Among the important works of local his tory of the end of the 19th century belongs also a huge German work „Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild“ that, besides demographic, geographic, historical or economical tractates contains also ethnographic studies. It also contains a volume dedicated to Moravia and Silesia, two multiethnic regions dominated by Czech and German inhabitants (in Silesia also the Poles played an important role). The book thus deals not only with two independent political units, but also with two nations whose mutual relations were certainly problematic at the time of the publication of this work. It seems that also in this book manifested itself the contemporary national barrier between the Czechs and the Germans, including the specialists on ethnography. In the book chapters written by renowned Czech authors, at the time at the peak of their Scientific career — František Bartoš, Josef Kivana or Vincenc Prásek. On the other hand, the authors of the ethnographic chapters about the German ethnic group are not that well known today. They didn't publish in the Czech ethnographic periodicals of the time, their works are not referred upon by their Czech colleagues. But the book as a whole is certainly well-arranged and balanced. The very ethnographical chapters provoke some doubts, because they reflect some of thepoliticalproblems of the time. In the very structure of these important chapters we can see a dominant role that the initiator s of the book ascribed to the German nation. Although it was less numerous and its folk culture and its folk culture could not be considered as a modelfor the folk culture ofother nation groups, the chapters on German folk culture precede chapters dedicated to the Czechs, resp. the Poles. The Czech nation is uniformly named „Slavic“, a fact that through its political conservatism certainly should have provoked the bad blood of the Czech patriotic circles. Also, the book was written in the particularly sensitive period ofrising discontent not only among the Czechs and the Germans, but also the Czech political representation and the leadership of the Habsburk Empire and its political élite.
The pastoral blowing of Christmas Eve belongs to the most remarkable Christmas traditions in Bohemian lands. The pastoral tuba (tuba pastoritia) was made by the shepherds themselves from wood, later it was made in a craftsman manner from brass. The records of the time corroborate the outstanding musical skills of some shepherds. Their signals on the pasture followed up with military or fireman tunes. On Christmas Eve the shepherds and night watchmen made walk-abouts with singing and blowing. In the frontier regions the costume of rounding up the sheep to Bethlehem had been preserved. The shepherd cracked the whip and blew the tuba and before him were running boys with collars and bells. Still at the end of the twentieth century Josef Svejkovský recorded in the regions of Rokycany and Zbiroh remarkable pastoral tunes that were played on the pasture as well as on Christmas Eve. A unique chapter of the pastoral blowing represents its use in church during Christmas ceremonies. Pastorales composed by Bohemian and Moravian schoolmasters required the pastoral tuba and later the trumpet. Some parts indicate a virtuoso artistic production of the interpreters. The tuba pastoralis had been used in two ways, either during the whole composition or later only in the overture and in the intermezzos, rather as a curiosity. This popular instrument entered the festival Christmas intrades and also the instrumental pastorales. Unique „Symphonia pastoralis“ from Dřevohostice (1788) is a small concerto grosso with solo violin and tuba pastoralis. On midnight mess sometimes two shepherds blew, each of them in a different part of the church. The chordal motives that are characteristic for the pastoral tuba were often imitated in pastorales for other instruments, usually for violines and also pastoral organ preludes. Rare are pastorales for cemballo that in the eighteenth century probably served as a home Christmas music.
The agricultural area of South Bohemia belongs to the regions where the steady advancement of industrialization created conditions for survival of continuous phenomenons of traditional culture, survival incomparably longer then in other regions. Up to the 197 Os, in the region of Blata (Moorland) in South Bohemia had been kept a traditionalfuneral rite that in a great part contained ofsongs above the open coffin of the deceased. This rite takes place in the house of the deceased and ali of the relatives and also the best friend from the village participate in it. Beside prayers they sing also the folk spriritual songs that are kept by the almost eighty-year old František Peterka from the village Borkovice. This singer was at the time of the research the only one able to lead this traditional farewell. Hefinds support in the manuscript recording taken from an original song collection of the teacher Kukla, also from Borkovoce in the region of Blata. This hymn book written in German cursive hand dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century and the comparison of its entries with the contemporary recording used by the singer Peterka reveals a direct continuity and many times a word-for-word taking over of those songs from the hymn-book that became the most popular in the span of 150 years. Not all the villages in the region had their own church and pastor. Because of this, it was indispensable the role of a specialized singer respected by the community that substituted the priest and the farewell in the church. The singer usually inherited his function from his father. The death songs recorded during the research in one of the villages of the region of Blata (Mažice) make part of the whole system of partial funeral rites. One of these is represented by a funeral procession through the whole village till its end, during which the same singer that is also organizer of the rite asks forgiveness from ali the participants in case the deceased did some wrong to them during his or her life. The rite is being accompanied also by other phonic manifestations: for example, the music performed by a small brass band, the sound of a passing-bell, cries and lamentations of the relatives, sounds of the poultry in the courtyard from which the procession starts, the songs of the singer in the procession. The ceremony led by the priest today takes part according to the standard Roman Catholic rite in the church of the neighouring village only after this traditional ceremony.
