'Regimes of Historicity' in Southeastern and Northern Europe, 1890-1945

Discourses of Identity and Temporality

D. Mishkova, B. Trencsényi, M. Jalava, D. Mishkova, B. Trencsényi, M. Jalava

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137362476
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The volume undertakes a comparative analysis of the various discursive traditions dealing with the connection between modernity and historicity in Southeastern and Northern Europe, reconstructing the ways in which different "temporalities" produced alternative representations of the past and future, of continuity and discontinuity, and identity.

Part I

Historical Cultures and Concepts of Time

1

Regimes of ‘Balkan Historicity’: The Critical Turn and Regional Time in Studies of the Balkans before the First World War

Diana Mishkova

The period around the turn of the twentieth century, generally characterized by the radicalization of national discourses and the emergence of anti-liberal nationalism, also witnessed, for the first time, the rise of comparativist methodologies constructing a sort of Balkan/Southeast European historical unit. In many ways this new realm of historical research, devised primarily not by historians but by linguists, ethnographers, and geographers, posed a challenge to the national–Romantic canon of history as it had taken shape during and for some time after the struggles for national emancipation. By the outbreak of the First World War, the periodizations – the chronological orders on which these national histories were built – had been put firmly in place, concocting ‘local times’ attuned to national frames. In general outline, these periodizations were structured around political and military events, starting with the creation and then the ‘rise’ of the medieval states, followed by the disaster of the Ottoman conquest and the regress caused by Ottoman (or, in the Romanian case, Phanariot) domination, which was reversed only with the national cultural ‘revivals’ and struggles for political emancipation, culminating in the establishment of national states. Significantly, this temporal scheme and the underlying vision of the main characteristics and watersheds in the national histories of the region were bolstered by the historical narratives of authoritative foreign historians.¹

Against the backdrop of these national temporalities, the present chapter undertakes to evaluate the regional conceptualizations and temporal schemata of the founding fathers of local Balkanistics (and of Balkan ethnography, anthropogeography, and history, respectively) in its formative period before the outbreak of the Great War: the Bulgarian ethnographer and literary scholar Ivan D. Shishmanov (1862–1928), the Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijić (1865–1927), and the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940). This choice has been dictated both by these scholars’ foundational authority in the budding field of Balkan studies as an alternative historical framework, and by the fact that in many ways they are representative of the intellectual–political currents of the period. Coupled with and informed by different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, these currents rendered different ‘Balkan regions,’ whose temporalities, their visions of the past and the future, also differed. At the same time, this first generation of local (regional) Balkanists shared some broad and important similarities. First, they all straddle the period – the threshold of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – of what might be called the ‘critical turn’ in their respective disciplines. This entailed, among other things, taking a stance with respect to the (legacy of) liberal–Romantic nationalism, with its teleological historicist and progressivist time-frame, which had dominated the ‘national epistemes’ until that time. Second, they all present key examples of the fusion of regional and national registers in their respective fields. This makes it possible to gauge the way the two scales of analysis interacted with each other to produce new, or bolster existent, notions of continuity and discontinuity, tradition and legacy, revival and development, preservation and change – notions that were foundational for the sense of community and identity and for the experiencing of modernity in the countries of the region.

