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The Czechoslovak academic discipline called ‘Ethnography and Folklore Studies’ was impacted and influenced by the daily realities of state socialism in 1969–1989. This book examines the role of the planned economy, Marxist–Leninist ideology, disciplinary hierarchies and clientelist networks, ultimately showing how state socialist features together brought about the discipline’s epistemic stalling. It offers a fresh perspective on the long-standing debates purporting to capture the differences between the Central and Eastern European tradition of ethnology and Western sociocultural anthropology.
“The book is clearly organized and the presentation maintains a high standard throughout. It is an original reappraisal of late socialist ‘ethnography’ in Prague.” • Chris Hann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
“This book is an innovative contribution to the history and theory of anthropology. It is an impressive piece of work that introduces a difficult subject in clear prose, is very well written, well composed and with a strong theoretical argument.” • Han F. Vermeulen, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Nikola Balaš is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He spent a year as an Erasmus student at the Department of Anthropology, Durham University (UK), and is a co-recipient of the SIEF Young Scholar Prize 2023.
Acknowledgements
Part I
Chapter 1. Preliminaries
Chapter 2. Bourdieu in Czechoslovakia
Chapter 3. Ethnography and Folklore Studies as an Intellectual Tradition
Chapter 4. From 1948 to 1968
Part II
Chapter 5. The Ethnographic Chiefdom
Chapter 6. Being an Ethnographer~
Chapter 7. Attitudes to Writing and the Publishing Process
Chapter 8. Epistemic Arrest and the Culture of Contention
Part III
Conclusion
Appendices
Appendix I: The Heads of Czech and Moravian Ethnography Institutions
Appendix II: Czech Translations of Anthropological Works
References
Index