Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the correspondence between ethnologists Milovan Gavazzi and Milenko Filipović, emphasizing the individual destinies of the two ethnologists and their strategies for dealing with challenges in a time of great socio-political turmoil in the 20th century.

Paper long abstract:

In the “short twentieth century“ period, a series of comprehensive social and political changes took place in Southeastern Europe. In just a few decades in the period from 1918 to 1945, several states were formed and several political regimes changed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. This paper will try to show the individual destinies of two ethnologists focusing on the correspondence between the Croatian ethnologist Milovan Gavazzi and his Serbian colleague Milenko Filipović. It is a continuous and content-rich correspondence that chronologically covers the period from 1930 to 1969. During that period several states were formed and dissolved (e. g. Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Independent State of Croatia, Socialist Yugoslavia). In that case, the Second World War represented an important historical turning point that decided the fates of the two ethnologists. In the interwar period, both ethnologists often worked outside their profession's narrow framework. However, in the shadow of the new socialist regime, their influence within the profession was gradually undermined due to various forms of repression after the Second World War. Therefore, I will focus on 1) the individual destinies of these two ethnologists, which became intertwined through the force of circumstance, as well as 2) the strategies that each of them used in order to cope with the challenges of the aforementioned period of great socio-political turmoil. The paper is methodologically grounded on the analysis of archival materials, mostly correspondence and written documentation, as well as academic literature in the field of the history of ethnology.