Anthropology of East Europe Review 

BOOK REVIEW: ENGENDERING SONG: SINGING & SUBJECTIVITYATPRESPA 


ALBANIAN WEDDINGS. SUGARMAN, JANE c., 1997. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 

PRESS. $29.95. xIx+395 (+20) + COMPACT DISK. 


Victor A. Friedman 

University ojChicago 


At the beginning of her excellent book, JS asks 
what she refers to as "the most obvious questions" 
about Prespa Albanian weddings: "How is it that 
these families have developed such a strong sense 
of place? What is it about weddings that makes 
them so central to the life of the community? And 
why is it so important that everyone sing at such a 
celebration?" (7). Her answer is a sophisticated 
monograph that combines anthropological theory, 
thick ethnography, musicology, and 
ethnomusicology elaborately interwoven like the 
different melody and drone lines of a Pre spa 
Albanian wedding song. Her rich material will be 
of interest not only to scholars in these fields but 
also to linguists, Balkanists, Albanologists, 
students of Macedonia, Albania, and former 
Yugoslavia, diaspora studies, folklore, and others. 
Moreover, the book is accompanied by a 70­
minute CD with 24 tracks of the songs and music 
about which she is writing, most of them field or 
community recordings not otherwise available. 
The CD itself will be a valuable addition to the 
collection of anyone interested in Albanian or 
Balkan folk music. The result is a real tour de 
force. By situating her extensive data firmly in 
anthropological theory, JS shows how Pre spa 
Albanian wedding songs -- "the principal means 
through which individuals participate in a 
wedding" (3) -- negotiate, inscribe. and reproduce 
social relations and identities in a complex society 
with a strong basis in tradition and patriarchy. 

The book is divided into eight chapters 
(1-345) followed by a glossary of about 60 items 
(347-51), notes (353-72), a bibliography of about 
250 items (373-86), a discography of 12 items 
(386), and an index (387-95). There are also two 
sections of high-quality photographs that are 
integral to illustrating the text and beautifully 
capture different points in the wedding rituals (ten 
each from Prespa [1980-95] and from North 
America [1985-94]), 23 musical examples 
(notations), six tables, and six figures. 

The first chapter (1-39), entitled 
"Approaching Prespa Singing," provides the basic 
historical, ethnographic, and theoretical 
background. Her fieldwork concentrates on 

families with connections to three villages in the 
former Ottoman nahiye of Lower Prespa, currently 
(and also before the administrative reforms of 
1996) a part of the Resen administrative district in 
the southwestern part of the Republic of 
Macedonia, which is the area in this region where 
JS regards the type of polyphonic singing she is 
studying to be more firmly established. Although 
a large number of these families now live in North 
America and elsewhere, JS quite justifiably frames 
her work in terms of "the musical practices of 
families living in two distinct locales who 
nevertheless regard themselves as part of a single 
diasporic community" (16). Although never 
glossing over differences between the Pre spa 
village and the North American city, it is not until 
the final chapter that she concentrates on changes 
wrought by the diasporic experience. 

Each of the subsequent chapters begins 
with a description of a specific wedding event, 
including song texts accompanying it, followed by 
more general discussion and critical analysis, 
which also make use of illustrative song texts. Her 
work thus creates its own polyphony of 
ethnography and theory. In this manner, JS 
provides a complete description of the main part of 
a Prespa wedding celebration over the course of 
seven days and also elaborates a description of 
Prespa social life. The theoretical sections build 
on both foregoing and subsequent events, and 
therefore JS suggests that the reader reread the 
initial section of each chapter after fmishing the 
entire book so that the analysis can have its full 
effect. 

The remaining chapter titles and the 
events they are built around are the following: 

2. Singing as a Social Activity (Singing at the 
Groom's) (40-78) 

3. Singing as a Gendered Activity (Women's 
Singing at the Bride's) (79-119) 

4. The "Order" of Weddings (The Bride Is 
Adorned) (120-54) 

5. The Prespa System (Men's Singing at the 
Groom's) (155-204) 

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Anthropology of East Europe Review 

