linguistic hybridity

“Authentic Hybrids” in the Balkan BorderlandsAuthor(s): Pamela BallingerSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 45, No. 1 (February 2004), pp. 31-60Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation forAnthropological ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/379633 .

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31

C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004� 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4501-0002$3.00

“Authentic Hybrids”in the BalkanBorderlands1

by Pamela Ballinger

This article critiques prevalent assumptions about hybriditythrough analysis of identity in a quintessentially “hybrid” site,the western borderlands of the former Yugoslavia. Drawing onthe case of a contemporary regionalist movement embracing ahybrid identity in the Istrian peninsula, it demonstrates the waysin which the hybridity concept replicates, both conceptually andin everyday life, the logics it ostensibly opposes. It does so by re-vealing the mutual constitution of discourses of purity and hy-bridity within the context of historical state-building projects inthe region. Furthermore, the analysis indicates that understand-ings of difference and forms of exclusion grounded in both natureand culture have long histories along the eastern Adriatic. Theoperation of an avowedly culturalist conception of identity thatnonetheless naturalizes and territorializes/grounds culturethrough horticultural and vegetative imagery foreshadows the“cultural fundamentalism” identified by Stolcke as a feature ofcontemporary Europe. It is suggested that the Istrian case, an ex-ample from the margins of Europe, proves productive for recon-sidering hidden problematics of race and hybridity both in theempirical context of Europe and on the theoretical terrain ofanthropology.

p a m e l a b a l l i n g e r is Assistant Professor of Anthropology atBowdoin College (7000 College Station, Brunswick, ME 04011-8470, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). Born in 1968, she was edu-cated at Stanford University (B.A., 1990), Trinity College, Cam-bridge University (M.Phil., 1991), and The Johns HopkinsUniversity (M.A., 1994; Ph.D., 1999). Her publications include“Europe,” in Race and Ethnicity, edited by Raymond Scupin (Up-per Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 2000), “Imperial Nostalgia: My-thologizing Habsburg Trieste” (Journal of Modern Italian Studies8:84–101), and History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Bor-ders of the Balkans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).The present paper was submitted 5 xi 02 and accepted 30 vi 03.

1. This paper has circulated widely and in various forms over theyears. I have presented the arguments laid out here in diverse set-tings, including meetings of the American Ethnological Society andthe American Anthropological Association in 1999, where I ben-efited from comments of fellow panelists and audience members.Joe Bandy, Robert Hayden, Marilyn Reizbaum, and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov read drafts of this particular article. My analysis has ben-efited from ongoing conversations with Lois Dubin, Glenda Sluga,and Marta Verginella. This article takes up issues considered in my2003 book, expanding and shifting the discussion as well as up-dating it in terms of recent events in Istrian politics. I thereforethank those who read the larger manuscript that served as a startingpoint for this piece, whose input on the hybridity issue provedinvaluable: Donald Carter, Michael Herzfeld, Douglas Holmes, Ni-kolai Ssorin-Chaikov, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and, above all, Kath-erine Verdery. The comments of the anonymous referees also helpedme sharpen my analysis. In this article I draw on fieldwork carriedout over a decade (1992–2002) and made possible by fellowships

In his 1989 book Culture and Truth, Renato Rosaldosketched the emerging outlines of what he deemed a“borderland anthropology” centered on questions ofidentity, cultural citizenship, and linguistic and culturalhybridity. Inspired by the scholarship on and dilemmasparticular to the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as the richbody of work on issues of mestizaje in Latin Americamore generally, anthropologists have followed Rosaldo’slead in contributing to an extensive field of studies ofboth literal and metaphorical border zones, considered“not as analytically empty transitional zones but as sitesof creative cultural production” (Rosaldo 1989:208; seealso Anzaldua 1987, Calderon and Saldıvar 1991, Gu-tierrez-Jones 1995, Hicks 1991, Polkinhorn, Dibella, andReyes 1990). This “creative creolization” along bordersgives rise to hybrid populations that are said to “sub-versively appropriate and creolize master codes, decen-tering, destabilizing, and carnivalizing dominant formsthrough ‘strategic inflections’ and ‘re-accentuations’ ”(Lavie and Swedenburg 1996: 9). The view that thesesubversive performances of identity “deploy hybridity asa disruptive democratic discourse of cultural citizen-ship” in the service of “a distinctly anti-imperial andantiauthoritarian development” (Joseph 1999:1) signalsthe widespread hope that the “mobilizing political en-ergy” attached to these “new hybrid identities” will“open up new ways of perceiving cultural and politicalpractices.” The decentering effects of such performancesof “border crossing” have prompted some scholars toherald a new “cosmopolitanism,” seen to be inherent inan increasingly globalized world and counterposed toboth nationalisms and localisms (for a critique, seeCheah 1998b:297; Friedman 2002). Rarely, however,have scholars in the borderland-anthropology traditionconsidered areas like the Balkans or Eastern Europe, de-spite the fact that since 1989 these regions have beenfertile sites in which anthropologists might study theredrawing of actual political boundaries and their con-sequences for cultural mixing (and unmixing).

Particularly surprising is the neglect of the former Yu-goslavia,2 a quintessentially “hybrid” site historically de-

from various sources: the Department of Hispanic and Italian Stud-ies at Johns Hopkins University, the National Science Foundation,the Council for European Studies, the SSRC-MacArthur Founda-tion, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the In-stitute for the Study of World Politics, and the SSRC’s WesternEurope program. A National Endowment for the Humanities Sum-mer Grant in 1999 and money from Bowdoin College permitted meto follow changes in Istria. Generous fellowships from the StanfordCenter for International Security and Arms Control and the Char-lotte Newcombe Foundation enabled me to write up this field re-search. I also owe thanks to the staffs of the U.S. National Archives,the Istituto Regionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazionein Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the Istituto Regionale per la Cultura Is-triana, and the Centro di Ricerche Storiche di Rovigno.2. Similarly, Capo Zmegac notes the relative lack of attention givento Croatia in a tradition of Mediterranean studies (1999a:33). Thatsaid, the dissolution of Yugoslavia has produced a large industry ofbooks examining the conflicts of the 1990s and the region’s earlierhistory. Relatively few accounts in the English-language literature,however, take much note of Istria, removed as it was from thecentral conflicts between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. There does



32 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004

fined by its interstitial position on the axes of multiplesymbolic and political boundaries. On second thought,however, this lack of interest may prove less puzzlingin that the violent decenterings of the recent Yugoslavwars (in which the topsy-turvy world turns grisly ratherthan carnivalesque and the menace of “degeneration” isrealized not in the blood but through bloodshed) forceus to rethink recent models of hybrid identity. In thisarticle I examine and critique some prevalent theoreticalassumptions about borderland hybridity through inves-tigation of hybrid identity in the Julian March, the regionat the intersection of Italy and the western frontiers ofthe former Yugoslavia. In this area, expressions of puritycompete politically with those of hybridity and inter-mixture, and such understandings may divide membersof the same ostensible ethnic group and even of the samefamily. In my analysis, I investigate the relationships—historical, conceptual, and political—between these(seemingly) discordant views of identity, thereby refo-cusing “attention to the pointed empirical questionsabout discourses of identity, which reach well beyondtheir allegedly ‘hybrid’ or ‘essentialist’ characters: whodeploys them, from what specific location, with whateffects?” (Hale 1999:313).

Though Hale focuses on what he deems “elite appro-priations” of discourses such as hybridity and mestizajein the Guatemalan context, I instead show the operationof purity and hybridity talk at a number of levels, nodesof power, and oppositional stances in the Julian March.Such discourses point to largely hidden histories of“race” on the margin of the European center, a site whereaspects of the “new racism” and “cultural fundamen-talism” noted by Cole (1997), Gilroy (1987), Stolcke(1995), and others as a feature of contemporary Europeanidentity discourses emerged at least a century ago. Thepotentially pernicious recombinations of culture and na-ture found in purity and hybridity discourses in the Jul-ian March thus shed light on larger dilemmas of con-temporary European identity, as well as broadertheoretical issues surrounding identity. In this region,“hybridity” in both common-language usage and specificintellectual formulations such as Yugoslavism or Istri-anism does not necessarily subvert essentialist frame-works but instead reproduces them.

Purity and Hybridity: The Julian March andBeyond

In considering the overall neglect of Yugoslavia in bothhybridity and borderland discussions, it is important torecognize that some anthropologists (e.g., Danforth 1995,Karakasidou 1997) have found the wider Balkans regiona productive site from which to investigate such ques-

exist a rich field of regional scholarship in the Italian, Slovene, andCroatian languages dedicated to Istria and Trieste in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries (for references, see Ballinger 2003). For spe-cific work from the region on autonomist movements and region-alism, see Komsic (1996) and Milardovic (1995).

tions surrounding transnational identities. Yet thesescholars tend to operate within the frame of a theoreticalliterature dedicated to “the anthropology of borders”rather than that of the borderland literature as such. Theformer field focuses on the relationships of actual fron-tier dwellers to representatives and institutions of cen-tral state power, though even here “anthropologists ingeneral have had much more to say about the culturaland symbolic boundaries between groups, than about theconcrete, physical borders between them” (Donnan andWilson 1994:4). My work attempts to bridge these twotypes of border anthropology through a focus on socialactors’ understandings of the pure and hybrid identitiesthat emerge out of negotiations over the meanings of anactual state boundary, that between Italy and the formerYugoslavia.

Today this border consists in multiple boundaries: po-litical ones demarcating the states of Italy, Slovenia, andCroatia and cultural-linguistic ones ostensibly distin-guishing “Italians” from “Slavs.” These political fron-tiers divide the small Istrian peninsula from the Italianautonomous region of Friuli–Venezia Giulia, reflectingthe post–World War II partition of the larger area as aconsequence of a decade-long border dispute between It-aly and Yugoslavia. This territorial division resulted inthe “Istrian exodus” (l’esodo istriano), the migration ofbetween 200,000 and 350,000 persons—many, but notall, ethnic Italians—from Istria in the years between 1943and 1955. Approximately one-third of these exiles reset-tled permanently just across the border, in the Italianport city of Trieste, while an estimated 30,000 ethnicItalians and their descendants remain in contemporaryIstria.

In the ongoing field and archival research I have con-ducted since 1993 on this exodus, I have sought to un-derstand how Italians who left Istria when it became partof socialist Yugoslavia (the esuli or exiles) and those whochose to remain there (the rimasti) conceptualize theirpostpartition identities. Current political debates aboutthe region’s ethnic provenance hinge on two competinginterpretations: one sees the area as having been eitheressentially “Italian” or “Slavic” (i.e., Slovene and Cro-atian) in historical character, and the alternative sees itas marked by cultural and linguistic hybridity. For themost part, Istrian Italian exiles in Trieste endorse the“purity” thesis, contending that Italianness (italianita)historically characterized Istria, which in their view was“stolen” by nonindigenous Slavs after World War II. Incontrast, many inhabitants of contemporary Istria—members of the small Italian minority, as well as Croatsand Slovenes—advocate a view of Istrian identity as mul-tiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual. Though I haveheard the term “hybridity” (ibridismo) used, Istriansusually draw on other terms expressing fusion: “mix-ture” (mescolanza), “mosaics” (mosaico), bilingualismor di/triglossia, and “cohabitation” (convivenza). Theyalso describe Istrians living abroad as part of a far-flungdiaspora.

The 1991 dissolution of Yugoslavia galvanized pro-ponents of both the pure and hybrid visions of identity.



ballinger “Authentic Hybrids” F 33

The exiles, for example, found a new reception for their“long silenced” histories in Italy thanks to the successfulreframing of their experience in terms of “ethnic cleans-ing.” Representatives of the exile associations currentlywork to parlay the newfound moral capital derived fromthis account into concrete reparations and return of lostproperties (beni abbandonati). In contrast, the view of amixed Istrian identity has been given expression over thepast decade by the popular Croatian political movementknown as the Istrian Democratic Assembly (Dieta De-mocratica Istriana or Istarski Demokratski Sabor, here-after DDI-IDS) and by small, left-oriented exile groupsin Trieste such as the Circolo di Istria. The regionalistparty and its sympathizers seek a regional, transstateentity that recognizes both Istria’s former territorialunity and its position as a linguistic and cultural border-land.

Regionalists maintain that only a transnational polit-ical entity expressing this intermixture can provide aframework for peaceful collaboration, cooperation re-garding the properties of those Italians who abandonedIstria, and the resolution of contentions created by Is-tria’s territorial division between Slovenia and Croatiain 1991. (The demarcation in the Gulf of Piran of themaritime and fishing boundaries between the two statesremains, for example, a fiercely contested issue a decadeafter Yugoslavia’s dissolution.) They link their challengeto current political borders with the desire to bring Istriainto the realm of the European Union, thereby facilitat-ing broader transnational cooperation. Their vision ofIstria as an inherently European space, given its dualVenetian/Italian and Austrian heritage, becomes key toprocesses of subverting and refashioning cultural andsymbolic boundaries, including those differentiating Eu-ropean from Balkan or non-European, civilized from bar-barian, present from past.

In analyzing these identity politics in the Julian bor-derlands, I heed the urgings of scholars such as Cheah(1998a), Clifford (1994), Hale (1994, 1999), Pollock (2002),Pollock et al. (2002), and Robbins (1998) to offer specificaccounts and genealogies of frequently used terms suchas “cosmopolitanism,” “diaspora,” and “hybridity.” Haleeven goes so far as to issue a “travel warning” aboutassuming “the meaning of terms like hybridity withoutcareful, contextual, political analysis” (1999:298). Herightly criticizes anthropologists for their relative inat-tention to the “unintended consequences” of “progres-sive-sounding discourses,” as well as formulations ofsuch discourses that prove highly context-specific butare nonetheless transferred wholesale to other settings.As noted, the U.S.-Mexico border has offered one influ-ential model for understandings of both borderlands andhybridity in anthropology and Chicano studies (Kran-iauskas 2000:249–50). In cultural studies more broadly,the colonial encounter and its legacies have inspired arich body of both empirical and theoretical discussionsof hybridity (as resistance and subversion as well as fu-sion and bricolage). Conceptually, many understandingsof hybridity draw heavily upon linguistic models suchas those of syncretism or creolization, Bakhtin’s concept

of heteroglossia and its association with carnivalization,and theories of performativity (on the latter, see Josephand Fink 1999).

While “hybridity” often refers explicitly to linguisticmodels—rejecting the notion of culture as object in favorof “a political theory of culture as a process or productionin language” (Cheah 1998b:293)—the concept nonethe-less bears the implicit freight of its original organic orracial associations (for different takes on this, see Brahand Coombes 2000: pt. 1). The idea of “border crossings”also implies homogeneous wholes whose intersection re-sults in the fusion of la frontera. Anzaldua’s pioneeringwork on the mestiza formed along the Mexican-U.S.frontier, for instance, resonates with the language of mis-cegenation. In Anzaldua’s formulation, the conscious-ness of the Borderlands arises “at the confluence of twoor more genetic streams, with chromosomes constantly‘crossing over,’ [and] this mixture of races, rather thanresulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, amutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool”(1987:77).

As this particular understanding of hybridity suggests,the slipperiness of the term’s definition proves “both-ersome. It [hybridity] threatens to dissolve difference intoa pool of homogenization” (Kapchan and Strong 1999:240). Other critics worry about the commodification ofhybridity in the global market of “difference” (Hutnyk1997), its potential limits as an antiracist position (Werb-ner 1997), the privileging of textuality, or the reductionof globalization to cultural hybridization and, in turn,the reduction of hybridity to the experience of the mi-grant subject in the metropole (Cheah 1998b). Anotherline of criticism links both hybridity and cosmopolitan-ism to the repositionings of a global cultural elite (Fried-man 2002). Some scholars even note the increasing he-gemony of the hybridity idea within “an increasinglyinternationalised and codified cultural studies” (Kran-iauskas 2000:239; also Moreiras 1998). Despite thesedangers, hybridity has enjoyed considerable popularityin recent scholarly debates because it seems, by someaccounts, to offer a challenge—and often a novel one, atthat—to the essentialized identifications of race and eth-nicity that dominate the contemporary moment. Indeed,many of the scholars in anthropology and cultural stud-ies examining borderland hybridity suggest that thesephenomena, together with distinct but related unset-tlings of place such as diasporic flows, reflect somethingnew in an increasingly globalized, deterritorializedworld; much of the supposed novelty of global circula-tion is thus located in specifically cultural processes,notably those of diaspora and hybridism (Appadurai1996, Bhabha 1990, Waters 1995).

Stressing tendencies toward deterritorialization anddelocalized transnationalism, for example, Appaduraiboldly identifies the development of “diasporic publicspheres” as reflective of the fact that in the current mo-ment “imagination has become a collective, social fact”(1996:5). In doing so, he overlooks long-standing pro-cesses of diasporic imagination, as well as hybridism,such as those detailed by Paul Gilroy in The Black At-




lantic (1993). In mapping out a Black Atlantic diasporicspace crisscrossed by peoples, ships, ideas, and culturalforms, Gilroy posits metissage as an alternative to amythical African essence at the same time that he im-plicitly uncovers the interpenetrated histories of notionsof mixture and purity (which perhaps explains why headopts what he deems an “anti-anti-essentialist” posi-tion [on this, see Gordon and Anderson 1999:287]). Schol-ars such as Hale (1999), Papastergiadis (1997), and Young(1995) have followed in Gilroy’s footsteps, detailing thehistories of specific ideologies of intermixture.

