Niko Županić and the Construction of the Yugoslav Ethnogenesis

The paper considers the role of Niko Županić in the processes of translation of the anthropological and archaeological knowledges into the language of the political activism during the First World War and immediately after. As recorded by Sima Trojanović, Županić was employed at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade in May 1914, as "anthropological clerk" with the duty to "first of all measure the Serbian people, and only after that the foreigners on the Balkan Peninsula". He was officially stationed here up to 1922, although he spent the war years out of the country, involved in political activism, along with other Serbian and Yugoslav intellectuals, with the aim of creating the state of the Yugoslavs. At the outbreak of the First World War, Županić spent the first three months as a volunteer in Niš, and was then sent to Rome and London, where he took part in the activities of the Yugoslav Board. During 1916 the Serbian Government sent him to the United States, to secure the support of the American Slovenes for the Yugoslav idea. From 1915 till the end of the war, he wrote studies on the South Slavic past and political announcements, drew the borders of the desired territories, held speeches on the unity of the Serbs, Slovenes, and Croats. His book Ethnogenesis of the Yugoslavs (1920), written during the war and at first aimed at the English-speaking audience, richly illustrates the ways in which all these activities intertwined. Here Županić stresses the "creative potency of the blood and racial source" of brachycefaly of the Illyrian natives observed in the case of the Yugoslavs. The critical analysis and contextualization of this volume makes possible the new insights into the concepts of identity in the history of the Serbian anthropology and archaeology. This study did not receive much attention in the archaeological circles, but its ideas have subsequently, selectively and indirectly become the part of the history of the Serbian archaeology