6. Singing and the Discourse of Honor (A Men's 
Konak at the Groom's) (205-26) 

7. Singing as the Practice of Patriarchy (The 
Groom is Bathed and is Shaved) (227-85) 

8. Emergent Subjectivities (The Bride is Taken) 
(286-345) 

Chapters Two and Three discuss Pre spa 
singing per se: The structures of the songs, 
specifics of vocal production, repertoire, and 
differences based on gender. Chapter Four 
describes and analyzes the structure of Prespa 
Albanian social occasions in general and weddings 
in particular. Chapter Five presents the Prespa 
"system", i.e. social order, notions of honor and 
morality, constitutions of personhood and identity. 
In Chapters Six and Seven JS moves from her 
interpretive focus on lived experience and the 
community's articulation of that experience to a 
critical analysis of how singing structures 
experience and engenders those who sing. Her 
final chapter, which is both the climax of the 
wedding celebration and the locus where the 
disjunction between Prespa and North America is 
fully articulated, investigates new forms of 
subjectivity emerging from Pre spa Albanian 
experience in North America. Particularly striking 
is the tendency among the younger generation in 
the direction ofgreater similarity among men's and 
women's singing styles and topics and away from 
"constructing though their singing the image of 
two innately and profoundly different genders, 
inhabiting polarized domains of activity and 
concern" (339). Also noteworthy, although only 
mentioned in passing, is the emerging hegemony 
of Geg (North Albanian) songs as symbols of 
Albanian ethnicity among families from former 
Yugoslavia (345), including those from Pre spa, 
despite the fact that the promotion of Tosk (South 
Albanian) songs in pre-l 989 Albania gave Prespa 
Albanians the sense that their songs were 
especially "Albanian" (77). 

From a linguistic point of view, ]S has 
done an superior job of rendering the Prespa 
dialect of Albanian accurately and intelligibly. 
Her translations are sensitive to nuance -- out of 
literally thousands of lines of text, I found only 
one omitted word that I would have translated 
(temjera 'wretched, poor, unhappy' [9]) -- and one 
grammatical error ('girl' is the subject and tambura 
is the direct object [54]), and I found only two 
typographical errors (Kanhov 1990 should be 1900 
[353], Montenegran should be Montenegrin 
[365]). 

There is one minor matter, however, that I 
would have preferred to see treated with greater 
consistency, namely that of etymologies, and, 
connected to that, the relationship of Prespa 
Albanian terminology and the usage to those of 
other ethnic groups in Macedonia. Although these 
concerns are entirely peripheral to JS's central 
theses and by no means detract from the 
tremendous significance of her accomplishment 
and the solidity of her arguments, analyses, and 
conclusions, -- she is, after all, concerned with 
Prespa Albanian wedding songs and their relation 
to gender and subjectivity -- nonetheless, the lack 
of consistency in etymologizing and comparison 
with other Balkan societies could give the 
impression of a purposeful distancing of Pre spa 
Albanian culture from its surroundings and 
immediate contacts, although this is not the intent. 

In general JS does a good job of 
addressing regional commonalties (e.g., an 
excellent and detailed summary of shared musical 
styles among groups of Albanians, Aromanians, 
Macedonians, and Greeks (356 n. 5), and she is 
sensitive to the delicacies of articulating issues of 
convergence without jumping to unsupported 
historical conclusions (71, 357 n. 10). Her 
comment on the role ofhistorical (men's) songs in 
socializing the various modem Balkan peoples to 
their respective modem national loyalties in the 
course of the nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries is right on the mark (257). Often she 
gives Macedonian and other Balkan and 
Mediterranean (usually Arabic) terminological 
and/or conceptual equivalents (e.g., 363 llll. 16, 
17). Nonetheless, the fact that JS has gone to 
the trouble of supplying the Arabic and Persian 
etyma of many of the Turkish words borrowed into 
Albanian -- in addition to the fact that these words 
are identified as Turkisms in the first place -­
suggests that ]S is attempting to place these 
aspects of Prespa Albanian culture (or at least their 
terminology) in a broader context. This is 
admirable but not consistently carried out. Thus, 
for example. bakllava (347), bereqet (247), and 
Rama::.an (350) are etymologized directly from 
Arabic with no indication that they arrived via 
Turkish, while for the Arabo-Persian Turkisms 
behar (136), daulle (I41, 348), gurbet (348), lafe 
(62), lokum (349), and siinnet (59) only the 
Turkish etymon is given. The term sinitore (141, 
351) is not etymologized, but it is based on 
Turkish sini 'tray', itself from Persian. The one 
word of Slavic origin in the glossary, gosti 
'evening gathering to honor relative' is not 
identified as a loan (348). On the other hand, 

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Anthropology of East Europe Review 

xhaxha 'paternal uncle or male first cousin' is 
mistakenly identified as "probably from Slavic 
djadja." (174, 351). The Slavic from djadja is East 
Slavic and does not occur as such in the Balkans, 
and the source is most likely Turkish amca 
'paternal uncle' (ultimately from Arabic 'amm 
'paternal uncle'; the appellative xha is probably 
original and not a shortening [180], and the 
etymological complications are probably due to a 
combination of expressive reduplication and taboo 
deformation that need not concern us here.) 

