The Ohrid Festival and Political Performativity in the Contemporary Republic of Macedonia

Abstract

This paper identifies art festivals and heritage venues as central pillars in contemporary politics in the Republic of Macedonia. While focusing on the venues used during the Ohrid Summer Festival, my analysis expands on the wider performative aspect of politics shaped by the 2001 conflict with the Albanian insurgents and the conflict with Greece around the name Macedonia that has additionally added performative elements of pronounced emphasis on Christianity and antiquity. These political performative practices reveal the critical role that the country's pending accession to the EU has had on the ideological struggles within and outside the country, and the centrality of high culture in the conduct of ethno-national and international politics.

Acknowledgements

This article is based on data gathered for the project ‘New and Ambiguous Nationbuilding in South Eastern Europe’, funded by the VW Foundation and the Austrian Research Fund. I am grateful to Professor Holms Sundhaussen, Professor Hannes Grandits and Professor Ulf Brunnbauer for their support and guidence throughout the project. My colleagues in Macedonia—Irina Stefoska, Ivona Opetcheska-Tatarchevska, Zarko Trajanovski and Ermis Lafazanovski—provided invaluable feedback on the topic of arts and politics in Macedonia.

Notes

 [1] Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier, ‘Governance by conditionality: EU rule transfer to the candidate countries of Central and Eastern Europe’, Journal of European Public Policy, 11, 2004, pp. 669–687.

 [2] Rozita Dimova and Ludmila Cojocary, ‘Introduction: contested nation-building within the international “order of things”: performance, festivals and legitimization in South-Eastern Europe’, History and Anthropology, 23(4) (special issue), 2012, forthcoming.

 [3] The ensuing analysis of the festival, with its ritualized, scripted and ceremonial character, arguably belongs to the ‘performance’ genre. I use the concept of performativity however to highlight the construction of an identity inevitably embedded in every deliberately staged event as well as the political dimension emerging out of the performance+performativity brace. I build on those arguments in which performativity is a process of enacting social categories and identities while shaping and being shaped by language and the body. Stuart Hall, for example, argues that race as a category is predicated on repetitive performative inscriptions. Stuart Hall, ‘Signification, representation and ideology: Althusser and the post-structural debates’, in D. M. Curran and V. W. J. Curran (eds), Cultural Studies and Communications, Edward Arnold, London, 1996, pp. 11–34. It is Judith Butler (1990, 1997), however, who introduced the notion of the performative arguing that gender is created through ‘citational practices’ and through repetitive indexing of social ideas about gender. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1990; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Routledge, New York, 1997.

 [4] In addressing the ‘idealized’ and ‘ritualized’ appearance of internationalism, Liisa Malkki foregrounds the steep hierarchy of the ‘family of nations’ in which the ideology of internationalism equates nations. Through this ideology the vast differences between nations ‘are made equivalent, equidistant, and thus domesticated, normalized and emptied of historical and political content’ (p. 59). Liisa Malkki, ‘Citizens of humanity: internationalism and the imagined community of nations’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 3, 1994, pp. 41–68.

 [5] See, for instance, Chiara De Cesari, ‘Creative heritage: Palestinian heritage NGOs and defiant arts of government’, American Anthropologist, 112(4), 2010, pp. 625–637; Chiara De Cesari, ‘World heritage and mosaic universalism. A view from Palestine’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 10, 2010, pp. 299–324; Rosemary J. Coombe, ‘Embodied trademarks: mimesis and alterity on American commercial frontiers’, Cultural Anthropology, 11, May 1996, pp. 202–224; George Marcus and Fred Myers, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995; William Mazzarella, ‘Culture, globalization, mediation’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33, 2004, pp. 345–367; Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004; Stephen Turner, ‘Sovereignty, or the art of being native’, Cultural Critique, 51, 2002, pp. 74–100; Jessica Winegar, ‘Cultural sovereignty in a global art economy: Egyptian cultural policy and the new Western interest in art from the Middle East’, Cultural Anthropology, 21, 2006, pp. 173–204; George Yudice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2003.

 [6] Prlichev Grigor, Serdarot, Misla, Skopje, 1971; Krste Petkov Misirkov, Za Makedonckite Raboti, Drzavnoknigoizdatelstvo na Makedonija, Skopje, 1946.

