Living With the Native Other: Production of Ethnological Knowledge in Croatia

Abstract
The first wide acknowledged representation of Croatian culture in the paradigm
of the scientific writing of the 18th century was travelogue Journey to Dalmatia
of abbot Alberto Fortis, Venetian scientist. In the travelogue Fortis represent the
cultural split between city culture (modern and civilized) and peasant culture
that was backward, stick to their tradition and habits. Soon after the travelogue
was published and translated to most of the European language, young
Dalmatian physician Ivan Lovrić wrote remarks on Fortis book. Although
Lovrić criticized Fortis he kept main idea of two cultures and thus produced
something that will later become object of ethnography. The essential feature of
such object was its condition of otherness – almost but not quite other or “native
other”. This shaped whole ethnological project in Croatia its epistemological and
ontological foundations. In this text I am trying to explain the specific
theoretical and social implication of the knowledge produced through such
mechanism of production and representation of otherness.

It was in 1939 when a little book, ‘A Year of Croatian Folk Customs’, appeared as
the first synthetic review of folk culture in Croatia. In the introduction, author Milovan
Gavazzi programmatically informed readers that they would gain an insight into: “the
original, authentic meaning and goal of the customs. This meaning is not clear at first
glance, but is later revealed through the research, in order to show that something has
changed, become muddy and become differently understood by the people”[CITATION
Gav88 \p 6 \l 1050 ]. This statement shows that Gavazzi presupposed some sort of
double nature in Croatia’s customs. One aspect of the customs was fragmented, almost
lost, but authentic, the other alive, performed, but at the same time somehow distorted.
This ambivalence allowed Croatian ethnology to identify itself as a specific discourse that
could reveal original customs as they were performed in the distant past. But it also
opened a space for discourse that was predominantly focused on the remainder of the
object – the “distorted” and “muddy” current state of the customs 1. To understand the

1
From the early 1970’s the debate on the nature of the ethnographic object turned into conflict between
ethnology and anthropology.
reason for discursive ambivalence in the history of Croatian ethnology we should try to
understand the broader social context in which it was born.
In this text we will try to explain the specific position of Croatian (and broader
East European) ethnology that sprang from the process of producing a social difference –
the main prerequisite for ethnographic description. “Otherness” is conceptualized here
through Lacanian theory that helps to open a different view on ethnological discourse and
its social position. This theory could also provide a broader perspective for understanding
the ambivalent position of the traditional East European ethnographic object, that is,
peasantry. This ambivalence simultaneously casts peasantry as neighbor and as “Other”,
or as we put it in the title – the “Native Other”. Its specific discursive position will be
approached from three different angles: historical (the invention of ethnology in the 18th
century as a specific counter-discourse to the imperial gaze), structural (ethnology as a
form of knowledge constructed around the parallel between the gaze and the voice
reflected in the tension between two ethnological schools) and relational (the form in
which ethnology normalizes social attitudes toward the past).

