The length of the already completed period of military service played an unofficial but exceptionally important role in the everyday practice of a military service (MS) soldier conscripted into the army for two years (730 days). The period that was getting always shorter and that remained to their return to civilian life (the “number”) significantly or even fundamentally strengthened the real position of a MS soldier within military community in barracks premises, and especially in a partial segment thereof (at the level “platoon, company”), a part of which the MS soldier was. The number was important for creating his ongoing social statute, mainly it determined the classification of a soldier in a clearly defined category (rookie, senior on fatigue duty, old sweat, super old sweat etc.), on which his position within the community of MS soldiers was dependent. The number was a symbol of the above-mentioned
variable process, and a lot of essential attributes, which left significant marks on the everyday life in barracks and outside them, related to it. The importance of this number was big enough to be called the “cult of number”.
Among the important works of local his tory of the end of the 19th century belongs also a huge German work „Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild“ that, besides demographic, geographic, historical or economical tractates contains also ethnographic studies. It also contains a volume dedicated to Moravia and Silesia, two multiethnic regions dominated by Czech and German inhabitants (in Silesia also the Poles played an important role). The book thus deals not only with two independent political units, but also with two nations whose mutual relations were certainly problematic at the time of the publication of this work. It seems that also in this book manifested itself the contemporary national barrier between the Czechs and the Germans, including the specialists on ethnography. In the book chapters written by renowned Czech authors, at the time at the peak of their Scientific career — František Bartoš, Josef Kivana or Vincenc Prásek. On the other hand, the authors of the ethnographic chapters about the German ethnic group are not that well known today. They didn't publish in the Czech ethnographic periodicals of the time, their works are not referred upon by their Czech colleagues. But the book as a whole is certainly well-arranged and balanced. The very ethnographical chapters provoke some doubts, because they reflect some of thepoliticalproblems of the time. In the very structure of these important chapters we can see a dominant role that the initiator s of the book ascribed to the German nation. Although it was less numerous and its folk culture and its folk culture could not be considered as a modelfor the folk culture ofother nation groups, the chapters on German folk culture precede chapters dedicated to the Czechs, resp. the Poles. The Czech nation is uniformly named „Slavic“, a fact that through its political conservatism certainly should have provoked the bad blood of the Czech patriotic circles. Also, the book was written in the particularly sensitive period ofrising discontent not only among the Czechs and the Germans, but also the Czech political representation and the leadership of the Habsburk Empire and its political élite.
Tramping or tramp movement represents a specific, relatively complex, richly structured phenomenon, that belongs to the subcultures of the youth in the territory of our country and partly also in Slovakia, although a time overlap is apparent here. This cultural phenomenon is presenting itself as a form of association of a group of residents and as a specific method of their use of free time. It is an expression of the lifestyle of mainly urban youth from lower and middle classes. Prior to 1989, Czech and Slovak ethnographers and folklorists only paid attention to tramping sporadically, however, since the 1990s researchers of the Brno workplace of the former Institute for Ethnography and Folklore of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (today Institute of Ethnology of the ASCR, v. v. i.) has progressed towards this kind of research particularly within the grant project Culture of Today’s Children and Youth with Special Emphasis on Folklore Manifestations. and The history and the present of the tramp movement were studied in several tramp areas of Moravia (West Moravian Trojříčí, Tišnov Region and Valašské Klobouky and Vsetín Region). The published outputs defined tramping as a cultural phenomenon, discussed its history and present, basic conditions for the development of this phenomenon, various attributes, tramping festivities, tramp pubs, and they addressed issues of the legality of the tramp movement. In the last ten years, tramping has been presented to students of the Institute of European Ethnology at the Faculty of Arts, in Brno, Masaryk University in the form of semester-long cycles of lectures and field research. It resulted in student reports from field research, their own expert essays and graduate-level theses. Currently, tramping continues to develop just like research on the tramping subculture in Brno and other centres while thematically focused exhibitions are organized as well (Ethnographic Department of the National Museum, National Gallery) and entire tramping sections are established in museums (Jílové u Prahy).