Conference: Between State Plan and Research Freedom

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 quite well-known here, so it will be quite challenging.

If you are interested in my presentation, you will only have to get up early, because my Friday panel begins at 9:30 am... But you are welcome! Since the conference is supposed to be international, I have a version of my paper in English too. Guests from abroad were given a special language enclosure (called Session III). I suspect that there are still too many academics who are afraid of their field being penetrated by some “migrants” from abroad. Instead of intermingling, the organizers opted for separation. Sigh! But if there is at least one person attending my panel who does not speak Czech and is proficient in English, I will proceed in English.

Summary: After 1989, local ethnography struggled to adjust itself to the new post-socialist situation and to vindicate its raison d’être among other academic disciplines within Czechoslovak (and subsequently Czech) academia. Not only was ethnography’s break with the past marked with personal changes, theoretical reorientation or with repeated and later successful attempts to rename itself to ethnology. It also had to face new challenges coming from without. Sociocultural anthropology posed one of these challenges. It was imported from the West by émigrés such as Ladislav Holý or Ernest Gellner who became active in the public and academic life during that era. Moreover, first departments of anthropology were founded and first study programmes of anthropology were initiated in the first decade after the fall of communism. The aim of my paper is to explore various relationships that emerged and developed between the local tradition of ethnography and the imported tradition of sociocultural anthropology from the end of the nineteen-eighties onwards. What were reactions of ethnographers and how did they perceive sociocultural anthropology? Were they converted to anthropology, did they oppose it or did they believe that both disciplines could flourish and prosper side by side? I will try to answer these questions with the help of accounts of the very witnesses of the post-socialist transformation of ethnography.