Inaugural Lecture of Erkko Visiting Professor Jane Cowan
Channel: Helsinki Collegium
Date: 2018-11-29

Inaugural Lecture by Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professor Jane Cowan

"An Anthropologist in the Archives: Reading letters to the League of Nations on minorities and Macedonia"

The 1919 Paris peace conference following the Great War finalised the dismantling of the Ottoman, Hapsburg, Hohenzollern and Romanov empires and established the ‘New Europe’ in which the nation-state became the normative political form. According to interwar scholar Jakob Robinson and his colleagues, the new political order detached almost 100 million people of the three great pre-war empires of Central and Eastern Europe and transformed 25-30 million of them into national minorities.

In this lecture, professor Jane Cowan considers the process of ‘making minorities’ from the vantage point of letters sent to the League of Nations on minorities and Macedonia and the encounters that they generated. She explores how these letters (treated by the League as ‘petitions’) were read by League of Nations civil servants, state diplomats, civil society advocates and allies and the European press. The authors penned their letters to make political claims and to seek individual and collective justice, yet many of those reading and responding to the letters held very different visions of justice.

Jane Cowan’s lecture will convey a sense of the drama that unfolded in the League Secretariat offices of the Hôtel Nationale as claimants asserted who they were and what they wanted. Cowan probes how they used or resisted categories like ‘minority’ within this subject-making process and how their readers responded and why. She also explores some methodological aspects of entering a historical archive as an anthropologist, one who has spent significant periods of time in the Balkans, especially in Greece, since 1975. Jane Cowan’s experience ‘on the ground’ and her anthropological training causes her to read archival records in a distinctive way. Although the League archives are full of claims about ‘the Macedo-Bulgarians’, ‘the Greeks’, ‘the Albanians’ and so forth, portraying them as separate peoples with unambiguous loyalties and clear boundaries, Professor Cowan’s forty years of work in the Balkans alerts her to the complex, always situated politics of identity, and the shifting ways that an individual may describe herself from one context to another, one audience to another, and across time. Inspired by Michel Foucault's project of 'a history of the present', Professor Cowan asks how our taken-for-granted notion of 'minority' arose out of the still fluid and contested identifications of the interwar period.