Modus vivendi

Wenceslas square In the last few days there appeared two videos on Youtube. The first video was recorded by a tourist in Prague. In it a police officer is playing a song called River Flows in You by the famous Korean composer Yiruma on a piano. Without any exaggeration, this video symbolizes the modern and progressive side of Prague, the capital and the biggest city of the Czech Republic. This Prague is full culture life, it is full of stylish cafés and restaurants offering high-quality food and drinks for very reasonable prices. It is full of smiling waiters and waitresses. It is this Prague in which police officers seem to have a cultivated taste. And there are pianos on the streets (and nobody stole any of them yet). The second of the two videos is also from Prague. It shows a taxi-driver using a turbo meter hidden under a gear lever. This epitomizes what I hate about Prague – cafés and restaurants not cleaned since the fall of Communism, disdainful waiters and...

I have not uploaded a post for couple of months so I decided to write a short post about what currently occupies me. My blog is not dead, not yet! First of all, I work on a paper for the annual conference of AntropoWeb which will be held in Pilsen from 17 to 19 October this year. My paper will be about my experience with studying anthropology at the Durham University. To be honest the word “work” is far from being true - I have not started yet. But I will start... soon. Do not worry if you are unable to take part, the subsequent article will be in English. Secondly, I work on a paper about the famous anthropologist, all-star intellectual who helped a vast public make sense of the human condition (in Robert Darnton’s words), Clifford Geertz. I have been engaged with Geertz’s theory since wrote my first really academic article. In that article I argued that Geertz’s theory of religion contributes little to our understanding of religion and that very similar framework for studyi...

In 1992 the University of Cambridge decided to award Jacques Derrida, the famous French philosopher, a honorary degree. A letter of protest followed. It was written by Barry Smith then editor of the journal Monist  and it was signed by philosophers from all around the world. Among those who signed the letter were Willard van Orman Quine and Wolfgang Röd. The letter and a subsequent discussion epitomize one of the key issues in the twentieth century philosophy - a rift between analytic and continental philosophy. After all the University of Cambridge decided to award Derrida the degree. But even if Derrida had not received the degree, the debate can be understood as a stimulating and interesting lesson in philosophy. It is not without interest that John R. Searle, a longstanding opponent of Derrida (e.g. their disagreement over the interpretation of Austin’s speech acts or over the importance of writer’s intentions), did not sign the letter of protest. Something seemingly ...

I have just recently finished reading of another book about my favorite topic - mythology. This time it was a book by an American existentialist psychologist Rollo May (1909-1994) called The Cry for Myth  and which was published in 1991. Since I do not know much about psychology, I was not sure if I would be able to understand the book. But I must admit that the book turned out to be a big surprise. The book is divided into two major parts. The first part is theoretical. In it, May presents some ideas about the nature of myth and mythology. I did not enjoy this part much because it is based on a very eclectic theoretical approach. He quotes two different Malinowski’s ideas about the nature of myth - once, myth serves deep moral cravings, for the second time, it enforces morality. May then quotes Jung and says that myths express the deep collective unconscious and immediately after this he quotes Lévi-Strauss for whom “the myth describes lived experience”. And finally Ma...

It has been two weeks since the first episode of the third season of TV series Game of Thrones  was aired. I became interested in GoT  in 2011 during the first season. Since the time, I have seen the complete first season, some episodes from the second and the first two episodes of the third. Since I prefer reading to watching, I was dragged to George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire  on which the ongoing series is based. As I am not a native speaker of English and I have other work to do, I have been able to read the first two volumes only - Game of Thrones  and A Clash of Kings . Many people who like fantasy say that they like the George R. R. Martin’s saga, because it is an unusual piece of fantasy. The book is rich of many different and interesting characters, and the narrative does not seem to fit the cut-and-dried struggle of the good against the evil, the cornerstone of any classic fantastic story which we know from the works of J. R. R. Tolki...

Couple of weeks ago I accidentally ran into one book in the Bill Bryson library. I was looking for some anthropological books about myth and religion when I spotted a spine with the title saying: Four Theories of Myth in the Twentieth-Century History . I do not usually borrow books at random from a library, but I made an exception for this one, because after I skimmed through it, I decided that it was worth reading. The book was written by an American scholar Ivan Strenski and published in 1987. I have never heard of Mr. Strenski before, however, his book turned out to be a really good one. The book is about four major thinkers on the field of myth in the twentieth century: Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, historian of religion Mircea Eliade, and two famous anthropologists - Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Ivan Strenski gives his readers some basic ideas about all four theories, and he also places them in their historical context. For example, Strenski t...