ABSTRACT
Probably no region of Europe has attracted so much interest on the part of Western scholars of kinship and the family as have the Balkans where two quite ancient and closely related forms of social organization have persisted in at least attenuated form up to the present time. Among the earliest English-language descriptions of these institutions were those of Mary Durham (1904, 1909, 1928), a British "lady" anthropologist and adventurer, who during the first part of this century braved the rigors of the wild and then relatively inaccessible Dinaric Highlands to study the fiercely independent and warlike tribes of Montenegro and northern Albania. This was no small undertaking in a part of the world some British still referred to as "savage Europe." Some decades later, Philip Mosely's pioneering work on the South Slav patrilocally-extended corporate family (1940, 1943, 1953) introduced the term zadruga into the lexicon of the British and American social sciences. Inspired by these early contributions, several generations of Western Anthropologists subsequently carried out field studies in post-World War II Yugoslavia, the majority of which underscored the primacy of family and kinship in South Slav culture. Among many other notable examples can be mentioned Boehm's exhaustive portrayal of the blood feud in Montenegro (1983, 1984); Halpern's longitudinal research on the transformation of rural Serbian society (1958, 1970, 1986); Lockwood's monograph on Bosnian Muslim villagers (1975); Baric's papers dealing with changes in the South Slav kinship system due to economic and spatial mobility (1967a, 1967b); Hammel's detailed exposition of Serbian and Montenegrin patterns of fictive kinship (kumstvo) (1968), his essays dealing with the role of kinship in the transformation of postwar Yugoslavia (1969, 1977, 1984), and his historical and demographic analyses of the zadruga (1970, 1976); and SimiC"s work on the positive contributions of family and kinship to the urbanization and modernization of Serbian society during the period from the 1960s through the middle 1980s (1973a, 1973b, 1988, 1990).2
