Orientalism and the Discourses of Modernization: Czech Anthropology in Subcarpathian Ruthenia (1919-1938)
Abstrakt
Most of the recent Czech historiography on the Subcarpathian Ruthenia aims at the issue of modernization. Typically the general progress in public hygiene, education, communication, industry and economy is claimed and presented as a clear civilising success, which is to be ascribed to the Czech administration of the region.
The proposed presentation tries to offer another reading of the story by problematizing the concept of modernization. As I claim, the discourses of modernization need to be analysed regarding their role in negotiating the centrum and the periphery of the Czechoslovak state and in legitimizing the Czech governance over the region.
Inevitably, the concept of Orientalism appears to be of great use here, since the discourses on the Czechoslovak "civilising mission", launched "for the sake" of the local populations clearly rested on an Oriental imagery. Ruthenians were portrayed as "backward" and "primitive", in other words "different" from the "developed", "Western" Czechoslovaks.
Applying this critical notion of modernization, I will outline the most important discourses of modernization, produced in the interwar Czechoslovakia towards the Subcarpathian Ruthenia and offer some possibilities for their future research. In the second part of my presentation, I would like to focus more closely on one particular type of knowledge, which markedly contributed to the reproduction of the discourses of modernization: the discourse of anthropology.
I will specifically address the activities of the anthropologist Vojtěch Suk (1879-1967), who conducted several field-researches in eastern part of the country throughout the 1920s-30s. Just like his colleagues who conducted anthropological research in the colonial spaces overseas, Suk pronounced a certain ethnical hierarchy, proclaiming some ethnic groups more worthy of civilizing/modernizing, then the others.