Current issue

The study focuses on the professional identity of drivers working in the emergency medical service in the Czech lands from the 1970s until the early twenty-first century. It draws on an analysis of oral-history interviews, which reveals that the core of this identity lay in the “driving mastery,” accompanied by high psychological resilience, the ability to improvise, and good physical fitness. This identity, however, had a liminal character: drivers were indispensable for patient transport, yet criticised if they perceived their role as limited to this task alone. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, a significant transformation took place as processes of professionalisation and modernisation weakened the autonomy of the “pure drivership”, shifting the role towards a hybrid profile of a driver-paramedic. While the older generation of drivers derived their value from their experience and a detailed knowledge of local geography, younger drivers gain recognition primarily through their medical expertise and their ability to work as part of a team. The driver’s identity has not disappeared but has gradually evolved into the broader professional identity of the paramedic, within which driving is regarded only as just one of partial competences.

The study describes the work of nurses / female paramedics within the emergency medical service over a long-term period, from the 1960s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. The text is divided into two thematic sections. The first focuses on selected aspects of everyday professional life (motivation for entering the profession, working relationships, and the transformation of work in connection with technological development). The second section addresses gender issues, primarily gender stereotypes and their operation within the broader context of the emergency medical service work. The study is based primarily on oral-history interviews with twenty-two women and fifteen men who have acquired the proficiency as nurses or medical paramedics.

The study examines how employees of the emergency medical service in the Czech Republic come to terms with death and crisis situations. It is based on oral history research and focuses on the everyday practice and experience of emergency medical service staff – physicians, nurses, drivers, and paramedics. It presents an actor’s perspective on death and deals with the early period of the modern emergency medical service, from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century. The article provides an overview of the attitudes towards death held by paramedics, but it primarily focuses on the strategies they have adopted to be able to cope psychologically with extreme situations and with patients’ deaths. The article also explores which cases emergency medical service employees consider the most difficult, as well as what they think and do in relation to their own psychological hygiene.

The period of the 1930s before the Second World War and the subsequent occupation of many countries by Nazi Germany represented a complex historical era for Europe. This also applies to pre-war Czechoslovakia and, from 1939 onwards, to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Historical circumstances affected Czech society in all its aspects. Culture, in particular, came under great pressure: during the period of the Protectorate it could function only within the framework of a totalitarian state and under the threat of persecution if it failed to comply with the conditions imposed by that state. The German nationalistic regime’s orientation towards historicism and traditions led to an emphasis on traditional folk culture, which in the Czech context resonated at certain exponents of the regime and resulted in the misuse of folk traditions. This study not only recalls this fact, which is illustrated by the striking example of the organisation Národopisná Morava [Ethnographic Moravia], but also attempts to demonstrate the broader role of folk culture in society during this period. Even in the period under study, folk culture and its symbolism played roles beyond those associated with its use in the propaganda of the Nazi regime. The paper further argues that the stigma of treacherous collaboration, which burdened the legacy of folk culture, must be researched from multiple perspectives so as to avoid the creation of a stereotyped image and to open the topic for further research and interpretations from the perspective of ethnology.

This study analyses the conception of tradition through the work of key figures of ethnography before World War I, in the interwar period, and after World War II. It argues that tradition whether associated with rural or urban environment has always been politicised. In the interwar period, tradition was used to support the identity of Czechoslovakism, while after the February coup in Czechoslovakia, it was employed to promote the vision of a socialist society. During that time, traditions began to be categorised as either progressive or reactionary (bourgeois, outdated). Ethnographers of the interwar period focused primarily on folk costumes, customs, and folk art which they aimed to purify of non-original deposits and preserve as long as possible – supported by tourism, academic interest, and festivals. Socialist ethnography viewed such interest as superficial and emphasized the “true content” of traditions, interpreting it as a popular form of resistance against national and social oppression. As a result, attention was paid to workers´ institutions and folk chronicle writing. According to ethnographers of the socialist era, traditions were to be studied and understood, but not revived.

The study examines manuscripts containing magical instructions, which were very widespread among rural populations in the 18th and 19th centuries, yet have not received much attention in contemporary historical research. The aim of the study is to present a group of texts that people used to secure personal benefits or advantages over others. The study works with a sample of manuscripts preserved in Czech and Moravian memory institutions. This sample shows that texts with instructions on how to solve problematic interpersonal relationships in various ways (advantage, superiority, damage to a competitor) circulated among people. The study presents a range of situations of human behaviour associated with competitive environment in rural areas. Through magical instructions, the study helps to understand the mentality of people at that time, who believed that these texts represented one way of dealing with their relationships with others.