A thesis on the emancipation of Albanian women

Recently, a doctoral thesis was defended in Paris on the emancipation of Albanian women in Kosovo by means of a so-called burrnesh (woman-man) status. Personally, I have not worked specifically on "sworn virgins" or "customary law" (known as kanun), but on other topics of social morphology and anthropology of Albanians, in particular on critical approaches to the production of anthropological knowledge about Albanians by themselves and by others, as well as more recently on critical approaches to the production of feminist knowledge about gender relations.

The merits of this thesis must be acknowledged for its broad vision of the subject, far from obsessions with sexuality and gender fantasies, centered on the emancipatory side or a gender (in the sense of "type") of emancipation. This is an invitation to a double reading: on the one hand the ethnographic description, on the other hand the desire to express an anthropological approach to the phenomenon known as the "sworn virgin" (burrnesh) and to contribute to the analysis of the feminist movement for the emancipation of women in Kosovo. The term " burrnesh » is central to this reading, since it allows us to comparatively consider a wide range of social categories (sworn virgins, widowed women, women artists, women activists, emancipated women).

The term burrnesh : meaning, translations and controversies

However, unless quickly mentioned that it is derived from the masculine man "man", it is surprising that a thesis defended within a doctoral school of languages ​​did not dwell sufficiently on a linguistic, lexical and semantic analysis of this term and its implications on social institutions. It is in fact a polysemic term in Albanian, designating both a "man" and a "husband", but also a strong, courageous person, comparable to a "hero" (as in the national anthem), whose lexical field includes not only burrnesh in the feminine but also the verb burrno and the adjective burnt.

The translation of the term into French as "femme-homme" is not very happy, not to say frankly unfortunate, and this point was noted in one of the reports. It can be translated into German (Mannfrau) and in English (manly woman, better than writing wo/man proposed by a traveler, Antonia Young). In French, we could use “femme virile” which would be the exact translation in French (from Lat. virile, vir "man"), to describe a strong and courageous woman, otherwise it would be better to resort to periphrasis, such as "women who socially become men", or even "women who claim the cultural and symbolic resources normally attributed or claimed by men".

In any case, this is an ambiguous position with regard to this term, which is both emancipatory and conservative, since some feminist activists who fight for women's rights reject the term. burrneshThey claim that it is a compliment that would be derived from a social status accepted and recognized by patriarchal society, and that therefore would refer to a negative sexist qualification. It is not quite an insult, but as feminist activists, they are against it because this term would show that society values ​​masculine attributes. "Often we hear that, to designate a strong woman, we use the word burrnesh, a word that should not necessarily be taken as a compliment and which comes from the time of Kanun by Lekë Dukagjin” (p. 329).

Some then propose the term grueresh derived from the generic term for "woman" in Albanian. This term would designate "a woman more than a woman, a 'superwoman', because she demands to be equal to a man without having to change her gender socially" (p. 299). This is all well and good, but at least from the point of view of linguistic awareness in Albanian, it does not exist and does not make sense, but must be taken in the context of the interview from which the term is taken as a simple play on words in the first degree.

On the other hand, in another feminist text, entitled Modern-day Burrnesh, the term has been reused to denounce violence against women. The idea is that the time has come for Albanian women to be fighters, more precisely "today we will become the burrnesh who will bring down the patriarchal system that is suffocating us" (p. 329-330). In this context, the term burrnesh becomes synonymous with "strong woman", "courageous woman", to designate women who have the courage to denounce and fight for their rights and against the inequalities they encounter. Sometimes, if not often, calling oneself a burrnesh ( trimnesh) effectively expresses a form of silent and creative resistance to the social and cultural pressures that weigh on women (p. 443).

Personally, I consider this term burrnesh should be part of the global heritage of feminism, as a legacy of the Albanian cultural tradition of women's emancipation, just like the English term women empowerment and like another Albanian term (zotero) which is used in the same sense in information science terminology.

