Ethnogenesis Mania
Identity Politics and the Return of Pseudoscientific Nationalism
In Podgorica, a new edition of Špiro Kulišić’s booklet On the Ethnogenesis of the Montenegrins has been published by the Dukljan Academy of Sciences and Arts. The work was first printed in Titograd in 1980 by the publishing house Pobjeda.
Kulišić was a Montenegrin ethnologist and anthropologist, born in 1908 in Perast, who spent much of his academic career working in Sarajevo and Belgrade. The very act of republishing it can hardly be regarded as surprising. For decades, the Dukljan Academy has functioned as a parallel—one might even say para-academic—institution shaped within the framework of a specific identitarian and political project of Montenegrin autochthonism, marked by a pronounced tendency to present ideological constructions about the past in the guise of scholarly revision.
Within that context, Kulišić’s work from the late twentieth century possesses an almost programmatic significance. His theses concerning a distinct ethnogenesis of the Montenegrins became one of the principal foundations upon which later autochthonist constructions were built by authors associated with that intellectual milieu, including Savo Brković, Jevrem Brković, Novak Adžić, Šerbo Rastoder, and other publicists and historians who sought to retroactively project a distinctly anti-Serbian, postmodern Montenegrin national identity deep into the early Middle Ages.
The Dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Resulting Identity Chaos
The political afterlife of such theses, however, cannot be understood apart from the crisis of the 1990s. The radicalisation of Serbian nationalism, its increasingly right-wing idiom, and the political use of “Serbdom” as an instrument of domination within the collapsing Yugoslav space gave unexpected strength to what had previously remained a relatively marginal idea: a separate Montenegrin national identity that would have to be emancipated not only politically, but also historiographically, from its Serbian historical matrix. In this sense, the Liberal Alliance of Montenegro under Slavko Perović offers a telling example. Its sovereignist and anti-war politics stood in principled opposition to Milošević’s project and to Montenegro’s subordination to Belgrade; yet, in the wider cultural field, that same struggle helped open a space in which the rejection of Greater-Serbian nationalism was gradually transformed into a more radical demand for the complete erasure of Montenegro’s historical, ecclesiastical, and cultural entanglement with the Serbian world.
Far from emancipating Montenegrin society, however, this movement was eventually absorbed by the Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro (DPS), the ruling political structure that emerged directly out of the old League of Communists and dominated Montenegro for decades. What made this transformation particularly paradoxical was the fact that the same political elite had, until roughly 1996, firmly occupied Serbian nationalist and chauvinistic positions, closely aligned with the politics of Slobodan Milošević during the Yugoslav wars. The subsequent ideological reversal did not produce a genuinely democratic or socially emancipatory project. Instead, it merely replaced one nationalist narrative with another, further deepening the fragmentation of Montenegrin society while overseeing its transition from socialism into a post-socialist nationalist dystopia marked by economic dependency, oligarchic privatization, and permanent identity conflict.
The emergence of a pseudoscientific pamphlet on “Montenegrin ethnogenesis” as early as the 1980s was itself one of the signals that the Montenegrin Titoist bureaucracy—much like its counterparts elsewhere in Yugoslavia—had, following the death of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, already begun preparing for the eventual dissolution of the common state, seeking to construct for the future Montenegro an identity as distinct as possible from its historical Serbian framework. None of this means that a distinct Montenegrin identity is in itself illegitimate or inherently problematic. The issue lies rather in the manner of its construction, which in this case appears not as an expression of social emancipation, but as an attempt to build, upon the ruins of socialism, a new model of exclusionary and chauvinistic nationalism.
The Reanimation of a Long-Discredited Pamphlet
But let us return to the new edition of Kulišić’s book, which appears at a moment when the technocratic government of Montenegro—the administration that replaced the decades-long rule of the nationalist Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro—stands on the threshold of the country’s accession to the European Union and is attempting to create a balance within a deeply divided society split between national Serbs and national Montenegrins.
What the publisher does not emphasize, however, is the fact that Kulišić’s booklet was subjected to a thorough scholarly refutation as early as the following year, in the study by Nikola Vukčević, The Ethnic Origin of the Montenegrins (Belgrade, 1981). Vukčević’s approach was neither journalistic nor pamphleteering; on the contrary, it consisted of a painstaking analysis of sources, terminology, quotations, and methodology, in which Kulišić’s text was subjected to an almost forensic reading. Already in the introductory sections of the book, Vukčević points out that Kulišić proceeds from a conclusion constructed in advance, and then selectively adapts both sources and secondary literature to fit that thesis (pp. 5—13).