Robert Young, for instance, recovers specifically Brit-ish genealogies of the hybridity concept at the same timethat he offers one of its most sustained critiques. Heunderlines the tensions inherent in hybridity’s biologicalusages, cautioning that “hybridity in particular showsthe connections between the racial categories of the pastand contemporary cultural discourse.” He adds, “It maybe used in different ways, given different inflections andapparently discrete references, but it always reiteratesand reinforces the dynamics of the same conflictualeconomy whose tensions and divisions it re-enacts in itsown antithetical structure” (1995:27).

Does hybridity discourse in contemporary Istria dem-onstrate, in a similar manner, an inherent link to thevery categories of classification that it claims to oppose?If so, what are the theoretical and political implicationsof leaving the language of purity in place by focusing onimpurity and mixture? In addressing these questions, Ibegin by historicizing the conception of a hybrid Istrianidentity and examining its operation (as well as inclu-sions/exclusions) in the contemporary moment.

Purity, Impurity, and the Problematic of Racein the Adriatic Borderlands

Extensive ethnic and linguistic diversity, on the onehand, and virulent and exclusive articulations of iden-tity, on the other, have characterized Istria and the JulianMarch, along with the Balkans and Eastern Europe morebroadly, since at least the nineteenth century. Withinthe logics of European symbolic geography, such borderareas figure as either transitional zones or battlefrontsbetween civilizations.3 In the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, the cultural, religious, and linguistic inter-mixture of such “crossroad” areas increasingly came tobe understood in terms of racial mixing and/or conflict.A twentieth-century geographer, for instance, typicallydescribed the Julian March as the “one area where thethree great European racial groups—Mediterranean, Ger-manic and Slav—meet” (Moodie 1945:57). During thelate Hapsburg period, Austrian ethnographers character-

3. On the imagining of Southeastern and Eastern Europe, see Bal-linger (2000), Hayden (1996), Herzfeld (1987), Todorova (1997), andWolff (1994, 2001). For the conceptual dilemmas of Croatia as aspace suspended between the Mediterranean and Central Europe,see the special issue of Narodna Umjetnost edited by Capo Zmegac(1999b).

ized Istria in terms of a “mosaic” of peoples whose in-termixings produced Hibridismus or hybridism (Johler1999:95).

Under the Serenissima of Venice, which dominated theIstrian coastline until 1797 (at least formally), however,“racial” or ethnic distinctions mattered less than thoseof class, which in turn often mapped onto divides be-tween rural/interior and urban/coastal. Members of theVenetianized ruling class (individuals who would in laterepochs identify themselves as either ethnic Slavs or Ital-ians) prided themselves on their urban values, seen to besynonymous with those of civilta, civilization or civility(note the significant elision of these terms in this con-text). In the eyes of such urbane cittadini, rural dwellersappeared as barbari, barbarians. Wolff has argued that“Dalmatia was Venice’s America, though small in sizeand close at hand, just across the Adriatic, replete withsavage tribes and civilizing missions” (2001:5). His fur-ther comments on Venetian Dalmatia also hold true forIstria: “The Adriatic empire, however, did not recognizea national distinction between Serbs and Croats amongthe Slavs, and, in fact, Venice preferred to consider bothItalians and Slavs of Dalmatia as amalgamated membersof the same Dalmatian nation” (p. 11). Admittedly, bythe late imperial period certain Venetian writers had be-gun to describe these Dalmatian Slavs as more closelyaffiliated with a larger pan-Slavic world than with anAdriatic sphere or culture. The complete transformationof these still unstable understandings of identity oc-curred, however, only during the subsequent period ofHapsburg rule. At this time, members of an ethnicallyGerman core increasingly came to characterize periph-eries like the Julian March (after 1867 incorporated intothe Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy) as ethnic “shat-ter zones.”

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, aliberal-integrationist, assimilationist “Austro-German”(i.e., imperial) identity began to yield to an increasinglynarrow nationalist understanding of Germanness. Thegrowing defensiveness and insecurity felt by some self-identified Germans in the face of demands for either au-tonomy or self-determination by “minority” peoples, no-tably various Slavic groups, was shared by the empire’s“Italian” peoples. Although Italians and Slavs alike re-sisted Germanization, Austrian liberal nationalistsnonetheless recognized the Italian language as being ona par with German—as the expression of a superior civ-ilization—whereas Slavic languages and cultures weredeemed to possess only “relative, local value” (Judson1996:386). Austrian ethnographers also reproduced clas-sifications dividing urbanized, maritime peoples from ru-ral ones (the latter seen to be rich in “authentic” folktraditions, unlike the deracinated townsfolk), now map-ping these cultural differences as ethnic ones distin-guishing Italians from Slavs (Johler 1999:95; Kappus2002; see Johler also for the ways in which Austrianscholars conceptualized different parts of the ethno-graphic terrain constituted by the Hapsburg littoral). Asdid Austrian Germans, Italian-speakers from Istria andDalmatia imagined themselves (and continue to do so




today) as belonging to what German-speakers calledSprachinsel, linguistic and civilizational islands ma-rooned in a hostile Slavic sea.

The island metaphor encapsulates fears of inundation,bringing to mind Linke’s (1999:xii) comparison of themetaphor of submersion (by water) to that of subversion(by blood):

The focus on blood served to interiorize the sourceof racial contagion: the flow of blood, regarded asdangerous and threatening, issued from inside thenation’s body. . . . In contrast, the focus on wateracts to exteriorize the locus of contamination. It isdisplaced from the body to the natural environment.But inundation by water likewise poses a threat tothe center—not from within (as in the case of blood)but from its outermost margins.

Linke’s own work on the (non-Austrian) German contextfocuses on the meanings attached to blood. She con-cludes, however, that the notions of subversion and sub-mersion have the same conceptual logic despite theirsymbolic opposition. She further suggests that though insome instances the idea of blood may not be explicitlyinvoked, it may find “expression in terms of other fluidsor liquid substances: foam, sweat, whirlpool, river,stream” (1999: xii). Though the eastern Adriatic pos-sesses its own specific histories of race (ones in whichthe concept of blood is, in fact, often explicitly tabooed),understandings similar to the ones Linke describes forthe German states may have been conveyed historicallyto the Julian March through the circulation of Gross-deutsche (Greater German) nationalism.

Another likely influence on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Italian nationalist claims to the Adri-atic is the work of German political geographers such asRatzel and Penke. Their notion of a Kulturlandschaft,or territory that has been “cultured” by a particular Volk(people), became an ideological justification for Ger-many’s rule over its Eastern Marches, despite the nu-merical minority formed by the ethnic German popu-lation there (Kopp 2002:13–14). “German activistspointed to an array of local physical markers as the re-positories of German identity” (Judson 1996:397). Sim-ilarly, the imprint left by “Italian” civilta was said tojustify Italian rule over primitive and barbaric Slavs evenin those areas, such as Dalmatia, where Italians formeda small proportion of the population. Monuments to civ-ilization such as architecture and land cultivation be-came the signs of a cultured space, culture explainingthe essential (ethnic-national) character of the place; thenaturalization of cultural imagery became quite explicit.Embracing both the Roman and Venetian heritages, forinstance, the twentieth-century geographer Paolo Revelli(quoted in Gambi 1994:83) summed up the Italian con-ceptualization of the Adriatic space:

So grandiose are the signs left by Rome and Veniceon the eastern seacoast of the Adriatic that anyonewho seeks to oppose our claim on these shores willhave to try to minimize the significance of those

traces, and call them the mere remnants of a state ofaffairs lost forever in the sweep of time. But Romeand Venice did not just found colonies there to havethem swamped in the barbarian flood of the darkages, then engulfed in the later wave of Turks, andfinally to have every last vestige cancelled by theartful greed of the Hapsburgs. They have set theirmark, the symbol of their inner selves, on all thepeoples along that coast in the lasting influence oftheir civilization.

Such claims to Italian Istria and Dalmatia reflected notonly categories of identity derived from successive Ve-netian and Hapsburg administrations but also the termsof nationalist discourse in those territories of the Italianpeninsula that became part of the Italian state estab-lished in 1861. Scholars often single out the brand ofnationalism that underwrote the Italian Risorgimento ornational independence movement as a liberal, “civic”(and civil) one in which national identity was constitutedthrough political belonging and was not seen to coincidenarrowly with race or ethnicity (Gellner 1987, Hobs-bawm 1990). In addition, the attendant sense of culturalbelonging is frequently described as indebted to a broad,rather than narrow, view of civilta italiana as “[a] cultureof inclusion, cosmopolitanism, and incorporation” (Ga-baccia 2000:33). Many scholars have taken such claims,which ostensibly express a sense of cultural nationalismmuch more than an explicitly biological or racial one, atface value. This view of Italian national identity as rel-atively benign (in part because of its scant resonanceamong Italians themselves, said to be loyal to family andlocality rather than to a state or nation) further informsa pervasive image of Italians as essentially good people(brava gente). Though Bidussa (1994) locates the originof this stereotype in the nineteenth century, it derivesits greatest force from the contrast drawn between anti-Semitic Nazis and Italian fascists who sought to shelterand save Jews during World War II (De Felice, cited inCaracciolo 1986:7–15). The brava gente myth maintainsthat Italians understand themselves as members of hu-manity first and a nation only secondarily (if at all).

In line with this self-congratulatory view, nineteenth-and twentieth-century proponents of the Italian cause inIstria and Dalmatia often took overt pride in espousinga “voluntarist” notion of national identity, which thesepro-Italians saw as setting their nationalism apart fromthat of Slavs. One writer put it succinctly: “The nation-ality of a people is like that of an individual, it is notdetermined by the language that one speaks but ratherby one’s will [i.e., self-identification]” (De Santi 1919:4).Though such writers may refer to stirpe—meaning“stock” (family lineage or genealogy) or ancestry—theyspeak less frequently of razza (“race” in the sense ofscientific racism). Recalling ancient distinctions be-tween Roman citizens and barbarians, notions of a Latinstirpe or popolo (people) carried with them the previouslynoted assumptions about a superior civilta capable ofassimilating (barbaric) peoples.

Slippage between the dual meanings of “race” as stirpe




and as razza nonetheless occurred, particularly with thefascist promotion of a “civilizing mission” in Africa andthe Balkans (Sluga 2001:60; see also, among the workscurrently rethinking the character of racist discourse un-der fascism, Rodogno 2003). By the time of World WarI, for example, Italian nationalists along the Adriatic hadposited an inherent linkage between “Slavic” identityand “socialist” ideologies (Pirjevec n.d.:25), an associa-tion that the Yugoslav partisan war during World War IIonly reinforced. During my fieldwork in the mid-1990s,I found that the term slavo-comunista still cropped upin daily talk in Trieste, serving as a shorthand for a largerfolk theory about Slavs’ inherently “totalitarian” na-tional character (for Greek beliefs in a Slavic “commu-nistic character,” see Herzfeld 1982:58, 60, 137, 141). Insupport of such ideas, many of my informants positedcontinuity in the actions of Tito’s partisans during WorldWar II and the Yugoslavs fighting in the wars of the1990s. An exile born in the Istrian town of Pirano/Piran4

voiced a common view: “They’re still that same race[razza] there!” As did most of my informants, he failedto note the irony in the Istrian Italian claim to differ, bydint of their nonracism and “cultural” nationalism, frommembers of a putative Slavic “race” (with slavo servingas a generic term to designate ethnic Croats and Slovenesalike, as well as their respective languages).

The elision of biologically ascribed race and culturallygiven national identity—the blurring of the nature-cul-ture distinction, with culture assuming much of the bag-gage of race, identified by Stolcke (1995) in her analysisof the “cultural fundamentalism” and by Gilroy (1987)in his study of the “new racism” characteristic of con-temporary European identity politics—thus occurredmuch earlier along the Adriatic. This blurring gave rise,at times, to pernicious forms of exclusion that nonethe-less disavowed themselves as racist. Despite the civiliz-ing, assimilationist projects of both the Venetian empireand the Italian fascist regime, the culture of AdriaticSlavs is often considered as nearly fatal (in its inescap-ability or its lack) as a presumed biological heritage. Ital-ian irredentist authors in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies often wrote of the Slavs as a people withoutculture, prone to laziness and savagery. Here they drewupon a tradition dating back to the Venetian adminis-tration in which even when officials explained certainproblematic characteristics in terms of culture (e.g., ag-ricultural practices) and economic inequality (e.g., landdistribution), ultimately they characterized the subjectMorlacchi/Slavs as troublesome by nature (Wolff 2001:132–34).

Herzfeld (1987) has admonished anthropologists to ex-amine the discipline’s underacknowledged complicity innation-building projects in Europe, encouraging anthro-pology to examine itself “through the looking glass.”

4. When using Istrian place-names, I give the Italian variant first,followed by the Croatian or Slovene. My analysis focuses on thediscourse of hybridity in the Croatian part of Istria, where I con-centrated my fieldwork and where the regionalist movement at-tained local power through its opposition to the nationalism of theTudjman government.

Exploring the constitution of alterity within Europe andon its peripheries offers one such (self) reflection, mir-roring back still underexamined, historically specific un-derstandings of race. The specific political terms—thoseof irredentism and imperial cosmopolitanism—in whichactors have historically articulated this language of pu-rity and hybridity, respectively, along the eastern Adri-atic have further obscured these histories of race andracism from the view of anthropologists.

Cosmopolitanism and Irredentism in theJulian March

Within Trieste and Istria, belief in an ostensibly non-racist (but overtly assimilationist) Italian cultural na-tionalism runs parallel with, if in seeming opposition to,invocations of the region’s “cosmopolitan” past underAustria. Nostalgia (in both scholarly and political forms)for an imperial period in which “we all lived togetherand everyone was respected” thus stands in contrast tomore exclusive, nationalist understandings that readHapsburg history as a time of suppression and tyranny.Not surprisingly, competing traditions of local histori-ography depict Trieste and its hinterland (including Is-tria) as continuously “Italian” since the classical Romanera or, alternatively, as constituting a unique regionshaped by millennia of cultural, linguistic, and religiousadmixture. The hybrid version has often been allied with“autonomist” projects of various types: those advocatedby socialists like Angelo Vivante (1984 [1912]) during theHapsburg era, the Free Territory of Trieste briefly insti-tuted after World II and supported locally by an inde-pendentist group, and the regionalist program in Istriaduring the 1990s.

Of the many accounts that have deconstructed the na-tionalist myths of Trieste (Filipuzzi 1988; Folkel and Cer-goly 1983; Negrelli 1970, 1978; Verginella 2000), AngeloVivante’s Irredentismo adriatico remains a key text, inpart because Vivante wrote as a subject of the Hapsburgempire who intended his work as both a scholarly de-bunking of and a political blow against the claims ofItalian irredentists. Vivante persuasively dismantled thecentral nationalist myth that Trieste and its hinterlandhad always been fundamentally Italian in character. Ar-guing that the “national question” was incompatiblewith the economic needs and interests of a city createdby imperial fiat and dependent on its position as Aus-tria’s primary maritime outlet, Vivante instead proposeda separatist solution that took account of “natural,” eco-nomic ties to its Slavic hinterland.

When I first began working in Trieste, I read Vivante(on the advice of my friends, self-proclaimed leftist in-tellectuals) and accepted at face value that a nationalistreading of history had distorted the truth of a hybrid,cosmopolitan past. Undoubtedly, the city’s incorporationinto Italy had rendered a once bustling imperial port asleepy provincial town on the margins of the Italianstate. The Italianization policies enacted by the fascist




regime together with the post–World War II territorialdispute and the resettlement in Trieste of thousands ofethnic Italians from Istria altered the social and demo-graphic patterns of the place while reinforcing a defen-sive frontier ideology of italianita. Whereas I saw thetransformations wrought by this purist nationalism assomething to be studied and, in effect, demystified, I didnot question what the much vaunted “cosmopolitan-ism” and hybridity of Hapsburg Trieste actually con-sisted in—and this despite the fact that these imageswere key to the belief that Trieste had been steered offits “natural” path (economic, political, and culturalopenness toward its multiethnic hinterland) with its re-turn to Italy. I had bought into Vivante’s argument thatlooking toward Italy was “unnatural” or contrary to (eco-nomic) logic, as if economic interests were natural. Fur-thermore, I had taken the meaning of “cosmopolitan-ism” to be axiomatic, assuming—together with manyrecent writers on Hapsburg Trieste (McCourt 2000, Mor-ris 2001)—that it implied, on the one hand, “a state ofbeing universal” (Schlereth 1977) and free of exclusive,particularistic loyalties and, on the other, a hybrid statecharacterized by a mixing of languages, religions, andethnicities and, as Hannerz puts it, “an orientation, awillingness to engage with the Other . . . an intellectualand esthetic openness toward divergent cultural expe-riences” (1996:103).

Ultimately, then, I had conflated contemporary mean-ings of and interests in cosmopolitanism, as well as hy-bridity, with the quite different realities of Austrian Tri-este. At the same time, I had failed to interrogate thosesame contemporary definitions of cosmopolitanism.Robbins points out that cosmopolitanism “has seemedto be a luxuriously free-floating view from above. Butmany voices now insist, with Paul Rabinow, that theterm should be extended to transnational experiencesthat are particular rather than universal” (1998:1). Heed-ing the advice of Robbins to take account of “actuallyexisting cosmopolitanisms”—advice echoed in the sug-gestion “that cosmopolitanism be considered in the plu-ral, as cosmopolitanisms” (Pollock et al. 2002:8)—I beganto consider what “cosmopolitanism” in its explicit in-vocations signified historically as an ideological expres-sion in both Triestine and Istrian life. Despite the seem-ing opposition between nationalism/irredentism andcosmopolitanism, for example, the two discourses in-tersected around the tradition of local autonomy and re-inforced one another at various points in their usage bylocal elites.

