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Introduction: On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe: Toward Cosmopolitan Anthropologies in the “Peripheries”

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Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe

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Abstract

There have been many studies with “rethinking” in the title.1 Edmund Leach’s collection of essays probably comes first to mind as a book that influenced anthropological thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world and beyond. The authors of this volume do not have the ambition of changing the course of thought in anthropology and the individual chapter authors do not spend much time trying to “understand what is happening in social anthropology” and they do not “go right back to the beginning and rethink basic issues …” (Leach 1961: 1, original emphasis). Neither do any of them enter “the game of building new theories on the ruins of old ones” (Leach 1961: v). In a rather modest way, they present findings from their ethnographic fieldwork conceptualized through contemporary anthropological concepts, bringing ethnographic accounts from their research field and interpreting issues they find important for the understanding of societies and peoples they study. Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe is is literally an account of ethnography in Central Europe, but contextualized through a particular historical perspective on anthropological studies on the region and in the region. This book represents the “tip of an iceberg” of a new wave of writings in Central European anthropological scholarship.

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Authors
  1. Michal Buchowski
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  2. Hana Cervinkova
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Editor information

Hana Cervinkova Michal Buchowski Zdeněk Uherek

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© 2015 Hana Cervinkova, Michal Buchowski, and Zdeněk Uherek

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Buchowski, M., Cervinkova, H. (2015). Introduction: On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe: Toward Cosmopolitan Anthropologies in the “Peripheries”. In: Cervinkova, H., Buchowski, M., Uherek, Z. (eds) Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137524492_1

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