Timothy McCajor Hall, Rosie Read

From WW II until the Velvet Revolution, few outside anthropologists had access to Czechoslovakia, while only a handful of Czech and Slovak ethnologists published in Western journals. In recent years, anthropological interest in Slovakia and the Czech Republic has increased substantially. This volume brings together a broad sample of recent cutting-edge ethnographic studies by Czech and Slovak ethnographers as well as American and western European anthropologists. Contents: Raymond June on measuring “corruption” in Czech society; David Karjanen on structural violence and economic change in Slovakia; Karen Kapusta-Pofahl, Hana Hašková, and Marta Kolářová on women’s civic organizing; Rebecca Nash on Czech feelings about social support and welfare reform; Denise Kozikowski on women’s experience of breast cancer; Věra Sokolová on population policy and the sterilization of Romani women in Czechoslovakia, 1972-1989; James Quin on pornography and the commodification of queer bodies in Slovakia; Ben Hill Passmore on working women in a Moravian factory; Krista Hegburg on Roma social workers; Zdeněk Uherek and Kateřina Plochová on ethnic Czechs in Bosnia and Herzegovina; Leoš Šatava on ethnic identity and language among Sorbian youth; Haldis Haukanes on history and autobiography in a Czech village; Davide Torsello on memory, geography, and local history in southern Slovakia; Peter Skalník reviews Czech and Slovak community (re)studies in a European context. Afterword by Zdeněk Salzmann.

Timothy McCajor Hall, MD, PhD, is a psychiatric anthropologist who has studied sexuality and alcoholism in the Czech Republic. In 2005-2007, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center on Aging at NORC & The University of Chicago. Rosie Read, PhD, has researched gender, work, and care for the elderly in the Czech Republic. She is a researcher at the Institute of Health and Community Studies at Bournemouth University, UK.

“Changes in the Heart of Europe is an interesting collection of essays, especially because the book covers a variety of topics including, civil society, gender, minority issues and memory in the post-communist context of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.” (CEU Political Science Journal, vol. 5, issue 4, December 2010)