Epistemological eclecticism: Difference and the ‘Other’ in the Balkans and beyond

Abstract

This article's concern is epistemological in that it seeks understanding of the nature of ethnographic knowledge production. Its background assumption is that decolonization of anthropology requires decolonization of anthropological epistemology. The article argues that anthropology is not so much a study of the ‘Other’, but an effort to acquire knowledge by translating across some sort of socio-historically established difference. Anthropologists do not acquire knowledge necessarily by translating between modern, Western European, and non-modern, ‘Other’ conceptual arrangements. Instead, the anthropological production of knowledge requires an effort to figure out the relevant differences and similarities between an anthropologist, their interlocutors, and their audiences, as well as a translation across these differences and similarities. In order to demonstrate this point, the article focuses on 19th- and 20th-century ethnographic discussions of rural joint families called zadruga in the Balkans. Through a critical reading of two works on zadruga, it demonstrates that anthropologists in the Balkans were epistemologically eclectic, in that they could make use of strategies of both ‘anthropology abroad’ and ‘auto-anthropology’, or combine and reverse them. While this instance of epistemological eclecticism is the result of widespread uncertainties concerning the status of the ‘modern’ and the ‘non-modern’ as organizational categories in the Balkans, it has direct implications for the production of anthropological knowledge generally.

Keywords

auto-anthropology anthropology abroad Balkans difference epistemology Other

We will have to fight some battles once again which up until a few days ago we might have hoped would have now ended. Yet, life in the Balkans [is] like an endless game of weaving and un-weaving. I guess this has to stop at some point.¹ (Nidžara Ahmetašević, a journalist from Bosnia and Herzegovina)

Introduction

This article explores the status of difference and its mobilization in the production of anthropological knowledge. It does so in relation to settings such as the Balkans – those that are neither completely in the ‘center’ of knowledge production, conceived of as modern and Western, nor completely outside of such centers, conceived of as non-modern and Other. The distinction between the modern/Western and non-modern/non-Western contexts has been foundational for socio-cultural anthropology – the discipline itself is frequently described as a study of the Other. Yet, I will argue that understanding epistemological approaches of anthropologists in places that are neither quite Western nor quite Other – where our interlocutors often describe their position as not fitting neatly into either of these two poles and explicitly discuss the instability of the ‘traditional’, the ‘progressive’, the ‘modern’, or the ‘non-modern’ as organizational categories in their everyday lives – sheds light on the production of anthropological knowledge more broadly.

My main argument is that anthropology is not so much a study of the Other, but an effort to acquire knowledge by translating across some sort of socio-historically relevant difference. Looking at how anthropologists produced knowledge in the Balkans illustrates that anthropology acquires knowledge by translating between familiar and unfamiliar conceptual arrangements – whereby ‘familiar’ conceptual arrangements are not necessarily modern or Western, and the ‘unfamiliar’ ones are not necessarily non-modern and Other. The anthropological production of knowledge requires an effort to figure out the relevant differences and similarities between an anthropologist, their interlocutors, and their audiences, and then to translate across such particular differences and similarities.

Let me explain how I understand concepts of ‘difference’ and the ‘Other’. Anthropology borrowed the Other as a concept from postcolonial theory to refer to the non-Western, non-European subjects who have ‘characteristics which are alien to the western tradition’ (Pandian, 1985: 6). As Sarukkai reminds us, ‘there is a plethora of human others which appear in anthropology’ and Pandian ‘lists some of the dominant others used in this discourse which includes the fossil other, savage other, black other and the ethnographic other’ (1997: 1406). These various kinds of the anthropological Other have something important in common – they all refer to the non-Western people whose practices, conceptual apparatuses, and everyday lives are presumably radically different from the West.

When using the notion of ‘difference’, I refer to a contingent, historically produced effect of the social practice of categorization. Difference emerges from socio-historically specific practices of ordering a plurality of ‘the human condition’ (Arendt, 1998). Difference is a relational concept, but what sort of a relationship is established by difference and between whom is not a given. In anthropology, it needs to be ethnographically and historically explored each time anew, whether a particular instance of differentiation includes exploitation, collusion, cooperation, solidarity and acting in concert, or something fifth – and between whom and in what way. This lack of determinism of the concept of ‘difference’ stands in contrast to the notion of the ‘Other’ which defines in advance that the relationship is one of domination and subjugation between the West and the Rest. In my reading, the Other also refers to a contingent, historically produced difference between the West and the Rest – but this difference was solidified through colonial exploitation and oppression to such a large extent that it is often presented and discussed as immanent (cf. Hall, 1992).

The problem here is that, when anthropology is understood as primarily a study of the Other, it seems as if there are two key epistemological choices in anthropology: one is to make sense of the strange, characteristic for anthropology abroad; another to produce self-knowledge, characteristic for anthropology at home (Strathern, 1987a). This makes the position of the Balkans and Eastern Europe in the general production of anthropological knowledge unclear at best, invisible at worst. It also puts limits on how we as anthropologists think about our epistemological choices.

By exploring how anthropologists in the Balkans learned across differences, I emphasize that there are more than two key epistemological approaches in anthropology – as a matter of fact, I argue that anthropology is epistemologically eclectic, in the Balkans and beyond. By epistemological eclecticism I refer to an ability to employ strategies of both anthropology abroad and auto-anthropology in the study of the same region, or to combine and reverse them. Epistemological choices of anthropologists in the Balkans speak about the need to decentre (cf. Agier, 2016) anthropological writing from categories such as a ‘modern us’ and ‘non-modern Other’. The struggles over and yearnings for modernity in the Balkans indicate that anthropologically understanding something otherwise means being epistemologically eclectic. Using both strategies of anthropology abroad and auto-anthropology, combining and reversing them constitutes an epistemological eclecticism – a powerful tool that anthropological practitioners can use to produce knowledge across difference in various ways.

