Loyal Unto Death

Keith Brown

Description

Evolution of an early 20th-century terrorist organization

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The underground Macedonian Revolutionary Organization recruited and mobilized over 20,000 supporters to take up arms against the Ottoman Empire between 1893 and 1903. Challenging conventional wisdom about the role of ethnic and national identity in Balkan history, Keith Brown focuses on social and cultural mechanisms of loyalty to describe the circuits of trust and terror—webs of secret communications and bonds of solidarity—that linked migrant workers, remote villagers, and their leaders in common cause. Loyalties were covertly created and maintained through acts of oath-taking, record-keeping, arms-trading, and in the use and management of deadly violence.

Introduction: The Archival Imagination at Work
1. Terminal Loyalties and Unruly Archives: On Thinking Past the Nation
2. The Horizons of the "Peasant": Circuits of Labor and Insurgency
3. The Oath and the Curse: Subversions of Christianity
4. The Archive and the Account Book: Inscriptions of Terror
5. The četa and the jatak: Inversions of Tradition, Conversions of Capital
6. Guns for Sale: Feud, Trade, and Solidarity in the Arming of MRO
Conclusion: The Archival Imagination and the Teleo-logic of Nation
Appendix 1. Documents of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization
Appendix 2. Biographies from the Ilinden Dossier

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Macedonia
• History of the Middle East
• Secret society
• Yugoslavia
• Ottoman Empire
• Middle East
• History of Europe
• Anthropology
• Eastern
• Yougoslavie
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 12 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253008473
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

LOYAL UNTO DEATH
NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EUROPE
Matti Bunzl and Michael Herzfeld, editors
Founding Editors
Daphne Berdahl
Matti Bunzl
Michael Herzfeld
LOYAL UNTO DEATH
Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia

