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University of Massachuses - Amherst

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Anthropology Department Faculty PublicationSeries

Anthropology

1970

Milenko S. Filipovic, 1902-1969Joel HalpernUniversity of Massachuses, Amherst, jmhalpern@anthro.umass.edu

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Halpern, Joel, "Milenko S. Filipovic, 1902-1969" (1970).Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series. Paper 42.hp://scholarworks.umass.edu/anthro_faculty_pubs/42

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SS8 American Anthropologist [72, 19701

MILENKO S. FILIPOVIC1902-1969MILENKO S. FILIPOVIC was born No-vember 8, 1902, the eldest son of arailroad employee, in the town of BosanskiBrod, on the Sava River, the boundary between Bosnia and Slavonia. His elementaryand high school education were completedin Visoko and Tuzla, and his universitystudies were pursued from 1921 at Belgradeunder the direction of Jovan Cvijic, thefounder of the school of human geographythat has had such impact on the orientationof Balkan folk ethnography, and of TihomirDjordjevic and Jovan Erdeljanovi6. Professor Filipovic earned his bachelor's degree in1925, taught high school in Sarajevo and inVe1es (Macedonia), and was awarded thedoctorate at Belgrade in 1928, with a thesison the ethnic origins of the population nearVisoko. He taught as a docent on the Belgrade faculty from 1928 to 1930, movingthen to the post of associate professor atSkopje. Regarded as an undesirable by theoccupation regime after the Axis invasion,he was pensioned in 1941; he found another

post on the Belgrade faculty but was againpensioned off in 1943. In 1945 he assumedthe position of curator at the EthnographicMuseum in Belgrade, leaving it in 1950 forthe status of research fellow in the Ethno-graphic Institute of the Serbian Academy ofSciences until 1955. At that time he becameprofessor of human geography and ethnology at the University of Sarajevo, where heremained until his retirement (after a severeheart attack) in 1962. In 1964, after longefforts, he succeeded in finding a home inBelgrade, where library facilities were better, and where he continued to occupy himself with field work, research, and writing.His death came suddenly on April 22, 1969,in a period of great scholarly productivityand during the completion of his magnumopus on the ethnology of Serbia.FilipoviC's contributions to Balkan ethnology were unusual in their number andimportance. His bibliography contains about380 items, including a number of papers inlanguages other than Serbo-Croatian. (Abibliography, 1924-1959, was published in1960 in Zbornik matice srpske za drustvenenauke 28: 159-170; it contains 280 items,not including many reviews and minor notices. )FilipoviC's work is of particular interestto colleagues outside Yugoslavia because histheoretical and methodological orientationswere considerably more modem than thoseof many other European students of European peasant society. To be sure, his interests would be regarded here as folkloristicand ethnographic, heavy on detail and withlittle theorizing; but these differences fromAmerican, English, or French fashion mustbe viewed in perspective. His works are devoid of the evolutionistic reconstructionpopular in Europe until at least the firstWorld War and reintroduced into severalareas with the advent of Marxist influenceand a revival of Morgan. F i l i p o v i C ' ~ ethnographies are unusual in their detail andscholarly documentation, and, even if notexplicitly theoretical to the modem Westerntaste, they provide crucial data for the in-

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Obituaries 559vestigation of most modern questions. Alarge number of the ethnographic descriptions making up the remarkable corpus presented in the volumes of Srpski etnografskizbornik, Zbornik za narodni zivot i obicajejuznih Slavena, and publications of numerous museums and local and national scientific societies place almost sole emphasis onpopulation movements, material culture, andthe exotica of folkloristic "customs." Relatively little emphasis is placed on social organization, but FilipoviC's works are outstanding in this respect. The experience behind them was wide, as well as intensive; hehad done more than forty years of fieldworkon separate projects such as the following:Bosnia and Hercegovina 1925-1941, 1950-1957, 1962-1969; Montenegro 1933; Kosovo-Metohija 1933, 1940, 1947, 1949; Serbia 1950-1951, 1954, 1956; the Vojvodina1947-1950; Macedonia 1929-1934; Slovenia 1966-1967, and others, and his research included a long interest in Serbs inthe United States.Professor FilipoviC's death, although asudden one, was not unexpected. He hadhad continuing difficulties since his heartattack of 1962, but his tempo of workabated only when he was too sick to write,speak, or move. He went about his researchwith a grim determination to document thefolk life of the Balkans in accordance withthe highest standards of scholarship. Amonghis friends, he was sometimes referred to as"stari vuk," the old wolf. His life and hisrelations with the world had always had thecharacter of a contest. He was regarded withsuspicion under the Austrian occupation ofYugoslavia in World War I and as an unreliable during the several regimes of theinterwar period. He was again suspect during the Axis occupation, and in the postwarperiod he continued to assert his points ofview vigorously. I t is difficult to be an objective scholar, with a congenital distrustfor compromise or sham, and an internationalist in a small and beleaguered country,but Filipovic maintained just that positionwith characteristic stubbornness. He was flu-

