Here follows the abstracts (cf. Balkan Studies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9) of Christian Marchetti (Tübingen): 19th-century Austrian Ethnography’s Discovery of the Proximate Other and its Legacy Today

The dichotomy between the exploration of the distant colonial primitive other and the discovery of the peasant as the nation’s »other within« provide a central divide in the historiography of the institutionalization of the anthropological sciences. In this ambivalent process Austrian ethnography was a borderline case. For ethnographic travellers as for aspiring scholars of all anthropological disciplines the proximate Balkans were a productive field of research. As the empire projected its powers into the same space, scientific "discovery" and military conquest often went hand in hand.