Issue 1, Vol. 99 (2012)

The summarizing study presents the research fi eld of the so called school ethnography of the body (SEB) that started to develop during the last decade. This interdisciplinary fi eld produces results that could be used in the social and cultural anthropology, sociology, social philosophy as well as in pedagogy. The introductory part of the study is dedicated to the concept of the body that is being productively handled within the frame of the SEB. Subsequently, selected concepts of the body are applied to the socio-cultural space of the school, and in the fi nal part of the study the results of partial researches within the frame of the SEB, realized so far, are presented, as well as the basic theoretical and methodological approaches.

The paper examines theoretical discourses of ethnicity and has three main objectives: (1) to categorize and compare three academic approaches towards ethnicity, nation and nationalism, (2) to identify the core distinction between ethnic and national identity, and (3) to analyze the differences between approaches through activity and objectivity of ethnicity. The traditional distinction between primordialist and modernist/situationalist approaches is enhanced by adding the ethnicist approach to the interjacent boundary. There are three core lines of distinctions between these approaches. Firstly, it is, more or less, the distinction between primordiality of ethnicity and modernity of nation, not primordiality and modernity itself, which divides the discussed approaches. Secondly, most academic theories, regardless of their background, interpret the ethnicity (nation) as situational rather than objective or subjective phenomenon. Lastly, it is the scale of activity of ethnicity (activity of individuals – components – systems) which differs among the theories.

Post-WWII geopolitical changes in Indochina and Central & Eastern Europe drastically altered the international relationships of Czechoslovakia. Vietnam became one of its partners. After the 1954 defeat of the French, the fi rst Northern Vietnamese immigrants came to Czechoslovakia. However, after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 political agreements on cultural cooperation ended, and a return migration began. Nevertheless, the reconsolidation of democracy in the successor states of Czechoslovakia did not bring to an end the long established connection, and spontaneous individual migration started. Since then thousands of persons have come, and the Czech Republic remains one of the most desirable destinations for Vietnamese migrants. This article is the result of a qualitative survey conducted among pre-1989 returnees that was carried out in Vietnam from July 2010 to February 2011. The main task of the study is to frame the migration in a broader historical and political context, and show how the consequences and organized features of pre-1989 migration have shaped the perception of Czechoslovakia and the returnees’ relationship with it.

The text summarizes the history and present state of the ethnocartographic research in the Czech Lands. It accentuates the fact that, in spite of the relatively high prestige of ethnocartography in many European countries and in spite of repeated efforts of several representants of our ethnocartography, „classical“ ethnographic atlas was never realized in the Czech Republic and probably will never be realized in the future due to several reasons. The causes of neglect or even negation of ethnocartographic research are mostly due to organizational and ideological reasons. The present-day Czech research must, therefore, face numerous specifi c tasks and problems that infl uence the concept and contents of the ethnographic atlas. From the nowadays already anachronistic effort to map the „whole“ of traditional culture the concept of the Ethnographic Atlas of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia moved in the direction of spatial documentation and analysis of partial, selected aspects. The second important feature is the giving up of fi eld research and the general use of questionnaires in the process of the collection of the data, instead of the analysis of written and iconographical sources. The basic conceptual and theoretical- methodological bases of the work on the atlas can be resumed as follows: the consistent application of territorial, not ethnical principle for collection and analysis of the data; the focus on the time period between the second half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th century; liberal choice of localities, preference given to statistical and proto-statistical data; consistent application of modern technological devices – especially geographic information system (GIS).

The study focuses on a unique manifestation of popular art: the fi guration by stucco reliefs with religious themes, from the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, that are found on the facades of the village buildings in the region Vysočina (on the border between Bohemia and Moravia). These stucco decorations follow the example of the popular glass paintings, paintings on procession fl ags, but especially the motives of pilgrimage badges and medallions (so called „little sacraments“). These reliefs, documented mostly on historical photographs, decorated in a whole 11 objects in 6 localities. In most of the cases original polychromy was proven. The themes were, besides the traditional saints, Saint Florian or Sain John Nepomucene, or Virgin Mary, also the depictions of closer or more distant pilgrimage places (Křemešník, Vranov u Brna, Sonntagberg, Lorch). Due to the fact of the limited durability of the material, as well as the social and cultural development, until today only two exemplars and one torso of the decoration were preserved. The study is supplemented by pictorial reconstruction of the original decoration, made by the author on the basis of preserved photographs.