Modus vivendi

1. Lost his fieldnotes, yet wrote a monograph that anthropologist love to read even after more than sixty years since its publication. 2. Became known even outside anthropology.  Political Systems of Highland Burma  appeared in  Autumn Ball , a famous 1979 novel by Estonian writer Mati Unt. 3. Expressed an opinion that Frazer’s Golden Bough  was actually a gilded twig. 4. Called Clifford Geertz a theologian disguised as a professor of anthropology (and seems to have suggested that Geertz was a major novelist also). 5. Took the label “positivist” as a compliment. 6. Spoke of his fellow colleagues as of mere butterfly collectors. 7. Revolutionized British anthropology by dragging Lévi-Strauss across the Channel. 8. Was surprised to find that so many people attended Lévi-Strauss’s 1965 Huxley Memorial Lecture, because only Leach himself (and maybe a few others in UK) understood Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. 9. Wrote that Melford Spiro’s anthropological a...

Postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, interpretive turn, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian Marxism, Bourdieu, anthropology of post-Socialism, Saussurean semiotics, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, Žižek, strong programme, Foucault, Nigel Thrift, Jacques Lacan, hermeneutics, Graeber, anarchistic (or anarchist?) anthropology, ontological turn, Strathern (but which one?), non-human anthropology, Kristeva, cognitive anthropology, cyborg anthropology, Merleau-Ponty, perspectivism, anthropology of landscape, political theory, Latour, actor-network theory, Sahlins waiting for Foucault, Latour, STS, Peirce's semiotics, who-the-f**k-cares anthropology, merological anthropology, phylogenetic analysis of culture, ethnomethodology, symmetric anthropology (of asymmetries!), phenomenological anthropology, ethical turn, Descola, theory of practice, dark anthropology, Anti-Latour, marxist hermeneutics, Foucault not coming anthropological anthropology, Heidegger, m...

Před pár týdny na DVTV vyšel rozhovor Daniely Drtinové s Mnislavem Zeleným, známým také pod indiánským jménem Atapana. Pro média je Atapana takový vděčný rebel, který té naší moderní civlizaci nastavuje zrcadlo. Nikdo bychom sice bez našich civlizačních výdobytků (třeba ty internety, ajfouny, Prigl, Feri a tekoucí horká voda) nepřežili víc jak dva dny, ale cosi se v nás hne, když slyšíme o tom, že někde na této zeměkouli ještě žije civilizací nezkažený domorodý kmen, který je schopný bez civlizačních výdobytků přežít a ještě je mnohem šťastnější než my. To ví přeci každý, že takový ušlechtilý divoch se nehoní za movitými statky, může celý den chytat lelky ve stínu palmoví, netrpí civilizačními chorobami a po čtyřicítce ho neklepne pepka kvůli krachu na akciovém trhu. Paroubkovsky řečeno: “Kdo z vás to má!?” Asi je to stará dobrá česká závist. Já totiž na rozdíl od Mnislava Zeleného jakožto vystudovaný sociokulturní antropolog svůj domorodý kmen nemám. Akademické okolí m...

The conference I attended and had written about earlier was odd. It was supposed to be an international conference but the only speaker from abroad was an Estonian Ph.D. candidate, Kaisa Kulasalu. Also, the conference was a witness to a real powerpoint hell - black letters on a dark background. But the colours did not matter. The letters were too small anyway. On the other hand I learned a lovely joke from Juraj Podoba about the current politics in Slovakia - Never make jokes on Boris Kollár, because he might be your children’s father . Self-censorship and continuity The best thing about the conference was its international element, Kaisa. After the conference she sent me her article titled  Immoral Obscenity: Censorship of Folklore Manuscript Collections in Late Stalinist Estonia . The article is basically about censorship of folklore collections in Estonia between 1945 and 1952. After Estonia became a socialist country, censors blackened some parts, glued paper over some p...

Czech students are divided by their teachers into two groups. Those who can write well and those who cannot. The first group does not need any further guidance, the second group does not deserve any time to be wasted on them. Regardless of what group you belong to, this post will tell you all you wanted to know about academic writing. My impression is that this side of becoming an academic is rather underestimated at Czech universities. There are suspiciously too many students who dislike writing and a considerable amount of those who are compulsive writers. This is too bad for the discipline. Either you have nothing to say, or you speak too much so that by the time you finish reading your paper, half of the lecture room is away and the other half deep asleep. I cannot deny myself a small comparison from my current work in domain-name dispute-resolution . While foreign panellists produce short, yet explicit decisions where nothing important is missing, Czech panellists like to...

Scroll down for the Czech version On Thursday this week I took part in a discussion wonderfully organized by students from Department of Ethnology at Charles University. The topic of the discussion was ethnology, its methods and aims. There were two key speakers - both distinguished Czech ethnologists. Since anthropology has been one of the main rivals of local ethnology, the discussion slid into a debate about differences between the two. Some participants expressed their distrust of social and cultural anthropology. There were many arguments, but I would like to focus on only one of them: Since the publication of Writing Culture  (in 1986), anthropology has been rather immersed in the inner self of the anthropologist’s subjectivity rather than interested in the outside world, and that nothing worth reading, maybe except for one book, has been published in anthropology! For all those who agree with this opinion and ostentatiously show their ignorance I have a list ...

Hooray! My first conference attendance related to my current Ph.D. project will take place on 17 and 18 March. It will be a conference jointly organized by three institutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The name is Between State Plan and Research Freedom and the conference will aim to cover Central European ethnography and ethnology during four decades of socialism. My paper is called  Imported tradition: A Challenge or a threat and it will cover the first years after the Velvet Revolution. True, the topic is temporally outside of the scope of the conference, but I hope that I will be able to show how ethnography during socialism influenced the post-socialist attempts to establish anthropology in Czech academia. More information about the conference can be found  here . It is a pity that the summaries have not been published yet (I added mine below). Anyway, I was placed in a panel with Zdeněk Nešpor and Juraj Podoba as co-panellists. Both men are qui...

After my last hate-entry from April 2015 about Star Wars (my estimation was not really far from the truth so to say), I decided to turn my blog to a research one. Things went in an unexpected direction and beginning with September last year I am a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology once again. As we say here - old love never rusts.  After my failed attempt at a Ph.D., I could not resist the temptation and I am head over heels with anthropology again. To be honest, I never gave it up during my hiatus after my previous Ph.D had unsuccessfully ended. But this time there are deadlines. There is one more change. I am not in Pilsen anymore. This time I am at the Charles University in Prague. The Erasmus year I spent in Durham (UK) as a part of my previous Ph.D. turned out to be more subversive than I had expected. You can read an article summing up my experience (hence the  title and the label Švejkian anthropology). This finally brings me to the topic of my current Ph.D. ...