In order to make this point, I will first discuss epistemological strategies of ‘anthropology abroad’ and ‘anthropology at home’. I will then explore how epistemological strategies of anthropologists in the Balkans complicate this distinction, by focusing on a somewhat forgotten discussion concerning the zadruga, a model of a joint family which consisted of seven or eight to 100 people in certain cases. Finally, I will suggest that epistemological eclecticism is possible only when differences are ethnographically explored – rather than taken as a given. Understanding anthropology as primarily a study of the Other reproduces a definitional approach to difference which assumes in advance what the relevant difference is. In contrast to such a definitional approach, an ethnographic approach to differences requires ethnographically exploring each time anew what counts as a relevant difference and the political implications of this.

Making sense of the strange versus finding strangeness in the familiar

Strathern (1987a) argues that there is a significant discrepancy between anthropology abroad and auto-anthropology (or anthropology at home), and that this has little to do with nativity, intimacy, or the familiarity of the anthropologist with the field in which she is conducting ethnographic research. Rather, for Strathern, the difference is epistemological: it stems from different approaches to the production and organization of knowledge.

Anthropology abroad means ‘the juxtaposition of indigenous and exogenous concepts’ (Strathern, 1987a: 25), making sense of their differences, and so learning through the strange and the awkward. In other words, the aim of anthropology abroad is to de-exoticize non-Western people by demonstrating that non-modernist practices, which may seem weird and counter-intuitive to observers used to modernist categories, actually present reasonable and logical actions in a particular socio-historical context. To show that ‘their’ strangeness and awkwardness make sense in ‘their’ specific socio-cultural and historical contexts suggests that ‘our’ modernist concepts, practices, and relationships are also artificial, socio-culturally constructed, and dependent on history.

Furthermore, an anthropologist abroad produces knowledge which is directed ‘outwards’, to the anthropologist’s audience, rather than to the studied people – he/she has no way to ‘substitute his/her own account for people’s own: he/she neither authenticates nor displaces them’ (Strathern, 1987a: 23). This outward direction has been a classic move of anthropology, understood as a cultural critique: ‘in using portraits of other cultural patterns to reflect self-critically on our own ways, anthropology disrupts common sense and makes us reexamine our taken-for-granted assumptions’ (Marcus and Fischer, 1999: 1). The ‘we’ of this sentence clearly refers to the (English speaking) readership of socio-cultural anthropology in the West (and not to the people who practice these ‘other cultural patterns’). This is not just a matter of a coincidence, or pragmatics. Anthropological thought developed in a particular modernist setting – that of Anglo-American and French intellectual traditions. The broad assumption that modernity has brought with itself a radical break with enchantedness and relatedness in the world has had a huge effect on anthropology: contemporary socio-cultural anthropology very often sees itself as an endeavor of translating between ‘their’ enchantedness and relatedness and ‘our’ [Western] neat, modernist, clear-cut, purified categories of ordering the world (see Da Col and Graeber, 2011). As Strathern writes,

Anthropology here constitutes itself in relation to an Other, vis-a-vis the alien culture/society under study. Its distance and foreignness are deliberately sustained. But the Other is not under attack. On the contrary, the effort is to create a relation with the Other. (Strathern, 1987b: 289)

In other words, anthropology learns by establishing a relation between knowledge of Euro-American modernity and forms of knowledge that are distant and foreign to it. This is why Strathern claims that, as long as anthropologists are doing anthropology – that is, as long as anthropologists rely on anthropological analytical apparatuses and forms of thinking – it does not really matter whether they are ‘native’ and where they come from:

Whether anthropologists are at home qua anthropologists, is not to be decided by whether they call themselves Malay, belong to the Travellers or have been born in Essex; it is decided by the relationship between their techniques of organizing knowledge and how people organize knowledge about themselves. (Strathern, 1987a: 31)

To state this concisely, an anthropologist is doing anthropology abroad when she researches the Other, non-modernist, ‘weird’, and ‘awkward’ social practices by revealing their underlying social logics and principles, grounding her analysis in the concepts which are incommensurable with those used by the studied people.

Auto-anthropology, however, involves another way of dealing with socio-cultural difference and, therefore, constitutes a different approach to creating knowledge. Here, ‘people’s commonsense understandings of the roles they play and their place in society are shown themselves to be contrived’ (Strathern, 1987a: 28). An auto-anthropologist tries to find difference and strangeness at ‘home’, in a social context that is familiar both to her and to her readers. As a result, an ethnographic account of auto-anthropology becomes available to the studied people, as one among several possible ways to explain why and how they engage in a certain thing (a narrative, a practice, affect, etc.). The auto-anthropological account displaces people’s own explanation of the events, so as to demonstrate the inherent artificiality, contrivance, and socio-historical situatedness of all human concepts, practices, and relationships. The goal of auto-anthropology is to expose the known and the intimate as artificial and socio-culturally produced, thus challenging the conceptual apparatuses used by the anthropologist and her readers in everyday life.

