Číslo 2, roč. 106 (2019)

This study deals with the Czech and Moravian manuscript hymn books from the 17th and 18th century. It summarizes the existing research and describes the most important manuscripts. Some of the hymnals are accompanied by musical notation and a large number of them are beautiful illuminated. The manuscript hymnography is one of the richest sources for an understanding of the folk culture and singing in the 17th and 18th century. The manuscripts were relatively independent of the printed hymn-books and were close to orality.

The aim of this paper is to inquire into possibilities of recourse to personal ads as a source of cultural-anthropological research. Specifically, it proposes an analysis of a corpus of over 500 such ads, published in 1931–1934 in a magazine of the Czechoslovak homosexuals minority, the Voice of the Sexual Minority. It proposes to approach these very short utterances as signs, an analytical work being possible only at the level of the signifiant. It also proposes to analyse some crucial expressions, repeated very often in these ads, throught the concept of an symbolic-deicitic field. In this way, the paper reaches a conclusion that sheds a new light on conceptual categories of the interwar Czechoslovak homosexual subculture, which have not yet been perceived by a classical historical research.

The article summarizes the history of keeping trees on the agricultural land in Czech lands from the beginnings of agriculture through their loss during agricultural industrialisation up to attempts to restore them in current multifunctional agriculture. It points at numerous traces of this land use and management in the czech palynological record, European iconography, 19th century tax records (Franciscan cadaster), scholar agrarian literature, photographs taken by Czech ethnographers and landscape itself. In the discussion over the results the discrepancy of record of this old cultural practice is shown alongside with the consequences that a symbolic annihilation of a certain theme in agricultural knowledge can have for the features of agricultural landscape.

This article suggests that emotional capital as an embodied form of cultural capital can be treated as a neoliberal strategy of identity. The ethnographic research is based within a community of Polish coaches and their clients (coachees). The paper argues that the identity and the status of upper middle class members are built, not only through accumulating material goods and creating beneficial social relations, but also on adopting lifestyle habits such us participating in coaching practices, in order to attain self-awareness, emotional well-being as well as the ability to manage emotions. From my analytical perspective, one can see coaching as a materialisation of neoliberal technologies of governmentality, helping to reach and tweak the cognitive-emotional dispositions that make up a form of emotional capital. Being self-aware and emotionally mature, thus more productive, becomes a key element in the upper middle class members’ production of self-image, which were effectively the objects of my research. They define themselves, as well as the members of the class they associate with, on the basis of a neoliberal logic and the discourse of psy-disciplines.

Letters and letter writing have played a formative role in the transfer of migrants from country to country and continent to continent, and sustained continuous crossings of the ocean that started in a few Moravian villages and ended in a cluster of Texas settlements. The letters in the current study detail lives of two brothers sharing news generated by daily events of the home town in Moravia, and news of farming and getting adjusted to living in Texas during the transition years of settling down and withstanding the temptation to return in 1874 to 1876 (the dialogue was maintained for twenty-two years). The dialogue is framed not only by the historical situation in Moravia and in Texas affecting migration, as captured in the letters, but also the grief that accompanied the brothers’ parting and despair over the difficulties of acculturation. The dialogue reveals uncertainty of migrating and settling down, intensity of material difficulties that accompany the process, and ways in which letters became the platform to negotiate it. Analysis of the correspondence provided answers to the questions, through what specific knowledge the letters enrich and modify our current representation of migration history to the U.S. in the era of mass migration, and in what ways they once shaped the migration discourse maintained in economically deprived regions of Moravia. The article is intended as the first part of a two-part study. Focus of Part II is the specifics of Texas integration, as documented by narratives in the letters exchanged from the 1870s to the 1890s.