Double representation

During the history of Croatian ethnology there existed a division – a double

nature, of sorts – in the engagement and reception of Otherness. Gavazzi’s statement was
not, therefore, simply invented as a point of departure for scientific endeavor but also as a
reaction to the ambiguity inherent in relation to the object of the discourse. This specific
discourse was “invented” very early on (in terms of the history of anthropology). At the
end of the 18th century a section of the Croatian peasantry, named Morlacs, were for the
first time represented in a proto-anthropological manner in the travel book by Alberto
Fortis ‘Voyage to Dalamtia’. Although Fortis’s principal goal was to give a description of
the natural world (plants, animals, and terrain) of inland Dalmatia, it was his description
of local peasant culture that ultimately garnered him fame as a travel writer. Europe was
fascinated with this archaic mode of living described on its own soil. What Fortis
achieved was the transmission of scientific discourse from natural history to culture.
Mary Louise Pratt described this process as “planetary consciousness” developed from
the Carl Linee system of classification of plants. In this system, every plant gained its
proper name through its specific feature. This enabled the classification of every plant
even if it was seen for the first time in the distant jungles of the new world. The complex
world of plants suddenly became controllable to the literate (usually male) European.
Instead of just classifying plants, animals, and rocks, Forits used the same classification
method to represent the Morlacs’ peasant culture. He divided their culture in order to
classify its parts such as customs, beliefs, food, and so on. This mode of classification
denied historical time (“denial of coevalness” (Fabian)), and more significantly, allowed
for the comparison of different cultures through universalistic categories. Examples can
be found throughout the text, for example: “They also believe firmly in the existence of
the Vampires and ascribed to them, as in Transylvania, the habit of sucking children’s
blood.” (Fortis 2004, 44). On another occasion: “Morlacs generally don’t care much
about economy: in this detail they are similar to Hotentots…” (Fortis 2004, 40). The
effect of this discourse was that Morlacs became closed in their time and culture, and we
cast as raw material for imperial social industry: “Armed, if they are governed wisely,
they express great dexterity….” In other words, their poor circumstances could be
changed only through enlightened foreign domination.
However, just a few years after ‘Voyage to Dalamtia’ was published a book by
Ivan Lovrić surfaced. Lovrić was a young physician from the small Dalmatian town of
Sinj, and his book was entitled ‘Some Remarks on the “Voyage to Dalmatia” by Abbot
Alberto Fortis and The Life of Stanislav Sočivica’. Lovrić’s main comment on Fortis’
approach related to the petrifying gaze Fortis imposed on the Morlacs. Instead of just
observing their life, Lovrić attempted to explain the habits, life, and nature of the Morlacs
from the point of view of the Morlacs themselves. He was strongly opposed to the idea
that Morlacs were imprisoned in their values, habits, and inbred capabilities and, in a
way, succeeded in returning history to the Morlacs: “I shall not confuse the present and
the past, and I shall have no courage to deny some old habits only because they are not
present today; therefore I think that Donati was not wrong proclaiming inland people,
Morlacs, barbaric in his book ‘Saggio di storia naturale dell’ Adriatico’. If Fortis, by
traveling through our countryside, found that Donati’s assertion was not true, he should
no’t admonish him for lying but note that habits have changed”[ CITATION Lov48 \l
1050 ]. What we read into this is a different conception of time. For Fortis, Morlacs lived
in another, unbridgeable time while for Lovrić, this time gap was virtual, they lived in the
present time, and any differences ascribed to habits could be abandoned for the sake of
prosperity. For Fortis otherness was an essential feature while for Lovrić it was a
provisional condition that could be transgressed through education and universal Reason.
The problem was further complicated due to differences between Dalmatian cities and
countryside. Instead of a simple imperial difference – us (enlightened) versus them
(primitive) – associated with all ambivalences relating to the mimicry of colonial
presence (Bhabha), in Eastern Europe circumstances were not so simple. Bhabha has
argued that mimicry was the product of colonial contact. Colonized peoples were
“almost, but not quite human”; there always existed some striking feature that prohibited
them from becoming fully recognized by the colonizers as being the same. For Bhabha
the reason for this is hidden in the ambivalence of the colonial presence: the colonizing
mission was organized around the idea of establishing universal European knowledge
around the globe. If this universal knowledge was successful then there would be no
reason for a colonial presence (the colonized become the same). On the other hand, if
universality failed then colonizing knowledge would not be universal any more. To
ensure a reason for colonial presence, the colonized were represented as subjects in a
never-ending “transition”. But contrary to “normal” colonial circumstances, the urban
culture of Croatia was cosmopolitan and hybrid, and where colonial presence was
invisible. Note Fortis’ portrayal of Zadar: “Today it benefits all the brilliance that could
be assigned to the vassal city; in the course of centuries it was probably gaining more
than it was losing. Zadarian society is as civil a society as any prominent city in Italy”
[ CITATION Alb04 \p 12 \l 1050 ]. And in those towns there were also prominent
citizens of Slavic origin. In the whole of Eastern Europe the key feature for the Western
traveler was ambiguity [ CITATION Wol94 \l 1050 ]; near the modern rich palaces were
simple, medieval-like huts of the poor peasants. Mimicry of colonial discourse was thus
different than in India for example. The colonizer represented accomplishments in the
cities and the jobs to be done in the rural area. There lacked any striking feature in the
subject (due to race, genes or any other reason), but society as a whole became split along
the rural-urban axis. Conceptualizing otherness was organized around the social
differences produced by the colonial gaze. The split between urban and rural culture
became the first foundation for constructing the specific scientific discourse called
ethnology. Ethnology then acquired the petrifying idea of colonial representation and
even reinforced it in 20th century. The way in which Morlacs were represented by Fortis
became a standard for representing the whole peasantry.
Spivak, in her well known article “Can Subaltern Speak?”[ CITATION Gay88 \l
1050 ], points to the inevitable homogenizing effect of “giving a voice” to the subaltern
by the local elite, and how such practices reinforce the social gap2. But what she does not
elaborate upon is the reason for the local maintenance of the social space produced during
the colonial time. It could be said that scientific interpretation (at least in the social
sciences and humanities) as such incorporates a homogenizing effect (see [ CITATION
Fab83 \l 1050 ]). In spite of strong argument in support of this, we should perhaps expand
this notion by considering the concept of transculturation—a term originally elaborated
by the Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz [CITATION Ort95 \n \t \l 1050 ] who wanted
to expand Malinowsky’s concept of acculturation.
Ortiz’s intention was to emphasize the dynamic nature of cultural contact.
Subjugated cultures select and at the same time invent what emanates from metropolitan
cultures (Pratt), and they use that material for their particular needs, instead of just
automatic acceptation. In this way we can understand the concept of nation as emerging,
not as grammar that was merely spread through the globe, but as a language that was
changed and used differently in specific contexts. Benedict Anderson’s description of the
nationalizing of South America can shed a light on this process: “If the indigenes were
conquerable by arms and disease, and controllable by mysteries of Christianity and
completely alien culture (as well as, for those days, an advanced political organization),
the same was not true of the creoles, who had virtually the same relationship to arms,
disease, Christianity and European culture as metropolitans … They constituted
simultaneously a colonial community and the upper class”[CITATION Ben06 \p 58 \l
1050 ]. New elites in colonies were simultaneously distant from imperial cultures and
from indigenous ones; both were Others to them. The Eastern Europe upper class

