son wear the pioneer beret saw it too as a symbol, but an opposing one. However, in spite of the reluctance parents feel towards school and their concern about the possible damage its ideology might cause to their children's Muslim identity, they still consider education to be very important (cf.chapter 7). From the religious instructor's point of view children's attendance at mekteb is often undermined by the demands of state education, and adult (male) attendance at congregational prayers in the mosque is negatively affected by the requirements of industrial labour. However, both are 256

affected by a third factor, namely the changing political climate towards religion at various periods in post-war Yugoslavia. Attendance at mosques was at a low during the restrictive fifties and once more in the eighties, when alleged fears of pan-Islamic demonstrations (see footnote 43 this chapter) led to a harsh attitude on the part of the authorities towards all public Islamic activities. The nineties have seen a new openness towards religion, reflected, among other things, in the number of new mosques being built. This increased liberalism coincides with a softer political climate in Bosnia, which was long known as the most hard-line Communist republic in Yugoslavia. However, when I asked a former village hodza what were the most striking changes since his retirement, he said that more people went to the mosque before, (this was probably true for the sixties), an opinion confirmed by other hodas of the same generation. He pointed out too that in those days more people were working on the land, and the young, who either went idle or worked on the fields, would join their seniors when they went off to attend the congregational prayers in the mosque. It is difficult for the Bosnian Muslim to combine his or her obligations as a worker in a factory or shop with those of a devout Muslim, since there are no officially recognised times or places for prayer and ritual washing, and canteens may well serve only pork. Today, Bosnian Muslims have to accept the conflict: having a job, i.e. working for the state, excludes being able to perform all Muslim ritual 257

obligations. The hodza thought the fall in mosque attendance had happened not so much because people no longer wanted to go, but rather because they were increasingly tied up with secular obligations.

258

Footnotes charter 8

1. To these young devotees "Muslim" is to a larger extent tied to a wider Islamic identity, rather than restricted to a Bosnian Muslim identity defined in relation to non-Muslim Bosnians. The former trend is well argued by Sorabji, 1989 in which chapter six "Religious charisma and wider Islamic identity" is particularly relevant. 2. The informant who I am partly quoting here was very worried about me mentioning any names. This was an attitude I often met among older members of the clergy, who were generally cautious about talking to me. They would also express the view that "in the west they often write untrue things about Islam", and were worried that I would do the same. 3. The boundaries of officially acceptable Islamic expression in this one-party run religiously and ethnically mixed republic are logically drawn at the state level, opposing any expressions of pan-Islamic sentiments. This is clearly illustrated by the "Sarajevo trials" in 1983, where eleven "Muslim nationalists" were given sentences ranging from six months to fifteen years for spreading "pan-Islamism" and trying to turn Bosnia-Herzegovina into a "purely Muslim" republic (See Radio Free Europe Research, Background Report 210, 2 Sept. 1983). 4. Also present were representatives of the Catholic and the Serbian Orthodox churches, who likewise -each gave a short speech. 5. There is an interesting parallel between the way in which the I.Z tends to take over and direct religious customs and rituals that were earlier initiated by the individual household or local community, and the way in which the regional branch of the Communist youth organisation has 'taken over' the traditional teferiâ or fair and, indirectly, the sijelo through the Saturday dance (cf. chapter 3). 6. The first mosque in Dolina (which was made of wood but replaced by the present one of concrete in the 1960s) is believed to date back to 16th century and was the first mosque to be built in the region. 7. I often heard older people making this distinction between the past and the present and contextualising the changes that had taken place by using the expressions "old Yugoslavia" (stara Jugoslavija) and "Socialist Yugoslavia" or just "now", or "today's Yugoslavia" versus "before in old Yugoslavia". 8. See also C. Sorabji unpublished Ph.D thesis Muslim identity and Islamic faith in Socialist Sarajevo, Cambridge, 1989.

259

9. This idea is, however, also supported by part of the Muslim clergy who have been educated at Islamic institutions in Arab countries, and is consistent with the role women are ascribed in both Arab nationalist and Is].amicist ideologies. In both a woman's education is seen as desirable because it will raise her quality as mother, educater and repository for ethical values. (cf. Haddad, 1985). 10. Personally, I knew of two young bulas who could not find employment. One of them is now assisting her father, who is a hoda, in teaching at the mosque school after having spent a year instructing at a mosque school in a remote village in her home region. The other had started working as a shopkeeper.

11. Ciqanski is a term used by villagers to denote any custom which ne valja (lit, which has no value) and which in other words has come to occupy an inferior status because it is not "civilized" (i.e. kulturan) or not "Islamic". 12. The local hodza was criticised both by villagers, though not openly, and by younger colleagues of the same dzemat as well as by the Islamic council in the region for not continuing with mekteb until the summer vacation. He was also criticised for not setting up the traditional hatme, a children's examination ceremony in the mosque. The hodza became quite bitter about having to put up with the villagers' lack of support on the one hand and his employers' increasing interference on the other, and wanted to leave.

260

CHAPTER NINE: COPING WITH MISFORTUNE

9.0 Introduction The Dolina villager's understanding of religion (and belief) may with some justification be described as "pragmatic". Pragmatism is also the aspect which integrates folk tradition and literate Islam, and it is in this respect that they are seen as one by the majority of the village population (this is with the exception of a few devout literate Muslims). Within this framework, religion and belief are seen as an insurance against misfortune. The popular view is that success (especially material), is proof of a person's devoutness. Thus, the fact that people in Dolina are poor is often ascribed to generally weak "faith" in the village (which when expressed by women would also be an implicit criticism of men wasting money on alcohol and feasting). A comparison is sometimes drawn with villages north of Dolina where people are known to be very devout and where living standards are considered higher. Others, however, would make the point that people there worked more, had more money and thus could 'display' their religiousness through lavish rituals such as meviud (see chapter 10). To illustrate this point further: on one occasion a woman who had been to Germany to visit her brother-in-law told women at a coffee-visit about the prosperity she had seen (which she exemplified by mentioning the ten different kinds of bread in the shops). There, she explained, everybody believes in God. 261

Generally, things that go wrong are explained by lack of faith and devotion (vjera). Thus, the drought and consequently bad harvest one year was assessed by women as follows: "The harvest has become as damaged (pokvaren) [which has the connotation of being morally corrupt) as people have; nowhere is there prayer to God." Traditionally, when there is a drought women hold prayers

(dove) at the three holy graves or turbe in Dolina. They had not yet hold prayers for rain and when I asked why, they blamed the female religious instructor or bula who would have to lead the prayers, for not taking the initiative; but she always had to be asked by somebody, "and nobody has asked her yet". In a neighbouring village somebody had called her and they had held prayers. And even if it was to be organised in Dolina these women were unsure whether it would work or not because "here people have a weak faith". The same idea, that the presence or absence of certain phenomena are dependent on positive belief, not in God this time but in the phenomena themselves, is expressed about the supernatural. Villagers claim that there used to be more 'supernatural events' as well as more casting of spells in the past, and that the reason for the decrease is that "people do not believe any more". It is interesting to note that they are not actually questioning the existence or truth of what I call here supernatural events (referred to by informants as incidents "when people had seen something which nobody else had seen"): they do not reject 262

the existence of these kinds of phenomena per se, but rather see them as accessible to people only when they are believed in. One typical story, referring to a recent event, was circulating in the village and had been authorised by the village hoda. A young man had picked up a young, well-dressed girl who was waiting at the roadside

asking for a lift. They had chatted and then at one point the girl had asked him to stop and she had disappeared before he had time to open the door for her. He noticed, however, that she had forgotten her leather jacket (a status symbol and indicator of material wealth), and he ran after her, but could not see her. He went in the direction she had said she lived and ended up at a cemetery. He was later able to trace the girl's parents' house by describing her to people in the region, but learned when he came to hand back the jacket that she had been dead for two years. Another story which had happened locally many years ago went as follows. A grandmother of about seventy years of age told how, when she was young, she had once accidentally killed a bird while she was outdoors washing clothes. A man had then appeared and told her: "You killed my bird, and for that I shall kill your two young sons". When the woman returned to her house, her two sons were dead. After telling similar stories informants would add that years ago there were many events similar to these, but then people stopped believing (in them); lately, however, such events had increased again. The common theme in these stories is death, and I 263

would argue that on a general level they are allegories of social change. The-weakening-and-loss-of-belief argument is an attempt to explain and to cope with radical social change involving the questioning and ever rejection of the basic structuring values and moral ideas in rural society. It is significant that the agent of this change in the eyes of the villager is the educated, urbanised, or politically influential figure: in other words the kind of person faced with whom most poor, semi-literate villagers feel powerless and inferior. Social change has brought urban, mainly western literate values to the forefront and by extension put rural, uneducated Muslims at the bottom of the hierarchy. Social change for the rural Muslim is therefore expressed and understood through the idiom of "not believing" (lit, having no faith in terms of religion),

which in effect implies the rejection or loss of the village community's traditional value system. It is symptomatic that those practices which are losing ground are those which are associated with a non-literate tradition. The vast majority of folk beliefs concern healing and the protection from misfortune. Some healing practices are remembered only by a few older women born in the village who once performed them. (Most such practices were performed by women.) Other healing rituals still known to the older generation of women are dismissed as superstition by the young and consequently less often performed these days. There is a pronounced awareness among the village 264

population, and even among the older generation who still practice the customs, that what they believe in (or are associated with) is seen as illiterate, superstitious and primitive by the literate, urbanised and thus higher-status population. It should be stressed, however, that while belief in some supernatural phenomenon may be questioned, belief in God is not. Faced with more educated representatives of society (e.g. the foreign anthropologist, the Yugoslav ethnologist or even the urbanised, young imam), most villagers would dismiss such practices as gatanje (i.e. fortune-telling, but with the connotation of "superstJus rubbish"). Far from taking pride in their belief-system (and ultimately their culture), they would repeatedly reject or ridicule it until, when convinced by the researcher's sincerity, they would present the information in a crude matter-of-fact way, displaying signs of boredom if further details were asked for. One of my key informants on this area would almost inevitably add to her description of a certain traditional belief or healing practice: "These are things we believe in villages (in the meaning of credulity as opposed to faith), but which others might think is

nonsense, but everything interests you, and you want to know everything, so I tell you." When asked about issues

concerning Islamic faith, (i.e. seen by informants to concern orthodox, literate and therefore high-status practices) the response was markedly different.

265

9.1 Diviners Although villagers, as we have seen, in certain contexts tended to dismiss all fortune telling as

gatanje,

there appears to be a sliding scale of respectability. Least respected are the gypsies travelling the countryside offering to read palms, and the kind of local women who read the villagers (usually young girl's) future in coffeegrounds and in beans. The various kinds of diviners and healers discussed below are valued according to their literacy; while the less literate are sometimes referred to as "sorcerers" sihirbaz, or sihirbazica for a woman; (the term derives from the word sihir, discussed in section 9.2.2), the learned sufi-hodas are almost universally esteemed. The different diviners or fortune-tellers in Bosnia may be divided into three different categories, depending on their background and the methods they use.. The first category consists of hodas who limit themselves to writing charms (zapis; see section 9.3.1). These are often retired hodas with long experience and good psychological insight into local life. The second category, which I shall call "lay diviners", consists of people, both men and women, who have no formal religious education, but are still, if male, called a "hoda" by the villagers, probably because they know the Quran better than the average Muslim and can write a little Arabic. It is obvious from this usage that "knowledge" (and literacy) per se has in rural areas traditionally been associated with Islam and the Islamic clergy. As we shall see, however, this does not 266

necessarily mean that all hodas are believed to "know a lot" merely on the basis of being literate in orthodox Islam. Alternatively, they may be called by the more general term of sihirbaz or sihirbazica. In "treating" clients the lay diviners mix prayers and recitals from the Quran with their knowledge of traditional folk medicine. They may refer a client to either a doctor or a hodia, depending on the problem, or they may prescribe different magical procedures: visiting holy graves, dispersing corn in a prescribed place while saying a prayer, or the intake of certain herbal mixtures. I know of three people in this category, but it should be noted that two of them are women and only the man is called hoda. The women are usually called by their first name and the name of their village. All three live in remote mountain villages. People may come all the way from Sarajevo to see them. One of the favourite stories told by villagers about one of them was that during the Olympic Winter Games in Sarajevo (1984) this "hoda" had visitors from far-away countries who took the trip all the way from Sarajevo to seek his help. ( I was later made aware that it was only one person with his family and that he was probably an emigrant.) The story was always told to establish this "hoda's" importance. However, lay diviners are dismissed by real hodas as "illiterate" because they mix Quranic knowledge with non-Islamic folk-beliefs

9.1.1 The "sufi-hodas" The third and most prestigious category consists of a 267

group of four actual hodas who are all related to each other through a common ancestor, the founder of one of the dervish tekija in the region of which they themselves are members. They combine being employed as hodas by the official religious authorities with being active members of a suf i-order (see appendix). They are thus mediators between orthodox Islam and those practices which are both associated with more mysticism and with more personal support and help in times of crisis. I shall call these hodas sufi-hod^as to distinguish them from other

categories of diviners and hodas. They are all highly literate men who know several languages including Turkish and Arabic. The sufi-hodas use a range of techniques and sources: sacred books, astrology, palm reading, prayers and Quranic recitals. Since what these sufi-hodas are doing is condemned by part of the Muslim leadership, and is also said by some to be illegal, they prefer to keep a low profile. I once asked one of them to "see" for me, but since at that point it was a well-established fact that I was "writing", he refused (while imitating somebody writing), obviously worried about any publicity. My information on what these hodas actually do is therefore not as detailed and accurate as could have been desired; it comes mainly from villagers who have been to see them. The sufi-hodas themselves are, unlike the first category (i.e. those who do straight-forward charm writing), unwilling to talk about their work. Indeed, villagers who had sought theii help would also be evasive 268

when asked what the hoda had told them. They would explain that the hoda had said that if they told anybody exactly what had taken place it would loose its effect. The obvious explanation is that the diviner does not want people to know that he might get it wrong and thus protecting the authority of their profession. However, more to the point is the fact that the magic performed by the diviner usually aims at either "undoing" or protecting a person from sihir. Passing on information about what the hoda has said, and most importantly what he has said about the person's future would leave that person vulnerable to sihir. The more orthodox clerics condemn divination since it is believed that only God can know a person's future, the diviners, however, see themselves merely as interpreters of God's message and in interpreting they use "divine books". The diviner-hoda is known and characterised as a hoda who knows a lot. There are also hodas who although literate in Islam are said not to know anything, knowledge in this context does not refer to knowledge of the Quran, but to more esoteric knowledge as it is believed that these people can see and understand things that ordinary people cannot. Like the ehit and evlija (see section 9.4.1) they are seen as closer to God and therefore in a better position to mediate between people and God, however the diviner cannot be as close as the ehit since he still belongs to this world. A diviner may therefore advise his client to visit a ehit's grave as an even more powerful intermediary. There is thus a hierarchy of intermediaries between people 269

and God. It is significant, however that intermediaries are mainly sought by those who do not read or understand the Quran well and to whom a sufi-hodza or ehit is therefore more accessible as a means of communicating with God (when the normal prayers seem inadequate). For the suf is themselves, however, communication with God consists of several circles where the Law makes up the outer one, the different means of communication are therefore not alternatives but complementarities. Some of those who know a lot may turn out to be an evlija (Arabic; waliyya, saint), but I only heard this term used about a dead person who had been very pious and performed miracles both in life and also after his death. The sufi-hoda is the person any villager will resort to when faced with problems that none of the official professions or institutions have not been able to solve. The person will always have sought help from a doctor or psychologist (or a lawyer if the problem is legal), first, but without success. When it concerns illness the suf 1hoda will always make sure the person has already consulted a doctor, otherwise he will tell him or her to do so. (Legal cases are more rarely taken on by hodias.) Among the most common problems are illness, marital difficulties, infertility, prolonged bachelorhood and mental problems such as anxiety or deep depression. Alternatively, people may just come to have the hodza write a charm for protection and fortune. Clients are never asked to give a fixed payment, but are rather advised to pay what 270

they can, and wish to. When the consultation is over the hoda leaves the room and the client will leave the amount of money s/he feels appropriate. While the hoda liketo define what is given as a gift, most villagers would see it as a payment not a gift (i.e. they would use the word for payment rather than the word for gift). Those who feel that they have been greatly helped may continue to give the hoda presents. I know of one particular case where a woman sought help with one of the hodas to find a partner and happiness. She later married a rich foreigner and is convinced that her good fortune in life is thanks to the hoda's efforts. She keeps bringing him expensive presents from abroad. One of the four sufi-hodas in the area, known to be particularly good at love spells, is also visited by people with higher education and an urban background. All four of them are, however, visited by people from all over Bosnia. Urban, educated non-believers may derogatorily describe the sufi-hodas' activities as gatanje. Some villagers, too, have reservations about the amount of money they appear to be making. (Hodas are in this context often referred to as "thieves" (hode su 1opov].) Most people,

however, respect and trust their knowledge and spiritual powers, and say that the sufi-hodas deverati, which could be translated with "to struggle with life's trouble and misfortune". The most common description, however, is simply "a hoda who knows a lot" or a hod2a who knows how to write zapis". 271

When I first started to inquire among villagers about the hodas who write charms (zapis), they told me that they had books or that they "look in books". However, these are books which are not accessible to anybody who knows how to read. It turned out in the case of the sufi-hodas that the books in question are central to the whole activity. These

hodas derive their knowledge and thus authority from a selection of "sacred" books. The books are in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and consist of Islamic religious literature including the Hadith and combined with sufistic

sources and other oriental literature on spiritual matters. These books have often been in the family for generations, collected and handed down by their forefathers. When villagers need to see such a hodia they say they will "go to hodza so that he may write something down". The fact that the "writing aspect" of their activity is stressed is significant. 1 Among the rural population where illiteracy was common until quite recently, the ability to read and write was considered both powerful and mystic. As literacy is increasing among the population at large the knowledge of reading and writing is losing some of its immediate power and mystic although this is still not entirely true for literacy in Arabic. A

hoda,

to gain

respect as somebody who knows a lot must have the knowledge

"to see" on the other hand, however, there is a scepticism about knowledge which is not derived from books (cf. illiterate

gatanje).

