The study deals with the German-language (Sudeten German) ethnography in the Czech lands, exemplifying it with an analysis and contextualization of a selected hand-written source concerning annual customs in Moravian Wallachia (Walter Repper: Das Kirchenjahr und seine Feste bei den mährischen Walachen). In his
text, the author points out the parallelism in the development of Czech-language and German-language ethnographic research in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This research showed only rare
overlaps and contacts between ethnically defined societies. However, the 1930s saw an increasing interest of German researchers in the culture of Slavic inhabitants of the Czech lands.
This trend was based on the concept of “tribal¨ethnography” (stammheitliche Volkskunde) and it was consummated by the establishment of an independent department at German University in Prague, which focused on tribal history and ethnography of
Moravia (Lehrstuhl für Volkskunde und Stammesgeschichte Mährens). It is in the context of this Sudeten German ethnography´s orientation that Walter Repper´s manuscript about customs and
habits in Moravian Wallachia is analysed. The manuscript is dated
to 1939. The author of it studied at German University in Prague at
the turn of the1940s, and he wrote the work most probably as part of a students practical training. The content of the manuscript is
compared with earlier published works about customary culture of
Wallachia, and subsequently particular sources of inspiration are
identified. The author of the study tries to highlight to which degree
the focus of Repper´s work corresponds to the application of the “tribal ethnography” concept.
In the post-Baroque era, science in the developed states of Europe gradually turned from theological scepticism to practical goals. The growing interest in the search for new sources of wealth resulted in the policy of mercantilism that developed in European powers from the Baroque period to the 1830s; this policy directly affected the nature of scholarly research, and in non-colonial states, it focussed, in the form of cameralist system, on the development of state administration and the improvement in and exploitation of economically marginal or directly poor regions. In connection with the Enlightenment ideal of a harmonious society, states aimed at a functional normalisation of relations among individual social strata; the scholarly interest, in the primary pursuit of economic and developmental objectives, focusses for the first time on folk culture, providing valuable reports on it and, last but not least, contributing to the popularization of its selected segments, with which Romantic philosophy as well as anthropology subsequently worked; in the period under study, anthropology was rather a natural science dealing with human evolution, including related cultural expressions. The aforementioned factors brought about the first ethnographic monographs applying the theories and methods that formed the basic building blocks of the future independent discipline; the treatise observes their development up to a noticeable ideological breakthrough in the pre-March period.
This paper summarizes the discussion of ethnology in Slovenia between ‘narodopisje’ and anthropology from the point of view of its theoretical and methodological issues. At the same time it delineates some characteristics of ethnology and folklore studies in Slovenia in the 20th century, whereby the discussion on the wider social implications is omitted. Considerations put forward here are limited to those disciplinary issues which are the fruit of self-reflexive and critical insights in ethnology, which enable to highlight the origins, the formation and changes of research patterns from predominant philological and cultural-historical roots of ‘narodopisje’ to anthropologically oriented contemporary research. Some general observations, a retrospective view of the status of theory and methodology, the tradition of ‘narodopisje’, the ‘farewell to folk life’, the new methodological horizons, the predicament of the ‘two-headed ethnology’ and recent anthropologization are considered. and Článek shrnuje debaty o etnologii ve Slovinsku, její vývoj od „národopisu“ {narodopisje) k antropologii, se zvláštním zřetelem k teoretickým a metodologickým problémům. Nastiňuje některé charakteristiky etnologie a folkloristiky ve Slovinsku ve 20. století, vyhýbá se ale diskusi o širších sociálních souvislostech. Omezuje se pouze na ty problémy disciplíny, které jsou produktem sebereflexe a kritického přístupu k etnologii, což umožňuje zdůraznit její počátky, formování a změny stylu výzkum, od převážně filologických a kulturně-historických kořenů „národopisu“ k antropologický orientovanému výzkumu v současnosti. Připojeny jsouněkteré obecné postřehy, a také retrospektivní pohled na status teorie a metodologie, úvahy o tradici „národopisu“, „rozloučení s lidovým životem“, o nových metodologických horizontech, dilematu „dvouhlavé etnologie" a aktuální antropologizaci.