Yannick Becker

Julien Sein

Lionel Velly

Laura Giacom Ino

Luc Renaud

M Arie

Dum Assy

Pascaline Boitelle

Rom Ain Lacoste

Jean-Luc Anton

Bruno Nazarian

Adrien M Eguerditchian
email: adrien.meguerditchian@univ-amu.fr

EARLY LEFT BRAIN ASYMMETRY IN NEW-BORN BABOONS: WHAT DOES IT TELL US (OR NOT) ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF THE LANGUAGE-READY BRAIN?

Language and its typical asymmetric brain organization are considered as unique to Homo sapiens evolution (Crow, 2002), suggesting a specific "language-ready" brain dating back to 350 000 ago. Therefore brain lateralization was hypothesized as central to characterize the language-ready brain, a majority of hu mans showing greater cortical activations in the left hemisphere for most language functions [START_REF] Vigneau | Meta-analy zing left hemisphere language areas: phonology, semantics, and sentence processing[END_REF]). The specific "language-ready" brain also suggests infant brain is pre-wired to learn languages. At birth preverbal new-born infants are already sensitive to their native vocal prosody and are able to d istinguish every phonemes (e.g. [START_REF] Mehler | A precursor of language acquisition in young infants[END_REF], suggesting the innate inherited readiness for language acquisition. Similarly than adults, infants also show structural and functional left ward asymmetry of a critical language area, the planum temporale (PT), h ighlighting the PT asymmetry as a marker for functional language readiness in children development prior to language exposure (e.g. [START_REF] Dubois | Structural asymmetries in the in fant language and sensori-motor networks[END_REF]. Surprisingly, PT structural asymmetry has been now reported in nonhuman species such as chimpanzees and baboons (e.g. [START_REF] Marie | Left Brain Asymmet ry of the Planu m Temporale in a non-Ho minid primate: Redefining the origin of brain specialization fo r language[END_REF].

The aim of the present study is to investigate the neuroanatomical asymmetries of the PT in new-born nonhuman primates, the baboons (Papio anubis). T1 & T2 weighted anatomical images were acquired in vivo on a 3T MRI scanner in 32 unwean in fant baboons of different ages (from 4 days to 2 months old at the Centre IRM (Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone) before the full maturation of myelin, synapses and cell bodies. Among those baboons, 18 have been scanned a second time when reaching 7 to 10 months of age (i.e., after myelin maturation). Both infant and mother were anesthetized for each M RI session and then put back in their social groups housed at the Station de Primatologie CNRS. Fo r each subject's MRI scan, the PT's surface area was manually traced in both hemispheres using ITK-SNAP software (see [START_REF] Marie | Left Brain Asymmet ry of the Planu m Temporale in a non-Ho minid primate: Redefining the origin of brain specialization fo r language[END_REF].

We found, for the first time in nonhuman new-born, hu man-like significant PT's surface asymmetry in favor of the left hemisphere, a brain asymmetry which increases across ages. This finding in non-linguistic primate infants strongly questions the idea that early PT asymmetry constitutes a robust marker for speech development in hu mans. It also suggest that such asymmetric brain organisation might be (1) h ighly heritab le with a strong genetic component in its development, at both ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels and (2) be inherited fro m our co mmon ancestor shared with old-world monkeys at least 25-35 million years ago.

Acknowledgements

The project has received funding fro m the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programm grant agreement N° 716931 -GESTIMAGE -ERC-2016-STG.


Hannes Grandits

Xavier Bougarel

Nathalie Clayer

Fabio Giomi

Karl Kaser

Patriarchal and heroic re-and deconstructions: a tribute to and critical reflections on four books of

Keywords: Generation eine leicht konstatierbare Unruhe, eine konstruktive Unzufriedenheit. Wir meinen weiters, dass man diese Unruhe nicht verebben lassen sollte, sondern dass sie aufgefangen und dokumentiert werden muss. … Diese Generation ist noch jung, sie (bzw. manche von ihnen) wird/werden erst wichtiger ist es, ihre jetzigen Absichten, Ziele und Programme kennenzulernen, um sie später zur

de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

like to take the task (and honor) to reflect again about their achievements and results and take also maybe the liberty to put them in retrospect in some constructive critical appraisal. We are aware of the fact that this can only be a preliminary endeavor. As we all know Karl Kaser, there is much further research from him to comewhich we look forward to.

Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden

In the early 1990ies, Karl Kaser's book Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden: Ursprünge und Gegenwart des balkanischen Patriarchats (published in 19924 ) marked the beginning of a paradigmatic shift in the historiography about Southeastern Europestarting in the Austrian institutional landscape, but was also increasingly acknowledged in the region itself and internationally. Looking back, it can certainly be regarded as one of the most significant books about Southeast European history of that period of time.

The innovation of this book laid in its fresh approach to rural culture in the mountainous regions of the (Western) Balkans. The Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden-book initiated something like a 'cultural turn' in Southeast European historiography. At that time, Kaser was experimenting with theories and methods of anthropology/ethnology. He also got deeply involved in the debates of the late 1980ies/early 1990ies within the German-speaking historical social sciences about the future orientation of social history. A newly emerging 'historical anthropology' started to criticize fundamentally the up to then so dominant Historische Sozialwissenschaften. 5 The critique pointed to the fact that most historians in conventional historical social science seemed to have forgotten the 'individual' and his/her agency in their studies on society, economy or class. Another point of critique referred to the usual preoccupation with questions of 'modernity'. Analyzing achievements andmore often -failures on the ways towards a 'modern society' were characteristic features in many social history studies dealing with societies in the periphery (of Europe)and the social history of Southeastern Europe was definitely written very much in such a tone. 6 Inherently connected to such modernization-centered approaches was an outspoken tendency to diminish and despise the 'culture' of the so-called 'non-modern'. And it usually focused predominantly on the nineteenth and twentieth century. Contrary to this, in Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden Karl Kaser was much more interested in reconstructing and understanding the 'cultural matrix' which seemed to have been shaping life over a long period of time prior to the dramatic and ongoing transformations of the latest century(ies).

