2015/09/03 by Edin Hajdarpašić · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Balkans: History, Politics, Society #Diverse Musicological Studies #Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
paper · doi:10.7591/cornell/9780801453717.003.0002
openalex publication_date 2015/09/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
This chapter studies how folkloric pursuits in Bosnia and Herzegovina—often disregarded as a passing romantic stage of nationalism—were crucial to the self-fashioning of national activists. In central and eastern Europe, the production of folkloric and ethnographic studies has long been recognized as a quintessential “national science.” These pursuits enabled the activists to develop new ethnographic-populist practices and to outline the subject of their activity: the narod or “the people.” Prominent South Slavic activists—from folklorist Vuk Karadzic to local collectors like Ivan Franjo Jukic—recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina as “the land of the people,” and in the process, helped establish new practices of national self-fashioning. Along with folklore, Serbian and Croatian activists discovered in Bosnia another concern: the suffering of the Bosnian Christians under Turkish rule.