The Czechoslovak academic discipline called 'Ethnography and Folklore Studies' was impacted and influenced by the daily realities of state socialism in 1969-1989. This book examines the role of the planned economy, Marxist-Leninist ideology, disciplinary hierarchies and clientelist networks, ultimately showing how state socialist features together brought about the discipline's epistemic stalling. It offers a fresh perspective on the long-standing debates purporting to capture the differences between the Central and Eastern European tradition of ethnology and Western sociocultural anthropology.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I

Chapter 1. Preliminaries
Chapter 2. Bourdieu in Czechoslovakia
Chapter 3. Ethnography and Folklore Studies as an Intellectual Tradition
Chapter 4. From 1948 to 1968          

Part II

Chapter 5. The Ethnographic Chiefdom
Chapter 6. Being an Ethnographer~
Chapter 7. Attitudes to Writing and the Publishing Process
Chapter 8. Epistemic Arrest and the Culture of Contention

Part III

Conclusion

Appendices
Appendix I: The Heads of Czech and Moravian Ethnography Institutions
Appendix II: Czech Translations of Anthropological Works

References
Index

Nikola BalaS is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He spent a year as an Erasmus student at the Department of Anthropology, Durham University (UK), and is a co-recipient of the SIEF Young Scholar Prize 2023.