| This dissertation examines the shifting ethnic affiliations of the extended Nikolic family of Sajevac, Croatia from 1941 to 1991. As a mixed Serb-Croat family from an ethnically mixed region of Croatia, the Nikolics shifted back and forth between Serb, Croat, and Yugoslav identities and sometimes even local and regional identities. They did this for a variety of reasons, including (but not limited to) personal gain and/or safety, changing political affiliations, community and family expectations, and in one instance youthful rebellion. Each shift had its own reason and context. Thus, instead of primordial attachments to nation or group, the Nikolics had other purely pragmatic reasons for choosing their ethnicities.; However, historians of former Yugoslavia have often portrayed ethnicity as having a fixed quality, as being assigned at birth or learned in childhood and maintained without change throughout a person's life. By doing so, they have given the primordialist impression that Serbs are always Serbs, Croats are always Croats, and that people's ethnic identifications are eternal and absolute. Such portrayals have left little room for discussions of mixed marriage or mixed ethnicity, as well as of the deeper nuances of ethnic and regional identification and ethnic choice.; Therefore, the following work is an alternative to primordialist Yugoslav history. It is based on a series of oral interviews conducted with the Nikolic family in 2000-01 in Sajevac, Croatia and Sombor, Serbia and explores the negotiated nature of ethnicity in a long-term familial context. When examined over a fifty-year period from 1941 to 1991, in times of war and peace and in various social contexts, the Nikolics reveal that in former Yugoslavia ethnic identity was dynamic and contextual and often the product of choice. |