272

9.1.2 Choosinc a diviner Diviners work unofficially, but, as we have seen, people often come from afar to seek their help. Clients may also belong to other ethno-religious groups. However, while Catholics are rare, Serbs (Orthodox Christian) are less so; they often go to

hodas after having tried their own

diviners and healing practices first. 2 All the hodas and fortune-tellers I spoke to said that it was not uncommon for Serbs to seek their help. A Dolina woman who was herself practising traditional healing and magic said (in relation to salLjevati stravu (see section 9.3.3] specifically) that Catholics (Croats) would ask her help only if absolutely nothing else helped, as they had their own remedies. Serbs, however, would be more likely to use Muslim remedies, and she added: "Serbs believe in everything." She confirmed that she herself had used Catholic methods: they have this kind of water which is blessed and once she used it when her cow was ill. These examples of syncretistic practices are consistent with the pragmatic orientation of this sort of religious activity (Cf. Hasluck, 1929). We have seen that there are different categories of diviners, and the question is what makes people choose to go to one rather than the other. The different diviners may be known to specialise in treating certain problems. One hoda may be known to have healing hands for children

(sevap ruke

za

dject), another may be particularly good at

casting love spells, another again at seeing and finding 273

lost items. Choice may also depend on who is closest to where the client lives, or on previous contact and personal preferences. The lay diviners may actually refer clients either to a doctor or a sufi-hoda. The general rule is, however, that if the first diviner did not remedy a person's problem, he or she may go and see a different one. To illustrate a typical procedure I give Faketa's story below. Faketa was born in Dolina, but is now married in a large market town. She started her account by saying that she did not believe in fortune-telling (gatanje), but that those who write charms and look into the stars (i.e. in this case the sufi-hodas) are different and she found them more convincing. This woman had once sought the help of a well-known diviner, a woman, because she became ill ("in her soul") after having witnessed a manslaughter. The woman will as a rule recite from the Quran in the presence of the person who is seeking help, but she also gives them different magic tasks to perform, which will vary with the character of the sufferings. Faketa mentioned those she could remember; she said there were so many she had to have somebody write them down for her. On three consecutive Tuesdays she should go to a turbe (a holy grave) in a specific town, where she should first recite a prayer, then walk around the grave and scatter grain which she had brought (and which, she did not fail to remark, is very expensive). She should furthermore take of f her undershirt, put it on the grave (turbe) and put it back on again. Nine 274

times she should go to a certain bula to have "the lead ritual" (salijevati stravu) performed on her. At this point she added that she thought these people who do fortunetelling (qatanje) has an agreement to send around customers to each other. In addition, she was to buy a kilo of bread throw crumbS into the source of the river running though Sarajevo. But since this is illegal, she did not dare and her mother had to do it for her. After all this, however, she only got worse and she concluded that it was all illiterate gatanje. But there are many people who go to

see them, she said; at the bula's she had to wait in a queue. But she claimed that these people help only those who merely imagine themselves to be ill. Faketa thought it was a lot of wasted money: for the taxi, for buying the corn, and for paying the bula. Since this did not help she eventually went to see one of the sufi-hodas, but her information on this was sparse; all she could say was that he had looked up in some books and that he had told her that she was born under a lucky star and that her husband was nice. 3 Lastly, she went to a well-known diviner in a remote mountain village whom some people call a hodza (she added thathe was not a real one). He too looked up some books, and she thought they all had the same books. He advised her to make a herbal tea mixture, and that was all, she said. Again, this account proved that people were more willing to talk about their experiences with the lay diviners than with the suf i-

hodas. 275

9.2 IclentifvincT the source of a problem Before the diviner may remedy a client's problems, being illness which doctors have not been able to heal, infertility or any other, the diviner need to identify the source of the problem. Two sources are generally cozsidered: attacks by evil spirits and the casting of spells. Sometimes people identify the source of the problem themselves, as most of the dangers of evil forces and the precautions to be taken against them

Corwo krovL

c.L j

."

9.2.1 Evil spirits It is believed that people are particularly vulnerable to attacks from bad spirits (called by the Arabic term

din) between sunset and dawn, until the cock crows, the most critical period being just at sunset. This is when bad spirits are roaming about, and they may enter a person in different ways. There are several different expressionused to describe that a person has become ill as the result of an attack from evil spirits. When describing these evil beings,

informants would use many different words, all of

which translates as "bad spirit" or "devil". If they were asked to specify further, the answer would usually be "who knows what it is'?" People were always understandably vague or even contradictory when giving explanations of the cause of events or nature of the spiritual and immaterial power. Two main expressions are nevertheless used: and

ugrajisati

se

uhvatiti. The latter means to seize or to take hold of

and is used in the construction. "something may take hold of 276

you". I never heard it used in the past tense about anybody; rather, the words were uttered as a warning against doing certain things: for instance, a woman or girl would be told not to go out after dark on her own or into the forest as something might seize hold of her. A person may be grabbed by a "devilish being", who may show himself in the disguise of a cat (female: matka) or a man with feet like a goat. Only a hod2a's zapis (a charm which will be described in section 9.3.1) can protect a person against attacks from evil spirits. The former expression, ugrajisati se has no simple literal translation and requires some further explanation. The villagers use it to express the bewitching of a person as a result of certain acts performed by this person. It is a word which does not exist in any dictionary, and my Sarajevan informants did not understand it. They suggested it was supposed to be nagaziti (na urok), which means to be bewitched, or alternatively naqrajisati, which means to get into trouble or to fare badly. (It should be noted that many verbs have both na and u as prefixes; the difference is in the time aspect of the verb. The language spoken by villagers is often condemned as grammatically incorrect by urbanites). It is believed that a person may be "bewitched" by what most informants would refer to as "something", or more rarely as a "devilish brew", which may attach itself on breadcrumbs, nails, blood, wood-chips or everything which is rubbish and has been left out of doors by humans. This stuff is what is believed tobe used by sorcerers when 277

making zihir. This devilish brew containing malevolent spirits may thus be transferred deliberately by sorcerers to people who then become possessed (see Fuller, 1992:ch. 10) for a similar case in Indian Hinduism.) Again, a person is most vulnerable to such attacks at aksam (lit, referring to the prayers at sunset). If a person has to go out after sunset he or she should always say bismillah 5 , since the person may unknowingly step over rubbish, like already mentioned, left by humans on the ground where "agents of the devil" gather. Again, however, the best protection is to wear a zapis. It is believed that "something" may enter into a person through the openings of his or her body and thereby causing minor paralysis, e.g. of the mouth or parts of the face. If this happens, the person must go to see a hodza, as only he may help, although some argued that there was no cure for this (see below). Because a person is attacked through the openings of her or his body women are seen to be particularly vulnerable: "the poison" or "devilish brew" may enter through her vagina. Women are therefore taught never to urinate outside after dark, as they may be poisoned on male urine (i.e. something devilish may gather on male urine); if they absolutely have to, they must keep their hand in front of their vagina. This, a woman explained, is why they always keep a chamber pot inside the house. A woman who has just given birth is equally vulnerable before the forty days of confinement are completed. (Such vulnerabilLty was not particularly 278

expressed in the context of menstruation, although ideas about ritual pollution were pronounced in this case She should not leave her house, or at least not her courtyard; if she has to go further, for instance to see a doctor, she should bring with her a key or

tespih (rosary)

from the

house. She should make sure to bring into the house before dark any of her own or her child's towels, bed-linen or clothes, as, I was told, "something may gather on it and enter her that way". 6 Although I was told that both men and women may se

ugrajisati, only

women expressed such fears, and while they

gave very specific situations in which it might happen to women, how it might happen to men was more unclear. Furthermore, the fact that women used the expression "to enter" in these specific examples of how a woman might se

uqrajisati leaves

us with a tempting analogy: that the fear

of being entered by evil spirits (or "something devilish") is an expression of a woman's awareness of her sexual vulnerability. It is significant that most of the women believed there to be no cure if this happened. The idea of "once entered, there is no return" could be seen as a symbolic expression of the loss of virginity: once a woman is "entered", the result is "incurable damage" to her body although there was no pronounced idea that such spirits were having sexual intercourse with the woman (cf. Fuller, 1992:ch. 10). Nost of the examples given of people being "bewitched" or "entered by something" describe women, their bodies and the restriction of their freedom of movement. We 279

may say that the vulnerability of the household as a unit is literally embodied in the woman 4o s at once the outsider to and the main reproducer of the unit. However, although men may construct women's vulnerability as a legitimation of women's inferiority women see this more in terms of their own health and well-being. Thus the Islamic commandment for a man not to have sex with his wife during her period or until forty days after she has given birth is not understood in terms of the woman being polluting, but rather as a health insurance for women. Thus, I was told that a villager now in his eighties had buried three wives because he had never respected the commandments to abstain. Yet, a woman who is seen as particularly vulnerable in one context may be seen as dangerous and polluting for exactly the same reasons in other contexts. Vulnerability is as we have seen connected with women's sexuality and reproductive functions, but danger and pollution are connected with the same functions in religious and ritual contexts. A woman when menstruating or until forty days after having given birth or just after having had sexual intercourse and before absolutions (this is also true for men); should not touch the Quran, enter the mosque or enter a saint's grave lest the saint may be angry. Women's sexual and reproductive powers are on the one hand associated with vulnerability and on the other with danger and pollution and while men will stress the latter aspect to restrict and exclude women from the ritual sources of power, 7 women woulI stress the vulnerability 280

aspect in relation to men's demands on their sexuality. Both, however, would refer to Quranic commandments (propis) as legitimation and it would therefore be misleading to talk about a Muslim male-female unified world-view. A presentation of such a world-view would appear contradictory, ambiguous at best as it would have to synthesize men's and women's different ideological discourses.

9.2.2 The castin g of spells

(sihir) may equally cause the only a hoda may remedy (with a

The casting of spells victim suffering which

zapis). Mystical religious activities such as divination,

healing, magic spells, etc. are, in the literature on mystic Islam, all labelled

sihr. In

sihir, sihr, is

Bosnia, however,

which is the Serbo-Croat spelling of the Arabic

only used about magic which is performed to cause evil. A hodza told me that

sihir is

knowledge which is not from

God: it is used for evil and comes from hostility, and

therefore God does not permit it. (By the same token, the various mystic activities performed by the sufi-hocIas are said never to be targeted at causing somebody ill fortune.) Sihir is believed to be mainly caused by Serbian,

especially female, sorcerers. Muslims believe they have the power to cast spells or use evil sorcery (uiniti/napraviti

sihir).

I was told by several informants that they were

wearing a zapis, so that nobody was able to "make something against" them. When I asked what this meant I was told: "so 281

that nobody can cause you evil" (zlo). It took me a long time to get an answer to the question about who would do this. When it was finally indicated to me by a good friend that Serbian sorcerers were known to cast evil spells on people, including Muslims, I was intrigued. At the same time it was stressed that Muslim sorcerers would very rarely make

hodas.

sihir; if

they did, they would not be real

One logical explanation to why Serb sorcerers in

particular (i.e. rather than Muslims or Catholics) are believed to cast evil spells could be that Muslims have a more ambiguous attitude towards Serbs than towards the Croatian Catholics. This in turn is mainly due to historical factors: first, the fact that the Bosnian Muslims are closer to the Serbs ethnically and culturally and secondly, and most significantly, the atrocities towards Bosnian Muslims committed by Serbian nationalists during the Second World War, which have left the Muslims fearful of the Serbs' capacity for evil. A

hoda is

the

only one believed to have the powers to undo evil spells. The Muslim diviners themselves are known to cast only love spells. (This is also what Christians would mainly visit them for, as they have their own healing practices and remedies.) I was told that you could go to a certain

hoda and

ask him to make the person of your choice fall in

love with you, or to influence a sweetheart or spouse to return if s/he had abandoned you. One informant told me that when she first arrived in her husband's home, her mother-in-law accused her of having had a 282

hodza neto

napraviti (i.e. cast a spell on her son so that he had

fallen in love with her). These accusations, understandably, upset the daughter-in-law terribly. I was also warned by the old couple in my household not to see a young hoda, one of my informants, as they worried he might "cast something" (neto napraviti) which would make me lose my mind like a drunk and stay with him. The alleged power of a hoda to cast love-spells is the one which is most spoken about and surrounded with most myths. The worrying about love magic seems to suggest firstly concern about sexuality and women generally (as suggested above) and secondly that love subverts properly organised domestic relations. Infatuation, in other words, is not only a threat to individual stability, but also to the social order.

9.2.3 The evil eve While casting of spells through magic and sorcery is believed to be a premeditated action, the casting of the evil eye (to ureéi somebody) is not. This is perhaps the most commonly mentioned form of bewitching. Evil-eye beliefs are well known and documented throughout the whole of the Mediterranean area (both in the Christian, see for example du Boulay, 1974 on Greece and the Islamic parts), the Middle & Near East and much of South Asia (cf. Maloney, 1976). When studying a Muslim neighbourhood in sarajevo, Sorabji notes that she found no evil-eye beliefs (1989:86). However, I found such beliefs to be quite pronounced in 283

Dolina, even if informants in the beginning were reluctant to talk about it. Although my material was mainly collected in rural Bosnia, I also consulted informants in Sarajevo on popular beliefs and it was clear that belief in the evil eye and knowledge about different protective measures are also found among Sarajevans, although the educated, Muslim elite may not want to express such beliefs. While the expression for casting the evil eye is to

ureci

someone, the villagers use several different terms

for "evil eyes", the most common being grdnt ot1 (lit, ugly eyes), but

urokljive oi (lit,

bewitching

eyes)

or pogane

oci (lit, filthy or evil eyes) were also used. I was told

that you cannot know if someone has evil eyes or not, and even the possessor does not know. A person may not know that s/he has been bewitched by evil eyes until s/he gets ill with a splitting headache and fever. If one person looks at a second person and says that he or she is beautiful without saying maa1ah, the first person may bewitch the second one. Maa1ah (see also chapter 2, footnote 2) expresses wonder at and pleasure in what the person sees. In the original Arabic it translates approximately as "what God wants will be" (i.e. everything is dependent on God's will). Beautiful girls are thought to be very vulnerable. A warning sign that a girl may be a potential victim of the evil eye is the reddening of her face: it is believed that the red colour causes a headache, and that it is the result of many people staring at her, and since "not all people's eyes are the same", she may be 284

bewitched. The word maa1ah also refers to an amulet worn by a small child to protect him or her from spells, i.e. primarily the evil eye. Children are considered to be the most vulnerable of all, particularly if they cry a lot or are very beautiful. The original maa1ah is a golden medallion on which is written rnaa1ah in Arabic, but as

these are expensive most villagers will attach colourful, small plastic figures at the front of the baby's cap, or alternatively a red thread around his right leg and his left wrist (or the other way around). A third possibility is to attach the small silver plate which is part of a horse's bridle to the front of the baby's cap. The point is that whatever is used as a maa1ah should be conspicuous in order to draw people's attention away from the child's eyes so that the "child's harmony is not upset". (The concept of personal harmony is an Islamic theme which I shall return+o in a discussion of name magic; section 9.3.2.) To ease a child who cries a lot and who is therefore suspected of reacting to evil eyes), the mother say a verse while she blows air onto the child's face and then licks it in a star pattern with three lines. The verse is in Turkish and translates approximately as: "dark, black eyes, blue and green eyes, spells fly back!" The verse is repeated three times. There are also others, some in Serbo-Croat, which express the same idea, telling the spells to go away an return to where they came from. The idea that children the beautiful and the 285

fortunate are particularly prone to attack by the evil eye is very widespread. Although many authors discussing evileye beliefs stress that they express the fear of envy (and through envy jealousy) and its destructive powers (cf. Maloney, 1976), I found it striking that in Bosnia allusion was never made to the envy (or jealousy) of the possessor of the evil-eye (although accusations of jealousy is often made to explain cause of hostile and uncooperative behaviour in other contexts) rather the focus was on the rctpLe of the evil-eye. In fact, the person would bewitch the child unknowingly, and the child was presented as the one who attracts people's attention because of his or her beauty. However, attention may be seen as potentially dangerous because it may arouse jealousy in others.

