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I don't know if I'm wrong (maybe I am because I never heard anybody debating over it) but I am from Croatia and I found really interesting phenomena regarding people from Serbia - I think that circa after Balkan wars in early 1990's their facial expressions look drastically different. When I watch some movies and TV shows from communist period of Yugoslavia, their faces look somewhat neutral for me, they look like regular people in our area, but those same people and people who were born after early 1990's look like ones for which you could easily point "he or she is from Serbia" when you look at him or her. First I thought maybe it has something to do with the fact that they are getting older, so naturally their looks change, but I found that even older people from Serbia back in the day didn't look like the ones today.
P.S. Maybe I0m not capable for judging Croatia people because I am from Croatia, but for me they generally look the same back in the day and now.
More on that, I found that British people also have typical facial expressions.
Not quite sure what you are trying to ask. Genetic traits shared by a population of isolated people can become more common or pronounced over generations because those people can end up becoming more and more closely related. Now that its so much easier for humans to travel between populations those traits can be diluted as new arrivals get mixed in. At some point, the scale of locality matters. A state? Region? Nation? Continent?
There's a big difference between facial "expressions" (which often are products of individual habit over time) or mannerisms and the permanent physical features one is born with (as influenced by the inherited shape of bony structure underneath). There could also be cultural aspects to some facial expressions too.
Then of course an observer can always bring their own personal bias into it...because assumptions and stereotypes about people from different cultures or locations are easy to make. We should remind ourselves that stereotypes are often not reality.
Last edited by Parnassia; 08-19-2021 at 03:38 PM..
If this only applies to Serbians I would be a bit skeptical that maybe my own perception had changed. But, on the other hand, look at Americans — from a huge variety of ancestry and ethnic backgrounds and they take on a similar presence or “style” of appearance. When in Europe, I can usually spot an American.
My Croatian language teacher (I took a formal class at the Croatian Cultural Center in San Pedro) was absolutely positive she could tell a Serbian woman from a Croatian woman based on physical features alone (and not just from language variances, i.e. lepa/ljepa, hleb/kruh). She actually said that all she needed to see was the woman's leg from the knee down and she could tell you which ethnicity she was. I never took her up on her assertions.
Having lived in the area for several years and having spent lots of time in Vojvodina/Slavonija/Dalmacija, you get the sense of some physical traits that are more commonly seen in one population than in the others. Slope of outer eyes on men's faces was something I observed. But I wouldn't swear to anything. The fact is there has been so much intermarrying.
As far as changes after the Balkan wars...everyone's facial expression changed (the ones that I knew). I'm not going to go into the details, because it was an atrocious war and barbaric things happened. I lost several members of my family, and in most cases specifically because of their ethnicity. Those who are younger and were from the next generation are probably not as war-wizened in their countenance, thankfully.
I don't know if there is a name for this, but people will be able to tell apart people from neighboring countries based on look alone. It's a feature of simply becoming used to those looks and the focus are on the things that make them different, even if it's very slight. Not only are people able to tell who is from what country, but also will detect almost immediately who is a local but mixed with them. This only happen with sorrounding countries.
People that aren't from there will not see the differences at first and will not be able to tell apart a, in this case, Croatian from a Serbian.
A good example are Asian peoples from Japan, South Korea, and China. They look different and once well acquainted you will be able to tell them apart simply by looking at them. They certainly can tell each other apart. People from Europe, to pick one place, in general are not able to tell these Asians apart, because to them they all look the same.
As for the other issue that you present of people's looks changing from a time when it was all one country (Yugoslavia) vs the various countries it's now, I really don't know what to think of that. I'm inclined to think that this is a fixation of your imagination, but I could be wrong and simply haven't done enough study on this potential phenomena. Generally, the predominant look in a country changes with time due to things such as immigration, mixing, etc. Humanity also continue to evolve, so perhaps there are new groups of people forming. That, however, takes place over many generations and that is not the case here.
I posted a photograph of my 85 year old mother onto a closed German genealogical group and the older German members were able to accurately guess her birthplace within a ~20 mile radius. It eventually led me to connect with a relative I didn't know I had.
In the Olde Days, the world was a much larger place.
I don't know about facial expressions, but I have known travelers that reported back in the USSR days those individuals could be easily recognized by their lack of laugh lines and skin damage done by alcoholism.
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