Timothy McCajor Hall & Rosie Read 
Changes in the Heart of Europe 
Recent Ethnographies of Czechs, Slovaks, Roma, and Sorbs

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.

About the author

Timothy Mc Cajor Hall, MD, Ph D, 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, Ph D, 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.