Balkan Life Courses

The historical upheavals in Southeast Europe since the early 20th century brought about deep transformations of people’s life courses. The concept of 'life course' enables the understanding of human lives within their socio-cultural and political contexts, stressing people’s everyday experiences and agency. The papers in this volume discuss problems such as the impact of migration and mobility on families, such as economic migration transforming traditional structures into individualistic strategies. Other papers give examples of ruptures of life worlds caused by the impact of dramatic historical events. Demonstrating the agency of actors instead of presenting them as passive victims, some authors present approaches that are innovative for the region. Apart from various forms of migration and their impact on life courses, the volume also includes contributions on the role of religion and social memory in the family.

The historical upheavals in Southeast Europe since the early 20th century brought about deep transformations of people's everyday lives and their life courses. The concept of ‘life course’ enables the understanding of human lives within their socio-cultural and political contexts, stressing agency and people’s everyday experience. Balkan contexts invite for analyses that bridge political and social changes and their influence on individual life courses. The papers discuss problems such as family life and parenthood, ages and ageing, life-cycle rituals and the artistic expressions devoted to them. The authors present manifestations of the social differentiation and cultural multiplicity under post-socialist or post-colonial conditions – from developing contemporary global life styles among the emerging urban middle class to the ghettoization of some social or age groups. This volume focusses on developing family cultures, on experiencing socialization and age, on ‘old’ and ‘new’ life cycle rituals and their artistic representations in contemporary Southeast Europe.

Everyday Life in the Balkans gathers the work of leading scholars across disciplines to provide a broad overview of the countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Turkey. This region has long been characterized as a place of instability and political turmoil, from World War I, through the Yugoslav Wars, and even today as debate continues over issues such as the influx of refugees or the expansion of the European Union. However, the work gathered here moves beyond the images of war and post-socialist stagnation which dominate Western media coverage of the region to instead focus on the lived experiences of the people in these countries. Contributors consider a wide range of issues including family dynamics, gay rights, war memory, religion, cinema, fashion, and politics. Using clear language and engaging examples, Everyday Life in the Balkans provides the background context necessary for an enlightened conversation about the policies, economics, and culture of the region.

This study, which is an updated, extended, and revised version of the out-of-print 1993 edition, reassesses the traditional stereotype of the place of the Balkans in the model of the European family in the nineteenth century on the basis of new source material and by synthesizing existing research. The work first analyzes family structure and demographic variables as they appear in population registers and other sources, and the impact of these findings on theoretical syntheses of the European family pattern. On most features, such as population structure, marriage and nuptiality, birth and fertility, death and mortality rates, family and household size and structure, as well as inheritance patterns, the Balkans show an enormous deal of internal variety. This variability is put in a comparative European context by matching the quantifiable results with comparable figures and patterns in other parts of Europe. The second section of the book is a contribution to the long-standing debate over the zadruga, the complex, collective, joint or extended family in the Balkans. Finally, the book considers ideology and mythology and the ways it has adversely affected scholarship on the family, and broadly on population history.

In the series of the monographs under the title “The Balkans” (publisher Livre de Lyon, Lyon, France), one volume has been dedicated to the everyday life and culture. This volume consists of four chapters examining the various phenomena in everyday life in the Balkans during the Ottoman era or phenomena still existing in the modern Balkan societies, as a result of the Oriental - Ottoman heritage in this region. This book presents one big step forward in research of the everyday life in the Ottoman Empire and especially the Balkans, since this is still one of the less elaborated and at the same time very important topics of the Balkan and Ottoman history, as well.

This compellingly written autobiography covers the past century and more in the life of Bato Tomasevic's Montenegrin family in the harsh and ever-turbulent mountains of southern Yugoslavia. The narrative begins some fifty years before the Balkan wars (1912-1913) and recounts the harrowing experiences of the Tomasevic clan in the twentieth century's two World Wars. The author conveys vividly the hardships of life in under Italian and German occupation: the daily executions, the heroism of underground workers and the effects of occupation on ordinary people. Bato Tomasevic was a boy soldier with the Partisans and experienced the horrors of warfare against the Chetniks, cheating death in an ambush in Eastern Bosnia.Just as vivid are his accounts of, inter alia, post-war Yugoslavia, his narrow escape in the Munich air disaster, life in Belgrade in the hopeful sixties and seventies, the break-up of the Federation after Tito's death, and the efforts of extreme nationalists to create a Greater Serbia and a Greater Croatia through armed might and ethnic cleansing. The family saga ends with Tomasevic's experience of the NATO bombing of Serbia in March 1999 and the downfall and imprisonment of President Milosevic. Tomasevic's story is at once fascinating, heroic, tragic, sometimes even funny, but unquestionably moving, such as his description of he and his mother finding his dead brother's skull or of witnessing a suicide by a young German prisoner of war of roughly the same age as him. It is a story as remembered by a young boy, whose family, like his country, was drawn into a violent and brutal conflict that it could not escape.