Date of publishing:
25.6.2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21104/CL.2019.2.02
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Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to inquire into possibilities of recourse to personal ads as a source of cultural-anthropological research. Specifically, it proposes an analysis of a corpus of over 500 such ads, published in 1931–1934 in a magazine of the Czechoslovak homosexuals minority, the Voice of the Sexual Minority. It proposes to approach these very short utterances as signs, an analytical work being possible only at the level of the signifiant. It also proposes to analyse some crucial expressions, repeated very often in these ads, throught the concept of an symbolic-deicitic field. In this way, the paper reaches a conclusion that sheds a new light on conceptual categories of the interwar Czechoslovak homosexual subculture, which have not yet been perceived by a classical historical research.
Keywords
cultural anthropology – sign – deixis – source – personal ads – interwar period – Czechoslovakia – homosexuality
Article Text