Each of these terms comes from an obvious conservative root and may seem ambiguous, but in both cases the conservative side of the power of domination (Ang. women empowerment, as well as Alb. zotero) or claiming masculine attributes (burrnesh) is totally sublimated by the emancipatory side. Despite its origin and even if some feminists oppose both terms, the available data show that the term burrnesh is used in all cases in an emancipatory sense, never conservative. So why this feminist state of mind regarding the term burrnesh Is this simply a confusion between the use of the term and the supposed reality of a status? a reification and essentialization of folk traditions or a feminist ideological bias, or all of these at once?

Social strategies and female figures

Let us start at the beginning, namely the so-called "customary law" and the so-called "sworn virgins", in order to better understand the role of the categories of widowed women, women artists, women activists and finally the feminist movement.

We can first note an excessive reliance on "customary law" (Kanun), which is considered the original source from which things are supposed to appear in reality. However, these are primarily conventional practices that are not codified, but are governed by orality. It is surprising to note that a thesis prepared in a research center on orality does not analyze, or at least does not discuss, "customary law" in terms of orality and the social implications of its transition to writing.

Conventional practices are recorded in writing in the accounts of travelers, missionaries, or ethnographers. They were codified late in life to serve as a basis for establishing rules stipulating how things should be, not how they actually are. This does not mean that ordinary people are imprisoned in this customary straitjacket and that they necessarily act as prescribed by the Kanun. On the contrary, depending on social situations, any available cultural and symbolic resource is used in social behavior to implement a strategy to circumvent customary prescriptions.

Indeed, after the codification of conventional practices with the publication of the Kanun by the Franciscans in 1933 and again by the communists in 1989 in the service of their respective ideologies, the Kanun prescribed as a bedside book for most families, and this or that prescription was subsequently used to justify this or that social behavior. In this regard, the communist recodification did not last long after the fall of communism, which gave more normative vigor to the old codification, while the proliferation of new codifications of the same prescriptions in even more elaborate fixed expressions testifies once again to the instrumental character of "customary rights". In other words, customary law, like any normative device, does not reflect reality but poses as an ideological support to control social behavior and justify or circumvent social reality.

In this sense, any description of the situation of women in society or in the family according to customary law would lead to the exoticism of the Kanun and the patriarchal submission of women, which is not only wrong, but also dishonest, not only on the part of a researcher, traveler or missionary, but also on the part of a local researcher and even more so a feminist activist who internalizes this type of exoticism or submission. There is already a lot of work on this subject that was not consulted for the preparation of this thesis, whose exoticism or shortcomings were also identified and mentioned in the thesis reports.

As for "sworn virgins," refusals of arranged marriages and premarital or extramarital sexual relations are commonplace at all times and in all places and have always and everywhere posed problems for the family and for society. To overcome these problems, societies have devised original solutions that are often justified by normative devices, and mystified by religious ideologies, Christian or Islamic, to justify and encourage chastity. In France, convents were invented to lock up sinful women, just as in Poland or Ireland, real prisons were established to imprison young unmarried pregnant women.

The difference is that nowhere is there any mention of "sworn virginity." In a patrilineal society, sworn virgins are just another cultural solution, nothing more, nothing less. While extramarital sexual relations have always posed a problem for the Church and society, the notion of virginity is recent, and we know that it was the Church that sponsored and sanctioned this solution, introduced by the Franciscans who drafted and published the code in 1933 (kanun) of customary law based on the ethnographic notes of one of their own. The fact that the phenomenon is found among both Christians and Muslims proves rather that it does not contradict its religious character, since these are religious and ethnic communities that share the same patrilineal structures of social morphology.

In this sense, resorting to sworn virginity would not necessarily mean that it is a particular masculinity, that a woman changes gender to become a man socially, or that she maintains her chastity, despite isolated cases that travelers and ethnographers have raved about, but which have never been anything more than folkloric and exotic curiosities. In all cases, it has been a circumvention strategy dictated by the circumstances of the social situation, justified by religious ideology and normalized by the codification of "customary law." It is surprising to note that in a thesis that would claim to be anthropological, this phenomenon is not analyzed, or at least not discussed, in these terms.

