Issue 1, Vol. 107 (2020)

Anthropological and legal literatures often claim that the anthropology of law is a boundary discipline between anthropology and law (or rather the legal sciences). From this point of view, the clear and unambiguous dividing line is a fundamental prerequisite for unproblematic interdisciplinary collaboration between social anthropologists and legal scholars and for the combination of ethnographic data with legal analysis. This article, on the other hand, recalls that in terms of the historical genesis of law-related disciplines, the relationship between the (social) anthropology and modern ontology of law embodied in the legal sciences, is entirely different. In particular, social sciences, and social anthropology in particular, have established themselves as reflexive empirical disciplines by continually transcending the spatial and temporal limits of modern legal ontology, with the anthropology of law and its predecessor, the historical school of law, playing a key role in this formative process. The anthropology of law, as a distinctive scientific orientation which understands law as a question of the other, is ontologically homogenous with anthropology and the social sciences, but heterogeneous with the legal sciences, though its historical origins also stem from them. Its specific position is itself a reminder of the historically born heterogeneity of the cognate normative and social sciences.

This article is an ethnographic exploration of doctors’ responses to the 1997 healthcare reform in Poland. Based on research carried out among practitioners working in Podstawowa Opieka Zdrowotna (POZ, “Basic Healthcare”), which was established in 1997 and opened up to the market, I demonstrate the newly emerged doctors` self-identification – “the expanded doctor”. Following Elizabeth Dunn`s and Asta Vonderau`s ethnographies of post-socialist reconstructions, I examine how POZ practitioners became “expanded doctors”, and what particular elements constitute this novel and liberal self-definition. Based on Eliane Riska and Aurelija Novelskaite’s description of practitioners` experiences of transforming from a planned economy to a world composed of “four logics”, I analyse the entrepreneurial face of the doctors` self-identification, their attachment to private ownership, and the cult of liberal capitalism.

The term “medical pluralism” is often used to describe the coexistence of different medical traditions based on different principles or worldviews in a society. The paper starts with a discussion on the concept of medical pluralism, introduced for the first time by Charles M. Leslie, then presents a theoretical framework of the exclusive medical model, which recognizes only one legal system of medicine. The author then considers folk medicine and psychotronic activities, as well as describes and analyses the healthcare situation that existed during the socialist period in former Czechoslovakia, which at a first sight seems to have been characterized as a monopoly concerning the practice of medicine, and compares it with the contemporary pluralistic situation that emerged in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the “Velvet Divorce” in 1993. The paper concludes by stating that government attitudes toward the existence of non-biomedical practices have undergone different development stages. In turn, it is acknowledged that the investigation of medical pluralism in Central European countries must deal more comprehensively with political and ideological history in the context of healthcare.

The paper presents preliminary results of analysis of less-known collection of Czech self-taught ethnographer František Řehoř. The collection is related to eastern Galicia and Bukovyna (parts of Austro-Hungarian Empire) and documents traditional folk culture of Ukrainians, mostly of the last decades of the 19th century. The collection is located in Department of Ethnography of the National museum in Prague and is being analysed in cooperation of Czech ethnologists and Ukrainian art historians.

Review of a book about the role of memory, forgetting and nostalgia in the formation of landscape.