Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Through an ethnographic analysis of public and “everyday” discourses in the Muslim-majority area of Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article shows how gender is frequently constitutive of orientalist and balkanist representations. Both orientalism and balkanism have recently undergone a shift, precisely in the ways in which they are gendered. Women have become more visible symbols of Balkan backwardness while orientalist depictions have moved from emphasizing erotic sexuality to a focus on heavily veiled and controlled women, symbolizing the political threat of the east/Islam. In examining the everyday workings of such discourses in a community straddling the imagined boundaries of east and west, Elissa Helms shows a range of competing (re) configurations of east/west and related dichotomies, which are reconfigured precisely through notions of gender. While some of these (re)articulations seem to challenge dominant orientalist and balkanist frameworks, Helms argues that they ultimately reproduce (gendered) notions of opposing east and west civilizations.
This paper has benefited from the feedback I received at different stages and from various audiences. I also received valuable comments from several readers, including Xavier Bougarel, Nicole Constable, Francisca de Haan, Rada Drezgic, Jessica Greenberg, Robert Hayden, Jasmina Husanovic, Stef Jansen, Abby Margolis, Paula Pickering, and Cornelia Sorabji, as well as Slavic Review's anonymous reviewers. I thank them all for their insights but absolve them of responsibility for the final product. The paper is based on research supported by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the Institute for the Study of World Politics, and summer grants from the Council for European Studies and the University of Pittsburgh Nationality Rooms.
1. Dani, 4January 1999: cover. The original song begins, “Budi se istok i zapad!” (East and west awake!) (This and all other translations are mine.)
2. I take the term pan-Islamist from Xavier Bougarel's description of this group's influence on what became the SDA. Xavier Bougarel, “From Young Muslims to Party of Democratic Action: The Emergence of a Pan-Islamist Trend in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ,” Islamic Studies 36, nos. 2 and 3 (1997): 533 Google Scholar.
3. The SDA was formed by pan-Islamists around the late Alija Izetbegović, but its base encompassed urban intellectuals, former Communist Party networks, and more secularperiod of the war up until the end of 2000, when pan-Islamists dominated the SDA leadership and conservative (religious) articulations of Bosniac identity. Since that time, the balance between religious and secular nationalists has been redistributed through new political parties and institutions, but debates over the place of Islam continue. In BiH, the term Muslim refers to ethnonational background as much as to (ancestral) religion. In common parlance, as well as in this paper, “Muslim” and “Bosniac” are used interchangeably, the latter being the more official name. But “Bosniac” should not be confused with “Bosnian,” which denotes anyone from BiH regardless of ethnonational affiliation.
4. The redefined Deda Mraz and the New Year's Tree (themselves resignifications of older pagan symbols) shifted the focus from a religious holiday to a secular one that could be celebrated by all in the spirit of socialist (multiethnic) “brotherhood and unity.” Sklevicky, Lydia, “The New New Year: Or How a Tradition Was Tempered,” East European Politics and Societies 4 (1990): 4–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5. Debates over Turkish authenticity, for example, revolve around women's dress and are frequently expressed in terms of east and west. See especially Navaro-Yashin, Yael, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar.
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14. Note that “Islam” is often opposed to “Europe” radier than to the analogous religious term “Christianity,” implying the association—positive for some, negative for others—of “Europe” with secularism and of “Islam” as a totalizing descriptor of “oriental“ culture. Such formulations nevertheless reconfigured even Huntington, moving Orthodox Christian countries to the side of “the west” rather than grouping them with Islamic countries and “the rest.” Huntington, Samuel, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996)Google Scholar. For examples, see Hayden, Robert M., “Muslims as ‘Others' in Serbian and Croatian Politics,” in Halpern, Joel M. and Kideckel, David A., eds., Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture, and History (University Park, 2000), 116–24Google Scholar; Jansen, Stef, “'Why Do They Hate Us?’ Everyday Serbian Nationalist Knowledge of Muslim Hatred,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 13, no. 2 (2003): 215–37Google Scholar. These formulations were also gendered: Jansen found Serbs who expressed fears that Muslims would lock Serb women into harems and impregnate them with Muslim sperm while circumcising Serb men. Jansen, “'Why Do They Hate Us?’ “ 219.