ent in English, French, and German as wellas in his native tongue and was well acquainted with Macedonian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Albanian, Latin, Greek,and a variety of other languages. Many ofhis Serbian monographs had article-lengthEnglish summaries. He spent a year at Harvard in 1952 with a Rockefeller grant, anexperience that greatly broadened his theoretical views, was a Foreign Fellow of theAmerican Anthropological Association, aFellow of Current Anthropology and of theAmerican Geographical Society, a permanent member of the Science Division ofMatica Srpska in Novi Sad (the oldest Serbian cultural organization), a member ofthe Societe Internationale d'Ethnologie etde Folklore in Paris, the Academy of Artsand Sciences of Bosnia-Hercegovina in Sarajevo, and the editorial board of Ethnology,and was editor of Etnoloski pregled (Belgrade). He was one of the founders of theEthnological Society of Yugoslavia and wasits first president, before World War I. Foryears he had maintained the most cordialand helpful relations with his American colleagues. Many of us owe our initial fieldorientation in the Balkans to him; we haveprofited from distillations of his lifetime ofexperience and we have entrusted our students to his care and courtesy when we sentthem into the field.Milenko Filipovic leaves his wife Marija(a former teacher), a daughter Radmila(curator of ethnology at the Sarajevo Museum), another daughter Mirjana (a gymnasium professor of mathematics), and fourgrandchildren. He leaves also a host offriends and of admirers, in Yugoslavia andabroad, who remember him with gratitudefor his kindness and with admiration for hisscholarship, energy, courage, and determination. His life was one of achievement and,with pregnant symbolism, it came full circle only ten days before his death when hereturned to Visoko, in his beloved Bosnia,the town in which he went to primaryschool, the area covered in his doctoral dissertation and in yet another monograph, to

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560 American Anthropologist [72, 1970]receive from the people of the region amedal honoring him as a scholar, a man,and a patriot on the anniversary of theirliberation from the Axis powers. 1

JOEL M. HALPERNUniversity of MassachusettsE. A. HAMMELUniversity of California, Berkeley

NOTE1 The authors are indebted to Dr. Vera S.Erlich of Zagreb and to Radmila FabijanicFilipovic for their courtesy in furnishing some

of the data for this obituary. Dr. Erlich's ownobituaries of Professor Filipovic are publishedin Sildost-Forschungen, Sociologija sela, andCurrent Anthropology. An article entitled "TheLife and Work of Professor Milenko S. Filipovic" (with English summary) was published byManojlo Gluscevic and others in Geografskipregled 6: 13-24, 1962, on his retirement fromthe University of Sarajevo.BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MILENKO S.FILIPOVIC(Works in English, French and German only)

1936 Das Zerkratzen des Gesichts bei Serbenund Albanern. Revue Internationale desEtudes Balkaniques 3:157-166.1940 Le village en Serbie meridionale. Pro-

ceedings of the Fourteenth InternationalCongress of Sociology, Series B, 2:38-48.Bucharest.1954a The Bektashi in the district of Strumica. Man 54: 10-13.1954b Folk religion among the Orthodoxpopulations in eastern Yugoslavia. HarvardSlavic Studies 2:359-374.1956 Das Gebaude tronj in der Umgebungvon Skoplje. Godisnjak Balkanskog Instituta1 :456-473.1958 Vicarious paternity among Serbs andCroats. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 14: 156-167.1959 Die serbokroatischen Mohammedaner.Tribus 9:55-60.1960a Volksglauben auf dem Balkan. SlidostForschungen 19:239-262.1960b Forms and functions of ritual kinshipamong the South Slavs. Actes du VIe CongresInternationale des Sciences Anthropologiqueset Ethnologiques 2(1) :77-80.1962 Die Leichenverbrennung bei den Sudslaven. Wiener Volkerkundliche Mitteilungen10(5) :61-7l.1963 Das Erbe der mittelalterlichen sachsischen Bergleute in den siidslavischen Landern.Siidost-Forschungen 22: 192-233.1965a Symbolic adoption among the Serbs.Ethnology 4: 66-7l.1965b Einige Motive in der balkanischenFolklore. Zeitschrift flir Balkanologie 3: 64-76.