2
“Outside (though not completely so) the circuit of the international division of labor, there are people
whose consciousness we are cannot grasp if we close off our benevolence by constructing a homogeneous
Other referring only to our own place in the seat of the Same or of the Self.”
identified itself in the same manner but inversely – in Eastern Europe this class was more
proximate to indigenes. The border that separated people in the colonies from those in the
metropolis was not created on the basis of culture or civilization but on the origin of
birth. South American creoles could not become Europeans proper due to the “wild
nature” of their homeland, and indigenes could not become “civilized” because of some
distinctive biological features. Nevertheless, to differentiate from the double Other and to
construct a new subject position it is necessary to produce a difference from one through
to another in the pair. The new class subject adopted nation not just as grammar for
establishing social unity, but at the same time as material for maintaining social
difference. In the case of Eastern Europe, ethnicity and ethnic identification materialized
as a difference to the local, native other. Why difference in a realm where commonly
people find unity? The paradox found at the core of cultural anthropology – to ask what it
means to be human one has to be outside of humanity itself (so anthropologists should
not be human) – is the same as asking what ethnicity is – the difference is always
inscribed. Due to the blending of ethnicity and class identity, national discourse was
invented to simultaneously differentiate and unify society or conversely to differentiate it
through unification. The incorporation of new symbolic language and the new
understanding of society covered the remainder of the transformation process. As in the
Lacanian “mirror stage”, for the new class in Eastern Europe there was always something
left after the conceptualizing of their new position. The fundamental fantasy of the new
class subject was a unified fully functioning society (ethnicity), but at the same time
society was lacerated (through class) from their pre-symbolic state of plentitude and
wholeness. Ethnicity occupies a position of the lost object – the Lacanian term is “object
a”. This “object a”, empty field, was shaped through two main possibilities in Eastern
European social formation: on the one hand a mythical unifying element and on the other
a threat to class identity. It travels from one side to another in the field of national
discourse, from symbolic fiction to spectral apparition:
1
„Those who alleged fully to realize fantasy (the symbolic fiction)
2
had to have recourse to fantasy (spectral apparitions) in order to explain
their failure—the foreclosed obverse of the Nazi harmonious Volksge-
 meinschaft returned in the guise of their paranoiac obsession with "the
Jewish plot."[CITATION Žiž96 \p 116 \t \l 1050 ]
The difference between Žižek’s example and the case of Eastern European society
is that the peasantry of Eastern Europe was portrayed as a threat (spectral apparitions,
class difference) and as a pleasure (symbolic fiction, bale of ethnic unity). Thus national
identification through ethnicity takes the form of “jouissance” – unbearable enjoyment.
Ethnicity as “jouissance” is a product of class differentiation, a mode of preserving the
difference. The nature of the Lacanian term jouissance is based on prohibition
(castration) and dissociation (from the mother, for example): “Castration means that
jouissance must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (l’echelle
renversee) of the Low of desire” [ CITATION Lac77 \p 324 \l 1050 ]. Ethnology became
a language of desire, acknowledged discourse that organized the enjoyment of peasants
as pure hosts of ethnicity. That was the reason why subalterns could not speak, and the
reason why ethnology adopted colonial discourse. New postcolonial elites merely
reiterated old modes of descriptions (like those of Fortis) to preserve their own identity,
to elude proximity to the Thing itself, to seduce the threat of equality with the native
other (what is paradoxically the aim of national identification). Through the work of
ethnology, ethnologists (as representative of the class, the subject of desire) and the
peasant (the subject of the drive) are both involved in, and are constitutive of, the
reiteration of constitutional failure (becoming a nation) because: “the basic lesson of the
transcendental self-consciousness is that it is the very opposite of full self-transparence
and self presence: I am aware of myself, I am compelled to turn reflexivity on myself,
only in so far as I can never ‘encounter myself’ in my noumenal dimension, as the Thing
I actually am.” [CITATION Žiž00 \p 304 \t \l 1050 ] So secret knowledge of the past,
constantly provoked in ethnology, is never attainable, like the Siren's voice, this
differentiation gives promise that national “jouissance” actually exists. This forbidden
jouissance is the reason why this specific discourse qualifies as scientific.

