Abstract
The end of the Second World War and the establishment of the Second Yugoslavia paved the way for the formation of a Macedonian state—for the first time in history. The immediate post-war national institution-building including the scientific, educational, and publishing politics in Macedonia created a peculiar context where academic workers were expected to navigate a fine line between the national and class criteria in research and teaching. In this chapter, I focus on the early post-war Skopje University to discuss the epistemological ruptures and continuities between the pre- and post-war habits of observation, methodologies, and social research themes. Despite the official prohibition of sociology in its pre-war form, this period is extremely instructive for the framework of the early post-war articulation of social phenomena in Macedonia and, especially, the context for institutionalizing sociology in Macedonia in the 1960s.
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Notes
- 1.
Instigated during the ASNOM, it took less than a year for the Macedonian government to prepare the inauguration of the five initial faculties of the Skopje University: the Faculty of Philosophy started its work in December 1946, followed by the Medical and Agriculture-Forestry Faculties in 1947, the Technical Faculty in 1948, and the Faculty of Economics in 1950, which soon afterwards was restructured as the Faculty of Law and Economics (1951).
- 2.
A group of Macedonian intellectuals associated with the partisans saw the Second World War as an opportunity for a unification of all the Macedonians. They initiated an informal group Action for the National-Liberation Action Committee [mk. Akcionen narodno-osloboditelen komitet, ANOK] and attempted to shift the course of the KPJ. Albeit such provisions are also stipulated in the main ASNOM documents, the group failed to alter the federal politics and it was sidelined in different ways.
- 3.
MANU Archive “Haralampie Polenakoviḱ” in Skopje, Dragan Taškovski Fund, Avtobiografija.
- 4.
MANU Archive “Haralampie Polenakoviḱ” in Skopje, Dragan Taškovski Fund, Predavanja za marksizmot (file 179).
- 5.
MANU Archive “Haralampie Polenakoviḱ” in Skopje, Dragan Taškovski Fund, Programa za predavanje po predmetot sociologija (file 163).
- 6.
The Bogomils are considered to be founded by the priest Bogomil in the tenth century as a Gnostic sect that rejected both the ecclesiastical hierarchy and state authorities.
- 7.
Racin’s poetic work will eventually inspire his acquaintance Nedeljković during the 1960s, an episode discussed in the next section.
- 8.
It was not uncommon for scholars from all over the Federation to end up filling empty positions in post-war Skopje; among them Bogdan Šešić (1909–1999), who stayed at the Skopje University from 1950 to 1954, a logician trained in interwar Berlin and Prague and the author of the textbook-introduction to dialectial logic in the late 1950s.
- 9.
Miljovski was also a professor of the Marxist subjects at the Agriculture-Forestry Faculty as of 1949, where he taught political economy and history of political economy, and at the Faculty of Law, where he was a visiting professor. He is considered to be the founder of economics in Macedonia, while his academic interests also extended to economic and sociological interpretations of demographics and migrations (Dimitrov 1984; Uzunov and Stojkov 1993). In 1951, for instance, he opened the annual art exhibition of Macedonian painters, setting the ground for future Macedonian artisanship as not only an engaged enterprise but also one inspired by the national forms (Petkovski 1989, 223–224).
- 10.
Miljovska was on a research stay at the University of Boston from November 1962 to April 1963 (Korubin 2000, 9).
- 11.
Chifliks were hereditary estates outside government regulation which allowed for greater freedom of the owners in their treatment of peasant workers. This occurred in spite of the fact that the Ottoman Empire formally prohibited feudal relations in the mid-nineteenth century.
- 12.
The department and its Chair in Geography with Ethnology [mk. Katedra po geografija so etnologija] was part of the Faculty of Philosophy until 1958, when the then Institute of Geography (formed in 1955) joined the newly founded Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (PMF) in Skopje (Ǵorgoski 2016, 239–263; Markoski 2019).
- 13.