A particularly devastating portion of Vukčević’s critique concerns Kulišić’s handling of Byzantine sources. Vukčević demonstrates that Kulišić treats “Nikola Akominatos” and Niketas Choniates as two separate individuals, although they are in fact one and the same Byzantine author—Niketas Choniates Akominatos (pp. 18—21). With a measure of academic irony, Vukčević remarks that “it is in poor taste to derive conclusions from Byzantine sources while simultaneously providing evidence that one has not even so much as smelled them.” More important than the error itself, however, is what it reveals. Vukčević shows that Kulišić relied largely on secondary mediation, read authors selectively, and frequently failed to understand the historiographical context of the texts he invoked. According to Vukčević, this is equally evident in Kulišić’s treatment of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, John Skylitzes, Kekaumenos, and the Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja, where vast conclusions concerning ethnogenesis are drawn from marginal or ambiguous passages (pp. 13—24).
Equally thorough is Vukčević’s dismantling of Kulišić’s treatment of ethnology and tribal tradition. Kulišić attempts to portray Jovan Erdeljanović as a representative of an “old bourgeois scholarship” that merely “classified” the Montenegrins as Serbs, yet Vukčević calmly reminds the reader that Erdeljanović was not an ideological propagandist, but an ethnologist who recorded how people described themselves (pp. 22—27). Vukčević then presents an entire series of examples drawn from oral traditions, Dubrovnik and Venetian sources, tribal chronicles, as well as the correspondence of Petar I Petrović-Njegoš and Petar II Petrović-Njegoš, in which the population of Montenegro and the Highlands is designated by the Serbian name (pp. 27—35).
Particularly significant is his analysis of the migration traditions of Montenegrin tribes—the Vasojevići, Bjelopavlići, Piperi, Kuči, and Bratonožići—where Vukčević demonstrates that these tribes traced their origins to Herzegovina, Kosovo, Metohija, and Raška (pp. 36—42). Kulišić’s attempt to explain all of this away as the result of a later “Serbianization” is judged by Vukčević to be methodologically untenable, since no primary-source foundation exists for such a sweeping claim.
Particularly striking are the chapters in which Vukčević analyzes Kulišić’s treatment of language, toponymy, and local particularities. He demonstrates that Kulišić interprets regional and tribal differences as evidence of a separate ethnic genesis, even though such internal distinctions are characteristic of virtually all European peoples (pp. 48—52). On several occasions, Vukčević also points to Kulišić’s tendency to treat the presence of Vlach, Romance, or Albanian elements in old Montenegro as automatic proof of a “non-Serbian” ethnic foundation, despite the fact that the sources themselves testify to the gradual assimilation of these groups into the dominant Slavic and Orthodox cultural framework (pp. 56—58). It is precisely in this calm, documented, and methodologically disciplined tone that the enduring strength of Vukčević’s critique resides: he does not polemicize with Kulišić on the level of political passions, but patiently confronts him with the very sources he ignored, misread, or interpreted arbitrarily.
The Borreby Nation
And it is here, in fact, that one arrives at the most intriguing part of the entire story. For after Vukčević demonstrated that Kulišić handled Byzantine sources, medieval history, and ethnographic material in a rather insecure and tendentious manner, the reader might expect the author at least to find firmer ground in the field of ethnogenetic theory itself—a discipline which, both in Europe and in the Soviet Union, had by that time already achieved considerable scholarly sophistication, including in relation to the South Slavic world. Yet it is precisely here that Kulišić collapses most dramatically—and with the almost museum-like elegance of a long-discredited European pseudoscience.
For while contemporary historiography and historical anthropology have for decades warned that medieval nations were collective confessional and eschatological categories—not modern constitutional nations, and certainly not biological “racial” designations—Kulišić grounds much of his narrative about the “ethnogenesis” of the Montenegrins in anthropological types, skull measurements, “racial” mixtures, and mystical physiognomic traits that would make even a serious reader of old issues of the Völkischer Beobachter recoil in discomfort. Thus Kulišić writes, without the slightest hesitation, that the majority of Montenegrins represent a “mixture of the Dinaric and prehistoric Borreby type, characterized by a large body, large skull, and broad face,” and that the Montenegrin “anthropological profile” displays affinities with the “Caucasian type.” From this, he proceeds to derive conclusions about a supposedly “distinct Balkan-Slavic ethnic synthesis.”
It is genuinely difficult to read such passages today without imagining some forgotten European racial theorist from the 1930s, trembling calipers in hand, wandering through the Montenegrin highlands measuring skulls in search of the metaphysical essence and biological substance of an “eternal” people. One is left with the impression that medieval men and women, instead of understanding belonging through dynasty, the concept of the “New Israel” as God’s chosen people, land, lordship, or political community—which is what the sources actually tell us—were, according to Kulišić, apparently walking about proudly displaying an awareness of their own “Borreby type” and “Caucasian” physiognomy.
