Traversing: Embodied Lifeworlds in the Czech Republic 9781501749247

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TRAVERSING

TRAVERSING Embodied Lifeworlds in the Czech Republic Susanna Trnka

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Trnka, Susanna, author. Title: Traversing : embodied lifeworlds in the Czech Republic / Susanna Trnka. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019034450 (print) | LCCN 2019034449 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501749223 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501749230 (epub) | ISBN 9781501749247 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Ethnology—Czech Republic. | Ethnology—Philosophy. | Czech Republic—Social life and customs. Classification: LCC DB2040 .T76 2020 (ebook) | LCC DB2040 (print) | DDC 943.7105/13—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034450 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034449

For Lukáš

Only by means of a body, and of a body which we control directly, can we be active in the world, taking a real part in the process of change of what it contains. —Jan Patocˇka, “The ‘Natural’ World and Phenomenology”

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Movement, Technology, and Culture in the Making of (Czech) Lives

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2.

3.

4.

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6.

Footsteps through the City: Social Justice in Its Multiplicity

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Digital Dwelling: The Everyday Freedoms of Technology Use

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Ballroom Dance and Other Technologies of Sexuality and Desire

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The New Europeans: Twenty-First-Century Families as Sites for Self-Realization

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Making Moods: Food and Drink as Collective Acts of Sustenance, Pleasure, and Dissolution

143

Reconnection: Between the Power Lines and the Stars

170

Notes References Index

191 193 205

Acknowledgments

First and foremost I would like to thank my interlocutors, friends, and relatives in the Czech Republic for opening their doors and sharing their lives with me. I cannot do justice to the many insights they have shared, much less to the generosity of spirit they have shown me and my family, but it has not gone unnoticed. I will not name them here as many of them appear (with pseudonyms) in the pages of this book, but my gratitude to them runs deep. Several colleagues and friends from around the world very generously read the draft manuscript and gave me detailed feedback for which I am extremely grateful. I would especially like to thank Alena Heitlinger, Lloyd Johns, Sarah Pinto, Amy Speier, Julie Spray, Marek Tesar, Jason Throop, and Anja Uhlmann. I am very grateful to my brother, Peter Trnka, who read the manuscript with a philosopher’s keen eye and engaged in many a debate over Heidegger’s texts with me. My husband, John Correll, deserves credit for providing feedback on a very early first draft as well as for patiently partaking in years of discussions about Heidegger, Patocˇka, and the nature of ethnography as the book unfolded. My parents, Nina and Jirˇí Trnka, took a keen interest in this project, reading through sections of the book and sharing their memories of post–World War II Czechoslovak society. Thank you also to my dear friend and longtime colleague Christine Dureau, who spent many hours discussing this project with me and gently encouraging it forward. Three other friends made sure I was well supplied with encouragement and enthusiasm during the research and writing process—my warmest thanks to Kerry Gibson and Phyllis Herda in Auckland and Katerˇina Krˇížková in Prague. Thanks are due to Tereza Stöckelová and Václav Beˇlohradský for their thoughtful and generous engagement with this project and to Jana Kopelent Rehak for sharing with me her memories (and those of her family and friends) of ballroom dance classes as well as her thoughts on how Czechs navigate through space. I am also grateful to Ivan Chvatík for showing me around Prague’s Patocˇka Archive. Courtney Addison, Sharyn Graham Davies, Pauline Herbst, Jesse Hession Grayman, and Sam Taylor-Alexander provided detailed feedback on chapter 3 as part of a Society of Medical Anthropology in Aotearoa (SOMAA) roundtable in Auckland. I would like to thank the editors of Ploughshares for permitting publication of an excerpt from Jaroslav Seifert’s poem “View from Charles Bridge,” the English translation of which was originally published in their journal. Chapter 6 draws from a previous publication (“Playing Cowboys and Indians: The ix

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Therapeutics of Nostalgia,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes 57 [3–4]: 284–98 © Canadian Association of Slavists, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of Canadian Association of Slavists), and I would like to thank the editor of that volume, Graham H. Roberts, for his encouragement and editorial finesse. Finally, a very hearty thank you to the editorial team at Cornell University Press—and most especially to Jim Lance and Mary Kate Murphy—for so enthusiastically shepherding this book to press.

TRAVERSING

Introduction

MOVEMENT, TECHNOLOGY, AND CULTURE IN THE MAKING OF (CZECH) LIVES

“Look, it’s Prague!” my nine-year-old son Lukáš exclaimed as he ran up to me carrying his father’s iPad. Google Maps was open to a satellite view of Smíchov, the area where we used to live. “It’s the park and the ice-cream place!” Lukáš said as he pointed excitedly, and then asked, “Do you think we can see the Eiffel Tower?” referring to the lookout tower in Prague’s Petrˇín Park, a smaller-size replica of its Parisian namesake. I was taken back for a moment to another time and place—not to our many stays in Smíchov, but to an evening spent on the other side of Prague, perusing Google Maps with my close friend Lenka’s eleven-year-old son Karel. Karel had asked me to show him where I live in New Zealand and I’d pulled up a satellite view of Auckland, pointing out some landmarks—the Harbour Bridge, the Sky Tower. But none of it meant anything to Karel, who had never been to New Zealand. We were both getting bored when he asked me, “Should we go to Paris?” and pulled up a view of the (Parisian) Eiffel Tower. My son and I could spend hours on Google Maps exploring Prague. Together, we are there, but not there, traversing the spaces we know so well, remembering the pleasures of the Czech capital and anticipating our next visit. There is a sensoriality to this experience, as we feel a thrill when we recognize a building or laugh at the familiar sight of swans on the riverbanks. We feel this because we have felt this city, we have been there before. In contrast, for Karel, satellite images of New Zealand are meaningless, even with a knowledgeable narrator sitting at

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his elbow. He has no bearings in Auckland and one street melds into the next as we “move” along them, courtesy of Pegman, Google Maps’ iconic little yellow man. But while neither Karel nor I had been to Paris at that point, the Parisian Eiffel Tower was something we both recognized. There was already an image of it in our heads, an image that was both confirmed and expanded by our experience of Paris through Google Maps. We were there but not really there—reaching out, extending ourselves, trying to grasp a world constituted by layers of fantasy, imagination, and digital surveillance. There is something about actually being there that Google Maps or any other representative media cannot convey to us. Being there is a matter of embodied sensoriality. It is a matter of getting to know the world through our perceptions, movements, and tactile capabilities. It is necessarily partial and subject dependent; it is our knowledge, conscious as well as unrecognized, of the world as we encounter it. In my forties, I made my first trip to Paris. I’d pictured the Eiffel Tower for many years and even steadied myself to experience a bit of a letdown after seeing so many iconic photographs and cinematic images. Instead, when I got my first glimpse of it in real life, I was startled by its size and command of the city. I had not been there, until I was there. As many a traveler has recounted, imagining a place is one thing, but experiencing it can be quite another (Bærenholdt et al. 2004). This is not to say that we cannot be in virtual environments, for we certainly can have deeply embodied knowledge of virtual spaces, as scholars who study digital culture, particularly gaming and virtual worlds, have shown (Boellstorff [2008] 2015; Doyle 2009). My point here is a simpler one. When we are engaged, even if bodily, with a simulacrum such as Google Maps, this simulacrum may very well be related to the “real world” and extend our experience of it, but it cannot replace what we gain by being in situ. Google Maps can extend our sense of being there, so that we are there again, or are there seeing more than we had before, taking a turn down a street we never traversed in real life, seeing a moment in time we did not experience. It can also prepare us for what we might expect when we first come there (which is often why we use this application in the first place). But it cannot replace the bodily experience of being in a place and all of the conscious and unconscious knowledge that that imparts. As the twentieth-century Czech philosopher Jan Patocˇka stated, our vision is always linked to our bodily interaction with a thing or a space. To see a situation, I must already be somewhere within it: “Perspective always extends out from a center constituted by a perceptually incomplete appearance of our own corporeity. . . . A situation is something in which I must be in order to understand it (not above or before it)” ([1967] 1989, 254). Patocˇka also elucidated how our vision is not static;

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rather, we see via our movements through space, learning to recognize through our corporeal engagement. Our movements, he noted, are, moreover, in a dynamic relationship with the world: as we move through it, we necessarily change it. Representative media, such as maps, photographs, or interactive virtual worlds, can extend our imaginations as well as our actual reach in very specific and partial ways, but they cannot erase the situatedness—the historical, cultural, and individual biographical specificity of how and from where we see the world and engage with it. They also cannot replace the more subtle but deeply profound knowledge we accrue by means of being in a place—our knowledge of how best to move through a particular maze of streets, avoiding the crowds or the gaps in the cobblestones on the sidewalk, of where to stand so we don’t get the sun shining in our eyes, of what it smells like or the crispness in the air—in other words, the sensorial facets of our bodily there-ness in this particular space and time. This does not mean that we encounter the world in some sort of pure or raw form. Cultural representations, collective accounts, and historical memories all shape not only the meaning of places but our experiences of them (Urry [1990] 2002). But to focus on these without accounting for the sensoriality of our embodied being-in-the-world is to miss a crucial facet of how we constitute not only knowledge but also ourselves (Csordas 1990; Patocˇka [1995] 1998).

Traversing This book is about our ways of seeing, experiencing, and moving through the world and the kinds of persons we become through them—a process I think of as traversing. Drawing from philosophical concepts developed by two phenomenological philosophers, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Jan Patocˇka (1907–77), and putting them in conversation with ethnographic analyses of the lives of contemporary Czechs, in the pages that follow I examine how embodiment is crucial for understanding our being-in-the-world. Specifically, I focus on three kinds of movements we make as embodied actors in the world: how we move through time and space, be it by walking along city streets, gliding across the dance floor, or clicking our way across digital landscapes; how we move toward and away from one another, as erotic partners, family members, or fearful, ethnic “others”; and how we move toward ourselves and the earth we live on. Traversing is necessarily an embodied practice. It highlights the significance of both spatiality (namely, being in a world of objects and spaces that determine our movements) and temporality, considering how movement varies across different moments in the body’s temporality or life course (childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age) as well as how the experience of time shifts as we move through, and

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with, it. Traversing also considers the fundamentally important role that interrelationality plays in our being-in-the-world: there is a decided social and political edge to traversing, as it is always played out in a politically charged universe of possibilities where the decisions that we make matter, not only to ourselves, but to others moving alongside and after us. Highlighting movement, traversing is necessarily active, but with an awareness of collective and structural constraints. Traversing foregrounds human independence and interdependence, agency and creativity. It posits culture, history, and technology in terms of how they shape how we traverse through life, and in turn examines how our movements act to create culture, recast history, and engage with, or disavow, technology. Asserting the dynamism of any given society and any given human life, it highlights how we move through life, just as life moves through and around us, necessitating that we never stay in exactly the same place and time but must continually navigate our “thrownness” or situatedness in a specific historical moment. I have chosen to explore traversing’s various facets by means of an ethnographic examination of key moments that occur across many Czechs’ lives. These moments are in many ways extraordinarily mundane, yet they remain extraordinary in terms of how they constitute what it is to live a life. They include such things as walking through cities, updating Facebook, taking part in ballroom dance classes, living within a family, eating and drinking, and reconnecting with nature. In each case, my interest is in how these activities shed light on how we go about moving through time and space, connecting and disconnecting with others, embracing and losing our sense of self and of the world in which we live. Conceptually, then, this book grapples with what it means for our existence to be necessarily corporeal and temporally finite, located in a specific place and time, and shaped by our dwelling in a world molded by culture and technology. A starting point that I find helpful for exploring these ideas is the philosophical work of Heidegger and Patocˇka, both of whom insisted on highlighting the importance of the historical, technological, and cultural specificity of how we live our lives, while also focusing on unveiling the universal characteristics of human existence. Particularly significant is Heidegger’s notion of “Dasein,” a term that is usually translated as “presence” or “existence” but that literally means “being (sein) there (da).”

Being There: Dasein There are many ways to interpret Heidegger’s employment of Dasein, but it is generally accepted that in replacing the notion of the “self ” or “person” with “Dasein,” Heidegger intended to emphasize the situatedness of existence. Heidegger

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perceived our existence, or being-in-the-world, as necessarily located within a specific spatial and temporal framing. In “being there,” we are always located in and therefore contingent on the temporal and spatial “there” in which we find ourselves. According to Heidegger, Dasein, moreover, not only is in the world, but dwells within it. Dwelling is fundamentally active; it consists of building and thinking—both reflecting on our world and reshaping it. Dwelling is thus closely linked to technology, as it is through technology—hammers and planes, bridges and roads, cars and high-rise buildings—that humans reshape the world in which we live. Heidegger’s contemporary, Jan Patocˇka, was greatly inspired by Heidegger but felt that noticeably absent from much of Heidegger’s conceptualization, and in particular his seminal text Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), was a comprehensive examination of how dwelling in the world necessitates being in a body. This may seem rather ironic as Heidegger’s work is often credited with being a philosophical catalyst for taking embodiment seriously (e.g., Csordas 1994). There is, of course, a bodiliness inherent in many of Heidegger’s descriptions of being. If, to draw from one of his most famous passages, being-in-the-world consists of reaching out and grabbing hold of a hammer in order to fix or build something, one must have either a hand or a prosthesis to do so. But the embodied dimensions of such actions—for example, how we see an object and experience moving toward it, how we feel as we lift it and how this experience might change as we age—remain largely implicit in Heidegger’s early work. Patocˇka’s point was to highlight the need for making a phenomenological examination of the corporeality of being-in-the-world the focal point of analysis. Inspired by Heidegger but significantly expanding on his vision, Patocˇka emphasized two aspects of being-in-the-world that he felt Heidegger left underdeveloped: the corporeal, with its inherent dynamism; and the interrelational, in terms of a much broader range of positive and negative relations to others than Heidegger had explored in Being and Time. In contrast to Heidegger, Patocˇka’s depiction of being-in-the-world spotlights what it means to be-among-others as a corporeal subject moving through space and time. Patocˇka also added an explicit political dimension to his analysis of being. Heidegger emphasized the importance of the individual facing the realities of being, and its finitude, in order for Dasein to be “in the truth” ([1953] 2010, 212). Throughout his work, Patocˇka greatly expanded on the need for, as he put it, “living in truth,” developing this concept in two directions: the individual’s ability to search for and live according to the meaning of being; and the collective establishment and protection of societies that have as their goal enabling their citizens to strive toward such “living in truth.” Crucially, “living in truth” thus has both personal (philosophic) and collective (political) dimensions.

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This point became central to the work of another Czech philosophical thinker—Patocˇka’s fellow dissident Václav Havel, who became one of the leaders of the 1989 revolution that overthrew the Communist state and then went on to act as the first postrevolution president. Indeed, when Havel penned his famous essay “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), he rallied opposition against the state socialist regime by calling on Czechoslovaks to “live in truth” and embrace all that this entailed. Much like Patocˇka’s underground philosophy seminars that were frequented by dissidents, artists, and academics, philosophy here acted not only as an exercise in critical thinking but as a political force. We will return to a fuller examination of Heidegger’s and Patocˇka’s ideas below. For now, it is important to note that their examinations were cast within the mode of philosophical argumentation as the two scholars attempted to parse away the assumptions and misconceptions made by both popular culture and the influential thinkers who came before them, and thus hone in on the fundamental attributes of being. There is, however, a much more empirical way of grappling with the nature of the human condition and all of its cultural, technological, and historical specificities: ethnography.

Being There, or Deep Hanging Out Since the early twentieth century, anthropology has insisted that there is a more productive method than philosophical reflection for both unearthing and moving beyond our own cultural assumptions. In fact, much of contemporary anthropological knowledge is based on the idea that only by delving into another context and immersing ourselves in another set of cultural practices will we be able to both recognize our own assumptions and, through comparison, come to a more genuine understanding of human nature. As an early pioneer of ethnographic inquiry, Bronisław Malinowski explained, “In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness” (1922, 19). It is precisely by exploring how these values, aims, impulses, and yearnings are differently constituted that we can throw into relief our own assumptions about what is, and is not, a universal facet of human experience. The most productive means for achieving this, Malinowski suggested, is ethnographic fieldwork, which requires anthropologists to plunge into a society and use their experiences living among its peoples as their primary “data.” A later formulation of the same idea came from Clifford Geertz (1973), who argued that the antidote to cultural essentialism is immersing ourselves in a cultural

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context that is alien to us in order to examine what really motivates and shapes various people’s being-in-the-world. In his famous essay “Being There” (1988), Geertz rocked the anthropological establishment by arguing that the authority of any ethnography resides not in its factual accuracy as much as in its author’s ability to convince readers that he or she has actually “been there,” living in the midst of the culture in question. Throughout his career, Geertz devoted himself to exemplifying how through immersion we uncover not only true universals, but also the astounding diversity of the ways in which human life is played out. Simply put, ethnography reveals how the world gives us many more options and much more variety than we can possibly think up ourselves, confronting and overturning our assumptions about “what must be” through a presentation of the radical alterities of “what is.” So how do we achieve this? There have been many primers on ethnographic fieldwork, but perhaps one of the most revealing expositions was Geertz’s 1998 review in the New York Review of Books in which he defended the process of fieldwork as a form of “deep hanging out.” Asserting that anthropology requires a certain depth of critical engagement beyond the fleeting interactions advocated by postmodern scholars such as James Clifford (whose book was one of the texts being reviewed by Geertz), Geertz offered a highly spirited defense of how open-ended, informal, in-depth fieldwork—that is, spending a year or more living in the field—is vital to anthropological knowledge production.1 Indeed, one of the true gifts of in-depth fieldwork is how it can often alter, sometimes in very radical ways, our thinking about the subject(s) we are studying. Theoretical ideas or concepts can be tried out in advance, but the nature of one’s interactions in the field usually determines which ones become the most salient for analyzing actual social phenomena. Deep hanging out, or immersive, open-ended research, requires the researcher to be willing to suspend being directive and let the research process play out in front of her or him, for while fieldwork might involve structured fieldwork engagements or directed questioning, it requires as much, if not more, nondirected engagement. We can never really foretell what we will encounter in the field, as our research participants can steer the project in entirely different directions. Serendipity can also play a key role in reshaping the structure of research. The payoff of such open-ended engagement for the researcher is that one encounters relationships or events that one never would have set out to study, but that can become the crux of one’s findings in the field. In a book that Cris Shore and I edited in which we asked several senior anthropologists to describe their fieldwork experiences to us, one after another

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told us of the “eureka” moment when their thinking about their research radically changed—and not based on encounters they had planned in advance (Shore and Trnka 2013). David Trigger (2013), for example, related how his understandings of social dynamics in Australian Aboriginal communities shifted when he unexpectedly became the victim of a sorcery attack, something you cannot build into your research agenda. Marilyn Strathern (2013, 239) described conducting fieldwork in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea in the early 1960s and documenting a phenomenon without even having a name for it—what she was observing, she realized in retrospect, “was really ‘gender,’ except that the term ‘gender’ wasn’t there yet; that word didn’t occur until [several years later]”—when it became a central concept in anthropology, in no small measure through her own contributions to the discipline. Michael Jackson (2013a) fascinatingly spoke of not only changing research agendas, but of wanting himself to be changed through his encounters with other peoples and other places, and his experiences in war-torn Sierra Leone would suggest he was. In fact, without allowing for this kind of open-ended quality to our research, we are guilty of the hubris of thinking we know the field in question before we begin our research and thus risk missing vital aspects of the phenomena we aim to understand. In their introduction to their book on fieldwork, aptly titled Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth, John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi suggest that, new philosophical reflection often takes the form of . . . puppeteering— the staging of dialogues between past and present, between theorists, or between theorists and native interlocutors—instead of grappling with the actual dialogues that go on in the field: episodes of asymmetrical conversation, argument, misunderstanding, agreement, mutual sharing, affection, aggression, and manipulation. . . . Fieldwork encounters, we hope to demonstrate, are modes of ethical engagement wherein the ethnographer is arrested in the act of perception. This arrest can lead both to a productive doubt about the ongoing perception of the phenomena in interaction and to the possibility of elaborating shared knowledge. (2009, 16, 19) As Borneman and Hammoudi attest, anthropology and, in particular, the ethnographic encounter offer the potential of radically revising our understandings of the world. That said, today anthropological scholarship is being carried out in an educational and financial environment that threatens to strip away the fluid and contextually responsive character of longer-term engagements.

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The danger of this is that short-term fieldwork that tightly adheres to a preset hypothesis, methodology, and analytical framework (all prepared prior to stepping into the field) leaves little space for altering the research process in response to what an ethnographer actually learns from her or his interlocutors. While brief fieldwork encounters have their role (and should have their role) in the anthropological enterprise, there will be a real loss if short-term fieldwork—from the cosmopolitan-style, decentered, fleeting dialogical engagements advocated by Clifford to the increasingly prevalent “interview-based ethnographies” necessitated by restrictions on researchers’ time and money—come to overshadow and dominate anthropology to the point where deep hanging out becomes a thing of the past. As Borneman and Hammoudi suggest, it is by only by enabling ourselves to have the space for pausing and changing our mind about the phenomena that we are encountering that we have the chance to stumble on to new paths and directions.

The Making of This Book This book undertakes the task of elucidating “what is” through an examination of such open-ended encounters. Its material comes from ethnographic observations I have made over the span of thirty years of visits—from 1987 until 2017— to what was once Czechoslovakia and is now the Czech Republic. Some of this material is drawn from my personal experiences as a Czech American, now New Zealander, going “home” to see people I deeply care about. Other parts of this book came about through the practice of ethnographic fieldwork and, in particular, by means of deep hanging out. At times, it is hard to separate one from the other. I grew up in a Czech immigrant family in the United States. My parents were part of a wave of emigrants who left Czechoslovakia when the borders opened up in 1968 in what was to be much too brief a period of democratic revitalization. Czechoslovakia had had a state socialist government and been under Soviet domination since the post–World War II election of the Communist Party in 1948. However, in January 1968, the newly appointed first secretary of the Communist Party, Alexander Dubcˇek, revealed himself to be a reformist, easing restrictions on the media, free speech, and travel. Soviet concern over these new stirrings of democracy resulted in Warsaw Pact forces invading Prague in August 1968. Dubcˇek was arrested and taken away to Moscow, where he and other Czechoslovak leaders were forced to reverse their reformist agenda. A series of political purges and crackdowns quickly halted the “Prague Spring,” and the nation was plunged into a harsher form of totalitarian control.

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My parents were in London when the Russian tanks pulled into Prague. Neither of them, nor any of their children, set foot into Czechoslovakia again until I made my first visit there in 1987 at the age of sixteen, a curious teenager wanting to see where my family came from and meet the relatives I had heard so much about. My trip was authorized by the Czechoslovak government, as my parents paid for the right to strip me of Czechoslovak citizenship. This was citizenship that the Czechoslovak authorities automatically gave to the children of all émigrés, even those like me who were born in the West. I’ve been told that had I remained a Czechoslovak citizen, I would likely have been stopped at the border on my way out and informed that having been deprived of the “right” to experience my homeland for so long, I was now not able to leave. Instead I spent a fascinating ten days “being there,” in what felt like another world, before returning home only to watch that world get remade two years later. In November 1989, anti-Communist revolutions spread across Eastern and Central Europe. The Berlin Wall was in the process of being knocked down and Czechoslovakia overturned the state socialist government, opening up the way for democratic elections. A month later my future husband and I drove from Berlin to Prague, imagining we would see jubilation. We found some of what we were expecting, but we also saw relatives who had a bottle of vodka open at the breakfast table as they struggled to make sense of how they, as card-carrying members of the Communist Party, were going to survive in a new political system. As a university student, I was learning the basics of anthropological fieldwork, and the reflections and notes I took then as well as on many subsequent visits to the Czech Republic are part of what I draw on in this book. Over the years that have followed, my time in the Czech Republic has included a wide range of experiences. I spent a three-month stint in 1993 working as a volunteer translator and editor at the Prague Gender Studies Centre, then a shoestring operation run out of the living room of the Czech sociologist and former dissident Jirˇina Šiklová. A few years later, I embarked on a year of sociological research on young women and the impact of the 1989 revolution on their lives, documenting their desires and dreams, career possibilities, family situations, and reflections on politics (Heitlinger and Trnka 1998). My graduate studies in anthropology led me to undertake fieldwork in an entirely different part of the world, examining ethnic and religious identity and political violence in Fiji, and resulted in a brief break in my travels to the Czech Republic, until political instability in Fiji forced me to switch field sites and return once more to conducting research in Central Europe. This book draws from a range of projects I have conducted in the Czech Republic, as disparate as oral histories with people aged seventeen to eighty-four

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about their experiences of World War II (for the older set), the post-1968 “normalization” period, and state socialism, and ethnographic research on sufferers of asthma and those who provide them with care. Some chapters rely heavily on interviews and observations I conducted specifically for this book on digital technology use, ballroom dance classes, and antialcohol awareness campaigns. But other material, including my reflections on food, drink, and transcendence; the sensoriality of urban walking; the public face of eroticism and sexuality; and Czechs’ fascination with country cottages (chaty) did not start off as “research topics” I intended to study but came about through hanging out with people I am close to. Indeed, the bulk of this book is based on entanglements in the lives of people I have come to know, in many cases over multiple decades, and the experiences we have shared together. In making sense of the moments I recount from their lives, and my life, I have found the philosophical work of Heidegger and Patocˇka, as well as some of their intellectual precursors and followers, especially useful.

Philosophical Legacies Many of the questions that troubled Heidegger and Patocˇka about our relationship to the world were first articulated by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). The founder of phenomenology, or the study of the nature of consciousness and how we experience objects and the world, Husserl is credited with redefining the place of the self and the body as central to our encounters with the natural world. Through his method of “bracketing,” or “phenomenological reduction,” Husserl suggested that we must necessarily suspend our knowledge and judgment of the world to recreate our understanding of it based on the content of our actual experiences. One of Husserl’s students who expanded on his thinking was Patocˇka. A more philosophically and politically controversial one was Heidegger. Heidegger was in many ways the direct beneficiary of Husserl’s scholarly legacy. He was a student and personal assistant of Husserl’s at the University of Freiburg, edited some of Husserl’s later writings, and eventually took over his chair in philosophy following Husserl’s retirement in 1928. Notably, Heidegger dedicated his magnum opus, Being and Time (first published in 1927), to “Edmund Husserl, in friendship and admiration.” However, the book’s groundbreaking approach to being represented a radical departure from Husserl’s philosophical methods. As the philosopher Richard Schacht notes, “Husserl began to have doubts about Heidegger soon after the appearance of Being and Time, writing to Roman Ingarden at the time that ‘Heidegger has not grasped the whole

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meaning of the phenomenological reduction’; and his doubts culminated in his embittered feeling, in his later years, that Heidegger neither practiced nor understood phenomenology as he conceived it at all” (1972, 294). Personal relations between the two men grew increasingly strained, reaching their nadir in 1933 when Heidegger, who had been appointed rector of the University of Freiburg, openly embraced Nazism at the same time that Husserl’s Jewish heritage resulted in his expulsion from the academic community.2 At the end of World War II, Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi Party led him to be initially banned from teaching. The ban was, however, lifted in 1951, and Heidegger’s status as a major philosopher continued to grow during the postwar period, with a bounty of his new scholarly work appearing throughout the 1950s. Often these texts are referred to as characteristic of “the late Heidegger,” distinguishing his later perspectives from those of his earlier works. Heidegger himself noted a significant shift or “turn” (die Kehre) in his philosophical thinking that took place sometime after the writing of Being and Time (Heidegger ([1946] 1998). Patocˇka’s formal forays into philosophy began at Charles University in Prague, where his PhD thesis focused on Husserl’s work. In 1932 a scholarship brought him to the University of Freiburg, where he was deeply affected by Heidegger’s thinking but formed a much stronger personal bond with Husserl, who was by then professor emeritus (Vít 2017, 5). On his return to Prague, Patocˇka launched himself into the philosophical enterprise of bringing together Heidegger’s and Husserl’s lines of thinking (Kohák 1989, xii; Vít 2017, 6). Most of Patocˇka’s academic career was conducted under strict censorship laws, first under Nazi occupation and later under state socialism. He was removed from several scholarly posts due to his political affiliations and barred from lecturing for much of his academic life; following World War II, Patocˇka was permitted to lecture only from 1945 to 1949 and then again from 1968 to 1972 (Vít 2017). During, the 1970s, however, he engaged in illegal, underground seminars which, as described by Jan Vít, took place “in various apartments, but also in artists’ studios and backstage in the theatre” in Prague and proved extremely popular; several of his lectures were subsequently published as samizdat (underground) literature (2017, 20–21). In January 1977, at the age of sixty-nine, Patocˇka became one of the public spokespersons for the dissident group Charta 77 (Charter 77), openly criticizing the state socialist government for its disregard of human rights. The backlash was severe; already in poor health when he was repeatedly interrogated by the secret police, Patocˇka was diagnosed with “extreme heart failure” and died in March 1977 (Vít 2017, 23). In addition to his political activism, Patocˇka left a notable philosophical legacy across Continental Europe, evident in the work of Jacques Derrida (1996) and Paul Ricouer (2007), among others. Arguably, one

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of his most significant achievements was his radical revisioning of Heidegger’s conceptualization of being-in-the-world.

