KAREL CHOTEK A CEROVO
Karel Chotek and Cerovo

From Initiation to Specialisation (Causerie on the Half-Century Long Transformation of Field Research

Summary/Abstract: This paper is about the monograph on the Slovak village Cerovo, published in 1906by Karel Chotek, the first professor of ethnography at the Comenius University inBratislava and the pioneer of qualitative field research in the Austro-Hungarian mo-narchy and later in Czechoslovakia. Following Lubor Niederle’s demographical datapublished in the map of the Slovak community living in Hungary, Cerovo, a villagein the Hont region, shows Chotek’s first attempt to cover the set of questions relatedto the monograph’s focus on people in their cultural setting via field research and di-rect experience. Though still partly immersed in stereotypes related to Czech utili-tarian conceptualisation of Slovak collective identity, Chotek’s monograph showsthe first step on the way to an ambitious serial (though mostly unfulfilled) projectof regional monographs, known as Národopis lidu českoslovanského(The Ethno-graphy of Czechoslavic People, 1918–1940). In the early 1950s, working already asa professor of Slavic and general ethnography at the Charles University in Praguesince 1931, Chotek returned to Cerovo with an idea of a new, comparative and recon-ceptualised focus on the same settlement as a half century before. Even though hedid not succeed in completing this new monograph, his experience inspired a num-ber of students at the Charles University, who later pursued Chotek’s field researchinspiration as important figures of Czech and Slovak ethnography during the rest ofthe 20thcentury (the so-called “Chotek school”). Besides rethinking the events rela-ted to the Czecho-Slovak relationship in the formative decade of professional scien-tific ethnography in Czech lands before World War I and, last but not least, analy-sing the so far unknown context of Chotek’s second expedition to Cerovo in 1953,the picture of Chotek developing his field research method from a descriptive ana-lysis to a more structured circle of special questions/issues in the 1950s is an at-tempt to capture some of the methodological changes Czechoslovak ethnographywent through during the first half of the 20th century.

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