9.3 Remedy ing the problem 9.3.1 The writin g of charms A hoda's most frequent and popular activity is to write the charms called zapis (lit, note) or more rarely muema (the latter is the Arabic word and describes the

wrapping of the note). The more general term hamajlija (lit, amulet) is also used. The writing of amulets is known throughout the Islamic world. Only a trained hodzva is seen as competent to write zapis; the few who actually do so are well known, especially among Muslims, in rural areas. Some more orthodox hodas, however, think this activity is UnQuranic and inunoral (because of the money involved). The official Islamic Association (Islamska Zajednica) is 286

rigorously against the activity and will teach young Medressa students (see chapter 8) to preach against the activity if they are posted to rural areas. The zapis is the most applied both as a protection against and a remedy for the different problems already discussed. A zapis is a small piece of paper with a verse or saying from the Quran written in Arabic and carried as a charm or amulet. The paper is wrapped into a triangle in a small piece of red cloth which has been oiled or waxed to make it more resistant. (The Arabic word muema literally means oilcloth.) The zapis is attached by a safety-pin as close to the person's body as possible, usually to the undershirt. As well as being worn for protection against spells and indirectly therefore against illness, or to solve a certain problem, it can be worn merely as an amulet to secure happiness and good-fortune. The verses written on the zapis are chosen according to what it is supposed to remedy. After the zapis has been written and wrapped there are several possible procedures: it may be worn immediately without any further measures being taken, or it may be put through various magical treatments. (It is important that the zapis is not worn, or left, in unclean places such as the lavatory if it is unprotected, i.e. not oiled.) The magical treatment varies according to the nature of the problem the zapis is supposed to protect the person from. A

hoda familiar

with

zapis-writing gave me the following examples: If a married couple who quarrel a lot come to a hodza who does zapis for 287

help, he will throw the zapis into water, in order for them to become friends again. The zapis is thrown into the fire when the "problem" needs to be totally destroyed. When a zapis is written against illness it is buried in the ground

(at the root of a tree) in order that the illness does not return. Below I give two typical case-histories of villagers who sought the help of a hodza and were given a zapis.

Case-histor y 1 Ref ika told me she had a splitting headache for the last couple of days (this was just weeks after she had been married and gone to live with her husband and his parents). She had not been able to go to work and had gone to see the doctor. He had given her some injections, but in spite of this she did not feel better. That day she had therefore decided to go and see a sufi-hoda in a nearby market town. He had asked her if she had already been to see the doctor. Then he had told her that she was a nice person and that she had a happy marriage, and that she would eventually have two Sons and a daughter. He had held a sort of map or circular piece of cardboard in front of her where Mecca and Kitab were marked, and made some movements over her shoulders. He then made her a zapis; this one was different from the usual kind in that it was covered in some kind of golden dust. On one side was written her husband's name in Latin letters, and on the other side hers in Arabic characters. Inside was a piece of paper on which something 288

was written in Arabic. The hoda had told her to throw the

zapis in water and thereafter to dry it and put it in her pillow, and it would be good if her husband sometimes carried it. On leaving she left the hodia as much money as she felt appropriate on the coffee-tray. She thought it was not expensive, as it was up to you how much you felt you could and would pay. Ref ika then showed me another zapis which she had fasterionto her undershirt with a safety-pin. She told me that this same hodzva many years ago had written her a zapis for her happiness.

Case-history 2 A mother told me the story of when her eighteen-monthold son was ill. (He is now seven.) The little boy had a fever and a red, itching rash on his hands, legs and body; and eventually his skin started to peel. She brought him to the doctor in the nearest market town. He told her that the boy was very ill, that "he's had enough" (pun a mu je kapa). He wrote out a prescription for some medicine, which my informant never used. Instead, she went to a hodza nearby who is known to have "healing hands" for children. He found that the boy had been attacked by crveni vjetar (lit, red wind; this was the common diagnosis of smallpox before general vaccination). He prescribed the following remedy: seven different flowers plus a zapis were to be boiled in water and the steam is inhaled over a bowl while a cloth was kept in front of the face, for as long as he could bear it. Afterwards, the boy was wetted with the water that had 289

been boiled together with the flowers and zapis. A different zapis was placed underneath the boy's pillow. The boy recovered. By mentioning again that the doctor had given her only a liquid medicine which she never used, she stressed the fact that It was the hodza who had the remedy, not the doctor, who she said did not even explain what the boy was suffering from. One of the hodias told me that he had fewer people to write zapis for today than in his younger days, since "today there are more doctors around, so fewer people come and ask us (hodzvas] to write zapis. Besides, young people nowadays do not believe in praying." Nevertheless, judging from the number of case-histories I collected of people who had sought the help of a hoda and who at least once had a zapis written for them, it is still a much-used strategy for coping with misfortune. There is, however, a tendency for people to seek help from one of the more prestigious sufi-hodas rather than from a knowledgeable old local hodza. The sufi-hodas, in contrast, report an increase in the number of people coming to them with health or personal problems over the last few years. This could be explained by the economic and political crisis in the country, the recurring corruption scandals and people's subsequent distrust of the authorities. -

290

We have seen that people often visit hodzVas for problems or issues which in an urban, educated context would be covered by the professions. It is significant therefore, that there is first, a reported (by clients and hocIas alike) decrease in the number of hodzas who practice divination activities such as the writing of zapis. This is clearly related to the younger hodzas' more orthodox and formalised educational background rendering them critical towards such practices. Secondly, there is a reported decrease in the number of people who seek the help of lay diviners. A decrease here should not only be explained by an increase in the number of doctors or other professionals, but also by the higher educational standards among villagers. Now that most people know how to read and write, semi-literate lay diviners have lost some of their powers. On the other hand the knowledge of the sufi-hodas derived from inaccessible "foreign books" is still respected. Zapis are for instance written in Arabic, and even if children learn to read and recite Quranic verses by heart, they do not actually learn the language. Lay people therefore do not usually have enough knowledge to be able to understand what is written in a zapis, as they would probably not know the Serbo-Croat translation.

9.3.2 Name magic After some time in the village one of my informants told me: "You know, they call ie Rem2ija, but my real name 291

is Fatima." She then explained that not very many knew this, but officially she was Fatima since, this was the name her father registered her under at the local council after her birth. Some time after this, I was repeatedly confused over a village girl's identity; it turned out that two different names were used to refer to her. The daughter in the house where I was staying, who was also a classmate of the girl, gave me an explanation which was later verified by the girl's mother. The girl, who is thirteen, became ill. All my informants were very vague about her symptoms, but the girl would not eat and became very weak. Her parents took her to several doctors, but she did not get better. Finally, they decided to go and see one of the sufi-hodas in the region. He suggested that her first name was somewhat difficult

(teko) for

her and that she should

take a different name. The one he suggested would have a meaning which he thought more in harmony with the girl's personality. The girl will now only respond to her new name. The girls' schoolmates admitted that they found this awkward, since whenever they forgot, and addressed her by her former name, she would just walk straight on without taking any notice. Later, I found out that quite a few people I knew (especially of the older generation) had a different name from their official one, i.e. the one on their identity card. They all explained that as children they had been ill a lot and their father, after taking advice from a

hoda,

had therefore changed their names to something "easier".8 292

Muslim first names are Turkish and usually ultimately Arabic in origin; as a rule they describe personality traits. Thus, Cazim means someone who calms anger, Hazim means dependable, Remzija means allegoric speech, etc. The meaning of the names are rarely known to the villagers; the sufi-hodas will know them, however, and will also be able to assess the appropriateness of a certain name to a certain personality. When I asked how the sufi-hodI p knew, villagers would invariably reply that they knew everything, and add that they had books. On a most general level the practice of changing names can be explained by the believed psychologically positive effect for the person of an implicit identity shift. Not responding to his or her original name, s/he is no longer that anxious, ill other person. More specifically, however, this practice should be seen as part of the concept of harmony in Islam and above all the harmony between body and soul as part of a larger whole in time and space. The centrality of this idea is reflected among others in the bodily movements during prayers and in architecture (where the mosque is the primal example). It is a holistic world view. The idea of harmony is one which is stressed in particular by sufism and pursued by the dervish in their sanctuaries (tekija). Within this tradition first-name meanings are significant and should fit the owner's personality. A sufi-hoda explained that a person's aim or power (sila) is decided by the stars at his birth but that no-one may know it. If, however, a person's sila does not 293

fit with the sila of his or her name, the person becomes ill. The only remedy is then to change the name to a different one where there is a better correlation between

sila in the name and sila in the person. But a name should not only reflect the power of the person who carries it, it should furthermore hide a person's weaknesses and protect the person from sihir. A person's real name (given at birth) is not a good name if it makes a child vulnerable to sihir. When the real name of a person (which exposes disharmony between person and name; weakness and strength; body and soul) is not generally known, he or she is protected from sorcery, as the sorcerer cannot attack someone without knowing the person's real identity (including his or her weaknesses).

9.3.3 Divination performed by women. There were two respected female diviners in the region. Such women are typically middle-aged; often they are also bulas of the traditional rather than the urban, Medressa-educated kind (see chapter 8). Generally speaking, female healers use fewer written sources and more pure divination and magic. They are particularly sought after for the sal4jevati stravu and the "praying of istihara", traditional healing practices accompanied by Muslim prayers and teachings from the Quran. Sa1jevati stravu means literally to pour, cast or form horror. The central item in the ritual is a lump of lead which is heated and then thrown into water, where it forms 294

a pattern from which the supplicant's troubles are divined. Apart from the local bula there was one other woman in the village who performed this ritual. She had learned it from an old bula (not professional) from the district, who decided to stop performing it after pressurv'her childrenurAo complained that it was primitive superstition. The woman instead taught Selima how to perform it and gave her the lump of lead. I observed salçjevati stravu on several occasions. It was always performed on the request of women who were either bereaved by the death of a close relative, or had been upset by other events in the immediate family. Some were anxious and unable to sleep, but without knowing the reason, as was the case with the woman in the casehistory below. The woman who called on Selima to salijevati stravu lived in a big, modern house at the lower end of the village. She normally lived and worked abroad with her husband, and only returned home from time to time to see to her older children, who stayed in the house %Jith their grandmother. She hoped to move back home for good in a couple of years' time. We were first served coffee and cakes. We sat around a table and drank from cups; this was in contrast to the traditional Muslim custom of sitting on sofas or on mattresses on the floor and drinking coffee from fi1dans (a small cup without a handle). The woman spoke urbanised Serbo-Croat, but wore a headscarf and a long robe. She said she did not sleep well at night, and wanted Selima to salLjevati stravu in order to rid her of 295

her anxiety

(sekiranje).

Selima first put the small piece of lead on a spoon and heated it over the fire. The spoon with the lead is then circulated around the head, the chest, the arms and the legs of the patient. While doing this the healer says verses from the Quran; she moves her lips but does not use her voice. Next, the lead is thrown into a bowl of water, taken out of the bowl again and the resulting pattern considered and interpreted. The lead lump is then pressed together and placed in the fire place again to melt. The lead is melted and thrown into the bowl of water three times. The first time the bowl is held over the head of the patient, the second time in front of her chest and the third over her legs. Each time the patient covers her head with a piece of cloth or garment. After each time, the formations that resulted from the lump of lead having been thrown into the water were examined and interpreted by Seliina. The first formation showed a sharp end; Selima decided that the woman had been terribly upset and scared by something that had happened to someone close to her, possibly her child. The woman remembered that some time back (two months ago) her baby son had fallen down the staircase. She had been terribly scared and had not slept well since. The two women decided that this event must have been the cause of her troubles. The second time the lead had formed a heart and Selima said this meant everything would be all right. The third time the shape was less obvious and it was only vaguely 296

interpreted, but it reinforced the first indication of something having scared the woman. Because the cause of the woman's anxiety had been identified as the accident to her baby son, Selima decided that she had to sa1jevati stravu on him as well. However, as the mother was worried that the child would be scared, the two women decided to make a figure out of the child's clothes to represent him. The sequences were then performed on the figure, with the exception of the first one when she says the prayers, and at the end they made the "boy" sip some of the lead-water. Women explain a good many physical afflictions by saying "she has been upset" (ona je se sekirala). They make an explicit connection between mental and physical health; and thus they acknowledge psychosomatic afflictions and do not see them as less important or less legitimate illnesses. If women feel worn out they will complain that they are ill from worries, or that they have been upset and are therefore not feeling well. These, they know, are afflictions which doctors at the health centre cannot cure, and they are therefore the most common reason for seeking faith-healers,

hodas and

other diviners as described.

The praying of istihara is performed specifically to predict the future. People, usually women, will come to the bula and ask if she can pray istihara on their behalf to find out what will be: whether a certain project will succeed, etc. Before going to sleep the bula will pray that her dream will reveal whatever it was the person in question wanted to know about her future. The bula will 297

then interpret the dream. The istihara is said to demand intense concentration and be mentally very tiring; not every bula can do it. While much of the divination practised in Bosnia by Muslims is considered to be unQuranic by more literate and orthodox Muslims, the istihara was stressed as a practice referred to in the Quran by the

bula I spoke to. Sa1jevati stravu is also performed by less educated Muslim women, as it requires less knowledge.

9.4 The cult of saints 9.4.1 Visitin g the graves of Muslim saints Another way to pray for a favourable outcome is to visit the graves of Muslim saints (ehit). The cult of saints is a pan-Islamic phenomenon but as noted by Gaborieau "The cult of the saints (...) forms part of those non-obligatory devotions in which a great freedom of choice is left to individuals or groups" (1983:305) and is Bosnia this cult has its own colouring. The visiting is primarily done by women, but often on behalf of other members of the family. A ehit is believed to be a man (or woman) who died "innocently" in the fight for his or her religion, a Muslim martyr whose death is considered heroic. His identity is often not known and the stress is on the heroic aspect of his death. Although such a martyr is also believed to possess evlija (divine power) he may be considered less powerful than the known and pious evlije who are often associated with the suf i and whose graves are visited for healing. There are several ehits' graves in or near 298

Dolina, three of them in the village itself. Most of them are fenced and with a headstone (nia) at both ends of the grave. (This is what distinguishes a saint's grave from a 'normal' grave. Yet, in recent years wealthy men have wished to have a grave with a headstone at each end; resembling a saint's grave, but most villagers dismiss this as pretentious and "no good".) The stone at the head-end of

the grave have a carved stone turban on the top of it. One of the Dolina graves, however, has a small square house built on top of the grave. This is called a turbe (mausoleum). The house is built in concrete and painted white, i.e. like a miniature Bosnian Muslim dwelling. The miniature house used to be of wood, like the traditional

.ardak1ija (see

chapter 6) and the mosque, until it started

to fall apart. Concrete, the new building material, was then used to build a replacement. Inside the house is a sarcophagus, covered in a green felt cloth and with headstones at each end. Unlike most headstones of male graves, this headstone does not have a carved turban, but instead has cloth wrapped round it in a turban shape. The popular explanation for this is that this sehit was beheaded; it is said that he came walking with

his head in his hands and asked to be buried in this particular spot. There are also praying mats and praying beads (tespih) in the turbe available for anybody who comes to pray. On the wall is a framed scripture which somebody from Sarajevo once came to interpret, but apparently without success. 299

The woman who is in charge of looking after this turbe inherited her duty from her mother-in-law and will eventually hand it down to her daughter-in-law. In theory, the caretaking duties are passed down through the male line of the family who owns the land where the

.ehit

died; in

practice, however, they go from mother-in-law to daughterin-law. This family claims that three brothers were killed on their land, hence the three graves in Dolina itself; others say there were seven. This myth is, however, typical of all

svehits

graves, the popular story is usually that if

several hhits are buried within an area, they are said to

be brothers. (The original meaning may well be that they were brothers in faith.) The woman, who has been looking after the

turbe

for more than fifty years, explained that

it is sevap (i.e. a good deed) to light a candle every night at the sunset-prayers (akam), but that Thursday night (on the eve of Friday; said to be the day the Quran was revealed to the Prophet) and Sunday night (on the eve of Monday; said to be the day of the Prophet Mohammed's birth) and all nights during Ramadan are the most important; then, more candles than usual are lit. Sometimes (if &woman is asked), water is carried in a bardak (traditional water jug) and left overnight in the

turbe.

