Aleksandar Bošković (born 5 June 1962) is an anthropologist with the degrees conferred by Tulane University (M.A.) and the University of St Andrews (Ph.D.). Bošković is the editor of the series "Anthropology's Ancestors," published by Berghahn Books, and a Senior Research Scientist (in Serbia referred to as Principal Research Fellow, or "naučni savetnik") at the Institute of Archaeology in Belgrade.
He wrote or edited twenty books and several hundred articles on the history and theory of anthropology, mostly from a transactionalist and comparative perspective. In 2018/19 he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Institut d'Études Avancées) in Lyon. Between October 2024 and March 2006, he received the Ulam/NAWA fellowship on "World anthropologies", based on Polish researchers like Kazimierz Moszyński, as well as his and Malinowski's former student Józef Obrębski. For this project, Bošković was based in Kraków, at the Jagiellonian University, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology.
Together with his colleague and economics professor John Hamman (Florida State University), Bošković organized a two-day conference about rationality, at the University of Lyon, on 10–11 April 2019. On 26 July 2024, with his late friend and colleague Thomas Hylland Eriksen, he convened a roundtable “(Dis)placements: anthropologies, histories, futures,” at the EASA conference in Barcelona.
Studies and early work Born in Zemun, Aleksandar Bošković studied philosophy in Belgrade Yugoslavia. At this time, he was mostly interested in the work of the leading representative of Neo-Kantianism, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), especially in his concept of myth as a symbolic form. At this time he also "discovered" philosopher Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994).
His first academic publications were about of myth and religion. Major influences were Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) and Mircea Eliade (1907–1986). Aleksandar Bošković edited Dictionary of Deities and Mythic Beings of the World (in Serbo-Croatian; co-editors were Milan Vukomanović and Zoran Jovanović), a single-volume reference work with 14 contributors, covering Non-classical Mythology. He contributed over 150 entries himself, including all the entries on Australia, Mesoamerica, Africa, the Celts, and some on the Middle East and Mesopotamia (Baal, Gilgamesh, Ziusudra), and India (Ganesha, Parvati, Rudra, Shiva). Several years later, Bošković revisited some of his earlier work on myths, in the edited book in Serbo-Croatian, which included some of the important articles written by Joseph Campbell, Beatriz de la Fuente, David Grove, Mircea Eliade, David L. Miller, Milan Vukomanović, and Alan Watts.
Some of Bošković's works focused on ancient Mesoamerican religions (especially Classic Maya and Mexican/ Aztec). In 1990, Bošković went to Tulane University in New Orleans to study anthropology with Munro S. Edmonson [1924–2002]. His research in Guatemala in 1991 was primarily motivated by the interest in Classic Maya ceramics, but this interest gradually waned, mostly due to Bošković's dissatisfaction with the then-dominant "direct historical approach" in Mesoamerican studies and the tendency by some anthropologists to use material from looted sites. He continued to occasionally review books about Mesoamerica, especially for the journal Anthropos. Bošković kept in touch with several prominent Maya archaeologists, including Richard E. W. Adams (1931–2015), an American archaeologist who taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who influenced him with his general perspective and methodological rigor; as well as Claude-François Baudez (1932–2013), the leading French Mayanist at the time, from the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). The interest in Mesoamerica was revisited in a book published by Archaeopress in 2017, Mesoamerican Religions and Archaeology. The book includes a number of review essays, including chapters on The Meaning of Maya Myths, Aztec Great Goddesses, and ways of interpreting the Codex Borbonicus (or Codex Cihuacoatl).
Bošković defended his M.A. thesis (supervised by Munro S. Edmonson), "William Robertson Smith and the Anthropological Study of Myth," at Tulane University in April 1993. William Robertson Smith remained part of his interest, present in his courses on myth and religion, culminating in the biography, published by the Berghahn Books.
In September 1993 he entered the Doctoral studies program in the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of St Andrews in Scotland. This move was motivated by the interest in contemporary anthropology, combined with the interpretive approach, to which he came through the influence of Clifford Geertz (1926–2006). In St. Andrews, Aleksandar Bošković was first supervised by Ladislav Holý (1933–1997), who proved to be a major influence, with his version of methodological individualism. Following Holý's illness, Bošković was supervised by Nigel J. Rapport, and defended his Ph.D. thesis (Constructing Gender in Contemporary Anthropology) on 1 November 1996. The external examiner of the thesis was Professor Dame Henrietta Moore, and the internal examiner was Professor Joanna Overing. The ethnographic part of the thesis focused on the feminist groups in Slovenia. Methodologically, some of the conclusions were influenced by Ladislav Holý's critical interpretative approach, as well as by Marilyn Strathern's and Henrietta L. Moore's anthropology of gender – especially considering gender as a social and cultural construct.
