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Ivan Colovic

The Balkans: The Terror of Culture. Essays in Political Anthropology, by Ivan Colovic (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft | Southeast European Integration Perspectives, vol. 5, 2011), 195 pp.

This book deconstructs culture as the catalyst for hatred and war in the Balkans. The author also pays particular attention to the post-war “patriotic” discourse and the use of culture – in Serbia and other Balkan countries – with the intention to determine how and through which rhetorical strategies this sort of discourse manages to preserve its ability to trigger conflicts. The book focuses on myths about the so-called “national spiritual and cultural space”: the alleged organic unity between the Balkan nations and the soil on which they live, and to which they lay exclusive claim. The author devotes particular attention to the cult of national languages, national poets, graves and monuments, and the epic tradition and its main symbol – the gusle. The mainstay of these myths and cults is the representation of culture as a means by which national territory is occupied and kept.

I was shaken up by the Balkan wars… The region was dominated by a powerful messianic and warrior romanticism. Ivan Colovic portrays it masterfully in The Balkans: The Terror of Culture, highlighting populist and nationalistic “yarns about nation”, spun by politicians.
Maria Janion, Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Kraków

In this excellent book, Ivan Colovic writes about the Serbian post-communist drama, in which the Marxist-Lenist ideology was replaced by a nightmarish admixture of populism and ethno-nationalism, enriched by national religion. It is nevertheless, a picture of something that is a threat to all of us...
Adam Michnik, historian, essayist, and political commentator, editor in chief of the Warsaw daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza

A merciless analysis of the role played in inciting the war by intellectuals and by the culture they created.
Konstanty Gebert, international reporter and columnist at Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw

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