This water is believed to have healing properties and is rubbed into the body or drunk during illness. Once a man had come to the

turbe

every day for fifteen days and left

water overnight to help his wife who was ill. Before a person enters the turbe s/he prays for good 300

health and happiness; once inside, s/he lights two or three candles while saying prayers. When entering a turbe, a person should always enter with the right foot first and make sure s/he does not turn his or her back towards the tomb when leaving. Some will take the smelted wax f-o'm candle!ith them and remelt it there; this is believed to help against headaches. The other two graves in Dolina are "smaller saints" without a mausoleum built over them. These graves are nevertheless conspicuous with their headstones at both ends and their fencing, as described above. At one time people were afraid to go to one of the graves, because the sehit was said to be angry. If anybody tried to enter the place where he was buried, a very strong wind would start to blow in the trees surrounding it. Some said he was angry because somebody had entered the place without abclest (i.e. without ritual washing before prayers, and was therefore unclean), others that an unclean (i.e. menstruating) woman had entered. Some

ehits are

known to be angrier than others,

and they do not allow "just anybody" (even if they are

clean) to enter. This ehit only admitted the man who lit the candles. However, his anger only lasted for a year and the following spring prayers for rain (see section 9.4.2) were held as usual. The other one is not angry and is regularly seen to by the daughter living in the house closest to it. She goes there to light candles, for two reasons: first, because the grave is on its own and nobody sees to him or worries about 1dm (this is an interesting 301

statement, given that Muslims do not attend to the graves of their relatives at the graveyard behind the mosque), and secondly, because it is sevap, and it may bring you happiness and luck. The idea that these graves need to be looked after in a way Muslim graves are usually not is an other example of the syncretic characteristics of Bosnian Islam, because Catholics, of course tend graves a good deal. The villagers would say that a gehit is a particularly "good man" (evlija), and it is believed that the corpse of a ebit does not decompose. All the ehits in Dolina were, however, said to have been soldiers who had fought for Islam and the Turks and the stress was sometimes more on the idea of martyr than was the case for the ehits associated with a sufi lodge in a nearby village (see below) 9 . The local hodzva explained that people went to pray at èehits' graves because ehits are seen as closer to God and therefore as possible mediators between "this-worldly" human beings and God. He said: "Some people feel that they cannot always pray directly to God and therefore say their wishes through a ehit. They feel that the dead person is in a better position to ask God for help. At such a grave someone has seen something no-one else has seen. It is like a flame. The dead. man possesses what we call evlija; he sees and knows what you yourself do not realise. Evlija is a special, natural power which only a few people possess. Because this is the way it is, is it not; some have the ability to see more than others?" In explaining wtiat a 302

turbe is, he drew a parallel with images and symbols of the Yugoslav Federal State: I was told that a turbe was like the memorials for fallen partisans in such places as Sutjeska.'° (The fact that Muslim heroes would normally have been fighting Christians was significantly played down.) ehits are Muslim heroes who, like the partisan heroes, died fighting for what they believed in, the first representing the Muslim credo, the second the Yugoslav and Socialist credo. 11 As we have already seen, a diviner may "prescribe" a visit to a certain ehit's grave and the performance of magic combined with the saying of prayers. This particular role of the iehit may be seen as characteristic of the dervish-influenced region of central Bosnia but the holy graves are in this respect clearly comparable with saints' shrines of North-Africa, the Middle East and South Asia (see among others Geilner, 1969; Eickelman, 1976; Gaborieau, 1983). The dervish orders have their own holy graves, belonging to men of religious learning believed to possess evlija because of extraordinary powers to "see" or to perform "miracles" in their lifetime as well as after. Many of them were sheikhs, i.e. heads of a suf i sanctuary or tekija. At the largest tekija in the mountains not far from Dolina all the sheikhs in the history of the tekija are buried. They are believed to have extraordinary powers, and people will come there to pray for health and good fortune in the same way as they do at ehits' graves. But unlike the ehits' graves, which is accessible to everybody who wants to pray, the sheikhs' 303

graves can only be entered with special permission from a senior dervish. Once a year, however, when the annual meviud (see chapter 10) takes place at the tekija, there is general access.12

The belief that special powers reside in a ehit's grave and the custom of praying at such graves is in most official Islamic and orthodox oriented literature explained in terms of pre-Islamic influences (cf, e.g. Johnson, 1980). In Bosnia such practices are in particular explained locally with reference to Bogomil influences (cf. Introduction) 13

9.4.2 Collective prayers at the Dolina turbe The local hodza made it clear that while the custom of praying at ehits' graves is not prescribed in the Quran, it is, however, not something which is against any orthodox principle either. The same could be said more specifically for the prayers for rain held annually at certain tombs in rural Bosnia. Praying for rain is known within Islam; the Bosnian ritual is distinctive in that these prayers are often held at Bogomil tombs or at their immediate extension where the graves of the first Islamized Bosnians are. Every spring in Dolina there are prayers for rain at the three different ehits' graves in the village. The event is usually said to be held only in cases of severe drought, but in practice it seems to be held annually anyway, to prevent drought later on in the summer. It should be held on the seventh Tuesday after Jurjev (a 304

traditional spring celebration which is explained below, In Dolina this occasion is attended exclusively by women and the prayers are led by the local bula. 14 While the

bula recites, the participants hold their hands flat out towards the ground to illustrate rain falling. The prayers for rain can clearly be seen as a fertility ritual and it is therefore significant that this ritual should be the concern of women. Another annual event in Dolina is the dova (Muslim for "prayer"), which takes place at the turbe. This is also held on Tuesday, four weeks after Jurjev. The dova, like the praying for rain, is for women only. Unlike individual everyday worship at the turbe, it is specifically devoted to the dead. The sehit is seen as the mediator between the women, their dead relatives and God. (There is an obvious connection between the dova and the tevhid, discussed in chapter 10). Women will come from surrounding villages, but also from further away. If they have relatives in Dolina they will stay the night. It is an occasion at which women prepare lots of food and expect to pay host to many visiting relatives, in-laws and friends. On the day of the dova women gather in great numbers at the small hill near

the turbe. There will be several bulas leading groups of women in prayers around the large tespih (praying beads) typical of female tevhids ( described in chapter 10). At one stage women will also enter the turbe to pray individually, leaving money on the tomb for woman who looks after it and the maintenance of the turbe. Later in the evening there 305

will be a fair with dance food and music on a field not far from the

turbe. Both

this

turbe and

the two other sehits'

graves are very near Bogomil burial grounds and their socalled stecak (i.e. large tombstones with carvings; it is not uncommon to find the symbol of the cross and the halfmoon next to each other on the same stone). At the dova some women would go to the most well-known stecak in Dolina for fajda (help). They would stroke the stone and then touch their face while saying prayers. Dolina women did not believe that this had any benefit. An old woman born in Dolina said that she had never seen any of their women doing it; she was from the place and knew that there was no point to the practice. There are nevertheless many myths attached to this tomb. Some would say that a boy and a girl were married there and turned to stone, others that a wedding had taken place their and a guest had been expelled and turned to stone. Older informants would remember that when a horse became ill, it was led. in a circle around the stone. The important point was, however, that these stones are never (and must never be) disturbed or moved.

9.4.3 The celebration of saints' days Juriev We have already mentioned that the dates for rain prayers and the dova are counted from Jurjev. Jurjev is a significant marker on both the ritual and the agricultural calendars of the Dolina Muslims (and Muslims throughout Bosnia). The day of Jurjev (St George's day; the Serbs call 306

it urdevdan), according to Orthodox tradition, is on 6 May. (Durdevdan is not celebrated by the Catholics in Bosnia.) In Islam i Muslimani u Bosni i Herceovina it is pointed out that the Bosnian Muslims were (and are) familiar with all the holy days celebrated by their Orthodox (pravoslavni) and Catholic compatriots. Muslims integrated or used in parallel the hidra reckoning and the reckoning according to Christian feast-days. (Hadijahiá, Tralji and Sukri, 1977:87). Muslims still celebrate some of these feast-days. Jurjev is in fact the traditional celebration of spring and fertility, and although it coincides with a Christian feast day, its origin is probably pre-Christian. The sun is said to be good after Jurjev, but before it is recommended not to be directly exposed to sunlight for long, as the sun is not good and will give you a headache. Certain crops should be sowed before Jurjev and others after. Customs associated with this day may vary somewhat throughout Bosnia, but in Dolina it was celebrated as follows. On the evening before Jurjev the boys make flutes of wood. This used to be done by the young, unmarried men and significantly was made from the wood of a young tree. On the following morning they go around to all the houses and blow their flutes to wake people up (originally, to wake up the maidens). Each household has to give them a piece of special cake made for the occasion and a couple of eggs. According to an older and more literate informant, this custom dated from the fight against the Turks. In spring the men would say: "the 307

forest has become green, now there is going to be war", and the women would give them eggs and cake for the journey. The evening before, the young girls go to the mill to collect water in bottles, which are hidden away from the boys somewhere outside the house overnight. If the boys find one of the bottles during night, they will pour out the water and replace it with their own urine. The boys will then knock on the girl's window pane and tell her that they have found the bottle. On the morning of Jurjev the girls wash their faces in the water caught from the mill to look beautiful and get rosy cheeks. On this day girls are supposed to throw their shoes across the roof of their house; from the way the shoe points, a girl can predict the direction in which she will marry. During the day and the evening, villagers and young people from neighbouring villages walk up steep paths to the fair, which is held on the highest hill in the village. At a small clearing in the forest a team of boys from Dolina and another from the village on the other side of the hill compete in a game of football. People have picnics while watching the game and chatting to neighbours. Jurjev is regarded as a particularly auspicious day for various magic spells and

ancient instance, may

divinatory practices which probably originate form Slav and pre-Christian times. Women for

perform different sorts of magic to prevent evil spells being cast. The best-known consists of boiling eggshells and flowers picked on the grazing fields and placing them at the door of the cow-shed, so that the cow is protected 308

from spells. The Catholic women in Dolina say they fear what Muslim women may cause to happen on this day, although in fact little of the traditional magic is either known or practised in Dolina today. On the other hand it was agreed that Muslim women from Eastern Bosnia (which is Serbiandominated) knew much more than the women from Dolina, and everyone remembered a man, now dead, who used to cast spells on cows on Jurjev.

Alidun Another feast-day in the Bosnian Muslim calendar is Alidun (from Turkish Alig'unu, lit. Alija's day). Although celebrated on 2 August, the same day as the Orthodox Serbs celebrate their Ilindan, (the Prophet Elijah's day) it has a Muslim reference. (Like -Durdevdan,

Ilindan is

not

celebrated by the Catholics in Bosnia.) However, the prophet Elijah also has a central place in popular Islam (For instance, Gaborieau reports from Nepal that a companion of the prophet Elijah, Khwaja Khizr, is venerated as a legendary saint, 1983:301). While Jurjev is still extensively celebrated in Dolina (albeit opposed by the Muslim clergy) Alidun (2 August) considering its

t

Muslim

legitimation is surprisingly less so. There used to be a fair, and in some villages they also held dove or prayers, but this happens less often today. One of the few reminders of Alidun is the much-quoted saying Do podne podne

Alija

Ilija,

od

('Until midday Ilija [Elijah], from midday

Alija"). The Bosnian ethnologist Miroslav Nikanovic 309

reports from a village in North Bosnia with a mixed Serb and Muslim population that Alidun/Ilindan is celebrated by both groups with a fair in front of a well-known turbe (allegedly of the hero Derzelez Alija, who, according to the Muslim legend, was killed on this spot while praying). Here, the literal meaning of the saying is acted out in practice. Until midday (including the midday prayers) Muslims pray at the turbe, while the Serbs are at a different place, said to be the site of a church before the Turks arrived. After midday the Serbs join in at the turbe for the general fair with music and dance, competitions and food, although it should be added that the two groups celebrate more or less separately, with the competitions, mainly in physical endurance, always being between a Serb and a Muslim (Nikanovi6, 1978). For the Muslims AlidUn is associated with the Islamisation of Bosnia. On a symbolic level the saying quoted above may be seen to express their acknowledgment of the pre-Islamic descent (origin) of the Bosnian Muslims, providing a legitimation for the celebration of AlidUn, and thus indirectly for the practising of customs which are not strictly Islamic, but part of the diverse cultural heritage of the Bosnian Muslims.

9.5 Conclusions In spite of certain syncretic practices, however, the so-called unorthodox or illiterate beliefs and practices found in Bosnian Islam are fçund throughout the Muslim 310

world and is an integral part of Islam. The stress on certain elements, however, varies. I have already indicated that literacy is significant in Bosnia as it discriminates between "backward" and "educated" within -/uc'o official discourse5 (both of which could be described as reformist in their attitude). Among the villagers, however, a person's achieved level of knowledge is not necessarily seen to be concomitant with a person's achieved level of Islamic literacy. Official Islam puts an emphasis on Islamic knowledge in terms of literacy and knowledge of "the book". Nevertheless, in Dolina we saw that the villagers see knowledge as something which moves beyond general literacy and its direct accessibility through the literate meaning of words. For a Muslim to gain the reputation as "someone who knows a lot" literacy is a prerequisite but not a sufficient one. In addition the person needs to possess the power to "see" i.e. have knowledge of an esoteric kind. The idea of what constitutes Islamic knowledge is to the villagers therefore closer to that of the suf is than that which is propagated by official Islam (through the Islamic Association). The influence of sufism on practised Islam is also apparent in the ritual practices discussed in chapter ten. However, while the sufi-hodzas seem to play the role as mediators between "folk" and official Islam in many of the more individual practices described in this chapter we shall see in chapter 10 that women play this role as participants in larger communal rituals. In the next chapter we shall examine the characteristics of Bosnian 311

Islam in more detail by focusing on the main ritual events and particularly on women's role in the idiosyncratic Bosnian memorial service for the dead, the

312

tevhid.

Footnotes cha pter 9

1. The emphasis on the virtue and power of writing in Islamicinfluenced areas has been demonstrated by several authors in J. Goody, ed; Literacy in traditional societies (1968). See, among others, the paper by M. Bloch, I. Lewis and J. Goody. 2. Such syncretism has a long tradition in Bosnia and the Balkans and is widely reported by F. Hasluck (1929). 3. As far as I know the sufi-hodas use 'standard' suf i- works on cosmology and astrology. The astrological charts used are apparently based on Alexandrian heremeticism. But see the discussion of cosmology and spiritual astronomy in sufism by Laleh Bakhtiar (1976), Sufi expressions of the mystic quest, London: Thames and Hudson. The author also gives useful references to further literature on the subject. 4. It should be noted, however, that many diviners, especially the literate hodas, do not acknowledge some popular explanations such as crveni vjetar (lit, the red wind), an evil spirit which is believed to attack especially children around the time of sunset (akam). They dismiss it as a children's disease (smallpox) which was common some ten years ago when there was no vaccination for it.

5. Bismillah is the first word in a line which introduces all chapters in the Quran prayers and means "in the name of God". It is often used on it own in a secular context for protection against dangers (for instance, when starting on a longer trip), and could then translate as "God help us!" (The complete line is bismillah-rahrnanir-rahim, which translates: "In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful".) 6. I.M Lewis reports that in Muslim Somalia a victim of spirit possession is described as having been 'entered' or 'seized' (1971:65). 7. Women's possible polluting potential i.5 for instance the reason given by men to exclude women from an annual mevlud at an old mosque in the mountains (famous for the myths associated with it). 8. In another healing custom which is not practised any more, the mother took her sick child to a crossroads and asked the first person who passed to become the child's igano kum (godparent: by giving the child his or her first haircut). 9. The Bosnian historian and archaeologist Enver Imamovi suggests, however, that in spite of the myths surrounding these graves they may be those of local people (personal communication).

