The article describes the establishment and development of Puhoi, a small village in New Zealand known as „Bohemian settlement”, from an anthropological point of view. Puhoi was established in 1863 by settlers who came to New Zealand from Bohemia and who presented themselves as „Bohemians”, however there has been a diversity of opinions on their ethnicity. In this article, we look for the answer to the question of the settlers’ identity and we follow its changes during the process of acculturation in relation to indigenous Maori population as well as during the process of continuing integration into New Zealand’s society. Further, the article examines the surviving tradition together with contemporary marks of distinctiveness and poses a question if Puhoi can still be viewed as unique and different within New Zealand’s culture.
This article focuses on the establishment and development of a new form of settlements, called “kolonie” [colonies] in southern Slovakia during 1921-1938. These settlements resulted from an extensive land reform when large tracts of land, originally belonging to Hungarian counts, were offered to Czech and Slovakian farmers. This paper, based on the settlers’ writings and on the interviews with the settlers’ children, follows their steps in a new environment, the village of Sülly (Šulany), where they were surrounded mostly by Hungarian neighbours. It also examines the settlers’ attempts to preserve their identity by pursuing and fostering traditions from the regions of their origin as well as their effort to cope with different traditions and customs of their Hungarian neighbours.