Importantly, the ‘home’ of anthropology in Strathern’s account is the West. Since anthropology mostly relies on Western modernist analytical categories (such as ‘society’, ‘culture’, ‘relationships’, ‘roles’, or ‘community’; Strathern, 1987a: 26), Strathern suggests that auto-anthropology can only be conducted by anthropologists working in the West – the social setting which produced the forms of reasoning and categorical apparatuses used in anthropology. She argues this means that auto-anthropologists are in a different position from, for example, Malay anthropologists working in a Malay society. A Malay anthropologist would employ analytical apparatuses and forms of thinking which did not stem from ‘Malay’ intellectual traditions, but from the traditions of Western modernity. They would produce knowledge directed ‘outwards’, because this knowledge could not be included alongside the existing ‘Malay’ explanations of why people are doing certain things. An auto-anthropologist, on the other hand, produces self-knowledge because she would use modernist knowledge practices (of anthropology) generated from the social setting that she studies (Western modernity).

Strathern’s interpretation of the distinction between auto-anthropology and anthropology abroad is very useful for thinking about the relationship between anthropologists who conduct ethnographic research abroad and those who do fieldwork close to their home and usual places of residence. However, grounded in the understanding of anthropology as primarily a study of the Other, her analysis does not quite capture the knowledge practices of Eastern European anthropologists, especially those from the Balkans. How did Eastern European, and particularly Balkan, anthropologists learn across socio-cultural differences, if at all? When they ethnographically studied the social practices of peasants in their own and neighboring countries, did they attempt to de-exoticize the ‘weird’ and the ‘unusual’? Did they attempt to find differences in the intimately familiar? Did they engage with differences in some third way?

Taking Strathern’s distinction into account, I will now discuss how anthropologists from the Balkans learned across socio-cultural differences. I will follow several arguments developed in the discussions of the zadruga, a rural joint family. There is an enormous body of anthropological, legal, sociological, and historical work concerned with rural joint families in the Balkans, which discusses such families’ origins, organizational principles, functions, and so forth (see, for example, Brunnbauer, 2012; Byrnes, 1976; Halpern and Anderson, 1970; Hammel, 1972; Kaser, 1994; Novaković, 2005; Vittorelli, 2002). Some of these works have touched upon the usefulness of the term zadruga. The term zadruga is a neologism most likely coined by Vuk Karadžić in his Serbian Dictionary (1818), while peasants who practiced zadruge (plural of zadruga) only used the term as an adjective (zadružna, zadrugarski, zadruzhen). This is why, wary of exceptionalist tendencies in scholarly studies of the Balkans, Todorova suggests that the term zadruga had only a literary life and ‘should be dismissed altogether from quantitative historical analysis’, or kept only if historians also kept other emic terms for joint families across Europe, such as ‘the French frérèche, the Italian fratellanza, and the German Grossfamilie’ (1993: 156). Margaret Mead also briefly participated in this discussion, by suggesting that ‘the term zadruga subsumes a kind of historical, geographical specificity which is lost in the cross-culturally more useful term, joint family’ (1976: xxv).²

In this article, I do not aim to provide an overview of the rich scholarly writings on zadruge. Instead, I will focus only on the epistemological strategies of anthropologists from the Balkans, sometimes using the term zadruga and sometimes ‘joint family’. I also use the geographic terms ‘Balkans’ and ‘southeastern Europe’ as synonyms. By ‘anthropologists from the Balkans’ I refer to people who have completed at least some part of their official education or career in an institution which is located somewhere in the Balkans. I also refer to ‘anthropology in the Balkans’, rather than to ‘Serbian’, ‘Croat’, or some other nationally defined ethnology.³ The reason for this choice is that the framework of ‘world anthropologies’ (Restrepo and Escobar, 2005) replaces an image of anthropological knowledge diffusing from the center to the peripheries, with an image of anthropology as a plural landscape of various disciplinary practices. However, this concept does not specify on what grounds world anthropologies could be differentiated. Due to dominant disciplinary practices, the national lens seems to provide the most straightforward ground for differentiation, whereby ‘US anthropology’ could be compared with ‘Serbian’ or ‘Bulgarian’ anthropology. Nevertheless, making such comparisons between national disciplinary traditions potentially presents intellectual landscapes as a mosaic of discrete cultures and thus reproduces methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002). Terms such as ‘Anglo-Saxon anthropology’ or ‘anthropology in the Balkans’ may flatten some differences in the daily practices of anthropological communities, but they also help to avoid reproducing methodological nationalism and the reading of ethnographies from the 19th and the first half of the 20th century through the prism of contemporary national categories.

‘Anthropology abroad’: family as a community of labor, not blood or residence

Anthropologists from the Balkans may take a similar position to that of anthropologists abroad, when they attempt to demonstrate that modernist categories oppress and fail to capture the logics of everyday life and local knowledge. This is the epistemological move taken by anthropology abroad: it learns about (‘their’) small-scale, grassroots, locally grounded relationships in order to criticize (‘our’) modernist concepts and dominant academic and political discourses. A case in point is the work of Milenko Filipović.

Filipović (1945: 20) asserts that the legal framings of a joint family ‘did not correspond to the folk understandings of zadruga, nor to the needs of the people’.³ Namely, article 507 of the Civic Law, ratified in Serbia in 1844 and still in power in 1945, framed the joint family as a community founded upon three categories – residence, property, and kinship (‘Zadruga is a place where there exists a mixture of shared residence and property, related by kinship or adoption, by nature established and confirmed’). Filipović, however, ethnographically demonstrates that in everyday life and from villagers’ perspectives, a joint family did not have to be a community of kin, or a community of residence. Instead, it was a community of labor and material interest – its main characteristic is that all its members worked together to secure their livelihoods. Sharing ‘blood’ and residence were less relevant than sharing modes of subsistence.

