EDITOR´S PREFACE
EDITOR´S PREFACE

Summary/Abstract: The title of this first Special Issue - Life at The Crossroads - reflects its underlying theme: that of multiplicity. All the articles here show that an individual´s sense of identity, of locality,of faith and of culture are complex constructs that operate on various levels simultaneously, with one level defining what distinguishes an individual from his neighbour and another level defining what he shares with his neighbour. Take identity, for instance: the nationalists would have us believe that it can be reduced to one simplistic feature, which defines all the layers of self of everyone who possesses it while excluding everyone who does not possess it. In reality, as the articles here demonstrate, people have multiple layers of loyalty: family, hometown, province, state, continent; profession, religion, ancestry, language; and so on. And even if the lines round some of these loyalties (e.g. Bosniak/Croatian/Serbian ancestry, Muslim/Catholic/Orthodox liturgy, Turkish/West-Slavic/Greek influences on lexis) run close enough together to be seen as sketching out a group identity, such identities are far from simple, and do not exclude other loyalties that are shared with members of other groups [...]

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