From Being-in-the-World to the World of Movement As noted, among Heidegger’s most prominent philosophical insights was the idea that any examination of human existence or being must begin with an analysis of our being-in-the-world. As he put it, “It is not the case that a human being ‘is,’ and then on top of that has a relation of being to the ‘world’ which it sometimes takes upon itself ” ([1953] 2010, 57). Instead, Dasein is always engaged in being-in-the-world: “In that it is, Dasein has always already referred itself to an encounter with a ‘world’” (86). For this reason, Heidegger insisted on grounding his analysis of human being in an examination of Dasein’s relation to the world, to objects, or to others. Much of Heidegger’s foundational analysis of being focuses on our relation to things, and in particular to the world of tools with which we act and create, not sitting passively but actively dwelling in the world around us. Technology, Heidegger suggested, is essential to “de-distancing,” or bringing the world into “nearness,” though often the technologies that are most central to doing this are those we are the most blind to, like the glasses on our nose, the telephone receiver we speak through, or the street we walk on ([1953] 2010, 103–4). Given that Dasein is always already in a world, it is important to understand the specificities of that world, in the sense of our being in a particular time and place and among the specific objects that constitute our world, which Heidegger referred to as our “thrownness.” Just as crucially, however, we should aim to stand back from the influence of sociality and historicity in an effort to see them and recognize their effects, particularly as the social collective—which Heidegger referred to as das Man, but which has also been translated into English as “the they”—does not occupy a well-regarded place in Heidegger’s vision of the world. According to Heidegger, it is das Man who restricts the content and scope of Dasein’s feeling, limiting our possibilities in life and creating “averageness” where there could be unique insight: “With the lostness in the they, the nearest factical potentiality-of-being of Dasein— tasks, rules, standards, the urgency and scope of being-in-the-world as concerned and taking care—has already been decided upon. The they has always already kept Dasein from taking hold of these possibilities-of-being. The they even conceals the way it has silently disburdened Dasein of the explicit choice of these possibilities” ([1953] 2010, 257–58).

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It is up to Dasein to recover these possibilities, as part of our very thrownness consists of making choices. According to Heidegger, “Dasein is a being-possible which is entrusted to itself, it is thrown possibility throughout. Dasein is the possibility of being free for its ownmost potentiality of being” ([1953] 2010, 139–40). We come here to a central aspect of Heidegger’s thinking—namely, that it is up to us as individuals to grasp these choices and realize ourselves, in the face of our being-in-the-world. Patocˇka reframed Heidegger’s vision to emphasize the fundamental interrelationality of Dasein with others, as well as the central significance of Dasein’s inherent corporeality. Corporeality, for Patocˇka, is that which defines us as human: “Precisely corporeity is what places humans into the world as intrinsically living beings, living a life” ([1995] 1998, 70). Our knowledge of the world is, moreover, always structured through our bodies. For Patocˇka (as well as for Husserl), our very perception and thus ultimately our understanding of the world is dependent on acts of movement. In fact, our very humanity is fully achieved when we begin to move, enabling our ability to actively engage through space and among things and people. “A biological organism,” Patocˇka wrote, “becomes a real person in the moment when I can do something on my own (i.e., move)” (25). Patocˇka envisioned movement in life as composed of three different directionalities. The first movement is that of rootedness. Rootedness is the way we ground ourselves, anchoring ourselves in our family, our culture, our history. Here we have our first look at how interrelationality is crucial to being; rather than beginning, as Heidegger did, with a description of Dasein grasping a hammer, for Patocˇka our first and most elemental way of being-in-the-world is the relationship we have as infants to our mothers. As he put it, “It is this structure of the other, as nearer to us than we ourselves and correspondingly near to himself through us, that is the foundation on which the most important aspect of the entire drama of life is set. Through this mutual bond people cohere with each other; even their biological coherence is not thinkable without it, and it is precisely this human context within which man grows up and learns to live before he does so among things” ([1967] 1989, 258). In Being and Time, Heidegger had proclaimed that “the world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is being-with [Mitsein] others” ([1953] 2010, 116). But while in Heidegger’s work there are glimpses of the centrality of the relationship between Dasein and others, many of these descriptions form part of his negative portrayal of das Man. In contrast, Patocˇka not only devoted much more of this thinking to explicating the nature of Mitsein but also depicted sociality as a vital and nurturing force.3 Following on from rootedness, Patocˇka suggested that our second movement is self-projection. Here we have the creation and extension of the self

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into the world of work, through which we come to take care of our basic needs and the needs of others around us. No longer living merely in the domestic unit but in the midst of “the harsh turmoil of the reality of labor and conflict” (Patocˇka [1995] 1998, 177), this is the space of utility and tradition, in which we come to be focused on a “nearness which lives moment to moment,” living from task to task in order to create “a program of life” (Patocˇka [1967] 1989, 265). The third movement is that of self-transcendence, in which we move beyond the particulars of our place and time in the world (our thrownness) to embrace the universe itself. It is characterized by the shift from the “self-loss in selfsustenance” that occurs during the second movement to “self-finding in selfsurrender” (Patocˇka [1967] 1989, 269). To reach this state is in part a matter of choice, a choice that is uniquely human: Patocˇka noted, “Humans are the only beings which, because they are not indifferent to themselves and to their being, can live in truth, can choose between life in the anxiety of its roles and needs and life in relation to the world” ([1995] 1998, 177). Patocˇka waivered, however, in his descriptions of how to achieve such a state, at some moments suggesting that one method was philosophy and the recognition of being that comes with the kind of critical thinking that philosophy enables, and at others indicating a more collectivist transcendence in the form of self-sacrifice for the greater good (see Tucker 2000). Taken together, Patocˇka’s depictions of the three forms of movement offer corporeal, interrelational, and morally vested dynamic trajectories of being. It is these insights into being and movement that I draw on in this book to explore traversing—the pivotal movements people make in going from one place to another, physically, imaginatively, or affectively, and that in turn become the grounds for contemporary Czech lifeworlds. In recent years, there has been a growing body of phenomenologically inspired anthropological scholarship that takes Heidegger’s work as one of its key points of departure (e.g., Ingold 2000, 2005; Jackson 1995, 2008, 2013b; Mattingly 2014; Throop 2010, 2017; Zigon 2017, 2018). A number of these projects have implicitly addressed Patocˇka’s criticism of Heidegger, employing Heidegger’s concepts to build a more robustly embodied approach to the nature of being-in-the-world (for example, Tom Boellstorff ’s [2011, (2008) 2015] analysis of the embodied dimensions of digital culture, or Tine Gammeltoft’s [2013] work on fertility treatments in Vietnam). A few have even directly referred to Patocˇka’s conceptualization of being-in-the-world (e.g., Throop 2018). In introducing the concept of traversing, I wish to extend this work by drawing on Patocˇka’s unique insights into movement, interrelationality, and selftranscendence. Making the case for why attentiveness to the body’s inherent

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INTRODUCTION

dynamism is crucial to understanding being-in-the-world, I use the concept of traversing to bring together Heidegger’s and Patocˇka’s insights with an ethnographic attentiveness to the specificities of how culture, history, and technology mold our movement through the world. Interrogating the possibilities and limits of Heidegger’s and Patocˇka’s philosophical concepts within an ethnographic analysis of Czech culture, I am interested not only in these concepts’ philosophical traction but, more fundamentally, in how we can employ them to better ethnographically examine various facets of (quotidian and transformative) lived experience. For me, traversing provides the conceptual groundwork for an approach to culture that foregrounds the interpersonal, deeply embodied, movement-oriented nature of living a human life, without losing sight of its cultural, biological, historical, or technological contingencies. My starting point for engaging in such an examination is thus not only a critical engagement with Heidegger’s and Patocˇka’s works, but an ethnographic exploration of how lives are being lived in the contemporary Czech Republic.4

The Making of Contemporary Czech Lives The Czech Republic may be a small country, but its population is increasingly diverse. Situated in the center of Europe, on the borderlands of the so-called “East” and “West,” the predominantly Slavic state is ethnically composed of Czechs, with notable minority populations of Slovaks, Vietnamese, Roma or “Gypsies,” and Ukrainians. Its history is one of foreign domination, most notably by the Habsburgs and later the Austro-Hungarians. Following a brief period of self-rule after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in 1918), Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Germans during World War II (1939–45) and was under the control of Soviet forces during the period of state socialism (1948–89). November 1989 heralded a largely nonviolent or “velvet” revolution, which led to the end of socialist rule and the beginning of a tumultuous romance with the capitalist market (as well as the division of the country into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic). Today, with an economy that is booming and an ever-growing gap between those who live in comfort and those who struggle to make ends meet, the nation is deeply embedded in global flows of commodities, entertainment, and lifestyle choices. As in many other parts of the world, the Czech Republic’s citizens are crafting together cosmopolitan lives that both embrace long-standing facets of their culture and accommodate to the vagaries of twenty-first-century capitalism. In attempting to elucidate some of these practices, this book considers six commonplace activities, ranging from the most mundane to the transcendent, each of

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which sheds light on how we traverse through the world, navigating our relationships with others through time and space, connecting and disconnecting with ourselves and the universe in which we live. Each chapter draws concepts developed by Heidegger and Patocˇka into conversation with anthropological scholarship in order to develop a better understanding of both the empirical details of Czech society and what they can reveal to us about the human condition. Such tacking back and forth between ethnographic examination and philosophical thinking, between the particular and the overarching, enables both an understanding of how Czechs experience various moments across the life course and an analysis of what such moments can tell us about the nature of our embodied being-in-the-world. We begin (in chapter 1) by traversing the streets of Prague, following in the footsteps of pilgrims and city dwellers alike as they celebrate the religious holiday of Saint Václav, otherwise known as “Good King Wenceslas.” Meandering through time, national identity, and state politics, we examine the phenomenological dimensions and symbolic meanings of the urban spaces that humans have walked through for over a millennium. We consider how time adheres to the body, shaping its movement through the spaces of the contemporary. We also ask in what ways we create and deconstruct history (actively engaging with our thrownness), what the current possibilities of “living in truth” are, and what any of this has to do with how Muslim refugees and other “aliens” come to be constituted as undesirable in the Czech Republic today. We then move on to the world of digital dwelling (chapter 2), assessing how virtual space enlarges but also condenses the spaces and temporalities of everyday life. We linger online with young people, the middle-aged, and the elderly, examining how school humiliations are offset by international sniper games, the differences and similarities between the world of marbles and the world of Facebook, and how internet shopping might constitute an antidote to a life otherwise plagued by agoraphobia. In response to Heidegger’s deep concerns over how our dependence on technology strips away not only our agency but our very humanity, we examine both the dangers and the promises of traversing through virtual spaces, focusing on the ways that Czechs’ lives are now punctuated with small freedoms that may or may not offset the challenges of living in a world radically transformed by technology use. Our next stop is the world of sex and the erotic, movement and interrelationality, by means of observing ballroom dance lessons, a required part of coming of age for many Czech youth (chapter 3). Following a daughter and her mother through the first steps of becoming a cultured ballroom dancer, we look at how (hetero)sexuality, male dominance, and female sexual objectification are both encouraged and circumscribed on the dance floor. Considering the ubiquity of

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INTRODUCTION

sexual imagery as well as the prevalence of male violence across a range of domestic and public sites, we ask what all of this means in terms of women’s agency and whether or not, as Patocˇka suggested, there is indeed an inherent liberatory potential to deeply intimate, erotic relations. Is sex a possible path to self-transcendence? Our examination of the first stirrings of sexuality gives way to an analysis of reproduction and the role of new technologies in creating and recreating contemporary families (chapter 4). Taking into account both Heidegger’s depiction of society as an alienating force (das Man) and Patocˇka’s emphasis on the social foundations necessary for individuals to engage in “caring” for their “souls,” we reflect on what the role of the family might be in providing possibilities for selfdiscovery or “self-realization.” Specifically, we examine how to reconcile the rise of new European family lifestyles with a strongly patriarchal culture that emphasizes women as preeminently talented in taking care of children, asking what the drawbacks are for men if the family cannot function as a site where they too can find a higher purpose in life. Along the way, we consider the pressures and possibilities of creating identities that do not accede to the demands of twenty-firstcentury capitalism, the implications of conceptualizing marriages as “fifty-fifty” shared economic partnerships, and how best to manage the inheritance left by a compulsive hoarder. We then turn to another core facet of familial and social life: technologies of food and drink and the ways in which they are used to foster particular senses of sociality, time, and space through the cultivation of interrelational pleasures (chapter 5). Following up on the centrality of moods in Heidegger’s depiction of being-in-the-world and using anthropology to focus on how moods are intentionally or unintentionally created rather than merely experienced, we consider the affective dimensions of eating and drinking as well as their impact on bodily and mental well-being. We take part in a feast that transforms time, and we follow a married couple on an alcohol-fueled revisioning of the world, examining when and how the possibilities of bodily transcendence turn into dissolution and potential demise. We finish our journey by taking seriously Heidegger’s, Patocˇka’s, and Havel’s exhortations to actively envision and embrace a world without advanced technology. Indulging in the many pleasures of the great outdoors, we examine how nature and “the natural” come to give us a different sort of bodily knowledge of who we are (chapter 6). From “Indian camps” that mimic the heavily romanticized and fictionalized lifeways of Native American tribes to the industriousness of a relaxing visit to the familial chata, or country cottage, we follow Czechs in their outdoor pursuits, asking whether the realities of living close to (a very technologically mediated form of) nature can indeed transport us to a deeper understanding of what it is be alive.

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Taken together, the chapters in this book explore the possibilities and limits of the acts of beauty and violence, dissolution and transcendence that make up everyday living. The ethnographic descriptions are intended as avenues for thinking through certain ideas, such as the meaning of freedom, how pleasure is constituted interrelationally, and the role of transcendence in contemporary life. Some of the phenomena examined in this book are old (using one’s chata as an escape from the pressures of city life, drinking alcohol, and partaking in religious pilgrimages), and some are novel (new reproductive technologies, digital culture, the current European refugee crisis). Many are global but still firmly culturally rooted: walking through history in the city, teenagers taking ballroom dance classes, the specificities of food and alcohol consumption, or the meaning of nature. In looking at them as culturally, historically, and technologically mediated movements, I reflect on the most intimate depths at which these forces mold our world, while also highlighting our active engagement in life making. Throughout this examination, I reconsider the possibilities, challenges, and confines of Heidegger’s and Patocˇka’s philosophic thinking, looking more closely at how the concepts of being, dwelling, being-with-one-another, corporeality, and movement—all fundamental facets of traversing—might help us to understand life as it is actually lived, in contemporary Czech society as well as elsewhere. My main intention in putting these philosophically derived concepts into conversation with anthropological insights is to enable us to grapple more closely with the complexities of contemporary social life. More broadly, in bringing these two ways of thinking together, I hope to extend the appeal of philosophical texts, particularly those focused on phenomenology and the body, for readers who are generally more anthropologically inclined. At the same time, to readers who may be more philosophically sympathetic, I aim to reveal some of the richness and surprise that empirical data can bring to the understanding of a given phenomenon. But ultimately, this book’s goal is a much simpler one: to trace our lived experiences of the body, technology, and culture across various moments in the Czech life course as a way of getting closer to understanding what it means to be living at the start of the twenty-first century. Two different kinds of questions are thus being asked here: What is it to be a Czech today? And what is it to be human? Answering the first should help us attain a glimpse of an answer to the second.

1 FOOTSTEPS THROUGH THE CITY Social Justice in Its Multiplicity

Day after day I gaze in gratitude on the Castle of Prague and on its Cathedral: I cannot tear my eyes away from that picture. It is mine and I also believe it is miraculous. .............. What bliss it is to walk upon this bridge! Even though the picture is often glazed by my own tears. Jaroslav Seifert, “View from Charles Bridge”

September 28 is a public holiday in the Czech Republic, honoring the life and death of the tenth-century political and religious leader Saint Václav (svatý Václav), or, as he is known in the English Christmas carol, “Good King Wenceslas.” Public processions, Christian Masses, and historical reenactments of events from the great saint’s lifetime are held in cities and towns across the nation. Pilgrims from around the country descend on the town of Stará Boleslav, where Saint Václav met his demise in either the year 929 or 935 (the exact date of his 20

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death remains in dispute). Simultaneously, the nation celebrates “Czech Statehood Day,” since as of 2000, September 28 doubles as the national commemoration of the founding of the Czech state. In Prague, locals and visitors alike can make the most of the holiday by traveling from one celebration to another. In 2016, in the center of town on Wenceslas Square (Václavske námeˇstí), a popular tourist spot named after the saint but also a notorious drug and prostitute hangout in the evenings, there was a reenactment of Saint Václav promenading into town on horseback followed by his medieval knights. Men dressed in furs and carrying swords and shields paraded around the square before undertaking mock battles at the saint’s request. From what we know, Saint Václav’s reign was in fact a tumultuous one. In the West, he is primarily recognized for his care of the poor, giving alms to the destitute on the feast of Saint Stephen on December 26 as the Christmas carol attests. In the Czech Lands, he is similarly hailed as a brave and just ruler who focused on protecting the nation’s interests rather than amassing his own fortune. But after only about a decade of rule, Saint Václav was murdered, many presume by his younger brother Boleslav, who then took over the monarchy. The 2016 reenactment, however, referred to an easier time, and after a short battle, the men laid down their arms. Saint Václav then exchanged his horse for a throne, and a bevy of women dressed in medieval costumes accompanied by folk musicians began to dance. In Stará Boleslav, the celebrations were more somber. Around a thousand pilgrims, many of whom had walked about thirty kilometers on foot from Prague, assembled for Mass outside the local church where Saint Václav was murdered (“Pru˚vod s ostatky” 2016). Held aloft in a portable reliquary, Saint Václav’s ornately bejeweled and crowned skull, which had also made the ceremonial journey from its home in a Prague crypt, joined the procession before being put on display. In 2016, the Czech president, Miloš Zeman, who had originally been an outspoken critic of the move to couple Czech Statehood Day with the celebration of a major religious figure, made his first-ever appearance at the Mass. Before the assembled brethren and with cameras and microphones transmitting live to the nation, President Zeman took to the podium and cited the Biblical verses “God is love” (Saint John) and “[If I did not have] love, I would be nothing” (Saint Paul), following which he declared, “Remember these words in a time when all of Europe is looking again for its cultural roots in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism. We must do all we can to make sure we truly return to these roots” (“Den cˇeské státnosti” 2017; author’s translation). Many of the people commemorating Saint Václav’s Day wouldn’t have worried about what Zeman’s comments were that day. They were out to have a good

FIGURE 1.1. Preparing to reenact Saint Václav’s procession on Saint Václav’s Day, an acting troupe assembles on Prague’s Wenceslas Square. Photograph by John M. Correll.

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FIGURE 1.2. Correll.

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An actor portrays Saint Václav in battle. Photograph by John M.

time, eating and drinking while enjoying the late autumn sunshine. But for others, joining the religious procession or taking part in commemorative Masses was a welcome opportunity to engage with the country’s religious and political heritage. But what direction did the president suggest they should head in? Was he advocating for more tolerance and love toward others, or for closing the doors to those deemed to be threatening the “cultural roots” of Europe? Given Zeman’s well-known antipathy toward refugees, his summoning of the nation’s Christian heritage was clearly part of an ongoing effort to bolster public antipathy toward Muslims. But as the possible double meaning of Zeman’s use of biblical verses demonstrates, his invocation of the nation’s history could lend itself to various moral framings. Indeed, walking through the city, whether as part of a pilgrim’s procession, engaging in historical reenactments of Saint Václav’s promenade, or simply traversing from one place to another, highlights the multiplicity of ways that morality and social justice can be constituted with respect to both historical events and the contemporary. What we must do, to echo Zeman, and how we must do it are in fact radically contested issues that draw on a range of historical narratives we meet up with as we move through urban spaces. What is at stake in choosing between these narratives is not only the question of what role Christianity should play in the contemporary state, but also what makes a good and just political leader—should one expect today’s politicians to follow the model of Saint Václav, for example? What are the state’s responsibilities to the nation’s citizenry? How do individual citizens, including those striving to live just and moral lives—aiming to “live in truth,” as Patocˇka, and later

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Václav Havel, phrased it—envision a just society, enabling the development of the individual while also promoting the “greater good”? Who gets to take part in such a society and who is left or actively cast away on its outskirts? And what role might entities other than the state, such as corporations, play in constructing, or supporting, social justice? One way of trying to get a grip on such questions is to walk our way through them. The accounts that follow were generated by walking with local residents through three well-known Czech cities—the nation’s capital of Prague, the industrial center of Ostrava, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization heritage site of Cˇeský Krumlov—and along the way, encountering various aspects of how history and social justice are evoked by urban landscapes. In retracing these steps here, our meanderings will reflect how Czechs both create a sense of collective belonging and exercise powers of exclusion in order to enact their visions of a just society.

Prague: The City as a Space for Life Walking through Prague, one is struck by all the green spaces: the grounds around the castle, the Royal Garden, the lawns of the Petrˇ ín observatory tower. On a spring or summer’s day, the sidewalks, parks, and playgrounds teem with people. Stromovka is full of families, some returning from a jaunt to the zoo. A younger crowd congregates in Letná, sunning themselves, drinking, playing guitar: one group smokes a hookah, another does tai chi in the park. Public space—once a site characterized by intense scrutiny and concern over what could and could not be revealed in a totalitarian state—has been transformed into a site for the celebration of life. Not everyone is jovial, however, as young men who have had too much to drink vomit next to buildings. Couples are caught in arguments, trying to sort out or dissolve marriages. The city is also a site of anxiety, particularly among those who cannot make it, or feel they cannot make it, in the new space of capitalist entrepreneurship. In the city center, there are fancy sleek black cars (Audi, BMW) and men sporting well-cut suits. Taxi drivers shake their heads in awe, noting how fantastically the economy is doing. But those who are not sharing in the wealth are also appearing in greater numbers. Homeless people are increasingly visible; not only men or young people but middle-aged women, some with children, sit next to upturned hats that contain a stray coin or two, begging for money. In recent years, economic disparities have increased tremendously. While unemployment in the capital is extremely low—at 2.5 percent in 2017, Prague has the lowest unemployment rate of any city in the European Union (EU)—the

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number of people living precariously is growing, due to the high cost of living coupled with some of the lowest wages in the EU (“Cˇeské mzdy” 2017). In a country that once ostensibly had no homeless people, there are now approximately 4,000 people (out of a total population of about 1.3 million) living rough in the capital (Scott 2013). There was a time when combating poverty was part of the purview of the nation’s monarch. Certainly Saint Václav’s efforts in this respect are central to his image as a just and noble ruler. In a postsocialist landscape dominated by corporate capitalism and cronyism, today Saint Václav’s largesse is held out as exemplary, but amid ever-troubling questions of how best to strive toward social justice and ensure the dignity of “ordinary people” within a twenty-first-century democracy.

Walking through Time At the top of Prague’s Wenceslaus Square stands a massive statue of the saint on horseback. A striking symbol of Czech nationhood, the statue is a popular meeting spot and assembly point. During the 1989 uprisings against state socialism, protesters did not need to disclose where to meet up, as people intuitively knew the demonstrations would start at Saint Václav’s feet (Holy 1996, 34). Legend has it that should the Czech Lands ever be under threat, the statue of the Good King and his steed will spring to life, hurtling down the boulevard and assembling his many hidden knights, before leading Czechs to victory. Consciously invoking these kinds of legends is one way of explicitly conjuring up historical narratives and placing oneself among them. Other gestures to the past are less mystical. They can be fleeting, as when, walking up Prague’s Petrˇ ín Hill on a family excursion, my friends wave toward the Hunger Wall, reminding everyone in our group how during a fourteenth-century famine King Charles IV ordered its construction in order to provide paid employment for the poor and thus alleviate their hunger. This is just one of many passing moments of historical reemergence, made possible by moving from one place to another for an entirely different purpose, but nonetheless taking the time to underscore the historicity inherent in the objects and places we live among. Other gestures are more self-consciously elaborate, as when my friends Jarda and Veronika, who are both in their early sixties, took me on an extraordinary, five-hour historical walking tour of Prague. Each step was punctuated with multiple, crisscrossing historical legends. At Vyšehrad we stood on the fortress ramparts overlooking the river, as Jarda and Veronika eagerly narrated the story of Libuše, the prophet and female founder of the ruling Prˇemyslid Dynasty, who in the eighth century had a vision of where to build the city of Prague. “Look at

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the curve of the river and how the landscape opens up before you,” Jarda, who is an engineer, prompted, “and you can see why this particular spot would be strategically the most advantageous place to build a fortification.” Crossing Charles Bridge provoked accounts of the exploits of King Charles IV, who initiated its construction, just as Prague Castle’s Saint Vitus Cathedral spurred stories about Saint Václav, who oversaw the building of the first church there. And so it went, the account of one legendary leader following after another. Not only did each of these leaders help make the city into what it is today, but, as their stories attest, they were thought to be endowed with extraordinary physical, mystical, or intellectual abilities as well as a deep sense of justice and a willingness to work for the collective good. While geographically the stories flowed easily one into another, temporally we took giant leaps, jumping ahead four or five hundred years, only to fall back in time again. Along the way, we took frequent breaks to take in the views. Not everyone can express it as eloquently as the poet Jaroslav Seifert in the epigraph to this chapter, but admiring a stunning vista (of which there are thousands) and feeling moved by it are commonplace activities. While we often associate such activities with tourists (Selby 2004), it is not uncommon for long-term residents of Prague to

FIGURE 1.3. Prague skyline with statues of saints on Charles Bridge. Photograph by the author.