So, the Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden-book was written in a period of general programmatic controversy and re-orientation. But the book can and should also be seen in the context of the productive research that Kaser conducted in the years preceding to the writing of the book. In 1986, he published his voluminous monography on the organization and social life of the peasant-soldiers in the Habsburg military frontier entitled Freier Bauer und Soldat.

Die Militarisierung der agrarischen Gesellschaft in der kroatisch-slawonischen Militärgrenze (1535-1881). 7 In the years 1986 and 1988, he co-authored (together with Karl Stocker) two volumes on Bäuerliches Leben in der Oststeiermark seit 1848 8 in which rural life, economy and social hierarchies in Eastern Styria were investigated in fascinating detail. These studies gave deep insights into the historical making of rural societies, into processes of class stratification in concrete regional settings and what the life of 'common people' andin particularthe sublayers of rural society could look like. In Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeskrieger Kaser now turned to the 'patriarchal core zone' of the Balkans, i.e. to the geographically rough and partly karstic, mainly mountainous area, which reached from Eastern Herzegovina and Montenegro in the north, that included much of present-day Albania, Kosovo and Western Macedonia, and reached far into Thessaly and Epirus in the south. This was historically the milieu of a pastoral sheep and goat economy, where the seasonal moves between winter and summer pastures were crucial elements of making a livelihood: it was for many centuries the milieu of the Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden.

Kaser depicts how the different economic logics of a pastoral life in an often extremely hard physical environment were a clue for the understanding of how social systems of tribal, patriarchal lineage and kinship organization were formed and how they worked. But he also makes clear that the patriarchal culture of the communities under study was not just a mere 7 Karl Kaser, Freier Bauer und Soldat. Die Militarisierung der agrarischen Gesellschaft in der kroatischslawonischen Militärgrenze 1535-1881, Graz 1996 (Zur Kunde Südosteuropas, II/15). This book came out first in the self-edited series of the Abteilung für Südosteuropäische Geschichte in Graz; it was reissued by Böhlau-Verlag, i.e. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau in 1997. 8 Karl Kaser / Karl Stocker, Bäuerliches Leben in der Oststeiermark 1848 bis heute. Bd. I: Landwirtschaft von der Selbstversorgung zum Produktivitätszwang. Wien, Graz 1986; Karl Kaser / Karl Stocker, Bäuerliches Leben in der Oststeiermark 1848 bis heute. Bd. II: Die verspätete Revolution. Wien, Graz 1988. adaptation to the given mountain environment. Historically, mountain economies have developed quite distinct cultural features of social organization.9 This was also true for the here discussed Balkan regions. But how can one understand this historical making of 'heroic patriarchy' in the given context? This is the key question that Kaser critically engages with in the first parts of the book.

Kaser refers to a variety of theories and reflects about the way the 'cultural matrix' might have evolved historically. The interpretation that he offers is combining elements of a longue durée reaching back far into antiquity with ruptures and processes of adoption of social and economic organization in later periods. According to Kaser, an 'Illyrian' mode of pastoral economy has already existed in the Illyrian times before the Roman rule over the region.

Under the Romans, the here discussed region belonged to the two provinces Illyria and Macedonia. Although over long time only confined to very remote peripheries of these provinces, the Illyrian model of pastoral organization continued to exist in parts of the mountainous margins. During and after the end of Roman rule and culture which was paralleled by the huge Slave immigrations, many of the former inhabitants fled into the mountains. When in the eleventh centuries sources depicted the mountainous regional contexts in the here given areas, they were already mainly populated by Vlach and Albanian pastoral communities. Together with other populations, especially Slavic speaking, these communities seemed to have arranged their pastoral life according to an 'Illyrian heritage' of economic and social organization. Starting in the fourteenth and intensifying in the fifteenth century, the Ottoman conquest of the region triggered an enormous process of migrations.

Parts of the population fled and others settled down in the deserted territories. What remained and even stabilized was, according to Kaser, the Illyrian mode of social and economic organization. Even more, it was particularly in this transformation period in which a development towards tribal, patriarchal lineage and kinship organization further materialized.

In the following centuries of Ottoman (in the mountains often rather indirect) rule, the whole system of patriarchal pastoral order according to the Illyrian heritage was an unquestioned way of life. And this continued to be the case far into the nineteenth and partly even the twentieth centuries.

How this way of life functioned in daily life is discussed further on in the book with a notable interest in the variabilities of the different pastoral milieus, regions and communities. In the chapter about the 'elements of patriarchal mentality', Kaser differentiates three variants in the persistence of a patriarchal adaptation (with varying degree of territorial and lineage overarching organization): Stammesgesellschaft (tribal society), Geschlechterverbände (lineage groups) and Verwandtschaftsverbände (kin-based groups). In all of the three variants, complex structured households seemed to have been widespread. In such complex households under the authority of the father, one or more married sons with their spouses and children formed a social and economic core element. Regulated by traditions of common law, alliances were formed through marriage, god-parenthood and traditions like blood-brotherhood. A crucial element in the ideological and spiritual foundation of the whole system was its close connection to an ancestor cult which usually was only loosely integrated into either Orthodox/Catholic Christianity or (variants of) Muslim religiosity. The embeddedness into an ancestor cult, which ritually cherished the male lineage going back many generations to a founding father of the community, was also the background for practices of blood-revenge or for the strong endeavors in maintaining the patrilineal descent by all means.

Another chapter deals in detail with the (variants of) pastoral economies in the given patriarchal settings. The milieu of the short-distance seasonal migrations (between the summer and winter pastures) are discussed in contrast to those of the long-distance movements. Transhumant, semi-and nomadic variations are the object of detailed discussions. A first 'erosion' of the systems came with an increasing presence of money economy. Starting in the eighteenth century, problems were even more caused by a continuing population growth beyond the level of economic sustainability. Poverty and seasonal hunger crisis seemed to have become an integral part of daily life in many communities. Banditry, mobilization as soldiers, labor migrations and/or increased orientation towards agriculture were some of the strategies to deal with these existential problems.

