Paper Short Abstract:

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787-1864), widely regarded in his home country as the "father of modern Serbian language," left behind another important legacy in addition to his celebrated language reform. This legacy was linked to the field of ethnology in Serbia, which was still not institutionalized at the time, and it proposed that folklore could serve as a tool for determining national boundaries. In doing so, he paved the way for further, integrated ethnographic and folklore data gathering in Serbia which continued well into the 20th century.

Paper Abstract:

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić was an exceptional man of his times: a language reformer, a translator, a folklorist, ethnographer, a chronicler of the First and Second Serbian Uprising against Ottoman Empire, and above all, a tireless fieldworker. In his efforts to emancipate Serbian folk culture from the stigma of inferiority and backwardness, he travelled across the Western Balkans collecting oral traditions – from epic poetry, myth and fairy tales to ritual and social practices – of uneducated and illiterate Serbian peasantry. One of the major national figures of the Romanticist movement, he embraced the key ideas of the German counter-Enlightenment to accomplish his twofold mission: first, the adoption of traditional, patriarchal, peasant traditions as the foundation for a new, widely accessible national culture; and second, the utilization of this newly defined national culture to bring together all Serbs, divided between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, into a single nation-state. In his effort to use linguistic, ethnographic, and folklorist material for modern nation-building in the Romanticist fashion, he influenced the political - and, necessarily, theoretical - context of ethnographic and folklore research in Serbia for decades to come.