Through a peephole: Vladimír Karbusický, the secret police and the scholarly ethos in socialist Czechoslovakia

0584391 - EÚ 2024 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Balaš, Nikola
Through a peephole: Vladimír Karbusický, the secret police and the scholarly ethos in socialist Czechoslovakia.
History and Anthropology. Roč. 35, č. 2 (2024), s. 352-371. ISSN 0275-7206. E-ISSN 1477-2612
Institutional support: RVO:68378076
Keywords : state socialism * secret police * Pierre Bourdieu * field theory * Czechoslovak ethnography and folklore studies
OECD category: 6.5 Other Humanities and the Arts
Impact factor: 0.7, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02757206.2022.2060218

The main goal of the article is to expose how the Czechoslovak state socialism shaped scholarly habitus through various mechanisms, institutions and policies, especially through the intrusion of the secret police into the scholarly world. The article is informed by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and presents a case study focusing on the ethnographer Vladimír Karbusický. In the 1960s, Karbusický was under surveillance by the State Security, the secret police of the socialist Czechoslovakia. His surviving dossier from the State Security archives allows us to see precisely how exactly the actions of the State Security diminished the autonomy of the scholarly world, influenced career paths and contributed to the formation of academic habitus. At the same time, the dossier, which emerged as part of the effort of the state to maximize its control over society, can be also used as evidence of the persistence of (surviving) academic autonomy and the concomitant scholarly ethos. This suggests that the socialist state of Czechoslovakia under the hegemony of its Communist Party may have not been entirely successful in its policies to control society.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0352360