On a few occasions, JS looks to Turkish 
or Arabic when there is a Macedonian or Turkish 
parallel right in the Prespa Albanians' own back 
yard, so to speak. For example, the use of kendoj, 
whose primary meaning is 'sing (both of humans 
and animals), in extended meanings such as 'be 
happy' and 'read' has an exact parallel in 
Macedonian pee for both primary and secondary 
meanings (the fact that 'read' is now archaic is 
irrelevant to etymological considerations). 
Although Turkish oku- can also mean both 'sing' 
and 'read', its other main meaning is 'call out', it 
does not have the meaning of 'be happy', and it is 
not used for animals (6t- is used for that). The 
association between singing and reading is clearly 
connected with liturgy as the primary contact of 
peasants with literacy in earlier times, regardless 
of religion. Thus, the Pre spa Albanian use of 
kendoj has an exact parallel in Macedonian, not in 
Turkish (cf. 68-70, 356 n. 7). The suggestion 
(183,362 n. 11) that the Albanian use of mend 
'mind', to mean '[human] reason, intelligence', is a 
translation of Arabic 'aq! rather than Turkish akV.1 
or a native or shared Balkan development, 
although not JS's, is nonetheless cited by her and is 
completely unjustified in view of the Turkish 
semantic complex and the fact that the Turks and 
Turkish were the vehicle for the importation of 
Arabo-Persian Muslim culture and lexicon into the 
Balkans. 

On several occasions (4, 23,135-37,370 
n. 29) JS comments on her "impressions from 
Macedonia of the marked differences between 
Albanians and the Slavic groups among whom 
they live." (23). Leaving to one side the thorny 
issue of ethnolinguistic terminology versus self 
ascription (JS refers to "Slavic-speaking Muslims" 
[II], although their language is the same 
Macedonian as their Christian neighbors, but 
"Albanian-speaking Roma" [9] although many 
such groups call themselves "Gjupci", 
[etymologically cognate with English 'Gypsies'], 
and consider themselves to be an ethnic group 
separate from the Roma; also [pace 5] there are 

some Orthodox Albanian-speakers in Macedonia), 
JS's observation about Turkish-speaking Muslim 
families from Prespa that "their system is virtually 
indistinguishable from that of Prespare" (371 n. 
9), suggests that the issue may be a basic 
Muslim/Christian rather than 
AIban ian/Macedonian cultural opposition. 

Moreover, it is arguable that at least some 
of the differences are related to the fact that as the 
state-forming majority, even rural Macedonian 
Christians have been subjected to more 
"modernizing" pressures of urban origin since 
World War Two. In the early 1970's, I had 
occasion to observe that Macedonian Christians in 
plains villages were already considerably 
differentiated in their behavior from those in 
isolated mountain villages, and those from the 
mountain villages observed the type of gender/age 
based "system" described by JS (185). This is not 
to say that Prespa Albanian society is not unique in 
many respects. The deliberate exclusion of 
singing from work activities and restriction to 
socializing (58) is a case in point, but JS herself 
(194,337) points out differences between Lower 
Prespa Albanians and those from Albanian­
speaking villages in nearby Upper Pre spa that 
suggest complex processes of contact and 
accommodation which, while justifiably beyond 
the scope of her study, suggest many rich avenues 
of further investigation. 

None of these considerations detracts 
from the tremendous accomplishment represented 
by JS's work. Prespa Albanian society is unique, 
richly textured, and inaccessible to outsiders, and 
JS has made an immensely significant contribution 
to the advancement of knowledge in both her 
collection and analysis of a fantastically rich trove 
of data and insights. What emerges is a warm, 
sympathetic, and finely drawn presentation and 
analysis of a specific practice (wedding singing) 
that illuminates an entire society (Pre spa 
Albanians) and more (the Balkan and 
Mediterranean regions). JS has demonstrated 
effectively that Prespa singing does not merely 
express, reflect or articulate but rather itself 
constructs, constitutes, maintains, and transforms 
gender in particular and social formation in 
general. 

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