Content area
Full Text
This ethnographic vignette details the way a difficult crisis in an extended Kosovar family was managed by its own members within the mandates of that overtly patriarchal culture while creating important avenues for change. The cultural and historic context for these events is provided, and the nuances of this solution-oriented, culturally congruent, "natural" (i.e., not in a therapeutic context) process are discussed.
THIS ETHNOGRAPHIC VIGNETTE depicts a complex family problem and the way it evolved toward its resolution. Both problem and solution are tightly framed by a socio-cultural context that, while in rapid change from traditional to westernized, may be quite dissonant with-and even ideologically challenging to-some of the readers. Anthropological journeys frequently are.
It also may offer an opportunity to imagine how we might have worked as hypothetical consultants in such a situation, having to choose between what Monk and Gerhart (2003) call conversational partner/collaborative stances and sociopolitical activist/narrative stances while immersed in a clash of cultures.
The events described took place in a small and impoverished countryside village in Kosova,2 a region that is barely emerging from its victimization during a brutal period of "ethnic cleansing." In order to place the story in its proper context, a brief description of the political history of the region will be provided.
Historical background/context3
The political instability of the Balkans is legendary. In fact, the word "balkanization" has acquired permanent status in our dictionaries. Its strategic geographic location has exposed that crossroads territory to invasions and counter-invasions, massacres and counter-massacres, forced religious conversion and counter-conversions, and unsteady boundaries and alliances. In this process, cultural profiles, norms, and identities have sometimes evolved-forced by radical changes in context-and sometimes consolidated, rooted in, and reconstituted by their respective versions of their history. What follows focuses on Kosova, a land-locked territory neighbored by Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia.
In the past 2000 years, that region, inhabited originally by Illyrian tribes, has been occupied and annexed successively by the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, briefly the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Serbian Kingdom and Fascist Italy, to be designated after WWII as a Yugoslavian territory. Each shift was accompanied by massacres of civilians, and mass exodus of one or another ethnic/religious group. In 1981, a year after Tito's death, a bid toward...