15. These metaphors imply different things and have different histories, explorations of which are beyond the scope of this paper. On “crossroads,” see Moranjak-Bramburać, Nirman, “The Privileged Crossroads: The Metaphor and Discourse of Space,” Forum Bosnae 11 (2001): 233–46Google Scholar. On die bridge, see Bjelić, Dusan I., “Introduction: Blowing up the ‘Bridge,’“ in Bjelić, Dusan I. and Savić, Obrad, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, Mass., 2002): 1–22 Google Scholar; Bougarel, Xavier, Helms, Elissa, and Duijzings, Ger, “Introduction,” in Bougarel, Xavier, Helms, Elissa, and Duijzings, Ger, eds., The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post- War Society (Aldershot, 2007), 1–2 Google Scholar; Green, Notes from the Balkans.
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19. Abu-Lughod, Lila, “'Orientalism’ and Middle East Feminist Studies,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 101-13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis, Reina, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; Nader, Laura, “Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Control of Women,” Cultural Dynamics 2 (1989): 323-55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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21. Nader, “Orientalism, Occidentalism.“
22. Macmaster, Neil and Lewis, Toni, “Orientalism: From Unveiling to Hyperveiling,“ Journal ofEuropean Studies 28, nos. 1-2 (1998): 121-35Google Scholar.
23. Representations of homosexuality also seem to have shifted somewhat: although Muslim enemies are still feminized, as in intimations that some 9/11 hijackers had homosexual tendencies, the Taliban's strict punishment of homosexuality has been held up as evidence of that enemy's barbarity.
24. See, e.g., Abu-Lughod, Lila, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 783-90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dana L. Cloud, “To Veil the Threat of Terror': Afghan Women and the 'Clash of Civilizations’ in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech90, no. 3 (August 2004): 285-306.
25. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 15.
26. Parallel to western women's roles in constructing orientalism, as Lewis discussed in Gendering Orientalism, for example, western women like Rebecca West and Edith Durham played a significant part in the construction of balkanist images, largely through travel literature. See Allcock, John B. and Young, Antonia, eds., Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travellers in the Balkans, 2d ed. (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar. For historical representations of Balkan women, see, e.g., Bakic-Hayden, , “Nesting Orientalisms,” 921; Dusan I. Bjelić and Lucinda Cole, “Sexualizing the Serb,” in Bjelić, and Savić, , eds., Balkan as Metaphor, 279-310Google Scholar; Aleksandra Djajic Horvath, “'Get Armed and Buy Your Women’ or What Did the Turn-of-the-Century Globetrotter See in Northern Albania?” Albanian Journal of Politics 2, no. 1 (2006): 26-43. This work suggests that further analysis is needed to determine more precisely how balkanist discourses have historically been gendered.
27. See Bjelić, and Cole, , “Sexualizing the Serb“; Wendy Bracewell, “ ‘The Proud Name of Hajduks': Bandits as Ambiguous Heroes in Balkan Politics and Culture,” in Naimark, Norman M. and Case, Holly, eds., Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford, 2003), 22-36Google Scholar; Todorova, Imagining the Balkans.
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29. Helms, Elissa, “'Politics Is a Whore': Women, Morality and Victimhood in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Bougarel, , Helms, , and Duijzings, , eds., The New Bosnian Mosaic, 235-53Google Scholar; Žarkov, “Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred“; Žarkov, Dubravka, “War Rapes in Yugoslavia: On Masculinity, Femininity and the Power of Rape Victim Identity,” Tijdschrift voor Criminologie 39, no. 2 (1997): 140-51Google Scholar.
30. Elissa Helms, “Gendered Visions of the Bosnian Future: Women's Activism and Representation in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2003).
31. See, e.g., Gupta, Akhil, “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State,” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 385-86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Sabina Mihelj points out, balkanist discourses in the media cannot be treated as uniform, even in one community, and are more productively examined together with research into how media is consumed: Sabina Mihelj, “Media and the Symbolic Geographies of Europe: The Case of Yugoslavia,” in William Uricchio, ed., We, Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (Bristol, forthcoming).
