Etnizacija religijskih identiteta.
Ethnicizing religious identities.

Towards supplementing the ethno-symbolic approach

Summary/Abstract: It has been argued that Anthony D. Smith, in spite of his obstinate insistence on the importance of meanings and symbols in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, remained hesitant to fully acknowledge the methodological necessity of taking a more discursive or semiotic stance of inquiry. It is his sociological realism privileging causal explanations that prevented him from making a more radical move into the register of Symbolic. In this article, using as an exemplary case what seems to be a pretty recent ethnicization of collective religious identities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we demonstrate how to conduct a research on identity construction within this register exclusively. Following F. Barth’s paradigmatic shift towards diacritica, i. e. ethnic boundary markers, and J. Derrida’s insights into ‘the structurality of structure’ and the role of ‘transcendental signified’, a structural semiotic model of explaining group identity transformation has been presented. It is conceived as a kind of set theory operating with signifiers standing for myth-symbol complexes.

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