Filipović criticized the legal understanding of a joint family as a community of shared residence by evoking ethnographic accounts of a ‘divided joint family’ (predvojena zadruga) whose members continually lived in two or more places. For instance, some members of a ‘divided joint family’ would had lived in the mountains and engaged in cattle breeding, while other members of the same joint family would had lived on a plain and engaged in agricultural work (1945: 40–55). The head⁵ of the ‘divided joint family’ circulated between the divided parts and managed the re-distribution and consumption of the goods between the parts, and ‘represented the zadruga as a whole towards the village and the authorities’ (1945: 60).

Filipović similarly criticized the legal understanding of a joint family as a community of kinship by evoking ethnographic accounts of non-kinship-based joint families (nesrodnička zadruga), which consisted of people who were not initially related in any way (1945: 8–36). Over time, by sharing property, last name, rituals (such as krsna slava⁶), and each other’s lives, members of a non-kinship joint family came to be a ‘single family which completed all the inside and the outside jobs under the governance of the [elected] head of the household’ (1945: 12). The members of a non-kin joint family developed ‘not only legal zadruga relations, but also a particularly intimate life, like in the most harmonious of zadruga consisting of blood relatives, and mutual dedication which can be found among the closest relatives’ (1945: 31). Thus, in Filipović’s reading, family intimacy emerged as a result of shared labor, rituals, and sharing the minutiae of life, and not from being of the same ‘blood’. Members might have made an agreement to start a joint family under very diverse circumstances, perhaps including: accepting into the home displaced persons who had fled from violence in their previous place of residence (1945: 9), a ‘sworn brotherhood’ (1945: 9), a ‘sworn sisterhood’ (1945: 27), adoption, re-marriage, the return of a woman to the parental home, matrifocal marriage, an agreement between two poor families (1945: 22), and so forth. Filipović mentions an ethnographic report of a joint family amongst the Kuče tribe, Montenegro, which consisted of two ‘sworn sisters’ who were of different confession (an Orthodox and a Catholic Christian) and tombelije: persons who were born as women but swore to never get married and who occassionally compellingly performed masculinity in the areas of contemporary Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, and Croatia (see Šarčević, 2004; Vince-Pallua, 2014). Since they labored together, followed marital customs related to dowry, and very rarely separated from one another, Filipović describes their community of labour and material interest as a ‘particularly interesting’ but legitimate example of a non-kin based joint family (1945: 27, see also Dučić, [1931] 1998).

This diversity of everyday practice, recorded in local ethnographies of the Balkans, was in sharp contrast with legal regulations. The 1844 Law prescribed that only ‘blood’ relatives and ‘sworn brothers’ could start a joint family. Thus,

over the course of the hundred years of its implementation, the Civic Law has, from its side, affected the people and people’s understandings of zadruga by preventing the creation and legalization of non-kinship zadruga and by giving them reason to expand and to generalize, in certain areas, the ‘sworn-brotherhood’ type of zadruga …(Filipović, 1945: 20)

Filipović’s intervention presents a case of what Strathern calls ‘anthropology abroad’ – it demonstrates that there is a fine logic and sensible reasoning behind an institution which was often perceived as the manifestation of a ‘lower civilization’ (Rakitsch, 1914).⁷ Understood as a ‘cultural other’ contrasted with the urban nuclear family, a joint family was often taken to be a sign of backwardness of people who live in the Balkans and of their impeded modernization (Rakitsch, 1914). By demonstrating that joint families were founded upon clear economic principles of shared subsistence, Filipović finds economic rationality in a practice which seems backward from modernist vantage points.

Furthermore, he offers an explicit cultural critique of rigid modernist legal definitions of a family, by contrasting them with folk forms of knowledge and practice. Since the Civic Law from 1844 was still in force in Serbia in 1945 when Filipović published his study, he used ethnographic data to criticize ‘the adaptation of people’s understandings and institutions to legal regulations’ which had occurred over the past hundred years. Filipović also suggests that, written under the strong influence of Western European legislature (‘mostly a translation of the Austrian General Civic Law from 1811’), this Law was ‘completely foreign to the people’s spirit and people’s legal notions’ (1945: 9). Since the Law failed to understand the principles of local, non-modernist categories of family life and subsistence, it needed to be altered:

Since we live in a time when history is being made, it is much needed and would be very useful to ratify a single law regarding zadruga for the whole state, that is, for all its parts where a zadruga remains, whose regulations would follow the spirit of the people’s understandings, and which would also take into account the contemporary needs and aims of social and economic development … such a law would help to implement social and economic reforms without turbulence, and in line with our people’s institutions and understandings. (1945: 61)

Filipović (1945: 7) started the research for his book in 1922 and published it in 1945, the year when the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia was formed.⁸ Presumably, in the last quote he suggested that the Yugoslav state (rather than Serbia, where the 1844 Civic Law was in force) should ratify a single law ‘for all its parts where a zadruga remains’ (Filipović, 1945: 61). This call was unsuccessful, since the Yugoslav state authorities legally framed the zadruga on several occasions as a community of labor, rather than as a family type (Begenišić, 1998). What is important for my discussion is that Filipović engaged in anthropology as a form of cultural critique: he used ‘portraits of other [villagers’] cultural patterns to reflect self-critically on our own [urban modernist] ways’ (Marcus and Fischer, 1999: 1), disrupting common sense in the process and trying to make political and legal elites in the country and abroad re-examine their taken-for-granted assumptions about what a family is, or what it could be.

