IN-PERSON: Prague – Section A

Abstract

This presentation provides an overview and excerpts of a larger work in progress chronicling the experience of several ordinary Czechs living through the extraordinary transformation of their country and lives from the period of late socialism to the present. The project draws on participant observation, archival research, and life history interviews with a range of collaborators (from a bamboo gardener to an underground musician, a teacher, an engineer, an artist, a counterintelligence officer, a prisoner, an historian, etc.) to trace a human-scale perspective on the momentous geopolitical, economic, and socio-cultural changes in the contemporary history of Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic. Recounting how individuals navigate the shifting historical context offers a series of petits recits to humanize, ground, and complicate the grand narrative of the revolutionary transition from Communism to capitalism and liberal democracy. The author is an outsider, an accidental tourist who first stumbled into Prague in 1985, returned shortly after the Velvet Revolution, and visited periodically but consistently over the next decades. I have maintained lifelong friendships and collaborations with a network of Czechs and have studied the history, culture, and language of Bohemia, earning a doctorate from Emory University’s interdisciplinary Institute of the Liberal Arts in 2001. While occasionally employing a first person POV, I’m not the protagonist of the story so much as an ethnographic observer whose peripatetic visits to the region provide a narrative structure to the project, through whose eyes the metamorphosis of the land and its people is glimpsed, and through whom my Czech friends can tell their own stories as a window into the structural and cultural transformations of the public and private spheres, the human heritage of people and their pasts across local and geopolitical cultural geographies.