imagined communities and real victims: self‐determination and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia
- 1 November 1996
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in American Ethnologist
- Vol. 23 (4) , 783-801
- https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1996.23.4.02a00060
Abstract
In this article I view “ethnic cleansing” in terms of the structural logic advanced by Mary Douglas (1966) and manifested in the constitutions of the republics of the former Yugoslavia. These constitutions reify and objectify “culture” in ways that provide the conceptual, ideological, political, and legal justifications for processes of exclusion, from the denial of citizenship to expulsion and murder. The analysis is grounded in the texts of the constitutions read against local Yugoslav understandings of their terms, in the bureaucratic practices of granting and denying citizenship on an ethnic basis, and in the geography of the wars in the former Yugoslavia. [Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia‐Hercegovina, nationalism, ethnicity, law, genocide]Keywords
This publication has 21 references indexed in Scilit:
- What if They Will Not Give Up?East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures, 1995
- Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in EuropeCurrent Anthropology, 1995
- Notes and CommentsEast European Politics and Societies: and Cultures, 1993
- Demography and the Origins of the Yugoslav Civil WarAnthropology Today, 1993
- Some Questions about a “Balanced” DiscussionEast European Politics and Societies: and Cultures, 1992
- Still More Balance on Jasenovac and the Manipulation of HistoryEast European Politics and Societies: and Cultures, 1992
- Citizenship Struggles in Soviet Successor StatesPublished by JSTOR ,1992
- Community, Integration, and Stability in Multinational YugoslaviaAmerican Political Science Review, 1989
- Intercommunal Killing in CyprusMan, 1988
- Heterogeneity and IntermarriageAmerican Sociological Review, 1982