Shadow Genealogies

"Shadow Genealogies" explores identity transformations under conditions of intense sociopolitical change. This book chronicles the fragmentation of the once-widespread urban Muslim communities known as the Sehirli into Turks and Albanians in the formative years of former Yugoslavia. This book is about the strategies that communities undertake in the face of rapid social change to protect their identities. Recreating identities under pressure forces communities to act like "cultural cannibals" who destroy and consume their own meaningful categories to emerge with alternative definitions or acceptable modes of survival. Based on intensive fieldwork in Macedonia, "Shadow Genealogies" demonstrates this process by weaving together the life histories of more than two hundred individuals across ninety well-known Muslim families.