32. On the ways in which discourses and texts circulate and get incorporated into local meanings in a given place, see Gal, Susan, “Movements of Feminism: The Circulation of Discourses about Women,” in Hobson, Barbara, ed., Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency andPower (Cambridge, Eng., 2003), 93-118.Google Scholar
33. Stef Jansen has catalogued similar effects in the everyday discourses of residents of Zagreb and Belgrade, following Michael Herzfeld in arguing that such preoccupation among ordinary people with their place in the larger geopolitical scheme of things is a reflection of particularly unsettled times. See Jansen, Stef, “Svakodnevni Orijentalizam: Dozivljaj ‘Balkana/'Evrope’ u Beogradu i Zagrebu,” Filozofija i drustvo 18 (2002): 33-71Google Scholar; and Herzfeld, Michael, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.
34. In a smaller image inside the magazine, this woman holds what looks like a glass of champagne, appropriate for New Year's celebrations but also a contrast with the Islamic prohibition against alcohol and, for a woman, a clear symbol of modernity and rejection of older gender conventions among all ethnic groups.
35. Senad Pečanin, “Uz ovaj broj,” Dani, 1 February 1999, 2. SDA leaders soon gave up their opposition to the New Year after it failed to catch on with the party's supporters among the more secular-oriented public. Although they continued to raise the issue periodically, mostly in religious circles, by 31 December 1999, the local SDA in Zenica was already actively organizing New Year's events. Several years later, the religious newspaper Preporod reported on the appearance of a Dedo Hidžr, a gift-distributing Deda Mraz-like figure for the Muslim New Year (Hidžretska novagodina). ‘Jesmo li ljudi ili nojevi?” Preporod, 30 January 2007. I am grateful to Xavier Bougarel for calling this to my attention.
36. For examples, see Bakic-Hayden and Hayden, “Orientalist Variations“; Gal, Susan, “Bartok's Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric,” American Ethnologist 18 (1991): 440-58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lindstrom, Nicole, “Between Europe and the Balkans: Mapping Slovenia and Croatia's ‘Return to Europe’ in the 1990s,” Dialectical Anthropology 27 (2003): 313-29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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38. See Helms, Elissa, “Women as Agents of Ethnic Reconciliation? Women's NGOs and International Intervention in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Women's Studies International Forum 26, no. 1 (2003): 15-33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Gendered Transformations of State Power.“
39. Such stances are most readily available to those at the bottom of balkanist or orientalist hierarchies, though the forms they take vary depending on which hierarchy is being addressed. On Serbian exhortations against the “Rotten West,” see, e.g., Colovic, Ivan, The Politics of Symbol in Serbia, trans. Hawkesworth, Celia (London, 2002), 39-47Google Scholar; Zivkovic, “Serbian Stories of Identity and Destiny.” On more equivocal positionings in Croatia and Slovenia, see, e.g., Razsa and Lindstrom, “Balkan Is Beautiful,” and Jansen, “Svakodnevni Orientalizam,” 52. Though seldom analyzed as such, gendered and sexualized representations were also present in such discourses, most dramatically when Croatian writers denounced Europe as “a whore“! Boris Buden, “Europe Is a Whore,” in Nena Skopljanac Brunner et al., eds., Media and War (Zagreb, 2000), 53-62.
40. For an analysis of Bosniac political and religious nationalism, see Bougarel, Xavier, “Bosnia and Hercegovina: State and Communitarianism,” in Dyker, David A. and Vejvoda, Ivan, eds., Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth (New York, 1996), 87-115Google Scholar; and Bougarel, “From Young Muslims.“
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42. Ismet Kasumagic, “Fafaron u rahM.-\6k\\m\i,“Dnevni Avaz, 30 May 1997,11. The author goes on to link moral character to eating practices: “This is no coincidence. It is known that the kind of food one eats affects a person's character. It is also known that, among the animals, only the pig cannot feel jealousy. That characteristic is then transferred to those who make pork a part of their diet.” Pork eaters are, of course, non-Muslims—most Europeans, including Serbs and Croats—but also lapsed or nonreligious Bosniacs, of whom the latter would nevertheless understand the association with pigs as a serious insult.
43. Dzemaludin Latić, “Bezbojni,” Ljiljan, lOJune 1994, 40. Latić's articles on mixed marriage are collected, along with others, in a booklet, Mjesoviti brakovi (Mixed marriages), published by the Islamic Community: Mehmedalija Hadzic, ed., Mjesoviti brakovi (Sarajevo, 1996). It is significant that this official body with close ties to the governing party chose this topic for its first postwar publication in a series on religious issues affecting the Muslim community.
