An Ethnographic Chiefdom

Download or read book An Ethnographic Chiefdom written by Nikola Balaš and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2024-10-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Czechoslovak academic discipline called ‘Ethnography and Folklore Studies’ was impacted and influenced by the daily realities of state socialism in 1969–1989. This book examines the role of the planned economy, Marxist–Leninist ideology, disciplinary hierarchies and clientelist networks, ultimately showing how state socialist features together brought about the discipline’s epistemic stalling. It offers a fresh perspective on the long-standing debates purporting to capture the differences between the Central and Eastern European tradition of ethnology and Western sociocultural anthropology.