Visualizing family, gender and the body in the Balkans

The production of knowledge in the disciplines of history, ethnology, and cultural anthropology is still primarily based on written and oral texts. The photograph is considered at its best as illustration. Although meanwhile the `pictorial turn` is in full swing in social sciences, it is still rarely used as autochthonous historical source. This means that a whole set of primary documents has been neglected in historical, ethnological, and cultural- anthropological research. The Balkans belong to the regions in the world with a comparatively scarcity of written documents. This lack is even more tremendous in research fields such as historical family and gender relations as well as bodily representations, which are per se not easily to be reconstructed. The overall aim of the project, therefore, consists in the adoption of the photograph as primary source parallel to written sources in social sciences focussing on the Balkans. The research questions are threefold: (1) Scrutinizing the representation and self-representation of family, gender relations, and the body. (2) The project`s contribution to historical knowledge consists in its research of modernization processes in the Balkans under the auspices of multiple or vernacular modernities. (3) Its original contribution to visual studies is related to the fundamental question whether or not images are constructed and perceived culturally different from the West in a pre-modern region with Orthodox and Muslim background. The methodology is based on a combination of serial-iconographic method and in-depth-interpretation of single photographs and consists of two basic operations: (1) The work in photo archives and (2) the analysis and interpretation of the selection at home. The research project concentrates upon the corpora of "indigenous" photographers (from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Serbia) and two Austro-Hungarian ethnographers. The photographs serve as valuable records, for example, of subjects that are often poorly documented in early ethnographic sources such as the family, gender roles and the representation of the body. Relevant categories are photographs for private use (family portraits, wedding photographs, graveyard photographs) and public use (documentary photographs, cartes de visite, photo postcards). The core of the dissemination strategy consists in the establishment of a photographic data base, which comprises analysed and interpreted photographs. This data base will be made accessible for the scientific community and other interested organizations. It is open for enlargement, supplied by other research projects aiming on the establishment of a Visual Archive of Southeastern Europe (VASE). Gender, family, and body history are internationally growing disciplines. Therefore the project can benefit from already made experiences, on the one hand, but can, on the other hand, contribute to the knowledge already generated.

The main objective of the project Visualizing gender relations, family and the body: the Balkans approx. 1860-1950 was to broaden the discussion on Southeast European history and anthropology by including visual sources. Visual sources such as photographs and postcards have rarely been in the centre of attention of historical research in and about Southeastern Europe. As has been argued and demonstrated, they open up issues, which are hardly to grasp by relying on written data only. It has been argued that including visual data into historical anthropological research not only broadens existing debates but puts into question theories based on written sources only. Changes in family and gender relations, generational hierarchies and the disciplining of the body miss an important dimension if not embedded in visual frameworks. By putting the visual at the core of its work the team working on the project contributed to these debates of growing importance. Moreover the team was able to preserve and unite around 2.500 digitized images collected in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Serbia and Austria. The collection forms the basis of the online archive VASE (gams.uni-graz.at/vase) developed within the framework of the project. The online archive is freely accessible and invites other researchers and students to explore the visual and include it in their own research agendas. It gives an overview on the variety of images and institutions in charge of them. Additionally the online archive highlights recurring motifs and the embeddedness of technically produced images in a broader framework of modernization and Europeanization. These questions have also been addressed by the project team in a number of presentations, publications and academic courses. In their analysis the project collaborators put forward a number of questions. They were able to argue that imageries developed in and about Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia should be understood as class and societal phenomena embedded in varying, often overlapping and also contested discourses. Historical discourses of nationalism and Europeanization, modernization and progress, power relations and social stratification, and last but not least of visual regimes and of beauty shaped and continue to shape images of the Self and the Other as represented in visual data.