44. For rural areas, see Bringa, Tone, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar; for urban areas, see Sorabji, Cornelia, “Mixed Motives: Islam, Nationalism and Mevluds in an Unstable Yugoslavia,” in El-Sohl, Camillia Fawzi and Mabro, Judy, eds., Muslim Women's Choices: Religious Belief and Social Reality (Providence, 1994)Google Scholar; Cornelia Sorabji, “Muslim Identity and Islamic Faith in Sarajevo“ (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1989); and cf. Dzevad Karahasan, Sarajevo: Exodus of a City, trans. Slavenka Drakulic (Sarajevo, 1994). All of these bring out both the gendering of familiar oppositions—public/private, political/domestic, secular/religious, multiethnic/ monoethnic, west/east—as well as the ways in which they recur fractally and in nested patterns as discussed above.
45. Cf., Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women“; McClintock, “Family Feuds.“
46. Latić, Dzemaludin, “Osmi Mart i Talibani,” Ljiljan, 18 March 1998, 46-47Google Scholar.
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48. Ismet ef. Spahic, deputy Reis ul-ulema of the Islamska Zajednica of Bosnia, in Bosanski Petrovac, 26July 1997. This rhetoric mirrors statements by Serbian and Croatian nationalists that assailed women who did not conform to models of “traditional” rural (heterosexual) families because they were educated professionals, single divorced mothers, had ties to westerners, or did not have children at all. See, e.g., Drakulic, Slavenka, “Women and the New Democracy in the Former Yugoslavia,” in Funk, Nanette and Mueller, Magda, eds., Gender Politics and Post- Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (New York, 1993), 123-30Google Scholar; Mostov, Julie, ‘“Our Women/'Their Women' Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers, and Violence in the Balkans,” Peace and Change 20 (1995): 515-29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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50. Eicher, Joanne B., ed., Dress and Ethnicity: Change across Space and Time (Oxford, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
51. E.g., Mustafa Cerić, “A Declaration of European Muslims,” speech given in Zagreb, 24 February 2006; Karic, Enes, “Is ‘Euro-Islam’ a Myth, Challenge or a Real Opportunity for Muslims and Europe?” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 22, no. 2 (2002): 435-42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52. Izetbegovic, Alija, Islam betweenEast and West (Indianapolis, 1984)Google Scholar. In this work, Izetbegovic offers a much less radical vision of political Islam, with more stress on democracy and the merging of “eastern” and “western” values than in his earlier Islamska Deklaracija (Sarajevo, 1990), published in English as “The Islamic Declaration,” South Slav Journal 6, no. 1 (1983): 55-89. Note also the postwar SDA campaign slogan, “We are supported by East and West” (Nas podrzava Istok i Zapad), which alluded to financial and moral support from governments in Europe and America, as well as from the Muslim world.
53. On the public/private dichotomy, see e.g., Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction“; Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender after Socialism, 37-62; Lamphere, Louise, “The Domestic Sphere of Women and the Public World of Men: The Strengths and Limitations of an Anthropological Dichotomy,” in Brettell, Caroline and Sargent, Carolyn, eds., Genderin Cross-Cultural Perspective, 3d ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2001), 100-109Google Scholar.
54. Sorabji, “Mixed Motives,” 116.
55. More devout Muslims, though, especially but not only the neo-Salafists, stressed continuity and connection among all Muslims throughout the world, dismissing unique regional differences as vestiges of folk practices, not “true” Islam. Sorabji noted this orientation among the more committed Muslim revivalists during the 1980s in Sarajevo. Sorabji, “Muslim Identity and Islamic Faith“; see also Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way.
56. Polygyny has in fact been practiced since Ottoman times among the Bosniacs of the remote northwest corner of BiH.
57. Cornelia Sorabji made these observations based on her fieldwork in Sarajevo, ongoing since the mid-1980s. Sorabji, e-mail communication, 17 October 2002.
58. Bougarel, Xavier, “The Role of Balkan Muslims in Building a European Islam,“ European Policy Center Issue Paper 43 (2005)Google Scholar.
59. Many women in and from villages, typically the older ones, wore dimije (baggy trousers) and head scarves (worn with a range of hair coverage) that marked them as both Bosniac and rural. Some Croat and Serb village women also wore ethnically marked clothing, but Muslim dress was the most distinctive. Based on her research in a Bosnian village in the late 1980s, Tone Bringa identified this as a source of orientalist prejudice toward Muslim villagers, to which few men were subject. Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way, 60-65.
