MAIN RESULTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE

BREAKING NEW GROUND

A basic and important contribution of DatC was to calculate the approximate numbers of migrants from South-Slav speaking regions of the Monarchy in Vienna around 1900 (see Fischer, Difference and the City, forthcoming). This calculation was based on Austrian and Hungarian censuses of the period. It also included recent contributions on the topic by Slovene colleagues and related the numbers of Vienna residents from predominantly Slovenian, Croatian or Serbian speaking districts to the language ratios in those districts. This yielded much more detailed an reliable results than before. 20% more such migrants can be documented than so far assumed, with a clear dominance of Slovenes. Also the professional setup of the migrants from predominantly South-Slavic speaking regions has become more describable. Based on the interpretation of work book protocols and census material, one can assume that Slovenian speaking migrants from Inner Austria and Croatian speakers from the neighbouring Hungarian counties were mainly working as sojourners, domestic personnel and craftsmen, while Croatian and Serbian speaking migrants from the Southern Hungarian and Croatian counties could rather be found among craftsmen, civil servants, military personnel and in trade. The student population recruited itself from all these groups. In the US material, the importance of migrant networks and clusters could not only be underlined, but were studied in more detail using private and business correspondences, church books, society meeting minutes, etc. This research also made visible the connections between several networks. Also lives of single migrants of several social positions were reconstructed and a generation based and gendered perspective was developed. The analysis of the plentiful US migrant newspapers in Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian offered a rich basis to describe strategies of public self-representation, also in dialogue with what was conceived as the American »mainstream«. Both on the more individual, the intermediary and the organized level, the relevance of ethnicity and intersectionality could be described. The US results made it possible to draw comparisons of South Slav identity projects in the US and in Austria-Hungary. The resulting contrast made it clear how and why the Viennese print products were not likely to create a Viennese migrant public culture, while the comparison with every-day strategies of migrants in the US highlighted what kind of strategies were to be expected in Vienna.

IMPORTANT HYPOTHESES

Which were the connections between identity projects and the infrastructures and technologies that were available to South-Slavic speaking migrants between the late 18th and early 20th century? Why did Serb media develop outside Serb settlements so often and what were the differences between the connected public cultures? New approaches have lead to several new theses. The mobility patterns of Serb elites included multilocality and translocality in a network that consisted of actors of the Orthodox confession but different languages (Greek, Serb, Aromanian). This would lead one to predict identity projects and media to develop in Pest and Trieste in the late 18th century, where the most important hubs of those mobile networks were located. But the media developed in Vienna first. This was due to two reasons. In politics, the court wanted to control non-Catholic publicity and therefore to control Cyrillic printing. Consequently, printing in Cyrillic letters outside Vienna was prohibited; on the other hand, the strategic importance of the Court for Serb elites made spatial proximity to the court an important criterion. And Vienna was a central place of knowledge storage and production, close to the Court. This made it a first choice for Slavic intellectuals who were interested in collecting information on an artifacts of several important ingredients of identity management: history, language, and folklore. These two factors taken together resulted in Serb and other Slavic dignitaries and intellectuals dwelling in Vienna temporarily and engaging in publishing. As the networks of Serb traders extended into the city of Vienna as well, connections emerged between these two milieus. This lead to the first Serb newspaper (1791) and the first Serb daily newspaper (1822) in Vienna. The revolution of 1848 facilitated newspaper publishing in Serbian language in the places one would expect, i.e. where the highest concentrations of Serbian speakers occurred in Southern Hungary. Printing technology had become easier to come by and the control of authorities ceased during the revolutionary days. Information necessary for identity management had in the meantime become easier available, last but not least due to Slavic printing in Vienna. The networks behind these new publications were temporarily mobile as well, but could allow for less mobility than in Vienna fifty years earlier. In Vienna, publishing of Serb periodicals ceased just a decade before an unprecedented increase of South-Slavic speaking students in the 1890s. New networks of multilocal and short term career migrants emerged but did not establish any newspapers. The difference lay in the diminished political function of Vienna after the Ausgleich of 1867 and in the better and broader availability and reproducibility of information throughout the empire. In one of the major centres of Austro-Hungarian migration, Pittsburgh, Serb newspapers started to appear in 1906. The networks around these periodicals were translocal and multilocal and reached across the Atlantic. The migrants in the US had few connections to the urban traders in Central Europe. Their elites organized in egalitarian fraternities and small church parishes. After World War I, the focus of identity management shifted from a Hungarian to a North American perspective.

DEVELOPMENT OF METHODS

The concept of identity projects seems the most important one in this respect. DatC does not claim to have invented it, but to have applied it systematically and to have explored its potentials and sub-definitions. Identity projects (IDPs) can be the project of an individual, a couple, a small group like a family or clan and of large and complex groups, like social movements or nation states. IDPs can pertain to the entire range of possible identifications and to combinations of them, e.g. ethnic class identity projects. IDP is not to replace other terms, yet to focus on the aspect of constructedness and the necessity to maintain social groupness. IDPs can end and be intermitted, they can be taken over, shared, transformed, reinterpreted. Evidently, the advantage of the concept is its flexibility and openness. Other than many traditional concepts in social and cultural history, it is not teleological and not preconceiving. IDPs can be identified by describing the actions of those actors who create and maintain IDPs. These are the identity managers (IDMs). Like IDP, IDM is a concept that has so far not been systematically applied, although similar combinations of terms have been used especially in cultural and social anthropology. Identity managers are actors who are trying to group other actors according to certain markers of identification, and who keep up the infrastructure of the IDP. IDMs use different kinds of infrastructure like media technology, transport, cultural knowledge etc.

ADVANCEMENT OF THE FIELD AND TRANSDISCIPLINARITY

In migration history, Difference and the City has contributed a truly translocal and transatlantic perspective. The pioneering adaptation of Actor Network Theory (ANT) was one reason to this. In migrant community studies, the new perspective that comes with the concept of identity management and identity projects comes as an innovative contribution. DatC is also an important contribution to a subfield of migration history, the study of diaspora media, and approaches it from the recent perspective of studying technology and infrastructure in the social sciences. In Southeast European history, DatC contributed a perspective that transcended the territories that are traditionally dividing this historical discipline in regional subfields, by studying exactly the mobile and deterritorialized aspect of Serb and South Slav history yet without simply containing this phenomenon in the notion of diaspora. DatC offers methodical, terminological and topical alternatives to traditional concepts in Southeast European history, which might facilitate the visibility of the field in the international academic debate. In Austrian history, DatC has made a point by insisting that Serb history is a part of Austrian history and vice versa. This inclusive approach opens up Austrian history for interpretations beyond essentialized notions of the past. DatC has been a contribution to making Austrian historiography more transnational. In cultural and social history, the most important contribution to advance those fields was to help »bridging the divide« between them. Again, ANT played a decisive role in making such bridging happen by considering actors and flows of information, goods, and actors as equally important and interconnectible. DatC has also been innovative in the US related research by negotiating between two methodologies usually not applied in the same framework: quantitative and discourse analysis.