As early as 1468, there had come into being two com-peting local parties in Trieste: one pledging allegiance tothe centralizing policies of the Hapsburg monarchy andthe other opposing them and claiming a supposedly an-cient tradition of communal (“city-state”) autonomy.The party of autonomy or municipalismo consisted ofthe traditional patricians, who saw themselves losingground against the center and, over time, to the wealthynew class of immigrants invited to settle in the “freeport” established by Charles VI; his patents of 1719 and1725 welcomed individuals of “any nation, condition,

and religion” (Dubin 1999:11). Yet this rising new bour-geoisie also came to embrace municipalismo/auton-omismo as a way of defending its interests against theGermanization policies of Empress Maria Theresa andher son Joseph (Negrelli 1978:63–64).

Prominent in the emerging Triestine elite were mem-bers of the religiously defined nations (nazioni) recog-nized by Maria Theresa and Joseph. The first ethnic-re-ligious group given juridical status as a corporate,communal body was that of the Jews, followed by theGreek Orthodox, Armenian Uniate, Serbian Orthodox,Lutheran, and Calvinist communities. Although variousprivileges and, later, the Edict of Toleration offered Jewsin Trieste an exceptional position even relative to Jewselsewhere in the empire, they bridled at the term “tol-eration.” In the context of eighteenth-century Trieste,this term carried implications quite different from ourunderstanding of tolerance and celebration of diversity(Dubin 1999:56):

To them, toleration connoted mere sufferance ratherthan appreciation or recognized standing. Indeed,sufferance was the implication when the Jews of Vi-enna were always referred to as “tolerated” (tolierte)and when Hungarian Jews were referred to as “onlytolerated” in an official document in 1744, and itwas the fundamental assumption behind the “tax fortoleration” that those Jewries had to pay.

Why did the Hapsburg monarchs thus “tolerate” andeven privilege Jews and other non-Catholics if not be-cause of some belief in the inherent value of religiousdiversity? The answer lay in these groups’ utility—theircapacity for productive service to the state. The creationof a multiethnic port in Trieste reflected the careful so-cial engineering of an absolutist state in which utilityand virtue, as well as value, were increasingly under-stood as synonymous. In contrast to contemporary cos-mopolitans, often imagined as hybrid, deterritorializedsubjects whose movements challenge state boundaries,members of Hapsburg Trieste’s nations derived theirprivileges from a strong state (even as they sought todefend particular religious practices as, in the case of theJews, in the realm of marriage law). “Each nazione be-came in part a state agency. . . . For all the religiousminorities, however, the civil integration and tolerationproffered by the Josephinian absolutist state entailed cen-tralization and greater state involvement in communalaffairs” (Dubin 1999:201, 204).

Though it owed its prosperity to the centralizing state,by the nineteenth century the Triestine elite increasinglyresisted tendencies toward Germanization (particularlyin the linguistic and administrative realms). It often didso by taking up the theme of ancient communal auton-omy and eliding this with a defense of “national” (i.e.,Italian) interests. Although this elite was, in fact, diverse,most members used Italian or the Italian Triestine dia-lect (the lingua franca of the port). More important, manyof them perceived as an even greater threat than Ger-manization the growing ethnic consciousness of Slavs,




notably the Slovene-speakers who had immigrated to thecity from the surrounding hinterland and had begun todemand education in their native tongue (Negrelli 1978:166–77; Verginella 2000:14–15). By the early twentiethcentury, many leading Triestines would openly embracean irredentist position, autonomy now becoming syn-onymous with separation from Austria and unity withItaly (in Austrian Dalmatia “autonomist” parties simi-larly stood for Italian interests). The city’s “cosmopoli-tan” elite thus proved itself quite capable of embracinga seemingly paradoxical national/ist position, one thatshows the ways in which the “nationalist”/irredentistand cosmopolitan positions at points overlapped. Rob-bins reminds us that “for better or worse, there is a grow-ing consensus that cosmopolitanism sometimes workstogether with nationalism rather than in opposition toit” (1998:2; see also Cheah 1998a:25).

The lives of the local intellectuals and writers mostresponsible for propagating an image of late HapsburgTrieste as a cosmopolitan crossroads of peoples and cul-tures also demonstrate the ways in which a “purist” na-tionalism and a hybrid cosmopolitanism may work intandem. The Jewish writer Ettore Schmitz, for example,created lasting portraits of a Mitteleuropean world evenas he supported the Italian irredentist cause and used thepen name Italo Svevo (“Italo” to symbolize his Italian-ness, “Svevo” for his Swabian or German side). In hermemoir, Svevo’s wife, Livia, recalls, “Ettore’s long pe-riods abroad had not made him at all cosmopolitan. Healways remained proudly Triestian and Italian” (Svevo1990:71).

The writer Scipio Slataper’s name (Italian first nameand Slovene surname) similarly denoted Trieste’s inter-mixture. His colleagues at the Florentine journal La Vocerecognized this when they proclaimed him “the perfectsymbol, in short, of that Trieste of his where three racesmingle” (Prezzolini, quoted in Cary 1993:139). In Il MioCarso, Slataper provided a rich portrait of what he calledhis city’s tripartite (German, Italian, Slovene) soul.“Everything in Trieste is double and triple, beginningwith its flora and ending with its ethnicity” (Slataper,quoted in Cary 1993:46). Yet Slataper also embraced ir-redentism and would die as a soldier in World War I afterhaving committed treason by renouncing his Austriancitizenship and going to fight as a volunteer for Italy.The position taken by Italy during World War I—with-drawal from the Triple Alliance with Germany and Aus-tria, declaration of neutrality, and eventual entry intothe war on the Allied side in 1915—forced cosmopolitesin the Julian March to take sides and thus showed thelimits (really, the particularity) of such cosmopolitan hy-bridity. When faced with such a devastating choice, someof Trieste’s socialists who remained most committed toan internationalist, autonomist position—most notablyAngelo Vivante—suffered mental breakdowns and sub-sequently committed suicide (Cattaruzza 1998:177).

The cosmopolitan ethos in Trieste often invoked withgreat nostalgia appears, then, to have been the productof state engineering, though the state clearly could notcontrol the usages of that discourse, which the elite often

turned back against the imperial center (nowhere moredramatically than in the crisis of World War I). A rangeof actually existing cosmopolitanisms existed in Trieste:that of a mercantile class that was favored by empire butwas not above playing the autonomist/nationalist card,a Mitteleuropean intellectual and literary tradition, anda socialist tradition of autonomy articulated by figureslike Vivante. Discourses of cultural autonomy associatedwith Istrian socialism during the Hapsburg period, bycontrast, remained much more inflected with worriesabout defending the position of the civilizationally “su-perior” Italian element together with concern for ame-liorating the condition of the Slavic peasant masses (fordifferent positions among Istrian socialists regarding the“national question,” see Cattaruzza 1998:102–7, 116–24).

The demise of the Hapsburg monarchy led to a dra-matic reconfiguration of the identity regime in as wellas the demographics of Trieste and the Julian March. Themajority of the “German” population abandoned the cityshortly after its annexation to Italy, and many membersof the “diasporic” populations (Greeks, Armenians, Dal-matians, et al.) that had prospered in the imperial portalso began to leave (though small communities remainto this day). The fascist regime’s discrimination againstthe Slovene and Croat populations of the Julian Marchprompted thousands of Slavs to emigrate to the new stateof Yugoslavia. The awarding to Yugoslavia of the Dal-matian coastline after World War I and Istria after WorldII similarly resulted in large-scale migrations by ethnicItalians to Italy. While having dramatically altered theregion’s social geographies, the population transfers ofthe twentieth century inevitably failed to impose a uni-form culture or language, given that all cultures and na-tion-states are hybrid products. The attendant violencedid succeed, however, in subordinating (albeit incom-pletely, as current Austrophilic nostalgia shows) explicitexpressions and formulations of hybridity in Triestewhile across the borders in contemporary Istria it hasfostered a political movement positing and celebratinghybridity in opposition to the homogenizing policiesadopted by the nationalist leaders of the independentCroatian state.

Contemporary Visions of Purity and Hybridity

In Trieste and beyond, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990sheightened public awareness of expulsions and refugees,creating a new space within Italy and the Yugoslav suc-cessor states of Slovenia and Croatia for talking aboutthe Julian March’s own difficult history of displacementand ethnic recomposition. After decades of neglect bythe broader Italian public, the Italian exile communityin Trieste began in the early 1990s to describe the Istrianexodus as socialist Yugoslavia’s “first ethnic cleansing,”demanding compensation and/or restitution of lost prop-erties and formal apologies from the Slovene and Croa-tian states. The violence of the Yugoslav breakup ap-peared to some to offer powerful proof of the Balkan




barbarism and cruelty described by Italian exiles, whoclaim to have been persecuted for the “sole crime ofbeing Italian.” Though contemporary accounts of the Is-trian exodus today find a new space and audience andemploy new vocabulary (“ethnic cleansing” in place ofthe older term “denationalization”), they display re-markable continuity with narratives produced at thetime of the events (1943–54), accounts which in turnbuilt on irredentist discourses from the Hapsburg andfascist eras. In Trieste, rallying cries of “Remember theexodus!” therefore refer to much more extensive dis-cursive configurations about loss and redemption (seeBallinger 2003). Such rhetoric emotionally underscoresarguments against increased economic and politicalopenness toward neighboring Slovenia and Croatia orguarantees of bilingualism for Italy’s autochthonous Slo-vene minority.

In contrast, inhabitants across the border(s) in Istriahave claimed a tradition of ethnic cohabitation or con-vivenza, one said to have been disrupted but not de-stroyed by the century’s multiple exoduses. Supportersof the regionalist scheme contend that this convivenzaenabled Istrians to resist the Yugoslav siren song of eth-nic intolerance during the 1980s and 1990s (Bergnach1995). Dealing with traumatic issues like the exodus andovercoming the silence long maintained under the Yu-goslav regime is posited by regionalists as an exercisethat can only strengthen Istria’s pluriethnic fabric. Thisapproach explicitly contrasts with nationalist takes onhistory prominent in Trieste as well as with the histor-ical revisionism that characterized Yugoslav politics dur-ing much of the 1980s and 1990s.

In the decade following Tito’s death, revisionist his-tories proved useful for politicians seeking to sharpenethno-national difference in Yugoslavia. In Croatia andSerbia, revived histories of Chetnik and Ustasha atroc-ities became common and played into ethnic groups’ per-ception of threat and demands for ethnically pure stateswithin which such groups could feel secure and pro-tected (see Banac 1992, Denich 1994, Hayden 1994, Pav-lowitch 1988). The constitutional definition of Croatiaas the state of Croats and other peoples not only upset,for example, the Serbs in the Krajina suddenly rendereda minority by Yugoslavia’s dissolution (Hayden 1992) butalso residents of historically mixed zones such as Istria.Finding the new Croatian state’s insistence on nationalpurity offensive, Istrians responded by promoting an in-clusive vision of ethnic cohabitation. This politically andconceptually challenged the exclusive notions of identityand history endorsed by Croatian President Franjo Tudj-man and his ruling party, the Croatian Democratic Un-ion or HDZ (Cocco 2002), as well as those of the Italianexiles in Trieste.

Promoting the idea of a hybrid Istrian identity, DDI-IDS won local majorities in the Croatian elections of1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, and 2001. (In contrast, it foundlittle support in the Istrian territory under Slovene sov-ereignty, whose inhabitants have sought to maintain ahealthy distance from the problems of Croatian Istria.)Indignation at Istria’s perceived servitude within the new

Croatian state informed this support. Many Istrians Ispoke with during my extended fieldwork in 1995 and1996 described the Tudjman regime as merely the latestin a long line of brutal state powers trying to forge ethno-national purity out of Istria’s historically hybrid popu-lation. “Everyone has come to Istria and taken withoutgiving anything back,” or “Istrians have seen every kindof system: the Romans, the Venetians, Napoleon, Aus-tria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Croatia.”

Istrians often note, with a mixture of pride and irony,that they (or their parents) had lived under four or fivedifferent states. One elderly man wrote me after ourmeeting,

I am the man in the street of Mitteleuropa. I wasborn in Istria and up to now, without having everbeen asked, I have been honored with four citizen-ships: Austrian, Italian, Yugoslav and Croatian. . . .This [territory] is a MOSAIC, which should neveragain be destroyed and ruled by anyone else but bythe autochthonous inhabitants of Italian, Croatian,and Slovene language.

This celebration of the “mosaic” appears to contradictthe assertion by Schwartz, writing in the context of an-other Balkan area of intermixture, that “mosaics aremore likely to be the inventions of scholars. They areoutsiders’ mapping devices to help visualize diversityand difference” (1997:262). If, in its origins, the notionof a mosaic is the dream of intellectuals and politicians,including those who promoted earlier multinationalschemes like Yugoslavism, it has now become diffusedwithin the everyday discourse of Istrians.

In a 1996 press conference, Petar Turcinovic (head ofthe DDI-IDS in Fiume/Rijeka) reiterated this trope,transferring the image of the individual with multiplecitizenships onto that of the typical Istrian family. Here,changing citizenships distinguish generations, despitethe fact that the family has remained in the same place(Il Piccolo, November 18, 1996, my italics):

My son, myself, my mother and my maternal grand-mother, we were all born in Pisino/Pazin, in theheart of Istria. All very simple, one might say, butinstead my grandmother was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, my mother in Italy, I myself inYugoslavia, and my son in Croatia. Almost everythirty years a new state and thus the Istrian adaptshimself, giving the primary place to the values offamily and man and only subsequently to the patriaand to other values. This explains why in Istria allmembers of all nationalities are accepted, withoutextremism or episodes of intolerance.

Regionalism advocates like Turcinovic thus posit is-trianita or Istrianness as an identity which is simulta-neously above nationalism (supranational) and more ba-sic, persisting at the local level despite regime changesand the attendant violence as states have attempted toinculcate new national identities. The persistence of thisIstrian identity further explains, as Turcinovic and others




see it, the peninsula’s ethnic coexistence, a convivenzathat the post–World War II exodus threatened but failedto destroy. According to this view, Istrians need not (andindeed, cannot) make an exclusive choice in proclaimingthemselves Slovene, Italian, or Croatian. The only optionis to declare oneself “Istrian,” a concept reminiscent ofthe failed “Yugoslav” identity.

Where Yugoslavism stressed “Brotherhood andUnity,” Istrianism stresses convivenza or ethnic cohab-itation. Yet regionalists such as Debeljuh (1995) viewtheir initiative as a grassroots movement, a genuine ex-pression of Istrian sentiment. They contrast this to thetop-down imposition of Yugoslavism, whose violence re-sulted in the Istrian exodus. Thus if Istrians express nos-talgia or affection for a multinational state, it is typicallyAustria rather than Yugoslavia that they explicitly in-voke (although Croatian nationalists frequently deemedIstria the site of “Yugonostalgia”).

Istrians I spoke with, particularly members of the Ital-ian minority, often considered the Austrian period a“golden age” of construction and prosperity, in contrastto the exploitative practices of both fascism and com-munism. Several informants reiterated that under Aus-tria both Slavs and Italians had their own schools. Notonly did the administration recognize trilingualism—German, Italian, and Slovene or Croat—but even trivialitems like postcards typically bore messages in three lan-guages. One former schoolteacher said, “Each group wasrespected, and we lived well.” This situation is con-trasted with that of the fascist period, when agents ofItalianization forbade Slovenes and Croats to speak theirnative languages in public and forced them to take in-struction in Italian. In accordance with the logic of na-tional purity, the Tudjman regime similarly attacked bi-lingualism and minority Italian-language schools.Istrians thus depict the Croatian regime of the 1990s,along with the Italian fascist state, as having (willfully)failed to recognize that Istria represents what speakersrepeatedly deemed a “mixture” (mescolanza).

As a letter to the Triestine paper Il Piccolo (January31, 1995) put it, “Istria is not Slovene or Croat or Italian:Istria is Istria. . . . We are and we will remain Istrians,proud of being such, in whatever epoch, without warsor conflict.” The self-described “common man” of Mit-teleuropa cited earlier expressed similar views in a letterhe composed in English and sent to me. Briefly outliningthe history of the region, he posited the existence of amixed, autochthonous population that had survived re-peated attempts at national homogenization:

Thus for more than four centuries here [have] live[d]together—cohabited—peoples of Slav and Italic ori-gins. Such “cohabitation” naturally led also tomixed marriages and thus these races have so mixedup that we have to ask ourselves: Who are we? Such“cohabitation” over time resulted in a “balance”and “unity,” which lasted for centuries until theywere “interrupted” and “destroyed” first by Italyand then by ex-Yugoslavia with the well known con-sequences, i.e. the terrible and inhuman “exoduses”

after WWI and WWII. Therefore, the true autochtho-nous inhabitants of our region “cohabit” already forsome centuries. . . . to request after twenty-thirtygenerations from the autochthonous inhabitants ofIstria and ex-Venezia Giulia to declare themselves asCroats, Italians or Slovenes [would] represent an ab-solute absurdity!