The book ends with a chapter about the beginning end of 'Balkan patriarchy', which Kaser depicts as closely connected with the growing interference of emerging centralistic modern statehood starting in the nineteenth century. Ali Pasha of Ioannina's rule in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century stood, as Kaser depicts in an exemplary section, at the beginning of this process. The drawing of new state borders, which began to be firmly established since several new post-Ottoman statehoods gained independence in the Congress of Berlin in 1878, were further steps in this development. Those state borders disrupted traditional pastoral migration routes. The increasingly bureaucratic order imposed the rule of its judiciary and undermined the traditional authority of modes of common law. In the end, new property regulations also increasingly confined the rights of pasturing on 'common ground'. All of these developments in combination vastly began to challenge the patriarchal economy and order.

Kaser's Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden depicted a social/cultural order that started to develop into a crisis and into a processes of fundamental transformations in the nineteenth century. But over a very long period of time, it has deeply shaped the life worlds of the people living in large parts of the mountainous rural regions of what is today Albania, Montenegro as well Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Greece. The book analyses how these people in often very peripheral areas struggled to make a living, how they organized their social daily life and what kind of understanding of honor and morality guided their communal relations.

Heroism and (partly extreme) patriarchal male domination seem to have been a characteristic feature in not just a few areas and, as Karl Kaser tries to show, were embedded into a 'cultural matrix' that came into existence in processes rooted far back in the past.

As pointed out already, there was huge interest in Kaser's historical-anthropological (and at that time Kaser sometimes called it also ethno-historical) approach towards the history of communal life in the studied contexts. However, one misunderstanding of what the book is about, accompanied its reception from the very beginning. Although the whole book is devoted to explain cultural modes of pastoral rural communities in the further past (the final chapter of the book on the 'beginning end' is discussing how the rule of Ali Pasha of Ionnina, who lived between ca. 1750 and 1822, had already deeply started to interfere with the 'freedom of the tribes and lineages'), some captious critics saw it as an a 'cultural othering' of people living in 'the Balkans' (even in the present). It is obvious that such an allegation was far out of proportion with the reality and the content of the book. Maybe there was some unease with Kaser's general methodological approach of explicitly not negating 'cultural difference' (this was also practiced by him in the above mentioned books on the peasantsoldiers of the Habsburg military border and also in the study on the rural communities of Eastern Styria). Kaser often stressed that we have to start from the point that social life in the past (the more distant one, but not only that) might have been culturally very 'different' to present-day perceptions, standards and beliefs. It would be the historian's task, according to Kaser, not to negate and 'write away' these differences in belief, behavior or accepted morality. Indeed, it is a challengeas the repeatedly upcoming debates on 'writing culture' point outhow to deal with 'cultural difference' of societies in the nearer as well as more distant past.

In the process of the book's scholarly reception, some critical feedback definitely was productive and stimulated the further discussion of the presented results. Three aspects should be shortly mentioned. Although Kaser explicitly deals with the pastoral mountainous populations, he is sometimes more than brief in writing about those (often quite considerable) proportions of the inhabitants living outside those communities, i.e. in the contexts of agricultural villages, within a chiftlik-economy or in the vicinity of or within town economy in given regions. Beyond Kaser's intention, it could be wrongly understood that he would not have been aware of the fact that in many of the studied regional settings, the lifeworld of pastoral organization was coexisting and even inter-connected within variable other settings of social structure. One can also discuss up to what extent 'Ottoman rule' was really that much 'remote' to the mobile populations as depicted in Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden.

There is evidence that there might have also been a quite systemic anddiffering in region and timeintense interconnectedness of the Ottoman power respectively administrative order vis-à-vis the discussed communities. Furthermore, there is an ongoing discussion about the 'Illyrian heritage'-thesis that is partly disputed. Despite all critical engagements with the Hirten, Helden, Stammeskrieger-book, the results, discussions, and reflections of the book are now a basic element of Southeast European historiography. With this book, Kaser has achieved that social (but also political and other) historiography on Southeastern Europe (and also neighboring disciplines) began to take 'cultural' beliefs, aspirations and world-views of peripheral people in the region/communities that once formed the 'patriarchal core' of the (Western) Balkans much more seriously. It also set in motion a highly dynamic process of approaching the history of the Balkans with a further historical-anthropological agenda. Karl Kaser himself continued to research in this direction.

Freundschaft und Feindschaft auf dem Balkan

Freundschaft und Feindschaft auf dem Balkan ('Friendship and Enmity in the Balkans'), a book published in 2001, begins with the observation that 'nationalism, enmity and hatred still appear to hold sway in the Balkans' (page 18), and endeavors to determine to what extent this impression actually corresponds to reality. This book was intended less for the academic community than for a broader readership troubled by the wars of the 1990ies, as well as for journalists and policymakers, as shown by the series of recommendations given at the end of the book. This may explain why it seems more outdated than Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden, and has less influence on contemporary Balkan studies. Karl Kaser's book makes two main contributions: firstly, it gives a general overview of the most controversial topics of the 1990iesan overview that was very useful when the book was published but is somewhat outdated today. Secondly, it provides a historical anthropology of Southeastern Europe, structured around the categories of friend and foe and their use in the Balkan societies of the past and present. In this review, I will focus on this historical anthropology laid out by Karl Kaser. Underpinned by his deep knowledge of Balkan family structures and pastoral societies, Karl Kaser delineates three kinds of society in Europe: the administrative societies (Behördengesellschaften) of Western Europe, where a highly institutionalised rule of law enables a trust-based civil society to flourish; the clientelist societies (Gefolgschaftsgesellschaften) of Southern Europe, based on asymmetric and personal relationships between patrons and their clients; and the kinship societies (Verwandschaftsgesellschaften) of Southeastern Europe, where ties between the members of the same extended families and clans stretch through the whole society and state, and where ties of friendship do not go outside the family setting, as the outside world is viewed as hostile.

This categorisation is intellectually stimulating and probably partly true, but it nevertheless raises several questions. Firstly, it confuses certain elements. For example, Karl Kaser states (page 191) that "friendship has nevertheless always existed outside confessional boundaries" in the Balkans. But this statement is not compatible with his assertion that ties of friendship only exist within family groups unless we assume that mixed marriages were frequent in traditional Balkan societiesand that was obviously not the case. Similarly, borrowing the distinction made by Ferdinand Tönnies between communities (Gemeinschaften) and societies (Gesellschaften), Karl Kaser classifies neighbourly ties as a part of society (page 70), whereas Tönnies classified it as a part of community. Unfortunately, Karl Kaser has nothing more to say about this issue of neighbourliness (komşuluk, komšiluk), although it is crucial in Balkan societies.

