Czech Ethnography in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. At the Crossroads of Slavic Studies, Regionalism and Heimatschutzbewegung - an Attempt at an Insight into a Seldom Researched Topic

0555903 - ÚSD 2022 RIV CZ eng C - Konferenční příspěvek (zahraniční konf.)
Ducháček, Milan
Czech Ethnography in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. At the Crossroads of Slavic Studies, Regionalism and Heimatschutzbewegung - an Attempt at an Insight into a Seldom Researched Topic.
Science, Occupation, War: 1939-1945. A Collective Monograph. Praha: Academia, 2021 - (Šimůnek, M.), s. 163-206. 1938-1953, 41. ISBN 978-80-200-3296-6.
[Science, Occupation, War: 1939–1945. Praha (CZ), 23.10.2019-25.10.2019]
Grant CEP: GA ČR(CZ) GA19-03474S
Institucionální podpora: RVO:68378114
Klíčová slova: ethnography * Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
Obor OECD: History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

The aim of this contribution is to map the dilemmas that Czech ethnographers were facing in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. With the end of the Czech-Slovak consensus on co-existence in a common, unitary state, the étatist, and later defensive ethos of Czechoslovak ethnography of the 1930s lost its foundation and argumentation basis. Similarly, too, after the Munich Agreement 1938 and quite definitively after the Nazi occupation, the notions of unity, purity and distinctive character of the ‘Slavic’ culture of ‘Czechoslovak state nation’ faced its ideological and methodological limitations. The present study emphasizes the continuity of problems that plagued the interwar Czechoslovak ethnography, including understaffing of Czechoslovak ethnography due to limitations of university policy at Czechoslovak universities in Prague, Brno and Bratislava. The article presents an analysis of institutional and academic foundation of ethnography after the closing of Czech universities on 17 November 1939. It describes both the conceptual and personnel continuity of care for regional cultural heritage in the 1930s. It also touches upon the ambivalent nature of documentary activities of the Ethnographic Commission of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts. Alongside with the orientation on general anthropology, including its racial aspects, the activities of Czech ethnographers during the occupation tended to focus on documentation of vernacular architecture. In this regard they also joined forces with architects and urban planners on projects that linked the idea of modernization of the countryside with efforts aimed at preserving its ‘traditional’ character in the spirit of the German Heimatschutzbewegung. This direction, as well as other impulses and motifs from the Protectorate era, were then further developed in the ethnographic ‘revival’ of the second half of the 1940s, which - paradoxically enough - resonated both with ‘new Slavic policy’ after 1945 and, to some extent, even with the subsequent Sovietization of the field.
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0330360