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frequently take a short stroll through the city just to stop and appreciate its beautiful views. Over the years many have tried to convey to me the power of Prague’s beauty and what it means to them; one relative simply handed me a book of Seifert’s poems and suggested I read it to understand. Jarda and Veronika are no different in this respect, deeply moved by the aesthetics of the city that they have lived in for six decades. But while I was fascinated by how our journey made the historical landscape come alive around us, this feeling was not at all new to them. In fact, our footsteps retraced a walk that Jarda and Veronika used to take every year with their children as they were growing up. Back then, each child was given the task of learning a new story or legend to share when they reached a particular spot, be it one of the thirty-one statues of saints and historical personages that line Charles Bridge (or, in the case of Prince Bruncvík’s statue, stand on the bridge’s pier) or the cannonball that remains embedded in Vyšehrad’s eleventh-century rotunda. The walk became not just a history lesson but a process of linking stories and legends to the material realities in their midst, enabling an old building, statue, or monument to rise to new significance while remaining a vivid part of the contemporary landscape.

FIGURE 1.4. Visitors and locals making their way across Charles Bridge. Photograph by the author.

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How we come to commemorate events and link them to a specific place is as much about how we view the present as it is about any given place’s actual past. History always inheres in places, whether we actively recognize it or not. History resides in the buildings, the turns of the street, the cobblestones we slip on in the rain. Prague’s Old Town, whose inhabitation is thought to date back at least to the ninth century, reflects close to a millennium of urban development. Despite being the site of armed takeover by the Nazis during World War II and a Soviet tank deployment in 1968, much of the city remains largely undamaged and retains its historical character. Today Malá Strana (the Lesser Town) is the setting for internationally produced movies that need an eighteenth-century backdrop. But it is also the space of contemporary life, of buses and commuters, bars and ice cream shops, parks and playgrounds. Indeed, in historic cities like Prague, negotiations of old and new constantly take place. When the building of a McDonald’s a few minutes’ walk from one of the entrances to Charles Bridge was proposed after the 1989 revolution, it was denounced for disrupting the historical character of Malá Strana. (Now it only elicits bad reviews on TripAdvisor.) Today, Prague’s “new” Dancing House (Tancˇící du˚m), built in 1996 and designed to visually evoke Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

FIGURE 1.5. Cobblestone road and sidewalk leading up to Prague Castle. Photograph by the author.

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dancing, graces the riverfront to the delight of tourists and the continuing horror of some residents who told me they are confounded by “the mix of old and new.” Why is this building so upsetting when not far away from Fred and Ginger stand a series of Cubist buildings, built at the start of the twentieth century, that seem even more architecturally distinctive? But the Cubist buildings are now part of history, while, for many, Fred and Ginger are not (yet). What then is considered history? Beyond rituals of commemoration, how do we actively invoke history in some places, coming to embody historical narratives through, for example, our daily traversing through time and space? Here we can get some help from both Heidegger’s and Patocˇka’s understandings of thrownness, movement, and perception. One way that Heidegger described the work of history was through the concept of thrownness, or how as human beings we are thrown into a particular time and place where we must enact our lives. Thrownness, according to Heidegger, is at the heart of the human struggle, as it results in inevitable feelings of guilt. We are never at the very beginning of an event, but are instead thrust into a time and place that are already constituted. As such, we come into a situation already ripe with choices, paths, options—and not only those we opt to embrace, but also those we cannot take. We make choices, we feel guilt. The truly knowledgeable self is the one who can reconcile these two facets, accepting one’s place in history while shaping one’s destiny. Heidegger thus viewed our existence as historically and spatially prescribed, but unlike many contemporary anthropologists or historians, his emphasis on the importance of the individual grasping her or his sense of place in history vests us with the ability to choose our responses to the exigencies of space and time. While Heidegger’s own choices with respect to promulgating a view of German destiny that embraced Nazi ideology were extremely destructive, we can learn from the questions that he posited, if not always from his own answers to them. One of Heidegger’s key points was that the spaces in which we dwell are always marked by time. Technology—buildings, bridges, agricultural divisions of land—is a part of these histories, reconfiguring the landscape, the world in which we are, and thus reconfiguring who we are and can be. Heidegger’s image of the bridge that actively gathers together both sides of the river to create a meaningful space is a good example of this: “The bridge swings over the stream ‘with ease and power.’ It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. . . . It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood” ([1971] 2001a, 150). Part of dwelling in the spaces created by buildings or bridges is moving through them. As Patocˇka (as well as Husserl before him) emphasized, our very perception of the world, and thus ultimately our understanding of it, is dependent on acts of

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movement. We are always located corporeally and need to move in order to see more widely the world around us. Walking can be a central aspect of this task. Whether a formal procession or a pragmatic means of getting from one point to another, walking is a way of being in the environment, of dwelling and finding one’s footing in the world. In the cities we live in or in foreign locales, walking is a means of dynamically creating a sense of place (de Certeau 1984, chap. 7), while also opening us up to the possibilities of incorporating the place within us (Arrellano 2004). Like other forms of movement, walking both enacts and throws into relief our passage through space and time, simultaneously constituting our presence and absence through a series of spaces (Lepecki 2004, introduction). Walking is interrelational, a means of bringing us into, or out of, pace with others. As the anthropologists Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst suggest, “That walking is social may seem obvious . . . . However to hold . . . that social life is walked is to make a far stronger claim, namely for the rooting of the social in the actual ground of lived experience, where the earth we tread interfaces with the air we breathe. It is along this ground, and not in some ethereal realm of discursively constructed significance, over and above the material world, that lives are paced on in their mutual relations” (2008, 2; see also Pink 2008; Pinto 2015). Walking is also a means of embodying one’s culture. The early twentiethcentury anthropologist Marcel Mauss noted how English soldiers had a different gait from French ones, remarking, “You all know that the British infantry marches with a different step from our own: with a different frequency and a different stride” ([1935] 2007, 52). Through an examination of what he called our “techniques du corps,” Mauss highlighted how our bodily enactments are marked by our social and cultural milieu, so that any movement, be it dancing, skipping, walking, or digging a ditch, not only carries cultural meaning but is culturally mediated. In the city, walking has its own rhythms, movements, and possibilities for engagement. Walking in the footsteps of those who came before us, traversing along their pathways, moving between the buildings they erected, our bodies comport. We may no longer need to leap out of the way of horse-drawn carriages, but instead we move aside for Segways and motor scooters. As we move through life, what the city requires from us also changes. Cobblestones and high heels have their own ways of accommodating one another, requiring a new sense of balance. Pushing a baby carriage along city streets requires yet another kind of attentiveness to the existence (or not) of sidewalks and curbs. For some of the elderly, spaces seem to shift, making new demands on old bodies. My friend Anežka, who is eighty and walks at a brisk pace, once jokingly complained, “I go to the graveyard every year, and it seems to me the path and the steps are changing—every year they get steeper and wider!” The city lives through our bodies and we are continually relearning how to accommodate it.

FIGURE 1.6. Statue of a larger-than-life male figure adorning a Prague building. Photograph by the author.

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FIGURE 1.7. Row of female statues adorning an art nouveau building in Prague. Photograph by the author.

Nor are we alone on these streets. Buildings have plaques to remind us of the lives of noteworthy occupants—“In this house lived, and on December 31, 1958 died, opera singer in the National Theatre of Prague, Milada Ševcovicová.” Even more imposingly, life-size (or often larger) statues seemingly propping up architectural facades—strong men with barrel chests, semiclad women, or fat, bucolic

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infants—stare down at us as we walk along. We feel their presence, as our feet find themselves tracing down the paths well worn by those who came before us, seeing some similar vistas, feeling a similar sense of cold or warmth—a simulacrum of the past, necessarily incomplete, conjured up by the sedimentation of time under our feet. This kind of walking is an act of tethering, an act of getting to know the ground beneath our feet, and in doing so, recognizing how it anchors us into a particular space and time—interlinking a moment in the life of a city with a moment in our life span, interconnecting a progression of lives and generations that are always in flux but are never interchangeable. For Heidegger ([1959] 1966), such reflective activity necessarily leads to embracing a particular kind of belonging, known as autochthony. The logical slippage between feeling anchored in a specific time and place and the privileging of autochthony are, however, not self-evident and are worth considering in detail. Heidegger opened his Discourse on Thinking by suggesting that we need to make a distinction between calculative thinking—the thinking of planning or organizing for future profit—and meditative thinking, or reflecting on “the meaning which reigns in everything that is” ([1959] 1966, 46). He then stated that “anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits . . . . It is enough if we dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history. . . . We grow thoughtful and ask: does not the flourishing of any genuine work depend upon its roots in a native soil?” (47). Heidegger’s next step was to suggest that “the rootedness, the autochthony, of man is threatened today at its core!” (48–49). Invoking his interpretation of the work of the poet Johann Peter Hebel, Heidegger asserted that we should heed Hebel’s message that “for a truly joyous and salutary human work to flourish, man must be able to mount from the depth of his home ground up into the ether” (47). As is well known, for Heidegger the search for and valorization of soil, ground, and rootedness led him in the direction of embracing the Nazi Party and deploring those whom he, and the Nazis, viewed as “rootless.” But autochthony or being the first people living on the land (sometimes conceptualized as being born out of the soil or springing forth from the land) is, as anthropologists have demonstrated, never just about finding the soil under one’s feet. Autochthony is actively constructed, and as President Zeman’s invocation of belonging in the Czech Republic and, more broadly, in Europe as a decidedly Christian endeavor demonstrates, it is a selective enterprise that comprises both inclusion and exclusion of all those who look down, see and feel the soil between their feet, and reflect, “Here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present

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hour of history.” There are other ways to delineate these histories, and, indeed as Heidegger himself elsewhere highlighted, the end point to which any given path may lead us is never guaranteed ([1971] 2001b). The historical accounts that are articulated by pointing out architectural features or undertaking pilgrimages, reenactments, or historical walking tours offer a select slice of the past. Such selectiveness can be quite obvious: despite professing, like the majority of Czechs, to have “no religion,” Jarda and Veronika reflect a distinctively Christian perspective in our five-hour tour of the city. Notably, their passion for history did not extend to Josefov, the city’s large, historically renowned Jewish Quarter, about which they indicated they knew extremely little.1 Instead, “history,” as they describe it, and as we came to embody it during our five-hour journey, focuses closely on the activities of legendary leaders, patrons, and saints who are recognized for bringing Christianity to Eastern and Central Europe but even more so for their contributions to developing the Czech state, in terms of both its political power and its cultural and educational foundations. Saint Václav united Christians and overturned the rule of his (baptized, but at heart still pagan) mother, but he is most highly regarded today for his generous and just treatment of the poor. King Charles IV is similarly noted as being the Holy Roman Emperor, but more importantly for expanding the city of Prague, making Bohemia a center of European political power, founding Charles University, and taking care of his starving people by building the Hunger Wall. Both rulers are most valued for their development of a just, generous, and inclusive monarchist politics, propelling the development of a nation whose inhabitants prospered and stayed on par with, or led, the rest of Europe. In popular discourse, the development of such a just society is often depicted as a teleological progression: the city founded by the prophet Libuše became the capital of the state developed by Saint Václav, which was further refined by King Charles IV. Each step in this process is portrayed as part of a natural evolution of society toward being more just and fair. As sites of commerce, politics, higher education, and cosmopolitan exchanges, cities in particular are often viewed as embodying the ongoing refinement of knowledge and, therefore, moral development. They are thus linked with a vision of social justice as it will one day be achieved if only history keeps unfolding. At the same time, however, in many people’s accounts, there are historical interruptions that derailed the natural momentum toward ever-increasing progress and social justice. These include such moments as the imposition of Austro-Hungarian rule, which placed Czechs under foreign domination; the Nazi occupation during World War II, when any chance of social justice morphed into the need for pure, dogged survival; and the period of state socialism, when moral

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progress was stalled by silence, fear, and collaboration with Communist authorities. As my sixty-year-old friend Kryštof once explained, “The country’s morality was left undeveloped because we were stifled by forty years of Communism. So while the West was moving forward [morally], we were stagnant and that is why there is all this corruption here now.” Jarda and Veronika are undoubtedly aware of such counterpoints to the narrative arc of national development and social justice they espouse. But neither alternative perspectives nor major moments of breakage dominate how they experience and self-consciously narrate (their place in) their city’s history. They may have trouble recounting Jewish histories of Prague, though I suspect they know more than they think they do, but they could very capably have traced Communist or Nazi pasts in the landscapes before us. Instead they offer a very particular framing—of kings and saints and (a certain kind of) social justice— that feels right to them, as indisputable as the beautiful vistas before our eyes or the solidness of the cobblestones under our feet. Indeed, it is this intertwining of history and the sensory, embodied realities of moving through the place where it once was that makes it so hard to recognize other possibilities. Nonetheless, other narrators, and other cities, foreground different kinds of historical consciousness. In Ostrava, where unemployment is rife, some of the people I walked with framed social justice in biblical terms while grappling with both totalitarian pasts and the potential new roles for states and companies in promoting the greater good for society. In Cˇeský Krumlov, our meanderings focused on carving out spaces of belonging while engaging in what were deemed to be necessary “exclusions” from the body politic.

Ostrava: A Tour of Christianity, Totalitarianism, and Dust Ostrava, in the eastern part of Moravia, represents an urbanity that is radically different from Prague’s. The Czech Republic’s third-largest city, with close to 300,000 inhabitants, Ostrava was founded in the mid-thirteenth century and rose to prominence with the development of its mining and steelworks industries in the early 1800s. Under state socialism, particularly during the 1950s, these industries rapidly expanded. Post-1989, however, the mines and many of the steelworks began to close down and jobs became increasingly insecure. Everywhere one goes, the city is marked by its industrial past and present. Abandoned coal mines litter the city’s outskirts. Friends and strangers alike ask if I have seen the city’s highlights—the shopping mall and a closed-down steel mill, renovated into a steelworks museum. On a nature walk, having just climbed

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a steep hilltop to admire a vista of the city, I cannot escape the predominance of smokestacks along the skyline. Today it is primarily ArcelorMittal—the world’s largest steel and mining group and by far the largest employer in a stagnating local economy—that dominates the city’s consciousness. But even those who directly benefit from its presence have an ambiguous relationship to the corporation’s largesse. As part of an official tour of ArcelorMittal Ostrava, I was led around the steelworks’ premises by Viktor, a retired foreman, now rehired as a company tour guide. I was the only visitor that day, and Viktor was delighted to give the whole tour in Czech. About an hour into it, he began to deviate from the companyapproved script. We were standing outside the main production buildings, on the railway tracks used for transporting steel off-site, when he drew my attention to the haze in the air, explaining that it was composed of dust that hadn’t been caught by the plant’s de-dusters. Viktor had already informed me about the company’s ecological awareness and the plant’s advanced de-dusting procedures, following which he’d wryly noted that Human Resources always checked afterward that he didn’t forget to include that part. “The part they don’t tell me to show you is the black stuff coating the ground,” he now murmured. We both stared down at the thick layer of dust. “The company cleans it up all the time,” he stated. “Otherwise it would be worse.” “But without dust,” he added sardonically, “it wouldn’t be Ostrava.” We continued walking, passing various buildings until we came to a large, unused warehouse. Viktor took a quick look inside and then pulled me in, thrusting the door shut behind us. We were alone in the abandoned building and I was momentarily afraid as his tone had suddenly changed; instead of sounding like an educational tour guide, he seemed to be interrogating me. “I looked you up on the internet,” he said. “You wrote about Christianity in Fiji?” I nodded, wondering what he was aiming at. It took me a while to realize he wanted to know my stance on “believers,” as he identified himself. I must have convinced him I was sympathetic, as he then recounted to me his life story. Hidden away with me in the warehouse, Viktor told me he was born in 1946 and so had effectively spent half his life under Communism (that is, post-1948), and the other half, since 1989, living under democracy, and so he could attest that both have their good and bad aspects. Under Communism the state took care of the people, he said. At the steelworks, the employees took vacations organized through the company. The company premises had once included a bank, a health center, a post office, and a dormitory, but now people had to sort these services out for themselves. (Actually, Human Resources had earlier related to me how the company was still in the process of selling off its vacation houses. While the steelworks still provides its employees with minor perks such as spa

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visits, today it engages in a broader corporate social responsibility program that provides health, education, and cultural services to the wider community, rather than acting as a direct conduit of state services to its employees.) But under Communism, life was difficult for Viktor as a Catholic, and he ran into trouble when he tried go to university. Instead he was forced to work as a laborer. He asked me if I had read George Orwell’s books, explaining that he was fascinated by how Animal Farm and 1984 were written before the Communist regime took power but nonetheless captured the Communist mindset so well.2 “That is because totalitarianism is the same wherever it is,” he asserted, “if it is in the police force that Orwell worked for, in the Communist state, or under Nazism.” Then he added, “Communism could happen again. The Bible tells us where all these things come from. It tells us it’s human nature and human nature hasn’t changed over time. . . . People don’t remember how bad it was and it is possible it will come again. Look, even Auschwitz is not so far from here—only eighty kilometers or so from Ostrava. Who is to say that won’t happen again?” We left the warehouse and started to walk back over to the company headquarters when Viktor stopped, grabbed me by the shoulders, and said, “Stand here and look at the building just next to the headquarters. It is the scientific research building where I also used to work.” (Viktor had worked his way through the plant, holding a number of different jobs.) “Look at the top floor and you’ll see there is another floor, set back under the roof, almost hidden. Can you see the two very small windows, just at the end, facing the main road and the entryway? And on the other side there are another two, just in the same place but facing the other direction. Do you know what they are?” They looked like gun slots to me, but I let him answer. “They are for shooting. This building was built in the 1960s, so fifteen years after the end of the war. And yet they still built gun holes so that if an enemy came down the street and tried to enter the premises, they could gun them down. . . . I don’t show that to everyone.” It was supposed to be a company tour highlighting both ArcelorMittal’s industrial productivity and its environmental sensitivity. But Viktor read the landscape differently. His was a conflicted story, as he struggled with how to position himself with respect to a steelworks for which he’d worked for decades and which continues to employ him long past his retirement, but which he also views as complicit in both the violence of socialism, still visible through the scientific research building’s gun slots, and capitalist production, evident in the many layers of dust that sit on the ground and float through the air, not only at the ArcelorMittal industrial complex but across surrounding neighborhoods. Rather than a teleological movement toward social justice (from Libuše to Saint Václav to King Charles IV . . .), his account was of attempting

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to come to terms with the Communist and Nazi pasts—and perhaps even their renewable futures—through an understanding of the Bible’s reflections on the immutable nature of good and evil. Viktor was one of many who felt persecuted by the socialist regime due to their religion. While not illegal, Christianity was frowned on and strictly regulated by state socialist authorities, with numerous crackdowns on priests and other religious authorities for their purported anti-Communist sentiments. Up until 1989, most of those who were believers tended to keep this fact as quiet as possible so as not to hinder their education and employment opportunities. Since 1989, Christianity has no longer been targeted by the state. The Czech Republic, however, has never been a particularly religious nation—at last count, according to a Pew Research Center poll taken in 2015, 72 percent of the population described themselves as atheist, agnostic, or believing in “nothing in particular” (2017, 5). Another 21 percent described themselves as Catholics (9). Some parts of the country, including Moravia where Ostrava is located, are considered more religious than others (Willoughby 2003). That said, religious rites that were once conducted in hushed tones now openly take place throughout the country, and plenty of those who identify as believing nothing in particular loosely ally with Christianity as part of their national tradition. Today, Christianity holds a prominent position in the city and countryside alike, from church bells ringing on Sunday mornings to public commemorations, such as Saint Václav’s Mass or the cleaning of graves on All Souls’ Day. Indeed, entering a cemetery on All Souls’ Day in 2006, I was struck by the crowds strolling past, as I watched groups of women walking two by two with their arms linked together, families of four or six, couples, and lone men and women in their fifties or sixties, some openly crying. The newspapers later reported that an estimated fifty thousand people walked through a single Prague cemetery that day and extra police patrols had to be put on at graveyards around the city. Just like the celebrations honoring Saint Václav, commemorating All Souls’ Day has become a new trend, rendering visible the role that Christianity plays in the nation’s heritage. But when it comes to debating political morality, apart from among the intensely faithful such as Viktor it is not all that common for people to explicitly invoke the Bible to determine what is or is not socially just. Rather, ideas about what makes for a fair society tend to draw on a multiplicity of framings, among which (teleological) narratives of national development, socialist ideals, and free-market rhetoric figure prominently. Running throughout these is a more diffuse sense that it is the role of society to promote the greater good and enable, or at least not hinder, individuals’ opportunities to live a good life, while requiring of citizens some level of responsibility either directly for one

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another or back toward the state (Trnka 2017a, 2017b). Such views on social justice may be crystallized in the platforms of political parties, but they also emerge in public discourse as loosely framed historical reminiscences about the “good leaders” of the past or in shared notions of how reciprocal relations between citizens and states should operate. One particularly influential way in which a broad-based but more formal, philosophical approach to social justice has been articulated appears in Patocˇka’s and Havel’s calls for society to enable its members to “live in truth.”

Living in Truth As developed by both Patocˇka and Havel, living in truth denotes the reciprocal responsibilities of the state and individual citizens for ensuring that society focuses on fostering the collective good. For Patocˇka, living in truth was closely related to another concept, “care for the soul,” which refers to an individual’s striving to recognize the truth of the world. At its most fundamental, care for the soul is the move away from one’s everyday mundane concerns and desire for satisfaction, toward reflection on higher transcendental truths and ideals (Patocˇka 2002). Living in truth, in turn, encapsulates both an individual’s care for the soul or striving to live according to higher ideals and the need to build the kind of society that will enable this effort. Patocˇka saw living in truth as an inherent part of European history, one originating with the ancient Greeks (due to their development of philosophy as a mode of critical reflection on the world and one’s place within it) and in the modern world closely linked with European notions of statehood. As described by the contemporary Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák, for Patocˇka, Behind the plurality and particularity of Europe there persists the idea of the sacrum imperium, of the state whose foundations are not empirical but rather ideal, a state grounded in the idea of truth and dedicated to nurturing men to the Good. For that is the basis: the idea of human being as meaningful not as a quest for self-prolongation but as a care of the soul, a life in truth, life guided by the ideal. Humans so understood cannot live in a community whose sole concern is satisfaction of needs. They need a community dedicated to justice. For all its all too human failings, Patocˇka is convinced, it is that idea of the care for the soul as the meaning of human being and of the state as serving and reflecting this task that is the basis of the idea of Europe. (1989, 124) Thus, though Patocˇka’s notion of living in truth was indebted to earlier iterations of the concept by Heidegger and Husserl, a major point of difference was

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that for Patocˇka, living in truth not only was about an individual’s ability to see the truth, but also encompassed the social and political conditions that are necessary to enable such a vision. Havel likewise used the concept (though it was often translated into English in his writing as “living within the truth”) with a decidedly political edge. Although he was just as keen as Patocˇka to see society collectively move toward living in truth, he arguably placed more emphasis on the individual as a potential dissident able to live in truth against the tide of mainstream thinking. And it was Havel’s perspective that garnered global attention. After Patocˇka’s death in March 1977, Havel penned what was to become his most famous essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” in which he outlined how individuals can employ living in truth as a strategy for overcoming the moral compromises that, in his mind, made the state socialist regime inherently unjust. Today, public discourse has largely been taken over by a singular vision of the state socialist past as politically, economically, and morally damaging. The socialist regime is often referred to by the same term—totalita, or totalitarianism—that is used to describe the Nazi protectorate. (Just one example is the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, which examines the histories of both the Nazi and state socialist periods.) But not everyone shares a predominantly negative view of the previous regime. In reflecting back on their lives under state socialism, people’s memories tend to be more nuanced (Trnka 2013). As I experienced with Viktor, one repeatedly hears of the positive aspects of the previous regime, including the cost of health care (free, except for the expected bribes) and housing (highly subsidized), and security of employment. This is not to dilute the power of the 1989 revolution, which is widely viewed as indeed a revolutionary step forward in granting citizens both increased freedom and the potential of having a real role in governance and civil society. But while state socialism as a mode of governance is widely, but not entirely, disgraced (the Communist Party still tends to receive about 8–10 percent of votes in many elections), the economic ideals of state socialism reverberate through social discourse. To understand how this is so, it is necessary to take a closer look at how Havel envisioned what living in truth entails. In “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel outlined the violence of the state socialist regime as stemming from the fact that it did not allow one to live in truth, by which he meant, among other things, the ability to retain one’s dignity and not feel compelled to lie about who one is or the way the world operates. Havel gave the now-famous example of the greengrocer who, like his fellow shopkeepers, is asked to hang a sign with a socialist slogan in his shop window and initially goes along with it. Havel next asked us to imagine what would happen if in an inspired future moment, the greengrocer refuses this seemingly

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small request, an act that Havel interpreted in terms of its much larger significance for leading the greengrocer to take other steps to live in truth and thus recover his “human dignity,” ultimately threatening the possible end of a totalitarian system that rules through lip service: “In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living with the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth” ([1978] 1990, 55). Significantly, the greengrocer’s bold move not only eventually frees him from the lies of the system, but holds up a model for others, fulfilling what Havel referred to as his “responsibility for society” or “responsibility to and for the world” (105, 103). “By his action,” wrote Havel, “the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth” (56). Living in truth, for Havel, signified reclaiming our ability not only to envision what we see as right but to live according to it—a necessary ingredient of a society and a world in which we feel we belong. For some, living in truth is about publicly speaking out and shaping civic life, as Havel advocated, but for others the issue that most resonates in Havel’s description is the need to retain personal dignity. Often those who speak of the indignities of Communism are living comfortably today and do not refer much to the indignities inherent in capitalism, while those suffering capitalism’s wounds focus on the benefits as well as the challenges of state socialism. But across the economic classes, many would agree that due to rampant corruption, the current political system undermines their sense of self-respect. As my taxi-driving acquaintance Michal stated, “The problem with life in the Czech Republic is that honesty is not rewarded. If you are honest and trustworthy, people start to look at you like you are crazy for not stealing and being corrupt like everyone else. It really takes away your sense of honor to have a government like this leading you.” Others focus more on the previous era and the denigration they had to suffer when, for example, paying bribes. Such illustrations of indignity may seem petty, but as Havel’s argument suggests, it was precisely the petty examples, such as hanging up a sign in a shop window (or not), that often carried the most meaning. My friend Marek, who is in his fifties, recounted a particularly vivid story. Spending a day at home waiting for a visit from the TV repairman, he reflected, “It reminds me of Communist times when people did anything and everything to get the repairman into the house. You would call up and they would give you a date about a fortnight later, with a time window of eight hours, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.! And then the day before he came, you started to prepare what you would cook

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for him. And then there arrived a burly guy in dirty overalls and big, dirty shoes that he doesn’t take off so he spreads mud everywhere across your house”—by now Marek was physically acting out the story, shuffling his slippered feet along the carpet—“and he walks in and says, ‘Wouldn’t there be any coffee?’ and you rush and get him coffee. Or say it is 1 p.m. and he didn’t have lunch yet, he might say, ‘Would there be anything to eat?’ And you give him the pork chop you’ve already prepared for him. Then he looks at the TV and says that you have broken a lamp which he doesn’t have, so he will return with it on another day. But when everyone has the same TV set and the same lamp must be breaking down all the time, can’t he keep a box of them in his truck? So you say, ‘Oh, couldn’t we sort it out? Here is something for your cigarettes—I don’t know which kind you like,’ and you slip him one hundred crowns. He looks through his bag and says, ‘Oh, you are in luck! I have one of those lamps right here!’ And the TV would be fixed. But you would feel so demeaned, always having to beg and plead and pretend to get what you need.”