More generally, Karl Kaser ultimately presents Balkan societies as segmented societies in which family groups gather into clans, then clans into clientships, and clientships into states.

At every level, there is only 'mechanical solidarity' (Emile Durkheim) between homogenous and self-sufficient elements, excluding any form of 'organic solidarity' between heterogenous and complementary elements. However, such a view of Balkan societies is only possible if cities and social classes are ignored. This approach runs the risk of viewing the state as nothing more than a successful family group. From this standpoint, Karl Kaser's approach to the friend-foe categories is in opposition to Carl Schmitt's conception of the state's political nature being grounded in its exclusive capacity to distinguish between friends and foes, both domestically and internationally. Instead, by using the terms 'friendship' and 'enmity' to describe everything from interpersonal to international relations, Karl Kaser ultimately depoliticises the issue of statehood, and this approach inevitably colours his interpretation of the events of the 1990ies. Indeed, in Karl Kaser's view, the wars of the 1990ies were attributable to the inadequate institutionalisation of the state, and its collapse in the case of Yugoslavia. Yet can the unprecedented violence of the Yugoslav wars be explained solely by the disappearance of the Yugoslav federation? In fact, the most blatant example of state collapse in the Balkans in the 1990ies was not in Yugoslavia, but in Albania in 1997. However, the Albanian crisis caused relatively few deaths. By contrast, the Yugoslav wars were primarily marked by the emergence of new states that aspired to replicate the Western nation-state model, thus resorting to military aggression, ethnic cleansing or even genocide. This resulted in a much larger number of victims. In the Yugoslav wars, traditional practices of violence, family-and clan-based solidarity ties, and confessional tieswhen presentwere marshalled for building a modern nation-state. Moreover, the actions of the international community, by and large, merely encouraged this process, as illustrated indirectly by the fact that the only two former Yugoslav countries to join the EU, to date, are the ones that are ethnically homogenous: Slovenia and Croatia.

A thorough discussion of the Yugoslav wars is beyond the scope of this paper, and would take me away from Karl Kaser's analyses. Thus, what I take away from this book is a set of remarks, more limited in scope, about changes in family structures and pastoral economies in the Balkans. For example, by emphasising the overpopulation and the crisis in traditional patriarchy that rural society endured in the first half of the 20 th century, Kaser opens new approaches for thinking about the Second World War and the Partisan movement. Indeed, this movement can possibly be interpreted not as a new manifestation of the centuries' old culture of hajduks (social bandits), but instead as an expression of sons revolting against their fathers, or as a form of 'migration for food' ('odlaženje na prehranu'10 ), in a wartime context that interrupted migratory paths that were prevalent during times of peace.

However, the Second World War is also a stark reminder that the friend-foe categories are by no means airtight in the Balkans. To the contrary, the global conflict was characterised, in this region of Europe, by frequently shifting alliances amongst individuals, families, ethnic groups and even entire states, as shown by Romania and Bulgaria switching to the Allied side in summer 1944. The case of the Partisans also suggests that, in Southeastern Europe, hatred is not transmitted from one generation to the next, but is built day after day. Forms of hate are also 'inventions of tradition' (Eric Hobsbawn). The book that Karl Kaser refers to most often to illustrate the historical depth of enmity in the Balkans is "Land without Justice", published in 1958 by Milovan Djilas.11 However, 16 years earlier, in 1942, the young Djilas published a text in the newspaper Borba entitled "A Noble Hatred", which proclaims:

"The sole measure of the amount of love for one's people is the depth of hatred for one's enemy. […] Seeking out something human within those monsters means believing them to have something that they do not and cannot have. It means forgetting that you are a man, great and noble, called upon to free men, [to free] your people, from monsters in human shape. Hating the occupants, hating their servants, this hideous growth on the sublime body of the people, hating them to the depths of your soul, in your every thought, with every drop of your bloodthis means being imbued in the great and noble sentiment of being an avenger for your people, this means remaining faithful to your people, to its history and future. […] Pitiless hatred towards them is your programme and your oath, it is the sacred fire for which you are fighting. It strengthens each friend of the people, it arms each warrior with the strongest weapon, the weapon of victory. It tightens the ranks in battle.

Remember that the great leader of progressive humanity, Comrade Stalin, said: One cannot defeat the enemy without learning to hate him."

12

The Partisans therefore instilled not only brotherhood and unityfriendship, as Karl Kaser would saybetween the Yugoslav peoples; they also fuelled the hatred of the German, Italian, Ustaša or Četnik enemies. Both processes went hand in hand. And so, in a sign of friendship for Karl Kaser, and in the hope that he will not consider this criticism to be a sign of enmity, we would like to present him with this poem, written by an anonymous Partisan in Slavonia: Hating, hating and hating, the highest and holiest of laws annihilating the verminthe fascists with each step I take.

The assault will begin soon.

I calmly await the order.

Then it is given. I run like the wind, hatred carries me forward and I am unafraid the shells rumble, the machine gun hits and strikes down, comrades, I cannot be defeated, for hatred carries me in its arms as a mother carries her favourite son. This poem could illustrate the strength and persistence of the friend-foe categories in the Balkans during the Second World War. However, it must be emphasized that the narrator does not regard his combat as a continuation of his ancestors' battles. He does not know whether his father was right or wrong to fight in the First World War (presumably in the Austro-Hungarian Army). While carried away by his own hate, he still keeps his distance from past wars, and is not a passive participant in a never-ending cycle of violence.

