Clientelism and the principle of seniority in the Balkans

Patrilineality, male dominance, and seniority constituted the pillars of the patriarchal structures in the Balkans. The element of seniority, i. c. priority or reign of older people, leads in the international research to two research fields: ageing and clientelism. Both of them are hardly resp. only in rudiments scientifically dealt with in the Balkans and are extraordinarily well suited for transcultural comparisons. The project in hand attempts to do such a comparative study. Its aim is to explore the reign of older people, which has to be understood in a twofold way (chronological and classificatory), in the private sphere on the one hand and in the public sphere on the other hand in the Western Balkans and to compare it with the Mediterranean zone at the coast. Societies with kinship systems based on patrilineality like in the Western Balkans use godfatherhood as a means for establishing external alliances. Unlike this patron-client-relationships developed in the Mediterranean parts of the Balkans since antiquity. In these regions the patron frequently was the godfather, too. In godfatherhood the godfather is always the older one in a classificatory sense, which does not depend on his actual chronological age. The principle of seniority on the other hand means the reign of fathers over their sons and of older brothers over their younger brothers. Classificatory age does not matter here, but the relative age resp. the generational gap within the household is decisive. In speaking of the reign of the older people one has to bear in mind that due to the demographic situation only 10% of all household heads were older than 50 years even in the 19th century. The chronological age gained a steadily increasing influence on the life course of the people in the Balkans, which was caused by beginning processes of modernisation since the end of the 19th century. This led to an extensive standardisation of the life course, whose comer-stones are: general compulsory education, beginning of occupational activities, and old-age pension systems, guaranteed by the state. A general theory of ageing based on English data has been developed, which should be evaluated for its applicability in the Balkans. In a parallel step we want to investigate, how political structures interact with their social and cultural environment. This means in this case an analysis of the relationship between politics and the traditional organisation of kinship and alliances. The work in this project will be focused on two contexts. In a first step research will be concentrated on the relationship between kinship, seniority, and clientelism in the Western Balkans resp. in Mediterranean Dalmatia before the onset of accelerated processes of modernisation in this century resp. before the massive socialistic changes. In a second step we shall investigate the question, to which extend kinship, seniority, and clientelism still play an important role in politics, economy, and everyday life.