Etnografický atlas Čech, Moravy a Slezska: stav a perspektivy výzkumu

The text summarizes the history and present state of the ethnocartographic research in the Czech Lands. It accentuates the fact that, in spite of the relatively high prestige of ethnocartography in many European countries and in spite of repeated efforts of several representants of our ethnocartography, „classical“ ethnographic atlas was never realized in the Czech Republic and probably will never be realized in the future due to several reasons. The causes of neglect or even negation of ethnocartographic research are mostly due to organizational and ideological reasons. The present-day Czech research must, therefore, face numerous specific tasks and problems that influence the concept and contents of the ethnographic atlas. From the nowadays already anachronistic effort to map the „whole“ of traditional culture the concept of the Ethnographic Atlas of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia moved in the direction of spatial documentation and analysis of partial, selected aspects. The second important feature is the giving up of field research and the general use of questionnaires in the process of the collection of the data, instead of the analysis of written and iconographical sources. The basic conceptual and theoretical-methodological bases of the work on the atlas can be resumed as follows: the consistent application of territorial, not ethnical principle for collection and analysis of the data; the focus on the time period between the second half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th century; liberal choice of localities, preference given to statistical and proto-statistical data; consistent application of modern technological devices – especially geographic information system (GIS).