The Kosovar Family Revisited

Kosova has been exposed to radical breaks of the political as well as socio-economic and socio-cultural framework. The decade from approximately 1989 to 1999 was characterized by an increasing suppression of the Albanian population by the Serbian regime, which, as reaction, strengthened the social cohesion among the Albanian population. The NATO bombardment of 1999 and the subsequent installation of international security and administrative bodies in the region lifted suppression and paved the way to liberty, which peaked in the declaration of an independent Republic of Kosova in February of 2008. The Kosovar-Albanian family has been frequently signified from a predominantly emic perspective as the last European stronghold of patriarchal ideology, of big family compounds as well as strong and extended kinship networks. The research project offers a unique opportunity to Albanian and Southeast European studies, migration studies as well as European family studies, which consists in the analyses of the adaptation of a relatively closed family and kinship system, based on a pronounced patrilineal ideology, to a rapidly changing economic, political and social environment. In order to understand the ongoing processes having impact on the cohesion of the Kosovar family deep qualitative research has to be conducted and more precise research questions have to be formulated than in recent research. Moreover, the project is of political brisance in relation to the future of Kosovar society because if the social cohesion of the family ruptures present social politics, based on efficient family and kinship networks, is at stake. Based on the findings of an initial project under the guidance of the applicant, the project`s aim consists in the investigation of the social cohesion of the Kosovar-Albanian family one decade after war (1999), forced migration and re-migration and the introduction of liberal economy. Based on methodologies of the grounded theory approach, temporal as well as regional comparison and the integration of international perspectives, it will provide answers to 6 research questions: (1) Which are the factors of change of family structures over time (late socialist period - present)? (2) What is the impact of considerable internal and international migration? (3) What is the impact of changing demographical and generational relations? (4) What is the impact of possible factors of re-traditionalization such as customary law and religion? (5) What is the impact of changing ideals with regard to family, marriage and gender relations? (6) How is change over time reflected and readable on the symbolic level? The project team will consist of an experienced German researcher (social anthropologist), a Kosovar-Albanian sociologist and a Kosovar-Albanian historian and will be coordinated on site by a qualified project coordinator. The team is gender-balanced as well as interdisciplinary and will be supported by an international advisory board.

In Kosovo kin care matters as public social security provisions are meager and unemployment rates are high. However, the way kin provides care and the meaning of intra- and intergenerational kinship relations are shifting. While until the 1990s kin care was often based on more or less complex, patrilocal household structures, today such household structures transform and become fragmented. On the basis of in-depth, qualitative research which has been carried out in two regions of Kosovo and which included transregional and transnational dimensions, the project examined the ways in which the family has transformed in Kosovo and identified the main challenges of kin based care. For this, various fields have been studied, which are gender relations, migration, and symbolic representations of kinship. Regarding gender relations, it was found out that women take the main load of unpaid instrumental support within the family, which hinders them to take up wage work. Not earning salaries and being hardly included in inheritance, women at the same time highly depend on kin support. However, an increasing number of women are well educated and in wage employment. Gaining independence and power, they are agents of change in kin based social security, as they financially contribute to the household and can select whom and what to support. Men increasingly fail to financially provide for the family and to take decisions. Migration constitutes another central field of change in relation to kinship and household constellations. While until the 1990s mainly male household members went on labour migration to Western Europe in order to finance the family at home, in the 1990s, in times of political crisis in Kosovo, women and children followed, which led to the foundation of neo-local households abroad and to the fragmentation of complex households in Kosovo. This diminished also the willingness and possibilities to send remittances. From the new millennium on, transnational kin care gained new meanings through marriage migration and irregular migration. Through marriage migration new alliances between transnational family segments are created. Many migrants still invest in kinship relations at home at various levels, but they also experience various problems with relatives at home. An important field of study was the symbolic representations of kinship in Kosovo. Since the end of the war in 1999, with the neoliberaliszation of the economy, wedding celebrations, engagements and circumcision festivals became an arena of partly contradicting representations of status and money, individuality and kin-collectivism, gender roles, tradition and modernity at the same time. Such symbolic representations may substitute every day kin contacts and forms of solidarity, and may create a new social order of kinship relations. It is therefore no wonder that migrants are especially active in this field.