With different cultures and changing times, a meaning of the same phenomena may vary. This applies also to knowledge in knowledge society: a plurality of bodies of knowledge will be preserved depending on social context, cultural significance, values and interests of the concerned groups. However, addressing the topic of the emerging knowledge society, particularly the “knowledge cultures”, implies addressing the issue of “change”: social change, socio-economic change, cultural change, changes in technology, life styles, and “environmental baselines”. A new “knowledge paradox” may appear as the rising usage of scientific principles stimulates scrutiny of knowledge and breeds uncertainty in this way. and Josef Hochgerner.
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.