313

10. At Sutjeska Tito's partisans were encircled by German and Ustase troops and outnumbered by eight to one in 1943, seven thousand partisans were killed and Tito himself was wounded. On one particular day in the year atheists/titoists go to Sutjeska to honour their heroes and people flock in processions; it is like a pilgrimage and is usually organised by the trade unions or by schools (when it is obligatory for everybody to participate). The Muslims have their parallel pilgrimage to the tekija in Herzegovina, while the Catholics have theirs to Medjugorije. 11. This allegory points our analysis of social categories in Bosnia in a direction I have been indicating already; in addition to the ethnic categories of Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox, we have to add the category of atheists-Titoists. However, considering the latest developments in Yugoslavia towards political pluralism and the disintegration of the Yugoslav state, the fourth category may ultimately disappear. 12. The same practice of praying at "holy graves' for health and good fortune may be observed at the annual mevlud at the suf i-sanctuary at Buna in Herzegovina. People come from afar to attend this annual gathering; busses are usually organised from many villages in Bosnia (including Dolina). The courtyard outside the tekija will be crowded with people while hocThas from all over Bosnia recite mevlud poems. Before and after the recitals people will enter the tekija to file past the tomb of the founding sheikh of the tekija; prayers will be said for fortune and good health and money left on the tomb. Some believe that saying prayers while touching the tomb and then an area of their body where they have pain will heal them. However, the organising of the mevlud has now been taken over by the central Islamic Organisation in Sarajevo (the Islamska Zajednica, see chapter 8) and, although the organisation caslrs in the money people leave at the tomb, it does not approve of the "unorthodox" practice of visiting the tomb for healing and guards inside the tekija will try to prevent people from touching it. 13. An example are the authors Hadijahid, Tralji and Sukriã of the book Islam i Muslimani u Bosni i Herce govini published by the Starejeinstvo (council of elders) of the Islamska Zajednica in Sarajevo. They argue that the practice of praying and performing certain rituals at graves is a legacy of the Bosnian Bogomils and that in the Middle Ages gatherings and prayers were held at Bogomil cemeteries and tombs. The Bogomils also built wooden burial chapels, very similar to the early wooden turbe, around tombs. They refer among others to the will of a certain Gost Radin in 1466 who leaves the Bosnian Church 140 ducats for a hz-am (temple or chapel) and a greb (grave). The Bogomil hz-am or mausoleum was the small square wooden building referred to above. The authors also consider it likely that the Bogomils also performed prayers for rain. They point out that prayers for rain are performed in villages in approximately the whole area between the rivers Bosna and Drina (the rivers forming the borders of Bosnia) and 314

that they are usually held on a fixed Tuesday (Tuesday having apotropaic properties) after Jurjev, either at cemeteries with Bogomil tombs, or at old Muslim graves located in their proximity. They stress, however, that although the praying at graves may originate in Bogomil practices, these were later integrated with the religious system of Bosnian Islam, and the original Bogomil meaning would have been gradually lost (1977:84-86). 14. There are, however, ethnographic reports of prayers for rain attended by both and led by the local hoda. See a paper by Veljko Palavestra and Mario Petriá called "Srednjovjekovni nadgrobni spomenici u Zepi" and published in Radovi Naunog drutva BiH, knj. xxiv, Odeljenje istorijskofilo1okih nauka, knj. 8, Sarajevo, 1964.

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CHAPTER TEN; GENDER AND RITUAL IN BOSNIAN ISLAM

10.0 Introduction This chapter will look at the different ritual obligations for men and women and point to some characteristics peculiar to Bosnian Islam. We shall see that women are more involved in the rituals of Islamic orthodoxy than in most of the Islamic world. The canonical rituals associated with the "five pillars" (i.e. the profession of faith, praying five times a day, keeping the fast, giving alms and going on pilgrimage) are codified and therefore identical for all the faithful and essential to the definition of Islam everywhere, including Bosnian Islam. However, since some of the rituals discussed below would be the basic common denominator for any Islamic community, I will not therefore go into any great detail unless I believe there to be features particular to Bosnian Islam. Yet although these rituals are a common denominator for what it means to be a Muslim, it does not necessarily follow that all Muslims practise them. In fact, some rituals are performed only by a small number of Muslims in the village and almost always by the same group of individuals. This is the case with tevhids (see section 10.3.3) and to some extent with Ramadan. This does not mean, however, that these rituals are any less important to the idea of a collective Muslim identity; on the contrary, their significance on a collective level derives not from the number of people who take n active part, but rather 316

from the fact that Christians do not perform them. The intensity of the religious activities in the village is not constant, but rather changes according to the ritual calendar. There are some major annual ceremonies, of which the most important are Ramazan (Ramadan), Ramazanski-bajrara (celebrating the end of Ramadan) and Kurban-bajram (or Hadijski-bajram) two months and ten days later, and the autumn mevlud (see section 10.1.2) celebrating the birth of the prophet Mohammed. The

Muslini new year is not celebrated (except among the more urbanised religious elite, which has no representatives in this particular village); nor is the hasura (a celebration on the 10th of Muharema - the first month on the Arab calendar), which most villagers do not consider as part of their traditional or ritual calendar. Other rituals which occur at various times throughout the year are tevhid (memorial service for the dead), denaza (burial ceremony) and mevlud (celebrations, e.g for the opening of a new mosque). Ritual activities may be grouped into those activities or rituals that are performed by both men and women; those performed exclusively by men, and those performed exclusively by women. Such a categorisation will, however, cut across other dimensions so that rituals performed by men are not necessarily concomitant with rituals that are more orthodox in form (cf, Tapper & Tapper, 1987). Likewise, urban, literate status does not necessarily go together with orthodoxy (cf. Geilner, 1981) . The rituals discussed in this chapter will thus beanalysed from three view317

points: first, gender, secondly, socio-economic status, and thirdly, the degree of orthodoxy involved; like every chapter in this part of the thesis it reflects the discussion among Bosnian clerics concerning the Islamic legitimacy of certain practices. The clergy may be roughly divided into those who see their role as to educate the Bosnian Muslims to be more orthodox (in the words of an educated devout Muslim: "It has to be acknowledged first that Bosnia is not the Middle East and secondly that it has always been heretical.") and those who recognise the existence of a unique Bosnian Islam and who categorise Bosnian peculiarities such as the tevhid (see section 10.3.3) as "voluntary" in the hierarchy of religious acts. In trying to make sense for me of Islam (and particularly the specificities of Bosnian Islam) a learned and modest hoda pointed out: "In Islam you have a set of rules about what you must do; customs that come in addition are voluntary (dobrovoljan, lit, of good will) and these are the ones which vary and which Muslims disagree about." According to the Hanafi school of Sunnism ( to which Bosnian Muslims belong), there are seven categories of ritual action varying from farz ((all practices under this category are those that God has commanded and therefore what all believers must do]; an example would be the fast as one of the "five pillars") to ha.ram (what is forbidden). Of these categories, Dolina Muslims would use the first and the last, farz and haram; a few would also know about 318

sunnet (what the Prophet said and did and which provides an example for all Muslims) and mekruh (hated by God, but not forbidden; e.g. divorce). However, a different categorisation was used in Dolina (not only by the villagers, but also by clerics when talking to lay people). A main distinction is made between on the one hand what is propisano (according to the law) and obavezno (obligatory) and on the other what is lijep (beautiful) and of dobra voija (lit, good will). The denaza or burial ceremony is an example of the former, the tevhid an example of the latter. Sevap (a Turkish word) is used more widely to describe any act which is considered meritorious because it pleases God. These are acts which have not been specified and formally evaluated and it is thus left to people themselves to decide what they are and whether to perform them. Picking up pebbles from the path and throwing them to the sides, helping an old woman to carry a heavy load or cleaning the mosque are some examples of actions which were considered sevap by Dolina Muslims. While the obavezadobra volja distinction can only categorise ritual actions performed by Muslims, any person may perform an act which qualifies as sevap. The fact that Christians can perform acts of sevap makes interaction between Christians and Muslims possible, although informants disagreed on whether such acts would help a Christian in the after-life. Thus, when I expressed a wish to fast during Rainadan I was told that it was not "obligatory" for me but that it would be sevap.

319

10.1 Rituals ierformed b y men and women 10.1.1 Ramadan: the month of fasting The month-long fast (called Ramazan by Bosnian Muslims) is the main event in the Muslim ritual calendar. As one of the codified rituals in Islam, the fast is both an individual statement of one's personal commitment (as a believer, vjernik), and a collective statement of Muslim group identity. It is also a period of most intense devotional activity, which among the lay Muslims is dominated by women. In Dolina the fast is kept mainly by the women. While a man who does not fast is readily excused (e.g. by referring to how hard he works), a woman who does not keep it is criticised and her behaviour said to be shameful. A commonly held opinion is that the fast is for those who have the time and do not have to work so hard, which to men means the women and old retired men. Women often find it upsetting that while they are fasting, they still have to cook for their husbands and Sons and are also expected to work next to them on the land if Ramadan falls at a time of year when agricultural work has to be done, yet still hear the men say: "Let those fast who have got time for it." The clergy and devout Muslims, being aware of this attitude ("many of our people think fasting is only the responsibility of those who do not have to work so hard"), will challenge it by voicing admiration for the Muslims in Middle Eastern countries who fast in the heat and still 320

work hard. Despite their own problems, women would often excuse their husbands by explaining that they did not fast because they had to go to work in the factory or firm, and "they cannot manage to go hungry". One evening a couple had a rather typical dispute for Ramadan. The quarrel started when the wife urged her husband to come along to the evening prayers in the mosque. It then developed into a row about past events during their fifteen-year marriage, and the husband asked his wife angrily why she had not married a hodza if that was what she wanted. He then summed up his miseries: "I am in pain from the finger I squeezed at work, I am cold [the wife had opened the window], I have been all day long without coffee, and it is Ramadan and I may not drink brandy." 2 It is widely acknowledged by the women that Ramadan is a particularly difficult time for the men. Their demands are not met as usual (for instance, they are not served coffee exactly when they want) and women have a legitimate reason for not meeting them, since they are fasting and have less energy. During Ramadan I found that relations between spouses deteriorated. Particularly during this period I used to hear the women say, when we were on our own and male members of the household had gone out, "How nice it is now without men present." Nevertheless, some women would insist that men could also fast if they really wanted to, and that the point was rather that in Dolina the men are "no good" (ne vaijaju, lit, are worthless). One woman would refer to her brother 321

who had his own firm and still fasted through the whole of Raznadan. The fact that he had his own firm is, however, significant. In a public workplace like a factory, the facilities for somebody who fasts (and prays) are poor (see chapter 8). For the women the month of fasting may nevertheless be a period they look forward to; the usual routines of cooking and work are broken and they are entitled to take more rest. They attend congregational prayers in the mosque more often: a legitimate activity away from household chores and the demands of grumbling men. During this month people also socialise more intensely. After sunset when the fast is broken neighbours invite each other na if tar (the evening meal with which the fast is broken). When the lights are turned on in the mosque everybody sits down to eat; the food is better and richer than at normal evening meals, and there should always be a sweet (something which is not common at everyday meals). Those families who do not have a view to the minaret from their house will send a child out to where the lights can be seen and he will report back. Others may follow the takvim (the lunar calendar with the prayer-times and the time for sunset and dawn throughout the year) and the time on the radio. The last fifteen minutes or so before the fast may be broken are often tense. When the lights are eventually turned on, there is a sigh of relief. This is the case both for those who fast and for those who do not: the latter will have had to wait a long day for a proper meal. 322

The keeping of the fast distinguishes not only "those who have time", from "those who have not", but also those Muslims who are devout or believers (poboni,

vjernici )

from those who are not considered as such. (According to Bosnian criteria, a person may well be a Muslim without adhering to the Muslim faith or practising Islam.) A nineteen-year-old girl gave this explanation for her

fasting: "I fast because it is a meritorious act

(sevap) .

I believe in God, and I believe he will love me more if I fast, because he likes it. It is a good thing to do. But there are those who never fast, for instance my next door neighbour: she has never fasted or done

anything which

shows that she believes in God." (This young girl was one a few girls who fasted, the fast is mainly kept by married women). A woman in her mid-thirties commented: "I believe in God, as you must have noticed, and this belief comes from the heart. Look at how sick I felt yesterday because of fasting, and today my body feels heavy and I have difficulty in walking. But if anybody told me that it is not possible to fast, I would say that it is a load of rubbish; it all depends on your wish and your will, and I wish very strongly to fast." We see from both these comments that the strength of belief is confirmed through visible religious acts and other Muslims' judgement of these acts. Although the young girl also mentioned the fast as an act for the sight of God as well as for the sight of co-villagers, there are reasons to believe that it is more important, at least in the short 323

term, that the act (here the fast) is seen by co-villagers and fellow Muslims. The following episode is telling. In one household the daughter-in-law had arrived back from hospital with her new- born son, and I went to visit with a neighbour. The young mother and her parents-in-law were present. Since it was Ramadan, coffee and cakes were not automatically served, as would normally be the custom to celebrate the happy event. However, the hostess asked me if I would like coffee. When I said it was not necessary, she suggested that I have a cup with her husband, thus indirectly indicating that he was not fasting. Instead, she made lemonade and served her husband and me. We then heard a car stopping outside the house, whereupon the hostess hurriedly removed the empty glasses from the table and the husband went out to greet the guests. He returned with a young man (the best man of the oldest son in the house) and his three-year-old son. The new guest was asked if he would like lemonade, but the hostess added, "Maybe you are fasting?" The young man answered: "For the little one, but not for me, thank you." She again asked him if he was fasting, but he only smiled without saying a word. The hostess told him she would make him one as well and that there was no reason to be ashamed: "If you do not fast, you do not fast and that is all." She then decided to make coffee as well, which she served the guest and me, but not her husband! It was apparently important to give the impression to the outside guest that everybody in the 324

household was fasting. It would have been considered shameful if the host were to display his non-observance in front of the guest. However, it is accepted that some find the fasting physically and mentally unbearable. One older woman would say that she never fasted, in spite of having tried several times. She had always cried and cried, and in the end had gone to see the doctor who had given her legitimate medical reasons not to fast. It is not uncommon for women who find the fast difficult to sustain to visit the doctor and then take a couple of days' break, allegedly on the doctor's advice, while still officially fasting. An old, devout Muslim would say that there are two categories of Muslims: "those who cannot [like the woman who cried all the time) and those who will not". To him it was the displaying of will which was the essential factor. The importance of the month-long fast as a collective statement of Muslim group identity is stressed by clerics throughout Ramadan. The following rhetoric is a typical example. At the late evening prayers in the mosque during Ramadan (teravija) it is customary for the

hodia to give a

sermon on a moral issue. One evening, he told a story to illustrate the importance of keeping the fast. It was a story about two neighbours. The first man was a very rich Serb who had a beautiful daughter, the other was a poor Muslim. One day the Serb offered the Muslim his daughter and as many possessions as the Muslim wanted, if only the Muslim converted to the Serbian faith. But the Muslim 325

replied proudly: "One minute of my Ramadan fast is more valuable than your daughter and all your possessions put together". And we could add that the fast as a statement of ethno-religious identity (seen as spiritual possession) is more valuable than material possessions and the economic advantage implied in giving up this identity (in a society where membership of the ruling Communist party is in practice a prerequisite for career and material advancement).

10.1.2 Mevlud There are two kinds of meviud: the annual celebration of the birth of the prophet Mohammed (on the 12th of

Rebiul-Evvela on the Muslim calendar), and those held throughout the year in private homes. A mevlud consists of prayers and the chanting of specific mevlud poems praising the birth and life of the Prophet. Mevlud is not prescribed by the Quran (propisano), but it is considered to be sevap: in other words, a household will thereby gain merit not only in the eyes of God, but also in the eyes of the local community. Hosting a mevlud is also described as lijep and of dobra voija (see p. 235) when people want to celebrate an event. A hoda put it this way: "People decide that instead of having a big feast where there is a lot of drinking, they will do something that pleases God." Phrasing it like this, the hoda was implicitly drawing a contrast to the way the Christians customarily celebrate similar events. 326

A household may decide to hold a rnevlud for various reasons: to celebrate the birth of a new family member, whether a son or a daughter; when moving into a new house, so that Allah will bless it; in connection with a marriage ceremony conducted according to the Quranic law of shariat (sver4jatsko vjentanje); or when a son of the household is leaving for the army (I had the impression that this was the most common reason for mevluds to be held in the region during the period of my stay). A rnevlud may also be given in conjunction with a

tevhid (see

section 10.3.3) on the

fortieth day after death (when the soul is believed to leave the body), but a

mevlud is

primarily given in

association with the celebration of joyous events, as described above. This is clearly different from what Tapper & Tapper (1987) reports for Turkish Islam, where the meviud (especially the one for and by women) seems to display more of the traits characteristic of the women's

tevhid in

Bosnia. There are no particular rules for meviud, but, as a

hoda told

me, "everybody has their own traditions" (e.g.

the dervishes shout more and louder "Allah illalah"s). A mevlud is usually attended by both men and women and led by one or more

hodas.

The exceptions are those held

within the dervish milieu attended exclusively by men (dervishes and

hodas).