Balkan und Naher Osten

Should we reorient the history of the Balkans to better understand it, to better grasp it, as we would do with a bottle of Orangina (but without shaking it)? What would become of this story if the North and South Poles were reversed? If from a Southeast, the Balkans became a Northwest? Karl Kaser would answer you that there is no need to turn the Balkans upside down (and a fortiori to shake them down!), no need to make the sun rise in the west and set in the east, no need to imagine the North Pole in the south and vice versa, no need to start walking on your hands and even less need to turn the book you have in your hands. No! it is absolutely necessary to 'orient' the Balkans differently, to consider them with an East, however close it may be! It is this disorientation in the form of orientalization (without orientalizing connotation) that Karl Kaser has, in a way, proposed in his book Balkan und Naher Osten. Einführung in eine gemeinsame Geschichte (published in 2011). 14 In the debate that took place, particularly in the Germanic space, from the late 1990ies on the Balkans as a historical region and on Balkan studies in general, 15 Karl Kaser took part in 2009 by making a completely innovative proposal, since it was a question of 'going towards the Middle East'. In other words, he proposed to extend Balkan studies to Minor Eurasian (Kleineurasian) studies, in order to take into account the common past (Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman) of the Balkans and their counterpart in Asia, the continental divide not being devoid of European centrism.

It is, without doubt, in this spirit that he has written this manual which, as the subtitle states, is intended to be an "introduction to a common history" of the Balkans and the Middle East. A monumental undertaking, since it involves considering together the territories stretching from "the Danube to the Tigris", or more broadly the European and Asian parts of the Ottoman Empire, from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Iraq, to the Gulf countries and Egypt, and analyzing different aspects of their 'common history' from the Hellenistic period to the end of the 14 Karl Kaser, Balkan und Naher Osten. Einführung in eine gemeinsame Geschichte. Wien, Köln, Weimar 2011. 15 Ottoman period (and even beyond), including the Roman and Byzantine periods. In this way, Karl Kaser reaffirms that he wishes to overcome the barriers introduced by the disciplinization of knowledge, as well as the compartmentalization of the social sciences through area studies and other temporal divisions (ancient history, medieval history, modern and contemporary history). His approach is therefore linked not only to a broadening of the geopolitical focus, but also to a desire to introduce the 'longue durée' through an analysis of historical anthropology. This approach leads him to choose a presentation by theme, rather than by period or region.

The manual is therefore composed of seventeen chapters dealing with political history, ecology, economic history, demographic issues, religious and cultural history and socioanthropology. The seventeen themes are: power, modes of domination, the environment, migration, pre-industrial economic relations, techniques and knowledge, industrialization, cities and metropolises, demographic developments, religion, religion and society, the body and body awareness, the meaning of the written word, the family and kinship, gender relations, nation and nationalism, 'we' and 'the West'. The book closes with an epilogue on the issue of Ottoman heritage and a glossary.

Monumental is therefore this manual offering a synthesis intended to introduce a new vision of the long history of a large region that we could also call the Eastern Mediterranean. The synthesis is all the more original because it goes beyond strict political history to offer socioanthropological analyses. The art of synthesis being difficult, it was inevitable that the synthesis would 'lean' slightly towards the areas/regions best mastered by the author. In this case, the balance tends to lean slightly towards the Balkan side.

But in this book, if there is synthesis, there is also thesis. In the epilogue, Karl Kaser explains that the Balkans and the Middle East followed, from the 11 th 16 th centuries onwards, a divergent evolution compared to Europe, which experienced a more favorable dynamic. He highlights the fact that this divergence is due to a complex web of reasons of various natures (cultural, religious, ecological, demographic and economic), and even to the hazards of history. He also points out that it is due both to external factors (such as the significant raw material resources of Europe and America) and to internal factors (such as the late spread of printing matter among Muslims). But he ended up emphasizing these internal factors in particular, since he invoked the Ottoman heritage as the main factor explaining the trajectory of the Balkans and the Middle East. Yet, for Karl Kaser, this Ottoman heritage is characterized in these regions by a mistrust of the populations towards the State because of a system of tributary domination, unlike the West where interventionist domination is developing. It is also characterized by a democratic deficit and authoritarian regimes, underdeveloped civil society structures, over-administered states, a state apparatus that is autonomous from society, an important role for the military and a Muslim presence, even in the Balkans.

Without going into all these points, this thesis raises several problems. First, in the end, it probably does not give sufficient attention to external factors, or perhaps to the dynamics of contacts and interpenetration in which asymmetrical relations are established between Europe, on the one hand, and the Balkans and the Middle East, on the other, in an approach of connected history and entangled history. Russia is somewhat forgotten in this perspective.

Then, if it is easy to follow Karl Kaser as to the importance of the Ottoman heritage, one can only partially adhere to the way in which it characterizes this heritage, mainly because, on certain points, this characterization is based on a distorted vision of the Ottoman Empire, heir to the projections of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries made on older Ottoman history, produced in particular by a strongly Europeanist Western historiography. Let us take the example of the issue of millets (religious communities) in the Ottoman Empire. Karl Kaser sees it as a system that ended in 1856, a system that had established parallel societies and instituted a mode of tributary domination. In fact, the millet system was introduced in the 19 th century, and led to the institutionalization of the various religious communities. To speak of parallel societies, whether for this period or for previous periods, seems far too strong, given the numerous interactions between non-Muslims on the one hand, and the Ottoman State and Muslim society on the other. We know that non-Muslims regularly went before the cadi courts when they were not forced to do so. Nevertheless, if the Ottomans did not seek to directly Islamize non-Muslims (except in special cases), it can be said that there has been an ottomanization of society, including an institution such as the Orthodox Christian Church; this does not prevent Ottoman institutions from having owed much to the Islamic and non-Islamic institutions that preceded them. In the book, the Ottoman system is, moreover, described too uniformly in time and space. More comparisons, not only with the Habsburg Empire, but also with Russia or France, could shed light on these political and social developments. Finally, it is regrettable that the author has not further developed in the epilogue the question he raises at the end, of the asymmetry between the Balkans and the Middle East.

Beyond comparisons, is not the problem that Karl Kaser's proposal -which has the merit of de-orienting us by 'orienting' the Balkans and thereby bringing new light to certain processes is confining the Balkans into an area of analysis as much as the usual approaches did when considering the Balkans and Europe? Instead of a (European) Southeast, it is, in a way, a (Near Eastern) Northwest that is build. So how do we do it? Shake the bottle? turn the compass over? change the course of the sun? walk on both feet and hands? tear the pages of the books? Certainly not. So where is the solution? We can think here of Ulf Brunnbauer's approach, 16 which suggests adopting a 'translocal' approach and considering different spaces whose relevance depends on the processes under study. It is certain that this makes it possible to free oneself from the spatial 'containers' that can lock up our analyses.

