Between the Archives and the Field

OPENING REMARKS

Please allow me to greet our Austrian colleagues, who are our guests today, in their own language.

We have gathered here in order to exchange opinions and learn of the research results that we have arrived to separately, following the theme of "historical anthropology." From our previous intellectual exchanges I know that we all understand that our aim will be best achieved through a competent discussion. However, we use slightly differring terms to denote such scholarly exchanges. While it is our habit to use the word colloquium, our guests use the English word that has already become a terminus technicus in the international science, Workshop. Thus we have agreed on the way of work for today and tomorrow. We shall first hear Professor Mitterauer, who will lay the basis for our discussion. We shall then work in three panels, in such a way that first the participants will outline the content of their previously prepared papers, and the scholarly discussion will follow. In the last, fourth panel, scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, we shall have a concluding discussion, and we expect the final word from our guests. The languages of this conference are English, German, and Serbian.

History of the origins of our meeting is neither long nor complex. We have easily come to an agreement in principle. It was at the reception following this year’s meeting at Bansko (Bulgaria), where we have spent three days participating in the international symposium on Ancestors and Precursors in the Balkans. It is due to our Austrian colleagues that we have met so quickly, and only seven months after our first agreement gathered here today in such a nice number: they have readily accepted our invitation to come to Belgrade, and correctly estimated that a scholarly discussion could be held during the first days of this year’s Fall.

When it comes to the Introduction to our meeting, I think that it is enough to say that we started from different points, from particular assumptions, and still we have covered the same thematic area in terms of research. Our guests found their assumptions in one of the main tendencies of the latest historiography, historical anthropology, in the development of which they lively and successfully participate. The Belgrade circle, gathered around the General Contemporary History at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, arrived to the same thematic area, one could say, spontaneously. Actually, what was giving a direction was a conviction of the extraordinary richness of history that, being human history, obviously encompasses social reality in all of its diversity, as well as what is personally human, which is as diversified and intensive. This is the approach best depicted by the expression a "complete history". It should not be mistaken for or equated with the term "total history", which insufficiently deals with the multiple contents of the concrete living of man as such in the practice of its research. An interest in processes, appearances and structures, for the rhythms of historical time, also for the events, all of this on the great areas of history as society, politics, economics, and culture, could be amply supplemented only if one is aware that humans are active agents, and that they are the ones who think, note, remember, feel, bear, suffer..., have families, opinions, habits, traditions...., or that they by themselves represent and exquisite richness of the contents of a historical life. That is to say, humans cannot be omitted from history, since there is no history without humans, and who anthropologically supplement in an important way the images of history.