Anthropology of the Balkans

Abstract

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article. Anthropological research in the Balkans has taken place under different names—ethnography, ethnology, and folkloristics, to name a few. There are various disciplinary histories in different countries in the region. A throughline that connects these histories is the emergence of the discipline under the influence of German romantic ideas about language and culture. Early anthropological research was entangled with political goals of nation-building in the aftermath of projects of national liberation from the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Oriented towards internal others—mainly peasants—anthropological research aimed to delineate and classify peoples into separate ethnic groups and describe their cultural specificities. After the Second World War, ideas from the Soviet practice of ethnography gained influence. Since the 1970s, national traditions of anthropological research have opened up to influences from the centers of anthropological knowledge production—primarily in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—as more foreign anthropologists were coming to do fieldwork in the Balkans and more anthropologists from the Balkans were receiving their training outside the region. The critical and reflexive accounts on the Balkans have developed into an enduring interest in borders, inclusion and exclusion, and representations of the self and others within broad geopolitical frameworks. In the aftermath of the fall of socialism in the 1990s, there was an emergence of vibrant debates on ethnic and religious conflicts, as well as nostalgia and memory politics. The restoration of capitalism and the process of Europeanization typically went hand in hand, producing significant consequences such as outmigration and depopulation. Anthropologists continue to focus on shared concerns in the region, across differences of individual countries in the Balkans, including in the enduring legacies of various imperialisms. Since the early 21st century, in response to multiple crises in the region, anthropologists have written about novel political and economic subjectivities, peripheral financialization, and humanitarianism and humanitarianization.