Cultivating a ‘slavic modern’: Yugoslav beekeeping, schooling and travel in the 1920s and 1930s
2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 41; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0030923042000335510
ISSN1477-674X
Autores Tópico(s)Balkans: History, Politics, Society
ResumoAbstract This article presents research on the foreign travel of Yugoslav teachers, students and beekeepers in the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses on Yugoslavs' travels to Czechoslovakia and examines the role that notions of the 'Slavic' played in the international circulation of ideas within these particular networks. During this period one finds striking homologies between the modernization of education and the modernization of beekeeping (apiculture); the article examines both of these domains exploring the question of what modulations the 'Slavic' worked on the 'modern' as both moved within one particular set of geographical and temporal coordinates. In the period under study, alongside the circulation of political, technological and institutional reforms, noteworthy changes in how human beings, their actions and their knowledge were thought about were also circulating. These changes have been referred to as the 'cultural constitution of modernity', and here ideas regarding temporal simultaneity, human agency and reason are examined, using travel texts and related documents to explore how these notions were mobilized, moved and embodied by teachers, students and beekeepers. In each of these three areas Yugoslav–Czechoslovak circuits were crucial to establishing a 'Slavic modern'. It is argued that the notions of Slavic temporal parity and coevalness were central to how Yugoslavia's relationship to progress was conceptualized and how collective identities were imagined. Similarly, it is argued that Yugoslavs' travel to their 'northern Slavic brothers' played an important part in putting ideas of modern 'agentic actorhood' into circulation in Yugoslavia. It is also proposed that these Yugoslav–Czechoslovak networks helped to normalize a set of governing principles in which the 'rational' and the 'emotional' were closely linked—a scientifically ordered reasoning was joined with a style of emotional comportment that valorized effusive sociability. The 'Slavic modern' can be thought of as one of the multiples of modernity, and in the concluding section it is proposed that in fact rather than thinking of the 'Slavic' as working modulations on a 'general modernity' it would be more accurate to see the 'Slavic modern' that was cultivated by beekeepers, teachers and students traveling to Czechoslovakia as one localized staging. Notes This article is part of a larger study of Pan‐Slavic cosmopolitanism and the foreign travel of Yugoslav teachers and students. My research suggests that a Pan‐Slavism in which Russia rarely figures was very important in the various circuits of Yugoslav–Czechoslovak interaction during the interwar era. Studies that deal with the modernization of social structures and institutions in Yugoslavia include Djurović, Arsen. Kosmološko Traganje za Novom Školom: Modernizacijski izazovi u sistemu srednjoškolskog obrazovanja u Beogradu 1880–1905. Beograd, 1999; Marković, Peđa J. Beograd i Evropa 1918–1941. Beograd, 1992. Wittrock, Björn. "Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition." Daedalus, 129/1 (2000). This is related to, though distinct from, the notion of cultural modernity as discussed in Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. "On Alternative Modernities." Public Culture XI/1 (1999). Mitchell, Timothy. Questions of Modernity. Minneapolis, 2000: xi. See the essays collected in Mitchell's volume. Though they do not expressly deal with the problem of modernity the following works are relevant as well: Stoler, Ann Laura. "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies." Journal of American History (2001); Stråth, Bo, ed. Europe and the Other and Europe as Other. Brussels, 2000. See, for example, the Winter 2000 issue of Daedalus, particularly Eisenstadt, S. N. "Multiple Modernities." Daedalus 129/1 (2000). Bjelić, Dusan, I. and Obrad Savić. Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Cambridge, 2002; Goldsworty, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. New Haven, 1998; Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford, 1997; Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, 1994. See, for example, Benedict Anderson's argument that nationalism emerged in Caribbean and North American colonies: Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn. London, 1991; Gwendolyn Wright's argument that French urban planning first played out in colonial experiments: Wright, Gwendolyn. "Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 1900–1930." In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler. Berkeley, 1997; and Ann Laura Stoler's work on sexuality and regimes of truth in East Asia: Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, 1995. I am thinking here of the work of John Meyer, Francisco Ramirez and their colleagues. See, for example, Ramirez, Francisco O., and John W. Meyer. "National Curricula: World Models and National Historical Legacies." In Internationalisierung/Internationalisation, edited by Marcelo Caruso and Heinz‐Elmar Tenorth. Frankfurt am Main, 2002. Schriewer, Jürgen. "World System and Interrelationship Networks: The Internationalization of Education and the Role of Comparative Inquiry." In Educational Knowledge: Changing Relationships between the State, Civil Society, and the