Modus vivendi

My book was honoured by the first review ever! The title for being the first to review  An Ethnographic Chiefdom goes to Veronika Pehe, a Czech historian working at the Institute of Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences. She is an expert on socialism, postsocialism and Czech(oslovak) popular culture. Veronika is currently working on a research on early nineties' entrepreneurs. The title also goes to Czech Journal of Contemporary History , where the review was published. Veronika's amiable, yet thorough review summarises the central points of my book and offers some critical remarks on the viability of my approach. So, if you are looking for an extended summary of my book written by a human reader, visit https://sd.usd.cas.cz/corproofs.php .

  This year, I was in the process of finishing my first book ever. As a newbie to book-writing, I learned a valuable lesson – a finished manuscript is just a first step. Several additional and burdensome steps lurk on the path to the final publication. As the more seasoned among you can vividly imagine, my 2024 was full of multiple rounds of editing and proofing. I also decided to to create the index myself. As a devout book lover and inspired by the wonderful Index, A History of the , I just had to. However, I will gladly hire a professional indexer the next time. In addition to my book-writing duties, I devoted the latter half of summer to prepare two courses for my autumn teaching duties. Sadly enough, the Faculty of Arts at Charles University does not offer its first-time lecturers paid time so that they can prepare in advance. Precarity, here I come! The rumour has it that at least at certain faculties of Masaryk University in Brno, you get paid several months before your teac...

It has not been long since I stumbled across Fabian's all time anthropology classic. Time and the Other . Another canonical book worthy of my attention! People talk about the book. It's commended, its author hailed. And as I hate Yetti books (in Daniel Dennett's words: "one of those books that is often cited by people who haven't read it but read about it, and think they know what is in it"), I immediatelly ordered it from my favourite trafficker in ideas. The book arrived. Pretty slim. Good. Will not take long to read. I like essay-like condensed arguments (I enjoyed Barth's Cosmologies in the Making  or Goody's The Domestication of the Savage Mind ). Not long after I had began reading it, Colin Hay's lyrics acquired a brand new meaning:  Alone between the sheets  only brings exasperation Desperation... ...produced some action and I googled the book. Ultimately, I found some consolation. So if you face ...

This summer I visited a small Bohemian village Malé Svatoňovice which is situated close to Czech-Polish borders. The village is a birthplace of one of the greatest writers, a seven-time Nobel Prize nominee (how unfortunate), Karel Čapek. Maybe you have heard about him. If you are interested,  there's a museum in the town dedicated to the works and lives of Karel and his older brother Josef.

HAU FB page shared this list of 30 essential books in anthropology compiled by AllegraLab . The original post is here . So if you are up for a round of humiliation , do not hesitate to share your ignorance. Mine is marked  in bold and makes two thirds of the list. Geertz, C., 1973,  The Interpretation of Cultures . Basic Books. Lévi-Strauss, C., 1955,  Tristes tropiques . Librairie Plon. Malinowski, B., 1922,  Argonauts of the Western Pacific . E.P. Dutton. Mauss, M., 1950[1923-24],  Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques . Presses Universitaires de France. Appadurai, A., 1996,  Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization . University of Minnesota Press. Boas, F., 1911,  The Mind of Primitive Man . MacMillan. Tylor, E.B., 1871,  Primitive Culture . John Murray. Mead, M., 1928,  Coming of Age in Samoa . William Morrow and Co. Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 1937,  Witchcraft,...

Exactly after three years I teach again! Hoooray! I have a small course called Anthropology and the supernatural at the Faculty of Humanities in Prague. The course resembles my old course which I taught back in 2014 during my unsuccessful Ph.D. I reworked my lectures and here I am. My course basically serves as an introduction for complete beginners in sociocultural anthropology. Instead of focusing on basic stuff like nature-nurture controversy, relativism-universalism issues or "What is anhtropology and how do you explain it to your grandma?" I decided to focus on the inner architecture of essential arguments and theories related to anhtropological theories of witchcraft, religion, magic or ritual. Also, I try to put less stress on biographical anecdotes (Malinowski's troubles on the Trobriand Islands, Leach's lost fieldnotes or Evans-Pritchard's WWII escapades) and hackneyed descriptions of the so-called paradigms in anthropology. Contrary to my previou...

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. ...

First I want to stress that I love Star Wars. I first saw Star Wars when I was a boy in the ninety-nineties. I watched the original trilogy on VHS cassettes with my younger brother. It was our mom who rented the cassettes from a local video rental store. Some years later I went to the cinema to see the Special Edition of The Empire Strikes Back. And I remember how eager I was to see the new trilogy at the turn of the old Millennium and at the beginning of the new one. Star Wars became an essential part of my coming of age and Star Wars are related to some of my nicest memories from my teenage years. I am not the one who agrees with what Queen sing in their Bicycle Race: “and I don’t like Star Wars” (although Queen has also been my favourite band for a damn long time). This December, I will be there too. But what I have witnessed during last days shocked me a lot. The release of the second teaser trailer became a monstrous event. Sure, teasers and trailers are an insepar...

The world of fantasy as we know it, lies in tatters. Heroes are dead whilst crows are feasting on their corpses. George R. R. Martin stepped over every possible line that demarcated what had been known as the genre of fantasy. Is it possible to save the world of fantasy from ever-pervading irony? Is it possible for the world of fantasy to reborn? Martin deliberately began with Eddard Stark, a typical high-fantasy character, who was cast in a medieval-like setting typical for the genre. Unfortunately for Eddard, a lot had changed in the world of fantasy. Virtuous characters like Aragorn, Ged or Conan are not rewarded for their deeds anymore - their virtue is the cause of their downfall. Eddard’s devotion to the old ways not only caused his death but also brought war and unstability to the Seven Kingdoms. Sure, you may say that Eddard acted like a true hero and followed his fantastical-categorical imperative. Yet can you see the consequences? Not only Martin changed our perceptio...