KEITH BROWN
Indiana University Press
BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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2013 by Keith S. Brown
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Brown, Keith, [date]
Loyal unto death : trust and terror in revolutionary Macedonia / Keith Brown.
pages cm. - (New anthropologies of Europe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00835-0 (cloth : alkaline paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00840-4 (paperback : alkaline paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00847-3 (ebook) 1. Macedonia - History - 1878-1912. 2. Macedonia - History - Autonomy and independence movements 3. Vnatre na makedonska revolucionerna organizacija - History. 4. Revolutionaries - Macedonia - History. 5. Macedonia - Politics and government - 19th century. 6. Macedonia - Politics and government - 20th century. 7. Nationalism - Macedonia - History. 8. Trust - Political aspects - Macedonia - History. 9. Political violence - Macedonia - History. 10. Political culture - Macedonia - History. I. Title.
DR 2215.B76 2013
949.5 6072 - dc23
2012047306
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
For Peter Loizos 1937 - 2012
History can only make her pictures and rebuild the past out of the things she can save from a shipwreck. . . . The memory of the world is not a bright, shining crystal, but a heap of broken fragments, a few fine flashes of light that break through the darkness. And so, history is full of tales half-told, and of tunes that break off in the middle; she gives us snatches from the lives of men, a peep at some corner of a battlefield, just enough to make us long for a fuller vision.
- HERBERT BUTTERFIELD , The Historical Novel
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Pronunciation
Note on Sources
Chronology of Key Orienting Dates
INTRODUCTION : The Archival Imagination at Work
1. Terminal Loyalties and Unruly Archives: On Thinking Past the Nation
2. The Horizons of the Peasant : Circuits of Labor and Insurgency
3. The Oath and the Curse: Subversions of Christianity
4. The Archive and the Account Book: Inscriptions of Terror
5. The eta and the Jatak: Inversions of Tradition, Conversions of Capital
6. Guns for Sale: Feud, Trade, and Solidarity in the Arming of the MRO
CONCLUSION : The Archival Imagination and the Teleo-Logic of Nation
APPENDIX 1 .Documents of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization
APPENDIX 2 . Biographies from the Ilinden Dossier
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is based on the Evans-Pritchard lectures I delivered at All Souls College, Oxford, in fall 2004, with the title The Structure of Loyalty in Revolutionary Macedonia. I owe that opportunity, at least in part, to the two mentors who wrote my letters of recommendation: the late Peter Loizos, to whom this book is dedicated, and Jane Cowan. I am also indebted to the fellows, faculty, and students who attended and provided generous and constructive feedback. In particular, I would like to thank the then-Warden Professor John Davis, Professor Wendy James, Douglas Johnston, Noel Malcolm, and Dimitar Bechev for their engagement and encouragement.
Commitments to other research priorities since 2004 have slowed the project but also enriched it. As a visiting fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute during 2005 - 2006, my primary focus was on patterns of labor migration from Ottoman Macedonia to the United States. Director Richard Brown and Associate Director Fran oise Dussart nonetheless created space and impetus for reflection that allowed me to realize the central importance of long-distance circuits of travel in Macedonia s modern history. At the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, my involvement in research projects on U.S. democracy promotion and counterinsurgency has also generated new perspectives on the importance of flows of resources and ideas. Amid the more recent turmoil of mission restructuring and academic receivership at the institute, Director Michael Kennedy and Interim Director Carolyn Dean, in very different styles, nevertheless provided effective encouragement and support to see the project through. And the staffs at all three institutions made things run more smoothly, especially Mary Yoe at All Souls, Jo-Ann Waide at UCHI, and Deborah Healey at the Watson Institute.
I have benefited from enthusiastic and critical responses to the project from undergraduates and graduate students at both the University of Connecticut and at Brown, and from colleagues at a number of conferences and workshops. I would like to thank the students in Anthropology and the Archive at the University of Connecticut in Spring 2006, and in Political Anthropology: Peasants, Tribes, Terrorists and Other Enemies of the State at Brown University in fall 2011 - in particular Matt Vining, Saskia Brechenmacher, Reuben Henriques, Julia Potter, Juan Ruiz, and Derek Sheridan - for their suggestions. Pamela Ballinger, Kristen Ghodsee, Milica Baki -Hayden, Melissa Bokovoy, Maria Bucur, Emira Ibrahimpa i , and Mary Neuburger provided congenial company and valuable feedback on a composite version of chapters 3 and 4 presented at Spiritualities and Secularisms in Southeastern Europe: An Interdisciplinary Workshop at Bowdoin College in October 2009, and Nida Gelazis, Dana Ponte, John Lampe, and Dragan Ristovski posed important questions in response to a presentation drawn from chapter 6 at East European Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., in February 2012.
As ever, the circles of obligation extend too widely to thank individually all those colleagues who provided insight since I began working with the Ilinden archives in Skopje in the early 1990s. James Fernandez was among the first to urge me to spend more time in the world they conjured; in a slightly different vein, Gale Stokes advocated for history over metahistory. Victor Friedman s unflagging and generous support extended all the way from shrewd graduate school advice to reading and commenting on this book s page proofs. Jovan Donev, To e epreganov, and Irena Stefoska continue to provide scholarly hospitality in Skopje, and I am grateful to Zoran Todorovski for making access to the national archives so straightforward. I have benefited from wide-ranging discussions with and/or specific reading or writing recommendations from Peter Andreas, Omer Bartov, Ulf Brunnbauer, John Comaroff, Jane Cowan, Loring Danforth, Victor Friedman, Dragi Gjorgiev, Chip Gagnon, Drew Gilbert, Vasilis Gounaris, Hannes Grandits, Michael Herzfeld, Michael Kennedy, Kostis Kornetis, Martha Lampland, Dimitris Livanios, Catherine Lutz, Mil o Man evski, Tchavdar Marinov, Vladimir Mil in, Marija Pandevska, Biljana Risteska, Marshall Sahlins, Philip Shashko, Ann Laura Stoler, Maria Todorova, arko Trajanovski, Anastas Vangeli, and Susan Woodward.
Anusha Venkataraman provided invaluable research support on the text; David Manning created the maps. I am especially grateful to Svetlin Rusev for granting permission to reproduce his 1966 painting, and to Viliana Borisova and Tchavdar Marinov for making that possible. I was not able here to incorporate the data and insights of two new archivally-based books on the armed struggle in early twentieth-century Macedonia; Dimitris Lithoxou s The Greek Anti-Macedonian Struggle (Salient Publishing, 2012), and Ipek Yosmaoglu s Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1908 (Cornell University Press, 2013).
I am grateful to the series editors Michael Herzfeld and Matti Bunzl for their support for the book, to the two external readers for their smart suggestions, to Nancy Lightfoot and Drew Bryan for meticulous copy editing, and especially to Indiana University Press editor Rebecca Tolen for her close reading, patience, and advocacy.
My greatest debt is to Shelley Stephenson, who has been there from the beginning, and has listened to or read every word here as well as all those that broke off along the way. When we are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book, and remind me I owe you, Chloe, and Leo a summer. At least.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND PRONUNCIATION
The primary language of research for this book was Macedonian, which is a Slavic language codified in 1944. Macedonian is normally written in the Macedonian Cyrillic script. The main text uses the following system of transliteration, except when citing from sources that used their own.
Standard literary Macedonian is based on dialects spoken around Veles, Prilep, and Bitola. Standard Macedonian is spoken throughout the modern Republic of Macedonia, although different regions have their own specific dialects (one of the most identifiable being the Strumica dialect). The Ilinden pension biographies were largely written in standard Macedonian in the Cyrillic script, though the