Issue 2, Vol. 110 (2023)

The changes in funeral practices in Czech society which occurred during the 20th century were more significant than those that took place during the whole of the second millennium. Traditional Roman Catholic Christian funerals which were performed at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries are described as a starting point from which the focus moves to a study of the major changes from the onwards. The first half of the 20th century was specific in the emergence of cremation. The Communist era was characterized by a huge expansion in the popularity of cremation as well as by a significant increase in the proportion of secular funerals. Contemporary Czech funeral practices can be seen as a direct continuation of those of previous generations and are noteworthy in terms both of having one of the highest cremation rates in Europe and, even more strikingly, the extraordinarily high rate of cases (around one quarter to one third) in which no funeral ceremony is held at all for the deceased

Ostrava, which used to be nicknamed the “steel heart of the republic”, was an important industrial centre during and after socialism. The city’s official visual presentation of itself during socialism was that of a happy life in an urban environment where it is already possible to catch glimpses of a glorious future facilitated by industrialization and its related transformations to the city’s everyday life and landscape. In this paper, I present a visual analysis of the official discourse about Ostrava and everyday life there. I then confront the constituent elements of this visually produced urban landscape with distinctly more ambivalent testimonies by artistic photographers from the same period. The aim is to comprehend the basic compositional elements that furnished the multilayered image of an industrial city and people’s roles there and use the two contrasting imageries of Ostrava’s urban landscape to inquire into the relationship between urban landscape and visual discourse.

The paper deals with the transformation of society and culture in totalitarianism through the example of the Czech folklore revival movement between 1948 and 1989. While describing the main objectives of communist cultural policy, the paper observes the reasons for the mass development of folk ensembles in the 1950s, the gradual transformations to their activity, and the philosophy behind it. The degree of cooperation between folk ensembles and political power, as well as the exploitation of these troupes to promote the communist regime, was varied. Politically-engagé performances by such ensembles and their participation in events organized by the totalitarian state apparatus have resulted in many Czech people adopting a negative attitude towards the folklore revival movement as a whole. In the fact most members of these ensembles were not motivated by politics – for many of them, this leisure activity was an escape from reality to the romantically viewed world of folk tradition.

This article is based on long-term field research in an Eastern Slovak Romani settlement and an English town to which Roma migrated from the settlement. The paper attempts to disrupt the bipolar approach toward the migration of Roma to England and, at the same time, to point out the transnational interconnectedness of the Romani community and the replication of inter-group boundary patterns. This dynamic approach to migration allows the authors to also consider a different phenomenon, namely, the religious conversion of Roma to Pentecostal churches. This leads to an observation of parallels in the narratives of conversion and migration, which are both based on a dichotomy of “new” and “old”, and inclusion of the phenomenon of religious conversion in the analysis of migration alongside the highlighting of transnational social networks, the acquiring of secondary social bonds, and the strengthening of local inter-group boundaries.

This study focuses on a specific type of tourism (so-called Heimattourismus), the main aim of which is to visit the countries, or better said, the localities that forcibly displaced Germans had to abandon after the end of World War II due to their forced migration, places they consider(ed) one of their ‘homes’. After the first such unofficial trips were made, it is possible to observe a gradual increase in group and individual tourism by forcibly displaced Germans to Czechoslovakia from the second half of the 1950s. In this article, we focus on one of the many subjects related to Heimattourismus, namely, Sudeten German tourists’ reflections about the local populations in their former homeland and the stereotypes constructed by them about these locals. We investigate this subject by analysing reports about such travel that were published by these forcibly displaced persons and expellees in their periodicals from the time such trips began until the mid-1960s.