However, I also attended a meviud

in one of the market towns which was for and by women and sponsored by a well-known Muslim family of the devout urban elite. It was attended by several bulas, including one from sarajevo who was leading it, female relatives of the 327

household and members of other elite families. 5 This meviud distinguished itself markedly in form from the women's tevhids I had earlier attended in the villages. In fact it

displayed several of the traits the Tappers describe for the mevlud in a Turkish market town; there was an emphasis on didactics and on preaching and the bula leading it was overtly emotional during the performance. My companions from the village felt awkward and embarrassed at this meviud, first, because of the apparent socio-economic distance between them and most of the other guests, but most significantly because of the display of such religiosity. A hodza familiar with the region told me there were no differences between the texts used in men's and women's mevlud respectively and that women's mevluds do not have any particular characteristics that distinguish them from men's. It became clear, however, that although there was no difference in the specific texts used (as reported for meviud in Turkey, see Tapper & Tapper, 1987), there was more emphasis on didactics and emotional preaching in this urban-styled mevlud than is the case both with mixed village mevluds and those by and for men where the emphasis is on performance of the texts. More prosperous households or members of the Muslim religious elite often give a mevlud annually. Prestige is gained by inviting a large number of guests, especially if some of these belong to the clergy, and also by being able to pay for several hodas ( or bulas) to recite. Hodzas (or bulas) from the major towns in the region would be of 328

higher status than ordinary village hodzas (or bulas). The amount and quality of food is a final prestige factor. A couple of families neither resident in the village were famous in the region for their sumptuous annual mevluds. (One local family was trying very hard to be included in the elite. This family had a high living standard based on money earned in Germany, but did not traditionally belong to the elite, and were possibly still considered by them as country bumpkins (seijaci), even if the villagers considered them more educated and "cultured".) Compared to the mevluds given by elite families a village mevlud would be a more modest affair; the participants would be local hodas and the guests and relatives of the host household. A private mevlud wa never held during my stay in the

village, but I had the opportunity to go to one in a neighbouring village given by the family of a relative by marriage of the household in which I was staying. This was a combined tevhid and mevlud which was held in honour of the deceased male head of the household. Tevhid was held first, with mevlud following immediately afterwards. Three hodas recited, as well as a number of lay people. This was a relatively small mevlud, reflecting the economic situation of the family. Well-to-do families may invite ten or more hodzas to recite, and guests are also more numerous. Mevluds seem to have been held more rarely in the village where I was staying than in other comparable villages, but this may have been mere coincidence, as I did hear about meviuds that had been held before my arrival. I 329

suspect, however, that the picture I received is representative. To hold a meviud is an expensive affair: food should be abundant, and the hodas who are invited to recite have to be paid their

sergija (see chapter 8). A

mevlud needs to be planned a long time in advance, maybe as

much as a year, and the saving of money is crucial.

10.2 Men's ritual obligations Some Islamic rituals are "obligatory" for men only and attended exclusively by them; they are all associated with the mosque. These obligations are to go to meetings of the village mosque council, to attend the Friday prayers, any burial ceremony, and the morning prayer at Bajram marking the end of the month of fasting. Although Muslim women in Bosnia have access to the mosque (see chapter 8) to an extent which would be unusual throughout most of the Islamic world, there are, however, still some mosque services which women do not attend, such as the Friday prayers (although I was told that this was not so in Sarajevo 6)• The explanation given by most clerics was that women may attend since it is not forbidden by the Quran; it was stressed, however, that to attend was no obligation for them and that it was not the custom.

10.2.1 Dzunia. the Frida y prayers The hoda leads the prayers every Friday throughout the year. Duma (lit, a week or seven days) can only take place if a minimum of three smen are present. There is 330

usually no more than one row of men attending, i.e. between five and seven. Most of them are retired, but some go when they are working a late shift and therefore have the early afternoon off. The younger men often go only after having been told by their wives that it is shameful not to when they are at home anyway. Once I asked the village hoda whether I could sit in on dzuma one Friday. The hoda smiled, reflected on the matter and then said "all right" (inoe) very slowly. "But",

he added, "it has never been done before." My friend, who had just arrived to ask if the hoda wanted coffee, suggested that I could sit upstairs where there are no men, on the musandara where women as a rule should sit (see chapter 8). But the hoda was not very happy with this solution. "Sometimes men sit upstairs as well. You know that it is not our custom." We finally agreed that I should come with my friend Nusreta and sit in the classroom, which had windows towards the musandara. The hoda again stressed that it is not that women are not allowed at the

dIurna,

but

rather that it is not obligatory for them. However, at mosque school only the boys learn to pray

durna.

When I

attended the Friday prayers with my friend, she got

confused with the order of the movements in the prayer, she found she could not follow and finally decided to perform a normal noon prayer. Those rituals for men only which make up the burial ceremony are described in the following section.

331

10.3 Rituals associated with death 10.3.1 Denaza (the burial ceremony) At death there are certain obligatory rituals which are performed by men (except for the ritual washing of a female corpse, which should be done by a woman). In addition there are some rituals which are considered "voluntary" and "beautiful" (cf. the "folk-classification of religious acts described earlier) such as the tevhid,

which are mainly performed by women. The obligatory rituals at death are the ritual washing of the corpse by a hoda (for a male deceased) and a bula (for a female deceased) and the denaza prayers and burial according to the rules. Only men attend the burial ceremony in the mosque (this is one of the ritual obligations for men); after the hodza or the bula has performed the ritual washing of the corpse, it is wrapped in a white shroud and placed in a tabut (lidless coffin covered by the Islamic flag). Earlier only females were placed in a tabut. This was so that the men would not have to touch the female body when carrying it to the mosque and to the grave. After the washing, the husband or wife of the deceased is not allowed to see the dead spouse as he or she may pollute the dead by "thinking of something" and the body would have to be washed again. The possible polluting effect of certain thoughts or memories relates first to the Islamic belief that the soul of the dead person does not leave the body until the fortieth day after death and that during this time the deceased is still a sentient being; the living, especially those emotionally 332

close to the deceased, should therefore avoid saying, doing or even thinking anything that may upset the deceased. Crying will upset the soul of the deceased; so will any comments or thoughts (memories) about the physical closeness between a person and his or her deceased spouse. The latter idea is associated with the polluting properties of sexual relations. (Both men and women are considered "unclean" after sexual intercourse and may cause misfortune until they have taken the obligatory bath.) However, mere physical closeness like a friendly kiss or the shaking of hands is a sufficient metonym for such relation in the context of ritual purity. Thus, women must sit behind the men in the mosque, because if they could be seen, men might "lose their

abdest" ( the ritual absolution taken before

prayers; the use of water on parts of the body while saying verses from the Quran syinbolises both a physical and mental cleansing). For the dead the danger of pollution is particularly great after the ritual washing of the body until the burial (hence the custom of carrying a deceased woman in a tabut); the mere eye or even the thought of the spouse is potentially polluting to the dead. This does seem to confirm Bloch's thesis (1982) that death needs to be denied to sustain the social order (and more specifically traditional authority), by denying of sexuality and birth. However, the denial does not in this case concern women in particular (as he argues generally); men too are associated with sexuality and both men and women should ritually deny any physical (i.e. sexual) link with their dead spouse. 333

Furthermore, the emphasis is on the possible pollution of the soul rather than the body of the deceased (cf. Tapper & Tapper, 1987: 87). The fact that the living may pollute the dead by their thoughts and desires is a reversal of the seemingly more common idea that the dead are polluting to the living (cf. Bloch and Parry, 1982). Male relatives and co-villagers of the deceased walk together to the mosque, taking turns carrying the

tabut,

four at a time. The women remain at the house to hold a

tevhid (the

a1osni or sorrow

tevhid) for

the deceased.

Close female relatives may express their grief through sobbing, rarely through loud crying and never through lamenting. Stoicism is the ideal behaviour in the situation. This is in keeping with the Muslim fatalistic philosophy which is perhaps most clearly expressed in the case of death, the ultimate expression of fate which is in the hands of Allah, but is also tied to the idea that the display of strong emotions may upset the soul of the dead. Furthermore, however, in striving for the ideal of not being overtly emotional, a Muslim woman is self-consciously distinguishing herself from the Christians, and especially from the Serbs, who are notorious for their lamenting at someone's death. The villagers tended to ridicule what they perceived as the excessive crying of Serbian women. Even so, women are generally prone to cry when emotional, and a public display is avoided by the custom which forbids the women to attend the actual burial ceremony; at least this

334

was the idea conveyed by informants when they were asked why women did not attend. The local Imam elaborated on this: "Women never go to the graveyard, only men do. This is a good custom (propis) we have, that women should not go to the grave. The moment which is the most difficult is when the body is carried away from the house/home (kuca means both house and home]. And when the "journey" (put] towards the graveyard starts the women remain. In that most difficult of moments the women are together in the house where they recite prayers for the dead person's soul, and it becomes easier for them to cope. Women do not go to the grave because they cry a lot." There are, however, exceptional occasions when women do attend the part of the burial ceremony which takes place at the grave: when the deceased has Christian in-laws. A Christian daughter-in-law would for instance remain slightly apart from the men, maybe with her husband, and lay flowers at the grave. (In the large cemetery in Sarajevo, which consists of four separate sections, one for Catholics, one for Serbian Orthodox, one for Muslims and one for atheists, you can nowadays see flowers next to Muslim gravestones. Traditionally, and in the villages, Muslims do not tend the graves of their deceased relatives.)

10.3.2 Prayers for the souls of the dead The Bosnian Muslims pray for the souls of their dead on several occasions: at mukabella and hatma during Ramadan 335

and at the male collective prayer (dzuma) at Bajram. In the

district of which Dolina is a part it is also common for different participants at the main burial ceremony (denaza) to recite prayers for the dead at the grave, and this they will be paid for (like the hodza leading the prayers) by the senior member of the deceased's household. They will call the act of praying or recite for the dead pokioniti (lit. "to give a gift", but also a synonym of klanjati,

"to pray while bowing"; of Muslims). Literate,

devout Muslims are against this practice; they argue that the Quran states unequivocally that there is nobody between man and God, and nobody can mediate ("interfere"), therefore the customs of praying at the grave and paying those who pray are merely the throwing away of money to no avail. (Cf. praying at ehits'graves, chapter 7) The mukabella is a gathering of several ha.fiz (learned

Muslims who know the Quran by heart) in the mosque to recite the Quran aloud from beginning to end. This reading is called a

hatma.

At Ramadan, when the mukabella usually

takes place, some will pay their hodza well to read a hatma

for their deceased relatives. In villages like Dolina a group of Muslims who know how to recite from the Quran gather in the mosque every day during Raniadan with the local hodza to read a

hatma.

It is prestigious for a

devout Muslim to participate in the mukabella; in most towns men are the reciters, yet in Dolina the reciters were a group of women led by the hoda. There are only a few men in the village who are good at reciting, and they are old 336

and were not interested in participating. It is likely that women in the village have taken over many of the ritual obligations primarily assigned to men because men nowadays spend most of their time as migrant workers in an urban, officially atheist world, where identity as a Yugoslav is more significant. As participants in the "public world", men have to compromise their "Muslimness" to a larger extent than the village women (see chapter 7 chapter 8). Although the urban clergy would give the more scholarly explanation that mukabella is held for the souls of those who have done good works in life, in Dolina it was understood slightly differently. At one meeting in the mosque a husband had raised the issue of payment to the performers in the mukabella. In other demats it is usual for the villagers to pay the hoda extra for this job. This husband, however, refused to pay on the grounds that then his wife should also receive compensation. Villagers were later discussing the issue. A woman who had also participated said she did not want to be paid, since she "had hers at the cemetery"; the hoda, however, ought to be compensated as he had nobody buried at the mosque and thus there "was nothing in it for him". She added that, after all, the hatma they recite at

mukabella is for those of

their relatives who are buried at the mosque. It is clear that Bosnian Islam, unlike orthodox Islam, has a specific tradition whereby it is believed that prayers for the dead, usually via a mediator (a ehit, hoda or bula), will help them in the other world. 337

Representatives of "official Islam" will (as shown in chapter 9) inevitably ascribe this belief and the practices associated with it to pre-Islamic Christian or Bogomil traditions. However, such practices are widespread throughout the Islamic world and are particularly pronounced in saints' cults.

10.3.3 The tevhid Tevhid is the most formalised ritual in which prayers

are said for the souls of the dead ("to help them over in the other world"). Tevhid comes from the Arabic tawid, which means approximately "faith in one supreme God", but is often translated more freely as "praise of God". Skajlic gives the following two definitions of tevhid in his dictionary of Turkish words in the Serbo-Croat language: 1) "commemoration of the dead which consists of the collective recital of religious declarations and prayers"; 2) "collective recital by dervishes of religious declarations

which is held while sitting in a circle". In the following paragraphs I shall concentrate on the first kind, since the only dervish ritual which is reasonably publicly accessible, while displaying the structure described above, is nevertheless cast as a mevlud. (The dervish mevlud will be dealt with in an appendix.) Softiâ (1984) mentions two types of tevhid: the tevhid for sorrow associated with death, and the tevhid in praise of life (or the joyous tevhid) held for marriage or the circumcision of male children. However, I never came across 338

the "joyous tevhid" in Dolina or its surrounding region. Tevhid was used solely to describe the ritual commemorating the deceased, while the religious rituals held in connection with joyous events were mevluds. I suspect that rather than a disparity in practice between Sarajevo and rural areas, we are dealing merely with a difference in terminology. The confusion is probably related to the fact that the concepts are Turkish and that learned Islamic literature still operates within the Turkish definitions, failing to take into account that tevhid in particular has developed into a uniquely Bosnian ritual associated with death (what Softi6 calls tevhid for sorrow). Although there is some confusion among the clergy concerning the origin of the tevhid, it should probably be traced back to dervish practices and rituals in Bosnia. Softic (1984) suggests this origin, based on the following evidence. First, it is similar in form to the tevhid held by the dervish orders in their tekija: one specific person leads the tevhid, while all those present participate; the large rosary

(tespih)

is used collectively during the

prayers. Secondly, tevhids are mainly held in areas of Bosnia where there were (and to some extent still are) active dervish tekije or sanctuaries. This theory is strengthened by the fact (confirmed by a hoda from that region) that there was no tradition in eastern Bosnia until recently (ten to twenty years ago) of performing tevhid to commemorate the dead. Sponsoring a tevhid is now becoming increasingly popular throughout Bosnia. Instead the dead 339

were commemorated by hatma and the saying of the fatiha (the opening chapter of the Quran), some lines of which Muslims will always recite "for the souls" when passing a Muslim cemetery. How exactly the practice of holding tevhid was then taken up by women Softic does not establish. However, a retired hoda, who had worked in the Dolina region for fifty years, suggested that the tevhid had entered private houses (the women's sphere) through dervish sheikhs who started to perform tevhid in private homes to help finance their tekije. It was then taken up by the women.7 Tevhid is held five times following the death of any individual, male or female, usually in the house of the deceased. The first is held on the day the deceased is carried away from the house: while the men attend the denaza (burial ceremony) in the mosque, the women gather in the house of the deceased to say the dova for his or her soul. The ritual is repeated on the seventh and fortieth day (on the fortieth day, when the soul is believed to leave the body, some families also give a mevlud in conjunction with the tevhid), after six months and after a year. It should be noted that the tevhid is held on the same days as the Serbian Orthodox hold their funerary rites. 8 At the first tevhid nobody is invited (although those who wish to may attend), and neither coffee nor food is served. At the others relatives and neighbours are invited and food is served. There are both muki and enski tevhids (tevhids by 340

and for men and by and for women respectively, irrespective of whether the deceased is male or female). The main differences between the men's and the women's rituals are as follows. First, women's tevhids are held at the home of the deceased and are led by a bula; men do not attend. Tevhids attended by men, on the other hand, are usually

held in the mosque. However, they may also take place in the house, in which case women will also attend; the tevhid is then led by a hodza and the bula is only present in her capacity as relative or neighbour. At such mixed tevhids, if they are small (i.e. the guests are neighbours and relatives from within the village), women may recite, but this is more rare. At mixed tevhid men and women sit in separate rooms if space permits, otherwise men sit at the front closest to the bodza while women sit at the back, as in the mosque. Secondly, men's tevhids are shorter (with the exception of those within the sufi milieu). Thirdly, more lay people recite at women's tevhids, perhaps because there are fewer bulas than hodäas in the district. (I have no reason to argue that the wider participation of lay women in the recitals reflects a less formalised "female structure".) Fourthly, in women's tevhicls a large communal tespih (rosary) is used instead of

individual tespihs; the women sit in a circle and let it pass through their hands (a practice of dervish origin). Fifthly, at women's tevhids food is served. Some households (usually to fulfil a wish of the deceased) prefer to give two parallel tevhids, one in the 341

mosque attended by the men, and one in the house attended by the women. There are in other words several possible combinations of place (mosque or house) and people attending (only men, only women or both men and women). What particular form of

tevhid a household chooses is

dependent on three main factors: the religiousness of the family, the pronounced wish of the deceased, and the economic status of the sponsoring household. Like the

roeviud,

the women's

tevhid is an occasion

where status both in the religious and the secular sphere may be asserted (though in a less obvious way, since the occasion is very different). Prestige gained by the household is through the amount and quality of the food served and the number of people invited and

bulas or hodIas

called upon to recite. However, also like the mevlud, it is an occasion for individuals to obtain admiration and prove their capabilities both in religious matters such as displaying knowledge and reciting well and in secular activities such as cooking and organising. A woman will also signal the socio-economic status of her household through how she dresses (this is the case for all guests) or the number of guests and clerics and the amount and quality of the food served. The

bula is the main organiser and reciter in the

tevhid. She always sits in the sofa at the centre of the congregation with the Quran on the table in front of her. Older women and those renowned for their piety will sit closest to the

bula. The other women 342

will gather on the

floor sitting facing the bula; if it is a large tevhid (i.e. many guests and a big house), women will also gather in adjacent rooms. The order of reciting is decided according to a strict hierarchy of age and reciting skill. Those closest to the bula will be called upon first, although younger women among those sitting on the floor may also be called upon to recite if they are known to be particularly good. As many as ten different women may recite at the larger tevhids. After every individual recital there is a congregational prayer. The whole prayer is called namaz, and consists of two to four rekata. A rekat consists of praying while standing upright, halfway towards the floor, hands on knees,

then bending going

down on the knees1 and finally prostrating oneself. Having finished all the rekata of one namaz, the congregation recites the tund2ina salavat (lit, salvation prayer) together. This prayer provides an obvious visual marker between the recitals of namaz, since the open hand is placed on the heart at the mention of the name of the prophet Mohammed while the body is bent slightly forward. The movement, revering the Prophet, is a characteristic of this part of Bosnia, and stems from the influence of the dervish order and its namaz practices in the region. (At a ineviud