The extraordinary advancement of the ethnological research in the twentieth century that aims to describe and explain the modalities of human existence brought also some important practical results. For example, ethnology has demonstrated the nonexistence of fundamental dijferences among the peoples of this planet and through this contributed especially to the struggle against racial theories. It also fomented a more profound study of the roots that give rise to basic consciousness of morals and of moral conduct in individual cultures. According to SigmundFreud, similarities exist in the psychic of allpeople, because we allpass through the universal experience of childhood and our life in adulthood is,for the main part, resultingfrom theprocesses oflearning and socialization in a concrete environment. The majority of things that man has to do doesn ’t stemm from the immediate experience and observation, but from the constant sifting and refming of the tradition that asks for individual acceptation and observation of moral principles which are impossible to justify through usual theories of racionalization. The Nobelprize holder, the Austrian economist Fr. A. Hayek, has stated that the selective process that had formed the cusíoms and morals, could háve responded to more factual realities then the individuals could possibly perceive, and owing to this, the tradition is “wiser ” then the human intellect. Moral attitudes and moral conduct don ’t emanate from the the books of ethics, but mainly from the traditions we were born to, and from the education that is based on these traditions. The principles of moral conduct, encoded in customs, songs, rhymes, stories and other expressions of family, national or ethnic traditions, háve a marked importance even in contemporary desacralized society, in čase we accept their historical conditionality. The current intense technical and economical processes, accompanied by the development of globál communication, influence the contacts of various cultural patterns and result in a difficult acculturation process. This could lead to the rise of a qualitatively new cultural systém, but at the same time these processes contains in themselves the inclination towards the defence of one ’s own systém and refusal of other influences, regardless of the fact that the conditions for the existence of isolated local cultures in reál cease to exist A human individual acquires his evaluative judgements through the processes of learning and experience to such extent that he comprehends the conduct that is incompatible with good morals as something impossibble. The contemporary ethnological research confirms that this is the essence o and f the ethical consciousness and conduct, albeit modified in different cultures, and that the precondition of peaceful development of the modem multicultural society is the comprehension of the sources of moral principles of the past generations.
Professor Josef Polišenský PhD. (December 16, 1915 - January 11, 2001) was an important Czech historian with a wide range of professional interest. He dedicated himself primarily to the problematics of the Thirty-Year-War and, concretely, to the Uprising of the Czech Estates in 1618 - 1620 in a broad international context. To the many histoirical problems of the Early Modern and Modern period he studied belongs also the problematics of the history of Latin America. His merits in founding the Czech Ibero-American studies were by rights appreciated abroad. The author of the article appraises the Scientific work of Professor Polišenský, from his PhD. dissertation from the year 1939, follows his professional career and his life history in the context of the ups and downs of the Czech national history, in the context of all the decoys, pressures and trials that endangered an intellectual who wasn’t indifferent to the political events. To Professor Polišenský can be given a credit for the fact that the Czech historiography in the years 1948 to 1989 was able to keep up with the European historiographical paradigms and that retained a respectable face at the same time. Unfortunately, at the moment when Polišenský found himself at the height of his Creative power, this couldn’t help him. On the contrary, it did a harm to this excellent schollar in the situation when the regime put ideological and political pressure on the science. The results of the work o f the internationally renowned scholar are and will manifest themselves also in the works of his pupils, many of them foreigners, in the activity of future generations of historians, ethnologists, archivists and specialists of other areas.
As opposed to other trades closely connected with building activities there was up to now little attention dedicated to the cabinet-making. Usually it has been studied on the basis of concrete production of preservedpieces and the trade as such, its organization, the structure of guildproduction, its personal composition etc. has been left aside. From the preserved sources of the guild provenance we can conclude that the main bloom of the guild production, or better to say of some trades (in particular the building ones) in the royal dowry town of Polička had started only after the Thirty-Year War. More numerous trades had made individual guilds, smaller groups of artisans associated and created common guilds. The smiths, cabinet-makers, locksmiths, towel-makers, turners and glaziers of Polička joined into a common „guild of the nine“. Even though the sources relative to this „guild of the nine“ for the given period were preserved in relative abundance (books of the masters, of the journeymen, books of counts, protocols of guild meetings, and also certificates of apprenticeship, certificates of journeymen, masters' certificates), to cabinet-makers refers only a slight portion of them. To obtain further, at least partial knowledge on the activities of cabinet-makers in Polička in the first half of the nineteenth century one must turn to the sourcesproduced by the municipal authorities that contain, among others, confirmations of apprenticeships and the journeymen's wanderings, the petitions for licens e to carry on the trade in the town and especially the petitions for bestowal of the master's right, eventually the records of the process of obtaining this right that in some cases contain also the data on the course of the master's examination or the making of the masterpiece. The cabinet-makers, called also table-makers, represent the main group within the frame of the trades dedicated to the wood-processing. Their constituting into separate guilds falls in general to more recent times then was the case of traditional guild trades (especially the textile and the alimentary ones). The case of Polička shows the proof of this fact. Almost in the mid-nineteenth century, in a complete contradiction to the tendencies that were being enforced in the handicraftproduction, in the time when the guild already passed their zenith and were approaching the final stage of their existence, on February 19, 1849 the cabinet-makers left the common „guild of the nine“ and established an independent table-makers' guild.