‘Auto-anthropology’: finding difference in that which seems to be the same, and vice versa

Anthropologists may place themselves in the position of auto-anthropologists, if they write for an audience in the Balkans, with the aim of finding something strange and counter-intuitive in the known and the familiar. One example is Valtazar Bogišić’s discussion of inokoština, written and published some 60 years before Filipović’s. Bogišić (1884) focuses on family types which he named the urban nuclear family (varoška porodica), rural nuclear family (inokoština), and rural joint family (zadruga).⁹ He argues that the urban nuclear family was ‘similar in its main characteristics to families in all European cities’ (Bogišić, 1884: 16) and was, therefore, dominantly understood as an urban, modern, and European type of a family. On the other hand, the zadruga was largely perceived as rural, traditional, and South Slavic. Since the third type, a rural nuclear family, ‘has the same external appearance as the urban nuclear family’ (1884: 21), many members of the local elites in the Balkans assumed they were roughly equivalent and legally regulated them in the same manner (1884: 26–29). For instance, Vuk Karadžić¹⁰ described the rural nuclear family as an ‘antithesis’ of the rural joint family (Bogišić, 1884: 20). However, Bogišić suggests this was a ‘true mistake’ (1884: 45).

Bogišić demonstrates that ‘wherever we find zadruga, we can also find inokoština as its correlative’ (1884: 13–14). Through looking into the everyday language and property rights¹¹ asserted and used in the villages, he concludes that the ‘principles of the social and of the collectivity have the same character’ both in rural joint families and rural nuclear families (1884: 51). Focusing on ‘nature, the principle’ (1884: 42) of social relationships in village families, Bogišić argues that the rural joint family and rural nuclear family present two different points in the cyclical development of the same rural family type – that is to say, one is not an antithesis of the other. The number of people in a rural family was shaped by many different factors, including wars, poverty, the division of property, the child mortality rate for births outside of hospitals, the number of deaths and marriages, individual longevity, infertility, and so forth:

As a result of these constant fluctuations, nothing is as common an occurrence as coming to find out about a family transformation from a joint family to one of rural nuclear status, and vice versa, switching from the rural nuclear to the joint family status … (Bogišić, 1884: 42)

In other words, the number of people in a joint family could drop to those of a rural nuclear family (parents and their children). And vice versa – a rural nuclear family was easily transformed into a joint family when children got married, or when non-kin were accepted as members of the household. The quality of social relations in the joint family and the rural nuclear family is the same in Bogišić’s view, which is why they present two points in a cycle of the same family type. Bogišić writes that it is ‘not rational’ to assume that the changes which are ‘related only to the number of people, [can] modify the nature, the principle of the village families’ (1884: 42). Although rural and urban nuclear families may have the same external appearance, they are drastically different: ‘In our opinion, it is illogical to a priori deduce the sameness of a principle from a similarity in external form’ (Bogišić, 1884: 13).

Furthermore, Bogišić juxtaposes his analysis not just to the legislators’, but also briefly to the peasants’ understandings of the zadruga. Namely, the peasants saw rural nuclear families and rural joint families as antithetical in terms of their labour capacity: ‘like everywhere else, the words inokoština and inokosna kuća are used [by peasants in Bosnia and Herzegovina] as an antithesis to the words zadruga and zadružna kuća’ (1884: 47). Peasants used the term zadružna kuća to refer to a family with a sufficient number of workers, while they referred to a family with a few workers (or no workers at all) as an inokosna kuća (1884: 44–46). Bogišić, however, suggests that the zadružna kuća and inokosna kuća refer to cyclical phases of the same family type, rather than one being the antithesis of the other in terms of labour capacities (as many peasants understood this difference, according to Bogišić), or in terms of family types (as the legislators and local elites understood this difference).

In Strathern’s (1987a) terminology, Bogišić was doing auto-anthropology. By focusing on ‘character’, ‘nature’, and ‘principles’ of family forms, he argued that what appeared to be different was actually the same (rural nuclear family and rural joint family), while what looked the same was actually different (the rural nuclear and urban nuclear family). In demonstrating that social relationships in rural nuclear families and rural joint families were similar (and also different from the ‘principles’ underlying urban nuclear families), Bogišić found something counter-intuitive and unusual in the known and familiar. He positioned himself ‘as a professional within that culture over all’ and illustrated ‘the way culture contrives’ (Strathern, 1987a: 28). Importantly, the analysis he offers relies on ‘the conceptual resources of that society as the foundations of description’ (Strathern, 1987a: 29). In other words, his work relies on conceptual terms which members of rural and urban families themselves used to understand the world around them – in particular regarding the notion of appearances (‘the similarity of the external form’) and rules (‘character’, ‘nature’, and ‘principle’). Bogišić’s insight (that the rural nuclear family presents a point in the cyclical development of a joint family) was directed ‘inwards’, since it displaced the accounts of both the peasants and the legislators who saw them as different on the basis of appearances, or labor capacities. ‘The self (individually or collectively)’ was supposed to benefit ‘from its knowledge’ (Strathern, 1987a: 29).