This man continued, “Our ‘region’ does not representanything new. On the contrary it was one of the oldestand most developed regions in Europe and existed muchearlier than our to-day’s ‘fatherlands.’ ” While we shouldquestion the speaker’s assumptions of Istria’s organicunity as a region, his statement might be altered to read“Our ‘regionalism’ does not represent anything new,”given that since the nineteenth century various region-alist or autonomist conceptions of identity stressing hy-bridity have existed in tension with more exclusive na-tionalist constructs. The autonomist tradition promotedby socialists like Vivante at the close of the Austrianperiod, for example, stressed a regional unity made upof a unique cultural mix. Various autonomist schemesgiving expression to local identities born out of inter-mixture—such as those establishing Fiume/Rijeka as afree port after World War I and Trieste as an “interna-tional free territory” after World War II—foundered onnationalist opposition, as well as Great Power politics.

Istrian regionalism to some degree builds upon theseolder ideas of autonomous or supranational entities atthe same time that it partakes of a diffuse nostalgia forthe Hapsburg empire, now seen to have equitably bal-anced the rights of competing ethnic groups. While Is-trians today tend to recall the Austrian era as “one oftrue democracy,” intellectuals like Claudio Magris(1986) in nearby Trieste have breathed new life into aliterary vision of Mitteleuropa. The reading of Triesteand Istria as quintessential Central European spaces inwhich the cultural streams of the Austrian empire metand mingled resonates in regionalists’ claims to Euro-peanness, a theme that is important to both the party’sexplicit program and the deployment of Istrianness ineveryday life.

In their founding manifesto DDI-IDS proponentscalled for the creation of an Istrian “Euroregion” cuttingacross Slovenia, Croatia, and Italy (Debeljuh 1993:24–25). The notion of a Euroregion has created room fordisagreement as to the degree of autonomy implied. Evenbefore the Yugoslav breakup, DDI-IDS supporters werecareful to draw distinctions between Istrian regionalismand the nationalist secessionism of Serbs in the (Croa-tian) Krajina. Early on, regionalist leaders denouncedKrajina Serbs for their “abuse of the concept of autonomy[in a manner] typical of Balkanic revindication” (Juri1990b:5). Such statements contrast peaceful, (Mit-tel)european Istrians with nationalistic Balkan peoples.

Notwithstanding regionalist self-portrayals of theiraims as liberal and progressive, Tudjman and his sup-porters continually portrayed the regionalists as seces-sionists, pointing to the Italian minority’s prominentrole within the DDI-IDS as “evidence” of the party’s




links with Italian irredentists. Tudjman frequently choseto attack Istria and its regionalists through the Italianminority. In 1996, for example, customs agents in Fiume/Rijeka imposed heavy fines on the Italian minority pub-lishing house (known as Edit), charging that taxes hadnot been fully paid on printing equipment donated bythe Italian state. This threatened to shut down the Italianminority’s newspaper (La Voce del Popolo) and the in-dependent Croatian-language newspapers (Glas Istre andNovi List) published on Edit presses. Such incidents onlyincreased the Italian minority’s perceived insecuritywithin the new Croatian state, leading it to reaffirm itsautochthony and redouble its commitment to a region-alist project respecting minority rights.

Not surprisingly, then, among the most prominent ofthe DDI-IDS’s intellectual formulators have been mem-bers of the Italian minority, who have located the the-oretical basis for Istrian identity in an autochthonous,territorially rooted Istrian subject. DDI-IDS Vice Presi-dent Debeljuh (1992) stressed the authentic and autoch-thonous nature of the Istrian hybrid, seen to provide anorganic basis for regionalism. Fulvio Suran, a scholar atthe Italian-minority research center in Rovigno/Rovinj,has similarly described Istrian convivenza as the by-product of interethnic marriage. In this view, the mixedLatin-Slav union provides “the key for better understand-ing the centuries-long cohabitation of the Istrian people,their antifascist fight and their mental disposition fordemocratic, local pluralism (communal, regional, etc.)”(1994:14). Underscoring the centrality of autochthony (aswell as hybridity) to the regionalists’ “antinationalist”project, the work of Debeljuh and Suran also points tocertain tensions contained within the model of Istrianidentity they propose, tensions which persist in the post-Tudjman era.

In such accounts, ethnic Italians are posed as a key“third” term linking Istria and Croatia to Europe. FurioRadin, representative of the Italian minority in the Cro-atian Sabor or parliament, deems the Italian nationalgroup in Istria a “catalyst and mediator for the devel-opment of a new climate of dialogue and comprehension,‘crossers’ . . . between Croatia and Slovenia and Europe”(Radin, quoted in Giuricin 1994:9). Thus protecting theautochthonous Italian language and culture in Istria isposited as vital to preserving a hybrid Istrian culture.Seen to underwrite Istrian multiculturalism, linguisticbilingualism has received particular emphasis in theDDI-IDS’s project (for an early scholarly statement ofthis program, see Milani-Kruljac 1990). Debeljuh, for ex-ample, stressed that in Istria, which “was never linguis-tically uniform, there should be institutionalized at theregional level a scholastic system of linguistic interac-tion that treats bilingual instruction as an instrumentfor the consolidation of interethnic cohabitation” (1992:331). DDI-IDS efforts to promote guarantees for bilin-gualism repeatedly provoked Tudjman’s ire, leading Za-greb to veto the Istrian Region’s bilingualism statute. Inaddition, the minister of education proposed legislation(the Vokic decree) to bar non-Italian children from at-tending Italian-language schools. These measures not

only antagonized Istrians but also further damaged theCroatian government’s “democratic” credentials in theeyes of institutions such as the Council of Europe.

In their struggle against the centralism of Zagreb, DDI-IDS leaders repeatedly looked to such European insti-tutions for support. In deflecting charges of secessionism,for example, DDI-IDS President Ivan Jakovcic stressedthe complementarity of regionalism with the Croatiannation-state, further arguing that regionalism offered ameans for Croatia eventually to enter the EuropeanUnion. Among the benefits of regional autonomy citedby Jakovcic were increased national stability and “Eu-ropeanism”; former President of the Region Luciano Del-bianco similarly contended that Istria’s gaze toward Eu-rope and its development as “one of the wealthiestregions of Croatia” could contribute to Zagreb’s growthonly as “a European metropolis” (quoted in Markotich1993:24). Istrians’ fundamental sense of being bothunique and European (i.e., more European than otherCroatians and in this sense unique as well) continues toirritate not only the HDZ faithful, today reduced to play-ing the role of opposition, but even (former) politicalallies who now govern Croatia.

Invoking Europe

During the 1990s, the strategy of forging ties with Eu-ropean institutions bore fruit in initiatives that providedthe regionalists with important resources in their strug-gle against the Croatian center. Istria became home tothe second “local democracy embassy” in Croatia, aimedat “developing a living environment in which citizensmust be able to participate in social, cultural, and polit-ical life, in a free and democratic manner” (Tovornik1995:2–3). Inaugurated with great fanfare on May 5, 1996,this institution had a different stated role to play fromthose located at Sarajevo, Mostar, Tuzla, and Osijek,where the primary activity was the provision of human-itarian aid to war-stricken areas. Recognized instead forits successful example of ethnic convivenza, Istria hasbeen portrayed by some European actors—notably theAssembly of Regions—as offering a model for the rest ofthe country as Croatia works toward civil society andpossible EU membership.

Throughout the 1990s, Istrian regionalist leadersstressed both the cultural and political differences be-tween themselves and other peoples in the former Yu-goslavia. “I don’t know how far we could succumb tothe nationalistic logics of Balkanic Yugoslavia,” claimedLoredana Bogliun Debeljuh in 1990. “Certainly we aresomewhat outside of these logics. . . . our cultural tra-jectories are European” (Debeljuh 1990:28–31, my ital-ics). Debeljuh later caused a stir when she announced ata Zagreb press conference, “In Istria we are nearer to theWest. We watch Italian television and we know how tocomport ourselves” (Il Piccolo, November 18, 1996). Anoted local personality in Rovigno/Rovinj, formerly ahigh-ranking member of the Croatian Communist Party,even contended (only half jokingly) that a fence should




be placed around the Balkans—which for him includedall of non-Istrian Croatia—and DDT dumped onto theterritory. Ivan Pauletta, one of the DDI-IDS’s foundingfathers, expressed a similar desire to distance Istria fromthe “Balkans” when he argued that incorporation intoYugoslavia in 1945 had brought only stagnation to theonce-advanced region of Istria. The resultant economicand cultural dislocations were heightened by the warsin former Yugoslavia, conflicts which to Pauletta ap-peared to be “typical” behavior for Balkan states. Re-marking bitterly in 1993 on the situation in Croatia, hecommented, “We are nearly always either at war or [in-volved in] some kind of discord with our neighbors. . . .[This conception] is leading us into darkness and hunger”(quoted in Markotich 1993:23). The comment that “theBalkans begin after Ucka” (Ucka being the mountainnear Fiume/Rijeka that marks the geographical borderbetween Istria and the rest of Croatia) occurs frequentlyin the everyday conversations of the Istrians Pauletta andDebeljuh claimed to speak for.

In the Istrian context, then, claiming a European iden-tity means distancing oneself from the Balkans by meansof the now-familiar strategies of “Orientalism” by whichthe West has been constituted as an object and demar-cated from the East (Said 1979). This tradition has beenemployed not only in figuring the distinction betweenthe “West and the rest” but also in creating internalhierarchies and alterity within the West. Orientalizingframeworks have played a prominent discursive rolewithin former Yugoslavia, particularly in the 1980s and1990s as Slovenes and Croats differentiated themselvesas “European” (Catholic, Hapsburg) in contrast to“Oriental” and “Balkanic” (Orthodox, Ottoman) Serbs;Serbs, in turn, demarcated themselves from “Oriental”Kosovars. Istrian attempts to distinguish themselvesfrom non-Istrian Croats (as Europeans versus Balkanicpeoples) thus echo those that Croatian “nationalists”make in setting themselves apart from Serbs. Theseshared logics reflect a symbolic crossgrid constituted bywhat Bakic-Hayden and Hayden deem “nesting Orien-talisms” (1992; Bakic-Hayden 1995): Croats positionthemselves as Europeans in contrast to Serbs, Istriansclaim Europeanness in contrast to other Croats, and Is-trian Italian exiles counterpose their own civilized Eu-ropean ways to those of contemporary Istrians.

Despite the Istrian concept’s stated inclusivity, then,the stress on authentic (European) istrianita in contrastto Balkanism appears to encode a sense of resentmenttoward or, at the very least, a potential exclusion of non-Istrians. These notions of autochthony and cultural su-periority of Istria vis-a-vis the “Balkans” reflect not onlymore general Orientalizing logics, however, but also themore precise discourse of civilta with its roots in theVenetian and Hapsburg periods. As noted earlier, in theJulian March urban settlement has long been viewed asthe site of civilization and (high) culture (both conflatedwith Italianness) in contrast to rurality, which becamesynonymous with backwardness (and with Slavic pop-ulations). In the late Hapsburg imperial period, a deep-rooted set of metaphors and myths about the Oriental

(whether figured as Turk, Jew, or Slav) coalesced intowhat Gingrich (1998) has called “frontier orientalism.”Heirs to that Orientalist tradition, Istrians not only boastof a European heritage reflecting centuries of Hapsburgrule but, in contrast to other Slovenes and Croats, canalso claim a longer, autochthonous tradition of “Italian”civilization. This difference presumably explains why re-gionalists like Debeljuh and Suran identify the key toIstrian convivenza as residing in mixed unions; the “Eu-ropean” (i.e., Italian) character of the mixture is thoughtto explain why this cohabitation has continued in Istriaand not in the other former Yugoslav areas where mixedmarriages likewise proved common.

In nearby Trieste, Italian exiles also boast of theirstatus as an autochthonous (and civilized) population inIstria, whose Italianness for them remains materially in-scribed on the landscape in various forms (for exile useof the notion of Balcania, see Baskar 1999). The headlineof a recent article in the newspaper TriesteOggi stated itin unequivocal terms: “Like the American Indians: TheItalians of Istria, Fiume, and Dalmatia are the only au-tochthonous people of those lands” (August 20, 2002).The author went on to contend, “In reality the Italianswho remained in Istria, the Carnaro, and Dalmatia arethe direct descendants of those autochthonous peopleswho lived in those lands even before their annexation tothe Roman Empire and who became identified by thenames Istrians, Dalmatians, and Liburnians.” He thenrecounts a narrative of the progressive displacement ofthese “natives” over millennia, beginning with the in-vasion of “barbarian” Slavs in the sixth and seventh cen-turies. For the exiles and their supporters, the rhetoricof “First Peoples” becomes linked to a notion of the“state of culture” rather than the “state of nature,” giventhat the early civilizers were ultimately supplanted notby those possessing superior technologies—as in the caseof the conquest of the Americas—but rather by (as theysee it) vandals lacking in culture and history.

Looking to the same cultural signs (architecture, cem-eteries, language) that the exiles do as evidence of Istria’shistorical hybridity, supporters of the regionalist project(including members of the Italian minority in Istria) priv-ilege the hybrid subject itself—what I call an “authentichybrid.”5 Despite its rejection of the myth of pure ori-gins, the Istrian discourse of hybridity and autochthonythus makes a claim to “repossessing the land” that par-allels Alarcon’s description of cultural nationalist nar-ratives of repossession that work “through scenarios of‘origins’ that emerge in the selfsame territory, be it atthe literary, legendary, historical, ideological, critical, ortheoretical level—producing in material and imaginaryterms ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic,’ ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’subjects” (1996:46). This emphasis on authenticity thusneglects the reality of Istria’s other (nonautochthonous)residents just as the exiles tend to ignore Istria’s Slavic

5. For an extended analysis of the rhetoric of architectonics amongIstrians, see Ballinger (2003). For useful introductions to the vastliterature about authenticity and the construction of the past, seeHanson (1989) and Friedman (1992).




dimensions. These dynamics call into question the re-gionalists’ claim that istrianita offers a conceptual al-ternative to the models of identity prevalent elsewherein former Yugoslavia or nearby Trieste, even while thepolitical uses of such models may vary significantly.

Crossing and Reinscribing Borders: AuthenticHybridity in Istria

If in its intellectual formulations the notion of Istrian-ness appears conceptually similar to an ethnically de-fined understanding of belonging, how does the discourseof Istrian identity operate in everyday life in the Croatianpart of Istria? Just as the regionalists positioned them-selves as defending the peninsula against the centraliz-ing, homogenizing aims of the national state, so did eve-ryday Istrians often express their identities in oppositionto immigrants (notably refugees from Croatia and Bosniaand, increasingly, Albanians) whose presence in Istriawas seen as the result of the government’s wrong-headedpolicies. Many Istrians expressed little enthusiasm forthe Serb-Croat War, the results of which led to the activedisplacement of thousands of individuals. In the early1990s the Croatian government resettled (at least tem-porarily) many refugees in Dalmatia and Istria, in partbecause of the existence of ready-made tourist facilitiesin which to house them. Some Istrians, including theDDI-IDS founder Ivan Pauletta, saw this as a sinistercalculation designed to “colonize” Istria and weakensupport for the regionalist party by introducing outsidersmore likely to support Tudjman’s nationalist party.

By means of a strategy that has become familiar inWest European debates about immigration, Paulettasought to deflect criticisms of Istrians as racist. Havingaccused the Croatian media of creating a false impres-sion of Istrians as “inhospitable and not wanting toaccommodate these poor people,” he went on to de-scribe the resettlement of Bosnians in Istria as a formof exploitation. In Pauletta’s estimation, these BosnianCroats had been forced into a cultural reality to whichthey were not adapted: “removed from their properroots, [they] are submitted to a double violence” (1994:9). He goes on to recount having spoken with one suchtransplanted refugee who confessed his inability tosleep because of the disturbing sound of waves alongthe seashore. Pauletta repackages the old tropes, datingback to the Venetian period, associating the coast withurban(e) values and the interior with backwardness. InPauletta’s formulation, culture—in this case, symbol-ized by “belonging” to the coast or by what a regionalistin Slovenian Istria deems the need for the state to guar-antee the “autonomous development of the peopleswithin their rightful habitats [proprio habitat]” (Juri1990a:9)—appears as deterministic as biology, offeringan Istrian example of the “cultural fundamentalism”identified by Stolcke (1995). Though the reason for thisdifference is said to lie in Istria’s diverse historical tra-jectory, cultural difference often becomes naturalized

and territorialized/grounded through images of plantsand other vegetative life.

In its horticultural and organic qualities, this lan-guage recalls the Yugoslav tradition of cultural geog-raphy (Cvijic 1929–31) even as it more generally re-minds us that notions of hybridity have their originsin discourses of race and genetics (including that of thecross-fertilization of plants) (for a nuanced discussionof differences between Cvijic’s views and those heldlocally in contemporary Istria, see Baskar 1999:124). Inthe Istrian context, vegetative imagery plays upon thedual meanings attached to cultivation: culture in itsoriginal, agricultural sense and culture as refinement(see Williams 1976). Over time, these meanings becamebound up in the culture/cultivation/colonization nexus(Young 1995:31). Malkki (1992) emphasizes how the useof agricultural or botanical metaphors by scholars andnationalists alike works to “root” peoples and culturesin territories.6 Istrian Italians in exile across the border,for example, often remark upon the abandoned fieldsin the Istrian interior, which they take to symbolizehow the wildness of nature (and Slavs/communists) hasturned back the advance of the civilta and culture leftby centuries of Venetian rule.7 Furthermore, exiles andcontemporary Istrians alike employ the same cultiva-tion metaphor, that of wine (and the label “d.o.c.,” diorigine controllata), to denote authenticity of both cul-ture and nature, whose fusion is symbolized by thewine-making process. Culture is thus naturalized, ren-dered plantlike, even as nature is cultured anddomesticated.

