Ethnic symbols and migrations. Serbian communities in USA and Canada

The book/monograph entitled Ethnic Symbols and Migrations, Serbian Communities in USA and Canada is based on an analysis of until then rare material collected on the field researches conducted in the period between 1984 and 1985, and then on processing and interpretation of the archive collections and systematized verbal and written sources, which opened a new field of emigration anthropology or anthropology of diaspora as it is also called

Ethnic Symbols and Migrations 27in some circles nowadays. Therefore, the main topics of the book are emigration and identity processes viewed from a constructivist angle, interpretations of ethnic identity stratification important for shaping various social groups, for association, approximations, differentiations and presenting emigrant communities, i.e. presenting a broad spectrum of interactions between emigrants. The passage of thirty years’ time has shown that, although articles were published in the 1990s as well, the ethnological work on this topic has in fact never been finished and that it has been waiting for a view from a distance. The sociopolitical context of the research work then and now has undergone certain changes in considering the micro- and macro-ethnological research discourse. The chapters in this book have been classified to analytical units, in accordance with the issues, such as studying the ethnic identity, immigration policies of the USA and Canada, immigrant communities in the USA and Canada, and symbolisation and mythologisation of ethnicity. This book is more of a comparative study than a typical monograph, owing precisely to the alternating course of presentation and the insight it provides into the two immigration societies – that of the USA and that of Canada, that is, the differences and similarities of their migration processes.

Miroslava Lukić Krstanović, Mirjana Pavlović