Czech Ethnography in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. At the Crossroads of Slavic Studies, Regionalism and Heimatschutzbewegung - an Attempt at an Insight into a Seldom Researched Topic

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F68378114%3A_____%2F21%3A00555903" target="_blank" >RIV/68378114:_____/21:00555903 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Czech Ethnography in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. At the Crossroads of Slavic Studies, Regionalism and Heimatschutzbewegung - an Attempt at an Insight into a Seldom Researched Topic

Original language description

The aim of this contribution is to map the dilemmas that Czech ethnographers were facing in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. With the end of the Czech-Slovak consensus on co-existence in a common, unitary state, the étatist, and later defensive ethos of Czechoslovak ethnography of the 1930s lost its foundation and argumentation basis. Similarly, too, after the Munich Agreement 1938 and quite definitively after the Nazi occupation, the notions of unity, purity and distinctive character of the ‘Slavic’ culture of ‘Czechoslovak state nation’ faced its ideological and methodological limitations. The present study emphasizes the continuity of problems that plagued the interwar Czechoslovak ethnography, including understaffing of Czechoslovak ethnography due to limitations of university policy at Czechoslovak universities in Prague, Brno and Bratislava. The article presents an analysis of institutional and academic foundation of ethnography after the closing of Czech universities on 17 November 1939. It describes both the conceptual and personnel continuity of care for regional cultural heritage in the 1930s. It also touches upon the ambivalent nature of documentary activities of the Ethnographic Commission of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts. Alongside with the orientation on general anthropology, including its racial aspects, the activities of Czech ethnographers during the occupation tended to focus on documentation of vernacular architecture. In this regard they also joined forces with architects and urban planners on projects that linked the idea of modernization of the countryside with efforts aimed at preserving its ‘traditional’ character in the spirit of the German Heimatschutzbewegung. This direction, as well as other impulses and motifs from the Protectorate era, were then further developed in the ethnographic ‘revival’ of the second half of the 1940s, which - paradoxically enough - resonated both with ‘new Slavic policy’ after 1945 and, to some extent, even with the subsequent Sovietization of the field.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

D - Article in proceedings

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60101 - History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

Project

<a href="/en/project/GA19-03474S" target="_blank" >GA19-03474S: Evolutionalism, Nationalism and Racism in Czech and Slovak Science (1882-1948). A Dialogue between Social Science and Biology</a><br>

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2021

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Article name in the collection

Science, Occupation, War: 1939-1945. A Collective Monograph

ISBN

978-80-200-3296-6

ISSN

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e-ISSN

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Number of pages

44

Pages from-to

163-206

Publisher name

Academia

Place of publication

Praha

Event location

Praha

Event date

Oct 23, 2019

Type of event by nationality

WRD - Celosvětová akce

UT code for WoS article

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