Still on the subject of "sworn virgins," at any time and in any place where social morphology is characterized by a patrilineal structure, the absence of a male heir poses a problem for the family and for society. However, despite the rather folkloric and exotic appearances, it is in no way a question of the disguise of a particular virginity into a particular masculinity. It is unfortunately quite serious to note that the objective facts are sometimes twisted to correspond to the status of "sworn virgin." In one case reported on p. 308, for example, a woman postponed her marriage to exercise the role of "social man" while her family was in a vendetta, but once the vendetta was over, she married and had children. This would thus be a case of "temporary" sworn virginity.

In an excellent article, which is mentioned in the bibliography but is rather misunderstood (p. 91), it is shown that in Albanian patrilineal society there are two different solutions to this problem: in the North the "sworn virgin" and in the South the "son-in-law at home". To these two cultural solutions, I could also add an extreme case of recourse to a kind of polygamy which is, however, completely foreign to Albanian tradition.

As Edmund Leach would say, cultural solutions and symbolic resources to achieve this (in this case the "sworn virgin"), "culture is only the clothing of the social situation." This proves that in all cases these are not transhistorical phenomena or essential to Albanian culture but rather specific strategies to circumvent the ideological prescriptions dictated by particular situations in a context of patrilineal social morphology.

Once it is accepted that in all cases the notion of the sworn virgin is only a symbolic cultural resource used wisely in social circumvention strategies, it would become possible to approach the rest of the thesis differently and to examine similarly widowed women, women artists, women activists, or even the feminist movement in Kosovo, as using the cultural and symbolic resources available in specific strategies according to social situations.

It can be recalled that, at all times and in all places, widowed women or single mothers are courageous women, who face the hazards of life alone without being able to share the burden with a partner. Widowed women do not necessarily take on the role of a man or a father, nor do they transgress the boundary or hierarchy of genders. They are even less akin to a so-called status of "sworn virgin." They simply assume a role that is normally shared by two and it is precisely in this sense that they are also considered more emancipated women than others, even if they are not called burrnesh nowhere else. If they are called that in the Albanian tradition, it does not mean that they become men socially.

To survive in a society that, after the war, was supposed to "re-traditionalize" and "re-patriarchalize," it is wrong to consider that these women had no other choice than to call themselves burrnesh which would be the only way to define oneself as a woman head of the family providing for the needs of her children (p. 399). It would indeed be serious to twist the facts, as in the case reported in this thesis of a woman who would have "experienced the status of widowed woman which is similar to that of the sworn virgin", because she became a widow with four children (p. 308). It is rather the opposite! By assuming the role of head of the family who provides for the needs of their children, these women resort to a strategy of circumventing their situation which allows them to carry out a strategic emancipation which could not be better expressed symbolically than by the term burrnesh, which in Albanian is a term derived from a polysemous word that means both "man" and "strong and courageous person."

In this sense, it would be wrong to resort to folkloric and exotic conceptions to link widowed women, burrnesh, in the sense of "emancipated", to a status of "sworn virgins" which would be prescribed by "customary law". These women renegotiate their place in society, in order to reinterpret their status as widowed women. They do not appropriate a status but one quality de burrnesh. This does not mean that they turn to a customary law or a legal status that actually exists (p. 398). It is the opposite! It is because they have negotiated their place in society that they can use a symbolic resource that could not be better expressed than by a term that refers to a role or a gender (in the sense of "type") emancipatory expressed by the term burrnesh, which has nothing to do with a gendered genre.

This invites us to consider the notions of masculine and feminine differently. These are not "objective" facts or characteristics of men and women. They are symbolic operators, which show that there is no rigid division, nor Manichean hierarchy. Every social behavior is simultaneously masculine and feminine, or rather every social strategy could be explored in its masculine and feminine aspects. This is what Françoise Héritier established as the "differential valence of gender" and this is what could allow us to analyze more fruitfully the situation of women artists and activists, as well as the feminist movement in Kosovo, by means of the notions of masculine and feminine as symbolic operators and not as objective characteristics of men and women.

