Issue 1, Vol. 104 (2017)

Since the start of this decade external borders of the European Union have increasingly become sites of hardship, uncertainty, danger and death as hundreds of thousands of people every year attempt to enter Europe to escape war and poverty in North and Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. The year 2015 saw the arrival of over one million people via maritime routes, an unprecedented number that caused panic among politicians on the continent and unsettled societies of the “old” and the “new” European Union. Neo-nationalist and neo-fascist parties and movements gained significant ground. In June of 2016 voters in the United Kingdom chose to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum whose erratic consequences will continue to play out for some time to come. The migratory crisis of the previous year fuelled the “Leave” vote by creating the perception that immigration to the EU is unchecked, and that the UK must “take control of its borders.” While it is not yet known what exactly is meant by “taking control,” we can observe that as a result of these events the terms and conditions of migration, mobility and citizenship in Europe are shifting. In this talk I will argue that this is a shift away from what I call the neoliberal-humanitarian consensus towards a new model whose exact shape is as yet undetermined, but whose emergent features are illuminated by recent anthropological scholarship. Drawing on the UK case study I will show that the control of borders and regulation of mobility is undergoing a distinct anti-humanitarian turn. I will explore the significance and prospects of this new anti-humanitarianism and the possibilities of anthropological insight.

Since the start of this decade
external borders of the European Union
have increasingly become sites of hardship,
uncertainty, danger and death as hundreds
of thousands of people every year attempt
to enter Europe to escape war and poverty
in North and Sub-Saharan Africa and the
Middle East. The year 2015 saw the arrival
of over one million people via maritime
routes, an unprecedented number that
caused panic among politicians on the
continent and unsettled societies of the
“old” and the “new” European Union. Neo-
nationalist and neo-fascist parties and
movements gained significant ground. In
June of 2016 voters in the United Kingdom
chose to leave the European Union in
the Brexit referendum whose erratic
consequences will continue to play out for
some time to come. The migratory crisis of
the previous year fuelled the “Leave” vote
by creating the perception that immigration
to the EU is unchecked, and that the UK
must “take control of its borders”. While
it is not yet known what exact

The paper deals with literary texts
related to the Baroque religious pilgrimages
and it attempts to interpret them using
interdisciplinary approach the ground of
which is a literary-historical perspective,
however, which exceeds beyond into the
fields of piety history, ethnography and
cultural anthropology. The main source
is the so called pilgrimage handbooks,
books of several literary genres in one,
i.e. the historic narration, meditation,
litany and pilgrimage song. The paper
analyses about twenty of them, all dated
to the times of the major flourishing of
the collective pilgrimages (1650–1800).
They refer to various Bohemian and
Moravian pilgrimage sites (e.g. Svatá
Hora near Příbram, Stará Boleslav, Křtiny,
Hájek near Prague, Velehrad, Štramberk)
and they also include those cross the
border ones (Mariazell, Čenstochová). All
the sources have been analysed as an
instruction to perform the pious practice,
as a demonstration of performative and
prescriptive literature.

The paper presents the interpretative phenomenological analysis of the psychophysical experience of ultraendurance athletes. It is based on the ethnography of altered states of consciousness, that can be reached by the people participating in the long-distance trails. Extremely long-distance trails are interpreted as liminoid time-spaces, where Turnerian communitas is formed on the base of the intersubjectively shared experience of the otherness. The paper uses the theoretical-methodological framework of the phenomenological anthropology, with the emphasis on the Merleau-Ponty´s phenomenology of perception and bodiliness. It concludes that some of the states of consciousness reached by the ultraendurance athletes are close to a religious experience, and that, ultraendurance sports can be interpreted as re-liminalized time-spaces, as a form of secular pilgrimage. In this sense, ultraendurance sports exceed the boundaries of how the sport is usually anthropologically defined and interpreted. The paper is the result of the fieldwork among ultraendurance athletes.

The article focuses on the
constitution and the subsequent
development of the Czech ethnography
of the working class in the second
half of the 20th century. The analysis
centers especially upon the way by which
the research teams and individuals
approached the study of influence and
importance of church communities and
religious feeling of the working class.

This article will introduce so far unknown type of migration in Czech social sciences, i.e. 15 or 16 years old descendants of compatriots and other young members from compatriotic society Stromovka who migrated to Czech grammar schools in Uničov and Rychnov nad a Kněžnou while their parents stayed in Dubno (Ukraine) and decided to support them from distance. This is a kind of so called transnational family, however, researchers interested in this topic overlooked „voices“ of children due to adultcentric perspective in evaluating migration experience of children. This article have ambition to introduce children´s perspective and their migration experience and compare it with perspectives of their parents.

Antonio Machado y Álvarez (1846-1893), also known as Demófilo, was a pioneering collector and interpreter of folkloristic material from Andalusia and Spain. He wrote on popular dialects, literature, tales, sayings, music, flamenco and other expressions of popular culture. In this contribution I bring his writings of the end of the 19th century in conversation with debates at the end of the 20th century. At that moment, different readings of Demófilo, and of the Spanish folklore tradition in general, played a prominent role within an evolving anthropological discourse in and on Spain. In particular, I focus on the three related themes both in the writings of Demófilo and the commentators of the “folklore tradition” in more recent times. First, I look at the discussions over the “scientific quality” and the “subaltern” status of Spanish or otherwise regional or national anthropological traditions. Second, I discuss the relationship between cultural (identity) studies and the interplay between central and peripheral ethno-nationalisms in Spain. Finally, I reflect on the academic dispute over the differences between contributions of “foreign” and “local” scholars to the analysis of the Spanish cultural reality.

Report about the conference

review of the ethnographic film festival - Antropofest

Recenze publikace týkající se korespondence českých jezuitských misionářů v zámořských koloniích z let 1657-1741

Autobiografie Anny Kutějové sleduje přelom 19. a 20. století. Upozorňuje na společenské vztahy, kulturní události a změny dané doby v lokalitě Jasenná, doplňuje dosud známé etnografické práce zaměřené na folkloristiku, rukodělnou výrobu, lidovou stravu. Reflektuje dopad první světové války na venkovské prostředí již. Valašska.

Dieser Essay basiert auf Reflexionen über eigene Erfahrungen und den aktuellen Migrations- und Integrationsdiskurs vor dem Hintergrund der großen Zuwanderungswellen nach Öster-reich in der jüngeren Vergangenheit.