A few remarks on academics turning their coats

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 passages or tore out entire pages from fieldwork notes, books and archives of Estonian folklorists.

Stupid Commies, one wants to cry out. But the fact is that the people who did the censorship were the very same folklorists who worked as folklorists in pre-socialist Estonia. History has a particular sense of irony, does it not?

With this on mind, read a following passage from Kaisa’s article:

Although compulsory references to the Marxist classics appeared, the study questions did not differ a lot when compared to the pre-World War II period (Valk 2010: 567). Notwithstanding this, some of the topics could no longer be studied, for instance, folk religion was left out of the researech questions... (p. 68)

This reminded me of an earlier article by David Scheffel and Josef Kandert from 1994. The authors argued that Czechoslovak folklorists and ethnographers had turned their coats after the Communist coup d'état in 1948 and remained in academia without further difficulties. Yes, they had to pay lip-service to Soviet Marxism, but they basically were the same people with the same standards of their work who unaffected by the coup remained in their chairs.

At the end of their article, Scheffel and Kandert express scepticism: It is therefore questionable whether the disintegration of communism alone will provide sufficient impetus for the hoped for transformation to western-style ethnography (p. 22). I wonder how much right they were in their assessment. I hope that my research will throw some light on it.

At the current stage of my research it seems that some features of academic work evince a great deal of resilience. Taken from this point of view, the 1948 coup and the 1989 revolution do not seem to have been total events that radically changed the Czechoslovak society and it seems that there has been a marked continuity with the past.

A sigh of resignation

It seems that Estonian and Czechoslovak ethnography and folklore studies trod similar paths. But questions arise. For example, why Estonia, not only a former socialist country, but also a former part of the Soviet Union, seems to have tackled better than the Czech Republic its post-Socialist heritage. Archivists and folklorists are quoting Fouçault and Bourdieu there and students learn how to create powerpoint preseentations.


Sources

K. Kulasalu: “Immoral Obscenity: Censorship of Folklore Manuscript Collections in Late Stalinist Estonia.” In Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, Vol. 7 (1), 2013, pp. 65-81.

D. Scheffel & J. Kandert: "Politics and Cultre in Czech Ethnography". In Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 67 (1), 1994, pp. 15-23.