Jonathan Schmitt

Whose is the House of Greatest Disorder? Civilization and Savagery on the Early 20th Century Eastern European and North American Frontier

Abstract:
While a connection between Ottoman and North American nomadic/“tribal” populations may at first seem merely tenuous, closer investigation bears out striking similarities.  That is not to say, however, that nomadic “tribes” in Anatolia, the Balkans or the Middle East evinced specific cultural similarities to the Indian populations in North America (in point of fact, North American Indian “tribes” very often exhibited scant cultural similarities to one another); but rather that the Ottoman and American states in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries relied on, and enacted policy within, markedly consonant discursive parameters that established a social continuum between the poles of “savagery” and “civilization.” In this paper, I will attempt to provide a broad overview of the discourses that operated in both the settlement of the North American West and the resettlement of populations in the Western Balkans in the early 20th Century.

In both instances, notions of “competency” vis-à-vis participation in a “modern” civilized society were mobilized as justification for the radical and—very often—destructive demographic reorganizations of “indigenous” or “tribal” peoples. In the case of North America, the establishment of the reservation system (begun in earnest with the Dawes Act of 1877) and its attendant policy of creating competent “Indian” citizens through the introduction of private ownership of formerly communal lands was the preferred civilizing tactic; in the Ottoman state, the emergence of centripetal Balkan “nationalisms,” the social chaos resultant to the Treaty of Berlin, and the persistent belligerence of Russia, Austro-Hungary, et. al., lead Istanbul to conceptualize it’s more recalcitrant citizens in “hinterlands” like the mountain regions of Albania as unfit (or at least unprepared) for the participation in the a burgeoning Ottoman “modernity.”  In both instances, when the strategy of outright violence failed to control “tribal” peoples, it was supplanted by a strain of “enlightened” paternalism that purported to bring the savage element in either state into the fold of modern society through education and territorial reconstruction.

Biographical Note:
Jon Schmitt, a doctoral researcher at Georgia State University, Atlanta, has been analyzing both Vietnamese “guest workers” in the DDR during the 1980s as well as a comparison of the rhetoric mobilized by ideologues/apologists for Anglo-Saxon genocide in North America and that of many of the same people “intervening” in the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars in search of a lasting diplomatic solution. His current work on the latter project, which is a a fusion of critical engagement with the discourse of American empire and its intersection with European transgressions during the first half of the 20th century, will appear in a forthcoming edited volume (University of Utah Press, 2012) by CAS Senior Researcher Isa Blumi and a fellow colleague.