The paper explores the relationship between normalising bodies and normalising political orders by investigating medical discourses in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. It argues that medical scientists not only presented knowledge about bodies, health, and pathologies, but also used this knowledge to promote a specific form of political order as the ‘true’ and ‘proper’ political order. In the paper, discourses from two different medical fields are analysed. The first part focuses on physiology, because it was not only key in promoting new medicine as a natural science, but also because many of its proponents were involved in the revolution of 1848, and continued to advance democratic ideas after the failed revolution, throughout the second half of the 19th century. It is argued that even though physiologists favoured democracy, their understanding of it was nonetheless narrow and androcentric. The second part focuses on medical sub-disciplines that specifically addressed sexuality and gender, such as psychiatry and sexology. Instead of seeking to advance a democratic political order, protagonists here used their epistemological clout to pathologise and thereby actively discredit ongoing political struggles such as the feminist movement and the socialist movement that aimed to establish a fundamentally different political order. From a feminist perspective the paper reveals how the powerful constructions of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ structured both discourses: Imaginations of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ were deployed to produce and legitimate medical regimes of truths about the body and, as a consequence, about a specific political order.
The aim of the article is to critically reassess relation between moral and economy of agents from the poorest class. The relational concept of the poorest class designates here homeless, drug-users, and some poor individuals generally that all have common particular social practices on the one hand and a position within of the social space on the other hand.
In this paper, we build on the ongoing disciplinary debate in cultural anthropology concerning changing understanding of contemporary ethnographic practice and consider our pedagogical work with students as a form of what Kim Fortun recently defined as "ethnographic experiment" for contemporary. We describe our methodology in which we are inspired especially by the tradition of educational anthropology and participatory action research to create spaces of collaborative encounters that we call urban laboratories.
V roce 2013 uplynulo 170 let od přijetí tzv. „systému tří period“ (doba kamenná, bronzová a železná) v české archeologii. V jeho praktickém použití patří priorita Dánu Ch. J. Thomsenovi (publikováno 1836) před soudobými německými badateli (Lisch, Danneil), pro německojazyčnou sféru (včetně české) měl zásadní význam překlad Thomsenova textu do němčiny (1837). V Čechách jej poprvé jednoznačně aplikoval J. V. Hellich, první kustos archeologie v Národním muzeu v Praze, v rukopise rukověti české archeologie z roku 1843 – tedy souběžně s jeho přijetím ve většině evropských zemí jižně od Dánska. Silný odpor proti „skandinavismu“ v německé archeologii 2. pol. 19. stol. neměl v Čechách širší ohlas, spíše tento systém narážel na přetrvávající zaměření české vědy k etnohistorickým interpretacím; teprve na počátku 20. stol. byl zápas obou směrů vybojován ve prospěch plného uplatnění třídobé periodizace v duchu artefaktuálního pozitivismu. and The year 2013 marked the 170th anniversary of the adoption of the ‘three-age system’ (the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age) in Bohemian archaeology. The Dane Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, who published his findings in 1836, is given more credit for the practical application of the three-age system than his contemporaries, the German scholars Lisch and Danneil. The translation of Thomsen’s text into German in 1837 was of fundamental importance for the German-speaking sphere (including Czech). The three-age system was first unambiguously applied in Bohemia by J. V. Hellich, the first curator of archaeology at the National Museum in Prague, in an 1843 manual of Bohemian archaeology, i.e. simultaneously with the adoption of the system in the majority of European countries south of Denmark. The strong resistance to ‘Scandinavism’ in German archaeology in the second half of the nineteenth century was not widely shared in Bohemia. Instead, this system probably ran up against the lingering focus of Bohemian research on ethnohistorical interpretations. It wasn’t until the beginning of the twentieth century that the conflict between the two directions was settled in favour of the full application of the three-age periodisation in the spirit of artefactual positivism.
The article summarises the position of George Frideric Handel, Joseph Haydn and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in the music history of the Bohemian Lands, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. Haydn became one of the leading figures of Bohemian music life during his life-time. Handel’s sacred compositions were known in Bohemia soon after he settled permanently in England. Handel’s and Haydn’s oratorios belonged to the core repertoire both of the Bohemian 19th century music societies and of private concert organisers; Handel’s music was performed arranged either by Mozart or by the controversial Viennese Kapellmeister and composer Ignaz Franz von Mosel. Mendelssohn was the only composer who matched Handel and Haydn in the number of performances of his oratorios in Bohemia.
The paper aims to demonstrate how the techniques of disciplinary power in prenatal care affect pregnant women. I will illustrate my argument using the results of ethnographic research conducted at the Division of Risk Pregnancy at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in a hospital in Central Slovakia. The analysis of ethnographic material indicates that although pregnant women are objectified and disciplined in prenatal care, they consider and evaluate the practices of the medical staff. Prenatal care interferes with other social roles which pregnant women play in their life. I interpret the ethnographic material in terms of the concept of disciplinary power developed by Michel Foucault, and in the terms of the theory of moral emotions by Jonathan Haidt. I argue that risk assessment is a part of the techniques of disciplinary power, and that the explicit ascription of feelings of the uncertainty, fear, guilt, and shame to a certain kind of behaviour in pregnancy helps to identify norms that regulate biological reproduction.
This article analyses anti-obesity discourse in post-war Czechoslovakia, particularly in the country’s late socialist period. The article conceives of the discourse on obesity as a tool of biopolitical, rather than totalitarian, power, examining the ways expert knowledge, power, and morality worked together to produce a socialist subject. On the first level, it analyses the expert anti-obesity discourse as an example of the expertisation of public discourse in socialist Czechoslovakia. Second, it shows the construction of obesity in contrast to bodily ability, and the stigmatisation of the ‘fat’ body. On the last level, the article focuses on the gendered aspects of the discourse and demonstrates the ways in which the anti-obesity campaign supported the heteronormative framework of late socialism. By examining expert and media discourses, the article argues that the campaign against obesity served as a means to construct a proper socialist body and induce a moral panic about the state of socialism.