East-Central Europe is a region forged in diversity, but redrawn as largely ethnonational after 1918. Historically, many people mixed dialects and languages with ease, without fully pledging ‘national’ adherence; others still blended regional affiliations, religious adherence, and secular or dynastic affiliations. So how do we account for such hybrid identities, some of which still exist today in the region in different forms?
Jan Fellerer and Robert Pyrah (University of Oxford) and Marius Turda (Oxford Brookes University) offer fascinating insights into how people’s identities have been manipulated from the outside, are seen from the inside, and practiced in daily life, and propose the term ‘sub-cultures’ to help account for them being different from mainstream ‘minority/majority’ identities.