 [7] Herbert Taub, Jugoslawien. Illustriertes Touristenhandbuch für Reisen und Ferien in Jugoslawien, Stauffacher, Zürich, 1957, p. 294.

 [8] Harry R. Wilkinson, ‘Yugoslav Macedonia in transition’, The Geographical Journal, 118, 1952, pp. 389–405 (p. 405).

 [9] John B. Allcock, ‘Yugoslavia’, in D. Hall (ed.), Tourism and Economic Development in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, John Wiley, London, 1991.

[10] Some of the most famous artists that have performed at the festival are: Mstislav Rostropovic, Aldo Ciccolini, Gideon Cremer, Ruggiero Ricci, Viktor Tretjakov, Henryk Szeryng, Salvatore Accardo, Elena Obrascova, Katia Ricciarelli, Victoria de Los Angeles, Maxim Vangelov, Vadim Repin, Julian Rachlin, Ivo Pogorelic and many other vocal and instrumental soloists. The most famous ensembles that have performed at the festival are: Munich Chamber Orchestra, Virtuosi diRoma Chamber Orchestra, George Enescy Chamber Orchestra, Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, Symphonic Radio Orchestra of the Austrian Radio, and choirs such as the Madrigal Bucharest, Glinka from St Petersburg, the Vienna Children and many others.

[11] The exact date of St Sofia's construction is uncertain because there are no inscriptions that would help to determine it. Most likely today's church was either built or restored during the period of Archbishop Leo who was on the throne of the Church in the period between 1035 and 1056. Its original shape was a three-naval basilica with a transept, a dome and galleries on the side naves. Risto Kuzmanovski and Drasko Saljic, Ohrid, Turisticka stampa, Beograd, 1966.

[12] The funding of the May Opera Evenings, another important festival in the field of ‘high art and culture’, in recent years has been coming primarily from private sponsors who display their corporate symbols in the interior and exterior of the building of the Macedonian Opera and Ballet. In 2007, I witnessed the conspicuous presence of several Audi cars squeezed inside the main hall, and several displayed outside the main entrance announcing that year's official sponsor, the company Porsche Macedonia. For more, see Rozita Dimova, ‘Nation building vs. nation branding: highlights from South-Eastern Europe’, in S. Nedeljkovic (ed.), Ambiguous Identities and Nation-building in South-eastern Europe: The Case of Montenegro, Bastinik, Krusevac, 2009, pp. 23–47.

[13] Guide through Ohrid, Skopje, 2007.

[14] Olga Demetriou (2006) observed a similar process in Komotini, Greece. Olga Demetriou, ‘Streets not named: discursive dead ends and the politics of orientation in intercommunal spatial relations in Northern Greece’, Cultural Anthropology, 21, 2006, pp. 295–321.

[15] Rozita Dimova, ‘Rights and size: ethnic minorities, nation-states and international community in the Balkans’, Zeitshrift für Ethnologie, 130, 2006, pp. 277–299.

[16] Rozita Dimova, ‘The “nation of poetry”: language, festival and subversion in Macedonia’, History and Anthropology, 23(4) (special issue), 2012, forthcoming.

[17] Elsewhere I discuss in more depth the process of nation branding and the claims Macedonia makes on its ‘ancient’ heritage. Although the conflict is framed in the language of antiquity and history, the entire discussion resonates with the contemporary regime of copyrights and regulation of intellectual property. For more, see Dimova, ‘Nation building vs. nation branding’, op. cit., pp. 23–47.