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61. Jelena Padovan, “Ko i kako obrezuje zene? Nema toga u Bosni?” Start Bosne i Hercegovine, 7 November 2000: cover and 32. The female circumcision case was reported in a small town in northwest Bosnia by the young woman's mother who said her daughter had had the procedure done at the request of her husband, a follower of “orthodox Islam.“ The mother complained, “This is the twenty-first century, not the stone age!“
62. In a National Public Radio piece on Saudi influence and radical Islam in Bosnia, Sylvia Poggioli reported seeing women in “burqas” outside the newly built, Saudi-financed King Fahd mosque in Sarajevo (described as resting “in a forested Balkan valley” [my emphasis] though it is on a small hill amid socialist-era high-rise apartment buildings). She could only have meant women in nikab veils but the burqa was perhaps a more familiar term to American audiences given the media attention to the Taliban. Poggioli also interviewed a “typical Slav—tall, blond, blue-eyed” who praised Osama bin Laden and blamed “the Americans” for bringing Ukrainian and Romanian prostitutes, drugs, and other kinds of—gendered—“evil” to Bosnia. “Bosnian Islam,” Weekend Edition, 14 July 2002. See also Cloud, “To Veil the Threat of Terror.“
63. Dani, 30 March 1998, cover; Vildana Selimbegovic, “Buducnost pod nikabom,“ Dani, 3 October 2000, cover and 38-39. Both these photos in fact show a form of women's dress that was in the minority for its time period: whereas the number of women wearing the nikab in 2000 was extremely small, in 1900, for Muslim women at least, the norm was precisely a heavy face veil covering even the eyes.
64. Žarkov, “War Rapes in Yugoslavia,” 147.
65. Helms, “'Politics Is a Whore’ “; Žarkov, “War Rapes in Yugoslavia” and “Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred.“
66. Jansen, “Svakodnevni Orientalizam,” 48; see also Allcock, John B., “Constructing the Balkans,” in Allcock, and Young, , eds., Black Lambs and Grey Falcons, 234-38Google Scholar; Ballinger, Pamela, “Definitional Dilemmas: Southeastern Europe as ‘Culture Area'?” Balkanologie3, no. 2 (1999): 73-91Google Scholar; van de Port, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild.
67. As has been the case in other postsocialist central and east European societies, the term feminism (understood as a western import) has been much maligned, stereotyped, and rejected in Bosnia, including by many women's rights activists, though some do embrace it. See Cockburn, Cynthia, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London, 1998), 189-92Google Scholar; Helms, “Gendered Visions of the Bosnian Future,” 155-96.
68. Zenica, Medica, To Live With(out) Violence—Final Report: Violence against Women (Zenica, 1999)Google Scholar; see also Helms, “Gendered Transformations of State Power.“
69. See Boehm, Christopher, Blood Revenge: The Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies (Philadelphia, 1984)Google Scholar; Denich, Bette, “Sex and Power in the Balkans,” in Rosaldo, Michelle Z. and Lamphere, Louise, eds., Woman, Culture, and Society (Stanford, 1974), 243-62Google Scholar; Whitaker, Ian, “'A Sack for Carrying Things:’ The Traditional Role of Women in Northern Albanian Society,” Anthropological Quarterly 54, no. 3 (July 1981): 146-56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
70. Cf. Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy; Jansen, “Svakodnevni Orientalizam“; van de Port, Gypsies, Wars, and Other Instances of the Wild.
71. See Helms, “Gendered Transformations of State Power“; Žarkov, “Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred,” 111.
72. Helms, “Gendered Transformations of State Power,” 353-54.
73. The women's NGO Medica Zenica found that domestic violence was equally distributed among all economic classes, professions, and places of origin. Medica Zenica, To Live With(out) Violence. Nevertheless, when a local journalist reported on Medica's violence hotline, his editors chose to illustrate the article with a photograph of a peasant's horse and cart. Avdic, Selvedin, “Pozivi puni straha i nade,” Start, 25 February 2000, 26-27Google Scholar; Selvedin Avdic, personal communication, Zenica, 28 February 2000.
74. See Sorabji, Cornelia, “Managing Memories in Post-War Sarajevo: Individuals, Bad Memories, and New Wars,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12 (2006): 1–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anders Stefansson, “Urban Exile: Locals, Newcomers and the Cultural Transformation of Sarajevo,” in Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings, eds., The New Bosnian Mosaic, 59-78.
