Issue 3, Vol. 106 (2019)

Odessa, as a port town, has been open to many foreign influences practically since its foundation in 1794. These would impact not only the area of economy, but also the realm of everyday culture. The character of the Odessa urban environment was therefore in many ways different from other cities of the Russian Empire at that time, and the lifestyle of its inhabitants took on a peculiar form in comparison to the rest of the empire. As a result of these specifics, Odessa became one of the first places in Tsarist Russia where modern tourism began to develop under conditions comparable to those in Western and Central Europe.

This article discusses the topic of food scarcity, hunger, and survival strategies in the context of the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. I open up the question of the role of food in the armed conflict using prevailingly the example of Srebrenica (and partially Sarajevo) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I have undertaken a long-term ethnographic fieldwork between 2013-2018. I argue that the people concentrated in the UN "Safe Area" of Srebrenica were intentionally subjected to mass starvation prior to the genocide. One of the most commonly adopted strategies against the food insecurity was food self-provisioning. In particular, I focus on the everyday strategies that emerged during the armed conflict with a focus on humanitarian aid and the consumption of wild and semi-wild plants. I am trying to show that the bio-cultural knowledge of food self-sufficiency plays an important role in increasing the individual survival chance in times of overall material scarcity and starvation.

The progress of JZD Slušovice, one of the best-performing cooperatives in socialist economy, was linked to the high performance of its employees. In the article, from the point of the Luhman’s social system theory the cooperative is viewed as a social self-organized system, which differentiated from the environment, representing the socialist economy, through work-related decisions of employees. According to the theory, the author assumes that the premises are continual as structures of the employees’ collective memory. Her aim is to generalize undecidable decision premises in attitudes toward work from narratives that were talked by the employees. As analytic tools was used structural narrative analyses focusing on the evaluation of work experience events. As a result two following premises were generalized from several categories of evaluated events, here called as evaluation variables: ‘to find a job according to skills’ and ‘it was essential to perform the task’.

Based on a detailed excerption of manuscript and printed sources, we map
the strategies of spreading and worshiping the cult of the Jesuit patron
St. Francis Xavier in expressions of local piety. On the example of the
Tertianship House in Telč, we observe the forms of reverence, how the
cult of St. Francis Xavier was accented within the Order (Xavierian festi-
vities – e.g. ceremonies connected with his feast or the anniversary of his
canonization, and theatre plays), as well as how it was promoted outside
the Order’s community (e.g. the establishment of the pilgrimage site in
Knínice near Telč, Stations of the Cross, special devotions, pious pere-
grinations, granting indulgences). Using the ‘miraculous looks’ recorded
in the Jesuit annual reports and in the history of the Jesuit Province, we
present a reflection on St. Francis Xavier as a holy doctor and protector
not only in the times of plague.

This study deals with the situation of rural masters in Moravia based on the example of a tailor and cobbler guild founded in Šlapanice in 1834. The author analyses different means of dependency of the rural masters on their home guild, the problems that were linked to this dependency, and the reasons for founding a new guild. This study also shows guild life in Moravia during the 19th century and all that was connected to it.

Report about the 40th AIW.

report about the 3rd year of the conference