Life as It’s Supposed to Be Part of the burn of such indignities comes from an understanding of how life is supposed to be and the sense of being thwarted in one’s attempts to enact this. The comparison of how life is versus how it is supposed to be is frequently voiced across Czech society. A major newspaper, Lidové noviny, affirms in its motto that it aspires to “how newspapers are supposed to be.” A child who treats another child badly on the playground is likely to hear his or her mother say, “That isn’t done” and set out an unequivocal position about how we are supposed to treat one another. In some cases, people try through the smallest of gestures to create everyday morality as it is supposed to be, regardless of the current state of affairs. I took my husband and then six-year-old son to an art gallery where two women who appeared to be in their sixties were working behind the cash register. I asked one of them in Czech for tickets to see an exhibit of the work of the art nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha, but she exclaimed, “Oh no, the Mucha show is really too expensive.” I insisted we wanted tickets, suggesting we could buy a family pass. But she firmly repeated, “No, not for the Mucha; it is too expensive.” The other clerk chimed in that we could go see a cheaper alternative. We were all getting a bit frustrated when one of the women changed tactics and asked, “How old is your son?” “He is six,” I replied. “No, no,” she said. “I did not hear that. He looks like he is five to me.”

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“Five going on six,” said the other one, and I softly agreed, “Yes, he is five” (very pleased this conversation was in Czech so my son did not understand and would stay silent). So they issued him an “under-six ticket,” which was free. We saved about 120 crowns (approximately four US dollars), but the larger issue was one of justice. Clearly both women held the firm conviction that this was much more of a just price to pay, and so they finessed the regulations, stretching the truth so we would not have to pay too much. This could have been an instance of living in truth except that it lacked the very crucial facet of standing up to authority; the clerks enacted life as they thought it was supposed to be, but I doubt very much that they told their employer about it. What is significant is how deeply uncomfortable they felt about overcharging us, to the point of trying to steer us to other exhibitions. If we all had enough money that paying the entry fee to art shows seemed like a pittance, there would be no need for such performances. Freedom of expression and dignity are often closely linked to material conditions, particularly for those lacking in all three. For many, like Viktor, the purported values of state socialism—namely, equality for all, regardless of class background—are a continuing source of inspiration. The realities of capitalism are simply not life as it should be. As one working-class man in Prague said to me, “The country is full of corruption, as thirty percent of the people own all the wealth.” He stated this disparity as if it was an obvious, fundamental injustice and not in need of any further explanation. For him, and many others on the left end of the political spectrum, the socialist promise of equal distribution of resources among citizens still holds strong. For others on the right, injustice isn’t manifest in the existence of class difference per se, but rather in the unequal opportunities that are thought to enable some to rise (and stay) at the top while others flounder in the new economy. Their disquiet is often voiced through complaints about corruption, an idiom used to suggest more broadly the lack of equal opportunities. In either iteration, left or right, moves toward creating a more just society are depicted as thwarted by the lack of government interest in fostering a society that evolves toward life is as it should be. Unlike the rulers of the past—Libuše, Saint Václav, and King Charles IV—who focused on building a great and just society, the leaders in this political system, many contend, are out to line their own pockets. In Patocˇka’s terms, the state is no longer, as Kohák put it, “grounded in the idea of truth and dedicated to nurturing men to the Good.” If, however, social justice is widely viewed as the need to feel equal to others in society (in terms of either resources or opportunity), having one’s well-being protected by the state, and being able to retain one’s dignity, there are those, such as the Roma (otherwise known as “Gypsies”) and Muslim migrants, for whom

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the possibility of social justice seems a long way off. Depicted as decidedly “other” in the least negotiable of terms, they remain relegated to the marginal spaces of social and political life.

ˇ eský Krumlov Building Boundaries in C Just as my friends in Prague enjoy historical walking tours, so do many of the people I know in the historic southern city of Cˇ eský Krumlov. Located in Southern Bohemia, not far from the border with Austria, Cˇ eský Krumlov, a small city of about thirteen thousand people, is famous for its thirteenthcentury castle complex. On a recent visit, I arrived just as a newly restored part of the castle gardens was opened up to the public. My friends, sixty-year-old Martina, a pharmacist, and her husband, seventy-year-old Ladislav, a retired plumber, were eager to tour through the gardens, which were packed with locals of a similar mindset. As we walked, we came upon a small crowd of people engaged in a lively discussion about the course of the path that ran through the newly reconstructed area. “How much of this path is merely restored and how much is brand new?” “Prior to restoration, how wide was the path?” “Wasn’t there once a gate at that end of the garden, where there is now a cement wall, which the path used to pass through . . . ?” Ladislav eagerly joined in, all the while carefully calculating the distance from his home to the various features under discussion, murmuring that the missing gate was so many kilometers from his house, the original start of the path was so far off from his front door, etc. The group, with us now incorporated, kept walking, and when we came to an overlook that gave us an excellent view of the city, the discussion shifted to an accounting of how the city, more broadly, had changed over the years. The most vocal, perhaps because of his seniority, was a man who had settled in Cˇeský Krumlov during the 1950s. “This street used to have houses that stood facing that direction, not like the way they are now. And that building that is now a gallery used to be the old brewery,” he loudly declared. Ladislav and Martina drew my attention to other landmarks, pointing out a synagogue visible in the distance. People in the crowd who overhead them joined in, speaking sympathetically about the fate of the Jews who had been sent to concentration camps during the war. The conversation turned to a collective lamentation over the “destruction of the city.” To my surprise, however, it was neither the Germans nor the Communists, but the Roma, who were singled out for blame. In the 1950s, said the

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stranger who had moved to Cˇeský Krumlov back then, “there were so many Gypsies living in the center of town, they took over the buildings.” Martina interjected, explaining to me that the city had been predominantly inhabited by Germans before the war and was a Nazi stronghold. When the Nazis left, Roma from other cities who had managed to survive the anti-Roma purges moved in. (Like the Jews, the Roma were part of Hitler’s liquidation campaign. Estimates of how many were killed during the Holocaust vary greatly, with some scholars approximating 250,000 and others suggesting as many as 500,000 to one and a half million [Latham 1995, 2].) The man then related how in the 1950s if you walked into the city at night, “You could see Gypsies who weren’t wearing any pants, just shirts, so when they ran around their naked buttocks were visible.” He recalled seeing an Austrian visitor “reach into his pocket, pull out a handful of chocolate candies, and throw them into the center of a group of Gypsies, and the Gypsies ran around like chickens, picking them all up.” He laughed, and I was struck by the animosity of portraying the Roma as akin to animals, in striking contrast to the civilized Czechs, Jews, or Germans. Nothing more was said of “Gypsies” until the next day, when we were walking to Ladislav and Martina’s church for Sunday services and Ladislav suddenly remarked to me that there must not be any Roma in New Zealand. I told him about a troupe of Czech Romany singers who occasionally perform in Auckland. He looked surprised and then said, “But, of course, singers go everywhere. The problem here in the Czech Republic is that the Gypsies got used to not working during Communism. They were given money by the state and got used to that. At the same time, the Communists put up the Iron Curtain so the Gypsies could not go anywhere. They were used to traveling in their caravans, but the Communists forced them to live in paneláky [state-run, prefabricated apartment units]. So they broke down the walls and threw everything out and generally made a mess. Nobody else in the panelák could sleep when the Gypsies were up all night singing! It’s fine for the Gypsies to sleep all day because they don’t work, but they keep everyone else up too!” He began talking about young Czechs who can’t get jobs and how he fears that they will get used to the habit of not working “and then not be good for anything—like the Gypsies.” He added, “The Gypsies should be removed from the cities. They don’t work, but destroy everything and should be gotten rid of.” Martina then chimed in to say that I needed to understand that she and Ladislav “aren’t against Gypsies. They would be okay if they lived a normal life, without making a mess. It isn’t them, but how they behave that is the problem.”

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Later that evening, Martina, Ladislav, and I took another walk through the city, on our way to the premiere of a documentary film. We arrived early and the photo-gallery-turned-movie-theater was not yet open. So Martina and Ladislav pointed out more of the city’s sights, drawing my attention to the castle library where Martina’s grandfather had worked during the Nazi occupation. They pointed out a nearby Communist memorial to the proletariat that featured victorious images of laborers, all with anvils raised over their heads. Martina recounted that this was the place where she used to dance at May Day, fondly describing the white shirt and red skirt she wore. It was yet another positive gesture to the state socialist period that so often surfaces in people’s narratives of the past. But in the midst of all the remembrances, there were also histories to be forgotten. The film we saw that evening was the biography of a local photographer, Josef Seidel. His son, František Seidel, inherited his photo studio—the very gallery in which we were watching the film. The younger Seidel took numerous photos around the Šumava Mountains during World War II, and the film’s voice-over briefly informed us that after the war, the Communists seized about five thousand negatives from his collection. It was a minor moment in the film but it dominated the question-and-answer session that followed, as a man in his twenties insisted on getting to the bottom of why the photographs had been seized. The museum curator who had shown us the film and was also a major figure in it indicated that he knew of two possible reasons. The first, he told us, was that new censorship laws that had been passed during this period meant that all publications needed to be cleared by the government authorities—thus the seizure. He briefly paused, and the young man hurried to fill in the second reason: “The other possibility was that there were photos of people who had collaborated with the Germans on the negatives.” Not exactly, the curator replied with a shrug. It was more that the photos contained information about various settlements in the district, where they were and who lived in them, and thus could have been used as a record of where the Germans had lived before their villages were wiped out. (The Sudetenland expulsions that followed World War II led to the removal of approximately three million Germans [Cordell and Wolff 2005, 2]. The number that died remains highly disputed, with figures ranging from thirty thousand to 250,000 [Cordell and Wolff 2005, 2–3; see also Tesser 2003, 83–102]). The film focused on inscribing the history of Josef and František Seidel and their photographs, but in doing so had referred to the often uncomfortable and elided history of the Germans expelled from this territory. But most of the audience wasn’t very interested in this narrative thread. Rather, at the end of the

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Q&A, they wandered around the gallery, gazing at the accompanying exhibition of Seidel’s photos and drawing the images of the past captured by the photographs into their own knowledge of Cˇeský Krumlov. From around the room, I could hear exclamations of, “Oh, look, that picture was taken from just over there,” and “That used to be such-and-such a place, but it isn’t there anymore.” Ladislav had another history in mind and rushed up to the curator, declaring, “František Seidel photographed our wedding!” inserting himself and Martina into the Seidels’ story, in much the same way as he’d calculated the distance from his house to each of the castle garden’s features. Ladislav had, however, yet another historical connection with the film, which remained private until the next morning when I found him poring over an old map. I asked him what he was looking at and he pointed to the Sudetenland, tracing his finger over the sites of the nearly invisible, not-to-be-remembered, predominantly German villages. “Have you ever been there?” I asked. “Sure, I grew up in a house there, taken from the Germans,” he laughed. “It was really big.” He would, however, say nothing more on this subject, and no amount of encouragement could get him to speak of it any further. It was a momentary breakthrough of a history that is not often openly articulated. In fact, when in December 1989, just before Havel took up the post of president, he suggested that Czechs apologize for the Sudetenland expulsions, the idea was met with widespread hostility and derision.

Exclusion Ladislav and Martina’s awareness of geography—“Look, our house is over here in relation to the castle gardens over there,” “Look, there used to be a gate here—it isn’t here anymore but you can just see its outline”—and its historical linkages is almost overwhelming. It is as if they are constantly trying to locate themselves in relation to places and times in history: Look, we are here, and this is where this here is in relation to everything else that has happened in this space. It is as if their lives are preoccupied with the fact of thrownness and the need to determine exactly where and when they are living. Ladislav, Martina, and many others derive a sense of solidarity from the remembered and forgotten aspects of Christianity, nationalism, and state socialist and World War II pasts as manifest in local, historical connections—one’s precise geographic, temporal, and kinship relationships to the castle in Cˇeský Krumlov, for example. But this solidarity is also created out of exclusions. Some exclusions are represented with sadness, such as remembrances of the destruction

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of Cˇeský Krumlov’s Jewish community. Others are hidden, such as the ejection of Sudetenland Germans, who are relegated to the quiet edges of family histories. Still others are pointed critiques against those viewed as not participating fairly in social and economic life. Martina and Ladislav’s rejection of the Roma as just and equitable partners in the Czech nation echoes a much broader discourse. Anti-Romany prejudice is rife and comes up in the seemingly most innocuous discussions. Repeatedly, Czechs tell me that “the problem with Gypsies” is that “they don’t know how to work”; “They want all the rights, but no responsibilities. They have twelve children so that they can take social welfare all their lives”; “They are prone to violence—they beat up people and steal. The good ones are the exceptions.” When a friend of mine laments that her seven-year-old son forgot his lunch box at school that day and it might get stolen overnight, her son attempts to console her by stating that “it won’t get stolen as there aren’t any Gypsies at my school.” Elsewhere, I have written about how Czech antipathy toward the Roma tends to focus on issues of labor (Trnka 2017b). Following classic models of state-citizen social contracts, many Czechs envision themselves as taking part in a reciprocal relationship with the state, whereby their labor contributes to the economic vitality of the nation and in return they are guaranteed health care, housing, education, and other services. In contrast, they view the Roma as largely taking from the state while being not only unproductive but disruptive of others’ ability to work. The social contract is seen as encompassing only those who have appropriate relations with the state—who give enough and do not take too much—thus casting the Roma as necessarily outside of the nation as it is supposed to be. Anti-Romany prejudice is also racialized, with many white Czechs negatively commenting on Gypsies’ “dark” appearance. It is unclear whether it may also have a religious dimension, as many members of the Romany community are Catholic but some also engage in pre-Christian spiritual practices (Balazova 2000). While most Czechs did not comment on the Roma’s religion, or lack of religion, as a point of difference, when I asked practicing Catholics about Roma’s religious participation, most said they had no idea what their religious practices were like, and as far as they knew, there were no Roma who attended their churches. It is hard to access Romany perspectives. In fact, it is hard to even know how many Roma exist in the Czech Republic, as their identity is so stigmatized. In 2017 when the central government demanded updated Roma population figures, some local authorities generated them through guesswork, apparently judging residents’ ethnicity “by the look of their faces,” while others refused to provide numbers (Janoušek 2017).

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Many of those who openly identify or cannot escape identification have experienced intense prejudice. In the 1990s when I worked as an interpreter for an international Romany rights agency, I met Czech Roma who described their children being barred from school, experiencing severe beatings by Czech skinheads, and being subject to police abuse. Since then, mistreatment of Czech Roma has garnered global visibility through the international backlash against a wall built in the town of Ústí nad Labem that divided Romany residents from all others. There is also greater awareness of the historical abuse of Roma, including the enforced sterilizations that took place during and immediately after state socialism (Romedia Foundation 2013). Today, many Romany communities suffer from unemployment and low wages, and the number of people living in so-called “Roma ghettos” has doubled from 2005 to 2017 (Janouš 2017). Living standards in these ghettos are so dire that, according to Ratislav Rosinský, the former head of the Institute of Roma Studies, “some Romany children see a toilet for the first time when they come to school” (Ustohalová 2017).

“We Will Make Them Sick” The Roma have been an ongoing focus of racial animosity, but currently Muslim refugees are increasingly sharing this role. The reasoning behind their exclusion is different, but garners a similar level of intense racial prejudice. This need not surprise us. As the anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1969) argued long ago, ethnic and racial prejudice does not stem from one’s response to a particular, objective characteristic of the Other (such as skin color, diet, or language), but from the desire to draw firm boundaries between who is “us” and who is not. The point of focusing on differences in skin color or food practices is to use these facets of cultural difference to construct a racial or ethnic boundary, rather than any intrinsic meaningfulness these characteristics may contain. Public sentiments against Muslims were galvanized in September 2015 when thousands of Syrian refugees began walking across Europe and Czechs braced themselves against an imagined onslaught. Since then, the othering of Muslims has become ubiquitous in public and private discourse. One Czech after another told me that they don’t like the idea of refugees from the Middle East coming there. Unlike refugees from Slavic countries, “who are fine because we can talk with them,” Syrian refugees would never be understood: “Who of us can learn Arabic?” During the 2017 parliamentary elections, all the major parties were united in their opposition to allowing Muslim refugees into the country. TV programs taking up the question of “what it might be like to be a Muslim” imply impermeable divisions between Muslims and others. A variety show on evening TV promised to give viewers a glimpse of what it is to be a Muslim

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woman by following around two Czech (non-Muslim) women dressed in burqas. Reality cooking shows query the validity of Muslims’ dietary restrictions. In one, the only Muslim contestant (an Egyptian emigrant who spoke fluent Czech after living in the Czech Republic for nearly two decades) was revealed in the final episode to be a liar and a cheat. Fears are expressed in classic idioms: “They are another civilization”; “They will never fit in”; “They are dirty and will make us sick.” Occasionally a new concern is raised: “We will make them sick.” In discussing the refugee crisis with friends over dinner, I was surprised to hear my fifty-five-year-old friend Mateˇj reveal that he supports the Czech government’s refusal to accept European refugee quotas because “these people don’t want to be here. They want to go to Germany.” His family was in agreement, expressing deep suspicion and mistrust. “It seems very organized,” his twenty-four-year-old son Alexandr mused. “They don’t seem like war-torn people.” “The main reason these people don’t want to stay here is because they don’t like our food,” Beˇta, Mateˇj’s wife, explained. “We put špek [a Czech version of prosciutto] in everything and even if they don’t know it, they end up eating it! They stay away from pork but inadvertently eat something with špek, and suddenly it makes them feel sick. That’s why they don’t want to stay here.” Alexandr joked, “So we should have a quota and just give them ‘enzyme therapy’ so they can eat our food!” Such assertions of corporeal difference inevitably lead to paranoia over possible embodied breakdowns between self and other. In 2015, President Zeman went on record telling academics who criticized his antirefugee rhetoric that if they wanted to welcome refugees to this country, they should open the doors of their own homes to them (Tománek 2015). Some Czechs responded that they were very willing to do so. For others, however, it was an invitation for scaremongering. The rejoinder from one TV news report (Prima TV 2015c) was to ponder, “So what would happen if you let a refugee into your home and they were dirty from their travels? What if they have tuberculosis—could they make you and your family sick?” The reporters wallowed in such questions for a long time, describing how the very small group of refugees (a few hundred at that point) who were actually in the Czech Republic undergo health checks for communicable diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS. They alleged that it seemed very probable that if these people were crossing the country by foot, living in unhygienic conditions and under great stress, they would have high rates of sickness. After leading the audience on for a long while and interviewing one frightened Czech after another, all of whom vehemently declared that they wouldn’t let refugees into their homes, the reporters asked the doctors who

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actually deal with the refugees about their health and reported that contrary to what we might expect, the rates of communicable diseases among the refugees are in fact very low. When the EU refugee quota system was introduced in 2015, the Czech Republic stood apart with Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia (the Visegrád Four) in refusing to accept their allotted number of Syrian asylum seekers. It became a fraught political issue, as the former socialist states opposed the demands of their EU counterparts, which responded with allegations of racism and xenophobia. Wanting neither to relent nor to be seen as kowtowing to Europe, especially to Germany, the Czechs turned the humanitarian crisis into a political assertion of national self-determination. At the time, a lower-level Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade official explained to me that, “like everyone else,” she thought the refugee crisis was terrible, but surely Czechs had the right to protect their borders, “and the way the Visegrád Four are being represented in the foreign press is appalling.” Referring back to Soviet rule, she added, “Having a foreign power telling you what to do—it’s like state socialism all over again.” Two years on, as the quota system was due to expire, even left-leaning newspapers lauded how in 2015, the “rebels” from Central and Eastern Europe stood up against a system that “today no one [in Europe] wants to see continued” (Hruška 2017). Ironically, at the same time, newspaper headlines suggest the country is in need of more foreign workers, as the economy is growing too fast for Czech workers to fill all the gaps. Many Czechs openly state that they would prefer Ukrainians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, or other Slavs to swell the population, but there simply aren’t enough of them (Su˚ra 2015). We now have a clearer sense of the significance of President Zeman’s 2016 involvement in Saint Václav’s pilgrimage, as well as his declaration that “God is love.” Zeman’s participation was intended to shore up the image of the Czech nation as needing to stand united against infidels; new boundary lines between the Czech state and the EU were being demarcated through the employment of old religious divisions. The pilgrimage became not just an invocation of Christian tradition, but an attempt to, however briefly, Christianize contemporary politics, employing the vision of the Czech Republic as a Christian nation in order to stand strong against asylum seekers and thus, it was presumed, keep the Czech economy buoyant. The president, who had previously fought against the Christianization of Czech Statehood Day, turned around and promoted the image of Christian heritage as uniting Europe against the tide of Islam as a politically expedient way of bolstering state autonomy. Moreover, while representing himself primarily as a leader striving for the greater good of the Czech people, he

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also tried to take on the mantle of speaking on behalf of “Europe,” suggesting his position was backed by Europe-wide Christian tradition. That said, notwithstanding its wealth of Christian tradition, the Czech Republic is not a Christian state. And despite the Catholic Church’s willingness to get more involved in state politics, it is unlikely to go in this direction, though ultimately this is up to its citizens to decide. It is also up to them to determine how they envision social justice, as there are multiple, sometimes competing and sometimes complementary histories of this concept that can be invoked, be they of legendary leaders, of the economic and social equalities promised by state socialism, of the “just and free market” of capitalism, of companies as protectors and providers, of dissidents living in truth, or of biblical depictions of good and evil. It is, moreover, largely up to the nation how porous and malleable it wants the boundary lines to be between those who “belong” and those who do not, or whether such boundary lines are even salient. We may be living in the midst of a world facing its most massive refugee crisis—as of late 2019, about 6.6 million people had fled from Syria—but the historical features that define the soil under our feet can be interpreted in multiple ways. In turning to Christianity to shut the doors to asylum seekers, the president courted and received support from sympathetic members of the church. Indeed, the state and church appear to be firmly on the same page, with Czech cardinal Dominik Duka proclaiming, in February 2017, “The current situation in the countries of Western Europe is a warning to us. . . . The whole history of humanity shows how uncontrolled migration causes violence and conflict, as well as economic and cultural collapse” (Luxmore 2017). Nonetheless, even before the first refugees crossed into the Czech Republic, there were those in the church, such as the priest and theologian Tomáš Halík, who publicly decried the rise of Islamophobia and called on Czech Christians to consider their “moral obligation” to offer refugees sanctuary (Cˇ eský rozhlas 2014; “Prˇ ijímat uprchlíky” 2014). One could, moreover, easily reinterpret Zeman’s invocations of God’s love in the spirit of welcoming refugees, rather than casting them away. Two competing forms of response both draw on Christianity for their historical underpinnings. As Heidegger, Patocˇka, and Havel remind us, we must necessarily make choices as to how to respond to our historical conditions. Autochthony is an active endeavor. Heidegger recognized this when he suggested we look at the soil under our feet and meditate on its meaning. However, Heidegger’s invitation to us in Discourse on Thinking is precisely to think. And as thinking can never be predetermined, it opens up multiple directions as to where it might lead. Heidegger’s mistake lay in the steps he himself took in pondering the meaning of the soil of his homeland, as well as his attempt to lead

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his readers along the path of his own thinking about autochthony in relation to German nationalism. But the choice of whether or not to follow in his, or in Zeman’s, footsteps is implicitly ours to make. Electing whether to accept the dominant modes in which “belonging” is made in our societies, or to listen to the more minor chords that are being played in the background, is our moment of taking charge of thrownness and determining which direction we walk in.

2 DIGITAL DWELLING The Everyday Freedoms of Technology Use

The Velvet Revolution of 1989 that harkened the end of the Communist state was a major turning point in Czechoslovak history, but arguably just as profound was the much softer “revolution” that took place a few years later when the country established its first public links to the internet. Under state socialism there had been tight restrictions on information exchange, but by the mid-1990s, the Czech Republic was securely linked into digital networks that enable its citizens to both receive and produce nearly unfettered global communication. Today an estimated 88.4 percent of Czechs have regular internet access, and daily use is growing: as of 2016, it was estimated that 93 percent of Czech young adults, ages sixteen through twenty-four, use the internet every day; daily usage across the age band of twenty-five to fifty-five years sits at around 75–89 percent; and for adults aged fifty-five and over, it is about 64 percent (“Daily Internet Usage Rate” 2016; “Czech Republic Internet Users” n.d.).1 These numbers suggest potentially radical changes in the ways Czechs (among others) traverse or move through the world—as well as what “the world” itself entails—particularly, but not exclusively, among young people. As in many other nations, one of the predominant concerns in Czech public discourse and the popular press is what it means for new generations to be “digital natives” who “grow up online” (boyd 2014; Palfrey and Gasser 2008). Many Czechs express great apprehension about the impact of online environments on young people in terms of cyberbullying, sexual predators, gambling, loss of privacy, and the increasing influence of YouTube idols (Šmahel et al. 2009). There 54

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are also looming anxieties over how all the time spent online might attenuate the skills and attributes necessary for successfully engaging in “actual” everyday living. The media and popular discourse are rife with concerns over young people’s lack of physical movement, and health conditions from obesity to neurological problems are attributed to youth spending too many hours sitting still in front of their computers (Bartošová 2017). Collective solutions include the building of new fitness centers and sports areas (playgrounds, soccer fields, etc.), with fiftyfive new outdoor exercise centers slated for Prague alone (Ludvík 2017). These fears are largely articulated through the trope of ill health, but in many ways, they resonate with Heidegger’s, Patocˇka’s, and Havel’s shared concerns over how technology use overshadows our awareness of and attentiveness to the very nature of our existence. Getting out onto a playground and moving may be healthy in terms of mitigating weight gain, but it is also a recognition of corporeality as the center of our being. For most of us, as Patocˇka elucidated, bodily movement through the world we live in is central to being alive, no matter how much our daily behaviors—sitting at desks, in front of computers and digital devices—might reshape it. All three philosophers feared the technological saturation of the world we live in, warning us, in Havel’s words, of the danger of technologies that leave us to “look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations (for instance from our habitat in the widest sense of that word, including our habitat in the biosphere) just as it removes us from the experience of ‘being’” ([1978] 1990, 114). The first step to regaining our freedom, they proposed, is to redirect our attention to the physicality of our existence and our necessary interrelation with the world around us; recognition of our natural, and essential, state of traversing in, through, and with the world becomes central to our ability to reclaim our place within it. But how do these philosophers’ concerns over technology use resonate with the actual experiences Czechs have of engaging with digital technologies? And what exactly was it that their line of philosophical thinking would have us so worried about?