The theme of autochthony or being d.o.c. also findsexpression in tropes of belonging not just to the landbut also to the sea, tropes that cross the borders. Alongwith the landed territory of Istria, its sea simulta-neously figures as the site of (urban maritime) cultureand nature, as suggested earlier by the anecdote fromPauletta about the Bosnian unable to “adapt” to thesea. In 1996, an acquaintance of mine in Rovigno/Rov-inj joked that he had just come back from the city

6. The danger that antiracist or antinationalist languages will re-capitulate the “botanical” logics they oppose is present even in thework of someone like Gilroy (1987). As Helmreich points out, thediaspora concept embraced by Gilroy “summons up the image ofscattered seeds . . . ancestral seeds from which genealogies sproutin particular soils (or oceans)” (1992:245–46). In Appadurai’s esti-mation, the prominence of a vocabulary of soil and homeland inantistate movements reflects “the poverty of their (and our) polit-ical languages rather than the hegemony of territorial nationalism,”a shortcoming that forces such movements to “embrace the veryimaginary they seek to escape” (1996:166). I would argue that forEurope, however, the logic of territory remains inherently writteninto regionalist “alternatives.”7. This Istrian association of nature with degeneration proves sim-ilar to the colonial imagining of the African bush “as a key signifierfor the decline of civilization in Africa. . . . The bush here signifiesthe ultimate nightmare of civilization—an irrational, atavistic sav-agery that obliterates . . . everything seemingly good and moral andcivilized. The Africans represented in the passage are also the bush,are the ‘human’ (or really subhuman) agents of a malevolent Na-ture—they complete the process of destruction begun by the bush”(Berger 1995:149).




beach, where—surrounded by Bosnians—he had felt asif he were in Mostar or Sarajevo. Such a comment ech-oed the recollections of Gianni Giuricin, who left hisnative Rovigno/Rovinj with the exodus after World WarII and recounted in his 1981 book his impressions uponreturning to his town for the first time in three decades.Giuricin awakens from a sweet daydream on the beachwhen he hears a women calling for “Mohammed.” AsBaskar contends, Giuricin “realized that these ‘Turks’also enjoyed this sea which had become their sea: al-though they entered the water differently, they do notjump into the water, as Giuricin and other Istrian boysused to, they enter it gradually, pandemonicallyscreaming as the water is cool” (1999:127). Here, thesea does not dissolve difference but reaffirms it, as isunderlined by the foreign noises created by “Muslims”at the Istrian beach (and the foreignness of the sea’ssound, as in Pauletta’s story).

These long-standing markers of difference—the cul-tured-nature/wild-nature opposition—continue to fig-ure powerfully in both exile and contemporary Istrianunderstandings of identity, as does a concomitant em-phasis on urbanity versus rurality. In Istrian cities likeRovigno/Rovinj, rural backwardness now threatens toinvade the urban(e) center, just as untamed wildernesscovers abandoned fields and buildings in the Istrian in-terior. In Rovigno/Rovinj, newcomers increasingly in-habit the Venetian Old City; emptied first by the exodusand then by the move in the 1960s and 1970s of re-maining locals to modern villa-type houses springingup in the New Town, its apartments became frequentvacation homes for wealthy Yugoslavs, especially Serbs.When Yugoslavia dissolved, refugees appropriated theseapartments, sometimes with the connivance of localsand sometimes in the face of their opposition, therebycreating their own refugee quarter. As a young manfrom Rovigno/Rovinj expressed it, “The Balkans startafter the arch [entrance to the Old City].” Such “na-tives” lament the increasingly foreign aspect of the OldCity, on whose streets they may hear Bosnian speechrather than the Istrian dialect, smell the odors of Bos-nian cooking, or encounter Muslim women wearinghead scarves. Loose talk in the town about supposedlyillegal building or additions without permits often cen-ters on wealthy Albanians (Shiptari), whose wealth—like their residences—appears suspect. One friend ofmine mused nostalgically about the good old days, pre-1991, when only “i nasi” (our people) inhabited Ro-vigno/Rovinj and one could leave cars and houses un-locked without worrying about the theft and break-insassociated with the post-Yugoslav era.

For those who identify themselves as belonging to “ourpeople,” these immigrants jeopardize—even as their dif-ference paradoxically reinforces—key markers of an au-thentic hybridity, including Latin-Slav cultural and lin-guistic intermixture and a cultural patrimonysymbolized by historical architecture. Both contempo-rary Istrians and exiles value architecture as sign of ci-vilta. Just as purity and hybridity are sides of the samecoin, so too do the naturalizing images of rootedness and

genealogy form the logical counterpoint to architectur-alized images of culture.

As of this writing, some new wrinkles have compli-cated this discourse of locals versus immigrants. In Ro-vigno/Rovinj, some of the apartments in the refugeequarter have been reclaimed by their owners and sold towealthy members of neighboring EU countries. Al-though this process had begun even before the demiseof Tudjman, the election of a democratic coalition wel-coming foreign investment has accelerated the process.The introduction of the euro prompted a spike in suchproperty sales as Italians and Austrians rushed to investtheir money outside the EU before the monetary change-over. The selling off of the historic center of Rovigno/Rovinj is creating new tensions between natives andnewcomers. Some locals I know complain bitterly aboutthe fact that the Old City will end up in the hands ofrich foreigners, who are beginning to price out locals.Others, however, respect the fact that the newcomersinvest money to restore old buildings in danger of deg-radation and deterioration.

Davor (a pseudonym), who with his family remainsthe only year-round “local” resident in his entire apart-ment building, commented that he much prefers Italiansas neighbors to other Croats from outside of Istria. In abuilding consisting of five apartments, two have beenpurchased by Italians from the Veneto region and two bywomen from Zagreb. Davor complains that his neighborsfrom Zagreb always leave open their bathroom door,which abuts on the communal hallway, so that everyonein the building can share in its special odors. For Davor,such behavior represents a lack of civility that an Italian,for example, would never dream of. Davor further addedthat the Italians living above him—with whom he andhis family have forged a close relationship—have respectfor Istrian ways, having preserved the old walls and floorsof their remodeled apartment in a style consistent withIstrian traditions.

Perhaps it is most accurate to describe Istrian attitudestoward newcomers, whether they be “Balkan” peoplesor “fellow” Europeans, as fundamentally ambivalent.This ambivalence is reflected in the fact that, despite awidespread resentment of Bosnians and Albanians andthe reinforcement of exclusionary models of identity, theviolence toward ethnic Others that marked Yugoslavia’sdissolution elsewhere has not occurred in Istria. At thesame time, the defensive character of much of the dis-course of Istrian autochthony/authenticity expressesvery real concerns about preservation of an Istrian iden-tity and, in particular, protection of minorities and bi-lingualism, given that throughout the 1990s such rightsremained under critical attack. As ongoing controversiesabout autonomy and minority rights suggest, however,in the post-Tudjman era a privileged sense of “authentichybridity” and rootedness nonetheless remains key toan Istrian identity, grounded as it is in concerns aboutterritory (reflecting its genealogy in multiple state-build-ing projects).




New Boundaries of Autochthony: Istria afterTudjman

Tudjman’s death in December 1999 and the election ofa democratic coalition the following month ushered in,with surprising speed, a new era in Croatian politics. TheDDI-IDS, long an opposition party at the national level,was now part of the democratic governing coalition. Ja-kovcic, DDI-IDS President, became Croatia’s Ministerfor European Integration, counting among his prioritiesEuropean integration by 2006 and political recognitionof Istria’s unique Latin-Slav cultural and ethnic mix (IlPiccolo, February 22, 2000; March 9, 2000). Other Eu-ropean leaders, notably those of neighboring Italy,pledged support to the new Europe-oriented regime. Is-trians in general and Italians in particular suddenly foundthemselves lauded by Croatian and European politiciansalike as “a national resource” that could only facilitateCroatia’s entry into the EU.

The political honeymoon would not last long, how-ever, as nagging questions about the nature and extentof Istrian autonomy resurfaced. Though criticism fromthe Croatian right was to be expected, even the DDI-IDS’s erstwhile allies wondered aloud about separatisttendencies when, in March 2000, Jakovcic threatened toresign his ministerial post and lead an autonomous Istria(an action for which he later apologized) should the cen-tral government fail to take action regarding a financialcrisis involving the Istrian Bank. Allies grew even morealarmed in the summer of 2001 when local representa-tives from the relevant areas in Italy, Slovenia, and Cro-atia moved to sign an agreement establishing the IstrianEuroregion.

The denunciation of this action in the Croatian par-liament by its Vice President Mato Arlovic reflectedgrowing concern beyond Istria that the regionalistssought to usurp power belonging to the national state.At this point the DDI-IDS had already withdrawn fromthe governing coalition, and Jakovcic resigned his min-isterial post in February 2001 because of a dispute overthe Istrian Statute. Critics charged that the statute,which instituted bilingualism (Italian-Croat) at a re-gional level, required constitutional authority. For Istri-ans this was all too reminiscent of the ConstitutionalCourt’s suppression of the Istrian Statute in 1995, duringthe Tudjman era (on these earlier struggles, see Cocco2002:184–86). Behind this wrangling lay a widespreadfear that permitting bilingualism in Istria would consti-tute a dangerous precedent for other minorities in therest of Croatia, notably the Serbs. As had been true forthe first decade of its existence, the regionalists againopposed the national center, a position that appeared tosuit them (at least in terms of popular support), giventhe construction of the Istrian identity in opposition toother Croats. And, once again, Istrians vaunted their ac-tions as European (i.e., progressive); Maurizio Tremul,leader of the Italian minority in Slovenia and sympa-thetic to the DDI-IDS, declared, for example, that Croatiacould be proud of the statute “because it is avant-garde

[i.e., forward-thinking] and thus could only be a positivefactor in the process of European integration” (La Vocedel Popolo, January 24, 2002).

Despite non-Istrian fears about setting a precedent forminorities that could be applied to Croatia’s Serbs, in2000 regionalists and Italian-minority leaders had al-ready underlined their difference from members of theSerbian minority, who requested recognition as an au-tochthonous minority in Istria. Italian and DDI-IDS rep-resentatives rejected the Serbs’ claims, arguing that anycomparisons between the Italian minority in Istria andthe Serbs were false in that Italians were a genuine au-tochthonous minority. The DDI-IDS deputy Petar Janko,for example, contended that Italians had lived in Istriafor 2,000 years whereas the Serbian presence dated onlyto the postexodus period (La Voce del Popolo, May 29,2000).

In contrast, Furio Radin, parliamentary representativefor the Italian minority in the Sabor, demonstrated muchgreater support for Serbs as fellow minority members.By the summer of 2002, regionalist positions had shiftedsomewhat as well, as Istrian representatives battledagainst the governing Social Democrats (who on theseissues had joined forces with the opposition HDZ) forthe application of the so-called double vote permittingminority members to vote for their (nonparty-affiliated)representatives in addition to district deputies associatedwith political parties. Nonetheless, members of the Ital-ian minority—Radin included—continued to stress inthe larger debate over the protections given to minoritiesthe need to recognize the principle of autochthony (LaVoce del Popolo, July 26, 30, 2002).8

8. In his work on the concept of multiethnic Istrian identity, Coccoagrees with my assessment of a cultural chauvinism at work inIstria at the same time that he argues against my central premise,contending that istrianita is “not conceived as emanation of anauthentic ethnicity” (2002:172). Focusing on the legal constructionsof citizenship, Cocco rightly notes that exclusion in Istria is “notachieved in the same way” (p. 193) as in Tudjman’s narrow na-tionalism. Yet Cocco looks more at political pronouncements andthe legal bases of citizenship than at lived practice, where the con-tradictions of the DDI-IDS’s “new” model for identity emerge mostclearly. He ultimately maintains that Istrian regionalism may offera solution as to how to “link local specificity and cosmopolitanrights [that] could be envisaged as an original and progressive wayto achieve a new form of international citizenship” (p. 195), eventhough he does not critically interrogate what such “cosmopolitanrights” may consist in. Nor does he consider the implications evenfor more formal models of citizenship (as suggested by the “doublevote”) that might follow from a continued privileging (post-Tudj-man) of claims to Istrian autochthony. An example of the dangerscreated by the legal privileging of autochthonous minorities comesfrom nearby Slovenia, set to enter the EU and proud of its partic-ipation in European conventions regarding minority rights. Eventhough all citizens of Slovenia are accorded “equality before thelaw,” the constitution also gives the autochthonous Hungarian andItalian minorities special rights and protections denied to otherminorities, notably the Roma (who are further classified as au-tochthonous or nonautochthonous Roma). According to a report bythe Open Society Institute, “All other minorities in Slovenia areexcluded, by definition, from enjoyment of the rights set forth inthe FCNM [Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Pro-tection of National Minorities]. Slovenia has ratified the EuropeanCharter for Regional or Minority Languages, similarly restricting




The emphasis on autochthony, attendant protections,and “positive discrimination” (as symbolized by the “dou-ble vote”) underscores the ways in which an autochtho-nous or “authentic hybrid,” rooted in the territory by ge-nealogies and ancestors, informs political demands torecognize Istrian hybridity and autonomy. This paradox-ically exclusive-inclusive concept of Istrian hybridity is adirect consequence of, rather than a contradiction to, Is-tria’s inherent European history and character. Not onlydo “Europeanism” and the experiment represented by theEU remain unquestioned in the formulations of its re-gionalist proponents but the attribution of anti-European-ism to DDI-IDS opponents becomes an explicit charge ofantidemocratic behavior and an implicit charge of beinguncivilized (in terms of civilta and “civil society”). Evenin the post-Tudjman era, regionalists privileged the “Eu-ropean” character of a special Euroregion and attendantbilingualism, thereby underscoring that other Croatianparties were not so enlightened. When, for instance, Ja-kovcic pronounced the disputed Istrian Statute a “modernand European document” (Il Piccolo, August 25, 2001), hebasically labeled its critics un-European. A year later, asthe debate over minority rights dragged on in Parliament,the DDI-IDS deputy Damir Kajin contended, “I am con-vinced that Istria has for quite some time offered solutionsthat are exemplary, both for Croatia and beyond. . . . Thefact that the situation of the minorities in the Region hasremained almost unchanged for the past ten years is thesign of a different politics, of a politics that can serve asa therapy, curing Croatia of its xenophobia and ethnocen-trism” (La Voce del Popolo, July 24, 2002).

While Europe as an ideal clearly serves to unite theregionalists against a common enemy (HDZ/Croatianright), the “Balkan” or anti-European charge also worksto discipline fellow Istrians. Recently, Jakovcic and otherregionalist leaders (as well as Prime Minister Racan) haveemployed the anti-European label and its negative as-sociations with nationalism and political “immaturity”in order to delegitimize the concerns of Croatian fish-ermen in northern Istria over concessions to Slovenia onthe maritime border and fishing rights. Such gesturesreveal the way in which discourses of European cos-mopolitanism and hybridity often operate as a “form ofmoral self-congratulation” (Werbner 1997:15).

Even amongst themselves the regionalists have disa-greed over what, in practical terms, the “Euro” part ofthe Euroregion formulation implies in terms of the de-gree and nature of autonomy to be accorded such anentity. By the end of my extended fieldwork in 1996, adissident group led by Luciano Delbianco, former pres-ident of the Istrian Region, had left the DDI-IDS to formthe rival Istrian Forum. This secession was the result oflong-standing tensions that first manifested themselvesin a series of expulsions from the regionalist party in

its provisions to the Italian, Hungarian and Romani languages. . . .A significant percentage of Slovenia’s total minority populationdoes not benefit from the de jure minority rights accorded to Ital-ians and Hungarians; these two groups together number fewer than12,000 out of a total minority population of at least 140,000” (2001:513).

1994 and came to a head in a dispute over the mayoralelection in Pola/Pula, Istria’s principal city. The depar-ture of Delbianco and his supporters from the DDI-IDSover the mayoral election prompted Kajin, vice presidentof the Region, to write an open letter in which he ques-tioned the Forum’s legitimacy. Kajin implied that manyof the regionalist turncoats were, in reality, opportunisticformer communists (given that in 1993 many of Del-bianco’s supporters had left the Social Democratic Partyfor the DDI-IDS) who “had never accepted the line, thefundamental conception, the mode of thinking of theDDI” (Gasparini 1996:5). Kajin thus positioned Del-bianco and his group as outsiders and inauthentic re-gionalists with the impurest of motives.

Commenting on the political split, the journalist RosiGasparini invoked the everyday language of autochthonyand authenticity by representing Istrian regionalism asan “organic” movement that, once free of its diseasedelements, would grow and flourish. Comparing the DDI-IDS to a tree, Gasparini (1996:7) lent the process of po-litical purging an air of natural necessity at the sametime that the arboreal imagery recalled those genealog-ical trees, symbols, in Linke’s (1999:62) text, of “bothcontinuity of essence and territorial rootedness” (see alsoRival 1998):

In its development from regionalist movement toparty on the national level, the DDI made giganticsteps in changing directions by making old alliancesand stipulating new ones of major weight on the po-litical scene. The DDI has every reason, then, toknock off, in the Istrian home, the branches thatdisturb the harmonious foliage of the DDI tree andto cut those that are old, to directly prune the rootsin order to regulate growth.