Between the gaze and the voice

 In addition, there is another, more structural, reason for maintaining the difference
to the native other. Native otherness can also be conceptualized using the Lacanian term,
the “subject who is supposed to know”, a subject that has a specific secret barred to the
common gaze. The secret of the native other is even barred to the other himself/herself
through his/her simple existence in time as suggested by Gavazzi’s quote. Every science
laid upon this barred object – physics, chemistry, and biology – has as object
impenetrable, infinite nature that constantly resists interpretation. This stubborn object
thus insures existence for scientific discourse. Or to put it in another way, the
impenetrable object opens the possibility for science to function outside of ethical
questions, outside of social desires: “satisfaction is here provided by knowledge itself, not
by any moral or communal goals scientific knowledge is supposed to serve”
[ CITATION Sla97 \l 1050 ]. What Žižek aims for is a specific drive that governs the
scientific search for knowledge. Instead of the subject of desire which is in a constant
game of metonymic reproduction of desire through phantasm, the subject of the drive is
subjected to a constant force (Konstante Kraft in Freudian terms). This scientific
forgetting of the context is similar to the forgetting of the original meaning of the custom.
In a formal sense it is devotion to methodology rather than to theory. Instead of asking
itself why, Croatian ethnology was merely gathering objects through a specific
classification system supported by questioners. Paradoxically, the more historical
“deviations” occurred the more originality was produced – and the more sophisticated
methodology was invented. At the same time, ethnological interpretations powered up the
barred peasant knowledge. There was always more in them than they could become
conscious of: “This, then, is a symptom: a particular, 'pathological', signifying formation,
a binding of enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpretation, a stain
which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse, of social bond network, but is at the
same time a positive condition of it.” [CITATION Žiž08 \p 81 \t \l 1050 ]. The only way
the peasants could present themselves to the symbolic order is exactly through preserving
this pathological position through formal tradition (customs, dress, food, etc.). Hence
why, even today, we can witness the different forms of folklore associations in almost
every village and town in Croatia. Customs became more important than life itself,
summed up in the proverb, “It is better for a village to vanish, than the customs.” What is
at issue here is the specific impossibility of constructing the entity “we” without dropping
into the realm of the uncanny. Something that can be perceived as our place, our
sanctuary, our secret private space can soon become, as Freud explains through the
different uses of the terms hemlich and unhemlich, something that is so secret that we do
not want to know anything about it: “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which
develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite,
unheimlich”[ CITATION Fre10 \p 6 \n \l 1050 ]. Eric Santner explains the problem of
understanding otherness using exactly the same logic, that any familiarity is ultimately
strange. In this way there is no translation or understanding of the other, what we
perceive is the lack in the other which remind us of our own lack [ CITATION San01 \p
6 \n \l 1050 ]. In this way it is not strange that knowledge barred to the ethnologist is
already barred to the peasants, as in Hegel’s famous sentence often quoted by Žižek:
“The enigmas of the ancient Egyptians were also enigmas for Egyptians themselves.” But
what is the nature of this lack in the other/us? It is the lack of the Symbolic – of language
or a social network that is insufficiently able to bear the surplus of life, the Real.
This Real as a leftover of some signifying practice can be detected in the
ethnological endeavor in Croatia. No matter how strong ethnology’s effort was in the first
half of the 20th century to preserve the undead status of the peasantry, ethnographic
representation produced a surplus of vitality – the contemporary life of peasants. This
unbearable life of peasantry filled with injustice, poverty, and social exclusion, was
relinquished to be the object of interest of other social sciences (such as psychology,
sociology etc.). However, traditional objects of ethnography (costumes, customs etc.)
remained part of this denied, paralyzed, non-historic life. From a different angle we could
