Ethnology of the Balkans

Historical overview of the study of culture and the ways of living in South-eastern Europe; local and foreign authors on the Balkans; changing emphases in studying the Balkans. Geographical, political, historical and cultural borders in the Balkans; the Balkans as a junction and a border between the East and the West; the Balkans and Europe. Age of Enlightenment and cultural construction of a savage. Romantics and local colouring; Orientalisation of the Orient. Disintegration of traditional culture; patriarchate and the hero cult. Traditional culture and modernisation. Religion and nation. Difference as identity; nationalism and nation-state. The past, (cultural) heritage and history. Collective remembering and collective forgetting.