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Paper short abstract

The paper examines silences in historical narratives and archives concerning the interwar history of Croatian ethnology. Based on doctoral research, it shows how personal archival fonds challenge the established picture of the discipline’s history presenting it in a different light.

Paper long abstract

In various historical overviews, the beginning of the modern history of Croatian ethnology is symbolically placed in 1927. This is an important founding year that begins with the arrival of the young Zagreb ethnologist and museum curator Milovan Gavazzi (1895 – 1992) as the head of the Chair of Ethnology and Ethnography at the University of Zagreb. According to the literature, this seemingly simple and unproblematic act of institutional transfer established the so-called cultural-historical paradigm within Croatian ethnology, positioning M. Gavazzi as its central figure. However, this established picture of the discipline's history begins to change once the researcher ventures into the archives and moves away from official documentary material toward personal archival fonds and ego-documents (memoir records, private correspondence). The research reveals a discrepancy between historical narratives about the interwar history, official documentary material, and events recorded in personal archival material. Based on these, a completely different picture of disciplinary history emerges: one that is dynamic and turbulent, shaped by the ideologization of science, political upheavals, and conflicts among various actors – but also characterized by various forms of symbolic erasure of individuals from its history. This case clearly demonstrates a process of production of silences by anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, operating at multiple levels: from the creation of documents, their archiving, to historical narratives. In this paper, I aim to problematize the role of archives as a repository of selective memories, places of “silencing” different voices but also a space for re-examining the written history of the discipline.