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While scholars of the Balkans have frequently emphasized the importance of nationalism in the region, labor migration has long been a critical component of economic, social, and cultural life. In this article, Keith Brown examines the connections between two well-documented cases of the risks faced by long-distance migrants from the territory of the modern Republic of Macedonia, separated by a hundred years. Putting each case into its larger context—U.S. industrial expansion in the early 1900s, and U.S. military occupation in the early 2000s—Brown argues that the study of contemporary Macedonia demands attending to imperial and colonial histories that make clear the larger systems of power in which the country and its people have long been suspended.

ABSTRACT  Drawing entirely on public, open sources, in this article I trace the recent development of U.S. military understandings and uses of cultural knowledge. Military education, training, and operations reveal complexity and diversity that demands empirical study. In particular, I locate in Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–present) an internal, critical theoretical disagreement between a model of culture as a static, or slow‐moving, property of a constructed "other," embraced by mainstream thought in the U.S. Army, and a competing sense of cultural process as dynamic, interactive, and emergent, emphasized by Special Forces and the Marine Corps. This disagreement feeds off of and into longer‐running debates within U.S. military circles, demonstrating that the U.S. military's engagement with the concept of "culture" is far from monolithic: different services' approaches are shaped by their own histories, driving rival emphases on weaponizing culture and culturalizing warriors.