What do Czech ethnologists think about sociocultural anthropology?
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 ...