Heidegger’s Concern Heidegger, Patocˇka, and Havel shared a wariness of the ways in which technology can come to determine both our lifeworlds and the future of our planet, with Heidegger’s concerns arguably the most influential. While Heidegger’s life did not encompass the popularization of the internet (he died in 1976), scholars (e.g., Babich 2017) have surmised that he would have found digital technologies

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worrisome, given his disquiet over how mass communication such as radio, television, and film deflects our attention away from the world. Writing of Germans made “homeless” through their reliance on technology, so much so that “often they are still more homeless than those who have been driven from their homeland,” Heidegger described how hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination and give the illusion of a world that is no world. Picture magazines are everywhere available. All that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man—all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world. ([1959] 1966, 48) Heidegger’s relationship to technology was, however, a complicated one. We will always have technology, and Heidegger was not a Luddite in the sense of wishing to reject it. In fact, technology is central to Heidegger’s conceptualization of dwelling, a key facet of humans’ being-in-the-world. Dwelling, for Heidegger, is the creative activity of forging a place for oneself within the world. Dwelling is constituted by care (Sorge), which connotes active engagement and creativity in the world—we care by engaging in projects and activities. Fundamental to our active, caring endeavors in the world is the technology we use, be it a hammer or a cooking spoon; our being-in-the-world, Heidegger explained, is always a form of active engagement, an engagement that is enabled and mediated through technology. While activity and production— for example, knowing how and when to plough a field—are important facets of dwelling (Boellstorff 2011, 514), so too is how we think about the world. As Heidegger put it, “Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling” ([1971] 2001a, 158). Heidegger delineated two modes of thinking: calculative and meditative. The thinking that characterizes our current use of technology is, according to Heidegger, calculative thinking, or “thinking that plans and investigates . . . [with the intention of] serving specific purposes. . . . Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself ” ([1959] 1966, 46). Calculative thinking is, moreover, at the heart of “enframing,” or viewing the world as a resource to be harnessed in the drive for maximum expansion (Heidegger 1977). Because of enframing, Heidegger suggested, we become blind to our interrelationship with the natural world and come to view the earth as a never-ending, easily exploitable resource. As Heidegger put it, “Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for

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modern technology and industry” ([1959] 1966, 50). This way of thinking is the foundation of our enslavement to technology. Indeed, for Heidegger, enframing constitutes the essence of technology; specifically, he argued that how we think about technology is more crucial than what a particular technology’s effects might be (Heidegger 1977). The opposite of enframing and the calculative thinking that characterizes it is meditative thinking, or “thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is” (Heidegger [1959] 1966, 46). Central to meditative thinking is the recognition of ourselves as mortal beings dwelling on the earth. Thinking in this way will allow us to dwell more authentically, or, as Heidegger termed it, poetically ([1971] 2001c), aware of the innate interrelations between the earth, the sky, the divinities, and humans—Heidegger’s “fourfold”—rather than deflecting from and anesthetizing ourselves to the world around us. Heidegger suggested that as long as we grasp the interrelationality between ourselves, as building and thinking beings, and the other elements of the fourfold, we might have a chance—however slim—of holding enframing at bay. Fostering recognition of our intrinsic relationship to the very soil we stand on, meditative thinking becomes the means by which we can free ourselves so that we can use technology without being reliant on it. It is clearly a delicate balancing act. But Heidegger was unequivocal that in the right mindset, “we can affirm the unavoidable use of technological devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature. But will not saying both yes and no this way to technological devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed” ([1959] 1966, 54). Heidegger’s fear of how the essence of technology poisons our thinking, coupled with his assertion that we can actually employ technology without allowing it to “warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature,” raises questions about how we might usefully extend the concept of dwelling to our engagements online. Can we secure our footing in the world, dwelling through our use of digital technologies? Or is the internet necessarily a deflection from dwelling, akin to Heidegger’s critique of television and magazines, leading to an aimless form of traversing in which we lose sight of our intrinsic place in, and of, the world? I would like to suggest that we can indeed consider dwelling as having other facets than being connected to the land (much less the “native soil” on which we were born), focusing on how, in an increasingly mobile world, we use digital technologies as a means of tethering ourselves to others and to the spaces we engage in on a daily level, while simultaneously employing them to engage in the world’s increasing boundlessness. Dwelling, as Patocˇka ([1967] 1989) reminded us, is always interrelational and thus as much about our relations with other people

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in the world as it is about the objects we are surrounded by and the spaces we move through. Online activities contain aspects of agency and creative production (“world building”), interrelationality, affect, and embodiment—all facets of dwelling in the world (Boellstorff 2011, [2008] 2015; Fischer 1999). Though they sometimes take the form of mindless entertainment—the kind of deflective time kill that Heidegger found so problematic—even this is part of our active relation to the world, tethering us by setting up a relation between ourselves and the objects, spaces, and peoples that inhabit the world with us. This becomes problematic, as Heidegger recognized, if and when we allow these relations to deflect us away from the recognition of life as characterized by corporeality—our being-in-the-body as well as our being-among-others as part of a much broader ecosystem. Ways of life that encompass being online involve different forms of knowing and engaging with the world(s) around us, but still require the physical world as their material foundation, if only to run the infrastructures (computers, cables, electricity) necessary to sustain the virtual. Technology thus becomes the yes and no, a means of extending dwelling, anchorage, or tethering but in ways that cannot exist on their own. Perhaps, then, we can think of the virtual as one among many spaces where dwelling occurs, while also noting its crucial dependence on the “real world.” Indeed, social scientists increasingly tell us that to understand the import of what goes on online, we must look offline and, better yet, move away from the false dichotomy of online versus offline to consider how digital technologies are embedded in the flow of experience (Miller 2011; Nardi 2015; Postill and Pink 2012). As the anthropologists Yarimar Bonilla and Johnathan Rosa (2015, 11) suggest, the trick isn’t just to note what goes on online, but “to better understand how digital and analogue forms of engagement are mutually constitutive.” In other words, while staying attentive to the distinctive relationships, spatialities, and temporalities that this technology affords us, understanding the impacts of digital dwelling requires considering the ways we craft a sense of self, grasp ahold of time (or not), and create a sense of place for ourselves both on- and offline. Like Heidegger, Havel and Patocˇka shared the view of technology as divorcing us from the earth and thus from being able to recognize the realities of being. Interestingly, however, for Havel and Patocˇka, freedom entails both an individual coming face to face with recognizing being (pace Heidegger) and the small movements we make in life through which we exercise sovereignty—for example, the greengrocer choosing to put the sign in his storefront, or not. It is indeed such small-scale movements that are necessary if we are to achieve the sort of society that will ultimately enable us to strive to understand being. And it is these smaller movements in which our everyday sensibilities of freedom are enacted that are now being lived out not just in the “real world” but also online.

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I’ve chosen to speak of such movements here in terms of both freedom and agency, as freedom is a much more familiar concept to most people (what anthropologists would call an “emic” term, rather than an “etic” one), encapsulating people’s sense of not only being able to do X, but being able to make decisions about how X is done—whether, when, or how to do it. In doing so, I am considering freedom in its affective sense—not legally or bureaucratically in terms of having the ability to “make a choice.” Freedom is different from “making a choice,” which can feel coerced (“I have to make a choice about X”). Rather, I am thinking of freedom in terms of Havel’s depiction of the sensibility of being able to enact something, even something as small as choosing to not hang up a sign. We all know that feeling of being able to, the feeling of recognizing that one has the ability to shape what will happen. It can be exhilarating. It can be terrifying. It can be mundane. In looking at how the internet has reshaped some of the conditions of contemporary everyday living, my interest is in how it presents us with certain freedoms—moments of being able to—that restructure the realm of the possible. It is in such moments when we decide: this, and not this. Now, not later. Here I go. Here I stay. It is in such moments that we feel we have entered a space of sovereignty not because this space is somehow disconnected or independent from the influence of others, but because, by going there, I feel I am acting. Such acts of engaging in potentially freewheeling international communication are, moreover, taking place in a country where less than thirty years ago, censorship was rife and the possession of samizdat literature, much less its production, could see one thrown into prison. The struggle over agency in one area can, however, cost us in others. Just as one has competing responsibilities in life (Trnka and Trundle 2017), one has competing freedoms. While Havel’s thought experiment about the greengrocer’s sign has us imagine a liberatory ending, in actuality the greengrocer’s refusal to put up the sign may or may not have led to something so significant. In a similar way, these small moments of sovereignty may or may not contribute to awakening and enlivening our actions in the “real world.” But regardless, they are extraordinarily significant in shaping twenty-first-century traversing in terms of how we constitute movement, dwelling, our sense of self, our physicality, our interrelations, and our affectivities—and thus deserve ethnographic attentiveness.

School Days, On- and Offline On a crisp September morning I was sitting at the kitchen table with two fourteenyear-old friends, Karel and Oskar, discussing their use of digital technologies.

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Karel is sporty and lively, bubbling over with energy, while Oskar is quiet, but with razor-sharp intelligence. Their initial response to my question about what they liked to do online was to detail their very intensive study habits: “I spend a lot of time downloading practice exam papers, because we have big exams coming up this year,” Karel said, while Oskar nodded enthusiastically. I couldn’t help but smile, and Karel suddenly seemed a bit awkward, shifting in his chair. I’ve known him for over a decade, frequently spending afternoons at his house when I am staying in Prague, and he could tell that I was a bit surprised by the formulaic response he gave me. I was well aware that there would be two forms of self-representation these young men would grapple with during our meeting—how they create and communicate a sense of their online selves (an activity they are very familiar with), and the (very new) act of self-creation they were undertaking through our interview, mediated by my questions and the tape recorder sitting conspicuously on Karel’s kitchen table. But I’d hoped they would be a little more up-front. I was just about to try another tactic, when Karel pulled out his phone. “Do you want to see what apps I have on it?” he asked, and I nodded gratefully. “Most of my time is spent on YouTube watching PewDiePie,” Karel said, leaning over to show me the icon. “I have his channel downloaded on my phone.” “He’s the biggest gamer on YouTube,” Oskar added. “He has fifty million followers [as of 2016] who watch him play games and comment on them.” PewDiePie is the pseudonym of a twenty-nine-year-old Swedish gamer and vlogger, Felix Kjellberg. At the time of this writing, his YouTube channel, which shows video after video of Kjellberg playing and commenting on online games, has received an estimated twenty-three billion views, making it one of the most viewed channels in the world. Given his massive fan base, PewDiePie has been called one of the most influential people on the planet (“The Most Powerful Swede” n.d.). There is even a website that shows his subscriber numbers going up in real time. At the time that this paragraph was last edited—10:49 a.m. New Zealand time, on September 14, 2019—he had hit 101,265,349. By following PewDiePie on their phones, Karel and Oskar are simultaneously highlighting their knowledge of global trends and allying themselves with a model of a successful, male identity that is most likely far outside their parents’ spheres of knowledge or interest. Our conversation occurred many months before PewDiePie experienced a spate of bad press regarding racist and antisemetic comments he had made. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, he remains intensely popular among the young men who affiliate themselves with PewDiePie’s so-called “bro army,” hoping some of his mana will rub off on them. In addition to watching PewDiePie and undertaking their own gaming activities, Oskar and Karel spend a lot of time watching and redistributing other videos

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and pictures to their friends. Unlike their vlogger idol, neither of them produces much material or has a creative presence online. While scholars have embraced the idea that by encouraging an identity based on both consuming and producing, web 2.0 has turned us into the hybrid “prosumers” (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010), these young men have not taken that message onboard. Even when they do get creative, it is by positioning themselves as relatively passive, cosmopolitan consumers of globalized culture. As Oskar put it, “We don’t put material up on the internet, very rarely. We might make a photo on Instagram—‘Here we are watching The Simpsons’—and send it around to our friends.” Like most teenagers, both boys are acutely aware of the potential of finding fame online, as well as the possible humiliation of public exposure. “I don’t even put my guitar videos online,” Karel said. I was surprised, as he is not only very talented but also not afraid of having an audience; he had recently won his neighborhood’s heat of “Prague Idol.” Lately he had even been making money off guitar by teaching my son Lukáš. From what I could gather, most of the time they sat and watched online performances of famous songs before Karel instructed Lukáš on how to play them. When we left Prague, Karel gave Lukáš a list of YouTube guitar tutorials so he could continue learning. But seeking fame online takes not only guts but time, and one of the biggest challenges Oskar and Karel described facing in their lives was “time famine.” Part of the problem, they told me, is the number of hours they spend at school. Phones are allowed only during break time, though Karel avidly demonstrated how he can read a phone hidden under his desk. “This way,” he said, “I can play games on my phone sometimes when I’m bored, like when the teacher tells us to work on something quietly at our desks and I’ve already finished it.” Even when they aren’t at school, their time online is necessarily integrated into their already very busy lives. Karel is an avid soccer player and devotes every Saturday to training. “I have no time to go online [that day],” he told me. “But the next day, I’m so tired, I can hardly move my body! All I can do is move my finger—click! click! [on the mouse]. And so I spend the whole day catching up.” While I was trying to keep our discussion focused on their digital activities, Karel and Oskar were really keen to find out how our interview together would appear in the book that I told them I was writing. In some ways, books seemed like magical items to them. “You read so many—my mom told me,” Karel said to me, as if reading a lot of books is extremely unusual. It turned out that neither one of them felt they could find the time to read a book all the way through. “My mom tries to get me to read. [But] you lose time and forget,” Oskar explained. Karel agreed. “I’ve hardly ever read a book from beginning to end,” he said. “I can’t find time to read. I don’t like it. It doesn’t grab me.” But then he added, “But I read clickbaits when they come up on Facebook.”

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Because of this, Karel has put together a strategy for dealing with school assignments that require reading a whole book: “I might read a few pages of the book we’ve been assigned and then lose interest, so I look at what’s been written about it on like twenty sites and I pull in different things from different places. I add my thoughts on the few pages that I read and put together a paper. I decide what I take from the different websites and I pull it all together with a few thoughts of my own, so there is still some room for creativity there.” There was no sense in how Karel recounted this that he saw anything problematic in his approach, much less that he feared being accused of plagiarism. Instead, it was another facet of his self-presentation as cunningly creative, taking advantage of small spaces of freedom, whether by playing on his phone under his desk at school or culling information from the internet to put together a book report in response to pressures (school rules, lack of time, a text that is too boring to read) that he cannot avoid. But although both young men expressed a sense of time as severely limited, they evinced a sense of the space of their activities as being almost limitless. While their offline lives may retain certain restrictions, online they actively position themselves as cosmopolitan subjects who traverse a vast range of fields.

Freedom of Movement Since Karel became a teenager, one of the concerns facing his parents has been the amount of freedom he should have in moving about the city. His school is only a few blocks away from his house and most of his friends live in the neighborhood, but still there are occasions when he needs to go further afield. “He goes and trains for soccer or he does guitar or singing lessons, and he needs to come home after dark, which can be worrisome,” his mother, Lenka, explained. “Kids here actually have a lot of time, as school ends at one thirty p.m. and then they have the day to do whatever they like.” “We do monitor him,” Karel’s father, Martin, added. “Like we know when he finishes and how long it should take him to get home. And there is always the mobile. So if he is late, we can always call him.” “And what about on the internet?” I asked. “Do you keep an eye on what he looks at?” “No, we can’t do that,” Martin laughed. “He knows more about the computer than we do! The other day when I needed to download a video, I just listened to him. I didn’t know what to do!” Given the expansiveness of opportunities on the internet, as well as the fact that most Czech children’s and teenagers’ online activities are not monitored

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(Ševcˇíková et al. 2013, 1050) and many like Karel have more computer skills than their parents, digital connectivity constitutes a significant shift in domestic authority. In the past, teenagers didn’t have nearly the same opportunities for independent and mostly unobserved access to such a broad range of resources and people. While parents can limit young people’s time online to a certain extent (easier done with desktops and perhaps even laptops, not so easy with tablets, much less phones), what that time is spent on is harder to control. But while we had quickly moved beyond Karel and Oskar’s opening representation of themselves as nothing but intensely serious students, I could not talk to them about all the various things they see and hear on the internet. Sex and porn, for example, were clearly off limits in our discussion. A few years before, though, Karel had told me about the glories of Snapchat, explaining how the pictures just disappear, “so you can send something dumb to someone.” “Like what?” I asked. “A boy can send a picture of himself without his shirt on to show a girl how strong he is,” he suggested, and then seemed immediately embarrassed that I might be thinking he does this, so we both changed the subject. Another mother of a sixteen-year-old mentioned to me that her son stumbled across an online porn video when he was just nine. “I think he was quite upset about it, because he wanted to talk to me about what he saw,” she said. Her son’s response underscores how in the best of circumstances, intimate familial relations can be drawn on to make sense of the affectual overload sometimes experienced online. But sitting with two fourteen-year-olds and talking about what they do on the internet, these sorts of issues were clearly not on the agenda. I could, however, ask them more generally about who they meet online. I was curious about what I saw as the internet’s great potential for breaking down communication barriers between national borders. But what they described was not so much breaking down borders in terms of an active, concerted effort, but simply dwelling in a cosmopolitan space, as opposed to being largely limited to the world at hand. Humans have used technologies for thousands of years to extend their voices, their visions, and their identities across time and space. What was, and continues to be, revolutionary about digital communication is how seemingly easily we can engage with it in continuously unfolding time, not just speaking with but seeing each other in real time. Also revolutionary is the way we can establish new relationships with others who are spatially distant, not just through reciprocal exchanges of information, but through active, real-time collaboration in a shared affective enterprise. Gaming is perhaps the best example (Golub 2010). Oskar tried to describe to me the thrill, as well as sometimes the confusion, he feels in playing soccer

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with international online competitors. Highlighting one case where the unspoken “rules of the game” that have been established—or are assumed to have been established (cf. Gershon 2010)—between online players were broken, he explained, “I like to play football simulations like FIFA 14, which has an online lobby where I can meet someone to play. The first time I played with a guy who was Czech—I found out when he was losing and started cursing in Czech. At halftime, I could hear him saying on his microphone some very vulgar words and slamming something on his desk and then he just logged out in the middle of the game! Can you believe that? I also played a German, an Israeli, a Paraguayan, and someone from someplace in Africa—you can play with anyone in the world. But it was only the Czech who was so rude.” Karel offered a more positive account, similarly focusing on the affective thrill he gets in playing group combat games online: “We play across the world in teams of five. Someone anywhere in the world can say, ‘I saw him [the target] go out the door.’ And someone across the world will say, ‘I got him,’ and shoot him.” The sniper game not only gives Karel an ability to extend his embodied experiences into a simulacrum of combat, a situation he may never face in “real life” but that nonetheless has very real, and at times intense, emotional and sensory effects on him (cf. Bardzell and Bardzell 2007; Boellstorff 2011; Taylor 2002), but, just as importantly, engages him in a collaborative endeavor that is meaningful to all the parties involved (Golub 2010). In the midst of his description, I noticed that Karel had switched from speaking (fluent) Czech to speaking (very good, but not so fluent) English, so I asked him if the games he plays are always in English. “It’s all in English. Everyone has to know English,” he confirmed. “What about those who don’t?” I asked. “Everybody has to learn. If they don’t learn, they aren’t smart.” “But maybe games are a way you could learn a language,” I suggested. But both young men shook their heads. “You can’t play a game and communicate in a language in which you’re just a beginner,” Karel asserted. “It’s much better to learn in person from a language teacher.” “But maybe you could use the internet to look up a language teacher and then have him meet you at home,” Oskar offered, trying to be helpful, while, ironically, further underscoring the limitations of trying to navigate digital contexts in a foreign tongue. If the language teacher started coming regularly enough, even Karel might make him a Facebook friend. Oskar has over two hundred friends online. “Mom and Dad are on FB [Facebook] with me,” Oskar explained. “And so are several people I’ve never met. I commented on a German football team in German and

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a German [man] became my friend. Or there are the people from Saudi Arabia who added me on Instagram and sometimes we share photos.” Karel, in contrast, prefers to stick to only people he knows “in real life.” But like many American teenagers (boyd 2014), the young men mostly use Facebook to communicate with people they already interact with face to face on a regular basis, sending messages to their classmates, training partners, guitar teachers, and soccer coaches. But never to their schoolteachers, they replied, laughing at my suggestion. “It would be good, though,” Oskar soberly noted, “if our teachers could learn to use some electronic way of communicating. They could post our grades online instead of reading them aloud.” In two of their classes, the teachers regularly read the grades out loud to the whole class. “But last time,” Oskar said as his voice noticeably dropped, “our math teacher came up with something really bad. He announced to the class that I had received the top mark and so I was going to return the test papers to everyone who had failed. I had to hand them out. And everyone I handed a paper to looked at me with anger on their face—and I got to be the one making them feel that way. I think the teacher did it just to amuse himself.” Karel nodded in agreement and added, “I think the teachers should stop thinking like Communists. We have a lot of people still stuck in the old system who need to move on.” It was unclear whether Oskar thought his teacher got a thrill only out of putting down the students who did poorly, or if it was the dual humiliation of both Oskar and the other students that was so titillating. Either way, the moment highlighted the two boys’ (and no doubt some of their classmates’) acute sense of powerlessness with respect to educational authorities, subject to a system that not only demeans those who do not achieve as expected but simultaneously jeopardizes relationships between able and not-so-able classmates. Just to make sure it was clear to me how immoral the teacher’s actions were, Karel reframed the event in terms of a Communist past where dominance, fear, and humiliation were not infrequently employed as (unofficial) pedagogical strategies. But when it comes to their education, their math teacher’s poor behavior is not their main worry. Next year, both Karel and Oskar will need to change schools. They will go either to a “gymnasium,” an elite institution that provides a broad educational pathway for university-bound students, a technical high school (whose graduates may or may not continue on to university), a vocational high school (which generally does not lead to university), or a drama or music conservatory. The stress over the exams that help determine a student’s future is intense, and many seek out extra sources of education and exam revision. (One teen told me she spent years attending a three-to-four-hour preparatory program

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every Saturday, plus worked once a week with a private tutor, in preparation for her gymnasium-intake exams—which she passed.) Going online does not necessarily detract from their efforts, but often acts as another route to practicing study tactics as students try out whatever tricks they know. “I use my phone for studying for exams. I download test papers,” Karel explained, returning to the topic on which he started our interview. Oskar was doing the same thing, but had also adopted the strategy of changing all his phone settings into German to get a little more practice before he took his language exam. Oskar is applying to the gymnasium, which he hopes will enable him to go to university to study politics and international relations. One day he’d like to move to Germany and become a politician, though he told me he is uncertain what the chances are for a Czech to make it in German politics. The son of a Dutch banker and a Czech painter, Oskar is testing the waters on just how cosmopolitan his “real life” activities can be. Karel, with his interest in sports, is opting for a specialist physiotherapy high school. Oskar has his parents’ full support, but Karel’s mother and father are divided. Martin likes the idea of a practically oriented high school, while Lenka laments forcing their son to make such an important decision at such a young age. “What if two years from now,” she said, “he decides he no longer wants to be a physiotherapist?” Other families I know go through similar debates when their children reach this age. Despite the amount of time they are devoting to preparing for their exams, most of Oskar’s and Karel’s online activities focus on having fun. Entertainment moves them affectively, whether they’re running across a soccer field while listening to their opponent curse despairingly, or taking part in a global collaboration to eliminate terrorist snipers without having to get out of their chairs. Entertainment is the currency of exchange with their friends, as sharing memes, pictures, or videos gains them respect, forges new possibilities for future collaborations, and deepens connections. Entertainment establishes them as cosmopolitan consumers, linked to international, primarily English-language trends, from selfmade (Swedish) vloggers to the corporate franchise of Homer Simpson. These cosmopolitan visions are nestled against the nationalist challenges of hoping one day to be a successful Czech politician in Germany or the cringeworthiness of listening to a fellow Czech utterly lose his temper on FIFA 14. And while the ability to transcend space and communicate with “someone from someplace in Africa” strikes them as interesting, amusing, even at times a little thrilling, their accounts are dominated by concerns over how to grasp control of time. In the midst of crafting themselves as certain kinds of (cool, masculine, cosmopolitan) subjects, poised to succeed in the various worlds they inhabit—the world of global gaming, the world of Prague, the world of Germany, or the world of the classroom next door—time seems to keep slipping away from

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them. But crafting a self requires some sort of agency over time. In the midst of days dominated by music lessons, sports, language, gaming, friends, school, and family, what they seem to crave most is for things to slow down, at least momentarily, so they can get a better grasp of time, and perhaps of themselves along the way. In Heidegger’s terms, meditative thinking, focused on “contemplat[ing] the meaning which reigns in everything that is,” rather than calculative thinking might be called for ([1959] 1966, 46; emphasis added). It is unclear, though, what—for them—getting a better grasp of their time might look like. In order to rid themselves of their feelings of time famine, would they consider giving up sports, or gaming, or the hours spent perusing Facebook clickbaits? I don’t think these young men are articulating an actual desire for another option; rather, they’re highlighting the tensions inherent in attempting to assert themselves and achieve a sense of agency within a space where information, entertainment, and the possibilities of interrelationality are increasing and moving more rapidly than ever before.

Meeting Pedro My friend Leoš’s daughter, Jana, age fourteen, is in the same position that Oskar and Karel had been in the year before: preparing for exams that will determine what kind of a high school she will go to. One afternoon I sat chatting with her father on the living room couch, while her ten-year-old brother, Honzík, played on his Xbox with my ten-year-old son, Lukáš. Jana, who was drawing nearby on her iPad, stubbornly tried to ignore her father’s attempts to draw her into our conversation. Jana wants to go to a vocational high school that specializes in graphic design, and drawing will be a part of what her high school exams will test her on. At fourteen, she is about to decide her occupational future—or at least a significant part of it—a fact that is causing her family major strife. Her mother, Tereza, is quietly supportive, but her father is adamantly opposed. “I want her to go to the academic high school, like me, so she has choices in life,” he declared to me. “It’s too hard,” Jana said, looking up briefly at him. “I’m not the academic type, I don’t want to study all the time. I don’t want all that stress.” “So she goes to graphic design school and becomes a graphic designer, just like that?” Leoš snorted. “I just can’t believe she’s deciding her future career at fourteen!” Leoš and Tereza are a middle-aged, middle-class couple with two children. They have always been very educationally focused. Though they live on the outskirts of Prague, the whole family makes the daily commute into the city, both for

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work and for the children’s schooling (not only are there better schools in the city, but better after-school activities as well). Year after year, they relate to me all of the after-school activities their children take part in. Most of these are organized by Tereza, though Leoš takes a strong interest in complaining about how they disrupt his schedule. Indeed, he often seems keenly uncomfortable with the rhythms of his children’s lives, describing how every day after school they walk together to one of their activities: Mondays is rock climbing, Tuesdays they’re involved in animal caretaking at a small zoological garden, and so on. “You didn’t do anything like that when you were young?” I once asked him. “Sometimes we went to Sokol [collective gymnastics], but it wasn’t every day. And it was free!”2 After their extracurricular lessons and activities, Jana and Honzík walk together to their grandparents’ house and wait until Leoš collects them at the end of his working day. “It is doubly beneficial,” Leoš once admitted, “as the grandparents take care of them and the kids keep an eye on their grandparents, alerting us if anything is wrong with them.” Every day after primary school, he collects Honzík and Jana in the afternoon, waiting until there is a pause in the seemingly never-ending string of Simpsons episodes that dominate one of the free TV channels, Monday through Friday. “The children will never leave before The Simpsons are finished,” he explained. Not surprisingly, almost every time I come to visit, Honzík seems to be wearing either a Simpsons T-shirt or one featuring the justas-popular yellow “Mimoni,” the Minions from Despicable Me. But while Tereza and Leoš share the desire to further their children’s education, when it comes to their career trajectories, they have different ideas. Leoš grumbled that since Tereza went to a specialist high school, she thinks sending Jana to a similar school is “good enough.” There was a tinge of hostility in his voice, which I’ve heard before from other parents whose partners accuse them of being elitist. The fact is that it is a significant trade-off: once in a gymnasium, the pressure does not diminish, and many students find themselves taking extra lessons in languages, Czech grammar, or math to keep up. Many of them seem run off their feet with work and anxiety, and their parents tend to find themselves going to great lengths to help them cope. In some families, it’s clear that their sons or daughters will never achieve the results necessary to get into a gymnasium and so the choice is a bit simpler. But in those where the children might pass the exams and be selected, this raises the very fraught question of whether to push them to excel and thus keep open the door to university and all the possibilities it might lead to, or allow them have a more relaxed high school experience. Leoš and I have known each other for a long time and I could see his concern for his daughter’s future, as well as his sense of powerlessness in stopping what he thought was the wrong decision.