TheKhants inhabit the area of the western Siberia in the basin of the river Ob and its tributaries, administratively belonging to the Tlumen region. In the two autonomous districts, Khanty-Mansi and Yamal-Nenets, lives the absolute majority of the Khants. The 1979 census estimated their number to 21 000. The Soviet literatuře divides the Khants to three groups; one of them being the Northern Khants - mostly reindeer herders. The oldest account of the Ob-Ugrians - the Khants and the Mansi ~ we find in the Nestor Chronicle. In the western Siberia there existed two types of transport- the dog teams were ušed by the Khants, the reindeer teams by the Samoyedic groups (for example the Nenets). The question of the time when the Northern Khants started the reindeer herding has not been resolvedyet. During the field research realized in theyears 1996, 1997 and 1999 during my stay with the Maksar family I háve studied the problems concerning the reindeers and the contemporary life in the Khanty community after the disintegration of the USSR. The everyday activity in the camp is centered around the reindeer. The camp moves periodically, depending upon the quantity of the pasture for the reindeer. The Khants can be described as „ seasonal pastoralists “ that every year leave from their point of departure, the community of Pitljar, to places chosen in advance, located in a precisely demarcated area, in summer in tundra, in winter in taiga. In summer the moving of the camp takés plače more often, approximately every fourteen days, in winter the Khants move three or four times altogether at the most. For the moving of the camp they use reindeer team and two types of sled, riding and cargo sled.
The rock architecture that forms part of the folk architecture has up to now been only inadequately studied. The present study is based primarily on the field researches that have been realized ince the 1950s by the Ethnological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (up to the year 1999, Institute for Ethnography and Folklore Studes of the Czech Academy of Sciences), researches that cannot be thought of without mentioning the name of Emanuel Baláš. The author of the present study himself realized the researches in the second half of the 1990s. The study aims to present, in historical perspective, the special type of primarily provisional dwellings that were being hollowed out primarily in the sandstone rocks. Beside the living quarters, the attention is dedicated also to other types–for example, to the out-buildings (such as barns, cellars) and technical buildings (water mills, blacksmith shops, drying-rooms) that are found in greatest number in the regions of Mělník, Mladá Boleslav, Děčín, Česká Lípa and Semily. According to the datation, the majority of the rock dwellings had been excavated since the second half of the eighteenth century and especially during the whole nineteenth century. But it is beyond doubt that such objects had existed also before, probably already in the Middle Ages, when they had especially the function of temporary refuges. The making of a rock dwelling was in the majority of the cases conditioned by the social status of the „builders“ that belonged among the poor classes. This was especially the case of the local agriculture workers (for example in the region of Mělník) and also of the seasonal workers from Slovakia that were coming especially after the founding of Czechoslovakia. There are many diferences in the disposition, extent and arrangement of the rock dwellings, even though from the point of view of typology this dwelling stems from the three-part chamber house. The incomplete character of the rock dwelling that often was reduced to a hall with a room was caused on the one hand by the economic situation o f the owners, but primarily by the natural conditions (the shape and size of the sandstone massive). The process of the rapid extinguishment of the rock dwellings started after the year 1945 when many of their inhabitants moved out during the settlement of the frontier regions. Minor part of the objects has up to now been used as barns or cellars.
Social memory embodied in symbolic stories, passed on within the society, take part in determination of the understanding of present time, because it lays normative claims to the society and shows a formative power. The structuration of time that we find in autobiographical stories reflects the understanding of history, and its present interpretation. The autobiographies don't employ only the individual time, but there appears also a social dimension of life. The individual „breaking points“ that emerge in the embodiement of the past not only divide quantitatively the differently experienced time periods, but they also indicate the existence of diffferent „communities of shared memory“. The text deals with the situation in the village Stonava in the Czech part of Ciezsyn Silesia. Just here we find the highest number of Polish victims of the Czechoslovak-Polish armed conflict of January 1919 that died in one village. The remembrance of this event or its forgetting, as well as placing these events to the broader interpretative frame, serves as a device to understand the structuration of the inhabitants of Stonava based on different foundation than simply the national identification or political preferences.