An Ethnographic Chiefdom: Epistemic Arrest and Knowledge Production in Czechoslovak Ethnography (1969-1989)

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.

Nikola Balas is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He spent a year as an Erasmus student at the Department of Anthropology, Durham University (UK), and is a co-recipient of the SIEF Young Scholar Prize 2023.