Abstract
After 1989, local ethnography struggled to adjust itself to the new post-socialist situation and to vindicate its raison d'être among other academic disciplines within Czechoslovak (and subsequently Czech) academia. Not only was ethnography's break with the past marked with personal changes, theoretical reorientation or with repeated and later successful attempts to rename itself to ethnology.
It also had to face new challenges coming from without. Sociocultural anthropology posed one of these challenges.
It was imported from the West by émigrés such as Ladislav Holý or Ernest Gellner who became active in the public and academic life during that era. Moreover, first departments of anthropology were founded and first study programmes of anthropology were initiated in the first decade after the fall of communism.
The aim of my paper is to explore various relationships that emerged and developed between the local tradition of ethnography and the imported tradition of sociocultural anthropology from the end of the nineteen-eighties onwards. What were reactions of ethnographers and how did they perceive sociocultural anthropology? Were they converted to anthropology, did they oppose it or did they believe that both disciplines could flourish and prosper side by side? I will try to answer these questions with the help of accounts of the very witnesses of the post-socialist transformation of ethnography.