We do need to encourage research into popular attitudes to the past among the Balkan peasantry of the nineteenth century and earlier. At the very least, we should recognize its cultural and historical specificity. His argument focuses on the South African context but describes a more general intellectual shift. If he is right, the term may perpetuate some of the confusions of its predecessor, and add others of its own particularly in the case of areas like Macedonia or southeastern Poland, which represent what we might, for want of a better term, call zones of indeterminate ethnicity. In determining how the inhabitants of Macedonia came to identify themselves in various ways, Victorian travelers' accounts and recent scholarship offer a number of perhaps banal clues.
Fear is the dominant, the ever-present motive.
It builds villages. The war in Bosnia would seem to bear out the importance of fear in forcing new, sharper definitions upon people. On a more abstract level, fear reflects the broader unpredictable range of risks and incentives that confront the individual. Recent work has begun to focus on this range of risks and incentives that defines the political arena. They polarize local politics and make it more difficult to hold a middle ground.