Current issue

Based on the land registers from the Zmišovice estate situated in the archbishop’s manor of Červená Řečice in the Pelhřimov area, the text attempts to contribute to the understanding of the form, equipment and furnishings of serfs’ homesteads in the early modern period. It uses mainly a series of records on the handover of the homesteads to new farmers from the years 1686–1810, about one hundred of which include inventories with equipment. The text focusses step-by-step on the form of the buildings, the livestock kept, the tools used and the household items. It also attempts to assess the informative value of the records under study in the sense of source criticism and possibilities of using them for the study of tangible culture, standard of living and economic position of rural residents.

The study deals with the phenomenon of nostalgic tourism of German-speaking inhabitants who were forcibly displaced from Czechoslovakia after 1945 and travelled to their old homeland during the Cold War period. The first legal individual and later also organised trips to Czechoslovakia date back to the second half of the 1950s; these were a reaction both to the slightly liberalising Czechoslovak tourism policy and granting of entry visas to western-European foreigners, and to the improving economic situation of German expatriates in the Federal Republic of Germany. Attention will be paid to specific features of these travels, whose final destination was the former home behind the Iron Curtain, their historical transformations, and the media construction in the Sudeten-German discourse of that time, which reveals nostalgic tourism and travel experience as a highly ideologised and politically instrumentalised theme.

This study deals with the overnight tourist trips that the United Union of Czech Agricultural Workers organized for agricultural workers in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It examines how two groups of ideas influenced how such recreational trips unfolded. The first centered around the effects of organizers’ efforts to make recreation a social-constructive tool of the Czechoslovak state and an ideological tool of the Communist regime. Imaginaries of the countryside and its inhabitants also influenced the planning of these trips. This study understands both groups of ideas as a part of the period under study’s social imagination, which according to Charles Taylor encompasses ideas about the arrangement of society and expectations about how it functions. The view from the other side, that is, how the vacationers experienced their holidays, demonstrates how successful the organizers were in meeting their goals and also reveals the sources of contemporary imaginaries of the countryside and its inhabitants.

Stylized expressions of traditional folk culture are currently enjoying increased public interest in Slovakia. When using and reviving elements of folk culture, we can encounter that even such manifestations that are not really folk culture are passed off as folk culture. This is pseudo-folk culture (fakelore), which misleadingly communicates false content. The text defines the term pseudo-folk culture in the context of other related terms. The next part of the study is devoted to specific forms of the use of "foreign" ornaments in pseudo-folk manifestations and considers the question of "ownership" of elements of folk culture.

Sword dances belong to the oldest layers of dance culture. The origin of these dances, which can be described as a phenomenal manifestation of dance culture in almost the whole of Europe, unfortunately cannot be reduced to a single genetic basis. It goes without saying that such dancing would not still exist today without its bearers. Sword dancing has been gradually modified in some countries, losing its ceremonial function or its connection to the calendar cycle, and being transformed into a theatrical form; in some countries it is now only maintained by small groups of dancers as a social occasion. The tradition of sword dancing is a unique example of Europe‘s intangible cultural heritage. The ancient chain and circle form of the dance is an element common to European countries, apart from the connection with the carnival season. The dance itself has its own specific features – dance patterns, costumes, clothing accesories, and props, which are unique components of the dance that point to its archaic character. The aim of the study is to document these dances, identifying the characteristic features and common expressions across almost all of Europe, or in the countries where they have been documented.