From Balkanology to Southeast European Studies

 

The first time I heard about the Balkan Sprachbund was in Serbia, while doing my Masters in German Linguistics. I had to compare one hundred German sentences with infinitive constructions — taken from Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” — with their Serbian translations. Linguists specialising in Balkan languages will not be surprised to hear that I observed far fewer infinitive constructions in Serbian due to the frequent use of the “da” + present tense construction – very similar to other Balkan languages, like Albanian and Greek. For the first time, I encountered the notion of an ‘area’, a geographical space having numerous commonalities due to social and cultural contact and interaction over a long period of time between groups inhabiting it, also resulting in linguistic convergence. This notion of the Balkan Sprachbund has ever since been a key feature of Balkan linguistics – the predecessor to Area Studies and Southeast European (SEE) Studies as they are known today.

The University of Regensburg carries Area Studies in its banner, declaring it a pivotal growth area for the University. As such, our university is home to several intersecting Area Studies programmes. Yet, Southeast European Studies is one of our university’s most visible Area Studies focuses due to its long-term development and collaboration with numerous institutions in Germany and beyond (including South-Eastern Europe).

While in recent years Southeast European Studies has become more sophisticated due to conceptual restructuring, it is important to acknowledge that still many significant challenges lay ahead of us. Some relate to a continued scepticism around Area Studies, questioning, for example, whether there is added value in focusing on areal knowledge in a globalised world (in both teaching and research). Further concerns have to do with Area Studies’ strong leaning towards theoretical and methodological eclecticism, often ‘packaged’ as (un-reflected) ‘interdisciplinarity’, and the instrumentalisation of areal knowledge in (geo)politics, knowledge production always being imbricated with issues of power (see, for example, the Introduction to The Rebirth of Area Studies by Zoran Milutinović).

More recently, Southeast (and East) European Studies have become subject to postcolonial critiques, questioning, for example, established epistemologies in the light of the much-needed ‘decentring’ and ‘decolonisation’ of knowledge. In line with this, some argue for the production and dissemination of other types of ‘vernacular’ knowledge, focusing for example, on the lived experiences of war and conflict (see the brief video with our partner, Vjollca Krasniqi from the University of Prishtina). Others criticise a stripped-down or ‘reductionist’ notion of language learning as merely a ‘skill’ that can be learned without providing an understanding of language use as a cultural practice. Finally, scholars, especially from the region, deplore the structural hierarchies that reinforce ‘epistemic injustice’ (see, for example, Jana Bacevic’s latest work on that topic), preventing their equal participation in platforms such as academic conferences and journals. Each of these considerations directly impacts knowledge production about South-Eastern Europe and thus, ultimately, the future of Southeast European Studies within Area Studies.

These were just some of the main topics discussed during the first Southeast European Studies Forum hosted by the seeFField project team, held in April 2023 in Regensburg. Nineteen representatives from fifteen partner institutions from Germany and Southeast Europe participated in the three-day-long Forum.

What´s in a name? Collaborative networks as a cornerstone of Southeast European Studies

The question remains what the key relevance is of studying a specific region as a ‘micro’ environment within a globalised world. Several important events in the last decade, such as the repeated migration and the COVID pandemic (see, for example, the books Is it tomorrow yet?: paradoxes of the pandemic by Ivan Krastev and Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina: Peripheral Selves by Daniela Majstorović), have shown that globalisation cannot be approached without zooming in on the dynamics of specific areas and their sociocultural, political, and linguistic make-up. The contemporary world – or an ‘area’ for that matter – must be understood as a ‘network’ rather than a set of clearly delimited material entities. Global and areal factors are always at play when analysing local processes (see the video statement by our partner, anthropologist Nebi Bardoshi). This view of the world as ‘connected’ is key to approaching areas such as South-Eastern Europe. Furthermore, it is this conceptual (transregional) understanding of an ‘area’, which is a key premise for participants in the seeFField project.

Thinking of South-Eastern Europe as connected and networked implies a ‘horizontal’ adjustment to both content-related and structural hierarchies. The former pertains to interdisciplinarity, the latter to decentralisation. Dealing with Area Studies, one learns quickly that adopting an interdisciplinary approach is imperative when trying to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of specific topics. When discussing issues of identity, for example, a range of theories in the social sciences, through history, to literary studies and linguistics, will need to be considered. In addition, many different methods can be applied to approach the highly complex issue of identity, starting with quantitative surveys (used in political science), oral history methods (as in history and anthropology) and discourse analysis (used first and foremost in linguistics), to name but a few. Recently, Digital Humanities too have gained prominence in Area Studies, not only because of the general surge in quantitative methodologies but also because of the academic imperatives of data availability, open science, and replicability of scholarly analysis (see the video statement by our partner, historian, Jiří Kocián from Charles University in Prague).

This can be overwhelming at times. Each discipline has a rich tradition of its own and sometimes this can lead to diametrically opposed views between the practitioners of different schools of thought and disciplines. Interdisciplinarity is not merely a fashionable term that can be bandied about by scholars; it requires genuine and substantial effort to coordinate input from sometimes competing fields. Adopting such an interdisciplinary approach is not always conducive to furthering one’s career, as many doctoral and postdoctoral students know. However, as our partner Christian Voss, a linguist from Humboldt University Berlin, stated, interdisciplinarity, strong in our field and fostered through continuous and open-minded collaboration, remains the strongest argument for Area Studies’ continued relevance.

The discussion about decolonising and decentralising Area Studies is neither new nor specific to South-Eastern Europe. The recent analysis by Lea Horvat and Aleksandar Ranković (2022) – compelling, empirically based, and thought-provoking – presents the issue in a nutshell: scholars from the region cannot easily gain visibility and recognition restrained and obstructed as they are by existing hierarchies. These are dominated by so-called ‘objective’ research(ers) from outside the region and perpetuated by the rules of neoliberal academia. Moreover, the dominant and prestigious position of English in academic communication and the ideology of asymmetric native-speakerism (that is, the ‘native-speaker’ English that is required from non-natives, but not vice versa for fluent English speakers in the languages of the region) essentially restricts the availability of an important body of research conducted outside of the academic ‘centres’.

The Forum’s participants fully recognised and extensively discussed these concerns, agreeing that building bridges with colleagues from other disciplines and countries represents an important remedy. With a view to bringing underappreciated bodies of knowledge to light – requiring a high degree of cultural intimacy with vernacular sites and contexts – all of this represents the cornerstone of the intellectual mission of the seeFField project and our partners. In the words of Ramona Gönczöl from SSEES, we are ready to sail out, combining our efforts and being committed to charting the often-turbulent waters of South-Eastern Europe and Area Studies together.

Further Literature:

Bacevic, Jana (2023). Epistemic injustice and epistemic positioning: towards an intersectional political economy. Current Sociology, Vol. 71(6), 1122–1140. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392121105760

Horvat, Lea; Ranković, Aleksandar (2022). Galeb i golub: Heritage Scholars, Power, and Knowledge Production in (Post-)Yugoslav Studies. Südost-Forschungen 81, 95-117.

Krastev, Ivan (2020). Is it tomorrow yet?: paradoxes of the pandemic. London: Allen Lane.

Majstorović, Danijela (2021). Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina: Peripheral Selves. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Milutinović, Zoran (2020) (Ed.). The Rebirth of Area Studies. Challenges for History, Politics and International Relations in the 21st Century. London, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.