RETURN TO THE STATE AND TO IDENTITY IN THE TIMES OF THEIR “END” FURTHER CONSEQUENTIAL ANALYSIS OF THE POLITICS OF SERBIAN ETHNOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Abstract

If we extend consequential analysis of the politics of Serbian ethnology and anthropology, initiated in our earlier works, to the ongoing debates over “the end of the state” and “the obsoleteness of identity” as a research concept, the optimistic scenario unexpectedly emerges. Our earlier pessimistic findings regarding the future of critical anthropology in Serbia failed to consider single, albeit promising, opportunity to overcome the uneasiness we regularly experience regarding the essentialist foundation of cultural heritage protection and our proverbial discomfort with state-governed identity politics. These are the times of social and cultural devastation, caused by the decline of welfare state’s crucial instruments, including subsidized healthcare, widespread social policy, and the complex system of state-financed self-governed educational, scientific and cultural institutions. What we need, both as citizens and as a professional community, is “more state” and identity-control mechanisms if we are willing to achieve our discipline’s most liberal goals. Such a mechanism, legitimized by the international community and incorporated into the Serbian administration by the hybrid learning-incentives model, and offered to our institutions relevant for cultural policy regulation and implementation, is already in power. It is an overarching, peacekeeping, identity-compounding international system of cultural heritage protection that we need to consider not as the most usual suspect for generating ethnic conflicts and cultural racism that will eventually lead to heritage wars and new circle of political instrumentalisation of collective identities, but as a conservative tool for achieving liberating goals. Such a counter intuitive endeavor requires strategic relinquishment of critical anthropology’s self-perceived identity of a “watchdog” that hounds on every single potentially nationalist or racist act, concept or process, and a proposed turn towards prudence instead. It would entail the instrumentalisation of instrumentalism itself, a turn to non-fundamentalist view on essentialism, return to the realist concept of relativism and further bureaucratization of identity-related issues. The general idea is to put identity away from public as far as possible, while the very public is reassured that interpretive sovereignty is protected by already legitimate institutions. Once we perceive cultural heritage protection as a reductive mechanism that refocuses identity-markers (proven “worth dying”) from whole populations to the abstract and depersonalized “elements of cultural heritage”, we will be able to achieve the most critical of all our aspirations. The key “sacrifice” we need to make in the process is to achieve basic consensus within professional community and to form a strategic partnership with “neoliberal” identity-compounding administration. “Identity market” on which cultural heritage protections operate should be further regulated to guarantee freedoms and rights of individuals, and not liberalized as anthropologists would naturally be inclined to in that regard, the context in which identity entrepreneurs freely used core populations’ resources of the self, including ethnic and religious identities, should be thoroughly revised in favor of ethnology’s monopole on national identity issues. The return to ethnology would be a crucial step in critical anthropology’s coming of age if it aspires to fulfillment of its peacekeeping potentials.