The question that arises then is how to imagine a synthesis under these conditions, a synthesis that would take into account the spatial dimensions? Because the latter are important, not as 'containers' of a history in the making, but as components of the social processes analysed.

For example, we can imagine a set of variable time-spaces, depending on power relations, economic exchanges, mobility, circulation of knowledge, etc. a set of time-spaces that forces us to turn our heads in different directions, to vary the focal length and to vary temporality. Let us take an example (not really by chance...): to better understand Albanian stato-national formation in the 19 th -early 20 th century, we must certainly analyse socio-political processes specific to the Ottoman area (that is to say Karl Kaser's "Balkans and the Near East"), but also processes more specific to the Balkan Peninsula itself (which Karl Kaser often implicitly does). However, we must not forget, by moving a little towards the West, by narrowing the spatial focal length and widening the temporal focal length, the processes specific to the Adriatic space (Karl Kaser speaks a lot about the Sea in his book). By re-opening the focus and moving further to the West, we must not, however, abandon the analysis of processes developing in the European space (including Russia), which contributes in many ways to this stato-national formation. Not to mention, by further opening the spatial focal length but reducing the temporal focal length, a transatlantic space that developed from the end of the 19 th century onwards (notably because of the activity of Protestants, of migrations, and the new political involvement of the United States in post-war Europe).

By proposing to consider the Balkans and the Middle East together, especially over the long term, Karl Kaser has shifted the gaze, broadened the spatial and temporal focus. However, more than a 're-orientation', one must push his proposal towards a 'disorientation', or rather towards the method of travelling in cinema: a "movement of the camera during the shooting, one of the uses of which is to follow a subject in parallel with its movement, another to approach or move away from the subject, to bypass it and possibly to reveal new aspects".... Karl Kaser recently had the good idea to start studying the history of cinema! A coincidence?

Traveling with "Patriarchy after Patriarchy"

The quality of a book (with a noteworthy exception: Holy Books) is not measured by the answers it manages to give, but on the new questions it helps to rise. Reading a book is, in a certain way, similar to traveling: the reached destination is less important than the journey done to get there. Reading Karl Kaser's Patriarchy after Patriarchy. Gender relations in Turkey and in the Balkans, 1500-2000 17 is a good way to travel and foster new questions: huge chronological bounds, going from the golden age of the Ottomans to the golden age of the European Union; an outsized area under scrutiny, running from the Danube to the Tigris; one explanatory device to make sense of such an impressive amount of diversity; one man at the sailing maneuvers. The total blue chosen by Lit Verlag for the book cover in 2008 emphasizes the feeling of being about to put out to sea. Have a good journey, reader! The goal of this text is not to explore the contribution of this book in the development of the history and anthropology of the familyscholars far more competent than I have already done it in a pretty convincing way. As a matter of fact, since at least the mid-1990ies, scholars have involved themselves in a Clash of the Titans over the place of the Balkans and Anatolia in the global taxonomy of families, redrawing (more or less Hajnal) lines across Eurasia, sometimes contesting the very sense of this intellectual and political operation. 18 What I would like to do instead is something more modest i.e. locating this book in a different field of study, the one of Women's and Gender History. As a matter of fact, "gender relations" is as well one of the key-words mentioned in the book's title. My argument is that this book is a great tool in order to navigate the unexplored borders of this field of study, and to discover new routes in the broad and expanding field of the post-Ottoman studies. Let us see how.

With Patriarchy after patriarchy, Kaser brings us to the more intimate core of its cherished Kleineurasien: family structures and, by extension, gender dynamics. As we learn from the Introduction, these elements represent constitutive bricks of Eurasia Minor's DNA. The easiest way to celebrate this book is of course highlighting its synthetic nature. In more than 300 pages, Kaser offers to the English-speaking reader a rich and critically organized summa of the scholarship on family produced by both historians and anthropologists working on this 17 Karl Kaser, Patriarchy after Patriarchy. Gender Relations in Turkey and in the Balkans, 1500-2000. Wien 2008. 18 . 18 For a recent overview of these debates, see for instance Maria Todorova, On the Epistemological Value of Family Models: the Balkans within the European Pattern, in: Maria Todorova, Scaling the Balkans. Essays in National, Transnational and Conceptual History. Leiden 2019, 284-299. historical region. And yet, stopping here would be unfair. As a matter of fact, this book has as well a powerful thesis that organizes this huge amount of datathe mysterious expression patriarchy after patriarchy to which we will come back later. Moreover, family is in this book always studied in close relationship with two other poles: the state of course, that "constituted the structural framework for the establishment of social relations",19 but also civil society. For this reason, the book will not only arouse the interests of scholars of family and gender, but of scholars of Eastern Europe and Middle East more broadly.

The book is organized in three chronological/thematic sections, that are also the three steps of Kaser's demonstration. The first chapter focuses on four centuries (1500-1950), the second on four decades (1950-1990), the last on barely ten years (1990-2000) a good example of modernity as acceleration! The central idea that guides the book, written in 2007, is that despite several decades of top-down policies led by the Socialist and Kemalist regimes openly aiming to promote equality between men and women, patriarchy is still alive and kicking on both sides of the Bosporus, maybe more alive than ever. To demonstrate his thesis, and to explore the roots of this specific Eurasia Minor's patriarchal pattern, Kaser brings us back to the early modern. The longue durée allows him to identify a specific kind of patriarchal relations, characterized by "patrilineality, patrilocality, patriarchially oriented customary law" 20 that differentiates Eurasia Minor from the rest of Europe and Middle East. This specific kind of patriarchy is revealed to be, in Kaser's narrative, extremely stable in time and space, and for good reasons: as the author tell us in Chapter One ("Patriarchy in power"), the Ottoman tributary state never engaged in any significant transformation of the social structures it found on the conquered lands, leaving family and gender relations "almost untouched" 21 for centuries. Such a situation came to an end in the second half of the 20 th century, when newly established interventionist nation-statessocialist in Southeastern Europe, kemalist in Anatoliamanaged to impose to their populations an impressive set of reforms in every domain of social life, gender norms and practices included. As we learn in Chapter Two ("The decline of patriarchy"), socialist and kemalist gender regimes managed to weaken Eurasia Minor's patriarchy, but only on the surface. When socialist regimes of Southeastern Europe collapsed, and political Islam gradually moved to the center of the political scene in Turkey, Eurasia Minor's deep patriarchal structures (at least a part of them) resurfaced. Here, patriarchy shows its most dangerous virtue: the fact of being a "very adaptable form of men's domination," 22 able to acclimatize to very different political regimes.