Ethnography and folklore in a Romantic–positivist frame

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Bulgarian ethnographer Ivan D. Shishmanov was one of the earliest practitioners and champions of what we would today call the ‘history of cultural transfer.’ The history of the Volkstum, we should bear in mind, was the actual cultural history of the nineteenth century (‘ethnography in the broadest sense is nothing other than cultural history,’ Shishmanov explained), and the study of Volkskunde, or folklore, was a science. In the spirit of the critical method, Shishmanov dispelled the notion of the autochthonous roots and uniqueness of national folklore (as propagated by what he dubbed ‘patriotic romanticism’), and instead charted a vast global network of exchange – ‘internationality’ – of beliefs, tales, epic traditions, and popular lore. ‘The existent research suffices to persuade us’, he wrote, ‘that we should stop regarding the popular lore of any single people as its totally original creation. There have been borrowings since time immemorial’ (Shishmanov, 1966a, p. 17). ‘The originality of a culture often lies in nothing other than its more or less self-reliant remaking of the borrowed foreign elements. Peoples – small and big – are great plagiarists’ (Shishmanov, 1965b, p. 373). Shishmanov thus undercut the Romantic notion of national uniqueness and exceptionality that precluded the quest for resemblances in the development of nations. Setting off from the assumption about the immanent interconnections between cultures across wide, indeed global, space, Shishmanov did not discriminate between intra-Balkan and extra-Balkan ‘borrowings.’ To his ethnographically informed gaze, however, it was obvious that interconnection and exchanges were especially intensive and traceable between neighboring countries at similar levels of development. The agencies and driving force behind this process were national cultures.

The notion of legacy – or ‘patrimony,’ ‘bequest of our ancestors’ (бащино наледство, наследство на нашите праотци) – concerned above all folklore (‘popular lore’) and, more broadly, folk culture. Modernity is understood as a fight between the old – the ‘patrimony’ – and the new, with a foretold finale:

We are standing at the threshold of two cultures that are competing for supremacy. It is senseless to believe that our old culture, preserved primarily in our popular customs and folklore, will be able to resist forever the new one rushing through all the cracks and holes of that waterlogged Great Wall of China which until recently separated us from the outside world. With the liberation, with the new state order [and] the new railroads, a new alien spirit has been introduced in the life of the people. Our towns and boroughs are racing to absorb the new cheap manna falling on them from all sides under the label of contemporary culture. It will not be long before the huts [the villages – DM] open the door to this new element, which scrapes off like a plane any typicality, every original feature in the life of the people. The old customs and mores are beginning to shake.

(Shishmanov, 1966a, pp. 9–11)

Shishmanov did not count himself among ‘those Jeremiahs who see in [the effects of the new civilization] the collapse of a nationality rather than the ruin of an older, weaker culture,’ nor among ‘the worshipers of the past only because it is past – laudator temporis acti,’ nor among those shedding ‘sweet sentimental tears’ over everything swept away by the construction of the ‘new public building,’ because

science proves to us that much of this patrimony … is not collected on a native soil, is not entirely original as many among us fancy, often it is purchased in exchange for such works or captured, or in many cases copied from foreign models. Comparative literary history and comparative study of folklore convince us more and more that what we very often attribute to the simple people is drawn from literary sources.

(Shishmanov, 1966a, p. 11)

The same applied to the material vestiges of folk culture: what at first sight appear as purely popular, rural national costumes, at second sight ‘indicate that they are but the last remnants of a fashion which several centuries ago had been exclusively urban and had served as adornment only for the higher social strata.’ Thus, the Bulgarian folk attire in Shishmanov’s own time bore the ‘unmistakable influences of the onetime Turkish urban fashions and, here and there, Byzantine patterns’ (Shishmanov, 1894–95b, pp. 131–2). In addition to national authenticity, Shishmanov thus undermined another favorite topos of the contemporary ethno-populist discourse – that of rural–urban antagonism and the village as the repository of national authenticity.

The very Romantic attitude to this issue, and so the connection between nationalism and ethnography, was at the same time historically contextualized. Albeit untenable, the ‘philological and historical fantasies’ of nineteenth-century nationalists and the ‘intended or naïve forgeries like the ones that had been fashionable until recently not only among the Slavs but also among the other European peoples’ were justifiable at a time of political and cultural self-assertion:

At issue for many peoples (especially for the smaller, politically oppressed nations that could not rely on a more glamorous history or culture) was to show to the world how high their poetic talent was, how inexhaustible the richness of their language, and how deep their philosophy, and how deserving they were, because of these unusual qualities, of the attention, amazement or compassion of the civilized world.