Without going into the examination of the artistic works presented, we can consider as valid their subversive and emancipatory character as presented in the thesis. In the context of women artists, the term burrnesh refers to a pioneer in a man's world, but also to a woman who fought to have a place in the field of artistic creation and to be recognized at her true value as a woman artist. We find the notion of a strong and courageous woman, a woman who must fight harder to achieve her goals because she is constantly limited, since women's art always seems to be considered different and in any case inferior to men's art.

Again, despite appearances, the recognition of women artists in the artistic space does not erase differences in sexual identity, much less bring them closer to the sexuality or other folkloric and exotic characteristics of "sworn virgins." If some women artists are described as burrnesh in Kosovo, this does not mean that they have acquired or claim a particular, masculinized status, which allows them legitimacy without calling into question tradition. Nor does it testify to a re-traditionalization of the ancient customs of Kosovo. It would be wrong and clumsy to consider that women artists and musicians of Kosovo reinforce any patriarchal mentality, which would even be preserved by their emancipatory imposture, because they have incorporated masculine norms or because they identify and are identified with the masculine through a supposed status of burrnesh.

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of observations in this thesis to consider that their emancipation is thus prevented and should perpetuate custom, without questioning tradition and reproducing patriarchal patterns (p. 441). Their status as burrnesh is constantly linked to the folkloric and exotic characteristics of "sworn virgins" and it is constantly presented as modified and reinterpreted to allow certain women to integrate traditionally very masculine domains without calling into question any custom of the tradition, such as for example to negotiate their place in the milieu of traditional music instrumentalists by adopting masculine behavior without calling into question the hierarchy of genders (p. 397).

On the other hand, these women do not act as "sworn virgins" and do not necessarily use a customary law status to legitimize their place in the traditional musical or artistic sphere. In all cases, it is on the contrary a desire, a quality or an additional value of emancipation and these women artists indeed consider themselves as free and emancipated women. For women artists, the denomination burrnesh does not mean that they do not correspond to the dominant model of femininity. Their commitment constitutes a founding act of feminine artistic work, whose mere presence is both subversive and emancipatory, even the bearer of an existential struggle. The representation of women's bodies thus becomes a political issue, often linked to a degree of violence expressed in its symbolic sense, the denomination of which burrnesh becomes subversive as a feminist combat weapon, to denounce a reality or express a difference, undeniably emancipatory (p. 400).

Through their actions, these women artists contribute to an active citizenship that challenges the status quo of institutions and places of male power. However, it would be wrong to consider that they are the only ones who can do this, against men and at the expense of men who would have no interest in questioning tradition and deep-rooted patriarchal ideology. The logical conclusion, both expressed and hidden in this thesis, would be that it is by creating their own empowerment, which is symbolically expressed by the term burrnesh, that these women emancipate themselves individually and collectively. Thus, women become key actors in their own emancipation, using their creativity, resilience and agency, they assert themselves and contribute to overturning established patriarchal norms (p. 442).

Just because women artists and musicians are no longer considered entirely women does not mean they can afford to travel freely, stay with men, and have an ambivalent appearance similar to the folkloric and exotic characteristics of "sworn virgins." It is the other way around! It is because they allow themselves to freely choose their figurative representations, their musical repertoire, or even the ambivalence of their own appearance, that they are no longer considered entirely traditional women but emancipated women, which could not be better expressed than by their qualification as burrnesh.

Artistic creative and interpretive choices are always strategic choices that are often expressed by going beyond the boundaries and symbolic operators of masculine and feminine. It is in this sense that some women artists and musicians in Kosovo choose their performances, their repertoires and even their own image by operating a symbolic strategy of masculinization. Similarly, in an excellent work mentioned in the bibliography (p. 273), the American ethnomusicologist Jane Sugarman, brilliantly shows how, among the Albanians of Macedonia, men choose their song repertoire in order to perform in the most feminized way possible. It is obviously not a question for these men of "becoming artistically women" but of showing appropriate artistic mastery and thus demonstrating, neither more nor less than, their virility. This proves once again that the notions of feminine and masculine as symbolic operators have no relation to the objective characteristics of men and women and even less to a re-traditionalization of old customary practices and mentalities.

