This article discusses the topic of national identification. The author's aim is to define the appropriate conceptual framework for describing nationality, while taking into account the pluralistic character of the nation and the related contextual and multi-levelled nature of national identification. In the author's view, the concept of 'identification' more accurately applies to individual nationality than the category of identity does, owing to the latter's undesirable subjectivism, methodological individualism, and its occasional references to an over-intellectualised concept of the individual. Scientists who use the second of these two terms tend, moreover, to conflate descriptions of individual and collective phenomena. In an effort to substantiate and elaborate his arguments the author draws on the Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek and presents an analysis of the national identification of the novel's multi-national protagonists. He demonstrates that national identification is multi-levelled and variable, depending on particular situations and institutional frameworks. The author's description shows that the best method of analysing individual nationality may be by examining the individual's set of social roles and institutions rather than describing individual identifications.
During the last couple of decades, paid childcare has become one of the central issues of feminist research. Agencies mediating childcare are a relatively new actor in childcare arrangements in the Czech Republic. This article argues that these agencies do not fill a gap in the market by offering childcare. Far from providing simple supply that reacts to a market demand, the agencies create the demand for specific care. Drawing upon qualitative research conducted with owners of these agencies, the text looks into the ways in which childcare is constructed. The issues of qualified, specialized, and professionalized care are discussed. The article aims to show that childcare in the agencies is deconstructed as a natural female activity and is reconstructed as a gendered activity requiring particular skills that are subjected to professional screening., Adéla Souralová., and Obsahuje bibliografii
In the years 2004 and 2005 a survey was conducted that focused on recording of authentic testimonies about the everyday lives of women in the country predominantly in the second half of the 20th century. Correspondents of the Czech Ethnographical Society, students and female seniors from different parts of the Czech Republic took part in the survey. this report reveals the results including characteristic quotations. The information was obtained from different localities on an uneven basis. There is a compact set of records from four villages in eastern Moravia and four authentic testimonies from Těšín region in the foothills of Beskydy Mountains. The information was either handwritten by the respondents, or their narration was recorded by the Czech Ethnographical Society correspondents, students of Silesian University or by a local chronicler. The outline of the research was available to everyone. We were above all interested in the changes which rural families had to go through in the second half of the 20th century due to collectivization of land and changes in social and economic conditions.
Bedřich Machulka was born on June 22, 1875. Since his youth he had been interested in Africa. However, only after meeting Richard Štorch he was able to realize his dreams. Together they parted for Africa. They settled in Tripolis in Libya and dedicated themselves in hunting and stuffing animals. Afterwards they moved to Sudan where they established a base for hunting expeditions. In the year 1927 Štorch died. Machulka moved his interest to eastern Africa. Since 1929 he had established a partnership with Duke Adolf Schwarzenberg (1890–1950). At the beginning their collaboration went on without problems. However, after Machulka failed to organize film recording in Kenya, the Duke did not entrust him anymore with organizing of other expeditions. This period of life of Machulka, until the year 1935, is well illustrated by letters that he exchanged with the Duke through the Schwarzenberg Office. Schwarzenberg valued Machulka highly for his professional and organizational qualities. Therefore, in spite of the mutual disagreements he found him a place of preserver and curator of small museum of ethnographic artifacts and trophies in the castle Ohrada (on the manor of Hluboká). There Machulka had worked throughout the Second World War until the year 1947, when all the properties of the Schwarzenbergs on the territory of Czechoslovakia were nationalized. Machulka finished his life in Prague in humble conditions. He died on March 6, 1954.
Besides many dispersed fragments related to theory of sleep, dreams and their interpretation, Babylonian Talmud contains a long passage dealing with those issues, which includes also several series of dream-interpretations. The passage is often referred to as „Rabbinic dream-book” in specialized scholarly literature. The present article analyses contain and compositional patterns of the text and indicates the presence of mutually exclusive theories of dreams and their interpretation, as well as typically Talmudic methods of organization such as association and agglutination. Since the final composition does not communicate any uniform statement, we claim it incorrect to call the text „Rabbinic dream-book” and suggest it is not more than a mere agglutination of pre-existing textual fragments.
My study aims to conduct a comparative analysis of two theorists in what were probably the most formative years of postwar Austrian history, the era of the conservative government of Josef Klaus. Specifi cally, I compare the conservative philosophy of right of Austrian philosopher of Croatian origin René Marcic and the Marxist humanism of Ernst Fischer. In doing so, it is my intention to describe the ideological foundations and intellectual horizons of Josef Klaus’s right-wing government and, at the same time, to discuss how this policy was confronted by Ernst Fischer from the left. A further purpose of my study is to inquire into the intellectual foundations that laid the ground for Austrian civil society, and to ask how these foundations were confronted by the Austrian Communist Party’s chief ideologist, Ernst Fischer.