Epistemological eclecticism

Bogišić and Filipović learned across differences in divergent ways: their analyses of family types went in different directions. Filipović found a difference between modernist legal conceptions of what makes a family (shared ‘blood’ and residence) and folk conceptions of joint families (shared labor, material and emotional needs). He claimed this difference was oppressive towards the people who practiced zadruga and their worldviews. Filipović’s insight did not offer an alternative account to the interpretations used by people who lived in joint families; instead, he used already existing folk interpretations of joint families to criticize the authority of social scientific and legal discourses. What legal and social science scholars saw as the basis of joint families contrasted with everyday notions of the zadruga. Bogišić, on the other hand, found a difference in what appeared to be the same to many people in the Balkans and abroad – the rural nuclear family and the urban nuclear family – and he argued that this perceived similarity was a mistake. He offered an explanation of the zadruga which displaced the existing understandings of this institution among the people who practiced it, as well as among the local political and intellectual elite. That two ‘local’ scholars analyzed the same ‘local’ institution using divergent strategies of anthropology abroad and anthropology at home is an illustration of epistemological eclecticism. Who exactly constituted the ‘Self’ and who the ‘Other’ for these two anthropologists from the Balkans is open for a discussion.

Epistemological eclecticism, or the ability to ethnographically learn across difference by relying on approaches of both anthropology abroad and anthropology at home, also means that anthropologists from the Balkans sometimes have attempted to combine and reverse their epistemological strategies. The case in point for combining epistemological strategies is Bogišić who, in the last pages of his book, articulated a strong criticism of the existing legislature on zadruga from the standpoint of anthropology abroad. Bogišić writes that the relevant legislature on zadruga ‘was codified several times, its different parts were reworked, changed, and even crippled, so that they fit at any cost the moulds which were prepared in advance, according to the borrowed patterns’ (Bogišić, 1884: 52). Here, one and the same scholar uses different epistemological strategies in the same book – auto-anthropology to analyze family relationships in everyday life; anthropology abroad to criticize the legal definitions of the family relationships.

The reversal of epistemological strategies may take place, in my view, when the intended audience is also ‘local’, that is, located in the Balkans. Anthropological epistemological strategies are shaped by socio-cultural similarities and differences between the studied people, the anthropologists, and their readers. However, not all audiences perceive similarities and differences in the same way. It matters whether an ethnographic account is written primarily for an English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon audience, whose modernity is not questioned, or if it is written primarily for an audience in the Balkans, who have particular ideas and experiences of their own and others’ modernity. When reversing epistemological strategies, new knowledge and criticism may be directed to the ‘local’ readership in the Balkans and their particular worldviews, rather than to modernist beliefs and practices of a global anthropological community.

Reversal is also an appropriate way to describe the work of some contemporary anthropologists in the Balkans. Approaches taken include choosing to look at the differences between socialist and post-socialist practices, where it is often unclear which practices might be considered ‘theirs’ or ‘more local’, and which ones would be viewed as ‘ours’, or ‘more modern’, and in what way. Or they may decide to critically approach economic experimenting which has taken place in their countries, by looking at how new (‘neoliberal’) forms of economic organization and governance get translated into existing forms of sociality and relatedness, directing their criticism both towards ‘more local’ and ‘more global’ actors, and so forth. This shifting status of ‘us’ and ‘them’ – and related problems regarding who perceives what as a similarity or a difference – has implications for thinking about the production of anthropological knowledge more broadly.

Who is Self and who is Other?

The status of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ for the anthropologists from the Balkans has been open for a discussion both in terms of nationhood and in terms of modernity. First, in terms of nationhood, Bogišić and Filipović wrote about a region where borders and statehood kept shifting, while the joint family was not practiced in a single country, a single nation, or a single ethnic group. The contours of the national ‘Self’ which was supposed to benefit from the auto-anthropological knowledge was not determined in a straightforward manner. The full title of Bogišić’s work is ‘Inokoština in a rural family among Serbs and Croats’, which indicates that this study focuses on at least two ethno-national groups – Serbs and Croats. Bogišić also writes that ‘with this, we do not imply that the zadruga exists only among these two nations (narodi), or, better described, in this nation with two names’ (1884: 14). Later on, he refers to the joint family as indicative of a ‘South-Slavic family’ (1884: 58). Whatever Bogišić’s personal views on ethno-national issues may have been (and they were likely in favour of building a ‘South Slav nation’), these comments clearly voice an ambiguity over precisely who practiced the zadruga, in ethno-national terms. Did Serbs and Croats who practiced the zadruga present one or two nations?¹² How does this discussion relate to the practice of inokoština and zadruga among other ‘South Slavic’ ethno-national groups (such as Bosniaks¹³, Bulgarians, Slovenians, Macedonians, Montenegrins …)?¹⁴ The issue of which national ‘Self’ was supposed to benefit from an ethnographic analysis of inokoština and zadruga is further complicated by the fact that different legislature was applied to different areas where the zadruga and inokoština were practiced, and that this legislature changed several times.¹⁵ The diversity of legal regulations of zadruga in different areas demonstrates that attempts to state clearly which (national) ‘Self’ was supposed to benefit from the ethnographic knowledge offered in Inokoština were likely to fail.

Second, the status of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ has been open for a discussion in the Balkans in terms of modernity as well. As Ahmetašević’s quote from the beginning of the article indicates, various people living in the Balkans see it as a place where boundaries – between concepts or between countries – are not really firm, because they have been woven and un-woven multiple times. In the hegemonic discourse, the Balkans is neither uniformly ‘modern’ nor ‘non-modern’, but somehow both at the same time, continually undergoing a process of modernization (Fleming, 2000; Green, 2005; Helms, 2008; Njaradi, 2012; Todorova, 2009). With respect to the former Yugoslav countries, the historical background to this hegemonic Balkanist discourse consisted of numerous struggles over how polities should be organized. Taking place since the 19th century, these struggles included those within and against the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, projects of nation- and state-building in creating a ‘South Slav’ country or a smaller nationally defined state by one of the ethnic groups within, efforts to build royal polities such as kingdoms, state and self-managed forms of socialism, violent national disambiguation in the 1990s, and so forth. The historical successions of such very different ideas regarding political and economic organization were hegemonically interpreted as repeated, failed attempts to ‘reach’ modernity – rather than as, for instance, political experiments in tune with their times, from which it might be possible to learn something of relevance for other parts of the world and politics on a more general level.