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I first “met” Leoš when he became my pen pal. I was eleven and he was fourteen. My father walked into my bedroom in Virginia waving an envelope adorned with several Czechoslovak stamps. “There’s a relative who needs an Englishspeaking pen pal,” he announced, “and you’re going to be it.” How could I write to a fourteen-year-old, and one I’d never met? I wondered. We managed, however, to find topics of common interest, sustaining on-and-off dialogue until we finally met six years later. In 1987, when I made my first trip to Czechoslovakia, we spoke for the first time, initially on the phone and then in person. Despite vocal protest from the aunt I was staying with, as he was a distant relation and not even on her side of the family, I agreed to join him for a tour of his university. Leoš told my aunt he was going to show me the lecture halls, but instead he took me to an underground heavy metal concert. Two years later in 1989, when he was involved in the student uprisings around the revolution, he sent me a package of brochures, stickers, and fliers made by the student radicals, with the explanation that should he disappear and not be heard from again, I was to take them to the Western press. Since then, Leoš’s life has become ostensibly less dramatic. He is now an accountant. There are no more illegal packages; we exchange emails and he frequently sends me Czech podcasts. He has done well in his career, but while the apartment he and his family live in is small, it is also very expensive. Despite finding the work extremely boring, to make more money he takes on consultancy jobs, working most Saturdays and often on Sundays and evenings too, managing to get through, he tells me, by keeping his headphones on and listening to podcasts. Today was one of his rare afternoons off, and our families were catching up with one another. But his wife was away and his daughter was sulking, and even the Xbox game wasn’t going as we had hoped. My son speaks very little Czech, yet both he and Honzík started off keen to spend the afternoon together. I’d assumed that since they are both huge fans of the same games, watch the same movies, and know the same cartoon characters, they would find a way to work together despite the linguistic barriers. But cosmopolitan consumerism stretches only so far, and Honzík kept interrupting our conversation with demands that we translate for him: “Tell Lukáš to shoot over there or we won’t get to the next level.” Even the setup of the game was causing headaches. Usually Honzík plays Xbox with his sister and she navigates all the logins, whose text is in English. Despite knowing the game inside out, he kept having to call her over to click the right boxes to get the software going. Clearly, what Oskar and Karel told me about the need to learn English was accurate. And yet Honzík also makes the most of the Czech-language resources he can access. He is, for instance, a very big fan of the Czech vlogger “Pedro,” who

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entertains his listeners in Czech while playing Minecraft online. Pedro, a thirtyone-year-old gamer named Petr Florián, is a cult figure among his fans, as we found out on another day when Honzík spotted him in person at an adventure park, grabbed his dad’s mobile phone, and ran over to Pedro, requesting that they take a selfie together. Despite not owning a phone, never having been in a selfie before, and having no idea how to actually take one, Honzík had effectively risen up in status, joining global legions of preteen, teenage, and older gaming fans documenting their delight over having met their internet idols in “real life.” With 894,000 subscribers (as of September 2019), Pedro hardly has the same reach as PewDiePie, but his local fans appreciate the accessibility of someone who speaks their native language and shares the same cultural context. Those who cannot (yet) navigate the internet in English can usually find some way of operating within Czech-language contexts, focusing on Czech websites and using Czech search engines (such as Seznam.cz), but these are very limited in scope and enable the creation of very different online selves than those of young people with a decidedly more cosmopolitan outreach, such as Oskar and Karel. “Don’t they teach you any English at school?” I gently asked Honzík, as he struggled with another Xbox login. Jana answered for her brother: “Of course they do, but the lessons aren’t any good. I used to have his teacher—she’s Russian and speaks English with a thick accent. And the teacher before she came along was Russian too! You only learn English when your parents get you into an afterschool tutoring group, and that they have to pay for.” I’m not sure if it was coincidence or if this school was still following old patterns of hiring “foreign-language teachers” from Russia, regardless of the language they were supposed to teach, but clearly Honzík’s cosmopolitan visions were still reliant on Czech, be it through the dubbing of The Simpsons or the Despicable Me franchise, or Pedro’s navigation through the world of Minecraft.

From Marbles to Facebook When we’d met up the year before, I had been on my own and Leoš and Tereza decided to take me along with their children to a gaming exhibition, the purpose of which was to show Jana and Honzík that they could have fun playing games without any digital technology. It was ten o’clock on a Saturday morning and both the kids were very quiet. “They didn’t want to get out of bed this morning,” Leoš explained. And they really didn’t seem at all keen on the activity their parents had selected. In the exhibition hall of the Novomeˇstská radnice, or New Town Hall, a big room of tables was set up with all sorts of board games, ranging from card games

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and word games to multiplayer battle games. We walked around together and each time we paused anywhere near a table, a games assistant, most of them young women in their twenties, rushed up to see if we wanted some help with playing a game. Finally, Honzík found a battle game he wanted to try, so we approached a table. But there was a problem—each table had four chairs set up and we were a group of five. I suggested we borrow a chair from one of the tables that no one was playing at. The nearby games assistant looked horrified and immediately stopped me, telling me she wasn’t sure if this was allowed. I pointed to the three or four completely empty tables surrounding us, again suggesting that if no one was using the chairs, it made sense to bring one over. She replied that she supposed she could go and ask the organizers if this was possible, in a tone that made it sound like this was the last thing she wanted to do. Her fearfulness of not conforming to the rules, to the point of keeping seats empty while people struggled to find a place to sit down, stood out in comparison to the art gallery clerks who had reinterpreted my son’s age to get the “right” cost of the ticket for us. Finally, however, I convinced her to go, and after we got formal approval from the organizers to borrow a chair, we dived into playing the game. Afterward, we went out for coffee and ice cream and I asked the kids what kinds of games they like to play. Honzík began to describe the joys of Minecraft, but Jana said she was too busy doing other things on the computer, like studying and spending time with her friends. I asked if she was on Facebook and she nodded. “You’re on Facebook?” Leoš bellowed, with a surprised and not-at-allhappy expression on his face. He shook his head when she despondently nodded and looked away, trying to end the conversation. “Did you know she is on Facebook?” he questioned Tereza, who shrugged and similarly dropped her gaze. I tried to steer the conversation to other topics, but Leoš had already moved on to complaining about how much time his children spent online. Then suddenly he looked at me with a slight smile and said, “You know what’s the main thing that’s different about how these children use a computer, from our generation?” When I shrugged, he continued. “They aren’t afraid they will break it!” I don’t think either of his children picked up on the admiration in his voice, as he struggled to both control and understand their online habits. (And I didn’t ask Jana any more questions about her use of digital technologies, in case I inadvertently again threatened the freedom she exercises online.) We left the coffee shop and took a tram over to the other side of Prague so the children could visit the mirror maze at Petrˇín Park. As we walked up Petrˇín Hill, Tereza and Leoš pointed out the historical monuments to me—“Look, it’s Hunger Wall”—until we found ourselves at the top, where we stumbled across a game of marbles. Leoš was delighted as we joined the crowd of men and women avidly watching what turned out to be the national marble championship.

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He excitedly explained to his children how he had played marbles as a child “in exactly the same way” as they saw before them now. “We also made a hole in the ground, and stood just over there, in that position, and threw our marbles in just that way. . . .” But after a while the young people started to get restless, so we continued on our way to the mirror maze. “We don’t play marbles,” Jana explained to me. Leoš shook his head at her remark. “They grew up in the city. They don’t know what it is to walk home through the vesnice [village], stopping along the way to play games—just stopping and digging a hole in the ground and playing a game of marbles along the way!” Leoš kept talking about marbles, and there seemed to be a lot at stake for him in convincing his children to appreciate their beauty. This wasn’t just about playing a game, however, but about a particular way of constituting the time and space of childhood. Repeatedly Leoš has recounted to me the freedom he felt growing up in the midst of “village life,” even though the area he was raised in is technically a small city. He is not the only one, though, as the romantic ideal of a village childhood permeates many people’s reminiscences of how life used to differ from the simultaneously more controlled yet more hectic pace that they describe as characterizing today’s urban living. In fact, Leoš is raising his children in a suburban neighborhood that was formerly a vesnice but, as the city has expanded, has now been incorporated into the Smíchov district of Prague 5. In the midst of the old-style houses are newly constructed apartment high-rises (one of which they live in). Honzík and Jana commute to school across town and return late in the evening, so despite having noticed other children in neighboring apartments who look roughly their age, they haven’t had a chance to introduce themselves during the four years that they’ve lived there. This is the context in which Leoš revels in relating stories of a boyhood spent wandering home with other children, unconcerned with the time it took or who he met and spoke with, absorbed in the possibilities of endless exploration and spontaneity. Looking back, he feels he had a real sense of freedom as a child, a sense of freedom he might wistfully want to reclaim now that his life feels so heavily scheduled. He thinks he would like to see his two children experience the same sense of spontaneity and openness to traverse in new and old directions but fails to recognize that his teenage daughter is trying to grasp a comparable sense of freedom, only she’s doing it on Facebook.

Houses with Fences It’s a similar sense of privacy and control over “their own time and space” that my middle-aged friends Jarmila, a primary school teacher, and Alois, a computer

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programmer, are eager to protect. “People don’t seem to realize what they lose when they have a mobile phone,” Alois remarked to me one day. “Nowadays, they can be called at home at any time. People call you up saying it’s an emergency, but really it is not an emergency, so you just end up on call, for work, all the time. You completely lose your soukromý život [private life]—the space and time you get to keep for yourself.” Jarmila explained how she tells all the new young teachers at her school not to give their students’ parents their personal mobile numbers, but they don’t listen and then they are surprised to get called at ten o’clock at night. “But that is when the parents get home from work, the kids go to bed, and the parents remember they wanted to talk to the teacher about the upcoming assignment,” she pointed out, laughing. Alois and Jarmila are both old enough to have started their working lives during state socialism, and remember well the days when there were more workers than work to be done in their respective institutions. Across a wide variety of workplaces, one had to clock in and out of work, but the expectations of what was done, and the pace of how it was done during the hours spent there, were often radically different from today. One woman who worked as a clerk in a government department and had her own office told me that she frequently went out clubbing late into the evening and then spent part of the day asleep under the desk in her office—“It was okay as long as nobody saw you,” she said, underscoring how little work she actually had to get done each day. Similar sentiments are conveyed through a popular joke reflecting back on socialist times: “We pretended to work and they pretended to pay us.” Today the pace and amount of work have shifted, so much so that for many middle-class professionals, their working lives spill out of the boundaries of their official working hours and seep into their private time, unless, like Jarmila and Alois, they consciously strategize to keep them contained. Digital technologies, with the ability they offer to make their users available just about anywhere, anytime, compound the sense of time famine, making the need to wrest control of time (online and offline) feel even more profoundly significant (Brunton 2012; Trnka and Ortiz 2017). For Jarmila, email provides a solution because she looks at it only when she chooses to. Instead of a ringing phone breaking through the space of family life, she has control over the timing of work-related interruptions. “The only parents I actually give my mobile number to are Roma because they often don’t have access to the internet,” she told me. But Alois finds email just as bothersome, as it accumulates in his inbox waiting for a response. Accessibility and connectivity have, he suggested, become the bane of not just his existence, but that of all those who desire an existence outside of their working lives. “People buy houses with huge fences around them now,”

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Alois reflected, “because that is the one place where they think they can protect their privacy. Everywhere else, it has disappeared.” It is ironic that Alois is so scathingly critical of how digital technologies have impacted our private lives, as he is in fact a web programmer. But he is up-front about how much he dislikes his job and can tell anyone who is interested the exact time, down to the number of hours, he has left to work before he can retire—“I have six years, seven months, two weeks, and three and a half working days left.” He is an avid nature lover, having initially trained as an ecologist but having been forced out of this line of work when his environmental politics didn’t line up with those of the socialist regime. He spends as much of his “private time” as he can “tramping” or hiking, mushroom picking, and visiting historical monuments. And programming. For when he isn’t at work, or walking outdoors, Alois is busily designing his own website. Jarmila is a special-needs teacher and is passionate about her work. Together, she and Alois have designed a range of online education resources for children with special needs, and whenever they have a spare moment, they sit together in front of the screen, updating their website. Here, before the computer, using his skills to creatively make something he finds intensely meaningful, just like on the tramping trail, Alois grasps a sense of freedom.

From Too Little to Too Much Time Having a sense of choice regarding how to spend at least some of one’s “private time” has a different meaning for Honzík, who desires more time playing Minecraft; for Jana, who quietly protects her access to Facebook; for any teenagers who are busy juggling the worlds of gaming, school, sports, family, and upcoming exams while, at fourteen, choosing the path of their future careers; and for forty- and fifty-somethings Leoš, Alois, and Jarmila, struggling to find space for themselves in worlds largely dominated by work. And it has yet another meaning entirely for those who are suddenly plunged into too much time and not enough sociality and engagement. Retirement often brings a notable disruption of daily rhythms, as many people experience, at least initially, a loss of their sense of what to do with themselves when their working lives come to an end. As the sociologist Robert Weiss (2005, 60) has suggested, “Retirees’ days are without urgency. They can get up from the breakfast table at noon if they wish. But one possible result of taking it easy is that time can escape unnoticed.” While Alois can eagerly tell you on any given day how long he has until retirement, many of the older, retired men and women I know speak of losing their

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way. “I had so much I’d planned to do,” Ema, age sixty-four, said, “but the day after I retired, it seemed like time speeded up and the day goes by so quickly that nothing gets done.” She waved around her apartment. “I keep meaning to clean out the spare room, to reorganize the kitchen, but it’s lucky if I get the grocery shopping done!” Indeed, it’s been over a year and a half since her father-in-law, who used to live with her and her husband, passed away, and yet his things still remain in boxes, waiting to be taken down to storage. The feeling of aimlessness is particularly acute for those who live alone, or are without children, grandchildren, or elderly parents or parents-in-law who require their time and attention. Not everyone has an extended household of reciprocal obligations to keep them engaged. Today, retirement age is being pushed back, but so too are cultural notions of aging. Alois’s mother, Kveˇta, is a short, sprightly woman of eighty-two. Watching her son count down the days until he can retire, she chided him: “Life after retirement—you think it will go one way, but it goes another!” She can’t believe she’s been retired for twenty-two years. “But times are different now,” she remarked. She remembers how when she was young, her grandparents were in their sixties and they were old. Her grandfather walked with a cane and her grandmother had gray hair always worn up in a bun. Both were extremely serious and dignified. “They would not have been seen skiing at fifty!” she said. “And today people are skiing at fifty!” At eighty-two, Kveˇta gardens. She is busy cleaning her house. She colors her hair (a brown-orange tint). Despite recently being widowed, she is seemingly content, busily engaged cleaning out her husband’s things from the apartment and country cottage they shared until recently, attending the weddings of three of her grandchildren over the last four years. One married too “low” (i.e., to a partner from a lower socioeconomic class) and could have done “better,” another had to be reminded to wait until his older brother married (“You can’t let the second son marry before the first,” she said, shaking her head), but overall the younger generation seems to her to be on the right track. She worries, however, about her younger cousin, Stanislava, who has become a recluse since a fall led to a hip operation from which she has had trouble recovering. A widow with no children, Stanislava has seemingly isolated herself, refusing to leave her apartment and not attending any family occasion, including her brother’s funeral, for nearly a decade. When I went to visit seventy-nine-year-old Stanislava, I recognized some of her cousin’s lively personality. She was still, however, walking with a crutch, and she explained to me that she cannot leave her apartment lest she become dizzy and fall again. Stanislava rarely sees her cousin and extended family. Her remaining immediate family (a brother and a sister and their respective children) all live overseas. The elderly woman’s isolation is, however, hardly complete. Twice

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a week she receives a visit from a social worker, a caretaker helps her bathe and brings her groceries, and a meals service brings her a hot lunch five days a week. Many of these service workers have become friends and ersatz family members, stopping by on their off hours for a piece of cake or celebrating her birthday with her. It helps, she acknowledged, that she has cash, thanks to her overseas relatives, and often slips a few extra bills to them. Even though she’s confined to her apartment, Stanislava’s life is expansive. The TV she kept running softly in the background as we talked is hooked up to the internet, and she eagerly showed me how she can access a variety of news sources. In fact, she is more up to date on politics, election news, and the latest financial scandals than anyone I’ve met. Sometimes, she told me, she will hear of some overseas disaster on the news and call her relatives in the UK or the US to make sure they are okay, reaching them before they even know it’s happened. She used to look forward to the weekly phone call from her sister in the US, but nowadays they Skype every day as it’s easier and costs nothing. She wasn’t at her cousin’s grandchildren’s weddings in Prague, but she accessed all the photos online. An avid user of Facebook, she can usually decipher what her overseas nieces and nephews have posted, despite not being able to read any English, based on their photos and videos uploads. She has recently discovered online shopping sites. Using them required her to set up a bank account—the first one she’s had in her life—but now she can have purchases delivered to her doorstep. We spent some time perusing online curtain catalogues, as part of her ongoing redecoration plans. Stanislava’s ability to engage in the lives of her relatives, without disengaging from her living room sofa, is profound. She moves from place to place, absorbing huge amounts of information, organizing strategies for acquiring the goods and services she desires. Her engagement is not one of “being there,” and she would never confuse Facebook photos with having attended a grandniece’s wedding. But she has managed to reconnect her life to the people and information flows that she finds meaningful. I finally thought to ask her how she got her TV hooked up online, and she explained that her caretaker’s husband is really adept at the internet. “For a few crowns, he can fix anything,” she said with a smile. It is hard not to be in awe of Stanislava’s creativity and the new forms of freedom she has crafted for herself while remaining within the confines of her small apartment. But I am also acutely aware of how much she is missing by not forcing herself outside her front door and engaging face to face with the world, and not just the segments of it that she pays (or that social services pays) to enter her living room. Digital encounters afford her a great deal of control, starting with her ability to cut off contact at a moment’s notice if she

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so decides (cf. Turkle 2011). She would need to relinquish such control if she stepped outside. On the other hand, I cannot imagine that even if the internet disappeared from her life, she would somehow find the courage to go out. Too much time has passed, and the feeling of inability is sedimented in her mind, if not in her bones. For Stanislava, digital technologies simultaneously enable her to avoid the realities of her embodied being-in-the-world while providing a dwelling space where she can engage with news, events, and her relationships with others.

Time and Space, On- and Offline A body too tired to get up off the couch after a day of intense soccer can still click and choose what to bring up on-screen. A young man unable to sit and read through an entire book can select which paragraphs about it to copy and paste together into an essay. Two best friends can celebrate their friendship by circulating a selfie of themselves watching The Simpsons. With a little help from his sibling, a young boy manages to play his favorite games despite the Englishlanguage login screens. A young woman navigates the tricky territory of keeping a father appeased while avoiding marbles and board games in order to spend her limited free time talking to friends on Facebook. A dead-end job is lightened by listening to podcasts, or programming in one’s spare time things that actually have meaning and purpose. A dead-end school day is spent gaming under the table while dreaming that a teacher will learn how to post grades online. An apartment that is both a sanctuary and a prison is transcended and later transformed through online shopping. These are microscopic struggles for freedom. These are the movements of early twenty-first-century lives. At different points in the life cycle, our sense of time changes. Be it via institutional structures (school, the workplace) or the vicissitudes of family life (the presence of young children or the elderly in need of care, the passing on of partners or other close family members), the structures and pacing of our daily rhythms as well as our sense of the past and of the future shift. Our sense of space also alters as our worlds expand and contract through growth, maturity, aging, and the acquisition of new skills and the loss of former capabilities. Technology is a facet of both how we come to see time and space and how they are reshaped before us. Digital interaction may seep seamlessly into everyday life, but it also creates new kinds of spatial, temporal, and social dynamics. It is another site in which we as humans both traverse and dwell within the world. Heidegger’s concern was the great danger we face in losing sight of the ground under our feet and the stars above our heads, of the ways we literally exist in

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the world. In attempting to elucidate how the virtual can be an expansive form of dwelling in which we consume and create new information, build identities, relate to others, and have affective and embodied engagements, my aim here has been neither to praise nor to damn the various possibilities digital communications have made available. Instead it has been to traverse alongside those who use them, to suggest how a more expansive form of dwelling has opened up as we make and remake ourselves and our lives not only in the space of the “real,” “actual,” “analogue,” or “offline,” but through digital dwelling, with its new possibilities and challenges. In engaging with these technologies, we must also, however, not overlook the differences that virtual communication creates. We must recognize the unique pace and selection of information that occurs on our Facebook feed, the difference in tempo and spatiality that takes place in gaming as opposed to in playing marbles on the way home. We may be able to download meditation apps to teach us how to take a break from the stress of everyday life, but with timers that end our sessions and logs for keeping track of our progress, this is a very calculative form of “meditation” (quite different from the meditative thinking that Heidegger had in mind) (Trnka and Ortiz 2017, 109–111). Stanislava can limit or expand her encounters with others through the devices at her fingertips, calculating what level of sociality she is ready for on any given day, rather than immersing herself in a world that may not always meet her expectations. Moreover, Heidegger may have warned us about the differences between meditative and calculative thinking, but we are in the midst of an even more frightening scenario—namely, that our calculative thinking is increasingly being carried out not by humans but by algorithms (Cheney-Lippold 2011), so that we may not even understand the terms according to which it is being done, much less attempt to correct its dominance in our own minds. While we may focus on exercising small freedoms, there are larger realities they are nested within. We may be living through a multiplicity of identities and embodied and affective dimensions, but the virtual can never supplant the inherently physical groundedness of our being. Humans have for millennia attempted, often successfully, to extend their reach beyond the space and temporal stretch of their lifetimes, and the technologies necessary to achieve this task do not need to be particularly elaborate. A book or musical composition allows us to create a certain kind of self and communicate it to generations afar (or at least attempt to). A tombstone does similar, if not always as creative, work. The internet is yet another means of extending our reach, albeit in a way that is more accessible, rapid, and widely interconnected than anything that came before. But (for now at least) our ability to exercise agency and act with intentionality, engaging with little freedoms in our lives, as well as some very big ones, remains vested in the

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temporal scope of this body, this existence, dwelling upon this earth beneath our feet, traversing under this sky in the heavens. In a later chapter we will come back to Heidegger’s, Havel’s, and Patocˇka’s views on heaven and earth and the fourfold, as well as Czechs’ visions of nature and how humans fit within it. But first we will take a close look at another form of bodily movement, following Czech youths as they put on their dancing shoes and enter the world of ballroom dance.

3 BALLROOM DANCE AND OTHER TECHNOLOGIES OF SEXUALITY AND DESIRE

Walking through many larger Czech cities on an autumn afternoon, you’re likely to encounter streams of young men and women, mostly aged sixteen or seventeen, the girls in evening dresses and high heels, the boys in suits and bow ties with white gloves peeking out of their pockets. Often they congregate outside ornate buildings, catching up with friends or having a quick cigarette before heading into the ballroom. A few come late, leaping out of their parent’s car or a taxi before racing through the doors. Either way, they are making their way to the quintessential Czech teenage ritual of ballroom dancing. At one such ballroom dance class in Prague I met Helena, a shy sixteen-yearold girl, anxious to look worldly and unaffected as she wondered which of the boys stampeding across the ballroom toward her would ask her for a dance. She was accompanied by her mother, Dasha, a forty-something émigré from Kazakhstan. Dasha and Helena are one of literally thousands of duos that turn up at weekly ballroom dance classes across the country. Predominantly they consist of mother-daughter pairs, but also include father-daughter, mother-son, and father-son duos (particularly during the “extended lessons,” which sometimes include a father-daughter or mother-son dance). The eighteenth century saw the start of collective ballroom dance lessons, with the practice becoming more widespread during the 1900s, particularly after World War I. Perhaps assisted by the spread of the phonograph across the European Continent in the early part of the twentieth century (Jones 1985),

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which made hiring a full orchestra unnecessary, ballroom dancing became a de facto prerequisite for adulthood. But although technology may have made this particular form of embodied practice more widely available, it did not strip ballroom dance classes of their upper-class veneer. Indeed, in the Czech Republic (as elsewhere), ballroom dance is often linked in the popular imagination to images of a long-lost age of elegant nobility (Cˇeská televize n.d.). Moreover, in addition to lessons in dance, dance classes focus on imparting education in etiquette and gentility; the courses almost always address table manners and dress codes, but often cover a much wider purview. As I was told by one dance mistr—or “master,” as the lead male teacher is referred to in Czech—among the lessons his students learn is to know where to hang up their coats at the opera (that is, in the cloakroom). Students also mention being taught how to politely introduce themselves, phone someone, or request a shift from formal to informal modes of address (similar to the shift from vous to tu in French). Usually starting in the month of October and running through about March, dance classes are tailored for fifteen-to-nineteen-year-olds, designed both to be a fun diversion and to instill in students the ability to accomplish a range of dances, from traditional ballroom dances such as the mazurka and the waltz to Latin dances such as the tango or the cha-cha. Given the number of dance schools (a city such as Prague has dozens) as well as the range of class sizes— some consist of thirty couples, others have over a hundred—it is hard to get accurate numbers of how many adolescents attend. There seems, however, to be—and to have been, across several generations—a general expectation among many Czech families that their sons or daughters take part. People in their seventies and eighties remember with excitement when dance classes were reinitiated after the end of World War II and how packed they were. My friends who are in their fifties recounted that when they were young, dance classes were an assumed part of young people’s upbringing and families economized to put together the money for clothes, shoes, and (for boys) “enough spending money to buy a girl a lemonade during the break.” Friends in their thirties reflected on how before the 1989 revolution, dance classes were considered one of the best places to meet up with friends while also mixing with young people from different schools or sides of the city. Dance classes’ popularity clearly has a long history, and while some suggest the classes were in greatest demand during state socialism (Cˇeská televize n.d.), they remain a rite of passage for many contemporary youth. Today, the general feeling is that most adolescents will at least try out a course, if not attend all the way through the eleven- or twelve-week session. In Prague, dance classes often sell out months in advance, particularly places

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for young women. Young men’s comparatively lower interest often results in courses offering discounts to males in order to bolster their numbers. Adequate numbers of both men and women are necessary as dance classes are designed to generate a certain kind of relationship between adolescent men and women. While no longer considered a likely site for meeting one’s potential future wife or husband, dance classes make it their business to foster “appropriately” intimate and often erotically charged relationships between the sexes, promoting decorum, male agency, female attractiveness, and an assumption of heterosexuality. Traversing, in this instance, involves the use of collective movement as an explicit means of producing and promoting particular kinds of gendered socialities. That said, given how technologies of mass communication (such as the internet, film, TV, and print media) make a variety of sexual content widely available to young people, these lessons have strong competition from other spheres. Indeed, dance classes are not likely to determine the shape or form of most young adults’ relationships, understanding of erotica, or sexual encounters. Nonetheless, they continue to provide another important medium for young people to learn and engage in (very rigidly imagined) heterosexual scripts. At heart, dance classes weave a story of movement, touch, and intimacy between the sexes that intertwines the temporality of the life course with the temporality of rhythm and movement. It is a story of romance, family relations, and emerging sexualities, shaped both within and outside the domestic sphere. It is also a story of how sexuality and eroticism are fostered in patriarchal contexts too often tinged with objectification and fear, as the male-female relations enacted on the dance floor take place in a broader context of power relations involving male dominance that can, at times, be manifested in violence or threats of violence against women. Throughout, it is a story of the power of sexuality in our relations with one another, underscoring our movements to and away from each other, to and away from ourselves, to and away from the world. That movement, touch, sexuality, and violence should be so closely conjoined should not surprise us. Dance scholars writing of other contexts have suggested that in patriarchal settings, the sensuality of male-female couples embraced in dance can simultaneously reinforce power differences and the threat of male violence and enact a stirring search for not only the possibilities of heterosexual love and affection, but also interpersonal unity, harmony, and even transcendence (Davis 2015; Taylor 1998). As the anthropologist and dancer Julie Taylor (1998) remarks with respect to the tango in Argentina, dance both highlights the differences between men and women and throws them into doubt, provoking insecurities and fear as well as stoking desire and affection.