employ the concept of Laplanche, who structured signifiers through meaning and
address. If meaning is lost, signifiers will still address somebody; their potential of
signifying is not lost. Even more: “we’re always already addressed, but this address is
blank, it cannot be pinpointed to a specific agent, but is kind of an empty a priori, the
formal condition of the possibility of our speaking” [CITATION Žiž96 \p 90 \t \l 1050 ].
This address part of the signifier is a product of the surplus in it; in a constant use of the
signifier there is always some undetermined part of it, something that belongs to
unconscious transmission. Fundamental fantasy would then be the device for furnishing
the address part of the signifier, answering the question: Who am I for the Other?
“Fantasy organizes or ‘binds” this surplus into a schema, a distinctive ‘torsion’ or spin
that colors/distorts the shape of our universe, how the world is disclosed to us….”
[ CITATION San01 \p 39 \l 1050 ]. Ethnic national unity is thus fantasy constructed
around meaningless signifiers of culture. As noted earlier, it is impossible for fantasy1 to
be successful enough and instead of national unity, during the early 1970’s ethnological
interest shifted toward the contemporary life of peasantry. From the immense archive of
ethnological texts devoted to the “new” paradigm of Croatian ethnology we shall extract
one citation (still instructive enough), written down by one of the founders of the “new”
approach: “research of customs in form of textual analysis, what is in fact in accordance
with our ethnological tradition, will be efficient in a completely new way if we don’t
simply bind this text with curiosity over origins, or if we don’t just find in variety and
variation of customs beauty of folkloristic expression, but if we try to understand the
whole text, everything occurred in a single performance of custom in the frame of actual
social and historical circumstances”[CITATION Rih01 \p 36 \t \l 1050 ]. The whole new
concept appeared to be trying to transform ethnology, to understand it as an interpretation
of everyday practice no matter where or when. Ethnographic material became closely
connected to the context in which people lived, not to some distant mythical ethnic past.
Peasantry lost its sublime status in the course of that kind of ethnography. What was
important in this shift was the moving from gaze to voice in ethnography. In the course of
“old” ethnographic effort peasants were condemned to silence; only here and there in that
ethnography can we actually read what the informant said – basically no more than a
sentence. On the other hand customs, dress, and other material were described in the
great detail3. Voice functioned as an element that filled the empty space of the gaze of the
other[CITATION Eva07 \p 72 \l 1050 ], voice was in the hand of the ethnographer who
tried to fill the gap in the gaze of the other. On the other hand, the “midst of life”,
unattainable within ethnography, appeared as a voice of the other. Thus old ethnography
mortified its object, pushing it outside of life itself through denial of that other voice.
However, expanding of ethnography to an everyday practice through the voice opened up
the double nature of the voice itself. This double articulation can be detected in the
3
It is not strange then that Milovan Gavazzi was one of the earliest ethnographic filmmakers in Europe (he
made his first ethnographic film in 1930).
textual practice of the local ethnography. Through an understanding of culture as text (in
a wider sense as a system of signifiers) the voice stood for the impossible residue of the
interpretational practice. What ethnography interpreted in that case was not everyday life
and practice but the “paralysis of the artificial dead” (Santner 2001, 22). Paralysis
occurred in the moment of detachment from the temporal flow of everyday life.
What was central to such ethnography was the effort to transform the voice of the
other seen as a noise, distortion, and so on, to meaningful, rational enunciation. But this
shift required the other whose rationality was barred. Thus, instead of the other who
possessed the secret of his/her unconscious ethnic identity, a new paradigm produced an
other who inherited rationality that was barred to him/her. Class difference was thus
inversely maintained; in search of ethnic identification the new class used ethnography to
try to cope with the lack of such identification through the other and in a “new paradigm”
ethnography brought to the other a way to cope with the lack of reflexivity. By trying to
assimilate the native other the logic of ethnological discourse and its social context
always produced a wider distance to him/her.

