This article critiques prevalent assumptions about hybridity through analysis of identity in a quintessentially “hybrid” site, the western borderlands of the former Yugoslavia. Drawing on the case of a contemporary regionalist movement embracing a hybrid identity in the Istrian peninsula, it demonstrates the ways in which the hybridity concept replicates, both conceptually and in everyday life, the logics it ostensibly opposes. It does so by revealing the mutual constitution of discourses of purity and hybridity within the context of historical state-building projects in the region. Furthermore, the analysis indicates that understandings of difference and forms of exclusion grounded in both nature and culture have long histories along the eastern Adriatic. The operation of an avowedly culturalist conception of identity that nonetheless naturalizes and territorializes/grounds culture through horticultural and vegetative imagery foreshadows the “cultural fundamentalism” identified by Stolcke as a feature of contemporary Europe. It is suggested that the Istrian case, an example from the margins of Europe, proves productive for reconsidering hidden problematics of race and hybridity both in the empirical context of Europe and on the theoretical terrain of anthropology.