I attended in the nearest market town, which was led

by a high-ranking bula from Sarajevo, this particular motion was not performed because the bula did not do it.) Following a series of amins, wIen the hands are held, palms 343

up, in front of the face, the tevhid recitals finish by praying for the souls of deceased relatives and neighbours of the household where the tevhid is held. The local bula used to state that it was a commemoration of relatives up to the ninth degree". The ninth degree is how far the Bosnian Muslims traditionally go in defining kinship (see chapter 3). This specification is criticised and considered ignorant and non-Islamic by the younger and more literate clerics in her district. However, the local bula's often detailed knowledge about families and their kinship network, necessary for this practice, is one of the reasons she is well liked in the villages (see chapter 8). If the

bula should happen to omit a particular deceased relative the women will remind her. The bula and the women then say a prayer together. After the recitals and prayers are over, women will engage in relaxed talk until they are invited to the table to eat. Food is usually served only once, except in prosperous households, where food is served both before and after the recitals. They will meet women from other villages who may have news about relatives or neighbours from their native village. They exchange information about who has married, who has died and who has had a child, etc. They will also learn about other households' forthcoming sponsored rituals, such as mevlud, tevhid or weddings. Indeed, women's different kinship and neighbourhood networks may cross each other: a woman may meet another woman unknown to her who passe on a greeting or perhaps a 344

wedding invitation from relatives or neighbours in the first woman's native village. The women eat in the traditional way from a common pot served at sinija (a low circular table). 9 Since only a limited number of people (usually eight to ten) can be seated at the table at any one time the table is usually set several times. A set table is called a sofra, and the size of a reception is often described in terms of how many sofre there were. As many as ten different dishes may be served at tevhids sponsored by more prosperous households. However, any household sponsoring a tevhid does aspire to at least five dishes. People usually eat quickly and take only a couple of spoonfuls from each dish. The number of guests may be a problem for some households. Between thirty and forty guests is a respectably large number; most households invite between twenty and thirty, a few above fifty. It may be difficult to limit the number if the family is large, although space and economic means will necessarily keep numbers down. Some households restrict invitations to close relatives and relatives and close neighbours within the village. Another solution is to avoid the women's tevhid altogether and give a men's tevhid in the mosque. The majority of women usually attending a tevhid are married and middle-aged. Some women are more active in attending than others. In Dolina there is a group of five women, including the bula, who are known as the poboz'ne (pious or God-fearing) women in Dolina. They are always 345

present at religious events where the village is represented, and regularly go to services in the mosque. While the majority of villagers, men as well as women, only attend congregational prayers in the mosque on special occasions like rnevlud, tevhid or during Ramadan, these women also attend the usual evening services during the week when the hoda is staying in the village. Young, unmarried girls see the tevhid as a gathering for zene (wives) and rarely attend, unless the tevhid is for a close relative or they may help to prepare and serve the food, in which case they will not participate in the prayers, but will stay most of the time in the kitchen while the recitals take place. Furthermore, the young girls usually have obligations at school or work and tevhids may often fall on a weekday. Tevhid, like ineviud, is an occasion for women to dress

up. Urban influences in dress at religious gatherings are becoming increasingly apparent (see chapter 7 on women's dress in general). The current fashion in places like Sarajevo is to wear big, white, embroidered headscarves from Turkey that cover both head and shoulders (called namazbezama), though urban women have also recently taken

to wearing silk headscarves from Middle Eastern countries. So far, in rural areas mostly only bulas will dress in this "modern" way, although some women who can afford them have started to wear the large white headscarves, together with their newest and finest dimije or kat (dimije and blouse in same material). Village womex who dress like this will 346

often receive the comment that they "have become more like a

bula" (se pobulala). There is an urban trend towards

women wearing long skirts or even skirts just below the knee rather than the rural, old-fashioned should a woman chose to wear a is to wear

dimije. However,

dimije, the most prestigious

dimije or kat made of material from Turkey,

imported privately, of which the most attractive is silk. Very few of the women in my village could actually afford to buy such material. It was therefore rarely seen except at

tevhids among a richer elite outside the village. All

the women following the urban fashion wear their headscarves in the same way as the bula, with the ends tucked in at the cheeks, to signify that they know how to pray. Some village women tie them as they would in everyday life with a knot underneath the chin.10 Many of the male clerics disapprove of female

tevhids. According to a highly respected bula, this is mainly because they are held in the house (and therefore, I suggest, outside the authority of the disapprove of female

hoda). Those who

tevhids would like to see them held in

the mosque. Men in rural areas generally tend to belittle female

tevhid as an occasion for gossiping and eating.

Although this opinion is contrary to those Sorabji reports from Sarajevo, it does not in fact contradict her argument that the

tevhid is valued by the men as a "vehicle for the

expression of [Muslim) group identity" (1989: 195). On the contrary, such disapproving comments should be seen in relation to the often ensuing remark (made particularly by 347

male clerics) that all tevhids ought to be held in the mosque. This suggests that men think the tevhid is too important and should therefore be under their control in the mosque. Indeed, since the tevhid organised by the women in the house persists and even seems to increase in popularity, a few hodzas now lead women's tevhid in the house on their own initiative "because the demat has no officially employed bula". Furthermore, the tevhid is the ritual which takes place most frequently within the region and which, of all religious activities, a woman most often engages in. Indeed, the tevhid is the most frequent (and legitimate) occasion for women (wives) to socialise outside the immediate neighbourhood and the village. The tevhid in Bosnia thus has a similar position to the meviud in the Turkish town studied by the Tappers (1987), with the significant difference that in Turkey the mevlud associated with death are mainly by and for men. Tevhid also stresses the central role of the wife as the link between two kinship and social networks. A wife should attend tevhids given both for her own deceased relatives and for those of her husband. In these contexts she represents the household (or if her mother-in-law also attends, her husband's segment of the patri-group). If a woman is a good cook she may often be called upon by her own or her husband's relatives sponsoring a tevhid to help with the preparations and serving of the food. This may mean travelling to villages a couple of hours' bus-ride away. Such invitations are often a welcome break from the 348

wife's usual routines and give prestige both to the woman herself and to her household. It would be considered very shameful for a husband to forbid his wife to accept the invitation.

10.4

Conclusions We have devoted a large part of this chapter to the

role of Bosnian women, who have access to official Islam to an extent highly unusual in the Islamic world. This can be explained by at least two factors. First, women in rural Bosnia have traditionally been more 'visible' and have had more access to the public world than is usual in many Muslim countries. In the religious sphere, men and women, as we have seen, have very different tasks and roles to fulfil. And although there seem to be more ritual obligations for men from which women are excluded than vice versa, women are given far greater prominence at the official rituals that are seen by both Christians and Muslims themselves as the quintessential characteristics of Muslim identity: the tevhid and above all the month-long fast. The second factor is the impact of state socialism and the official discourse of sexual equality, which has put official Muslim leadership under strong ideological pressure. Whereas earlier a bula was instructed by a local

hodza in the recital of the Quran, and by a senior bula in how to perform the ritual washing of a female corpse, since 1980 a bula has had the same education as a male Imain (see 349

chapter 8), and through these women trained in Islamic orthodoxy, lay women also have access to orthodox teaching. Women as a group are thus not associated with unorthodoxy; however, a relationship between social class and forms of religious practice is perhaps particularly pronounced in the case of women. We have seen in the comparison between a tevhidmev1ud conducted among the urban Muslim elite and a common village tevhid that the "urban" tevhid put more emphasis on preaching and didactics. For the older rural population (particularly illiterate and semi-literate women), a religious custom which was currently popular would automatically be "Quranic"; orthodoxy or lack of it was outside its frame of reference. Today, the young hodzas and bulas alike are more literate and more concerned with orthodoxy than the older generation of rural clergy. Orthodoxy is in other words not exclusively the concern of men. We have seen that both orthodox and unorthodox elements are present in rituals performed by both sexes. These "unorthodox" elements are mainly the influence from sufisxn and therefore intrinsic to Islam. In chapter 9 we saw that the male sufi-hodas were the main mediators between "popular" and official Islam in more individual religious practices. In this chapter, however, we have seen how women have this role through their participation in the larger communal rituals like the tevhid. Such communal rituals enhance Muslim group identity

and are particularly central to a Bosnian Islam. The "classical" picture of a mal-dominated official Islam, 350

with a peripheral female-led healing cult requires significant modifications in rural Bosnia.

351

Footnotes chanter 10 1. Sorabji remarks on the problem of the Orthodox/popular divide specifically in relation to how religious practices are categorised in terms of the farz-haram continuum. (1989, pp. 86-117) 2. Bosnian Muslims, unless devout, have a generally lax attitude towards the consumption of alcohol. This does not imply, however, that they do not know it is haram (a sin) according to Islam, although in Dolina I was told that the injunction in the Quran against drinking alcohol concerned wine (sic) in particular. A Dolina Muslim would never drink wine like the Catholics did, but they would drink plum-brandy (1jivovic Most men in Dolina would, however, abstain from brandy during the holy month of Ramadan, as to drink alcohol at this time is considered a particularly grave violation. 3. However, this is improving as a result of the political changes since I left the field in 1988, and more men in Dolina did actually fast during my second visit in April 1990. 4. We see here that the girl describes the fast as sevap, although according to orthodox categorisation it must, as one of the five pillars of Islam, be classified as farz. 5. When I talk about a Muslim elite, I am referring to those families who have a long tradition of wealth and involvement in major religious ritual events. They are almost without exception based in the towns, and have a tradition of members joining the clergy. It is not unusual for them to send their Sons or daughters to Middle Eastern countries, Turkey and Egypt being the most common, for further religious education. For a more detailed discussion of this milieu see Cornelia Sorabji's Ph.D thesis, Muslim identity and Islamic faith in Socialist Sarajevo, Cambridge, 1989. 6. This is confirmed by Cornelia Sorabji (personal communication). 7. Tevhid led by the dervish outside a tekija is known to have happened as far back as in 1531 when a tevhid was held in the main Gazi-Husrevbeg mosque in Sarajevo. Furthermore, according to a manuscript from 1780, a certain dervish ("who liked to be in the company of women") is supposed to have "recited" tevhid with them (cf. Softi, 1984:201). 8. The Tappers report from Turkey that mevluds given for death are held immediately after the funeral, on the 7th, 40th and 52nd days after death, and thereafter on the anniversary of the death (1987:77). 9. Eating from a common pot is considered by Christians to be one of the main characteristics of Muslim "primitiveness", and Muslims feel uncomfortable when Chrá.stians witness this. The truth is, however, that rural and more traditional Christians 352

also eat from a common pot (see chapter 1). 10. I was usually made to wear mine with a knot under the chin, as a little girl who does not yet know how to recite would do. My hostess told me that it was in order to distinguish myself from the others. This was particularly important when we went to other hamlets or villages where people did not know about me. We had already experienced that those present could be misled into thinking that I was a Muslim and then get very upset when they realised I did not pray.

353

CONCLUSION

At the beginning of this dissertation the household was identified as the unit of interaction in village life, socialising new village members and thus recreating the moral and social values central to self-identity. Loyalty to the household unit, the importance of which was pointed out in chapters 2 and 7, in fact becomes a symbol of loyalty to Muslim values in the face of influences from non-Muslim institutions. Group values and by implication group identity are seen as constantly threatened by different traditions and values: there is a general worry that exposure to non-Muslim ideas makes a person nonMuslim, reflecting the commonly-held view that people are formed by their social environment. This is most clearly exemplified in the control of young girls, whose successful transition from maiden to wife is considered as crucial to the persistence of ethnic group identity. We have seen that the control of girls is focused on two main areas of concern: education and crossethnic intermarriage. These two at times overlap. Both school and leisure pursuits outside the village (such as going to coffee-bars) are seen as arenas where girls may meet and eventually marry non-Muslim boys. The preoccupation with preventing Muslim girls from marrying Christian boys reflects a concern with keeping Muslim daughters and, most importantly their daughters' children within the group. This boundary is seen as non-negotiable 354

by most girls, and even the more 'modern' ones who have negotiated more freedom and choice of movement for themselves. At the same time the household is itself a recipient of competing institutional influences from 'outside'. These are aptly sununed up in the two kinds of pictures found in almost every Muslim home, which were mentioned in the Introduction; one of Tito (symbolising the socialist Yugoslav federation) and one of an Islamic motif, often of a girl in headscarf and dimije praying (symbolising Islamic institutions). The symbol representing Islamic identity, a young girl, underlines the role of the female as the guardian of Islamic values and thus of Muslim (religious) identity. But the two pictures are next to each other on the wall, perhaps representing coniplementarity more than opposition. They represent ideologies which women draw on to legitimate their various roles, which are in other words synthesized in women. In part 1 we have seen that the vulnerability of the household as a unit is symbolically embodied in the women, who are at once outsiders to and the main reproducers (both morally and biologically) of the unit. In discussing the secular life of Dolina women, we have noted the often individualistic behaviour in this sphere and the increasingly private character of events which were earlier the concern of the community. In this account we have contrasted two aspects of women's role in village society, those of continuity and change: first the conservative aspect, represented by married and senior women (i.e. 355

mothers) as the guardians of Muslim values and group identity, and secondly the more radical aspect, represented by the young unmarried girls who attempt to define their future role by constantly testing the limits of acceptable behaviour. Every generation of women negotiates new roles and behaviour patterns. We have met three generations of women. The earliest of these, the pre-war generation, typically had no formal education, married before the age of eighteen, conducted courtships secretly, and attended social events within the village rather than outside it. They had a marriage ceremony according to Islamic law, usually married within their own native village, and had five children on average. As married women they wore the full veil whenever venturing outside their neighbourhood (though they were also the first generation to dispense with the veil, after the war). The only access they had to Islamic teaching was through the oral teaching of the male Imams. The next generation, their daughters, grew up in the sixties during a period of rapid economic development and radical change in social values (western consumerism and socialist policies). Four years of primary education had become obligatory, and with it literacy, opening up possibilities for further education and wage labour. They picked up new styles in dress and behaviour which qualified them for the positive label "modern/As teenagers, these women began to attend dances outside the village, and many eventually married outside it, some going abroad on labour migration with their husbands. They had access to 356

information about contraception and to free abortion, and had three children on average. Dolina men of this generation often married brides from other villages. These women are today the mothers of the third generation, Dolina's teenage girls, and their different backgrounds make for varying degrees of "modernity". Some from the more modern villages refuse to wear a headscarf, as married women normally do in Dolina; they wear dimije only in the village and a knee-length skirt when venturing outside. Some take employment in the nearest market town, and tend to press for an earlier division of the joint household made possible by improvement in the economy and western consumer values. Still, many acknowledge that their formal education has been limited. The combination of increased social contacts outside the village, some in urban centres, and the influence of the media (particularly television) has made them feel "uncultured". This is why many encourage their daughters to take secondary education (on top of the present eight years of obligatory primary education). However, as wives and mothers these women also aspire to be good Muslims: they worry about how they dress in the village; they fast at Ramadan; they go to the mosque and participate in

tevhids;

and they want to bring their

daughters up to be the same. The dilemma for these mothers is that in their wish to give their daughters better chances in life through education they expose them to nonMuslim values and ideas. The girls themselves see no 357

contradiction but complementarity in these opposing influences: one night they may go to coffee-bars, dress in short skirts or tight jeans and listen to western popmusic, while the next night they may dress up in their finest dimije and headscarf to attend a religious gathering where they listen to recitals from the Quran. The official definition of Muslim identity in Bosnia is as was pointed out in the Introduction, devoid of any religious content. In the first part of the thesis we focused on women as the pivots of this ethnic and secularly defined "Muslim" identity in Bosnia. In part 2 we saw that women were also active both in those religious rituals central to Bosnian Islam, and in orthodox Islam (although the individualistic behaviour which we noted for women in the secular sphere is replaced in the religious sphere by a more uniform 'communal' behaviour enhancing group values and identity). Within the religious sphere as within the secular sphere there is continuity and change. Not surprisingly, the young women represent a radical force here. Many young bulas have refused the marginal role of their predecessors, and in fact the young Medressa-educated