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As we’ve noted, central to Patocˇka’s analysis of human life is that our beingin-the-world is characterized by both physical movement and ongoing interrelationality, which has embodied dimensions (as well as discursive and affective ones). According to Patocˇka, Heidegger’s ontological descriptions fell short of taking into account the fact that life is necessarily characterized not only by corporeality, but a corporeality that is dynamic and engages the world and others through movement: “To understand existence as movement means to grasp man as being in and of the world. . . . This movement . . . is a being that understands itself. . . . It is a being that makes possible clarity, understanding, knowledge, and truth” (Patocˇka [1968–69] 1989, 279–80). Thus while Heidegger alluded to our movement through the world—we grab the hammer to make use of it—but did not elaborate very much on the relationship between body, movement, and perception until his later works (e.g., [1987] 2001), Patocˇka made movement and corporeality central to our understanding of ourselves and the world. Drawing from Aristotle, Patocˇka posited three primary movements that human beings engage in: the sinking of roots (that is, the movement toward our most primordial ties), moving outward and cultivating self-realization through the world of work, and transcendence. Each of these movements is as much about getting to know the world and objects within it as about engaging with other people. As his teacher Husserl did before him (Moran 2005, 56), Patocˇka foregrounded interrelationality as a central aspect of the constitution of the world we live in. Thus Patocˇka argued, “Contact with others is the very center of our world, endowing it with its most intrinsic content, but also its most important meaning, perhaps even all its meaning. . . . All significance that grows in our life or finds a resonance therein is oriented to the contact with others” ([1967] 1989, 258–59). Indeed, Patocˇka described our first moments and movements in the world as being our separation from our mother (through birth), followed immediately by the movement back toward her (the sinking of roots)—the initial movement that denotes us as an individual being. To use Patocˇka’s insights to examine the meanings of dance is thus not to bowdlerize his philosophical thinking, as Patocˇka himself considered movement in terms of conceptual dynamism (e.g., the movement to find oneself) as well as, following Husserl, with respect to the actual corporeal dimensions involved in moving through the world (e.g., reaching out for an object)—and in fact, in Patocˇka’s thinking, these actions are closely intertwined. It was in both senses that Patocˇka asserted that it is imperative to understand being in terms of moving through a world characterized by being-with-one-another. Indeed, for Patocˇka, as well as for our Czech adolescent dance students, the world of being-with-one-another is characterized by embodied sensuality,

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intimacy, pleasure, and danger—all of which play an important role in how we come to be who we are.

Learning to Traverse the Dance Floor, among Other Things Národní du˚m na Vinohradech, or the National House of Vinohrady, is one of many sites that host ballroom dance lessons. Like all of the dance school teachers and administrators I have spoken with, the manager of its dance classes is extremely proud of their historic location. In this case, the neo-Renaissance building, built in 1894, includes three ballrooms. When I arrived, I was immediately escorted to Mayakovsky Hall (Majakovského sál), named after the Russian poet Vladimir V. Mayakovsky. With its gold-leaf ornamentation, historic murals, and chandeliers, it is considered the most sumptuous of the three. At the far end, a band sat on the stage, ready to supply live music for the lesson. All around the perimeter were chairs for the students to sit on. One side was reserved for girls and the other for boys, as they had most likely been taught during the first class. Set along the back end of the hall were three rows of tables where the audience—mainly mothers, but a few fathers and several younger sisters—could sit and observe. Over the course of twelve lessons, plus two more formal “extended lessons” and a closing ball, the parents observe their children learning the waltz, blues, mazurka, tango, foxtrot, rumba, samba, cha-cha, jive, and polka, among other dances. They also observe who pairs off together, how often their sons are left without partners (as social engineering often ensures that despite boys’ reluctance to sign up, there are more boys than girls at any given lesson), and whether their daughters’ dresses are up to scratch. Hopefully their children will be having fun, in addition to learning new skills in how to move with, hold, and smile at members of the opposite sex, while engaging in the subtexts of heterosexual romance. My introduction to some of the intricacies of dance classes came from Dasha. The front tables where I had seated myself were quickly filling up when she asked if she could join me. Dasha visibly stood out from the crowd with her dark skin, eyes, and hair. She was extremely friendly and spoke beautiful Czech but with a thick accent that I could not place. A few minutes later her daughter Helena sat down next to her and they began to chat together animatedly. In the midst of scanning the crowd to see if her dance partner, Petr, who lives in another city, had arrived, Helena wanted her photo taken. Dasha toyed with the buttons on her mobile phone, wanting to take several pictures, but Helena

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needed to set up the phone for her each time, as she was clearly better versed than her mother in the use of mobile phones for photography. After they took about a dozen photos, Helen scanned through them, self-deprecatingly complaining that she had a square face and only looked good in one of the images, to which her mother replied that she only needed to learn how to stand and present herself better. Dasha then addressed me—just in case I thought they took too many photographs, she explained that several of the pictures were no good because there was a babicˇ ka, or “grandma,” from the next table visible in the background. She then told her daughter, who was looking around reluctantly, that it was time to join the girls sitting on the chairs lined up on their side of the ballroom. “If you wait any longer, you will be running across the parquet to get there in time,” she admonished. As soon as she departed, we introduced ourselves properly. Dasha informed me that she is an emigrant from Kazakhstan, where she had met her Czech husband, Helena’s father. She came back to Prague with him several decades ago and has stayed here ever since. She speaks English, Russian, Kazak, and Czech, as does her daughter. Even though her husband didn’t want Helena to learn Russian because, she said laughing, “he is an ass [vu˚ l],” she is teaching her anyway. Just today they were working on her pronunciation, as Czechs, she told me, can’t pronounce the letter L the way Russians do. “They think it is the same language, but it isn’t,” she noted drily. Otherwise, she tries to raise her daughter to fit in with Czech culture as much as possible, and that includes going to dance class. “All Czechs go to dance classes, unlike in Kazakhstan,” she explained. “It is their tradition [tradice]. Their mothers went, their grandmothers went.” Like many parents, Dasha put careful thought into which dance school she selected for her daughter. As part of the stiff competition for students, dance courses promote various facets of their lessons. In Prague, a big attraction is the ballroom, with schools vying for the distinction of having the most stunning architectural milieu. The name and reputation of the dance teachers, especially the mistr, or male teacher, are also key. It is notable how many of the adults I spoke with about their memories of dance class immediately recalled either the specific hall or the name of the mistr in charge, even five or six decades later. The classes at Národní du˚m also emphasize themes of tradition and nationalism, reflecting links between dance, the body, and national identity that have been noted across a multitude of settings (cf. Hughes-Freeland 2013). The website for Národní du˚m’s courses, for example, informs potential students that “dance classes for youth are our phenomenon, that not only all of Europe but all of the world, is jealous of. The teaching of group dance lessons along with social etiquette has been part of the education of generations in our country from the

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days of the national revival [during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries]” (“Tanecˇní kurzy pro mládež” n.d.). Other dance companies, particularly outside the capital, attempt to sell a mix of traditional and more contemporary elements, highlighting how much fun dance class can be. A promotional video for dance courses in the Moravian town of Uherské Hradišteˇ, for example, opens with scenes of cross-dressing, with all of the young men in wigs and skirts while the women don tuxedos. This is interspersed with images of a Halloween-inspired ball, at which the students were dressed up as vampires and angels. Should, however, either parents or students be wary of the focus on high jinks and entertainment, the video’s closing frames are of students in traditional suits and ball gowns, heterosexual couples intertwined, with one of the final images showing a young woman reaching up to her (male) partner to kiss him on the lips (Emko2305 2014). Indeed, these young people are learning more than the rhythms of the cha-cha (or, as it is popularly called in Czech, the “cha-cha-cha”) or the polka. As they move across the dance floor, they are taking part in a social attempt to control the nature and timing of sexual maturity and the bodily intimacies that occur between either strangers or friends of the opposite sex.

First Steps: The Stampede and the Promenade Národní du˚m has a large beginners’ class with over two hundred students, making up a hundred dancing couples. The boys slightly outnumber the girls. On this day, I’m told, there were fifteen extra boys at the start of the two-hour lesson, but by the end of the night, the number of extras dwindled to three. The skewed numbers are deliberate, according to the dance school’s manager, as “the first lesson that is taught to every girl in the room should be that she is desirable.” It was the third week of classes, and as the boys and girls walked in, they already knew to obediently take their places on opposite sides of the room. In other dance courses that I observed from the first lesson, mistrˇi (masters) began by highlighting the need for gender separation; one admonished his novice class, who sat in mixed-gender groups all across the room, “Because it is your first day, we let you [initially] sit wherever you want, but now, anyone who is not a boy and is on my left side must cross over to my right, and anyone who is not a girl on my right side must cross over to my left.” The gender division is necessary for the dance class’s first step: the claiming of a partner—or, rather, the “invitation to dance,” as it is described—at which point the boys cross the room en masse, each approaching a girl and soliciting a dance by bowing to her. In practice, this most often takes the form of a stampede, as a

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horde of young men literally bound across the room, attempting to reach a desirable partner. It is a fraught process, as no one wants to be with a partner not to his or her liking, and for the men there is the possibility of not getting a partner at all and having to wait out the dance. There are often strategies for managing this: as one man, now in his fifties, recounted to me, “You wanted her to be pretty but not too pretty, or some other boy would beat you to it.” Many older men (and a few women) I spoke with remembered this as the most hateful moment of the lessons. While any young woman who is solicited for a dance ostensibly has the choice of saying no, I have yet to see this, and none of the women I know remember ever actually turning a boy down, as most said they were pleased to have been quickly chosen and thus spared the potential embarrassment of having to sit and wait too long. The next step is the promenade. Now that the women and men are partnered up, they promenade as couples around the ballroom, showing themselves off to the audience and other couples. This can take up to five or ten minutes, as they traverse the ballroom multiple times, giving their parents time to take photos.

FIGURE 3.1. Teenagers taking part in the promenade at a ballroom dance lesson at the popular National House of Vinohrady classes in Prague. Photograph by the author.

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At this point in the lesson, Dasha was straining to see if Helena was with her regular partner, Petr, and she audibly sighed with relief when she spotted her on his arm. Helena and Petr first met, Dasha explained to me, when Petr asked her to dance at the start of the first class three weeks earlier. After that first class, she’d implored Helena to contact him over Facebook to make sure he wouldn’t forget her, so she could enjoy having “a long-term partner” for the remainder of the course and not be anxiously waiting to be chosen each week.

Finally, It’s Time to Learn to Dance Most classes have a male and a female instructor who dance together, but the mistr is clearly in the lead, not just for the actual dancing but for teaching purposes as well. It is the name of the mistr that is advertised on dance schools’ websites and that is available to students when they sign up for a particular course. Often the mistr wears a microphone to amplify his voice, while his female partner’s lack of similar authority is clearly indicated by the absence of a microphone for her. As would be expected, the focus is on imparting a sense of movement and timing, so that couples learn the steps of the dances as well as how to coordinate their movements with one another. The mistr and his partner demonstrate in the center of the ballroom while the circles of students around them copy their technique. Some larger dance classes have assistants who walk around checking students’ progress and correcting their form. Among the range of skills that are imparted, students learn how to recognize and move to the rhythm; the right way to hold or touch their partners (“You have to offer your hands to your partner, boys,” one mistr calls out while teaching the mazurka. “Don’t just grab ahold of hers”); when and how to step, slide, or bend forward; and when to smile at one another (during the twist in the mazurka, for example, which brings partners momentarily face to face). Initially the emphasis is on getting the movements right, rather than teaching any notions of grace or style, and there is little attention to the feeling or emotion of the dances as students struggle not to bump into surrounding couples, get themselves caught in a crowd of students jammed into a corner of the ballroom, or step on one another. In today’s lesson at Národní du˚m, after the first dance is completed, the mistr calls on the couples to promenade again. Now any of the boys who were initially without a partner can ask any girl to dance and she can’t refuse him. (The girl’s partner from the first dance will then sit out the next dance, waiting to be called back at a subsequent promenade.) And so the couples circumnavigate the

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ballroom again, even if this time they seem a bit reluctant to do so, as they face the danger of having to get to know a new partner all over again.

Etiquette and Politesse From the very beginning, dance classes involve lessons in social etiquette. Boys are required to wear a suit and smart shoes. In some schools, a bow tie is mandatory, while in others a regular tie is acceptable. Boys must wear white gloves, a clothing requirement that mistrˇi often insist on. Girls wear fancy dresses, usually evening gowns or cocktail dresses, though a few I saw were in simpler fare. The question troubling the members of many families of female students, including Helena and Dasha, is how many different fancy dresses—or, more to the point, seemingly different fancy dresses—they can afford to conjure up over the four-month period. Dasha explained that the young women tend to wear the same dress every week even though they would much prefer to have a range available, as otherwise it gets too expensive. But, she said smiling, in her daughter’s case “the dress” is actually a separate skirt and top (though that’s not clear when she dances across the ballroom), and so they have the possibility of changing the top and having a bit of variety. “We can also alter her hair,” she added, “so she looks different that way.” Usually Helena’s hair is very straight, but today it had ringlets throughout, and Dasha explained that it took almost twenty minutes of curling to get it that way. Nowadays boys are generally considered to be getting off lightly, as they require only a single suit, gloves, and a pair of decent dress shoes, but of course, the cost of these can be quite prohibitive for some families. Historically, some families went to great lengths to meet the clothing requirements, demonstrating just how socially significant these lessons are thought to be. My father, who first attended dance classes after World War II, once told me that following the euphoria he and everyone else felt when they found out that dance classes were back on again after the end the war, he faced the problem of how to acquire his first suit. “You couldn’t just go out at the end of the war and buy one,” he recalled, “so my mother took an old suit of my uncle’s and resewed it to fit me.” My mother, who attended classes in the early 1950s, remembers her mother selling some of the family gold to acquire the money for dressmaking materials. She can still describe in exquisite detail the patterns of the two dresses her mother made her, as well as the costume her mother produced for her to wear to her class’s masquerade ball. Dance lessons include instruction in etiquette specifically related to dancing— for example, teaching boys to bow to their partners, to lead their partners around during the promenade in the correct way, and to bring their partners a flower bouquet as part of an “extended dance” or ball. But there are also formal lessons in how

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to behave appropriately in a range of other social situations, such as how to eat at a formal dinner party. At Národní du˚m these lessons take place on a different evening (but are considered part of the same course) and are taught by a professional etiquette teacher. The mistr and the manager both explained to me that what they teach is not only how to dance but also how to enter society, so that when students finish the class they will know the necessary dance steps as well as how to eat, dress, attend the opera, and go to a ball. These lessons are necessary if students want to move through a certain kind of social sphere. But there is another kind of social interaction that dance classes not only prepare students for (though many have already partaken in them) but also provide: erotically charged heterosociality.

(Hetero)sociality Dance classes foster social and physical intimacy with members of the opposite sex. While it may be going too far today to present dance lessons as, as one class recently advertised, a “pivotal” moment in young people’s lives, constituting “the first big step into society,” it is not so far-fetched to think of them as “good fun that you will remember your whole life” (“Tanecˇní kurzy pro mládež” n.d.). In the winter months when the weather can limit social activity, dance classes may be one of the few nonwork or nonschool activities that young people, and sometimes their accompanying parents, take part in on a regular basis. They constitute a space in which young people mix with one another, meeting youths from other schools or even, as in Petr and Helena’s case, from other cities. Such intermingling can produce its own entertainment, as when parents watch and comment on who pairs up with whom, comparing their son’s or daughter’s successes with those of other children. It can also include its own anxieties—for example, when Helena complained that she didn’t like to sit exposed along the wall of the dance hall, waiting to be invited to dance, and Dasha chided her, saying that arriving late was not going to increase her chances of being selected. During one of the refreshment breaks in the lesson, Helena guzzled down a Coke, and when her mother told her to slow down, she retorted that she felt very nervous. “How are things going with Petr?” Dasha asked worriedly. Helena replied that she liked dancing with Petr but was worried she was irritating him by stepping on his toes. Her mother shook her head and suggested she “loosen up.” Dancing as a couple isn’t, of course, just about getting the movements right. During most of the dances, partners avidly talk to one another. There are running conversations, lots of smiles, and some giggles when it looks like they are confiding in each other that they cannot figure out the steps. The mistr admonishes them to stop talking and focus on the dancing or they will never learn.

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FIGURE 3.2. Couples learning to move across the dance floor together. Photograph by the author.

The process reinforces the importance of partnership and how working together can help you maneuver through an awkward space, in more ways than one. It seems that almost none of the dancers want to lose their partners and end up (however momentarily) alone, even if for the young women, this could be an opportunity to meet someone new. Instead every effort is focused on keeping the partner they already have, building knowledge and trust between the two of them, and hoping not to irritate their partner too much (by, for example, stepping on their toes too often). The lesson suggests the power of social ties in helping one maneuver through a large-scale society where personal relations are often key to achieving success. “How is it now with Petr?” Dasha repeatedly inquired, sending the implicit message that this was a relationship that should be tended. When parents aren’t exhorting their children to cooperate with one another, they sometimes mingle among themselves. There is a cash bar, and most of the mothers and fathers enjoy beer or wine along with open-faced sandwiches and other delicacies. In many dance halls, the dress code for parents is very relaxed, but at Národní du˚m all of the fathers were in suits and most of the mothers were elegantly dressed. The parents looked like they could be going to a dance themselves, and I briefly wondered how many parental romances are born out of

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such surroundings, particularly as the lessons run every week. Indeed, the events are so popular among parents that some dance halls limit the number of adult chaperones to one, requiring tickets for extra individuals. Dasha was surprised to hear that I got in for free. In fact, when I’d attempted to walk in without a ticket (not knowing there was such a thing as tickets for watching a dance class), I’d been stopped by a security guard. But in addition to mixing with other parents, the events provide a site of ongoing, focused parent-child interaction, which is not always an easy feat when raising teenagers. Some of this takes place through the sustained conversation and sharing of commentary between parents and students during the breaks, but there are also more formal moments, such as the father-daughter and mother-son dances that frequently take place as part of the extended lesson. In the past, however, such intergenerational intimacies did not always stay within the family, as male students were expected to invite their partners’ mothers to dance during the extended classes, thus further expanding the spheres of physical engagement.

Erotics Part of what is being taught in the context of dance is interrelationality, in terms of how to inhabit, hold, and move one’s body while in close proximity to the bodies of others, particularly those of the opposite sex (cf. Hewitt 2005 7; Pinto 2013, 84). Dance is designed to bring a couple together, both physically and socially. Like other forms of dance, traditional ballroom is constantly playing with the physical possibilities of intimate contact, creating often intensely affective possibilities for experimenting with touching another person and being touched by them (cf. Fisher 2007; Lepecki 2016). In Czech classes, dance answers the question of what it would be like to hold or be held by this boy, or that boy, or the next one . . . always, of course, following along heterosexual lines. Students learn about not only their own bodies—how to move them, the steps they can and (as yet) cannot do—but also the bodies of their partners. Over time, the partners get to know one another. Indeed, the mistr tells me that after a few weeks, the partners in each pairing have grown close to one another (už se sblížili). Dasha had a similar opinion, explaining that after a while the boy and girl in each couple get to know one another, not just in terms of their personalities but physically, and so they dance better together. Proficient dancers may choose to express sexual or erotic emotions through their movements. In these kinds of classes, though, the dancers are all beginners. Nonetheless, even those with no such intentions, who are focused just on clumsily

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making their way across the dance floor, confront circumstances of enforced physical intimacy. Even if one finds a regular partner with whom one feels comfortable, the lessons require exchanging partners, and some dances involve young men and women taking a turn with all of the members of the opposite sex in the room. In some cases, the physical differences between a sixteen-year-old man and woman may be pronounced, and many a face gets flushed when short men dance with women who are a full head taller than they are, standing face to bosom rather than face to face. During one of the dances, the mistr told the young men, “You need to hold your partner close to you—you need to glue yourself to one another,” causing some seriously embarrassed expressions. He went on instructing the men on how to take charge of the dance, watching out for their partners—“If the room gets crowded and it looks like someone from another couple is dancing too close, you need to watch out for your partner, look over her shoulder, see that she is too close to the other couple, and move her.” The implication was that it is the man’s role to take care of his female partner. But for some of the couples, I wasn’t sure how the young man could even see over the woman’s shoulder, as she was so much taller than he was, and given the palpable feeling of awkwardness that rapidly spread through the room at such moments of instruction, they clearly knew it too. The last dance of the evening was the mazurka. The couples formed a circle around the perimeter of the room, not facing their partners but standing one behind the other. They took two steps toward the inside of the circle, the circumference getting smaller and their bodies pressing closer together. Each woman had a man standing closely behind her and another man standing closely in front of her, all of them moving even closer as the circle contracted and their bodies were squeezed together. Then they took two steps backward, enlarging the circle again. Back and forth they went, and whenever they stepped toward the center of the room, forming a smaller, tighter circle, the expressions on many of the women’s faces clearly revealed how unpleasant they found this. After two steps outward the mistr told the students it was time for the women to turn around so that each couple, man and woman, could take a good look at one another, before the man spun his current partner behind him and she became the partner of the next man in the circle. So they went, one hundred couples facing each other and then moving on to the next partner, facing each other, and moving on to the next partner, and so on. At each of the turnings, all of the men turned their heads to fully face the new women they were holding and take a good look at them. A fair number of the women, however, refrained from completing the full head turn, keeping their faces cast downward and refusing eye contact, as if to signal, I don’t want to see you. When it finally ended, the original

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couples made a final promenade together before the young men escorted their partners back to their mothers, as if to return them to their families now that the dance class was over. Forging intimacy is as much about producing distance as it is about creating closeness. Intimacy, Ara Wilson notes, is expressed through “positively valued feelings like affection but also problematic feelings like fear and disgust” (2012, 32; cf. Stoler 2002). In this case, the tension in the room spoke volumes about how uncomfortable many found the physical intimacies necessitated by this particular dance. In fact, the discomfort, and in some cases perhaps disgust, that women as well as men may feel in being compelled into such close physical proximity with so many different partners, compounded by women’s experiences of being passed along from one man to another, reinforces the developing bonds between established partners and the comfort couples find in embracing the “known other” as they twirl across the dance floor. Very few of these couples will end up in actual romantic liaisons, much less lasting ones, but both the lore of dance classes and the actual movements of some of the dances underscore their romantic and erotic potential. One mother of a fourteen-year-old girl complained to me that in the past, a girl had to be sixteen or seventeen to take ballroom dancing lessons, but now they are enrolled as young as fifteen. “Do you think I want her meeting up and dating boys next year? Not a chance,” she said. Similar reflections on dance classes as sites of potential romance are frequently voiced by older Czechs. “My sister met her first boyfriend there,” a seventy-five-year-old woman told me. “It was totally platonic between them of course, but they got to try out being together for four months of lessons.” Pavel, a man in his late eighties, had a more heartbreaking, if hilarious, story of how both he and his friend, Arnošt, had their eye on the same young woman. They both noticed Veˇra at the start of the first lesson—and here Pavel gave me a detailed description of exactly how beautiful she was. But when the stampede was over, Veˇra’s hand was on Arnošt’s arm and Pavel was standing on his own, until Veˇra steered him toward her cousin, who had remained partnerless. Week after week they danced, Arnošt with Veˇra and Pavel with her cousin, whose name he tellingly could not remember. Finally, one week they both decided to make a move. They both asked Veˇra out to the cinema for the coming Friday night, but to different movies. She smiled and said she would be there, but refused to say which one of them she would go with. It was only when he ended up standing outside the cinema with two unused tickets in his hand (which no doubt had cost him a considerable amount of money) that Pavel realized she must have gone with his friend. (The possibility that she didn’t go out with either of them did not seem to strike him.) A full sixty years later at his high school reunion, Pavel met Arnošt

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and asked him what ever had happened to Veˇra. “And that ass said he didn’t even remember who she was!” he exclaimed. In Helena’s case, Dasha hopes for a more subtle outcome. Helena already has a boyfriend, Šteˇpán, who is a year older than she is. They know each other from school but don’t really have time to see each other, Dasha explained. Between the hours of seven in the morning and six in the evening, Helena is at school, on her way to or from school, or taking afterschool lessons, so the only time she has to interact with her boyfriend is when she gets on Messenger. Being a year older, Šteˇpán took dance classes the previous year and he didn’t want to take them over again, even though Helena would have been keen to have him as her partner. “But now he is very jealous of Petr,” Dasha said, laughing, her tone indicating that this was a good thing. And after only three weeks of lessons, Helena and Petr decided they would take the advanced class together the following year and be partners again. Dasha had been surprised at the speed of this arrangement and asked Helena if she had told Šteˇpán about this decision. Helena hadn’t and wasn’t sure how to. But Dasha thought it was essential that Šteˇpán hear the whole story. “Helena and Petr aren’t necessarily going out with each other just because they are firm dance partners,” she explained to me, “but it’s always important that Šteˇpán knows that there is that possibility.” Not everyone finds that dance class provokes such romantic entanglements. Many adults told me they quit after the first few lessons, finding the matching up of partners at the beginning of each class particularly off-putting. “After the first week,” one woman in her mid-forties recalled, “most of the boys stopped going, preferring to spend their Fridays at the pub, and a few weeks after that, I wasn’t the only girl who decided to join them.”

In (Sexual) Context Dance classes attempt to determine the timing not just of the rhythms on the dance floor, but also of sexual maturity and bodily intimacy. Creating (or attempting to create) what is at times a decidedly erotically charged space, they throw into relief the gendered dimensions of traversing. Admittedly, they do so in a context where similar lessons are being learned elsewhere, and today these classes are clearly not the dominant mode of knowledge acquisition. That said, many of the messages about sexuality expressed in ballroom dancing lessons are reflections of ideas present in the broader cultural context—namely, that sexuality is assumed to be heterosexual; that women, by definition, should be desirable to men; and that romantic interactions are best initiated by men who select their female partners, rather than by both women and men being similarly sexually agentive.

