uniform global culture is emerging. But instead of forever hunting for the
pristine and primordial in order to unveil the essence of a culture, ethnographers
have taken also to investigating the fuzzy edges and the seams that hold the
colourful tapestry of groups and subgroups together and, at times, come undone.
Ethnicity and cultural identity are not timeless and static, nor do they show any
sign of being soaked up by the whirlwind of globalization. Because people want
them, they persist. Fredrik Barth and his colleagues pointed the way when, in the
1960s, they gave attention to people who change their ethnic membership, and
proposed what is now known as a constructivist view of identity. Almost three
decades later, the title of a book by Belgian ethnographer Eugeen Roosens
captured the essence of this paradigm shift, Creating Ethnicity.
Ethnic identity is acquired at birth. The legacy of the group into which they are
born is inherited by newborns by fate, forming the only reality they know for
some time. Yet changes and various degrees of affiliation are possible. This is
why establishing unequivocal and stable boundaries of ethnicities is difficult.
Rather than upholding their ancient tradition, many ethnic groups are the result
of relatively recent fission or fusion. Criteria of likeness and difference on which
ethnic identity is based are selective. They may be foregrounded or suspended,
as desired or expedient.
Until the dissolution of the multiethnic Yugoslav state, the population of Bosnia-
Herzegovina consisted of Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs. In the course of the war
of the early 1990s, Islam, which in Yugoslavia was ‘just a religion’, became the
defining feature of Bosnian ethnic loyalty, producing the ‘Muslim Bosniak’
ethnicity.
A group’s ethnic identity always unfolds in its relationships with other groups,
and it depends on the nature of these relationships how permeable its boundaries
are. The ethnically homogenous nation state is a rare exception. Hence ethnic
groups interact with other ethnic groups at various levels and degrees of intensity
within the overarching framework of a state.
Administrative classification
It took time for the constructivist approach to ethnicity to trickle through to the