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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Victor A. Friedman*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago and director of the University's Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies

Abstract

Almost every country in Eurasia and Africa has been labeled a "cross-roads" at one time or another. In the Balkans, every country on the Via Egnatia and the Via Militaris was a crossroads simply by virtue of being on the route. In fact, when applied metaphorically, a crossroads need only involve two directions rather than the literal four, and the metaphor often invokes problematic dichotomies—for example, Christian/Muslim, east/west, center/periphery, tradition/modernity—rather than enlight-ening complexities. Still, as crossroads go, the territory of the Republic of Macedonia has seen quite a bit of traffic over the millennia, and the presence of seven different language groups with eight centuries or more residence—Slavic, Romance, Albanian, Hellenic, Indie, Armenian, and Turkic—gives it the same linguistic complexity as Greece, although the latter country pays considerably less attention to its multilingual and multi-ethnic heritage. The illustration on the cover of this issue, with signs in two alphabets and four languages (Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, and English), taken in a busy commercial district in the capital, Skopje, is intended both to illustrate the everyday nature of this complexity in Mace-donia and to acknowledge the global processes of which Macedonia is now a specific part.

Type
Challenging Crossroads: Macedonia in Global Perspective
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2010

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References

I wish to acknowledge the support of a Fulbright-Hays grant and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Neither organization is responsible for any opinion expressed here.

1. See Friedman, Victor A., “Review Article of Adamou, Evangelia, ed., Le Patrimonie plurilingue de la Grèce (Le nom des langues II),” Balkanistika 22 (2009): 215–26.Google Scholar This attitude has even penetrated the world of men's magazines. The November 2004 issue of Maxim featured a photo spread of international “Miss Maxims,” each a scantily clad and provocatively posed representative of a different country with a putative quotation from the model and a “hometown fact” about the country such as the difference between the Netherlands and Holland or the number of bulls killed annually in bullfights in Spain. Miss Maxim's hometown fact for Greece was the following: “According to the Greek government there are no ethnic divisions in Greece” (176).

2. Rogers, Douglas, “Postsocialisms Unbound: Connections, Critiques, Comparisons,“ Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Rogers also provides an excellent set of references to relevant work.

3. As Keith Brown points out in his article, though Macedonia and Iraq are widely separated in geopolitical terms today, they were still part of the same state only a century ago. While Macedonia has been repeatedly enmeshed in networks of labor migration that result in complex combinations, networks of ideology have led Macedonia, and Greece, further afield, to the Hindu Kush, in search of putative descendents of Alexander of Macedon with whom they attempt to claim kinship.

4. The conference, entitled “Re-Thinking Crossroads: Macedonia in Global Context,” was organized by the University of Chicago's Center for East European and Russian/ Eurasian Studies (CEERES) with funding from Title VI (U.S. Department of Education) as well as from the University's Center for International Studies, Department of Anthropology, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Franke Institute for the Humanities, Norman Wait Harris Fund, and Student Government. As director of CEERES, I wish to thank Meredith Clason, associate director of CEERES, and Jeremy Pinkham, then outreach coordinator of CEERES, for their work on the conference, as well as all the participants for their contributions, which inform this cluster and its introduction. Thanks also to Andrew Graan, who helped both formulate the original idea and see it through to realization, to Susan Gal for advice and support, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their input and to Mark D. Steinberg for bringing the cluster to fruition. Finally, and most importantly, I wish to thank my two coeditors, Susan L. Woodward and Keith Brown, who both expended enormous time and energy in engaging with these papers and this introduction. The quality of the entire cluster is a reflection of their hard work, and their comments on the introduction, especially those of Susan L. Woodward, were crucial to its final shape.

5. To the north, the Serbian Orthodox Church claims the Macedonian Orthodox Church as schismatic. To the east, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences still treats Macedonian as a Bulgarian dialect. See Ivan Kočev, Bălgarski dialekten atlas (Sofia, 2001). To the south, the government of Greece rejects the fact that Greece has an ethnic Macedonian minority and that the Republic of Macedonia has a right to its constitutional name and blocks Macedonia from international organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—even in the United States, the Modern Greek Studies Association distributed a call to prevent the Seventh Macedonian-North American Conference on Macedonian Studies from taking place at the University of Utah. To the west and northwest, Albania and Kosovo are concerned about the fate of their fellow Albanian-speakers in Macedonia—Macedonia also has an interest in some Macedonian-speakers in Albania— and fears of inedentism exist in various sectors to varying degrees of intensity.

6. These were the five dissertations: David B. Rheubottom, “A Structural Analysis of Conflict and Cleavage in Macedonian Domestic Groups” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1971); Nahoma Sachs, “Music and Meaning in a Macedonian Village” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1975); John C. Grossmith, “Marginality and Reproductive Behavior among the Albanian Minority in Yugoslav Macedonia” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1977); Christopher Marshall, “The Aesthetics of Music in Village Macedonia“ (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1977); George H. Ford, “Networks, Ritual, and ‘Vrski': A Study of Urban Adjustment in Macedonia” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 1982).

7. The arguments here can be fruitfully compared to Rogers Brubaker's Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). Although “groupness” is a part of the dynamics of the relations Dimova analyzes, her argument shifting the focus of “groupness” from ethnicity to class and consumption resonates with Brubaker's Hungarian-Romanian examples.

8. On the private/public distinction in the Yugoslav economy and its consequences, see Woodward's, Susan L. groundbreaking study Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia 1945-1990 (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar.

9. Marinov, Tchavdar, “Anticommunist, but Macedonian: Politics of Memory in Post- Yugoslav Macedonia,” Tokovi istorije 17, no. 1-2 (2009): 6583 Google Scholar, at www.inisbgd.co.rs/ celo/2009_l.pdf (last accessed 1 September 2010). See also Ilievski, Petar, “Two Opposite Approaches towards Interpreting Ancient Texts with Anthroponymic Contents,” Prilozi MANU: Oddelenie za lingvistika i literatuma nauka 31, no. 1 (2008): 3548 Google Scholar, at www.manu .edu.mk/Prilozi_MANU_OLLN_XXXI_l.pdf (last accessed 1 September 2010). Ilievski's text is actually a broad, solidly linguistic discussion of the whole Ancient Greek-Ancient Macedonian-Modern Macedonian dispute.

10. Another example is Macedonia's Romani population, which has shown the need for nuancing in political science modeling. See Eben Friedman, “Explaining the Political Integration of Minorities: Roms as a Hard Case” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2002).