75. Helms, “'Politics Is a Whore.'“
76. Foreign writers also used miniskirts and gendered behavior to make such comparisons. A French journalist writing during the war about Islam in Sarajevo wrote, ‘Judging by its streets, Sarajevo is clearly a European city, not a Muslim capital. Women are more likely to wear miniskirts than head scarves; men drink alcohol.” Ourdan, Remy, “The End of a Dream,” World Press Review 42, no. 1 (January 1995): 29 Google Scholar, reprinted and translated from Le Monde.
77. Tone Bringa with Debbie Christie, We Are All Neighbours ﹛Disappearing Worlds series, documentary film, 1993).
78. “Zene su ravnopravne,” Oslobodenje, 15 March 1998, 11 (emphasis added; capitalization in the original). The Oslobodenje opinion survey was part of an extended polemic that ran in the Bosnian press after an incident in March 1998, at a roundtable organized by local women's activists for International Women's Day (8 March), on the subject of “Women, Society, and Religion.” A petition was being circulated at the gathering, which was part of an international feminist campaign to call attention to the plight of women under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, symbolized in posters by women in burqas. The appearance of a group of neo-Salafists, the men in short pants and beards and the women totally veiled and gloved, caused quite a stir. The group claimed that women in Kabul were perfectly protected and respected under Islam, while women in the west were the ones who needed help because of high divorce rates, low birthrates, pornography, and sexual objectification of women.
79. This flag was deliberately chosen for BiH by the High Representative, head of the pseudo-protectorate governing the country, to offer a unifying symbol that could be accepted by representatives of all political (i.e., ethnonational) forces. Not surprisingly, it gained acceptance more among those favoring a united BiH than among those favoring ethnonational autonomy or separation. See Hayden, Robert M., “Intolerant Sovereignties and ‘Multi—Multi’ Protectorates: Competition over Religious Sites and (In) tolerance in the Balkans,” in Hann, Chris M., ed., Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Practices in Eurasia (London, 2002), 170 Google Scholar.
80. “Bosna se vraca sebi!” Dani, 7 July 2000, cover.
81. Dz, N., “Cardeaje ozbiljna pojava,” Dani, 31 March 2000, 60 Google Scholar.
82. A lesbian interpretation would never have occurred to the vast majority of Bosnians, as was apparent from the puzzled looks I got when suggesting such a possible perspective in relation to the “East and West Kiss” image.
83. This followed the scandal in November 1999 involving the winner of the Miss BiH contest, Alisa Sisic, a would-be model from Zenica, who was stripped of her crown after nude photos of her surfaced. Like Fetic, both the dethroned winner and her supporters bemoaned the “backwardness” and conservatism of Bosnia. One commentator, citing the rhetoric of Islamic leaders, wrote: “Crucified between the ideology of the Near East and the normalcy of the even nearer west, Alisa, like most of her generation, chose the latter.“ Mile Stojic, “Ljepotica i zvijeri,“Dara, 12 November 1999, 37. A member of the jury, fed up with the many other injustices and open questions in Bosnia, told a reporter, “We're not between East and West, we're in the center of the Bermuda Triangle. BiH is something like a hole in the ozone.” “Svi znamo sta imamo ispod odjece,” Dani, 12 November 1999, 38.
84. Interview with Nadina Fetic by Avdic, Edin, “Zenicanke nisu valjale dok su bile 'pokrivene,’ …” Slobodna Bosna, 8June 2000, 30-33Google Scholar.
85. For such critiques of balkanism, see Patterson, “On the Edge of Reason“; Mihelj, “Media and the Symbolic Geographies of Europe“; Fleming, “Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography.” On the diversity of balkanist representations among “Balkaners“ themselves, see Bracewell, Wendy and Drace-Francis, Alex, “South-Eastern Europe: History, Concepts, Boundaries,” Balkanologie 3, no. 2 (1999): 47-66Google Scholar; Maria Todorova, “Introduction: Learning Memory, Remembering Identity,” in Maria Todorova, ed., Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (New York, 2004).
86. Helms, “Women as Agents of Ethnic Reconciliation?” and “Gendered Visions of the Belms, “Women as Agents of Ethnic Reconciliation?” and “Gendered Visions of the Bosnian Future.“