The third and last chapter of the book ("The continuity of Patriarchy") offers a somehow ambiguous conclusion: on one side, it acknowledges that "the people of Eurasia Minor […] have never had so much freedom in choosing their ways of life, although under harsh economic conditions"; 23 on the other side, it recognizes the existence of a visible "patriarchal backlash" 24 both in Turkey and in the Balkan states, acknowledging that "women have been among the chief casualties" 25 of the recent political shifts. Anyhow, continuity prevails in Kaser's narrative.

The ability of Karl Kaser in conflating approximately 150.000 days and 70.000 kilometers in a coherent narrative is honestly impressive, and represents the most powerful side of this book. Nevertheless, strength and weakness, in research as in other life domains, go hand in hand. We understand the temptation of the architect of Patriarchy after Patriarchy to compress and organize such a huge amount of scholarship in a clear-cut, three-stage, explanatory model. Nevertheless, in this way, the book ends up focusing more on structures and continuities, than on processes and changes. In particular, the last century of the Ottoman Empire, in which gender discourses and practices became a highly contested domain, is addressed only marginally as a prelude of the upcoming kemalist gender regime. A closer dialogue with the gender sensible scholarship produced by Turkish historians from the 1980ies would have probably contributed to acknowledge a higher degree of specificity to the decades from the tanzimat to the collapse of the Empire. The same can be said for the place of the pre-1950 independent Balkan states: the decades (roughly speaking) separating the rule of the sultans from the rule of the communists are neglected and implicitly considered as irrelevant. [START_REF] Daskalova | The birth of a field. Women's and gender studies in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, part I[END_REF] At a broader level, there is another aspect of Kaser's line of reasoning that sounds problematic: in building his gendered Eurasia Minor, in tracing his route in such a lost continent, Kaser never loses its bright polar star i.e. Western Europe. All along this book, the amazingly rich set of data on the Balkans and Anatolia is mobilized to measure the Eurasia Minor's performance vis à vis Western Europe; needless to say, in the comparison, the former regularly ends up with broken bones. In this way, Karl Kaser rich and audacious tryptic ends up fostering the old adagio of a modern and dynamic Western Europe, opposed to a stagnant Eurasia Minor incapable of serious progress.

And yet, Patriarchy after patriarchy's virtues outnumber its limits. Since the Introduction, the reader is vigorously invited to an intellectual operation that is only rarely pursued in contemporary scientific landscape i.e. gendering the (post-)Ottoman space. In other words, Karl Kaser's effort to do a longue durée history of Eurasia Minor's gender regimes invites us to explore in deep what the Ottoman Empire did, 'and still does', to gender relations. From the 19 th century onwards, gender norms became a crucial ground of contention in the Ottoman Empire as it experienced military, economic and political crisis, while at the same time, it engaged in reforms of its administrative structures. Political and religious authorities, in addition to actors of an emerging civil society, competed in efforts to propose/impose new ideas of masculinity and femininity on different segments of the Ottoman population. Gender played a crucial role in establishing conflicting imperial, national, confessional or class loyalties, and to draw the boundaries between 'us' and 'others'. In order to orientate oneself, Karl Kaser points the way: to get rid of the methodological nationalism that has long structured historical research in and on the various post-Ottoman states included in the domain of women and gender. 27 By keeping the nation-state as a fundamental category of analysis, historians have often marginalized the 'before'the Ottoman past, which is ultimately referred to as the source of the oppression of nations and social and economic backwardnessand the 'beyond', that is, phenomena that transcend state borders and the dominant national grouptransnational networks and circulations. Last but not least, Patriarchy after patriarchy is also an invitation to think critically about the organization of research and teaching on a global scale, structured in area studies based on essentially linguistic criteria that helped to make Southeastern Europe and Asia Minor two distinct regions that were only rarely thought together. On the very contrary, this book breaks down the walls separating Middle Eastern, Islamic, or Turkish studies from one side, and Eastern, Central-European or Balkan studies on the other. 28

Conclusion

As already referred to in the introductory sequence of this article, Karl Kaser saw it as his intellectual and scholarly task "to move out into the new territory, exploring new themes, drawing on new resources, reaching new conclusions". In this article we have been reflecting about four books of him dealing with the history of family, kinship and social structures in the Balkans (and beyond). Despite all critical considerations that have as well been put forward in the preceding pages, there cannot be any doubt that Karl Kaser has indeed been able to fulfil the task that he has set to himself. Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden, Freundschaft und Feindschaft, Der Balkan und der Nahe Osten and Patriarchy after Patriarchy are books that in many ways lead us into "new territory" of historical-anthropological research, "explored new themes", "drew on new resources" and also came to (not rarely inspiringly debated) "new conclusions". There is very much argument that Clio will not have any thoughts about "revenge"quite the contrary! 28 Yves Chevrier, "La traversée des sciences de l'Homme : aires culturelles, humanités et sciences sociales", in Thierry Sanjuan (ed.), Carnets de terrain. Pratique géographique et aires culturelles, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2008, pp. 43-94. David L. Szanton (ed.), The Politics of Knowledge: area studies and the disciplines, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