[18] In his analysis of the making of modern Greece, Herzfeld (1982) describes the efforts (and problems) of the newly established Greek state in 1833 to live up to the ideas that European intellectuals held of Hellenism and ancient Hellas. The reality that politicians encountered on the ground was quite different from imagined past glories. In the first half of the 19th century, the majority of the population was rural and the dominant spoken language was so-called Romeic, which was quite different from the ‘pure Greek language’ (katharevousa) preferred and enforced mainly by intellectual elites. In the second half of the 19th century, universalistic views of the grandeur of ancient Hellas gradually shifted from a collective historical reference to Western modernity into a Greek national geopolitical claim. This shift required Greek intellectuals to fit the vast rural population into the project of forging historical continuity between modern Greece and ancient Hellas, a project they tried to accomplish by invoking the social scientific disciplines of folklore, anthropology and archaeology to establish Greece as the ‘cradle of European civilization’. It is this struggle to claim historical continuity that determines the power of symbols such as the name Macedonia, Alexander the Great, the Star of Vergina and Philip the Great. The right to use symbols that refer to the classical past, and which are invoked to bridge the gap between modern and ancient times, comprises one of the central issues in today's dispute between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia. For more on this, see Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1982, p. 6. Dimitrios Christopoulos and Kostas Tsitselikis, ‘Impasses in the treatment of minorities and homogeneis in Greece’, in S. Trubeta and C. Voß (eds), Minorities in Greece—Historical Issues and New Perspectives, Slavica Verlag, München, 2003. Michael Herzfeld, ‘Archaeological etymologies: monumentality and domesticity in twentieth-century Greece’, in D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos (eds), A Singular Antiquity. Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-Century Greece, Mouseio Benaki, Athens, 2008, pp. 43–54. Christian Voss, ‘Das Motiv der Wiedergeburt in der Großregion Makedonien’, Zeitschrift für Balkanologie, 38, 2002, pp. 91–111.

[19] Jane Cowan, ‘Fixing national subjects in the 1920s Southern Balkans: also an international practice’, American Ethnologist, 35, 2008, pp. 1–20; Tasos Kostopoulos, ‘Counting the “Other”: official census and classified statistics in Greece (1830–2001)’, in S. Trubeta and C. Voß (eds), Minorities in Greece—Historical Issues and New Perspectives, Slavica Verlag, München, 2003, pp. 55–78.

[20] Sarah F. Green, Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek–Albanian Border, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2005.

[21] For more on this, see Olga Demetriou, ‘Prioritizing “ethnicities”: the uncertainty of Pomak-ness in the urban Greek Rhodoppe’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27, 2004, pp. 95–119; Demetriou, ‘Streets not named’, op. cit., pp. 295–321; Sevasti Trubeta, ‘Minorisation and “ethnicisation” in Greek society: comparative perspectives on Muslim immigrants and the Thracian Muslim minority’, in S. Trubeta and C. Voß (eds), Minorities in Greece—Historical Issues and New Perspectives, Slavica Verlag, München, 2003; Christian Voss, ‘The situation of the Slavic-speaking minority in Greek Macedonia—ethnic revival, cross-border cohesion, or language death?’, in S. Trubeta and C. Voß (eds), Minorities in Greece—Historical Issues and New Perspectives, Slavica Verlag, München, 2003, pp. 173–187.

[22] For more on Macedonian, see Victor Friedman, ‘Macedonian language and nationalism during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century’, Balkanistica, 2, 1975, pp. 83–98; Victor Friedman, ‘The sociolinguistics of literary Macedonian’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 52, 1985, pp. 31–57; Victor Friedman, ‘On the complexity of identity in the nineteenth century Balkans as reflected in a multilingual text’, Vpoiskah ‘balkanskogo’ na Balkanah, 1999, pp. 48–51.

[23] Dennison Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment, 1948–1974, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1977.

[24] Ivo Banac, With Stalin Against Tito, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1989; Jane K. Cowan, Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference, Pluto Press, London and Sterling, VA, 2000; Hannes Grandits, ‘Dynamics of socialist nation-building: the short lived programme of promoting a Yugoslav national identity and some comparative perspectives’, Dve domovini/Two Homelands, 28, 2008, pp. 15–28; Dennison Rusinow, Yugoslavia: A Fractured Federalism, Wilson Center Press, Washington, DC, 1988; Paul Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question, Columbia University Press, New York and London, 1968; Christian Voss, ‘Sprach- und Geschichtsrevision in Makedonien. Zur Dekonstruktion von Blaže Koneski’, Osteuropa, 51, 2001, pp. 953–967.

[25] Keith Brown, ‘Seeing stars: character and identity in the landscapes of modern Macedonia’, Antiquity, 68, 1994, pp. 784–796; Keith Brown, The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2003.

[26] Ohridsko Leto Program, 2007.

[27] In 2007 the audience witnessed remarkable performances by the Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra from Hungary performed in the church of St Sofia, several theatre performances from the Balkans and Europe in the court of St Sofia, a concert of the American opera singer Barbara Hendrix performing modern jazz tunes, the ballet performances St Bartolommeo Night and Scheherazade performed by the Macedonian Ballet.

[28] James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1998.