Shortly, the uncertain status of the ‘modern’ and the ‘non-modern’ as organizational categories in the Balkans is most likely the result of competing projects of modernization that took place in the region throughout the 19th and the 20th century. Alternative frameworks of modernity were tried out and developed – most notably those of communist and socialist modernities (Collier, 2011; Gaonkar, 2001). The assumptions and categories of these alternative modernities cannot be directly translated onto the assumptions and categories of Western European modernity; there are many similarities, but there are also important differences.

The result of uncertainties concerning the status of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ is that, in anthropological writings on the Balkans, the ‘modern’ and the ‘Other’ most often function as elements within entangled threads, rather than as epistemological devices. In other words, a large number of anthropological discussions has not drawn conclusions by approaching the local ontologies, practices, and relationships in the Balkans as the Other in relation to the modern ones. Instead, they have looked at how difference, modernity, and Otherness were claimed and negotiated by various actors caught within particular entangled knots of relationships (see, for instance, Erdei, 2012; Naumović, 2013; Petrović, 2014; Simić, 2014).

Definitional and ethnographic approaches to difference

Uncertainties of modernity in the Balkans can illustrate a discrepancy between definitional and ethnographic approaches to difference. Arguably, no place is quite modern or quite non-modern (Latour, 1993). Yet, this distinction is not unreal – whether or not anthropologists aim to show that it does not quite hold, or seek to learn from it, the modern/non-modern distinction has a performative effect: it describes ‘a set of processes that produce ontological effects, that is, that work to bring into being certain kinds of realities or … that lead to certain kinds of socially binding consequences’ (Butler, 2010: 147). Recurring attempts to ‘develop’, ‘modernize’, and ‘Europeanize’ countries in the Balkans present some of these ontological effects and the socially binding consequences of this distinction (Bilić, 2016; Coles, 2002; Jansen, 2015). Such attempts to ‘modernize’ the Balkans were explained through several kinds of differences – temporal, spatial, and minor ones.

First, the Balkans appeared to be temporally (rather than ‘racially’ or ‘culturally’) different from the West, repeatedly trying to ‘catch up’ with it (Blagojević, 2009). Multiple projects which sought to introduce a Western kind of modernity and articulate alternative socialist forms of modernity created various situations which were marked by a struggle over modernity. Hegemonically understood through the prism of ‘lagging behind’ the West, this struggle is particularly visible in the wars (literal and cultural) fought in the former Yugoslav countries over one of the key institutions of modernity – the nation-state (Bugarel, 2004; Duijzings, 2003; Ron, 2000; Sorabji, 1995).

Second, the Balkans appeared to provide a spatial boundary between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’, becoming an ambiguous zone which was the bearer of both ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ characteristics (Todorova, 2009). In various journalist reports, travelogues, and literary accounts, the Balkans is dominantly represented as semi-developed, semi-modern, and inherently ambiguous: if orientalism is a discourse about imputed opposition, Balkanism is a discourse about imputed ambiguity (Todorova, 2009: 17). This hegemonic view has become internalized and today it shapes a great deal of self-understanding in former Yugoslav countries (Bakić-Hayden, 1995; Hodges, 2016; Jansen, 2001; Obad, 2014).

Third, the differences within this ‘ambiguous’ region appear to be minor. Freud’s notion of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ offered one way to interpret the wars in the former Yugoslavia, where presumably ‘the erosion and loss of distinctions and differences result in violence’ (Blok, 1998: 43). Building on Freud’s ([1917] 1997: 66; [1921] 1949: 55; [1930] 1962: 61) remarks, several social scientists have turned to this concept as a heuristic tool to explain violent ethno-national conflicts in different regions across the world (Ignatieff, 1998). Some have questioned its usefulness (Kolstø, 2007), while others have suggested that minor differences ‘form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility’ and their ‘counterpart – hierarchy and great differences – makes for relative stability and peace’ (Blok, 1998: 33).

In this article, I will not further discuss the problematic implications of the suggestion that minor differences are related to a certain kind of group pathology (narcissism). Instead, I find this notion useful because it illustrates well a ‘definitional approach toward concepts’ (Green, 2014: 2), which loses a focus on the political and social work that goes into making a ‘difference which makes a difference’.¹⁶ As a matter of fact, all three hegemonic assertions – that the Balkans is temporally different from the West, that it presents a spatial boundary between the East and the West, and that its parts are mutually different only in a minor manner – follow from this definitional approach.