The feminist movement in Kosovo and its limits

The final part of the thesis is a detailed description of the feminist movement in Kosovo, which is fairly standard but unrelated to all of the above. In the period of post-war reconstruction of society in the 1990s, the first challenge for women activists was the International Mission, where experts pushed them aside because they arrived with the idea that "this is an Islamic country" and that "everything would have to start from scratch" (p. 338). The international staff came "with prejudices that Kosovo was a traditional and patriarchal society where there were no capable and active women." The stereotypes were reinforced by their prejudices, referring to the Kanun, without taking into account the new legal framework (p. 384). The greatest obstacle has been the “perpetuation of the belief that women in Kosovo are not ‘culturally suited’ to become partners in public policies,” perpetuating the perception of women as victims and mere recipients of aid rather than active partners in the reconstruction process. Women’s lives have remained socially precarious, “holding them hostage to their families, traditions, the nation, and the state” (p. 374).

These prejudices have played a major role in reaffirming new divisions and exclusions, particularly by perpetuating traditional gender hierarchies. Gender is manipulated to ensure discipline and obedience, for the purposes of education and the development of democracy. The West is thus criticized for having installed symbolic and structural domination and for imposing a patriarchal model through the intertwined metanarratives of post-war international development and the aspirations of Kosovar Albanians to become a modern state (pp. 379-380).

In contrast, the defense of Albanian identity and nationalist discourse already suggested the emergence of a new political era for women, as well as a space for another form of cultural agency (p. 358). Most activists aimed to “show that women were not backward villagers locked in their homes by authoritarian men,” but that they were modern, active citizens deserving of rights (p. 370). Later, the feminist movement aimed to end the stereotypes in Yugoslav and international media propaganda that presented Albanian women as Muslim women, childbearing machines subservient to their families, and uneducated slaves. Its main goal was to show the world that Albanian women had agency, countering the negative stereotypes produced by the Yugoslav media (pp. 355–356).

Under these conditions, it is perfectly legitimate and even commendable that researchers can join to actively contribute to the feminist movement, but they should rather contribute through work that activists cannot do: historical, ethnographic, anthropological and sociological analyses to help and guide the feminist movement. Much work is available in this direction that has not been taken into account in this thesis and these gaps are regrettable.

If from the 1990s a nationalist discourse emerged which seems to "retraditionalize" society, particularly with regard to female and male roles, a contemporary reference to a tradition is never a simple resumption of old codes and we would rather have liked a true historicization of contemporary references to tradition. A historicized socio-political contextualization would have allowed a better understanding not only of the way in which women have taken up, reinvented and criticized the category of burrnesh, but above all the different paths of women's emancipation; what is presented in this thesis essentializes fixed things, giving an immutable vision of so-called customary law and tradition, thus preventing the development of perspectives on the idea of burrnesh as a strong, courageous and emancipated woman.

Far beyond an opposition between tradition and modernity or a confusion between nation and nationalism, the bias of this thesis, influenced by writings of travelers in search of exoticism, is to continue to consider that with the modernization of society the phenomenon of sworn virgins has not disappeared. While the phenomenon is strategically diverted and transformed according to specific social needs and situations, this thesis work persists in distinguishing and reifying two traditional aspects of burrnesh which overlap: a fixed status of sworn virgins or widows carrying out activities usually reserved for men and an emancipated status of women activists, artists and instrumentalists.

In any case, it would not be the emancipatory type of "gender" that counts, as a sort of instrument in a strategy of circumvention, but the emancipation of the sexualized gender passing to the feminine gender and associating it with the masculine gender. A status of "sworn virgin" is always found as the condition sine qua non to access rights that women are deprived of or to access traditionally male and closed environments. Thus, the fight of women for their rights and their prospects for emancipation is completely erased, ultimately proving useless, since everything would rest on the transhistorical and essential immutability of the so-called customary law and the so-called status of sworn virgin. In short, if the stated reason for this thesis is to report on the feminist movement in Kosovo, its basis is unjustifiable and irrelevant: much ado about nothing!