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“Modern” Masculinities: Ethnicity, Education, and Gender in Macedonia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Rozita Dimova
Rozita Dimova*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany. [email protected]
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Extract

In 2000, when conducting a household survey as part of my research on consumption and ethnicity in the small western Macedonian town of Kumanovo, I received explicit proof of how important education has become for ethnic Albanians. It was a Friday afternoon on a hot summer day. I was in my top-floor apartment, working with my research assistant, Adnan, a 28-year-old ethnic Albanian man who had been helping me for the past year. We had grown to be a well-synchronized team. It was his turn to dictate while I entered data from the survey into the computer. The questionnaire concerned interior decorations, but it began with several general questions about the ages, education, and number of family members. After we finished entering around thirty of the questionnaires completed in Albanian, Adnan suddenly stood up without a word. He went into the kitchen, and started drinking water from the first thing he saw, which was an empty olive jar drying on the dish rack. Then he came back, clearly upset. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the upper part of his hand, and exclaimed,

There is something not right here. I cannot believe that, in a family of eight, six members have college degrees and they all live together in one house. Bullshit! I would have known that family. I know most of the Albanians here and, trust me, this is not true. This is all exaggerations and lies.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , July 2006 , pp. 305 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. See James Arthur, ed., Citizenship and Higher Education: The Role of Universities in Communities and Society (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2005); Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988); Mike Cole, Marxism, Postmodernism and Education (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2005); David Coulby and Evie Zambeta, eds, Globalization and Nationalism in Education (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2005); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2002).Google Scholar

2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991).Google Scholar

3. Adem revealed that his youngest brother, who had remained with his elderly parents, died four years ago, and that the widowed daughter-in-law had continued to live in her husband's family with the children. Everyone (including Adem) contributed to living expenses for their widowed sister-in-law. After her husband died, she was offered two options. One was to remain with her husband's family, to become “one of them” and raise her children. The second option was to move out and remarry (she was only 31 when her husband died). Should she decide to move out, however, her children would have to remain with her husband's family and she would lose the right to visit them. Faced with this choice, the widowed daughter-in-law agreed to stay. According to Adem, she is now really part of the family, taking care of Adem's mother and father. He told me with a proud expression on his face, “I spend more money for the children of my deceased brother and his wife, than for my own wife and kids. That's how it is among Albanians: she agreed to make the sacrifice and we all have to show how much we appreciate that.” He went on to remark that, unlike Macedonians, Albanians care about family. Albanian family members know how to appreciate the sacrifice a widowed daughter-in-law makes for her children.Google Scholar

4. Sasho Lambevski, “Suck My Nation: Ethnicity, Masculinity and Politics of (Homo)Sex,” Sexualities, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1999, pp. 397–419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. See Clarissa De Waal, “From Laissez-Faire to Anarchy in Post-Communist Albania,” Cambridge Anthropology, Vol. 20, No. 3, 1998, pp. 21–44.Google Scholar

6. Educated, sophisticated, and articulate Albanian women, primarily from urban environments, became a powerful force for initiating social change among Albanians. They took the lead in convincing others of how important it was for women to obtain an education. When AWA was first founded, its members went from house to house in the towns and the villages where Albanians lived to promote the importance of education for women and to encourage parents—primarily fathers—to send their daughters to school. In addition to urging Albanian men to send their sisters and daughters to school, the founders of AWA sought the implementation of the literacy law that required that Macedonian citizens be literate. The members of AWA also wanted to increase the number of Albanian women participating in the paid workforce, to teach women about family planning and sexuality, and to encourage smaller families. The AWA activists claimed that the high number of children per household were symptomatic of the subordinated status of ethnic Albanians in general, and of Albanian women in particular.Google Scholar

7. The intertwined histories of Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia during the 1990s enabled Albanians in Macedonia to draw from a wider pool in recruiting activists and experts to lead their social movement. Tetovo University (Mala Recica), for example, was founded in 1994 by two ethnic Albanians, Fadil Sulejmani and Arben Xaferi, who moved to Macedonia from Kosovo in 1991. The newly founded university in Tetovo was the first institution that enabled Albanians in Macedonia to receive a higher education entirely in Albanian. Over only five years, the number of Albanians attending the university increased more than threefold. By 2001, 32% of the 2,480 students enrolled at the university were women, a dramatic increase from the 14% who enrolled in 1994 when the university opened.Google Scholar

8. Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1998, pp. 151–242.Google Scholar

9. See Thembisa Waetjen, “The Limits of Gender Rhetoric for Nationalism: A Case Study from Southern Africa,” Theory and Society, Vol. 30, 2001, pp. 121–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1994).Google Scholar

11. For more literature on different social tensions inscribed in women's bodies see Jane Fishburne Collier, From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in a Spanish Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Gail Kligman, Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation Postcolonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Julie Mertus, ed., The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

12. Peter Fitzpatrick, “We Know What It Is When You Do Not Ask Us: Nationalism as Racism,” in Peter Fitzpatrick, ed., Nationalism, Racism and the Rule of Law (Aldershot, England: Dartmouth, 1995).Google Scholar