Unlike a definitional approach, what I call here an ethnographic approach to differences requires looking at how specific forms of difference are socially produced and made relevant in a certain context. An ethnographic approach to difference requires taking a close look at which categories have been made important in a particular knot, and which entities have been made to relate, in what way, and with what (political) consequences, in the ‘starry night of reality’ (Reyna, 2017: 5). In other words, what constitutes a difference is not a given, but an outcome of ‘various forms of knotting’ (Green, 2014: 2) historically located entanglements of actors, practices, and their relationships which operate on various, unequally positioned scales. Difference needs to be performed, in the sense that it emerges as a result of particular social practices of categorization, and it also shapes social practices of categorization in return. Difference is produced through ‘encounters, crossings, and entanglements’ (Green, 2014: 7) of people, narratives, and practices, as well as through ‘structural effects’ and particular social institutions that ‘give relevance to difference’ (Eckert, 2016: 242). If plurality is one of the key aspects of the ‘human condition’ (Arendt, 1998), the way in which this plurality is ordered, managed, and governed produces particular forms of differentiation among people. Since difference is ‘being given significance by the unequal relations that we stand in towards each other’ (Eckert, 2016: 241), an ethnographic approach to differences does not assume what a difference is. Instead, it looks at:

the political implications of asserting that difference has one meaning rather than another … Difference does have meaning; it simply cannot be stated in advance what that meaning might be, or what are its implications. (Green, 2014: 2)

This would be the crux of an ethnographic approach to difference and the resulting epistemological eclecticism – making an effort to figure out the relevant differences and similarities between an anthropologist, her interlocutors, and her audiences (instead of assuming in advance what the relevant differences and similarities are) and then translating across differences and similarities by finding the awkward in the familiar, and the similar in the strange.

Is epistemological eclecticism specific to the Balkans?

Is epistemological eclecticism somehow specific to the position of Balkans ethnologies and anthropologies in the global production of anthropological knowledge? Should it be understood as a specific (subaltern) vantage point that differentiates Balkan anthropologies from those in the West? I contend epistemological eclecticism is not specific to the Balkans. I do not want to suggest that anthropology in the Balkans has its own specific epistemic standpoint, which would be based on some kind of a (pre- or post-modern) playing with identity based categories as one wishes. Or that epistemological eclecticism is the result of endlessly changing possibilities to connect and relate entities in many different ways in the Balkans. Indeed, understanding this region ‘as a multitude of proliferating fragments and continual changes in boundaries and names … is a key aspect of the currently hegemonic element in the concept of the Balkans’ (Green, 2005: 140).

While ‘hybrid characteristics … structure the position of a small European ethnology’ (Prica, 2001: 10), epistemological eclecticism is not, I contend, the result of ‘border thinking (or border epistemology) [which] emerged primarily from the people’s anti-imperial epistemic responses to the colonial difference’ (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 208). Mignolo and Tlotsanova’s (2006: 214) call to go beyond dominant epistemological geopolitics by thinking ‘from the borders themselves’ does not translate easily into southeastern Europe. This is partly because different historical trajectories create what could be described as an ‘awkward relationship’ between the ‘East’ and the ‘Global South’. Shifting borders and multiple, repeated experiments with statehood throughout the 19th and the 20th century in the Balkan areas where the zadruga existed were not direct counterparts to colonialism.

In the Balkans, there was no single, stable ‘hegemonic discourse endowed to “other” people, classifying them as inferior and at the same time asserting its geohistorical and body-social configurations as superior and the models to be followed’ (Mignolo and Tlotsanova, 2006: 208). The same groups occupied divergent positions. As Baskar suggests, in his discussion of the national movement in Croatia during the Habsburg empire, ‘Ethnicities within empires may be potential nations aspiring after their own states, but they may also be potential colonialists (or “imperialists”) acting within empires on their own behalf’ (2008: 70). As a matter of fact, a particular ‘hierarchy of national cultures’ shaped ethnographic engagements in this context in a nested way:

the ‘top down’ choice of fieldwork location was the rule: the German speaking Austrians studied, to some extent, all national groups; the Italians were somewhat interested in the Slovenians and Croatians; the Croatians and the Serbs (later joined by the Slovenians) showed interest in the Muslims of Bosnia. (Baskar, 2008: 73)

Furthermore, struggles for national autonomy and claims to native knowledge in the Balkans were directly related to territorial parochialisms, exclusivity, and violence directed towards people proclaimed to be non-nationals, in various moments since the 19th century until today. With respect to the more recent times, violent conflicts in post-socialist Eastern Europe can be contrasted to the local struggles of working-class communities or native groups fighting for their place against multinational corporations (Massey, 2008). In this case, ‘Horror at local exclusivities sits uneasily against support for the vulnerable struggling to defend their patch’ (Massey, 2008: 6). Instead of suggesting that anthropology in the Balkans should be recognized as a specific (subaltern) vantage point, I aimed to show how ethnographies of zadruga may be useful for thinking about production of anthropological knowledge more broadly. Epistemological eclecticism does not result from the Balkans’ specificity, but is an outcome of approaching differences ethnographically.

Balkan literature on zadruga provides a unique angle for thinking about whether anthropology is primarily a study of the (Western) Other, or a study of human differences in all their richness and versatility. The position of the Balkans and its anthropologies as neither (Western) nor (Other) illuminates multiple avenues for acquiring anthropological knowledge. Put together, these different avenues demonstrate how anthropologists could be epistemologically eclectic in their work. In this way, Balkan ethnographies of zadruga shed light on a powerful epistemological tool for studying difference – epistemological eclecticism – in all (Other) places and times.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Andrew Hodges, Stef Jansen, Ines Prica, and the New College Europe Institute for Advanced Study (NEC IAS) seminar for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers and the Anthropological Theory editor, Stephen Reyna, for their constructive and critical comments. This work was made possible thanks to the generous support of the NEC IAS, Wenner Gren Foundation’s Conference Grant, and the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Čarna Brković is postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg. She is the author of Managing Ambiguity. How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2017) and co-editor of Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entanglements (2016).

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