Later generations should not be unfair to that past when the peoples in question ‘through history and ethnography, for the first time obtained consciousness of their national unity and past dignity …. Ethnography has made enormous contributions to the political awakening and revival of many nations’ (Shishmanov, 1894–95b, p. 117). Shishmanov dubbed that time the patriotic period, when ‘every-thing had to serve the development of national awareness and where science itself was a means, not an end.’ This period had fulfilled its purpose and was unlikely to be repeated; many of its methods had become unusable – a ‘cumbersome anachronism’ – in the new circumstances (Shishmanov, 1894–95b, p. 119; idem, 1965b, p. 371).

Yet, despite methodological criticism and condescension to ‘patriotic romanticism,’ Shishmanov did not question the edifying potential of ethnography (‘the science of the poor in spirit’) to chart the path of the nation from its past to its future: ‘To be able to know in which direction our people has developed and to determine the direction of its future development in the best sense, we must study it in every respect.’ He also stressed the great need for a systematic study of folklore for the ‘regeneration’ of national culture, fostering thereby the institutionalization of low culture as national culture (Shishmanov, 1966a, pp. 23, 25–31). Cross-national interaction was important in the sense that every investigation of the modern history of these new nations had to deal above all with the effect of foreign influences on their development, highlighting the foreign borrowings in the national culture and ‘their beneficial or harmful absorption by the people’s body’ (Shishmanov, 1965b, p. 371). ‘Transfers’ and ‘entanglements’ notwithstanding, therefore, there appeared to be some stable – continuous if not atemporal – inner ethnic essence, making possible the identification of the alien influences and elements that came to interfere with it.

Positivism, nationalism and historicism informed each other in all of this. In the interpretation of historical sources and literary phenomena, Shishmanov largely followed Hippolyte Taine and his ‘famous theory of the influence of three primary factors: race, environment and history’ (Shishmanov, 1966b, pp. 300, 304–9). Overall, his approach could be called sociological or socio-evolutionist, in that ‘social evolution,’ understood as progressive and law-driven, had a crucial explanatory function. He espoused Comtean positivism, with its search for general laws and the equation of ‘evolution’ with ‘improvement’; contemporary social science such as Durkheim’s ‘collective consciousness’; and Taine’s idea of the social organism (derived from the German historical school). His call for ‘studying the people in every respect’ thus subordinated the Romantic ethnographic (as well as literary and historiographic) ‘knowledge of the traditions preserved by the people’ to the positivist sociological ‘knowledge about the people.’

The destabilization of the Romantic notion of authenticity, however, was not intended to relativize the national framework. Instead, it helped underwrite a definition of the nation in which historical right was superseded by the ‘actual ethnic conditions’: ‘The Bulgarian “great idea” is nothing other than the national idea, which makes uniracial or unilingual masses join into a single political entity regardless of history. In the modern national idea the first word belongs to ethnography, and then to history’ (Shishmanov, 1894–95a, p. 222). By ‘history’ Shishmanov meant political development, and by ‘ethnography,’ culture; in neither content nor temporality nor scope did the two coincide.

Shishmanov’s overall conception of nationalism keeps the flavor of the late-Enlightenment ideas that had dominated the national revivalist period. He considered it to be ‘one of the most powerful cultural factors,’ ‘a weapon of liberty, enlightenment and progress,’ the form in which human genius is revealed in its cultural diversity and fundamental unity. He takes on the role of a ‘new generation’ national awakener: he fully reproduces the national-liberal program and the temporal scaffold of the revivalists, convinced as they were of the cultural and social progress of the nation in a European frame, now armed with ‘solid, scientific arguments.’ This program rested on an awareness of considerable cultural delay but also faith in the ability of the national leaders – the intelligentsia first of all – to bring the nation back into the mainstream of European civilization and progress. The nationalism of the new times, Shishmanov maintained, could no longer draw on the ‘national dreams’ of the national romantics: the intelligentsia should be given ‘more positive national ideals … based on a deeper awareness of our national, material and moral forces, of our past, and on an accurate analysis of our nati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Historical Cultures and Concepts of Time
• Part II: The Ideologies of Regeneration
• Part III: Representations of Modernity and National Temporalities
• Index