Comp. Southeast Europ. Stud. 2021; 69(1): 5–18 In the Name of the Daughter. Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro Čarna Brković* In the Name of the Daughter – Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro. An Introduction https://doi.org/10.1515/soeu-2021-2013 Gender in Montenegro In 2012 international organizations warned that Montenegro is one of the world’s leaders in sex-selective abortion, with as a result significantly fewer births of babies recognized as girls.1 Initially, that piece of data seemed to attract little attention, but that changed after a few years. NGOs working on women’srightsorganizedcampaigns advocating against the practice of sex-selective abortion; German journalists came to Montenegro and reported on them; the Montenegrin national newspaper Pobjeda stopped publishing information on the genders of new-born children and began reporting births gender-neutrally instead. In dominant media and NGO discourses, sex- selective abortion was interpreted as the result of the patriarchal backwardness of the country, where sons were more valued and, therefore, more wanted than daughters. The collection of articles in front of you explores how to look beyond the balkanist discourse to understand abortion and other gendered practices in Montenegro.2 It articulates anthropological criticism of patriarchy, misogyny, and gender inequality in Montenegro without reiterating the common tropes about 1 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) data reveal that Montenegro is one of the top eleven countries in the world for sex imbalance at birth; that is in the difference between the numbers of boys and girls. Cf. Christophe Z. Guilmoto, Sex Imbalances at Birth. Current Trends, Consequences and Policy Implications, UNFPA Asia and Pacific Regional Office, Bangkok 2012, 20. 2 This special issue was made possible through the workshop ‘Anthropology of Gender in the Balkans’, which was organized in September 2019 at the University of Göttingen and financed through a DAAD grant. We are grateful to Sabine Hess for her support. For more details, cf. https:// genderinthebalkans.wordpress.com/. All Internet sources were accessed on 16 February 2021. *Corresponding author: Čarna Brković, University of Göttingen, Institute of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, Göttingen, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Open Access. © 2021 Čarna Brković, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 6 Č. Brković ‘backwardness’, ‘modernity’, and the need for the country to ‘catch up’ with ‘Europe’. The authors ask, ‘Is it possible to criticize the clear Montenegrin prefer- ence for sons without evoking a retrograde Balkan culture and, if so, under what conditions? How can we talk about gender in Montenegro without implicitly or explicitly comparing Montenegrin lifeworlds to “European” standards’? Gender is very often used to make (geo)political statements about how progressive or backward, modern or traditional, civilized or primitive, a certain place or group is. Montenegro is a case in point. In its own mytho-poetics Montenegro is a land of men, who are both warriors and poets. Montenegro is the country where blood revenge3 was a legal institution and sworn virgins4 a third sex throughout the twentieth century; a savage borderland that was surrounded yet allegedly never overwhelmed by Ottoman forces.5 Such discourse on the Balkans can and shouldbecriticizedasbalkanizingand patronizing. Yet, does that mean that any criticism of gender inequality in Montenegro reiterates balkanizing and patronizing standpoints? Not quite. The thematic section ‘In the Name of the Daughter’ argues that we can under- stand gendered practices in Montenegro, such as sex-selective abortion, only if we consider the complicated ways in which material and economic processes become intertwined with social and cultural logics, simultaneously reinforcing old stereo- types while creating new spaces for action and change. The special issue presented here suggests that the practice of gender in Montenegro is predicated on specific kinship and property relationships, which it also perpetuates, and that women in the country are neither as oppressed nor as free as they might seem from a liberal feminist perspective. Anyone pondering how to articulate criticism and how to encourage change to gendered practices in Montenegro should take into account how possibilities for individual as well as collective action are shaped by kinship relationality, inheritance expectations, and state and public policy on gender. Beyond Diagnostic Knowledge Production Writing about gender practices in Montenegro from an anthropological perspec- tive means going beyond what anthropologist Dace Dzenovska has called the ‘diagnostic mode of knowledge production’. In her study of the projects to promote 3 Christopher Boehm, Blood Revenge. The Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies, Philadelphia 1991. 