Old boundaries and new cultural landscapes of a multiethnic city in modern-day Macedonia

Abstract

In the context of Macedonian and Albanian ethnonational discourses functioning in North Macedonia that constitute a significant component of the system of the city’s symbols and semantics, we come upon confrontational strategies between the Slavic and non-Slavic entities that function in the cultural area of Skopje. On the one hand, these confrontational strategies determine the polemic nature of urban space, understood as both material cultural space established on the basis of places of memory and cultural artefacts, and, on the other hand, they are a product of space as an area of activity of actors and social and political networks, often used to construct incoherent self-defining processes within the space defined by the influence of ethnocultural processes. Based on the two entities in this discourse, one Slavic and one non-Slavic (Macedonian and Albanian), a semantic model of the city, described as a “polemic city”, was created as an outcome of the empirical research performed. This model can also be used for analysing other cultural areas characterised by polycentric interethnic relations. A significant point of reference, a category that constitutes the key component of this analysis, is the transformative nature of the place as an area of stigmatisation by ethnic, cultural and political determinants and subjected to a game with the participation of social and political actors. Anthropological research distinguished semantic categories referring to the place and the contestation of place, all of which I have analysed, drawing special attention to the Slavic and non-Slavic entities in Macedonian and Albanian discourse in North Macedonia.