Modernism and structuralism: Serbian ethnology/anthropology in the last twenty five years of the twentieth century

Abstract

Modernisation of Serbian ethnology/anthropology in the second quarter of the twentieth century was marked by structuralism. More precisely, structural analysis that became a must of the analytical interpretation was based on the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, but also on those of the predecessors of structural analysis, like Van Gennep and Prop; British followers of structuralism like E. Leach and M. Douglas, as well as on the Russian semiotic school and Barth’s semiology. Taking aside predecessors of structural analysis, main sources of Serbian structural-semiotic revolution came from Levi-Strauss structural anthropology. When in the 1970s Serbian readers faced anthropological books coming from different intellectual backgrounds and representing major theoretical trends in anthropology, Serbian ethnology, firmly based on its hundred years old romantic roots, gave equally opportunities to all theoretical approaches that fought for the intellectual domination in the discipline. This paper tries to answer the question why structural analysis played a crucial part in the modernisation of Serbian ethnology/anthropology, while the ideas coming from functionalism, culture and personality school, or neo-evolutionism did not have the same revolutionary and deep impact.