The Kanun The rules of pain and suffering

Abstract

In this research, I collect and review various stories of Albanian men and women who interpreted the Kanun law in different ways, and have thus suffered differently. This code embodied, and still today represents, the spirit of the mountain man, his honor and sense of hospitality, his mentality, the call of duty and the code of revenge, as well as the rite of marriage. In particular, this research focuses on the phenomenon of burrneshë, regulated by the Kanun. A woman who chooses the status of burrneshë acquires the duties and part of the rights attributed in patriarchal societies only to men. Through a comparison and analysis of various anthropological and ethnographic explanations, this transformation is considered as a painful deprivation of a woman’s femininity. A sorrowful, self-inflicted holocaust that I sexperienced through a different reality, halfway between a gloomy solitude and an aura of magic (Dones, 2007).