Ethnic identity of Goranies

Impressive preservation and maintenance of ethnic identity is the leading problem of ethnic and historical drama of Goranies. Through ethnic identity as a determination symbol, their ethnic borders and sovereignty are established. Four basic constitutive models: biological, social, existential and spiritual, which determine the ethnic community of an absolute type and special identity characterize the ethnic community of Goranies. We will try to sketch the theoretical premises in an attempt to comprehend their ethnic identity. This large and rather complex problem cannot be satisfactorily dealt with and explained if the two notions – ethnic identity and ethnic personality are not in advance clearly defined and confronted with each other because they overlap in practice. This narrow correlation is important in order to shape the picture of identity in general. Ethnic personality is a scheme of notion indicatively deduced from concrete data, which can be classified into two not very peculiar types. The first type of data originates from a directly observed behaviour held apart as something typical of the ethnic group of Goranies. Such behavior is not simply human in relation to the fact that elements of the entire possible human repertory it involves are used in a special way. The second type of actual data is connected with instantly observed verbal behavior that represents generalizations of the ethnic personality specified by informers, who behave like self-ethnographers, as De Vos and Romanucci-Ross formerly called them. When ethnic personality is consciously applied in behavior, there is an inclination to experience it as the application of that kind of the ethnic identity model which, if logically analyzed, is already infected by the ethnic personality model. In many cases, it is more difficult to recognize the rash, spontaneous actualization of a certain aspect of the ethnic personality as such than to recognize the very act by which it is consciously expressed.