  i gledam kako se neprijateljski rovovi crne i mislim: i moj otac borio se nekad, da l'krivo ili pravo, ne znam. Znam samo jedno: danas kolju moj narod i sestre naše blate i skrvne. Moj otac se borio nekad, a za koga je pao? Mlad sam partizan i mnogo mi toga nije još jasno, Tek jedno znadem: za slobodu naroda svoga Život bih lako dao. Sada pred jurišem toplina neka srce mi hvata, u meni budi se čuvstvo krasnomržnja. I ona raste svake minute i sata ulazi u svaku poru mojega tijela, obuzima me cijela, ona je, drugovi, silna ko vihor kad ruši stoljetne hraste. Drugovi, kako ja mrzim svakom kapljom uzavrele krvi, svakim napetim nervom svoga mladog tijela. Moj djed i majka, dva brata i sestre bili su zaklani prvi, pobijena mi je rodbina cijela, ostale su mi samo dvije najdraže druge: osveta i mržnja. Mrziti, mrziti i mrziti, to je zakon najveći i sveti ništiti gamad -fašiste na svakom koraku svome. Uskoro će početi juriš. Čekam komandu i mirno stojim. I ona padne. Ko vjetar jurnem, mržnja me nosi i ja se ne bojim mine zatutnje, mitraljez tuče i kosi, drugovi, ja pobijeden ne mogu biti, jer mene mržnja, kao najdražeg sina majka u naručju nosi. HATRED 13 Golub, "Mržnja", Slavonski partizan, no. 10, 15 June 1943, reprinted in Ivo Bogner, Pučke pjesme slavonskih boraca za vrijeme NOB-a, in: Ivan Jelić (ed.), Kultura i umjetnost u NOB-u i u socijalističkoj revoluciji u Hrvatskoj. Zagreb 1975 (Institut za historiju radničkog pokreta Hrvatske), 411-425, 416-417. I am in the shelter and I watch the enemy trenches darken and I think: in the past my father, too, fought, whether for right or wrong I cannot say. I know only one thing: today they are cutting the throat of my people and they defile and dishonour our sisters. In the past my father fought, but for whom did he fall? I am a young partisan and many things are not yet clear for me I know only one thing: for the freedom of my people I would easily give my life. Now just before giving the assault, warmth fills my heart within me a marvellous emotion is kindledhatred. And it looms larger every minute and every hour entering every pore of my body, it grasps me full on it is powerful, comrades, like a whirlwind that uproots centuries-old oaks. Comrades, I hate so much with each drop of my boiling blood, with each tight nerve of my young body. My grandfather and my mother, my two brothers and sisters had their throats slit my entire family was killed, and I am left with only my two dearest companions: vengeance and hatred.

  Once abandoned the glasses of methodological nationalism, new mobilities become suddenly visible on the map. Traditionally, the only mobilities that have been studied are the ones between Anatolia and Southeastern Europe and Western Europe. In other words, scholars (including gender scholars) focused on mobilities happening along East-West and Nord-South axis only for decades. Patriarchy after Patriarchy invites us to see and analyze post-Ottoman mobilities i.e. along South-South, or Southeast-South axes as well. As a matter of fact, far from disappearing, networks of intellectuals, artists, medical doctors, administrators and religious officials established during the Ottoman era adapted to the new political configuration. A vast array of transnational movementscommunists, feminists, modernist Islamists, traditionalistsalso wove their own networks across the boundaries of newlyestablished states, and developed their own forums and institutions. These individuals and networks proposed different formula of change and emancipation: of the nation by imperialist powers, of the ummah by the enemies of Islam, of the proletariat by capital, of woman by the patriarchal system. Women's and men's bodies became the privileged loci where these political projects were homed and implemented.

  See for example Holm Sundhaussen, Europa Balcanica. Der Balkan als historisches Raum Europas, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 25, 4 (1999), 626-653; Maria Todorova, The Balkans as category of analysis. Border, Space, Time, in: Gerald Stourzh (ed.), Annäherungen an eine europäische Geschichtsschreibung. Wien 2002 (Archiv für österreichische Geschichte, 137), 57-83; Stefan Troebst, Introduction: What's in a Historical Region ? A Teutonic Prespective, European Review of History, revue européenne d'histoire 10, 2 (2003), 173-188; Wolfgang Höpken, Zwischen "Allgemeiner Geschichtwissenschaft" und historischer Regionaldisziplin. Die Südosteuropäische Geschichtswissenschaft heute, Südosteuropa Mitteilungen 1 (2006), 40-49.

Karl Kaser, Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden. Ursprünge und Gegenwart des balkanischen Patriarchats. Wien, Köln, Weimar 1992.

Very much influenced were Karl Kaser and his students by the trend-setting innovations towards a more historical-anthropological Familienforschung as developed by Michael Mitterauer and his group at the Institut für Wirtschafts-and Sozialgeschichte of Vienna University at that time. For the early 1990ies, see especially Michael Mitterauer, Historisch-anthropologische Familienforschung. Fragestellung und Zugangsweisen. Wien, Köln, Weimar 1990.

Informative for getting an illustrative impression of such a kind of dealing with the (social) history of Southeastern Europe are the eight volumes of the Südosteuropa-Handbücher that were written between the mid-1970ies and early 1990ies. SeeKlaus-Detlev Grothusen, Südosteuropa Handbuch, Bd. 1-8. Göttingen 1975- 1998.

From the beginning a trend-setter with this regard was the book of Pier-Paolo Viazzo that dealt with the remarkable variability in social and economic arrangements in the Alpine regions. See Pier-Paolo Viazzo, Upland communities: environment, population and social structure in the Alps since the sixteenth century. Cambridge 1989. Another 'classic' that highly influenced the 'Kaser School' was without a doubt John Cole / Eric Wolf, The Hidden Frontier. Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley. New York 1974.

Milenko Filipović, Odlaženje na prehranu, Glasnik geografskog društvaXXVII (1947), 76-93.

Milovan Djilas, Land without Justice. New York 1958.

Milovan Djilas, "Plemenita mržnja", Borba, 8 October 1942, reprinted in Vladimir Dedijer / Antun Miletić, Genocid nad Muslimanima.Sarajevo 1990, 221-224.

Ulf Brunnbauer, Der Balkan als translokaler Raum. Verflechtung, Bewegung und Geschichte,Südosteuropa- Mitteilungen 51, 3, 2011, 78-94.

Kaser, Patriarchy after Patriarchy, cit., 30.

Kaser, Patriarchy after Patriarchy, cit., 33.

Cit., 30.

Ulrich Beck, La condition cosmopolite et le piège du nationalisme méthodologique, in : Michel Wieviorka (ed.), Les Sciences sociales en mutation.Paris 2007, 223-236.