In Memory of Karl Kaser (1954-2022)
Part one of an essay I was honoured to contribute to a volume in my late PhD supervisor's memory
This is a good week for the Erich Sonntag Postcard Collection—not only did I receive my book (with that extra-awesome jacket design) but I also received my copy of a collective volume in memory of my late Ph.D. supervisor, Karl Kaser (1954-2022).
Karl died a few days before Easter 2022, and his long-time partner, my friend Michaela Wolf, then marshalled many of his companions and, within what appears record-time, put together an anthology of 300+ pages containing essays from many of Karl Kaser’s former students, colleagues, and collaborators. Entitled, Visionen Historischer Anthropologie im südöstlichen Europa (roughly Visions of Historical Anthropology in Southeastern Europe, LIT, 2024), the resulting volume is an enduring testament to Karl’s scholarship and legacy.
In some ways, today’s posting is a follow-up on the three-part series I did about Dubrovnik:
And now I’ll present you with my short essay (pp. 153-61 in the above vol., and if you prefer a PDF version, please email me) from the above volume—which also features a couple of vintage postcards from the Erich Sonntag Postcard Collection.
Karl Kaser and Historical (Urban) Anthropology in Dalmatia
Leaving there and proceeding for some hours toward the south, one reaches the Adriatic. Lined with ancient towns, monuments old and new, streets paved with marble and asphalt, sprawling resorts and suburbs where once were solitary plum trees, peaceful vineyards, and small hamlets. Many of these beauties are familiar to any armchair traveller, who has read up on that old dream of Northerners, the Great Sea. But there is a special quality, if not familiar ring, to the historian and anthropologist – ethnographer – who arrived here one day in an era when many things appeared to have been so much more different from the present.
Strolling through the “Pearl of the Adriatic” on many days around the turn of the millennium, one experiences many sights and sounds, open-air food stalls and outdoor dining places offering distinctly local specialities. It was there – or here? – that one realises: the past is firmly in the past, and, strolling again through these very same, narrow streets, one must ask: are these “still” the same streets, or is man fooled – fooling himself – by returning ever so often, inevitably longing, perhaps hoping, to return to what certainly appears in retrospect to have been an easier, less complicated time and place? It may very well be a city of his dreams, a figment of imagination, which may have also contained the scholar as a young man who merely arrived at “the Pearl” at a more advanced age. He arrives there in his old age. In the square, there is still the café where the old men sit, endlessly sip their coffee, and watch the young pass by. Now, he sits next to them, immersed with recollections, or memories.
Cities and Methods
There are two ways of describing, relating the work of the scholar: you could emphasise the role of the outside observer, of a travelling ethnographer who is both the outgrowth and representative of a distinct “West European” way of looking at the world. Scientifically-methodically, empirically, and always keen on making comparisons between his “own” European (sub)culture and that of the observed. By contrast, the proverbial “Other”, his “research subjects”, might participate in this “dynamic” that is – still – a kind of “game which both the researcher and representatives of the people of the other culture play” (Kaser 2002a: 73; my modification, emphasis). Mindful of one’s own Otherness, it is, of course, legitimate and appropriate to emphasise the crucial gap between “doing research” and “producing an account”, something academics in the Humanities and Social Sciences, pressed into cartoon-ish representations of “a career” and frequently torn between “dissemination” efforts and “real scholarship”, often struggle to close. Apart from one’s own humanity, recognition that one’s research “objects” are subjects who have their own agency and history, the immersion into a research project is often accompanied, if not pre-conditioned, on certain, varying levels of abstraction of the Other. Of course, doing so cuts both ways, by which is meant that to the scholar, his subject is the Other – and vice versa; overwhelmingly, it is the former’s view that makes it into essays, monographs, and, eventually, reinforces existing or makes new stereotypes.
Cities and Boots
Once the scholar leaves the proverbial Ivory Tower (comfort zone) and ventures into a field of research beyond what is traditionally associated with “Western Civilisation”, many concrete problems soon manifest themselves, ranging from the comparative lack of source materials about past societies to very different paradigmatic ideas that dominate the present. Doing research in what Maria Todorova and many others consider a distinct European (sub)culture, one often walks for days among trees and among stones. There are many signs that upon a first, quick glance do not speak to the tourist: reeds indicate a vein of water; the hibiscus flower announces the end of winter. The rest remains rather silent and interchangeable, yet it is possible to eventually render the various evidentiary clues into recognisable patterns and, at a later point in time, into the conventional – expected – scholarly output. In the Balkans, though, “history is out on the streets”, with “the past” being “not only represented in documents but in the present”, too (ibid.: 78).
Ill. 1: A View of Dubrovnik after the Second World War
Picture Credit: Erich Sonntag Postcard Collection, Stephan Sander-Faes
At first, the journey leads out of “the city”, with the senses seeing and perceiving things, not least oneself, that mean other things: social norms, honour (if it still exists in the present), and, not least, protocols, culinary and funereal: a coffin, the procedures, dress, and experiences re-produced by outside scholars on printed pages. Is it all a figment of imagination if, in an auspicious moment, one learns that “the original ceremony had already taken place at four o’clock in the morning” and that the hosts
did not want to wake us up this early in the morning and decided to produce a copy of the original version of the ceremony which they did perfectly judging from my colleagues’ innocent and enthusiastic comments. My question is this: how often are we as historians deceived by our sources and never become aware of it? (Ibid.: 85, emphasis in the original)
Typically, the historian’s gaze scans the scenery in the city streets as if they were written pages: the city tells you virtually everything there is to see, what you shall think and thus what to write about it. In a way, this leads the scholar into a proverbial, epistemological cul-de-sac as the outsider becomes absorbed by that which he observes, with the latter in turn causing the former to reproduce the discourse. Frequently, the observer might leave, think, write believing to have gathered valuable insights when, in actuality, he rarely, if ever, succeeded beyond the mere recording – re-ordering – of names and places with which the Other defines himself. Irrespective of the Other’s true self, past and present, and beneath its imposing sights and signs, frequently the scholar leaves without having discovered much, if anything genuine.
End of Part 1 | Post-Script
I’ll post the rest of the essay tomorrow for the posting is quite long already.
I shall conclude, however, with another quote—it’s from my new book—to pay tribute to Karl Kaser once more:
Godspeed, my friend, and may you rest in peace.
I still love that postcard photo-looking down on the town
Wonderful tribute thank you for sharing