The author analyses the organization of selected nursery schools and their interactive patterns with the assistance of ethnological concept of rituals of transition. Two types of nursery schools were chosen for this purpose - the alternative model of initial schooling represented by approach of Maria Montessori and the common public nursery school. The author describes the Montessori-preschool as a place of sacral ritual practices which correspond to transitional schema of A. van Gennep and V. Turner. The common public nursery school can be also understood as organization based on rituals of transition, but its rituals are symbolically reduced and meet more profane purposes. These propositions are demonstrated with the assistance of conceptual and field data (resulting from school ethnography). The significant symbolic divergence of transitional schéma in both organizations is in contrast to similar formative effects on children. The common implicit aim of these schemas seems to be the effective conformization of behavior, which Montessori calls “joyful obedience”.
The contribution analyses the broader context of the existence of musical subculture hard core in Slovakia and the Czech Republic in the 1990s. It especially focuses on illuminating the connection of this subculture with life experiences of young generation and the cultural reality of the period. At the same time, the article describes the ideology of this musical subculture and gives examples of its projection into the texts of various hard core formations.
The summarizing study presents the research field of the so called school ethnography of the body (SEB) that started to develop during the last decade. This interdisciplinary field produces results that could be used in the social and cultural anthropology, sociology, social philosophy as well as in pedagogy. The introductory part of the study is dedicated to the concept of the body that is being productively handled within the frame of the SEB. Subsequently, selected concepts of the body are applied to the socio-cultural space of the school, and in the final part of the study the results of partial researches within the frame of the SEB, realized so far, are presented, as well as the basic theoretical and methodological approaches.