Kinship and Ethnicity in the Balkans: Social Realities, Concepts of Belonging and National Ideologies

With regard to the societies of the Balkans, kinship and ethnicity are two outstanding and closely intertwined phenomena. From a historical perspective the Balkan is considered a region of weak institutional penetration. The Church, the state and the manorial system did not profoundly intervene into the social affairs of many people. Correspondingly, familial social forms such as joint family households and kinship groups were widespread and have shaped social life in a sustained manner. Ethnicity, on the other hand, refers to a concept of relationship between groups which consider themselves, and are regarded by others, as being culturally distinctive. The politicization of cultural difference (ethnopolitics) for the sake of altering or reinforcing inequality between ethnic communities has become a defining feature of ethno-national politics ever since the decline of Ottoman rule. On the one hand, the lecture deals with the relationship between kinship and social organization in different socio-economic and  

ecological milieus of the Balkans. The second focus is on the processes of political reorganization of the Balkans in the wake of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Inspired by the French Revolution and the Enlightenment particularly concepts of national romanticism disseminated in the Balkans in which the state derives its political legitimacy as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs. The lecture deals with intersections, connections and analogies between concepts of kinship, ethnicity and ethnonational belonging, and illustrates the concomitant difficulty of creating a trans-ethnic understanding of citizenship.

Robert Pichler is a senior researcher at the Department for Balkan Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a lecturer at the Universities of Vienna and Graz. He is co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Contemporary Southeastern Europe and head of the Center for Balkan Societies and Cultures (CSBSC). He published widely on family and kinship, migration and transnationalism, historiography and history teaching in Macedonia, upland communities in the Balkans and social and political history in Kosovo and Macedonia. 2004 he received together with Wolfgang Petritsch the Bruno Kreisky Award for Kosovo-Kosova. Der lange Weg zum Krieg (Kosovo-Kosova. The Long Road to War, Wieser Publishing House, 2004). As photographer he works at the interface of documentary and art photography. 2011 he received the Holding Graz Photo Award for the series Nightmares and Nightingales.