While in St Andrews, he met a brilliant linguist in the Department of Social Anthropology, Sándor G. J. Hervey (1942–1997) and read critical editions of Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857–1913) Cours de linguistique générale. Saussure's concept of the linguistic sign also proved to be a major influence in his work.
Human rights, identity issues, and liberal values
Aleksandar Bošković spent some years in the so-called "pro-democracy" journalism in Yugoslavia (1983–1990) and briefly worked as foreign politics editor and member of the editorial board of the Belgrade weekly magazine Student (1984/1985). During this period (1984–1990), he contributed to almost all of the major Yugoslav magazines. Aleksandar's journalistic texts and interviews dealt with political issues (he interviewed some of the former Praxis School philosophers – including Gajo Petrović, Svetozar Stojanović, and Mihailo Marković), foreign affairs, but also with cultural issues, comics and science fiction. Since 2015, he is occasionally writing for the liberal-oriented Belgrade newsmagazine Novi magazin.
From the mid-1990s, Bošković was a member of The Belgrade Circle, an "Association of Independent Intellectuals" that was opposed to nationalist policies of Serbian government, and whose members included philosopher Miladin Životić (1930-1997) and writer Radomir Konstantinović (1928-2011). Between 1996 and 2000 he was Associate Editor of the Association's journal, The Belgrade Circle Journal, for which he also translated several articles, wrote a couple of reviews, and edited a special section on different approaches and interpretations of the 1982 movie Blade Runner.
In 2006, Aleksandar Bošković briefly worked as a Program Director (in charge of transitional justice) in the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade. The interest in human rights followed on his criticism of nationalism and violence and led to his continuing collaboration with other human rights organizations in Serbia in the 1990s (like the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights). Bošković also worked for the UNDP in Belgrade on several short-term contracts, again on topics related to transitional justice. Throughout this period he has been an outspoken critic of nationalism, as well as of all other totalitarian and discriminatory practices and tendencies within Serbian society. In mid-1990s Bošković used the then-emerging concept of virtual reality to refer to the ways in which the political elites of Serbia (as well as other post-Yugoslav societies) understood the reality and the world among them. Several of his article on this topic were published in the Canadian Journal for Political Theory and widely read. The suggestion made in his writings was that the foreign observers and diplomats trying to communicate with Serbian leaders would be much more successful if they were aware of the concept of virtual reality, as the reality that the local political leaders believed in had no connection with what is usually (in everyday life) considered as real.
Following his interest in psychoanalysis, Bošković used Christopher Bollas's concept of the "fascist state of mind" to elaborate on the political and social situation in Serbia, in an essay published in the Belgrade weekly Novi magazin, on 15 June 2017. He also commented on the pervasiveness of racism in Serbian society, and the fact that it is a topic that is never discussed.
As a result of considering wider implications of the persuasiveness of nationalist-inspired thinking and ideas, Aleksandar Bošković organized a round table debate dedicated to Benedict Anderson (1936–2015), at the Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade. This was at least in part due to the influence of Bruce Kapferer. Bošković also published a paper on anthropological studies of myths and nationalism in 2013, in the oldest anthropology journal in the world, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie - as a review article of Kapferer's major book. He wrote a chapter that deals with Serbia's troubled relationship with her own past, and the inability of the country's elites to come to terms with its nationalistic past. This paper was based on a presentation from the conference held at Landskronna (Sweden), in early June 2012. The chapter's title is "Serbia and the Surplus of History: Being Small, Large, and Small Again".
Bošković also contributed an entry "Images of Gender and Sexuality in Southern Africa" for The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as (with his colleague from the Institute of Social Sciences, Suzana Ignjatović) on "Gender equality in Serbia".
Teaching and research
Bošković taught his first academic course at the University of St Andrews during the Martinmas Term of 1994 ("Mesoamerican Pre-Columbian Civilisations"), at the Honours' level. He started teaching part-time at the Faculty of Social Sciences (FDV) of the University of Ljubljana in 2000 (M.A. level courses "Contemporary Anthropology" and "Anthropology and Feminism"). However, his most important teaching experience was after he moved to the Department of Anthropology of the University of Brasília in late March 1999, where he became interested in Mariza Peirano's and Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira's (1928–2006) concept of a horizontally-structured anthropology. (This will later influence his interest in "World Anthropologies.") While in Brasília, Bošković taught courses on gender, myth, anthropological theory, Latin America, but also started to develop an interest in anthropology of Europe, as he was hired as "Visiting Professor of European Ethnology." His monograph on Mesoamerica (Mesoamerican Religions and Archaeology: Essays in Pre-Columbian Civilizations) was published by Archaeopress in January 2017.