Imagining connection in arboreal terms proves a fre-quent practice of Istrians (whether intellectuals or not),who thereby “root” the social facts of kinship and cul-ture in nature (Linke 1999:59, 62; Malkki 1992; Schwartz1997). Informants often recounted their respective fam-ilies’ autochthony, as well as hybridity, by means of treevocabulary. During my fieldwork period, members of theItalian community of Dignano/Vodnjan produced a vol-ume, entitled Radici (Roots), detailing such genealogies.Writers in contemporary Trieste sympathetic to the re-gionalist vision of Istrianness such as Claudio Magris andPaolo Rumiz have likened Istria to an evergreen holmoak (Quercus ilex) with three roots representing the Is-tro-Venetian, Croatian, and Slovene populations (Baskar1999:128). Some exiles in Trieste use this tree imagerybut give it a different twist. A pro-Italian tract producedin English at the time of the postwar contestation overthe Julian March, for instance, captures the Istrian exiles’sense of their deep roots, here contrasted with those ofthe Slavs. Featuring a design of three intertwined trees(fig. 1), the pamphlet shows a shallower “Slavic” offshootof the Istrian tree. Given that these branches are asso-ciated with such traits as piracy, paganism, criminality,and communism, it can be seen which branches pro/




Fig. 1. The Istrian tree (from Right Against Force).

purist Italians consider as disturbing the “harmoniousfoliage” of the Istrian home.

In contemporary Istrian politics, such imagery servesa similar purpose: as an argument for truncating or elim-inating elements artificially “grafted” on, as it were. Re-call, too, the remark, quoted earlier, about eradicatingwith pesticide the unpleasant growth constituted by

non-Istrian Croats. In denouncing Delbianco and his sup-porters, regionalists not only deemed these reformedcommunists to have been unsuccessfully grafted ontothe regionalist program but also accused them of literalgraft, claiming that they had financial motives for de-serting the party (Gasparini 1996:6). Such claims work,albeit incompletely, to deflect charges about opportun-




ism and abuse of power by DDI-IDS leaders. Many Is-trians cynically remark on the newfound prosperity andconspicuous consumption of their leaders. The legalcharges about abuse of power leveled at local DDI-IDSofficials in Dignano/Vodjnan and the revelation that Ja-kovcic’s considerable real estate holdings include an en-tire Istrian village have only confirmed many Istrians’belief that once in power all politicians line their ownpockets.

Explaining the “Balkan Paradox”

Having considered both the conceptual limits of the hy-brid Istrian identity promoted by the DDI-IDS and itsconsequences in practice, my analysis here suggests thatthis model of identity raises serious questions about theregionalist party’s ultimate potential to constitute eithera dramatically different model of inclusion or a new formof politics in Croatia. As Sinfield comments on the rad-ical potential of hybridity, “To say this is not to denyresistance [that is, any possibility for it]; only to doubthow far it may be advanced by cultural hybridity” (2000:105)—or, I might add, by political ideologies of inter-mixture. More broadly, examining the dialogic relation-ship between purity and hybridity historically in theJulian March helps explain the seeming “Balkan para-dox”—the competition over the past two centuries be-tween exclusive notions of narod (ethnic group as equalto nation) and expansive, multinational structures andideologies. Those who look at only one term in the pu-rity-hybridity dialectic thus fail to understand, for ex-ample, why Istria (or Bosnia) has been home to both in-terethnic tolerance and ethnic unmixing (see, forinstance, facile readings of the true Bosnian history as atradition of cohabitation tragically betrayed by instru-mentalist elites [Donia and Fine 1994, Sells 1996]).9

Competing accounts of Istria or, for that matter, theformer Yugoslavia that read its history exclusively interms of either purity or hybridity fail to take accountof the historical dialogue and interpenetration of lan-guages of purity/homogeneity and hybridity. Rather thanread political ideologies such as those promoting an au-tonomous Julian March or Yugoslavism as the unrealizedor failed alternatives to exclusive ethno-nationalist iden-tifications (e.g., the tack taken by Sluga 2001), it provesmore productive to consider how ideologies of intermix-ture nevertheless left in place narrower understandingsof identity (“Italian” and “Slav,” “Serb,” “Croat,” “Slo-vene”). In moments of crisis and state reconfiguration,the concept of hybrid identity readily breaks down intoits constituent identities.

In the case of the South Slav (Yugoslav) concept, atdifferent moments expressed in either supranational or

9. As Hayden notes, such situations seem paradoxical only when“syncretism is presumed to require amity between the groups solinked” (2002:207), that is, where syncretism is assumed to implycoexistence (one of the key claims made by the Istrian regionalistsin their celebration of convivenza).

synthetic/hybrid terms, the very notion of a pan–SouthSlav identity left troubling questions about the place ofminority, autochthonous non-Slavic peoples (Shoup1968, Wachtel 1998). Not coincidentally, many of thesegroups were clustered in the border areas of Yugoslaviaand appeared to represent a potential irredentist threat,given their proximity to their mother countries. AfterWorld War II, members of these minorities (notably Ital-ians, Germans, and Hungarians) frequently fled or facedexpulsion as a result of their association with Yugosla-via’s occupiers. Although those who remained in Tito’sYugoslavia (with the exception of the Germans) enjoyedminority guarantees, this status nonetheless set thesepeoples apart from the federation’s constitutive SouthSlav populations. Even in the multiethnic Yugoslav fed-eration, then, some peoples appeared to be more “au-thentic” than others in a manner not so dissimilar fromthe politics of authenticity prevalent in contemporaryIstria.

Does unpacking the “Balkan paradox” shed light,therefore, on current dilemmas of Istrian identity? Yesand no. In introducing the phrase “Balkan paradox” as“so-called,” I have sought to signal that the oscillationsbetween ethnic coexistence and ethnic violence appearparadoxical only when one ignores the intertwined his-tories of purity and hybridity discourses. At the sametime, however, I also intended to call into question the“Balkan” part of the formulation, given that the contra-dictions of “authentic hybridity” reflect not only his-torical dynamics particular to the region but also theproblems at the heart of the European project on whichIstrians have looked so favorably. As the anthropologistChris Shore cautioned in 1993, “EC [now EU] policy-makers tend to privilege a static, bounded and exclusivistdefinition of ‘European’ identity” even as they attemptto “ ‘build unity through diversity’ ” (1993:781, 791).Morley and Robins similarly warned of the “ominousutopia” represented by the ideal of a Europe of regions,for “whether ‘home’ is imagined as the community ofEurope or of the national state or of the region, it isdrenched in the longing for wholeness, unity, integrity”(1993:7). Subsequent anthropological and sociologicalanalyses of European integration such as those of Del-gado Moreira (2000) and Holmes (2000) have followed upthese critiques. Delgado Moreira, for instance, demon-strates the tensions between the model of a high, pan-European culture promoted by the Commission of theEuropean Union and the Committee of Regions’ stresson locality of culture, multiculturalism, and protection.In reality, the tasks of these committees are comple-mentary, rooting the vision of a universal, “cosmopoli-tan” European culture in territorially specific, autoch-thonous cultures. In keeping with this, the EU Treatyon Union draws on a by-now familiar horticultural lan-guage to denote the means by which the “flowering ofthe cultures of the member states” may be realized(Holmes 2000:32). As in Istria and Trieste, this natural-ized language finds its cultural(ized) counterpart in anemphasis on “Europe’s architectural and artistic heri-tage” (Shore 1993:789).




Although guaranteed equal rights as (potential) citi-zens, non-European immigrants fit uneasily into the Eu-ropean model of multiculturalism, given its privilegingof autochthonous and regional cultures, just as Bosniansor Serbs in Istria remain outside the sphere of istrianid.o.c. Istria serves as a sort of “looking glass” (Herzfeld1987) for Europe, then, in which we find revealed thecreation of regimes and everyday communities made upof two types of citizens, some of whom appear moreauthentic (though not unequal, at least in law) than oth-ers. The contradiction at the heart of the Istrian projectthus reflects not only a “Balkan paradox” but also a Eu-ropean dilemma (that of “cultural fundamentalism”),one foreshadowed by the historic conflations (or hybridmixings) of nature and culture in the borderland iden-tities of the Julian March.

Conclusion

The Istrian case proves productive for interrogating as-sumptions about hybridity, borderlands, race, and iden-tity at a number of theoretical and empirical levels. Ifanalysis of historical processes in the former Yugoslaviahelps us rethink received anthropological wisdom, wemust return to the starting point of this inquiry and askwhy the former Yugoslavia has been so neglected in theborderland-hybridity literature. Without a doubt, forscholars seeking in the hybridity concept a way out ofthe mess created by “bad” identity politics, the repeatedfailures of the Yugoslav idea dampen our enthusiasm. Inher book Imperial Leather (1995), Anne McClintock de-scribes a museum exhibit that dramatically illustratesthe passage from a dark, colonial past into a safe, securestate of postcoloniality and hybridity. As she tells us,there is only one possible itinerary through the exhibitand only one possible terminus point. What does it doto our vision if, as we enter the room of hybridity, wefind (at worst) a bloodbath or (at the very best) an exclu-sionary regime based on authentic hybrids and Others?To preserve our view, we have silenced the case of theformer Yugoslavia (as well as other experiments in so-cialist hybridity and internationalist supranationalism)from a good deal of current anthropological theory. Theformer Yugoslavia and postsocialism are good to thinkbut also to prohibit.

Despite the use of seemingly novel discourses of hy-bridity and multiculturalism in the Istrian case, we findthere a contemporary rearticulation of long-standingrhetorics about cultural intermixture and attendant po-litical autonomy. Although the hybridity discourse of theregionalists appears to challenge state forms in Croatia,it nonetheless remains indebted to the hybridity ideol-ogies (imperial cosmopolitanism and autonomism, Yu-goslavism) that proved key to earlier state-building pro-jects. While providing a significant political alternativein the Croatian context, it ultimately does not subvertthe essentialist logics of Croatian national identity butrather reinscribes them because of the continued em-phasis on autochthony and metaphors of rootedness that

locate the “authentic hybrid” as a subject (rather than aprocess) in a specific territorial space. (Elsewhere, inplaces like Latin America, ideologies of mestizaje haveproven fundamental instruments in state making.) Op-ponents of such ideas nonetheless tend to challengethem in terms that likewise remain captive to the hy-bridity-purity dynamic. As Canessa puts it, “The projectof creating homogeneous nation-states in Latin Americacomposed of a hybridized mestizo ‘raza cosmica’ is beingseriously challenged by such [indigenous-purist] move-ments” (2000:115).

Examining such rhetorics of power and contention intandem, as well as in their historical specificity, shedslight on the dynamics of state and identity formation ina specific region, reminding us of the need to be cautiousof “traveling theory” (Said, quoted in Hale 1999:312) andits careless application in incommensurate contexts. Theanalysis presented here thus offers what Hale deems “anincrement of assurance that theory will be accountableto some place and some people in particular” (1999:313).At the same time, I have argued that the specific Istriancase can illuminate broader dynamics whose particulareffects in other contexts remain for other scholars tostudy. If we deny the possibility that theory can travelat all, we risk treating it like an autochthonous plant(theory d.o.c.?) that can thrive only in its native soil.

Comments

jasna capo zmegacInstitute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Ul.kralja Zvonomira 17, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia([email protected]). 14 ix 03

Ballinger proposes to “examine and critique some prev-alent theoretical assumptions about borderland hybrid-ity through investigation of hybrid identity in the JulianMarch.” To be more precise, instead of an examinationof borderland hybridity, she presents an analysis of thehybrid identity discourse in the area. These are quitedifferent levels of reality that are potentially the objectsof different kinds of anthropological examination. Cre-olization—a cultural and historical process with out-comes that might be ethnographically studied (at leastby those who do not reject the notion of culture as anobject)—is one thing; creolization is quite another mat-ter when it is appropriated by identity politics and usedas a rhetorical weapon against other identity politics.Much of Croatian ethnology has favoured research ofthe first kind: its goal has been to identify “culturalzones,” areas of diffusion of similar culture elementsin space. In this endeavour it has paid special attentionto borderland areas of culture mixing in regions suchas Istria, Lika, and the Dalmatian hinterland, whichhave been treated as zones of intersection and hybridcultural forms. (Another quite contemporary insightimplied in such research was that cultures were not to




be conceived of as homogeneous wholes. Yet, the ap-proach, along with other diffusionist approaches, hashad its less acceptable aspects.)

Ballinger is discussing another matter—identityconstructs, past and present. She has convincinglyshown that the hybrid identity construct of the re-gionalists in Istria in the 1990s only seemingly op-posed ethno-nationalist identity constructs prevalentin Croatia. Whether conceived of as purity or hybridityconcepts, identity texts are culturalist, essentialist,and exclusivist; they naturalize and inscribe cultureonto territory through horticultural imagery. In ad-dition, they exclude others who do not partake ofthem, for example, contemporary immigrants. Thisshould not, however, come as a surprise. The very for-mulation of an identity freezes what is otherwise aprocess, past and present, of identity formation (iden-tification). Identification is in the making; identity isa snapshot thereof at a particular moment. In the actof identity narration, the processual, dynamic aspectinherent in the process of identification is lost. Iden-tity is by definition static and requires preservationrather than accommodation to novel realities.

It has been argued that research on identificationexclusively as a discursive construct produces unilat-eral and incomplete analyses precisely because it begsthe existence of dynamic processes of identity con-struction through interaction in a particular socio-cultural context (Otto and Driessen 2000). An exclu-sive research focus on identity as discourse mayoverlook parallelism and/or opposition between iden-tity narratives and interactive constructions of iden-tity. In my research in a northern Croatian borderlandI have identified the parallel existence of an Orien-talizing discourse in both newcomers and locals andgood neighbourhood relations, borrowing, and supportbetween “natives” and newcomers (Capo Zmegac2002). It would be interesting to research the inter-active pole of identity formation (identity in the mak-ing “in practice”) in Istria to see whether the much-praised convivenza is indeed invoked only as part ofidentity rhetoric or whether it is also part of the ev-eryday practice of Istrian inhabitants. This would leadto examining the potential of “ordinary people” in hy-brid areas for genuine open and democratic dialogue.

Finally, I do not share Ballinger’s assessment that theformer Yugoslav areas have been neglected in hybridityand borderland discussions. To my knowledge the Istrianpeninsula has been studied by numerous foreign anthro-pologists in the past decade. One could say that it wasa favourable fieldsite on the margins of Europe (verymuch like certain Greek provinces). Besides numerousCroatian researchers a Swede, several Swiss, and Amer-ican, Italian, and German anthropologists have showninterest in Istria precisely because of its borderland andhybrid character.

virginia r . dominguezDepartment of Anthropology, 114 Macbride Hall,University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242-1322, U.S.A.([email protected]). 9 x 03

Ballinger wants to critique “prevalent assumptions abouthybridity through analysis of identity in a quintessen-tially ‘hybrid’ site” and offers this essay as a demonstra-tion of “the ways in which the hybridity concept repli-cates, both conceptually and in everyday life, the logicsit ostensibly opposes.” There is a clarity in this intro-duction that deserves praise, but Ballinger’s use of “hy-bridity” seems to me to undermine her otherwise solidpoint.

Whose discourses of hybridity are being critiqued here?Ballinger is correct in pointing to a tendency in the pastdecade for scholars in certain anthropological circles and,more generally, certain types of cultural studies to view“hybridity” with favor. Whether the citation is of RenatoRosaldo (for viewing border zones as sites of creativecultural production), David Harvey (for his notion of“spaces of hope”), Michel de Certeau (for identifying“tactics” in the practice of everyday life), or one of thegrowing circle of scholars who read, cite, and debate eachother over notions of “creolization,” many anthropolog-ically oriented scholars are abandoning the role of criticand endorsing particular types of cultural or social move-ments and the people they identify with them. DespiteMarcus and Fischer’s notion of “anthropology as culturalcritique” (1986), a history of critical political economy,and well over a decade of serious critiques of represen-tation (or possibly because of them), optimism and ap-plause characterize much of the anthropologically ori-ented scholarship of the past ten years. Ballinger iscorrect in seeing this in Lavie and Swedenburg’s wordsin Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity(1996), as much as I value the courage and insights bothscholars typically show in their work. But the pattern ismuch more widespread, and it is this investment in thepossibilities of “hybridity” as a good thing for the worldthat Ballinger critiques.

Her essay, however, raises the crucial question of howto relate “data” to theory, whether or not one buys intothe notion of anthropology as science. The scholarly dis-course that invokes the notion of “hybridity” does in-deed warrant examination—as much for its potential toreveal the incompleteness of hegemony in locations ofgreat geopolitical inequality as for its limitations. Thequestion is with what type of data and what type ofargument. If, as appears to be the case among Istrians,the term “hybridity” is not part of discussions aboutbelonging, difference, or conflict, what does it mean forBallinger to claim that Istrian “understandings of differ-ence and forms of exclusion” call into question our ownscholarly discourse on “hybridity”? This is not a matterof whether theory can travel effectively but, rather, ofhow favoring certain theoretical discourses obscures oth-ers. How should scholars select their scholarly frames?How do we identify those of value?

