ABSTRACT
Ethnic, national, and religious identifications have been intricately intertwined in East Central Europe. Ethnicity and nation can evolve without or with religion, in East Central Europe as elsewhere. Theoretical frameworks emerging from multiple disciplines that challenge the analysis of ethnicity, nation, and religion as concrete “things in the world” have helped to clarify this complex historical nexus. The application of constructivism to ethnicity, however, has been slower to develop. In the 1970s, anthropologist Frederik Barth had formulated a constructivist theory of ethnicity, understood as a form of identification emerging at the boundaries between groups, rather than centering on the essential content found within such groups. Constructivist and modernist approaches to nationalism and ethnicity have themselves been challenged, most prominently by Anthony Smith whose “ethnosymbolism” represents an alternative to the modernist narrative.” Historians of religion have long accepted the social construction of specific religions, anticipating the modernist turn in nationalism studies, by centuries, going back at least to the Enlightenment.
