This article summarises the results of field research carried out in 1998 among families of Czech origin in north-west Kazakhstan. The centre of research was the rural community of Borodinovka, founded in 1911 by emigrants of Czech origin who had already settled in Tsarist Russia in the later 19th century on the territory of what today is the Southern Ukraine. Research was ais o conducted in the industrial town of Aktyubin, where some of the descendents of the Czech emigrants had moved over the years. We likewise visited the village of Meshcheryakovka not far from Orenburg in Russia, where other emigrants of Czech origin has settled at the beginning of the 1990s after leaving Kazakhstan. The text contains a concise history of Czech emigration to Kazakhstan, with a description of characteristic livelihoods, accommodation, food, healing, social and family life. Attention is also devoted to forms of identification with ethnic and national consciousness. The survey shows that the group is a remarkable cultural form in which elements of Russian, Ukrainian, Czech and Kazakh culture interpenetrate. The descendents of Czech emigrants conceptualise some of the particular features in material and spiritual life by which they distinguish themselves from the other groups of the local population as specifically culturally Czech, whether these in fact have their roots in Bohemia or elsewhere conditions. The research suggests that the concept of tradition in social anthropology is highly problematic, since in the conditions of contemporary Kazakhstan and Russia, where there is a struggle formaterial survival, the application of cultural elements that we often call „traditional“ can actuallybe an innovation born of hardship. These are elements relating to self-sufficiency andindependence of a range of public institutions such as canteens, shops, bafories, houses of cultureand so on. Institutional relations have also relaxed in the field of transport and health care, and newforms of commercial exchange are emerging to replace monetary economy. After 1991 when Kazachstan gained independence, much of the non-Kazakh population moved away. In recent years descendents of the Czech emigrants have also been re-emigrating to the Czech Republic and to Russia with their Russian, Ukrainian and other family members. The materials obtained are deepening our knowledge of Czech minorities abroad.
The concept of „tradition“ has been studied in the social sciences fo r at least two centuries and over that period every discipline has created its own variant or specialist interpretation of the term. In ethnography and ethnology research on tradition is one of the fündamental themes of scholarship, and was and is studied mainly from the perspective of external observers - i. e. members of the scholarly community. In our own researches we meet this concept only rarely and, moreover, we may find that our informants understand historicity in a way different from us; they can also think in terms of static time. This situation can be illustrated by examples from central Slovakia and Southern Moravia. It appears that we have to reckon with a double understanding and double labelling of the same phenomenon - once in historically unclarified terms (at the level of data collection) and then for a second time in historically more precise terms of „tradition“ (at the level of data processing). The historically unclarified terms are converted into more precise terms by the researcher, so that he can bring the apparently unchanging world of small communities (villages and towns) nearer to the changing world of great national and State communities. The world of the small communities then uses general terms from the outside world - among them „tradition“ - in situations of mutual contact between the two worlds. Thus „tradition“ is not merely an interesting academie problem with which the social sciences are stili wrestling in their second century of existence, but also an important transmission lever between existing microworlds and macroworlds.