Past participant in the present

A similar disposition to that between ethnological discourse and its object can be
found in the relationship between Odysseus and the Sirens. The Sirens’ song is at the
same time “that which incites Odyssey, as narration, while, on the other hand, that which
results from this narration; its remainder, which cannot be recounted” [ CITATION Sal98
\p 61 \l 1050 ]. Salecl even goes further in analyzing this relationship by assigning the
Sirens a specific relationship with the past, a past that can’t be symbolized. This
intervention by Salecl in terms of the understanding of the song of the Sirens as the
knowledge of the past has correlation to the ethnological idea of the survival of the
cultural forms from the past. As is clear in Gavazzi’s quotation, ethnology took on the
task of symbolizing this impossible knowledge – knowledge in the Real [CITATION
Žiž08 \t \l 1050 ]. Instead of avoiding the traumatic core, the cause of desire, an
ethnological subject such as Odysseus wanted to hear the secret song of the past. Of
course that song of the Sirens could not be heard, but nevertheless it existed. For the
purpose of the argument we should extend a little the notion of Lacanian Real, which is
constructed through object “petit a” and the symptom. It is true that these two forms are
in a way the rest of the work of the symbolic, of interpretational endeavor, its traumatic
core, but they also could be seen as witnesses of the old symbolic. This put them in the
position of being, not only the impossible object, but the supposed lost object. The
construction of the Eastern European ethnographic object is a good example of this. This
object was never part of the lived experience; it gained its status through the many
different forms of the symbolic dead. One of them was the social dead – objects of the
past were thrown out of use, and the native Others were represented as dominated by an
irrational repeating of forms – people involved in those repetitions did not give pragmatic
reasons for their behavior, something which is acceptable by the modern mind. It is
exactly the past that can’t be signified something that in an interview with Helen Cixous,
Foucault named “memory without recollection”. There is no signifier that could cover
this kind of past because it is a product of its impossibility. As Helen Cixous puts it: “As
if loss were never lost enough, as if there were always more losing to be done”
[ CITATION Cix08 \p 158 \n \l 1050 ]. This is why Salecl referred to the past in the
sound of Sirens; it is always the sound of forgetting, of something to get (for-get),
something that is not lost enough. And of course to recollect means that something was
once collected and now needs re-collection. The main idea constructed by the Eastern
ethnologies is that this memory without recollection could be brought back, that the old
Symbolic could speak again. This would be possible only if markers of that specific
feature were not lost; if there was no second death of the ethnographic object. The drive
as such can never be lost as it is a constant force; if peasants were to forget it, ethnology
would bring back this specific “jouissance of the drive”. This ethnographic mechanism
that represent the native other as the “subject of the drive” goes hand in hand with
comparative method. We can even say that it produce a possibility for comparing through
ensuring the gaze at culture as the gaze at plants what brigs us back to the already
mentioned concept of “planetary consciousness” by Mary Louise Pratt[CITATION Pra03
\p 5 \t \l 1050 ]; a new possibility of male European subject to classify and control what
was before a chaotic world of nature thanks to the system proposed by Carl Linee.
Exactly tradition and associated drive were tools to get rid of the historical process that
would differentiate nature from culture. Drive, thus, becomes past that is always here.
What we get here is the dichotomy of the Lacanian Real which is neither natural nor
cultural; it can’t be historicized; more text produced about it more distant it become.

