Bilateral kinship and biogenetic substance in the Balkans. The case of Voyvodovo, Bulgaria (1900-1950)
Abstrakt
This contribution focuses on the concept of kinship in Voyvodovo, the village of Czechs and Slovaks in north-western Bulgaria in 1900-1950. The author shows to what extent Voyvodovo villagers insisted on the putative biology in their construction of kinship, and analyzes their notions of kinship that oscillated between patrilinearity and bilaterality.
The data are based on a long-term fieldwork (2006-2015) with the Voyvodovo villagers, and on the analysis of genealogy, archive materials, parish registers, and native "family chronicles". The focus of the text lies in the analysis of the flexibility of the bilateral (cognatic) kinship, which still possesses some patriarchal and patrilineal bias.
The emic perspective of kinship on the part of the Voyvodovans is put into a wider context of anthropological study of kinship, especially in Europe and in the Balkans. The text shows that Voyvodovo kinship, despite being placed in the Balkans in the first half of the 20th century, does not easily fit into the theoretical frame of the "Balkan family pattern", based on patrilinearity and emphasis on agnatic ties.
Apart from this, there was a different view of affines, and a complete absence of ritual kinship and other kinds of "artificial" kinship in Voyvodovo, that have been reported in other Balkan communities in the same period.