I picked up Robert D. Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts to read up a bit on the region in advance of a planned trip. I'm going to DNF it because it's filled with ethnographic phrenology. Here's a typical excerpt, with the author attempting to divine the psychological makeup of an entire ethnic group based on a single vignette, in this case viewing a fresco of John the Baptist in the Gračanica Monastery.

One could perhaps forgive the use of words like "oriental" in a book published in the 1890s, but this book was somehow published in the 1990s.

#reading #balkans #racism