Conclusion: never ending transition

The problem of the relationship between two ethnographies in producing lack and
difference through the desire for assimilation is even further complicated due to specific
strategies of the Other (peasants). Peasants adopted the position imposed on them through
the search for ethnic jouissance and they produced a specific representation of
themselves. Through the adoption of a specific position in the social narrative, peasants
understood their own culture solely through sublime objects of their past. What was
perceived as the original voice of peasants in the old paradigm became distortion and
obstacle for the “new” ethnology in pursuit of the authentic peasant voice. The old
ethnology perceived the new one as effort directed toward the objects of ephemeral
significance for the ethnological project. The new approach toward the peasantry through
interpreting their everyday life was even labeled, by old ethnology, as different science
(frequently as anthropology). Thus, the reason for the fundamental failure4 of one of the
systems was assigned to the opposite system and that relationship produced intensive
scientific and social debate throughout 20th century – at least in Croatian
ethnology[ CITATION Ple99 \l 1050 ]. This antagonistic view of peasantry (and the
whole of society) was in fact possible only with anamorphic distortion [CITATION
Žiž06 \p 26 \t \l 1050 ] of the society itself. The unresolved status of class versus ethnic
identity was further amplified by the socialist ideal of a classless society.
Here we can detect the reason why in post-socialist era departments of ethnology
in Eastern Europe turned to Western anthropology as a salvation discourse. The European
Union as the big Other served as a possible cure for the traumatic wound in society.
Western anthropology was just another associated member within the European Union

4
Both ethnological schools conceptualized themselves as discourse in a permanent crisis – wether it was a
crisis of object (vanishing traditional culture) or a crisis of the subject (crisis of representation)
[ CITATION Pri01 \l 1050 ].
big Other. Instead of a smooth transition from antagonistic discourses, local ethnologists
were themselves let down by the shining theoretical consciousness of Western
anthropology. Although the new paradigm of ethnology strictly criticized the concept of
static ethnic identity, it was regarded as a questionable discourse by Western
anthropologists. This was especially vivid in the conference held in Zagreb in 1995 –
‘War, Exile, and Everyday Life’ where Ina Maria Greverus criticized native ethnologists
for using oral historical methods to produce monuments of memory, as well as for
transforming displaced persons and refugees into “professional victims” as part of
nationalistic discourse[CITATION Gre96 \p 283 \t \l 1050 ]. Thus she emphasized the
location of anthropology as a crucial factor for producing the interpretation, not the
methodology or theory. It would perhaps have been more fruitful if she had asked why
anthropology could provoke nationalism in spite of its critical legacy. The conclusion we
can draw from Greverus remark would be that there was always some surplus in local
ethnology, despite its theoretical or methodological standpoint, that could subvert the
“original” (read Western) anthropological endeavor. This surplus and subversion were
(and still are) differently represented by different anthropologists of post-socialism. Some
regarded the problem as encompassing a lack of research in different cultural settings,
others see a problem in a lack of proper institutionalized anthropological education. Chris
Hann goes even further and uses the term Eurasia to describe the surplus: “Eurasia is
understood here as the sum of the continents usually distinguished as Europe and Asia,
plus North Africa…. From Eastern Germany to Central Asia, from the Balkans to
Chukotka and Kamchatka, we find that the socialist era remains the crucial temporal
baseline, even for many of those too young to recall any adult experiences of living
under socialist forms of government” [CITATION Han03 \p 7 \l 1050 ]. Although this
could imply a type of new orientalism (through some homogenous culture), Hann avoids
this criticism because of the confined diversity of Eurasia – a type of diversity he
promotes as able to provide a chance for local ethnologies to become more cosmopolitan,
that is, comparative. On the other hand, the result of such a comparative approach in the
confined space of Eurasia could also ensure the existence of Western identity and
endanger anthropology by turning back to the Eurocentric position criticized by
postmodern anthropology and postcolonial theory. The anthropology of post-socialism
could thus produce the Other on its own soil, intensifying the border between “new” and
“old” Europe. The figure of the local ethnologist remains in the position of “almost
anthropologist but not quite”, like the whole of East European society (“almost European
but not quite”). Local ethnologist points to the anamorphic distortion of the West as if
he/she comes from Western unconscious – a possible model of anthropology that should
be denied. Here we can rest on the belief of Mladen Dolar that Yugoslavia was/is the
unconscious of Europe[CITATION Mla07 \p 12 \l 1050 ] and that the native
anthropologist represents the impossibility of anthropology – its Siren’s voice, its
unchemlich, and its spectral apparition.

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