ALBERT

Description: The collective monograph Balkans and migration includes five chapters written by anthropologically oriented researchers (L. Budilová, G. Fatková, L. Hanus, M. Jakoubek, M. Pavlásek) practicing a long-term research in the Balkan territory. In addition to general parameters of anthropological optics and an anthropological field research in the Balkans those particular studies are connected by study transversal theme of migration. While, however, the Balkans and anthropology in the publication are invariant framework guaranteeing the unity of the whole volume, the migration represent in this respect the constant variable. The given phenomenon is studied in case of various groups (Bulgarian and Romanian Czechs, Karakachans), and we can observe some aspects of its heterogeneous nature (post-war migration within the re-emigrant interstate agreements, seasonal labor migration, migration of farmers for the land, leaving the homeland because of religious disputes, etc.). The ambition of the monograph is to justify the relevance to attend to the fieldwork based research in the Balkans, and show why the new generation of anthropologists and other social scientists, practitioners, should pay their professional attention to the Balkan peninsula. Although Western anthropologists have been already focused on the Balkans for few decades, in Czech environment was this theme ignored by anthropologists and ethnographers. They yielded this interest to the political scientists, historians, travelers, and television reporters. This monograph is going to rectify this situation by a series of analyses applying different perspectives of the research. Those analyses are based on the interpretation of ethnographic data collected during the long-term field research. The Balkan peninsula and this terrain inhabiting populations are presented as a stimulating field for Czech anthropological researchers. An attractive topic reflected in those five chapters is the Czech expatriate presence in the Balkans. Until the present time there live several enclaves of Czech compatriots, who actively claim their Czech origin. Those enclaves adapt dynamically to the global political and economic changes. Not only the authors of this monograph have noticed that the science paradigm in the second half of the twentieth century, which is based on a priori national categorization, is not able to capture new social and cultural formations of minority groups living outside their „homeland“. An attempt to overcome the nationalistic classification of Czech (e) migration could be applied and grounded in many identification strategies taking place in the distant past. It seems that the time has come to revise the still dominant scientific approaches to expatriate minorities and expand their attention to the dimensions of collective life reflecting the changes in the last twenty years. The transformation of strategies of Czech expatriate minorities in topologically, economically and politically open Europe (hence the global environment) is a useful platform, where certain phenomena can be observed. Those phenomena produce inspiring issues of sustainability and transformation of collective identities in the contemporary world. Certain marginality of the region including more difficulties in accessibility of resources force the marginal populations to adapt to difficult conditions. These minorities are a good example for monitoring the development of organic solidarity patterns (in Durkheim sense) into more complex social structures, often „aside“ all scientific concepts of collective identification.

Description: Many lives were influenced by the political developments which took place in Czechoslovakia during the twentieth century. Yet with the exception of those “who make history” – people who have left deep traces in the collective memory of the nation – or those select eyewitnesses who have had the opportunity to testify to the “great” people and events in Czech history, the ordinary destinies of individual participants remain overshadowed. Such a selective approach, which is the product of historians’ reliance on the line of official (political) history, can give the false impression of a unified, and thus relatively unproblematic, form of the period under study. In an attempt to counteract this bias, the present publication focuses on reconstructing an alternative image of the period. Using a participants’ experience – the story of an “ordinary twentieth century man” – it focuses on the biography of a native of Prague, aircraft engineer and exile Vincenc Hodek Jr., whose personal and family history between the years 1904–1977 serve as a frame of the presented research. On a theoretical level, the text addresses issues typical of works dealing with history from below; namely the blending, influencing and encountering of the micro and macro perspectives. Thus, even though the present book purposefully prioritizes the personal history of Vincenc Hodek, the starting point for the (re)construction of the period are the events that showed to be of great relevance to the subsequent destinies of the participants. The importance of the context provided by “great” political history, which set the background for the Hodek family’s life, is not downplayed. By taking into account both perspectives and connecting them it is not only possible to trace the individual image of the twentieth century Czechoslovak, as reflected by personal moments of marriage or birth, but also to delineate the individuals’ role in the contemporaneous political-social atmosphere, as can be detected, for example, in Vincenc Hodek’s active participation in the resistance movement against the Nazi occupational power. This publication confirms that the micro perspective, continuously ignored by Czech scholars who have refused to acknowledge the tangible historical matter enfolded within personal accounts, is indeed necessary, alongside macro history, in constructing a comprehensive account of a period. Nevertheless, the book also tackles the problematic aspects of using egodocuments as a relevant historical source. Often criticised for their subjectivity and distortion, ego-documents have regularly been deemed inappropriate for general research. The present book, however, proves that in spite of their theoretical and practical disadvantages, personal histories present an all-encompassing source and, when seeking to present the micro historical perspective, an indispensable source of information that does not devalue the research but, on the contrary, renders a completely new perspective for those chapters of Czech history that have long been considered closed down from the point of view of official sources. The present publication, while not aspiring to relate how the period was perceived by the entire society of the period, represents one of the possible ways of (re)telling twentieth century Czech history. Other than exhibiting the micro historical variability of the period under study, this book also aims to accentuate the possibilities presented by some of the modern theoretical and methodological approaches that, in spite of numerous foreign inspirations, remain rather undervalued within the frame of Czech historical studies.