Abstract
The paper deals with historical contexts of a phonographic collection of wax cylinders stored today in the Library of the Institute of Musicology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. The collection is used as a historical witness here.
It discusses the links between the Berlin Phonogram Archives and German speaking musicology in Prague in the field of non-European and European folk music studies in the 1930s and early 1940s. It focuses on Central Europe as once a space of remarkable scholarly networking.
The methods used are historical and it examines scholarly practices as Foucauldian discoursive practices. The research is based on primary sources such as correspondence, contemporary university official documents and archival documentation from various institutions from countries in Europe and the USA.
Its goal is to say something about the workings of scholarship, about the "inner" logic of it as a specific field of cultural production and about its vulnerability to the "outer" socio-political context.