Educational Community. edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz. Albany, 2000; Schriewer, Jürgen, and Carlos Martinez. World‐Level Ideology or Nation‐Specific System‐Reflection?: Reference Horizons in Educational Discourse, 7 vols, vol. 3, Cadernos prestige. Lisbon, 2003. For a more extended discussion see, Sobe, Noah W. "Feeling Slavic Hospitality and Kinship in the Travels of Yugoslav Teachers and Students to Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938." In Turizm: Leisure, Travel and Nation‐Building in Russian, Soviet and Eastern European History, edited by Anne E. Gorsuch & Diane P. Koenker. Forthcoming. Jovanović, Jovan P. "Pčelarska Ekskurzija u Čehoslovačkoj." Pčelar XI/11–12 (1925): 165, 166, 169. See Witkovsky, Matthew S. "Tales of an Absent Monument: Views of the Monument to National Liberation in Prague." Harvard Design Magazine XIII (2001). Archives of Yugoslavia (Belgrade), Ministry of Education Opšte odeljenje, stipend report from Miloš Đ. Ilić to the Ministry of Education (undated, 1936?) 66‐443‐702. Glumac, Djordje. "Moj Boravak u Čehoslovačkoj." Československo–Jihoslovanská Revue III/5 (1933). Archives of Yugoslavia (Belgrade), Ministry of Education Opšte odeljenje, stipend report from Momčilo Balabanović (11.9.1933) 66‐443‐702. My thinking about coevalness is in part inspired by the now classic work of Johannes Fabian who specifically traces how "a denial of living in the same moment" is generated through the ways in which the objects of discourse are constructed in the field of anthropology. See Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other. New York, 1983. See, for example, the discussion of evolutionary, stagist theories and the notion of "uneven development" in Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, 2000. Meyer, John W., and Ronald L. Jefferson. "The "Actors" of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency." Sociological Theory XVIII/1 (2000). In this section I am drawing on planning documents in the Archives of Yugoslavia (Belgrade), Ministry of Education Odeljenje za osnovnu nastavu 66‐2340‐2214; a report from the sponsoring organization "Izvještaj o radu godini 1933" (Zagreb, Jugoslovensko–Čehoslovačka Liga, 1933); as well as Debenak, Andrej. "Vtisi iz učiteljske studijske ekskurzije po Čehoslovaški," Učiteljski tovaris 10 i 11 (1933); Ljubunčić, Salih. "Naučno putovanje naših učitelja u Čehoslovačku." Napretka i Savremena Škole, nos 5–10 (1933); Ljubunčić, Salih. Školstvo i prosvjeta u Čehoslovačkoj: s osobitim obzirom na pedagošku i školsku reformu, edited by Salih Ljubunčić, Biblioteka "Škole Rada". Zagreb, 1934. Ljubunčić, Školstvo i prosvjeta u Čehoslovačkoj: 44, 8. Ibid.: 10. Nolan, Mary. Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany. Oxford, 1994. Ljubunčić, Školstvo i prosvjeta u Čehoslovačkoj: 10. Donzelot, Jacques. "The Promotion of the Social." In Foucault's New Domains, edited by Mike Gane and Terry Johnson. New York, 1993: 124. Ljubunčić, Školstvo i prosvjeta u Čehoslovačkoj: 40, 43. See, e.g. Budimir, Sima. "Med i šećer." Pčelar VI/7 (1923). Jovanović, Jovan P. "Pčelarstvo kod Čeha." Pčelar IV/3 (1921): 6. For purposes of convenience I am using "emotion", "feeling" and "passion" interchangeably in this discussion of the normative organization of what might alternately be called the "affective" domain of human behavior and thought. A more carefully specified study of how these concepts and descriptors have historically traveled is outside the ambit of the present article. For useful analyses of recent anthropological and historical work on emotions see Rosenwein, Barbara. "Worrying about Emotions in History." American Historical Review, 107/3 (2002); Wilce, James M. "Passionate Scholarship: Recent Anthropologies of Emotion." Reviews in Anthropology XXXIII/1 (2004). Jovanović, Jovan P. "Iz istorije pčelarstva." Pčelar VI/1–3 (1923). Djordjević, Svetoz. K. "Kako se pčelari u Evropi." Pčelar VI/6 (1923): 88. Budimir, S. "Pčelarstvo kod nas." Pčelar V/3 (1922): 38–39. See, e.g., Iskruljev, Jovan. "Skola Vysokyćh Studii Pedagogickih v Praze a v Brne." Učitelj, nos 5–6 (1924); "Ispitivanje dedinjstva u Čehoslovačkoj." Učitelj, no. 3 (1923); Jela Ivanovićka, "Narodno prosvećivanje u Čehoslovačkoj—Masarikov Institut." Učitelj, nos 5–6 (1924). An excursion of university students in 1930 (of approximately 350 Yugoslav travelers) complained of being "financially exploited" and fed poor food during their visit to Czechoslovakia. The Yugoslav foreign ministry concluded, however, that part of the problem lay in their not being properly guided by their professors. Archives of Yugoslavia (Belgrade), Ministry of Education Opšte odeljenje, 66 POV‐78‐218. Ljubunčić, "Naučno putovanje:" 142. Closely paralleling this account is the report of a Slovenian teacher participating in the excursion. See Debenak, "Vtisi iz učiteljske studijske ekskurzije po Čehoslovaški." Archives of Yugoslavia (Belgrade), Ministry of Education Opšte odeljenje, stipend report from Miloš Đ. Ilić to the Ministry of Education (undated, 1936?), 66‐443‐702. On the problem of "enchantment" and "modernity" see also Bennett, Jane. "The Enchanted World of Modernity: Paracelsus, Kant and Deleuze." Cultural Values I/1 (1997). Ljubunčić, Školstvo i prosvjeta u Čehoslovačkoj: 9. Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London, 2002: 12. Mitchell, Timothy. "The Stage of Modernity." In Questions of Modernity, edited by Timothy Mitchell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000.
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