Ballinger’s call for historical particularity and speci-




ficity in analyzing discourse is indeed important, andmany of the data she offers support this point well. Theirony is that “hybridity” is not the discursive (or cog-nitive) frame used in this region of the Mediterranean.Ballinger states that there is practically no reported Is-trian position arguing that there is “cultural hybridity.”Convivenza, after all, means “cohabitation” or “coex-istence,” not “hybridity.” The sharing of geographicspace and the patterning of institutional and social in-teractions involving people categorized as different seemcentral to the case, but these seem to me part of ongoingdiscussion about sovereignty, coexistence, and compet-ing nationalisms much more than of discussions theo-rizing hybridity.

Why couldn’t the essay’s important message about themutual constitution of notions of purity and their pre-sumed opposite have been couched in other analyticterms? Istrians are indeed conceptualizing themselves asgroups or circles or communities—what I often call as-serting sameness and difference simultaneously—and atthe same time debating how much difference they seekto denigrate, get rid of, or value. This is a very commonphenomenon in many parts of the world, noted by schol-ars for years and discussed in many ways. It does notseem to me that Ballinger’s data do much to endorse orcritique the scholarly discourse framed in terms of “hy-bridity” in the contemporary United States. Yes, onecould take this case as an example among many of lo-cations in which entrenched ideologies of sameness anddifference lead residents to see their society as mixed,and one could then show that proponents of politicalpositions locally viewed as very different share morethan they realize and point out that there is more con-tinuity than subversion in their ideological debates. ButI have never understood any of the scholars who invokethe notion of hybridity as a potentially useful analytictool to assume that all contexts seen as full of differentkinds of people will develop primarily subversive publicor private cultures.

Ballinger’s case is quite interesting for its data, and theBalkans do indeed deserve much more and deeper atten-tion. However, there is little in this essay that appearsto be about “hybridity,” and its contributions to contem-porary scholarly discussions of samenesses and differ-ences would not have required privileging the discourseon “hybridity” (even to critique it).

charles haleDepartment of Anthropology, University of Texas atAustin, Austin, TX 78712, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 18 ix 03

I have learned a lot from this smart, nuanced analysis ofIstrian and Croatian politics and find the essay’s centralarguments generally convincing. Since I know so littleabout the specifics of the case at hand, I have focusedmy queries more theoretically, using Ballinger’s con-cluding question as a point of departure: Where is thespace between disembodied traveling theory that leads

to woefully wrong or—more frequently—utterly irrele-vant readings of political process and “theory d.o.c.” thatmimics the essentialist, “rooted” premises againstwhich one hopes theory to work?

First, while this essay does amass additional empiricalrationale for burying the celebratory “hybridity-as-cre-ativity-and-resistance” thesis, I would push Ballinger’sjustification for the burial one step farther. Her argumentechoes Rosaldo’s penetrating, if elegantly understated,critique of Nestor Garcıa Canclini’s Culturas hıbridasin the preface to the English translation of that volume(1995). There are two polar understandings of hybridity,Rosaldo observes: as “a space betwixt and between twozones of purity” and as “an ongoing condition of all hu-man cultures, which contain no zones of purity becausethey undergo continuous processes of transculturation”(p. xv). Garcıa Canclini, Rosaldo asserts, “never resolvesthe tension between the two . . . but his analysis favorsthe former.” By placing sole emphasis on contrastingsubstantive features of the discourse, this critiqueeclipses questions of consequences. By implication, themeaning of “hybridity” put forth by the Istrians, theMexican political elite, and some theorists affirms racistpremises (inadvertently or otherwise), while the secondmeaning remains truly creative and contestatory. Thissets us all to work elaborating on the second version,even though a theoretically inclined ethnographer is sureto come along and demonstrate that this latter discoursealso, in some concrete political situation, has been mo-bilized to nefarious ends. In short, while the racial im-agery in Istrian “authentic hybridity” is crucial, the heartof the problem, it seems to me, is the specific work thisdiscourse has done in the Istrian context. Is there noscenario in which this submerged racial imagery couldbe relatively benign rather than highly toxic? Can wereally count on nonracial hybridity discourses to servesuch radically different ends?

Second, in this swirl of conflicting and contradictorydiscourses—from authentic-hybridity fundamentalismto irredentist nationalism—I miss a more sustained anal-ysis of what might be called “neoliberal multicultural-ism,” a conjunction of discourses and practices that goesby various names in a range of contemporary theoreticalwork (e.g., Rose 1999, Hardt and Negri 2000, Zizek 1997,and Goldberg 2002). The idea, briefly, is that emergentforms of governance have increasing recourse to a poli-tics of recognition as a means of affirming alignmentwith modern values of cultural pluralism and tolerance,heading off cultural-political militancy, and, most subtle,inciting self-making collectivities to govern themselves.In Latin America, for example, enthusiasm for the wide-spread contestation of mestizaje as national ideologymust be tempered by noting that rights to cultural dif-ference now form part of the repertoire of the neoliberalstate (Hale 2002). If Istrian “authentic hybridity” is inpart about the reinscription of “cosmopolitan Europeanculture in territorially specific, autochthonous cul-tures,” perhaps its leaders are also playing out a versionof this neoliberal bargain. Put differently, perhaps thepuzzle of autonomy framed in the racialist language of




“authentic hybridity” has given way to a more powerfulparadox: “autonomy” and “cultural rights” as keywordsin the refurbished development arsenal of the neoliberalestablishment.

Finally, in thinking through the “theory d.o.c.” prob-lem, I’m reminded of an observation that Stuart Hall(1996:412) makes about Gramsci: “His ‘theoretical’ writ-ing,” Hall notes, “was developed out of [an] organic en-gagement with his own society and times and was alwaysintended to serve, not an abstract academic purpose, butthe aim of ‘informing political practice.’ ” Perhaps Gram-sci’s theoretical ideas have traveled so far and wide, withsuch extraordinary influence and staying power, in partbecause they were developed with such a different pur-pose in mind. Ballinger’s essay provides an excellent ex-ample of this theoretically engaged political analysis,driven less by an abstract theoretical itch than by thecompelling need to understand the “Balkan paradox” atthe root of such horrific human aggression and sufferingsince the early 1990s. At this essay’s most convincingmoments, the theoretical problem of authentic hybriditybecomes a footnote to that political story. Given thiscomplexity, I felt a slight disappointment with the sug-gestion that the “Balkan paradox” could be resolved bynoting that discourse like that of the Istrians is both“hybrid” (i.e., leading people to live together) and “au-thentic” (i.e., inciting essentialist tendencies toward eth-nic cleansing).

The “travel warning” that follows is not against theorymoving between disparate sites but against theoreticalelaboration as a high-prestige, low-risk endeavour pro-ducing generalized ideas that accumulate value and pur-ported explanatory power in their own right. The alter-native is not theory that “can only thrive in its nativesoil” but theory driven by a political-analytical problemin a specific time and place and, especially in the caseof high-stakes problems like ethnic-national conflict inthe Balkans, by theorists who engage their subjects, whostay around to listen to their responses, and who agreeto gauge the validity of their analysis at least in part inrelation to its effects within the political process thatcontinues to unfold.

anastasia karakasidouDepartment of Anthropology, Wellesley College,Wellesley, MA 02481, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 18 ix 03

It is always a pleasure to read a new paper on nationalismand identity in the Balkans, and this one attempts todemarcate the borders of its own theoretical terrain,grounding analysis in a root metaphor of cultural “hy-bridity” transplanted from Rosaldo’s work on the Mex-ican-American border. Ballinger seeks to distinguish be-tween an “anthropology of borders” (or “borderanthropology”) and “borderland literature,” but her dis-cussion of the former is dismissive and the definition ofthe latter (to which she seems to subscribe) weak. Toassert that (the former) Yugoslavia has been neglected in

“hybridity and borderland discussions” is to define theboundaries of such discourse narrowly or to ignore theacademic and popular literature of the past decade.

Peter Sahlins’s Boundaries (1989), focused on thenearby Pyrenees, marked an early milestone in the studyof borders, boundaries, and identities. My own earlierwork on Greek Macedonia addressed frontier zones ofinteraction but was not premised upon notions of bor-ders; and while Danforth (1998) and I (1997) both ques-tioned national master narratives of purity, neither of usdealt explicitly with the theoretical concept of hybridity(perhaps because it was not there). A border is a boundaryof demarcation; conceptual or concrete, it is an expres-sion of dualist thought—a bi-order, if you will. Even inmathematics, the concept of border is always definedultimately by what lies on the other side. In this sense,notions of purity and hybridity often represent stereo-typic and oppositional idealizations. But the social re-alities of life on either side of any border or boundaryare not homogeneous, and practical expressions of suchconcepts are historically situated. In a masterful studyto which this paper does not refer, Liisa Malkki (1995)addressed similar issues of space/place essentialism andnationalism in the locally specific context of Burundirefugees in Tanzania, demonstrating how shared histor-ical experience can create different discourses of purityand hybridity.

The subjects of this paper have different shared his-torical experiences of cultural separateness within im-perial state economies. Under Venetian control until1797, the Istrian ruling class was heavily influenced bynotions of the cultural superiority of Italian civilizationand regarded the region’s rural population (largely Dal-matian Slav agriculturists) as little more than barbarians(later communists). Such sentiments persisted underAustro-Hungarian control, Ballinger argues, as a distinc-tive cosmopolitan identity developed amid the auton-omy of a “golden age” of prosperity, when Trieste wasAustria’s principal maritime outlet and Italian was thelingua franca (though local residents spoke a distinctTriestine dialect). But while she devotes considerablespace to the narrow arena of urban Trieste, there is littleconsideration of the population of Istria at large. More-over, although cosmopolitanism may have been a cul-tural and political reality, it is not synonymous withhybridity. Nor is cosmopolitanism necessarily an idealpolitical and cultural formation for community har-mony; it is built upon unequal social and economic con-ditions of material existence. Cosmopolitanism in Tri-este seems to have developed historically in response tonotions of Germanness promoted by other actors in theregional political and economic arena when it was underAustrian control. After World War I the region becamepart of Italy, and an exodus of “Germans” and other“diasporic” cosmopolitan populations followed. Thesepeoples’ historical experience with Istrian identity orTriestine cosmopolitanism would seem to warrant in-clusion in a study of cultural hybridity in the area. Per-haps Ballinger was unable to find a way back into thosehistories, but more recent histories are also omitted.




There is little discussion of the important developmentsand historical experiences of the interwar andpost–World War II periods, leaving readers to wonder howsocioeconomic class formations under socialism affectedhistorical experiences. At the same time, she goes on atlength about post-1989 political activism in the regionin a section that reads more like a journalistic accountthan an anthropological analysis. Readers learn little ofthe socioeconomic positions of the major actors.

To me, the primary significance of this paper is themanner in which it reveals the powerful model of Eu-ropeanness as a master narrative for shaping identitiesin the Balkans. In the Balkans today there are many sites(and sides) where one may observe similar discourses ofpast cosmopolitan diversity. Each of these locales offersa fascinating venue for exploring how debates about Eu-ropeanness are manipulated by historically positionedsocial actors. I agree that the commodification of notionsof hybridity in the global scene of cultural differencesought to be critiqued, but I would take the argumentfarther. We should examine more closely the socioeco-nomic hierarchies that underlie such cultural expres-sions. We ought to be cautioned by the observation thatthe Istrians themselves (in contrast to the Nuer) do notexplicitly employ the concept of “hybridity” in their dis-courses of identity, preferring a variety of other termswith quite different meanings. Indeed, if we are to borrowanalytical metaphors from science, we should be con-sistent in their application. Let us not forget that not allhybrids can reproduce and with those that reproduce theresults are unpredictable. If hybridity is to be reproducedacross time or space, we must look carefully at the actorsand actions that are responsible for its production. Oth-erwise, cultural hybridity may yet turn out to be a sterilenotion.

l idi ja nikocevi cEtnografski Muzej Istre, Trg Istaskog Razvoda 1,52000 Pazin, Croatia ([email protected]). 20 ix 03

It has been years since I read Ballinger’s first work onItalian and Istrian themes, and I have always admiredher lucidity and her ability to get to the heart of theproblems she studies. This latest piece shows her com-petence with regard to the Istrian exodus and the iden-tities associated with this phenomenon. Reading “Au-thentic Hybrids” sometimes forced me to (re)examinemy own general attitudes and thoughts about hybridity,ethnicity, borders, and politics in Istria. I find especiallyclever her way of viewing hybridity in Istria as a kind ofsuperior identity with the potential for exclusion of non-Istrians, both those living outside Istria (other Croats,etc.) and the newly formed groups in Istria that do notfit the concept of hybridity desired for istrianita. Also,she convincingly explains the seeming opposition be-tween nationalism (irredentism) and cosmopolitanism inthe ideologies of Trieste and, to a certain extent, Istria.

As an ethnologist living in Istria, I suggest that parallel

with the phenomena that Ballinger describes there areother cultural realities. Taking Croatian census materialfrom 1991 as a “vertical” example, we see a discrepancybetween Istrian/multicultural/hybrid/mosaic identityand self-identification as Italian or Croat. Although some18% insisted on local, “Istrian” identification in thatcensus, it seems that not many Italian Istrians wereamong them. On another, broader “horizontal” level, thepopulation of many parts of Istria identifies itself as pureCroatian or adopts some other, more complex local iden-tity. The same is true of the concept of borders in Istria,where borders among three countries (Italian, Slovene,and Croatian) are in fact in question. It seems that the“question of borders” (especially the one between West-ern Europe and the Balkans) has led Ballinger—thoughperhaps unconsciously—to the presentation of Istria as“an example from the margins of Europe” even thoughit is certainly geographically an integral part of Europe.

peter skaln ıkMilady Horakove 119, 16000 Prague 6, CzechRepublic ([email protected]). 16 ix 03

Ballinger’s article is positive in at least one sense. Itshows (especially to exclusivist nationalists or localists)that the identity problems of Istria are not unique. Inthat sense, it demonstrates the usefulness of comparativeanthropology, but only in part, for it draws in a numberof parallels from other parts of the world without at-tempting a systematic comparison between the Istriancase and any other.

Less persuasively, though interestingly, Ballingerpoints to the danger of cultural fundamentalism as itdevelops in regions such as Istria. It is indeed intriguingthe extent to which the stress of cultural authenticityand autochthony may be translated into a politicalagenda of autonomism, if not separatism, which in turnmay become a hotbed for not very democratic politics.If Europe is increasingly a Europe of regions, anthropol-ogists must be wary of becoming themselves instru-ments of the politicization of cultural issues. In the questfor understanding and explanation of very complexclaims, Ballinger may have underestimated the need fora functioning civil society in Istria and any other culturalregion of its kind. Following Gellner, it could be saidthat regionalism, like nationalism, is a populist phenom-enon and this makes it seem democratic without beingliberally democratic (cf. Lessnoff 2002:49).

Turning to the negatives, they are several. Perhaps inorder to sound a la mode, Ballinger describes her task asa critical analysis of the hybridity concept instead of ananalysis of emic conceptualizations of autochthony dis-course in Istria. The hybridity concept is imposed uponher data too early in the paper to allow her to reveal thecomplexity of both politics and culture in this excitingplace. Besides, the findings and viewpoints of Istrian,Italian, Slovenian, and Croatian anthropologists or othersocial scientists are not very well presented. The poli-ticians-cum-cultural-activists to whom she refers are of-




ten quite unrepresentative of the vox populi—in this casethe folk conceptualization of ethnicity or identity.

The discourse of ethnicity and race is also not persua-sively exposed. I think that this is partly because of Bal-linger’s predominant use of or attribution of credibilityto the Italian literature or literature written through anItalian prism. Labels such as “savage,” “barbarian,” “pu-rity,” and “impurity” are not evidence for (post)modernracism in Europe. They refer to past prejudices but ignorethe institutional racism in the relation between the Eu-ropean Union and candidate or future candidate coun-tries such as Slovenia and Croatia. The case of Croatiais especially sensitive. Whereas its main population issubject to prejudice from the Italian and Istrian view-point, its political elite was known until recently for itsdiscriminatory policy towards non-Croats.

On the whole, Ballinger’s article is a useful but perhapsunnecessarily complex text. It is a contribution to theunderstanding of a region in the centre (certainly not themargin!) of the expanding European Union that pointsto the liveliness of old grievances that may jeopardizeits intended unity. The explanatory power of Ballinger’sanalysis is in my opinion limited not only by the lengthand complexity of the article but also by her referring toa plethora of sources and secondary literature withoutmaking a sufficiently clear distinction between thesetwo categories and their relative weights.

glenda slugaDepartment of History, European Studies Centre,Room 855, Mungo McCallum Building, A7, Universityof Sydney, Sydney, N.S.W., Australia ([email protected]). 11 ix 03

Readers of this journal would probably agree that an-thropologists have had much to teach historians. Ballin-ger’s descriptions of the politics of identity and historyin the Istrian peninsula are no exception. She shows thatsince the Enlightenment a variety of discourses of hy-bridity have resonated with the ostensibly antitheticalideas of racial and national purity. Indeed, hybridity dis-courses rooted in the language of civilta and autochthonyhave nurtured “nesting Orientalisms” and with thempersistent and destructive forms of chauvinism. Ballin-ger reveals too that this language and its politically andsocially undesirable consequences are not indigenous tothe Balkans or the border. Rather, they rehearse the quan-dary of the cultural fundamentalism historically at theheart of conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism and ofEuropean union.

