University of Helsinki
You are cordially invited to the Inaugural Lecture by Jane and Aatos Erkko Professor Jane Cowan (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies): An anthropologist in the archives: Reading letters to the League of Nations on minorities and Macedonia
TIME: 27.11.2018 at 16:15
VENUE: Pieni juhlasali/Small Festive Hall, Main building, Fabianinkatu 33, 4th floor, University of Helsinki
The lecture is free and open to the public. Reception in honour of Professor Cowan to follow the lecture
Description
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 Cowans 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 Cowans experience ‘on the ground’ and her anthropological training causes her to read archival records in a distinctive way. As 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 Cowans 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.
About the Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professorship: The Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation donated 2.92 million euros to the University of Helsinki Funds in 2008 for the establishment of a visiting professorship in studies on contemporary society at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. The research emphasis of the professorship will be on issues concerning social justice. http://jaes.fi/en/
Kind Regards,
Maija Väätämöinen
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Maija Väätämöinen
Service Coordinator, Administrative Services
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, National Library
Tel. +358 (0)2 941 22458