DEMISTIFICIRANJE “ETNICITETA”
DEMYSTIFYING “ETHNICITY”

Summary/Abstract: This paper was conceived as a discussion about the concept of “ethnic identity”, which represents a significant segment of the broader issue of the so-called historical identities, i.e., identities in the past. The author analyzes the aforementioned concept, discussing many of its aspects, such as the original meaning(s) of the term “ethnos”, the problems of the modern use of the term, and the efforts made by some authors to give this term a more specific and a more defined meaning. He points out the unsuitability of the concept of “ethnic identity” in the sense in which it is understood by most authors who use it. Despite the fact that the terms “ethnos”, “ethnicity”, “ethnic group”, “ethnic identity”, etc., have been used for decades in contemporary social sciences (but also in the historical science), there still seems to be no consensus about their meaning among the authors who use them. For this reason, it seems useful to try to examine what the term “ethnicity” originally meant, or could mean. Such an approach, except that it points to the original meaning of the term, also allows us to compare it to the meanings ascribed to that term by contemporary authors, and to determine the extent to which modern usages of that term resemble or differ from its original meaning. In addition, the author discusses the contemporary use of terms such as “ethnicity” or “ethnic group”, in cases when they are used as synonyms for the concept of “community” or “group”, and this approach of many modern authors is subjected to criticism. This paper seeks to emphasize the serious problems that arise in research when terminology is used without a prior attempt to clearly define what the term covers and what its meaning should be, since without an adequate scientific apparatus, the results of the research cannot be considered credible. In addition to the discussion of problems related to the concept of “ethnos” or “ethnicity”, the author also attempts to draw attention to some problematic concepts that are often used in historiography, like “ethnogenesis”, “ethnohistory”, etc., and to elaborate the reasons for their exclusion from the scientific discourse. Building on the previously discussed problems, the author likewise points out that one of the few acceptable criteria for conceptualizing “ethnic identity”, as a type of identity that would be different from other types of identity, could be the image of blood kinship. So, the only criterion that would distinguish “ethnicity” from other types of collective identities would be the biologization of social bonds within a group. The author also points out that the term “ethnos”/“ethnic” is unnecessary, and even meaningless to use in the South Slavic languages, because there are much better terms that are already in use, such as the term “narod” (people/folk). That is, etymologically speaking, the word “narod” is a far more acceptable term than the foreign and etymologically ambiguous word “ethnos”.

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