What is depressing about Ballinger’s conclusions istheir confirmation of the ineluctability of cultural es-sentialism and chauvinism in twenty-first century Eu-rope, but for historians they also add another telling pieceto the puzzle of discourses of identity and sociability inthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analysts ofthese discourses (including myself) are increasingly ar-guing that representations of Europe as the product ofcultural and racial “mixtures” were consistently accom-

panied by assumptions regarding the superiority of cer-tain “mixed” nations, their ability to assimilate inferiorcultures, and the relative capacity of different races/nations/cultures to “manage” heterogeneity. As TzvetanTodorov and George Stocking have pointed out in quitedistinctive ways (the former concentrating on France, thelatter on Britain), by the late nineteenth century “cul-ture” had begun to take over the sphere of determinismgoverned by “race.” Ballinger adds to such discussionsan example of the ways in which the depiction of Italiansas a brava gente grounded in the motifs of their civiltahave operated to establish a “cultural fundamentalism”at the expense of other European or designated “Balkan”cultures. Her analysis brings us up to date too on theextent to which cultural fundamentalism (what Todorovcalls “cultural racism”) has permeated the contemporarydiscourses of hybridity employed in the articulation ofvarious Istrian political and cultural identities, regardlessof any intended expansiveness or exclusivity.

Ballinger denies the possibility of any innocent viewof cosmopolitanism or hybridity, but there are still ques-tions to be asked about the political role of discoursesthat aim at social and cultural inclusiveness, even if onlyof a relative kind. Given the impossibility of articulatingany “untainted” notion of hybridity, is there more thanone way to assess the relevance of discourses of hybridityarticulated within the constraints of political contin-gency? Ballinger effectively shows us how, in practice,discourses of hybridity can promote chauvinism. Butwhat of those “Balkan” border residents who in the early1990s cried out in defence of “multiculturalism” as away of silencing the guns fired in the name of nationaland racial fundamentalism and against hybridity? Theircries might not, if tested, have been totally sincere oreven imaginatively inclusive. However, if, as Ballingerargues, “in moments of crisis and state reconfiguration,the concept of hybrid identity readily breaks down intoits constituent identities,” it is also precisely in mo-ments of crisis that the possibility of hybrid identity hasbeen of such (perhaps ultimately impotent) significanceto those who would challenge fundamentalism of a cul-tural kind.

Ballinger establishes the significance of “the Balkanborderlands” to prominent theoretical discussions of hy-bridity discourses. She shows both the situated forms ofknowledge of place and identity that have emerged overthe course of the past few centuries (coterminous withthe Enlightenment) regarding civilization and who ownsit and their resonance in the discourses of mixture per-tinent to other places. However, it is not certain that (asBallinger claims) “the Balkan borderlands” have beenmarginalized in the discussion of hybridity because ofthe naıve predilection of commentators for the myth ofa hybrid socialist Yugoslavia. If anything, the very no-menclature of the “Balkans” is suggestive of the otherspectre of hybridity discourse, namely, the motif of adestructive fragmentation. That motif has rendered theBalkans symbolically atypical and liminal. By contrast,Ballinger (in contrast to most commentators on the re-gion) has been able to open up this region to Europe (and




vice versa) both empirically and theoretically. As a resultof the exchange, the potential cultural status of both hasbeen substantially diminished.

Reply

pamela ballingerBrunswick, ME, U.S.A. 13 x 03

I appreciate these thoughtful responses to my article.The commentators offer several useful suggestions forpushing my analysis farther, thinking about how and towhat degree my findings might “travel,” and highlight-ing areas where I did not state my arguments clearly orforcefully enough.

One set of criticisms centers on the definition(s) ofhybridity that I—and my Istrian informants—employ.Dominguez and Karakasidou take up my observationthat Istrians themselves do not always use the explicitlanguage of hybridity but rather draw on other termsexpressing intermixture and ethnic cohabitation. Do-minguez moves from my comments about the frequentuse of terms other than those of hybridity to concludeerroneously that “Ballinger states that there is practi-cally no reported Istrian position arguing that there is‘cultural hybridity.’” Karakasidou further commentsthat “cosmopolitanism”—which I classify as one variantof a hybrid discourse in the Hapsburg period—is not syn-onymous with “hybridity.”

In addressing these concerns, I must first reiterate thatthe term “hybridity” was used in the past, particularlyby contemporary observers of Hapsburg Trieste and Istria(whether ethnologists or intellectuals/political activistslike Angelo Vivante). In present-day Istria, intellectualsand regionalist leaders alike more frequently use lan-guage that denotes hybridity—that of “nationally im-pure” identities (Suran 1994) and “ethnic fluidity” (De-beljuh 1993:21)—contrasted with a quite explicitlanguage of purity. In the broader Yugoslav context, forexample, the model of a “synthetic” Yugoslav identityadvocated by ethnographers like Cvijic drew upon a lan-guage of popular genetics (i.e., hybridity in everythingbut name) to call for “an amalgamation of the most fer-tile qualities of our three tribes” (quoted in Wachtel1998: 93). Even if the term “hybridity” is not privilegedin this context, does a language of intermixture opposedto purity not represent a kind of hybridity discourse?

In unpacking Istrians’ own conceptualizations of iden-tity, I should also note that there is no single, monolithicvision of Istrian identity (a problem that has led to dis-agreements among the regionalists). Instead, understand-ings fall along a continuum that ranges from an under-standing of multiethnic cohabitation between well-demarcated ethnic/linguistic groups to a more unifiedvision of Istrian identity as its own ethnie forged out ofthese different cultural influences. Loredana Bogliun De-beljuh, one of the early and key formulators of the re-

gionalist intellectual platform, shifts between these no-tions in her theoretical conceptualizations of istrianita.In doing this, she makes explicit reference to the diver-sity of “Istrian” self-definitions at the same time thatshe declares Istrianness a product of merging and syn-thesis (1995:99–100, my italics):

In defining Istrianity as a variant of ethnic identitythe following points must be kept in mind:

a) Istrianity is a multi-ethnic concept, whether de-fined as ethnically homogeneous or heterogeneous;

b) Istrianity is a regional identity, an expression ofthe territorial unity of the Italian and Slavic peoplesof Istria as ethnic communities not fully integratedin the context of their respective national states. . . .

The Istrian ethnic group is identified with a com-mon Istrian territory and shares a common history,but its cultural heritage is diverse. . . . The mix, de-rived from an interweaving of the cultural elementsof both the Italian and Slavic societies, is the prod-uct of intense ethnic and cultural interactions. Froma socio-cultural point of view it can be defined as adistinct Istrian ethnicity. . . . The existence in Istriaof positive and dynamic inter-ethnic relations led tothe creation of a specific cultural synthesis.

Similarly, the term convivenza—literally, “living to-gether”—refers both to separate ethnic groups that getalong with their neighbors and to models of Istrian iden-tity as embodied by mixed marriages whose offspringprove linguistically and culturally (as well as “literally”)hybrid (Suran 1994:14). The letter-writer who calls Istriaa “mosaic” envisions Istrianness as an identity made upof three separate cultural streams but simultaneouslyrepresenting something in and of itself, declaring thatIstrians and Julians merit their “own justly defined‘IDENTITY’ which was always denied to them,” an iden-tity he sees as comparable to that of the Swiss. SomeIstrian intellectuals, voicing their profound lack of be-longing to a single ethnic group or nation-state, speak ofIstria as the only country/homeland (l’unica patria) inwhich all the multiple strands of one’s individual iden-tity (as well as diverse groups’ identities) may find ex-pression (Milani-Kruljac 1992:7). I could offer many moresuch examples of Istrian notions of cultural hybridityand synthesis. Let me merely add that outside observersof the broader region often explicitly and uncriticallydraw on hybridity language, as when Morris declares ofTrieste, “The human hybrid is the norm in this city”(2001:112), or McCourt deems Italo Svevo “a not untyp-ical personification of the Triestine hybridity” (2000:86).

That said, I agree wholeheartedly that one must becareful not to conflate terms such as “hybridity,” “cos-mopolitanism,” and “multiculturalism.” Actors in thisregion draw upon local discourses such as cosmopoli-tanism that may invoke hybridity even when they donot prove synonymous or coterminous with it. If I riskconflating anything, it is processes of identity formationin Trieste with those in Istria, something that Kara-kasidou comments on and to which Nikocevic alludes.




I admit that my analysis needs more delineation of thesehistorical trajectories, given that coastal Istria becamejoined with Trieste under Hapsburg control only after1797. Yet Trieste’s undeniable gravitational pull for Istria(indeed, its unofficial status as Istria’s “capital” at leastuntil the end of World War II) also explains why it andthe identity discourses emanating from it have great rel-evance for Istria. Trieste remains a key reference pointfor Istrians, many of whom shop, work, attend univer-sity, or have relatives living there.

While being careful to sort out the various terms (andtheir specific genealogies) used to describe identity inTrieste and Istria, I nonetheless maintain that theseterms form part of a larger discursive configuration op-erative in both the region and a certain scholarly tradi-tion. In places like the Julian March, this discourse pro-vides a powerful political and theoretical vocabulary fortalking about and managing difference. Here, Hale’s in-troduction of the notion of “neoliberal multicultural-ism” proves fruitful, offering one way to situate this Is-trian example more firmly in a comparative analysis (justas Sluga adds to the discussion a further comparativehistorical dimension). This broader nexus of ideas aboutdifference has purchase in today’s world, a fact that Is-trian regionalists prove quite savvy about in their appealsto diverse audiences (including supporters in Europeaninstitutions). It is not coincidental that sociologists likeDebeljuh and Suran familiar with wider scholarly de-bates have been significant intellectual formulators ofan Istrian identity (particularly in the initial phases ofthe regionalist project).

In illustrating my arguments with examples from Is-trian intellectuals, my article struck readers like CapoZmegac and Skalnık as focusing on elite discourse alone.Capo Zmegac rightly notes that my article focuses lesson hybridity than on hybrid identity discourses in Istria.I take as axiomatic that all cultures are hybrid products—that purity must always remain a “mythical” con-struct—and therefore agree with the comment by Ro-saldo that Hale usefully introduces into the discussion.Rosaldo deems hybridity “an ongoing condition of allhuman cultures, which contain no zones of purity be-cause they undergo continuous processes of transcul-turation.” If one accepts this as the case, hybridity be-comes interesting from a theoretical point of view whenmade explicit by social actors. Not surprisingly, becausehybridity often appears more visible or politicallycharged in a border area, these areas tend to be ones inwhich hybrid discourse and concomitant purity talk be-come more prominent as well.

The means by which the processes of hybridization orcreolization become the object of explicit discourse neednot always reflect a top-down identity politics, thoughin my mind it proves hard to separate completely whatCapo Zmegac calls the “interactive pole of identity for-mation (identity making ‘in practice’)” from identity pol-itics altogether, especially in a place like Istria. The mul-tiple state-building projects that I mention (but do nothave space to address fully) underscore the degree towhich the ethnic subjectivities of “ordinary people” have

been constituted (and reconstituted over time) throughthe shifting of political and symbolic borders. Part of myaim in noting long-standing identity constructs is to re-veal how those discourses are bound up with identity inpractice in contemporary Istria and the broader JulianMarch.

The social and cultural contexts in which Istriansmake identity cannot be isolated from the political realm(both its formal and informal aspects) in which such in-teractions take place. In the larger study (Ballinger 2003)from which this research is drawn, I pay attention toboth the broad political processes and the microphysicsof power by which identities of ethnic Istrian Italians(divided after the cold war by political borders and dis-placement) have been shaped and transformed in the cen-turies between the time of the Hapsburgs and the post-Yugoslav era. I refer Karakasidou to this largerdiscussion, apologizing here for the space limitationsthat kept me from talking about changes in identity andidentity discourse during the interwar and post–WorldWar II period. In the article I do attempt to suggest someof the ways in which Istrianness operates as lived prac-tice, showing that the potential exclusions implied bythe Istrian concept at times translate into exclusions inreal-life interactions. Yet, to answer Capo Zmegac’squestion as to whether convivenza proves part of ev-eryday practice in Istria, I would argue that in manymoments it does.

Convivenza or tolerant cohabitation does generally ex-ist between Istria’s autochthonous populations (thoughnot in the recent past, as in the World War II era) and,in many cases, between “locals” and “newcomers.” Inthis sense, as I acknowledge in the article, the Istrianidentity promoted by the regionalists in the 1990s con-stituted an important response to what Skalnık calls theCroatian political elite’s “discriminatory policy towardsnon-Croats.” Given this, Sluga poses a challenging ques-tion, “Is there more than one way to assess the relevanceof discourses of hybridity articulated within the con-straints of political contingency?”—a question echoed byHale’s query, “Is there no scenario in which this sub-merged racial imagery could be relatively benign ratherthan highly toxic?” Sluga reminds us that Istrian re-gionalism represented a courageous effort to respond tothe nationalists who tore Yugoslavia apart by embracingthe very thing that the nationalists sought to destroy: amulticultural society. In that moment of crisis, Slugapoints out, hybridity discourse came to the fore as ameans to challenge a brand of cultural fundamentalismfar more virulent in practice than anything of the sortfound in Istria.

Indeed, when I first arrived in Istria in the early 1990s,I vigorously defended Istrian regionalism as Croatia’s“best hope” for a democratic alternative after witnessingthe repeated efforts of the Tudjman regime to margin-alize Istria and its political majority. With Tudjman andhis party removed from power, however, the contradic-tions in the Istrian identity became ever more apparent,suggesting that while a valuable alternative to Tudjman’sbrand of Croatian nationalism, Istrianness did not nec-




essarily represent a long-term “solution” or permanentbase upon which to rebuild Croatian civil society. Inproposing an extension of the regionalist approach toCroatia, the Istrian regionalists beg the question of howto deal with the demographic changes brought about bythe wars of the 1990s. Where and how do the large groupsof nonautochthonous peoples resettled after those con-flicts fit into regions conceived as historical entities de-fined in terms of “authentic” (even if “authenticallymixed”) populations? As I state in the article, the factthat a hybrid identity remains grounded in territory (inthis case, in a regional space) sets firm limits on theinclusiveness of this concept. This does not mean thatmore processual notions of hybridity might not offernovel ways of thinking about identity and practicing pol-itics, although the inevitable referencing of purity im-plied by hybridism makes that challenge a difficult one.

In deflating some of the regionalists’ claims about thepotential of their multiethnic model, I hope by extensionto have made a persuasive case for tempering some ofthe more self-congratulatory literature on hybridity com-ing out of what I call the “borderland anthropology” tra-dition. The celebratory ways in which the regionalists(leaders and everyday supporters) laud the Istrian exper-iment in intermixture as progressive parallels the claimsof some of the most romanticizing theorists of hybridityin cultural studies and anthropology, even as the intel-lectual discourse of istrianita at times intersects withthese scholarly debates. In critiquing the body of “bor-derland anthropology” work (whose proponents andboundaries Dominguez usefully outlines in her com-ment), I am by no means subscribing to it as Karakasidoupuzzlingly contends.

If my treatment of the alternative “anthropology ofborders” literature appears dismissive, as Karakasidousees it, this was inadvertent and unfortunate. The workof Sahlins, Donnan and Wilson, and others examiningborders (as well as Malkki’s Purity and Exile) explicitlyinforms my larger study and demonstrates many of thelimits of the “borderland anthropology” literature. Fromthe other direction, I do not mean to minimize the richand ever-growing body of work by Croatian and otheranthropologists examining identity in Istria and otherborder areas in the former Yugoslavia—work to whichmy own research remains indebted. Yet almost none ofthis literature (as far as I know) directly engages the “bor-derlands” work that looks more toward cultural studies(and that takes as its starting point certain assumptionsdrawn from the experience of the U.S.-Mexico border)than toward the “anthropology of borderlands” and Eu-ropean ethnology. Though Karakasidou worries that Imay define the boundaries of this “borderland anthro-pology” too narrowly, I stand by my contention thatthere is still too little dialogue between these diversetraditions of studying identity formation in borderlands.

As for Istria’s status on the “borders of Europe,” letme address Nikocevic’s comment that Istria “is certainlygeographically an integral part of Europe.” I do not dis-pute this statement of Istria’s cartographic or historicalrealities. Istria has, however, been defined over time by

its position as a periphery of imperial and state centers.This sense of peripherality informs the ways in whichIstria (as positioned by Istrian identity discourse, bothfrom inside and from outside of Istria) symbolically sitsat the margins of Europe, in the same way that Herzfeld(1987) writes of Greek identity’s resting on a problematicrelationship to “Europeanness.” Several of the readerscomment on the discussion of Europeanism and Ori-entalism (or Balkanism) at work in Istrian identity pol-itics, offering other comparative examples (as demon-strated by Capo Zmegac’s work in another Croatianborderland) and noting the relevance of this topic forunderstanding the politics of the EU.

Finally, the Istrian case has not featured prominentlyin mainstream Europeanist anthropology/ethnology de-bates and in this sense, too, has remained somewhat atthe margins of “Europe.” As the comments indicate, thissituation is beginning to change. I hope that my articleand the ensuing discussion will help bring Istria—whatSkalnık justly calls “this exciting place”—to the atten-tion of anthropologists working outside of the region.

References Cited

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