EN
The article aims at analysing the collective bovarism in (post)colonial studies. The term “bovarism” was coined at the turn of 19th and 20th c. by Jules de Gaultier as one of the main assumptions of his idealistic philosophy. It refers to a man’s innate ability to imagine oneself different from real, which can be manifested alike at individual and collective level. Thus, the collective bovarism, inseparably tied to the process of evolution, is characteristic of numerous societies all over the world. The article focuses on the discussions about the various approaches to the collective bovarism as based on the analysis of the texts by Arnold van Gennep, who researched it in Liberians, Jean Price-Mars (in Haitians), Frantz Fanon (in Martinicans), as well as on discerning the similarities between the collective bovarism and Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of mimicry.