4 Predrag Šarčević, Sex and Gender Identity of ‘Sworn Virgins’ in the Balkans, in: Miroslav Jovanović / Slobodan Naumović, eds, Gender Relations in South Eastern Europe. Historical Per- spectives on Womanhood and Manhood in 19th and 20th Century, Münster 2004, 123–144. 5 Roy Trevor, Montenegro. A Land of Warriors, London 1913. Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro 7 tolerance in postsocialist Latvia, Dzenovska demonstrated that the hegemonic assumption that Eastern Europe needs to ‘catch up’ with the rest of the continent has made dominant diagnostic modes of knowledge production which ‘assume prior knowledge of the disease’.6 In other words, diagnostic knowledge practices involve measuring how particular people and places fare in relation to an already- defined problem. The problems—like the solutions—are defined in advance and are seen as needing to be ‘transmitted’ or ‘transferred’ from the West to the East. In this diagnostic mode of knowledge production, partners from postsocialist Eastern Europe—including Montenegro—are expected to generate knowledge that evaluates how their countries are performing in relation to given problems. A good illustration of that is the 2019 National Gender Equality Index for Montenegro, authored by Olivera Komar, professor at the University of Montenegro. The Index was developed in collaboration with national and international agencies and ‘in accordance with the methodology of the European Institute for Gender Equality for the European Union Member States’.7 The Gender Equality Index for Montenegro was ‘calculated with a score of 55 while the “middle” value recorded for countries in the EU-28 was 67.4; thus, Montenegro was seen to lag behind most of the developed EU countries’.8 The sort of knowledge made available by the Index is important for various reasons. On the one hand, it makes it possible to compare the legal, social, economic, and political frameworks of various countries using a transnational scale. On the other hand, it allows Montenegrin NGOs and other local actors concerned with women’s rights to put pressure on the government by claiming the need to change gender-related policies if the country wishes to stop ‘lagging behind Europe’. Furthermore, various members of the Montenegrin public take some pride in the fact that Montenegro has skilled professionals able to produce expert knowledge in the diagnostic mode, and thus to include their country in Europe-wide comparisons. However, there are also various problems with that mode of knowledge pro- duction. First, its methodology reshuffles everyday life in a way that removes from sight its local historical and sociocultural context, with an aim to make possible a relatively straightforward transnational comparison. The process of reshuffling and attendant ‘cleansing’ of sociocultural and historical layers ends up creating an abstract construct that tells us little about the actual gender practices and forms of gender-related exclusion and inequality that affect the lives of Montenegrin 6 Dace Dzenovska, School of Europeanness. Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in Latvia, Ithaca/NY 2018, 110. 7 Olivera Komar, Gender Equality Index Montenegro 2019, Montenegro 2019, 3, https:// eurogender.eige.europa.eu/system/files/events-files/gender_equality_index_2019_report_ final.pdf. 8 Komar, Gender Equality Index Montenegro 2019. 8 Č. Brković women, men, and others. That becomes a major problem when we take into ac- count that there is almost no systematic support for any other form of production of knowledge about gender in Montenegro, whether locally, nationally, or interna- tionally. Most attempts to produce other empirical and theoretical knowledge about gender in Montenegro such as the various doctoral and MA theses, exhibi- tions, and published texts, remain incidental and scattered, with at best meagre institutional support and recognition.9 A second problem is that the diagnostic mode of knowledge production usually prescribes the solutions to the very problems it diagnoses. Local and national actors are neither expected to generate knowledge that would enable an in-depth understanding of how gender is practised in everyday life, nor are they provided with the means to do so. As a result, they are unable to deliberate how to pursue changes to such practices in a contextually sensitive and meaningful manner, nor even whether they should do so. Instead, they are expected more or less to ‘copy-paste’ bundles of policies, rules, and values prescribed elsewhere. An example