The length of the already completed period of military service played an unofficial but exceptionally important role in the everyday practice of a military service (MS) soldier conscripted into the army for two years (730 days). The period that was getting always shorter and that remained to their return to civilian life (the “number”) significantly or even fundamentally strengthened the real position of a MS soldier within military community in barracks premises, and especially in a partial segment thereof (at the level “platoon, company”), a part of which the MS soldier was. The number was important for creating his ongoing social statute, mainly it determined the classification of a soldier in a clearly defined category (rookie, senior on fatigue duty, old sweat, super old sweat etc.), on which his position within the community of MS soldiers was dependent. The number was a symbol of the above-mentioned
variable process, and a lot of essential attributes, which left significant marks on the everyday life in barracks and outside them, related to it. The importance of this number was big enough to be called the “cult of number”.
The struggle between Eliška Krásnohorská (1847–1926) and the proponentsof the monthly Lumír, including Josef Václav Sládek (1845–1912) and JaroslavVrchlický (1853–1912), clearly reflects the situation amongst Czech critics and ofKrásnohorská herself in late 1870s and early 1880s. By considering Krásnohorská’sefforts, the article seeks to examine the well-known dispute, which took place inthe periodicals of the times, in associations of artists like the Umělecká beseda, at private meetings, and of course in private correspondence. The bone of contentionwas the nature of criticism, the new aesthetics, and the power of literature.Among other things, this had a suppressed gender aspect, since it had to do witha woman’s right to be a critic, though her position was advantageously supportedby nationalist patriotic interests. Lastly, it is noted that the Lumír proponents’dispute overlapped with the initial difficultly Realism had making its way intoCzech literature.
In this paper author focuses on mental representation of ethnic and racial groups in Gabčíkovo village in Slovakia. The objective is to show, that to explain ethnic and racial classification, we need to regard two factors. The first one is social interactions. It means the social, cultural, historical and political conditions of social phenomenon. The second is the cognitive processes of the mind: in what ways the human mind operates particular external information. To explain ethnic and racial classification, the author uses the framework of cognitive anthropology, in particular theory of folk sociology.