Instrumental Borders of Gender and Religious Conversion in the Balkans*

In this paper I look at religious identifications and affiliations in the Balkans as instrumental political resources for ascertaining hierarchical relations among social groups and individuals, with extensive use of gendered metaphors, referring to different categories of people as either effeminate or truly manly, and actual women often used as a currency of exchange. A Gendered Ethno-Religious Ideology More than anything else, the Balkans is a place of passages, encounters and contacts, formidable in its capability of hybridising Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Islam. However, a generalised view on Southeast European cultures and societies, especially in the case of Albania, would underscore regional differences between mountains and plains, between life-worlds shaped by different religious cultures, and between different social and economic settings, urban and rural, especially as far as their impact on gender relations is concerned. In the Balkans, as elsewhere, religious conversion and politics have normally related to a collective history, which embraced social and cultural communities, or more precisely, members of a family, a lineage, a village or a larger group. Before, during and after the heyday of islamicisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one converted either to Islam or to Christianity because of belonging to a social network. Conversion and religious belonging or affiliation are therefore part of a process of socialisation through the pursuit of a collective identity. Collective representations and beliefs, ritual practices and ceremonies are considered part of the official religion – Christianity or Islam accordingly – of a given local community or social network, regardless of whether a particular cultural trait does or does not form part of the world religion in question. They are categorised collectively not as religious features of *An earlier version of this paper was presented at the international conference ‘Religion on the Borders: New Challenges in the Academic Study of Religion’, Sodertorn University College, Stockholm, Sweden, 19 – 22 April 2007, and at the Kotor Network conference on ‘New Religious Minorities’, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 25 – 26 May 2007. The preparation and presentation of this paper were made possible with financial support from the UNDP Brain Gain Programme and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Religion, State & Society, Vol. 36, No. 1, March 2008 ISSN 0963-7494 print; ISSN 1465-3974 online/08/010055-09 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09637490701809738 Published in: