What keeps the Czech folk ?alive??

Abstract

In presenting my argument, I have moved from the contemporary description of folk culture as ‘still alive,’ through the popularization and dissemination of recipes for tradition in the work of Zibrt back, to the Ethnographic Exhibition of 1895. It should be clear what keeps the Czech folk alive, and what was involved in establishing such a ‘reality maintenance’ system. Whose reality is it? Much has been written on the topic of culture contact. Most recently Wolf E. Woft, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). has demonstrated the impact European expansionism had on the creation of entirely new ‘tribes’ and ‘customs,’ while Sahlins M. Sahlins, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985). has shown, with equal persuasiveness, that the ‘native’ response to external transgression is best understood as an interpretation and incorporation of the ‘event’ in terms of the indigenous conceptions of reality and history. In both cases the existence of two originally independent cultures is assumed. The opposite may be the case for the ‘two cultures’ that are thought to have coexisted within a single territory of the future nation state. I started this essay by showing how much the discovery of popular culture, by the elites, was a cultural and political need at the very moment when the social reality of the rural population was being radically transformed. The distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and the nature of their mutual relationship has been one of central topics of the disciplines of ethnography and folklore, the very disciplines responsible for helping to create and maintain distinctions ‘folk’ and ‘non-folk’-as degrees of authenticity-in the first place. The ethnographic movement had more than a political purpose in a nation struggling to assert its national identity. As an organization, with a rhetoric and a collection of objects which it controlled, it made the world of ‘folk culture’ in to a ‘style’ available for consumption and thus a vehicle of social differentiation. The concern over authenticity, the debates over the direction in which the cultural values flow, the fact that fashions and style do move between social strata, all this points to the inevitable conclusion: the differentiation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, as academic topic and social reality, is the outcome and not the point of departure in the dissemination of culture. What Bourdieu asserts for high art and the art of high living which, in denying the “lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile,” affirm the superiority of the upper class consumer, holds equally well for the Czech middle classes (and ex-folk):” ... art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences P. Bourdieu, (Cambrige: Harvard University Press, 1984), p.7. .” The exhibition of 1895 marked a decisive step towards selfrecognition of a social class that managed to construct and display the ‘folk tradition’ as its own commodity fetish.