Urban research in Serbian ethnology and anthropology – from “the view from afar“ to a “subdiscipline”

Abstract

This paper discusses urban research in Serbian ethnology (later on also anthropology). The era from the formal institutionalization of ethnology at the turn of the twentieth century until present day is segmented into five consecutive periods: the period before 1945, years between the end of World War II and the 1970s, from the seventies until the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the 1990s and the early 2000s, and the most recent contemporary period. This approximate timeline is made having in mind the state of urban research in Serbian ethnology and anthropology in the last more than hundred years, and prevalent periodizations of the overall disciplinary history; the paper gives a chronological discussion of dominant tracks and themes of ethnological/anthropological research of the cities.