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Paper short abstract

This paper examines fragmentary archival traces of a WWII-era exhibition at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. Treating archival absence as ethnographic data, it explores how institutional silences reveal the moral, political, and epistemic tensions of anthropology under occupation.

Paper long abstract

My contribution examines archival documentation relating to the Ethnographic Museum in

Belgrade during the Nazi occupation of Serbia, and attempts to assess the position of various actors involved. Particular focus is on an exhibition set up between 1942 and 1944 at the request of the authorities, at a time when the museum did not have its own exhibition space. The exhibition itself is only fragmentarily documented in wartime and post-war sources: archival traces are sparse, dispersed across multiple repositories, and notably absent from the museum’s own archive, for reasons that remain unclear. Rather than treating this absence as a mere obstacle to historical reconstruction, I approach it as an interpretive challenge, asking how institutional silences, gaps, and selective preservation reflect the moral, political, and epistemic entanglements in a historical situation where scholarship and politics intersect at multiple levels. I am treating the archive as a site where, instead of living interlocutors, we encounter voices from the past that speak to our subject unevenly or perhaps not at all. Unlike living interlocutors, these voices are not open to further questioning. Instead of struggling to reconstruct what exactly happened, we can instead direct attention to how (institutional) memory is produced, erased, or sanitized, and also move beyond moral binary oppositions of complicity and resistance.