Lessons from the Selective Adaptation of Ottoman Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Balkans

Abstract

The article examines how Ottoman intangible cultural heritage persists in the Western Balkans through a process we term selective adaptation. This process entails the retention of particular cultural fragments alongside the simultaneous denial of their imperial origins. Although nation-building projects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries framed the Ottoman past as antithetical to European modernity, many of these practices endured in everyday life – in language, cuisine, aesthetics, and social customs. Despite the programmatic suppression of their genealogy, these elements did not disappear over time; instead, they were reclassified as “authentic” national culture. The paradox we highlight lies in the fact that these very elements now serve to shape contemporary representations of the difference between Balkan nations and Europe. Official heritage protection regimes, including UNESCO’s framework for intangible cultural heritage, inadvertently reinforce this process by encouraging states to “purify” and ethnicize hybrid cultural forms. We further consider how the Balkans illuminate a broader post-imperial pattern identified in comparative research in anthropology and related disciplines, in which authenticity is not restored but produced. Selective adaptation thus offers a conceptual framework for understanding how cultural memory, political identity, and European aspirations are interpreted, negotiated, or rejected – both within the region and beyond it – where heritage becomes a site of encounter between aspirations toward Europeanization, on the one hand, and fears of cultural disappearance, on the other.