The contribution submits the detailed empiric data on funeral ceremonies for an old and a young woman in one village in Western Slovakia in 2003 and 2004. During her field research, the authoress had the opportunity to monitor the burial as a ritual activity in the public space. In her contribution, she thoroughly describes the activities and behaviour of persons involved in the ceremony, as they followed with the time, and as she could observe them at the church, in the cemetery or in the street. She mentions her comments on the performance and behaviour of the persons involved in the ceremony, which she has obtained from the respondents of the research. Within the description, she pays her attention also to the ritual objects. She deals especially with flower decoration and flower presents at the burial. She discusses the selected examples in dependence on the social relations within the local community. She observes the changes of the ceremony during the time, comparing the selected examples with other similar burials in the locality in the course of three decades.
The paper deals with the history of scientific thought in ethnology in Slovakia in the period immediately after the establishment of the Communist regime, i.e. the second half of the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s. This relatively short period was characterised by rapid changes in definition of the research subject, theoretical and methodological approaches, scientific goals, and even the discipline's very name. The paper focuses on the implementation of the new methodological orientation, which was named Marxist ethnography. The authors investigate how Slovak scholars approached the new orientation and what theoretical concepts appeared during the period. Furthermore, they explore the question of how the new methodological orientation was made operational, i.e. how it was used in research projects and daily scholarly routine. The authors study scholarly practice as a social process. They examine the activities of scholars, the relations within the scholarly community, and the relations between scholars and society. They attempt to answer the question of whether and how the implementation of Marxist ethnography influenced ethnological research in Slovakia and whether and how it contributed to changes in scholarly thinking.
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