ABSTRACT
In previous chapters, the term “Balkanism” appeared quite a few times. Hegel’s description of the South Slavs as a “scattered barbarian remnant”, Freud’s South Slavs overestimating the sense of smell, Konstantinović’s world behind the hill, all share in a rhetoric of Balkanism to a smaller or larger extent. It is therefore necessary at this point to offer a systematic definition of Balkanism and to show how it relates to the archaic. The dynamics of Balkanism cannot be grasped without taking the previously discussed mechanisms of authoritative narratives into account. It is these mechanisms that establish the functions of a Balkanist discourse and make Balkanism curiously resilient with regard to efforts at critique.