Trifunoski’s anthropogeographical monograph about the Ohrid-Struga region, based upon fieldwork which he did in the region during the late 1970s that was eventually published in Belgrade in 1992, opens with an editorial note which announces him as a researcher who “strictly” follows Cvijić’s research guidelines (in Trifunoski 1992, XI).
- 14.
His last intellectual project was an attempt to back the past politics about the formative character of the South Serbian legacy for the Serbian state that was “inexplicably” aborted after 1945 (more in Trifunoski 1995).
- 15.
A brief summary and a comparison of both the studies was published in the first issue of Sociologija, the first Yugoslav sociological journal (Kostić 1959, 170–170).
- 16.
- 17.
Interestingly enough, Nedeljković worked on this very topic in the interwar period, as discussed in the previous chapter, arguing in favor of an ethnic unity of the different groups populating the area and supporting his argument with ethnopsychological methods.
- 18.
The Macedonian communists were not enthusiastically welcoming of intellectuals in the resistance movement and the Macedonian branch of the KPJ in the early phases of the war and occupation. Vladimir Poležinoski (1912–1980), another Sorbonne graduate in law of ethnic Macedonian origins, joined the party after a heated discussion over his admission. His legal training, similar to Arsov, facilitated his way up to the team preparing ASNOM, while he was also a member and a second secretary of its Presidium. In the aftermath of the war, the Yugoslav military mission recruited Poležinoski to France, because of his knowledge of legal French, and then to West Germany. In the midst of the Yugoslav-Soviet quarrel, he paid a civil visit to a Soviet counterpart of his in Frankfurt; he was dismissed shortly afterward and accused of treason and spreading enemy propaganda. He served three years in the infamous political prison and labor camp Goli Otok from 1951 to 1954, but he gradually rehabilitated his career, first in Belgrade and then in Skopje (more in Čepreganov et al. 2013).
- 19.
MANU Archive “Haralampie Polenakoviḱ” in Skopje, Boris Arsov Fund, Psihološki studii: Pregled na nekoji psihološki koncepcii vo francuskata buržoazna nauka, 1–23.
- 20.
Taškovski studied Marxist and non-Marxist scholars, such as Diderot and Halbwachs, during the interwar period as per his autobiographical account. In MANU Archive “Haralampie Polenakoviḱ” in Skopje, Dragan Taškovski Fund, Kratka biografija.
- 21.
It took her some time to face her “long internal conflict” and acquaint herself with the Marxist literature (Mićić in Marić 2016, 88).
- 22.
Together with Pavao Vuk-Pavlović (1894–1976), an aesthetician of Croat Jewish origins, critical of the dogmatic Marxism, who stayed at the Skopje University from 1958 to 1971, and several other Macedonian philosophers. The program had a blast during this period, which overlapped with the liberal communist turn in the early 1960s and the room for public deliberations it tolerated (discussed in the next chapter). The philosophy program developed an atypical, for the Yugoslav context, aesthetic laboratory and participated in organizing theater and youth festivals (e.g., Temkov 2003).
- 23.
Another such publication of Kultura is Zagorka (Zaga) Pešić-Golubović’s (1930–2019), “one of the most prominent Serbian social scientists” (Spasić et al. 2022, 44), 1963 booklet titled The issues of the contemporary man. The booklet’s structure is twofold: the first part deals with philosophical and the second one with sociological issues. In the second part, she discusses the social character of the individual focusing on, inter alia, the issues of alienation in the Frankfurt School, but also reverting to Freud and Wright Mills. The main takeaway of Pešić-Golubović’s booklet pertains to her view of the sociological studies as evaluators of the development of the Marxist theory in practice, as well as the challenges which the population is facing in the course of this process (Pešiḱ-Goluboviḱ 1963, 41–57), an agenda which she adhered to during the coming decades.
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Trajanovski, N. (2024). Walking a Fine Line: The Skopje University in the Early Post-War Period (1945–1950s). In: A History of Macedonian Sociology. Sociology Transformed. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48869-6_2
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