The Decontextualization of Historical Identities
Particularly comical is Kulišić’s attempt to reduce the expression “the Serbian rite” (christiani di rito servo) to a mere liturgical formality, as though it were some impersonal confessional label devoid of any collective meaning. In doing so, he reveals not only a misunderstanding of the medieval concept of peoplehood, but also a complete lack of awareness of how premodern man understood belonging in the first place. In the Middle Ages, identity did not function as a modern national census category, yet neither was it an administrative inventory of “rites.” Concepts such as “the Serbian lands,” “the Serbian people,” or “the Serbian rite” belonged to a sacral-political and eschatological universe in which land, dynasty, Church, and historical mission formed a single organic whole
It is precisely for this reason that the Nemanjić dynasty and post-Nemanjić tradition developed the idea of the Serbs as an Orthodox “New Israel”—a people who understood their history and political order through a sacred role within the Christian cosmos. In that context, “the Serbian rite” did not signify merely a manner of celebrating the liturgy, but membership in an entire civilizational and historical framework. To argue otherwise would be roughly equivalent to claiming that the “Romans” (Rhomaioi) of the Byzantine Empire were merely a fiscal or ritual category, rather than a civilizational and political community.
Kulišić’s argument becomes even more absurd when confronted with concrete sources from the sixteenth century. How, then, is one to explain Božidar Vuković Podgoričanin, who in Venice wrote that he wished to print “our Serbian letters” (i naša srpska slova)? How are we to explain his son Vićenco Vuković, who requested permission to print books in lingua et caractere serviano, for the benefit of the natione et lingua serviana? Were they too, according to Kulišić’s logic, merely some faceless technicians of a “rite,” men who happened to use the adjective “Serbian” accidentally and without any awareness of the broader community to which they belonged?
The problem lies in the fact that Kulišić attempts to dissect the premodern world with modern positivist instruments. Yet the sources themselves reveal precisely the opposite: within the Orthodox Slavic world, rite, peoplehood, land, and sacred history formed inseparable components of the same eschatological order.
And it is precisely this fact that ought to be acknowledged by every inheritor of that culture, regardless of whether he is religious or not. For a believing person, it represents the continuity of an ancient Orthodox eschatology—the idea of a people as a sacred historical community. For one who is not religious, it should at the very least be recognized as a historical phase in the development of one’s own community, rather than something to be concealed in embarrassment beneath improvised constructions and an anthropological cabaret assembled from yellowing European racial manuals.
For it is truly depressing to watch part of contemporary autochthonist folklore declare as the only “fictitious” identity precisely the one that shaped the entirety of Montenegro’s literacy, spirituality, literature, statehood, and historical memory, while offering as “authentic” some phantasmagorical hybrid in the style of an ancient Matarugo-Pipero-Lužano-Vlaho-Montenegrin—a mythical creature who has apparently wandered across the Balkans for a thousand years carrying his great-grandfather’s Borreby skull in a satchel, patiently awaiting discovery by Špiro Kulišić.
Needless to say, none of this implies that the currently dominant forms of Serbian nationalism in Montenegro are in any sense “progressive”—quite the contrary. It is within that very milieu that one witnesses some of the most bizarre attempts to rehabilitate Nazi collaborators and wartime reactionaries from the Second World War, from Pavle Đurišić to the broader Ravna Gora Chetnik tradition, often under the pretext that they were “Orthodox believers” or anti-communist patriots. Đurišić’s forces, however, were deeply implicated in collaboration with Italian and German occupation structures, while the Chetnik movement as a whole was marked by terror against Muslims, Partisans, and their supporters. Yet one form of chauvinism and social decay cannot be fought with another form of chauvinism that inevitably produces its own corresponding social disintegration.
Smaller, weaker, and more internally divided
And it is here that this new edition of the booklet becomes a genuinely valuable cultural document—not about medieval Montenegro, but about a certain segment of the post-Yugoslav intellectual scene that still believes modern identities can be constructed through skulls, anthropological typologies, and romantic fantasies about “deep ethnic roots.” One almost expects some future edition to include a chapter on the mystical ethnic significance of moustache length or the angle of the cheekbone. For once history is abandoned as a scholarly discipline and replaced with the world of pseudoscientific ethnogenesis-mania, the boundary between ethnology and caricature becomes almost imperceptible.
In this sense, the Montenegrin case also invites a broader postcolonial and anti-imperialist reading. After the destruction of Yugoslavia, identity politics across the post-Yugoslav space increasingly became the cultural expression of political fragmentation and economic dispossession. The smaller, weaker, and more internally divided these societies became, the easier it was to integrate them into external systems of dependency—financial, military, diplomatic, and ideological. Fragmented identities thus ceased to be merely questions of memory or culture; they became part of a wider architecture of domination.
This is visible in Montenegro with particular clarity. Today, both the Serbian and the new Montenegrin identity are often articulated not as sovereign cultural projects, but as rival symptoms of the same broken political condition. One side frequently reduces Serbian identity to defensive resentment, clerical symbolism, and nostalgic gestures deprived of any serious social programme; the other attempts to construct a new Montenegrin identity through negation, amnesia, and anti-Serbian choreography. Meanwhile, behind this theatre of identity, economic sovereignty has been almost completely dismantled. A country without control over its resources, strategic infrastructure, labour market, banking system, and development policy can hardly produce a calm and self-possessed cultural politics. What remains is a colonial stage on which impoverished communities are invited to quarrel over symbols, while the real structures of power are quietly transferred elsewhere.
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