Family in the Post-War Context: The Serbian Community of Southeast Kosovo
Family in the Post-War Context: The Serbian Community of Southeast Kosovo

Summary/Abstract: The paper is based on multi-sited fieldwork carried out in southeast Kosovo (Gnjilane with its surrounding villages and Vitina enclave) and among persons displaced from this area to Smederevo, Vranje, and Vranjska Banja (all towns in Serbia). The aim was to examine the relation between ethnicity and other forms of identification (religious, regional, gender) in a context that had undergone profound changes since 1999, when an international protectorate had been set up for the region. This article focusses on changes occurring in family and kinship relations in the period following 1999. The pronounced traditionalism of the Serbian family in the context of rapid social change (war and postwar trauma, international administration, the migration of some of the population to Serbia, the influence of globalization, etc.) acquired new forms, reflected in, among other things, gender and inter-generational relations, procedures of property inheritance. The symbolic language of family rituals such as weddings (a private event which takes place in the public arena), expresses an imaginative merging of global and local into glocal.

• Details
• Contents