Ethnic Studies it the Czech Republic

The term ethnic studies is not frequently used in the academic community of the Czech Republic. It is predominantly connected to the name of the Ethnic Studies Department at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and with texts produced by Czech ethnologists dealing with migrations, minorities and adjustment processes to the new environment (in the Czech academic texts of the second half of the 20th century, occasionally called „etnické procesy” [ethnic processes]). The author of this text scrutinizes the meaning of the concept of ethnic studies in the Czech context and poses the question what types of enquiries there have been so far. He compares the concept of ethnic studies in the Czech Republic and the USA, where ethnic studies departments originated in the 1960s and 1980s, and concludes that in the Czech Republic, in contrast to the United States, the theme of ethnic studies relates rather than the ethno-revivalist movements with social anthropological research into the dynamics of human relations and intercultural contacts, which were frequently called interethnic relations in the 1990s.