bula can be seen as the epitome of young Bosnian Muslim women. Their status as female religious leaders is ratified by two different institutions (the I.Z. and the socialist state) and their ideologies, more all-encompassing and powerful than the traditional village based structures. We have seen that the official I.Z. is eager to include women in its sphere of influence and therefore encourages the 358

education of bulas, and that the secular socialist state also encourages women (mainly through education) to take a more prominent role in public life. As a result these women have a far greater prominence in official religious life than is usual both among Muslims anywhere else and among Christian women, who have to rely on access to orthodox teachings through a male cleric. In this context these women are in fact not only a radical force which challenges traditional patterns by demanding for itself more formal influence in the religious sphere (such as participation in mosque councils), but also a conservative force as the embodiment of educators and guardians of religious values within the household. The I.Z. and the socialist state have in common that they are represented by literate specialists who not only provide women with a legitimating force, but also instruct people on who they are or ought to be. This is done mainly through mass education and the media (cf. Anderson, 1983). Such institutions represent modernity. Giddens argues that modernity must be understood on an institutional level but acknowledges that "the transmutations introduced by modern institutions interlace in a direct way with individual life and therefore with the self"(199l:l). In this thesis we have discussed how such processes work through real people in the creation of an ethno-religious identity. The written text as a source of authority in Bosnian culture is a key to the processes which are taking place. As we have already seen, Bosnian Muslim culture itself has 359

had to be validated through texts (Cf. the discussion of the existence of a separate Muslim ethnic group in the Introduction). The written version is by definition the official, authoritative version: this is as valid for the state as for official Islam. These competing ideologies seek to influence first through face-to-face education, but also through books, other published material and the media. The validation of culture through books is, as we have seen an important characteristic of the Islamic world. Thus, Lambek writes "In any Islamic society everyone is engaged to some degree, in the never-ending tasks of learning, reproducing, using, and passing on the sacred texts. The management of sacred knowledge plays a significant role in the development of the social persona and the construction of a Muslim identity" (1990:25). The Bosnian Muslims are part of this tradition. However, the presence of another set of doctrines which builds its legitimacy on the writings of Marx, Lenin and Tito, has, I suggest, reinforced the "validation of culture through books". It is typical that the "ethnogenesis" of the Bosnian Muslims is in itself a creation of a written discourse, i.e. their status as a separate ethnic group is validated through officially approved historical and sociological academic literature. As a result, ritual practices which

cannot be

validated through either state socialist or Islamic literate authority are losing ground locally. Through the

increasing influence of literate authority on a village 360

level (i.e. through either Islamic or secular education), "non-literate" practices are relegated to the realm of the "primitive", "uncultured" and "ignorant". The outcome is often the polarisation on a theoretical level between what are considered Islamic and Bosnian Muslim customs on the one hand, and non-Islamic and non-Bosnian Muslim on the other. But this distinction does not fit actual practices, and a fertile ground for debating Muslim customs and cultural identity is thus created. Women, as integrators of the secular and religious spheres, are today rejecting both the state propagated secular (ethnic) definition of Muslim identity as well the orthodox Islamic one. In fact, they formulate a Bosnian Muslim identity which transcends both officializing bureaucratic definitions. Through this identity, based on religious discourse, women escape the peripheral role traditionally assigned to them in orthodox Islam.

361

APPENDIX: THE SUFI PRESENCE

The dervishes see themselves as better Muslims and closer to heaven than others, but I say every dervish is not a Muslim.

This critical remark was made by an old village hodza familiar with dervish religious practices and their influence on religious rituals in his region. His opinion is representative of the popular view of dervishes as well as that of the Islamska Zajednica (although the latter would phrase it more subtly). Dolina is situated in the heart of a region which is known for its suf i-sanctuaries, 1 known as tekije. In chapters 9 and 10 the Dolina villagers practices of praying at saints' graves and for the souls of dead relatives at the tevhid were mentioned as possibly influenced by suf I traditions in the region. The most striking legacy of the dervish presence in this region is, however, the performance of zikir (sufi rituals of remembrance in which the Names of God are invoked; fra Arabic dikr) at mevlud and tevhid in private homes or in the mosque in Dolina and other nearby villages in this region. When performed by the dervishes of the Naqshibendi order, it consists of chanting the names of God accompanied by violent rhythmic movements and the beating of a drum; it increases in intensity until climax is reached when somebody falls into a trance. However, when performed by villagers and their hoda it is 362

a shorter and less intense ceremony, and is not (unlike the dervish version) the central element in the sequences of prayers and recitals at a rnevlud or a tevhid. Practising Muslims and even clerics from other parts of Bosnia are often unfamiliar with the body movements accompanying

the chanting performed collectively at rnevlud

and tevhid in Dolina and surrounding villages. 2 One woman

who had moved into the area from east Bosnia had never experienced these practices before until she attended a

meviud in a nearby village to Dolina. When she asked why they did it, she received the answer that it was sevap (see chapter 10). The zikir is associated with the dervishes and thus with men in general. Although women may perform zikir at mevlud and tevhid with both men and women present and led by a hodza, they tend to react with a mixture of bemusement and embarrassment and either perform the zikir in a restrained manner or do not take part at all. On their way home from such a ritual women will usually comment dri].y that there was "a lot of hukanje" (i.e. roaring). At tevhid and meviud led by a bula (and exclusively attended by women) the zikir is never performed. Algar (1975) reports that the first Naqshibendi

tekija

in Bosnia was built in 1463 by the Ottoman governor of

Bosnia, Iskender Pasa, of which nothing remains today. In the mid-nineteenth century another Naqshibendi tekija was founded in Sarajevo; this one is still in use after having been closed down by the authord.ties in 1980 for allegedly 363

holding meetings encouraging fundamentalist and separatist political ideas (cf. Sorabji, 1989). Algar notes, however, that it is outside Sarajevo that the traditional life of the Naqshibendi tekija continues to flourish. There are three in the region surrounding Dolina: Visoko, Oglavak and Zivcici, but at present only the lastnamed, the most active of the three, has a sheikh. The founder of this tekija was a native of ivii; Sejh Husein Baba Zuki, who died in 1799 or 1800. Form the Medressa in Fojnica he continued to Sarajevo and from there to Istanbul, where he entered on the sufi path and was initiated into the Naqshibendi order. After travelling to Konya and to Turkestan to study the tekije there, he returned to Bosnia and his native village, where he founded a

tekija. His

founded the

only murid (pupil), who was also a local boy,

tekija in

Oglavak, and it was one of his

followers, Muhammed Mejli Baba, who had come to Bosnia from Western Anatolia In search of the "perfect sheikh", who succeeded ejh Husein in ivii. ejh Mejli Baba'a successors have all been his descendants, albeit not always in a direct line (one was the grand-nephew of his predecessor). (For further details see Algar, 1975). While most dervish orders are based within the Shia tradition, the order which is dominant in Bosnia, and indeed in the Dolina region, the Naqshibendi, belongs to the Sunni tradition. Indeed, it is the only known order which traces its descent (i.e. its genealogy of its lineage of transmission of knowledge back through the first Muslim 364

ruler, Abu Bakr. The rest of the known sufi orders trace their origins back to one of the Shi'ite spiritual leaders, and therefore through Imam All, and so back to the Prophet Muhanuned. Algar (1975:87-88) noted that the Naqshibendi order has developed an attitude of militant hostility to Shi'ism. He points out that one of the order's main characteristics, the silent zikir, is opposed to the open and vocal zikir practised by the Naqshibendi in Bosnia, and he suggests the latter is an influence from other orders such as the Qadiri. In the nineteen-fifties the activities of Bosnian tekije were banned by the Islamska Zajecinica, with the approval of the political authorities. The order was not dissolved; instead a core of its members went underground and continued to hold zikir secretly in private homes. Clearly, the order lost much of its popular appeal, as their activities could no longer be part of the religious experience of "ordinary Muslims". Male Dolina villagers in

their seventies and eighties would, whenever our discussion touched on the dervishes, remember attending mevlud at the

tekija in ivii. Their descriptions were vivid with the intensity of the experience: the number of men crowded inside and outside the tekija, the mystic authority of the sheikh and in particular what they remembered as the "throwing of knives". Today, sabre and skewer piercing do not play any prominent part in the zikir (except for those held among dervishes only). There are two reasons for this. First, the order has few dervishes among its ranks who are 365

able to perform these feats; usually somebody has to be invited from an order elsewhere (such accomplishments are more common among the Kosovo dervishes, particularly those belonging to the Bektashi order; see &lhajid, 1986). Secondly, these practices were prohibited by the I.Z. on the grounds that somebody might get hurt. However sincere the I.Z. may have been, the ban was also a way of reducing the attractions of a cult which they perceived as unorthodox. In recent years the I.Z. have attempted to bring the Naqshibendi order and its members into their sphere of influence, for example by sending representatives to every major dervish ritual. Thus, the popular annual meviuds that the order hold at their tekije in ivcidi and at Buna in Herzegovina are now supervised by the I.Z. A high-ranking member of their clergy will give a sermon to the crowds gathered in and around the tekija to participate in the mevlud and listen to the recitals form the Quran and the singing of ilahije, many of which were written by the first sheikhs of the Naqshibendi tekije in ivii and Oglavak. In the last few years the I.Z. has initiated the "pilgrimage" to the annual meviud at the tekija at Buna (Herzegovina). Each demat in the Dolina region organises buses to take interested villagers to the mevlud (cf. chapter 9). While during the first few years only the most devout and older Muslims in Dolina would attend, in the last couple of years it has become a popular outing in which the young also take part. Last year there were two 366

buses going from Dolina, and the meviud at Buna has become one of the major events on the ritual "calendar" in Dolina. 3 People make a picnic in the beautiful hills around the tekija, and some try to squeeze through the compact crowd to get inside the tekija to pray, to have a better view of the prominent hodzas and sheikhs who sit in the courtyard reciting mevlud poems, and to say prayers for health and fortune at a former sheikh's tomb. This is where people leave money as a tribute. This money used to go directly to the maintenance of the tekija but is today. collected by the I.Z. The Buna mevlud takes place during the day, but the dervishes hold their zikir the night before the official ritual among their circle of adherents and guests from other dervish orders in Kosovo and Macedonia. (These private zikirs may well include the sabre and skewer piercing mentioned on p.ç.) During mevlud at the tekija in iviOi, which is less accessible and therefore attended mostly by people from surrounding villages, a zikir for the general public is held on the night of the

mevlud, although again the

dervishes will hold a more exclusive zikir for special guests the night before. The larger, public zikir starts by the rhythmic repetitions of lailahe illallah ("there is no God except the one Allah"), and the invocation of the names of God, Allah and Hu, each accompanied by specific physical movements, mainly of the head, which all have a symbolic meaning. Later, as the collective sayings 367

intensify, the dervishes who sit in a circle with their sheikh facing the congregation, his back to the Kibla, rise to their feet and stand in a circle, accompanied by the rhythmic repetitions of the congregation and a drum. Their body movements become more vigorous and as the intensity escalates, a dervish may fall into a trance, saying the name of Allah repeatedly. When he recovers, the repetitive words and tunes will decrease in intensity, and will eventually be replaced by recitals and illahije. Women may also attend the zikir, but they do so from behind a latticed gallery at the back of the room. A young bula who was close to the dervish milieu told me that there

were also female dervishes, although the sheikh of the tekija denied this. She claimed that a female dervish has

to recite three particular doctrines (from the Quran) seventeen times before morning prayers (sabah) throughout her life; it is therefore a major commitment. Female dervishes may not participate in zikir, but may watch men's zikir from the gallery. In other words, the "female

dervish" is not accepted as such by the men, as she cannot be part of the brotherhood or participate in the zikir, which is the main defining characteristic of the dervishes in Bosnia. For a woman, being a "dervish" is thus an entirely personal experience. I was told by a hodza familiar with the dervish milieu that because recruitment of new dervishes is difficult, requirement for being accepted are far from ideal. He suggested that novices have tQ read some books, but that 368

they do not need to be unusually religious. It is difficult to state how many dervishes (i.e. members) belong to the three tekije in the Dolina region. When I asked a sheikh about their numbers, he was reluctant to answer, but indicated that it was somewhere between three and 200. Each order has a hierarchical structure with the sheikh at the top (a position which usually goes from father to son). The sheikh accepts new members on the basis of an interview. The main participants at the sufi-mevlud in Zivcici are the circle of descendants from the second sheikh of the

tekija, Muhammed Mejli Baba, and their friends. Devout Muslims and hodas in the region who fall outside this circle often consider it an exclusive club and see them as a socio-economic elite. Among some their sincerity is questioned. Echoing the old hoda whose quote introduced this section, a young hodza claimed to know one of the dervishes famed for performing sabre-piercing on himself in a trance, saying that he was the least devout Muslim there, often skipping his prayers and so on. Another hoda, who had just witnessed a zikir where a dervish had fallen into trance, compared their ritual with a stimulus like alcohol. He claimed that the more solid a person's faith is, the less he is a dervish. The view of the dervish as less rather than more Muslim has some supporters, especially among the clergy faithful to the I.Z. A senior representative of the organisation gave a speech at the

opening of a mosque in the so-called dervish region where 369

he spoke rather unfavourably about a fictive dervish who spent all his time contemplating, and having somebody else to bring his daily bread. The moral of the fable was: when the choice is between prayers and work, work is the more important, because it is for the benefit of the society (cf. chapter 8). Furthermore, at the I.Z.-directed Medressa in sarajevo, students who train to become hodzas or bulas are taught that sufism and the practices of the dervish orders (including the writing of zapis (see chapter 9) by some prominent members of the order) are not "pure Islam", and are "outside the Quran". This is also the message most of them (who are not familiar with the orders themselves) will pass on to the members of the dzemat they are eventually sent to teach and lead. However, the fact is that most dervishes and sheikhs in Bosnia are also I.Z.employed hodias committed to orthodoxy. There is not necessarily a contradiction between orthodoxy and "popular" suf i-Islam; rather they may be described as different styles of participation in religious life. The most religiously learned among Bosnian Muslims adopt different styles in different contexts. The I.Z.-employed hodza teaches children at mekteb, but later in the evening the same man may receive people in his home who are seeking help for a problem which "school-medicine" has not cured; his knowledge of healing is part of the suf i tradition which he shares with other sheikhs. The influence of the dervish orders in Bosnia has elsewhere been seen as very ]4mited. Sorabji argues that 370

the dervishes do not offer a real alternative to Islam as presented by the Islamska Zajednica (1989:169-170). However, it is my contention that the dervish orders in Bosnia never had the aspirations to lead the Muslims locally in the region, a role the sufi sheikhs have taken on in other Muslim countries (such as Morocco and Bangladesh). The dervish orders in central Bosnia are dominated by the members of the same family, and the position of sheikh goes from father to son. This family has to a large extent become the link to inclusion into the sufi milieu. Although it could be argued that the dervish families therefore have a vested interest in maintaining exclusivity, it is clear that during certain periods (e.g. the fifties) the orders had to become exclusive to survive, and their "underground" existence made recruitment very difficult from outside their own limited social network. I believe this structure has been perpetuated even during the recent more liberal era. However, there are indications that the new more liberal attitude towards the orders both from the political authorities and from the I.Z. has generated a new interest among young, urban Muslims. Furthermore, the difference between the I.Z.-led Bosnian mainstream Islam and the Naqshibendi order's sufi path is not striking enough for the latter to present a real opposition and challenge to the former. (As already noted, many dervishes, and certainly those in more senior positions, are also I.Z.employed Imam

While the I .Z. 's take over of dervish 371

rituals has provided official Bosnian Islam with some of the mysticism and popular appeal which it lacks, it has also watered them down, as we have seen, to the extent that the mystics have lost much of their former attractions.

372

Footnotes appendix

1. The words "sufism" or "sufi" are rarely used in popular speech; villagers and village hodzas will usually talk about the dervishes and the dervish influence. 2. I shall not here go into details about elements in the zikir specific to the Naqshibendi order, as I limit my account to aspects of the dervish presence in the region which have relevance to the religious life of the population of Dolina. For an excellent review of the Bosnian Naqshibendi order and their devotional practices, however, see Hamid Algar, 1975. 3. These trips have also become powerful collective expression of Muslim ethnic identity. This is no less true after the buses one year were attacked by young Serb nationalists. 4. This representative has now (1990) been replaced by someone else, and there are indications that the new leadership will take a less accommodating attitude towards the political authorities (which, it should be stressed, are becoming increasingly tolerant towards the Islamic community).

373

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