The author defines spiritual folk song as asubject of ethnology of the present and ethnomusicology, and focuses on the contribution of this research to interdisciplinary hymnology. It represents one of the options of critical use of the model of ethnographic research of the present village performed by Václav Frolec with team at the Masaryk University in Brno in the 1970s and 1980s It is a thematic concept of research and a qualitative method which goes from the chronology of sources to the study of cultural continuity and cultural changes. The author modifies this methodology for research on songs and presents three case analyses 1. Current forms of ritual communication and the change from the spiritual to the secular
function of songs; 2. Two contexts of Baroque songs and contemporary culture; 3. Social function of the renewed customs and the origin of new Marian songs. Within this concept,
ethnomusicology and ethnology of the present are part of historical ethnology.
In the Croatia territory, the Czechs are concentrated predominantly in the area of the northwestern Slavonia. Center of this region with relatively compact Czech settlement is the town of Daruvar. Before and after the World War I, when the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute and the National Czechoslovak Council were established, the interest in this region increased. In 1930’s the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute initiated a mapping survey of this region, which was, however, not completed. The further initiative was launched several decades later. A research of culture of the Czech colony in the Daruvar region was carried out in 1965-70 by the Ethnography and Folklore Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (ČSAV) and the Folk Art Institute in Zagreb. More recent works devoted to the Czechs living in Croatia originate primarily in the country itself. My research in the region was realized above all in the form of interviews. I received a lot of necessary information from the Czech Union archives and from the local professional literature. In comparison with the previous research and with respect to the several-decade distance, it was possible to trace the process of acculturation and assimilation and to estimate its possible development. The accessible printed materials and literature are of miscellaneous origin. they partly come from the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute employees - Antonín Šembera, Rudolf Turčín and Jan Auerhan. Many valuable documents are deposited in the Central State Archive in Prague, in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs archive as well as in the Náprstek Museum’s archive. A rich archive is situated in the seat of the Czech Union in Croatia - in the Czech House in Daruvar. It contains many documents from the life of the Czech minority. The collections in this archive were assorted with the help of the Czech Republic, that is to say by archivists from the Central State Archive in Prague who had been working here for several years since 2001.
The Zittau library of Christian Weise has an extensive collection of manuscripts, among which we find a number of early modern-era chronicles relating particularly to the six towns of the Lusatian League. One of these is the Zittau Chronicle by Tobiáš Schnürer from the 16th century, preserved in a later transcription, in which he chronologically recorded the most important events of his era, including the names of members of the Town Council. Memorial and chronicle records are also included in a collection of manuscripts by Abraham Frenzel (1656-1740). This includes a preserved transcription of an early modern-era chronicle of Sorau (Żary), which details the problems of life in the town and the local authority at the time. Another of Frenzel's preserved manuscripts describes the journey through Europe made by Michael Frank at the end of the sixteenth century, including his visit to Bohemia.
This paper summarizes results of the participative ethnographic researchi nto a warlike community (so-called “guild”) that occurs in the virtual settings of the game Guild Wars 2. The attention is paid especially to the organization and adaptation mechanisms of the players as well as to the analysis of their functional modus operandi (sophisticated organization of so-called “rushes” and emergency mechanisms of offensive group formation). The article deals also with the analysis of cultural production of virtual communities (so-called “machinima”, guides/gameplays“ and playing modification of electronic encyclopaedias), which significantly falls outside the inter-subjective scope in the form of (theoretical and practical) correlation with the development of contemporary warfare - in particular with the conception known as “swarming”.