THE АТТITUDE OF THE MACEDONIAN ACADEMIC COMMUNITY TOWARDS THE “TORBESHI”: METHOD OF SOLIDARITY OR SCIENTIFIC SUBJECTIVITY?

The title is inspired by the article of Lisa M. Tillman Healy, "Friendship as Method" (Tillmann-Healy, 2003), in which she advocates the ethics of friendship in her research. This method is appropriate, especially when dealing with sensitive and intimate research topics, and is based on the principles of interpretivism, feminist research, queer methodologies, activist research, etc., which oppose the myth of value-neutral research (Harding 1991, according to Tillmann-Healy, 2003: 733), the myth of universal truths and other positivistic principles. In Macedonian society, ethnicity has long been a sensitive and tense topic. The young multi-ethnic society is still very much obsessed with ethnicity in many ways. Here, we will focus on the principles of contestation and defense of ethnic identity, which are still considered critical professional commitments of many Macedonia social sciences and humanities researchers. While different ethnic communities have experienced denials and contestations of their distinctiveness, we promote solidarity as a method instead of passionate expressions of researchers in their scientific argumentation for determining the "true ethnicity" of communities whose members disagree with popular scientific theses about how they should feel. We will illustrate this problem by analyzing the attitude of the Macedonian academic community and the general public towards the Torbeshi.