Spotlight on Students: Gender Comparisons

The following post features the work of a student in my Anth 101: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course.  In this assignment they were tasked with comparing the gender norms of the Burrnesha with those that exist in the United States.  This is the last time I will give this assignment, so it is with great pleasure that I feature this exemplary work.

The Burrnesha of Albania are also known as "Sworn Virgins".  They are women who take on the roles of men due to financial hardships, to avoid a bad marriage, or to assist their families.

By: Jennifer Greenlee

In the United States, we are now starting to slowly open ourselves up to accepting that sex and gender are not interchangeable. We are starting to see that just because a child was born with little boy parts it does not mean that he in terms of sex will want to live as a boy in terms of gender his whole life. The difference between sex and gender is that “sex refers to biological differences”, and gender “refers to the cultural construct of whether one is female, male or something else” (Gezon and Kottak 146). The sex of the baby boy was determined when the little boy is born and the gender of the little boy will be decided after he becomes more aware of his culture and how he feels in it. In our culture, the majority of the time, being male or female is a choice that we can freely make should we decide to be the opposite gender than that of the sex we were born. In other cultures, Albania for example, women used to take an oath of celibacy to become a man for various reasons and not always by choice but by necessity. The U.S. is just now starting to become somewhat accepting of the differences in regards to sex and gender, while other cultures have been giving their people the choice since the fifteenth century.

             

Albania is a little country in Europe that is located on the southwestern part of the Balkan Peninsula and is mostly made up of mountains. Albania also has flat land along the coast of the Adriatic Sea for agricultural purposes; the agriculture does not bring in money as Albania is one of the poorer countries in the world. Albania currently has a rising democratic government, but was a communist country for an extended period of time. During this communist time, women in Albania were seen as half of the value of men and were only to take care of the home and children. Albanian men during this time were allowed to carry weapons and were generally given more freedoms than a woman (Bilefsky). Albanian women were given the option to live as men for a list of reasons, but the most common seemed to be due to a shortage of men caused by wars turning out high numbers of death among men or because of a natural death of a male member of a family.  In these cases where the man of the family is now deceased and there is not another male to assume the role of the head of the family, a woman in the family is lawfully allowed to do so should she choose. In the case where a woman decides, or is forced, to take on the role of a man, she will then take an oath of virginity and become what was known as a “sworn virgin” and will then “assumed male gender roles and activities to meet the societal needs when there was a shortage of men” (Gezon and Kottak 161). After this oath is taken the woman will dress and act like a man for the duration of her life and is held accountable to that by her culture.

            

 Women of the Albanian culture did not just take the role of a man to assume a lead role when needed, they also took the oath to become a “sworn virgin” to prevent or get out of an arranged marriage. Albania is a country that was “strictly patriarchal, patrilineal”, meaning that the wealth of the family came down through the men’s side and that once the man and woman were married, the woman would move in with the man’s family (Tarifa). With Albania being “such a male dominated society” that was a very “oppressive culture for women”, becoming a sworn virgin gave women a chance to come out of that oppression and be treated as an equal to men giving them new freedoms that they would not ever experience as a women (Tarifa). In Albania, the choice to live as a different gender was most often a means of necessity. Living as a man became a necessary part of these women’s lives as they either needed to be the head of a family or needed get out of an unwanted situation, and in some cases just wanted to simply be treated as an equal and have more freedoms. For a women in the U.S., the need to live as a man looks very different and is hardly ever a necessity like it is in Albania.

            

 The United States of America is located in North America and is bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The U.S. has a democracy that is based on elections of presidents by the people that reside in the U.S. The U.S. is also one of the wealthiest countries in the world. In the U.S., historically speaking, traditional families consisted of a mother, father and some children. Traditionally, and much like the Albanian family, the father would go out and work as the mother stayed home to take care of the kids and the house. As decades have passed, the U.S. has started to see a large percentage of women join the work force as almost an equal to men. In Albania as decades past, women were allowed to become equals to men if they took a vow of celibacy and dressed and acted like men. In Albanian culture, it was acceptable for a woman to decide to take on the role as a man, but here in the U.S. it was looked down upon in our culture. For a women to dress as a man in the U.S. and try to act like an equal was not something that was socially acceptable. Until recently, if a baby was born as a woman, she was expected to live the entirety of her life as a woman doing women specific jobs. If the little girl felt the urge at any point to dress like a man, she needed to do it in private and may be shamed for doing so if someone found out. There has never been a need for women in the U.S. to dress like a man and the only reason it is done now is because women feel that they identify more as a man than a woman.

             

The U.S. is recently starting to recognize the difference between gender and sex and is slowly starting to accept the notion that people may identify more with the opposite gender then that of the sex they were born. Social norms are slowly starting to change as more women are starting to join the work force in positions that were once deemed “for men only” jobs. The U.S. is starting to lift the demands of women staying home to raise the kids as families are changing to single mother families or same sex families. The purpose for gender in the U.S. and Albania is clear for what the needs for men and women are, but as the needs of the culture start to change in the U.S. and Albania, so does the purpose for gender. There will always be gender roles and those roles will always be fulfilled, but the person that fills those gender roles may look a little different then they used to.

             

In doing this assignment, I have learned that both of these countries have gender roles that need to be filled for the purpose of life. In both the U.S. and Albania, women and men are typically doing the same things for their family and in both countries, the women have the ability to live a life as a man. The biggest difference between these two countries is that Albania is doing it out of necessity or to get out from under oppression and the U.S. is doing it because some people identify more with one gender or the other. The other difference I noticed is that in Albania, it is in some cases encouraged, while in the U.S. it can be greatly looked down upon. The biggest thing that I took away from this assignment was that culture plays the biggest role in deciding whether a person will take on the role of a different gender and be accepted or mocked. I also learned that while Albania heavily relies on the strength of “men” to be the providers, the U.S. with its rise in single mothers and same-sex couples, is getting away from relying on men to be the providers. This was a very thought provoking assignment  in regards to the way culture plays the biggest part in a lot of life changing decisions that people make.

           

           

Works Cited

Background Note: Albania." Background Notes On Countries Of The World: Albania (2007): 1. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 21 July 2015.

Bilefsky, Dan. “Sworn to virginity and living as men in Albania”. New York Times. Europe, June 23, 2008. Web. 20 July 2015.

Gezon, and Conrad Kottak. ANTH 101 Cultural Anthropology Truckee Meadows Community College. United States: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014. Print.

Tarifa. 2007. "Balkan Societies of "Social Men": Transcending Gender Boundaries." Societies Without Borders 2 (1): 75-92. Available at: http://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/swb/vol2/iss1/6