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Erotica and explicit sexual imagery have long saturated public space in the Czech Republic. Following the 1989 revolution, there was an eruption of erotic images in the public sphere. Previously unavailable, soft-core pornography was suddenly on sale at every city newsstand. Lisa A. Mulholland describes how “in November of that year [1989] the floodgates opened and the images poured into the Czech Republic. During the initial excitement I counted at least thirty different magazines available for purchase in each metro station. The periodicals ranged from Czech produced, untouched snaps of undressed women to glossy airbrushed centrefolds sent from all over Europe. ‘Naked Lady’ posters went up in public buses and offices. One train-station café sported a full wall . . . collage of pornographic images” (1993, 57). Today the streets of both Prague’s downtown and the city fringes are lined with sex shops and brothels, along with softer variants such as the Hooters Bar and Restaurant, which is known for waitresses wearing tight clothing in order to display their apparent “sex appeal” (Hooters Havelská n.d.). (For a while I lived next door to one of their branches, and most of the waitresses I saw serving their outdoor tables looked like blonde Barbie dolls stuffed into tight T-shirts that emphasized their breasts, or “hooters,” and very tiny, tight orange shorts. The expressions on their faces were almost invariably bored.) Mulholland (1993) suggests that there tended to be openness around nudity and public displays of heterosexual affection prior to 1989, which accords with what I experienced during my brief trip to Czechoslovakia in 1987 as a sixteenyear-old. Similarly, today sexuality, particularly among young heterosexual couples, is widely on display, be it in magazines, on TV, or in person. There is nothing stopping men and women from embracing or kissing in public settings, particularly along the hillside of Petrˇín Park, a well-known romantic spot (due to its statue of the romantic poet Karel Mácha) where one almost always encounters scores of heterosexual couples openly kissing. And yet there is also a great deal of public concern about the need for Czechs to be more open and relaxed about their sexuality. Sexologists are frequently interviewed about this topic in the media. Magazines run articles about Czechs’ repression around sexual topics; one focused on the repression surrounding male nudity, all the while featuring a cover photo of five naked men, albeit with strategically obscured genitals (Moravec 2010). It’s not unusual for large-scale billboards in the city to feature seminaked men. In 2010, an ad for an internet provider featured the phrase zapni meˇ—which could either mean “turn me on” with respect to turning on a switch (to turn on a light, for example, or in this case to turn on the internet) or “do me up”—above the image of a handsome man wearing nothing but an open pair of jeans that he is waiting to have zipped up for him. As Jacquie True (2003, 114) notes, almost as soon as female nudes

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went on public display, they were accompanied by sexually explicit images of men. While these could be interpreted in many ways, most public understandings took them to be heterosexually focused images intended for the aesthetic pleasure of women. Almost all of the images of couples intended for widespread public consumption are, moreover, decidedly heterosexual. For example, when Respekt magazine, a popular news and culture weekly, ran a cover story about sexual education in schools, the associated image was a cartoon explicitly demonstrating fifteen different sexual positions, all of which involved heterosexual couples (see Cˇápová 2010). Of course, one can go online and encounter gay and lesbian erotica as well as much more provocative images and discussions, but the point here is how ubiquitous explicit heterosexual images are in the general public sphere. In public discourse, the characteristics of beauty, desirability, and erotic allure are generally associated with women. Even if women are occasionally targeted as consumers of male images, images such as the man with his jeans unzipped are situated in a wider context that generally privileges men as agentive consumers of erotica and women as objects of desirability. In fact, the man beckoning “do me up” (zapni meˇ) is employing an informal mode of address, used for speaking to those one is either already intimate with or hierarchically superior to. He is thus simultaneously issuing a sexual invitation and a sexual command. As True (2003, 113) furthermore points out, erotic images of men often highlight male dominance. The idea that Czech women are especially erotically pleasing is embraced across many facets of Czech culture. For example, when interviewing Czechs about the 1989 revolution and subsequent changes in the country (Trnka 2013), I asked men and women what I thought was a rather bland question about what they liked about their country. Frequently men replied that “Czech women are the most beautiful in the world.” The emphasis on women as beautiful, and more significantly the expectation that women should be beautiful and should do whatever they can to cultivate their beauty, is a common topic of both public and private commentary. Mainstream women’s magazines, such as those that are distributed as inserts in widely read newspapers, run stories on what kind of breasts men like to see on women and whether or not having big breasts is an “important” aspect of women’s lives (“Vyzpovídaly jsme muže” 2010). It is, moreover, not only men (who view themselves as the primary recipients of women’s beauty) who pass along the message that being aesthetically pleasing to men is extremely important to women. Women say similar things. When I was in my midtwenties, I conducted a series of interviews with Czech nurses who were the same age. The interviews took place in their homes or in restaurants or cafés. Many of these women, whom

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I had never met before and would likely never meet again, openly criticized my appearance, pressing me to get rid of my glasses and wear contact lenses, put on some makeup, and let my hair down if I happened to have it tied up in a ponytail (see Heitlinger and Trnka 1998, 7). After a few interviews, it became obvious that by turning up well dressed but not wearing makeup or being fancily groomed, I had unknowingly transgressed something they held very important; namely, I was not taking the time to make myself look as pleasing as possible. Decades later when I took my then ten-year-old daughter to a Prague-based doctor for an asthma checkup, in the midst of listening to her breathing, the female doctor commented to the two of us that she had better lose a little weight in order to take the stress off her muscles, adding that “it is also important with attracting boys, as they look first at your face but then look elsewhere and they won’t find the extra weight pleasing.” Similar messages of women as wanting and needing to make themselves look beautiful to men, and in fact being empowered if they can do so, are also conveyed among intimate relations in the domestic sphere. A formerly very thin woman in her twenties once told me that after she gained a bit of weight, “My father complimented me that I’ve got enough curves that I could get a job in striptease now.” The view that women should be erotically pleasing to men extends to the widely held idea that a man has a right to experience seeing beautiful women around him, and so women should either make themselves look attractive or step aside for those who are better looking. Sometimes there is no limit to the grumbling if such “beautiful women” are not available. Attending a popular evening variety show (one of Jirˇí Suchý’s productions in his Semafor theater) with an older academic couple—Jaroslav, who is in his early eighties, and Eva, who is in her midseventies—I was a little surprised when Jaroslav complained that in previous shows there were always “attractive girls who could sing beautifully,” but this time “the girls can sing but aren’t very good looking,” and Eva’s response was to nod and say, “They really should have put the pretty ones onstage for him to look at!” Another man of my acquaintance grumbled when his twenty-year-old niece from another part of the country came to his house for an extended visit, remarking, “Couldn’t the family at least have sent me a pretty one?” The result is a public milieu in which communication between women and men is frequently sexually charged. Scholars have described some of the negative consequences of this, critiquing, for example, the prevalence of sexual harassment. Writing in the early 1990s, the Czech sociologists Jirˇina Šiklová and Jana Hradilková (1993, 60) observed that “obscene comments about women, women being criticised due to their looks, various ‘playful’ smacks, and pseudo-flattery are routine in most workplaces. . . . Sexual relations between bosses and underlings,

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verbal allusions to sex and sexual jokes at business dinners . . . are routine and no one—to the surprise of Americans!—objects to it.” But there are also much more innocuous or positive erotic exchanges that similarly permeate public interaction. A few years ago when I was walking alone through an upscale restaurant district close to midnight, I caught the eye of two older men sitting at an outdoor restaurant, who stood up and called out that I should stop and have a drink with them. They playfully tried to convince me, calling after me as I kept walking in the other direction, but clearly didn’t mean it seriously. Another day, it was still midmorning and I was walking alone down a deserted street when a lone car drove by and pulled over a few feet ahead of me. The driver leaned out, looked back at me, and shouted, “You’re so pretty!” before driving away again. These kinds of flirtations are commonplace. In mentioning them here, I do not intend to deflect from the damage of much more demanding or violent moments of objectification. My point rather is that there is a wide range of ways, both positive and negative, that women experience being viewed as sexual beings in public space.

Domestic Lessons Sexuality and eroticism are, of course, not just about the objectification of women or men, and to stop there is to tell only one side of a complex story. Coming to understand one’s body, experiencing touch and intimacy, and embracing nudity and recognizing its beauty are all facets of the erotic. While there are certainly public forums, both on- and offline, in which we may experience these, often the first places where we encounter them are within the domestic sphere. In the Czech families I have spent time with, boys and girls run naked in the summertime at local bathing spots. They are hugged and stroked, their bodies openly remarked on. When I went swimming with some friends at a local river, the parents told me that their eight-year-old son Ríša usually swims naked but today, given my presence, he insisted on wearing underpants. And yet, the whole afternoon his father teased him relentlessly, pulling down his pants to expose his backside and inviting him to strip off and swim in the nude. A few years later, when Ríša went on his first date with a girl from school, the topics of sexuality and intimacy were again openly discussed by his family, again with much teasing involved. Ríša refused to talk about his date other than to say that he took it as a good sign that the girl smiled a lot. His father repeatedly tried to bait him, asking if he held her hand or if he “got” a kiss. Later that afternoon, Ríša’s paternal grandparents arrived for a visit. The topic of his date had faded into the background but the sexual banter had not. His grandfather, who is in

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his late sixties, chose this occasion to demonstrate his own manliness by making a string of sexually explicit jokes about women. “Do you know, they have these new pizzas in the restaurant around the corner from our house,” he told us, “so whenever I want, I can get a slice with a prostitute [prostitutka] on it!” “He means prosciutto! It has a slice of prosciutto on it,” his wife groaned, rolling her eyes and laughing. In addition to joking and sexual banter, touch is central to many relationships between adults and children, in particular young children. Czechs not only often remark on how much they like to touch children, but also note how they notice people in other societies frowning on such interactions. In the midst of learning massage techniques intended to dispel phlegm from children’s bodies at a respiratory health center, I was informed by a senior physician that “not only is massage useful for stimulating pressure points, but the very fact that the child is being touched and stroked by someone can be a very enjoyable and positive experience. We shouldn’t forget how important it is to be touched” (Trnka 2017a, 188). In another context, a Czech scholar who had just come back from England related how she seemed to surprise the children she met at a London preschool when she reached out to touch and stroke them. “English people don’t want to be touched,” she lamented, before explaining how the beauty of children compels you to want to touch them. In some cases, the distinctions between nonerotic and suggestively erotic intimacy between men, women, and children can be blurred. At Easter, boys and young men run around with pomlázky, or “Easter whips,” made out of woven willow twigs festooned with colored ribbons, lightly flogging females of reproductive age in the hopes of eliciting a colored egg from them. Everyone is aware that what is being enacted is a fertility rite, and to me these encounters feel sexually suggestive. Yet when my son, who was then seven, was repeatedly handed a pomlázka at various friends’ and relatives’ homes, he was asked if he’d whipped his (teenage) sisters yet. Both I and his sisters felt great discomfort at the idea of fertility rituals being performed between siblings, but there seemed to be no such hesitation among anyone else, perhaps in recognition of the fact that while sexuality and fecundity are indeed to be enacted outside the household in which we grew up, their origins lie in how we first learn to be in our bodies through interactions within the natal unit. For it is here, as Patocˇka reminds us, that we first begin to discover ourselves as corporeal persons. This includes our first lessons in the intimate and the erotic. We, moreover, never truly depart from the world created by our natal relations; as Patocˇka also noted in his depiction of the “sinking of roots,” our deepest understandings and visions of the world are rooted in our primordial ties to both those who cared for us when we were young and those we now care for.

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As the account of the scholar visiting the London preschool makes clear, the intimacies of touch are not constrained within domestic relations. Nor do they always take place between adults and children. I am at times taken aback at the range of situations in which Czechs might reach out and touch me. For example, an elderly taxi driver whose services I’ve regularly used for several years once asked me if on my next visit, I could bring him a T-shirt with a New Zealand logo. When I turned up with the T-shirt a year later, he reached out and stroked my back in appreciation. We are neither family nor friends, and are in fact still using the formal vy/“you” to address one another, but to him this kind of intimacy was entirely appropriate. As the cultural historian Constance Classen (2005, 13) reminds us, touch is a culturally mediated activity. To my mind, my interaction with the taxi driver highlighted a cultural difference between what each of us finds comfortable. But in other cases, there are clearly distinctions among Czech men and women as to what forms of intimacy are appropriate, by whom, where, and when. In considering the meanings of such interactions, it is crucial to remember that they do not happen in neutral spaces, but are played out in contexts of male dominance, patriarchy, and far too often, male violence.

Domination and Violence When Václav Klaus, a formidable right-wing politician, was still president, there was a popular joke that gives some insight into not only Klaus’s personality but also Czech perspectives on marital relations. Klaus was at home in his bathroom shaving when he badly nicked himself. He didn’t notice he’d cut himself, but when his wife, Livia, walked into the bathroom and saw the blood dripping down his face, she exclaimed, “Oh my God!” Klaus replied suavely, “Livia, you know you don’t need to call me that at home!” In fact, wives’ deference to their husbands is not always merely a form of public performance. Many women, particularly those in their forties and fifties or older, talk about their relationships with their husbands as marked by a sense of respect that often blurs into deference and submission. Sometimes this is viewed as problematic by the women themselves, as, for example, when women sadly told me they let their husbands drive drunk “out of respect.” Others frankly described their husbands as dictatorial and demeaning toward them and their children. When male authority is directly questioned, or even when households do not operate as men might envision, violence or the threat of violence is far too common. Though violence against women is not usually openly talked about, it

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does not reside very far from the surface of some families’ public lives. It’s not infrequent, for example, to walk down the street, particularly on a summer’s day when house or apartment windows are wide open, and hear men and women engaged in loud arguments, with suggestions of possible physical violence. Domestic violence has become increasingly discussed on television and in the media, with TV show plots revolving around the issue of how married couples deal with male violence. In one popular serial, a young woman left her husband who had been very violent toward her to go live with her mother, but after he expressed remorse, the plot pivoted around the question of whether or not she should now return to him (Prˇístav 2015). It is difficult to get an accurate sense of how prevalent these problems are, as they often aren’t adequately captured by survey data. That said, the information we do have from one European Union survey from 2014 suggests that 32 percent of women in the Czech Republic over the age of fifteen have experienced physical or sexual violence, with 21 percent experiencing violence at the hands of an intimate partner (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2014, 28). About 16 percent of respondents also knew of women in their neighborhoods who had been victims of domestic violence (155). We have significantly less information about the prevalence of domestic violence against children. The use of physical force against children is becoming less publicly acceptable, though low-level force still occurs openly. It is not infrequent, for example, to see children slapped or hit in public by their mothers or fathers (Trnka 2017a, 137), and similar tactics of familial control are not unfamiliar across Central and Eastern European households, as Mary Weismantel (2001, 7) has noted for Germany and Lujza Koldeová (2012) has for both Germany and Slovakia. Increasing numbers of Czech women are, however, speaking out about their concerns over their husbands’ use of excessive levels of force against their children. Mothers often complain that their husbands are too strict with their children, shouting at them or bullying them in ways that lead their children to fear them. Indeed, I have seen men go into a rage, screaming and shouting over a bowl of food a child has spilt or a cup the child has dropped and broken on the kitchen floor. Some forms of male domination are more subtle, yet still damaging. When I was in my early twenties, my husband and I spent the weekend with a family that ran a paper factory. Patrik (age thirty-one) and Kamilka (age twentyeight) had three children, a girl and two boys. Their daughter, who was also the eldest child, was a very bright and curious six-year-old who happened to share my first name—Zuzana (or Zuzano in the vocative form used when you call someone). Throughout the weekend, her father angrily shouted across the house, “Zuzano, go do this!”; “Zuzano, why are you loafing about?”; “Zuzano, get up

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and get moving!” Every time I heard her name/my name, I would jump up in fear alongside her. After a mutual (American) friend expressed concern that she had seen Patrik hitting Zuzana, I tried to talk to him about how he disciplined his daughter. His reply was that the beatings were fine, as “she is too spirited and should’ve been born a boy.” Many fathers I know do not embody such stereotypes and are neither stern authority figures nor strict disciplinarians. In fact, the role of the benign, and sometimes slightly comical, father is gaining traction, and many men embody tenderness and patience in their relationships with their children. But even parents who seem to be gentle with their own children defend other families’ use of violence. One couple, for example, related how their neighbors had “a son who was completely wild and undisciplined and they really beat him. Now at the age of ten, he is so much better behaved! They can’t beat him like that out in the open anymore, though who knows what they do at home, but they really managed to improve him by being so firm.” The acceptance of male violence reverberates across the generations and has implications for sexuality as well. In a context where men are generally accorded more authority than women, and male power is not infrequently backed up with physical force or the threat of such force, the emphasis on women as sexual beings is too easily transformed into a view of women as needing to cater to male desires in ways that can radically constrain their physical, imaginative, and affective movement through the world. The confluence of fear, violence, subordination, and sexuality comes through vividly in a story my friend Marek, who is in his fifties, told me about his aunt and uncle. The two of us were sitting at his kitchen table discussing how his aunt, Zdenˇka, and her husband, Bohumil, were soon going to embark on a long bus tour across Austria, Italy, France, and Spain, when Marek expressed how very worried he was about this. “It’s a bad idea,” he declared, “as Zdenˇka has a bad back and the last time they went on a long bus tour, she was in a lot of pain. The doctors told her not to sit without moving for long periods again.” “So why are they doing this?” I asked. “Because Bohumil is very selfish [sobecký],” Marek explained. “He doesn’t care that it will hurt her. He likes bus tours because he can just sit and watch all the scenery.” “So why does she go along with it?” I asked. “Because she is afraid of him [bojí se ho]!” “She is afraid of him?” I repeated. “Yes, afraid. That is normal in their generation,” he said. He looked around quickly, murmuring that his three sons must not hear this about their great-aunt

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and great-uncle, and then continued. “She is afraid of him. Just look at how they behave when we visit their house! There Zdenˇka is on a Saturday morning, going around the garden wearing a short skirt and high heels because she always has to wear high heels [implying that she needs to keep looking sexually attractive to her husband]. And so she is gardening in her short skirt and high heels and with her watering can and Bohumil is reading something. And then suddenly Bohumil says [in a very angry and aggressive tone], ‘Come on, we are going to Slovakia!’ Because he has just read something about the spas in Slovakia being so nice and relaxing and he thinks, I want to go. And she says, ‘Oh, now?’ and she runs and drops the watering can and turns off the oven, because she was going to be baking something for him that afternoon and she has it all prepared, but she puts it all away and dashes off with him on his little excursion to Slovakia. And the fact that this little trip is really about him being moody, quick tempered, and almost irrational is not the point! Or he will look in the fridge and the fridge light isn’t working so he gets really angry and says, ‘We are off to the mall to buy a new fridge!’ And off they have to jump into the car and go buy a new fridge that instant. This is what happens. I’ve seen it.” “But if he likes to sit on the bus and she gets injured by it, why doesn’t she take the train, or even fly, while he takes the bus?” I asked, knowing that they could easily afford it. “Oh, no, no, no. She needs to be there to be his support. He will sit on the bus and say, ‘Zdenˇko, I am hungry!’ And she goes, ‘Oh!’ and opens up her bag and gives him a sandwich and he eats it. And then he says, ‘I am thirsty.’ And so, ‘Oh!’ she cries and opens up a drink for him. She always needs to be right there in order to support him. His wife won’t say anything because she is afraid of him and needs to please him. She has no money of her own and has always been dependent on him and on keeping him happy. And then once they are back, she will say to us, ‘Oh, how my back hurts from all those hours sitting on the bus.’ But she won’t tell him. This is how it is in that generation, the way that husbands and wives relate to one another.” In reflecting on the internal dynamics of a marriage that has lasted fifty-five years, we have in many ways moved far away from the stampede that takes place when young men launch themselves across the ballroom to acquire a partner. But in other ways we are not so far away, given how the (taught) distinctions between masculine assertiveness and dominance, on the one hand, and passive, female beauty, on the other, linger. The image of the seventy-something woman running around the garden in a short skirt and high heels and dropping everything on her husband’s whim in order to please him is disturbing on two levels. Zdenˇka’s sexuality is being defined solely in relation to her husband’s interests. Women at this age, moreover, used

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to be seen as outside the realm of the sexual, and yet as that is no longer the case, Zdenˇka seemingly has no respite from feeling compelled to do her best to gratify her husband. What would her perspective be? How does she view her sexuality, her beauty, her body? I cannot ask her. I know her both too little and too well for that. But I think of her in the context of both male domination and a culture that celebrates women’s beauty and the pleasure of erotic relations, and feel incredibly sad and angry.

The Power of the Erotic At the same time that there is a great deal of objectification of women, it is widely recognized that sexuality is a beautiful thing that should be pleasurable for both men and women. When people speak of sex, it is generally understood to be an activity that interests both men and women and from which both sexes can derive much (ideally mutual) satisfaction. Simultaneously, however, women are thought to have a unique source of power and meaningfulness in the world, due to not only their beauty but its connection to their reproductive abilities, as women’s beauty is often thought to stem from not only their erotic allure but their capacity to become mothers, linking together aesthetics, fecundity, reproduction, and the milk of maternal love. The beauty of women’s bodies is widely celebrated, and public life is saturated with images of them—in advertisements, in mainstream media, and in artistic mediums—that are shocking, risqué, or as mundane as the ever-popular annual calendars of paintings by Mucha, each page featuring an evocative, often erotically suggestive and sometimes semiclad, female image. The social value attributed to the beauty of the female form and to female sexuality is also embraced by a large number of women, especially young women in their teens, twenties, and thirties, many of whom put a great amount of time and energy into cultivating bodies that are slender, well dressed, and carefully coiffed (for example, the twenty minutes spent curling Helena’s hair) and demonstrate a large amount of satisfaction, pride, and pleasure from this. One only need watch them walk down the street to see how important it is to them to evoke a sense of beauty and sexiness. But the embracing of women’s eroticism does not end with youth. Women in their forties, fifties, and sixties speak openly to one another about their sexuality and the importance of retaining sexual pleasure, particularly in the context of menopause and its associated physiological changes. “Don’t worry if you ever need a hysterectomy,” woman after woman tells me as they relate their own reproductive histories. “You won’t lose your libido!” Clearly, being sexually active

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and deriving sexual pleasure are important to them. Despite the media attention given to men’s bodies as erotic objects, there isn’t a similarly widespread sense of celebrating the beautiful or erotic male body. In part, this is due to the highly dichotomous view many have of the “two sexes,” which are seen as necessary complements to one another. This raises obvious challenges for those in gay and lesbian relationships who often face being labeled “unnatural.” Up until the revolution in 1989, homosexuality was widely viewed as a disease. Czechoslovakia had unusually high rates of female-to-male surgical operations, a fact that some members of the LGBT community suggested could be explained by lesbians being widely viewed as women who in fact “should be” men (Trnka 1993, 46). Today there is much more social acceptance of lesbian and gay identity, and same-sex partnerships have been legally recognized since 2006, but public attitudes remain largely focused on heterosexuality as the assumed norm. Many Czechs have a profound respect for the power of nature (prˇíroda) and, in particular, what they see as the complementarity of the masculine and feminine principles that generate life. Masculinity is often viewed as forceful and physically dominating, while femininity is embraced for being erotically desirable, nurturing, and aesthetically beautiful. These dichotomies punctuate public and private life and are often evoked without any conscious reflection. Such perspectives of women highlight their sexuality, beauty, and “natural” aesthetic capabilities as fundamental not only to sexual relations but to the capacity for motherhood as well. Motherhood—pregnancy, birth, and nursing, as well as mother-and-child relations in general—is frequently regarded in Czech culture as an incredibly powerful and beautiful force, even in the most mundane contexts. For example, in the zoo, standing before a group of giant anteaters, a (human) family is positively ecstatic when an anteater pup begins to root around his or her mother, looking for her nipple, before beginning to nurse. Mother, father, grandmother, and two young children all crowd around the display. “Look, look, the baby is drinking milk! Look, look!” the mother repeatedly exclaims, trying to convey to her two-year-old child what a beautiful and wonderful act this is. Unfortunately, the idea of the female (whether a human being or other animal) as a vital, erotic force in the world has a flip side in this context—namely, rhetorics and practices of masculine control. A different aspect of the dichotomous complementarity between male and female was expressed in a TV interview with an actress in her fifties, who commented that she was really enjoying her new romantic relationship because, to paraphrase, her new partner was “fun and laid back.”

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“And he also puts you in check,” prompted the (female) TV interviewer. Interspersed between photos of the actress in sexually provocative poses came her reply: “Yes,” she agreed. “And I need a man like that, because I can be a bit wild and hard to handle, and it takes a real personality to do that [i.e., handle me]. But that is what a man should do. I think men are men and women are women, and it should be that way” (Prima TV 2016). Such an exchange suggests both how sexuality, fecundity, and the beauty of the human body are widely celebrated in Czech culture, and the fact that the downside of this celebration is far too often the belittling or objectification of women and the defense of male dominance. As we have seen, both implicit and explicit messages that the relations between the sexes are properly marked by subjectification and dominance are enacted not only in the home but throughout a range of public sites, of which the dance floor constitutes only one. Dance is, however, pivotal in providing young people a site for both reflecting on and physically enacting such scripts. Necessarily requiring physical intimacy between the sexes (usually with both friends and strangers), it opens up a space for experiencing the many sides of sensuality, as well as for confronting a range of possible intentions and potentials that emanate from physical proximity. Julie Taylor, reflecting on the tango, writes that dance can express sensuality through a wide array of “overlap[ping] . . . categories,” ranging from deep tenderness to anger (1998, 106). Trying to sort out what fueled her own increasing compulsion to frequent dance halls during the years she lived in Argentina, Taylor describes realizing that “what could have been a simple search for physical closeness” through dance actually embodied for her a much wider range of (often conflicting) feelings. “One night,” she recalls, “I looked at one of my partners and realized with the same clarity with which I could see the features of his familiar and kindly face that I was afraid he might hit me. So that was going on [for me], too” (69). Recognizing that sensuality and physical intimacy between men and women may at times culminate in either violence or pleasure, or a combination of the two, does not, of course, mean we should ignore, much less turn away from embracing, the power of the erotic. Sexuality is a powerful force that can bring people together in intensely beautiful ways, obviously not only within heterosexual couplings. It can lead to the most mysterious and powerful of all human activities— namely, reproduction and birth. It can also be a site of intense self-realization, as well as one of deep connection with and understanding of another. Joyfully watching a nursing anteater, enjoying the double entendre in an advertisement that alludes to male or female sexual pleasure, or taking a ballroom dance class are all moments that embrace the sexual and the erotic and their potentially transformative effects, celebrating the embodied dimensions of interrelationality

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and the possibilities of finding oneself and the world by means of physical intimacy and being-with-another. Patocˇka did not focus much of his philosophical writing on the topic of sexuality, but he is notable for recognizing and honoring its power. “In an erotic relation,” he wrote, “I am given to myself not in what I make myself, what I strive for or do, but rather in that which I am, that is, what I already am—therein lies the passivity inseparable from the charm, from the magic, of this entire region. Life is given back to me—. . . it is directly present as a gift, something given to us, aimed at us, that we can never give to ourselves” ([1967] 1989, 264). Indeed, for Patocˇka, the sexual relation provides an avenue to the ultimate goal of traversing toward self-transcendence, offering us a glimpse of what our “true and final love” for the universe as a totality might look like: The strength of the transubstantiation of life is the strength of a new love, a love yielding itself unconditionally to others. Only in this love does individuality become itself without maintaining the other in a selfalienation. Only here is the distraction of atomized life replaced by an inner continuity for which the other is not alien but a living I, not only abstractly but in the power of self-surrender—much as in vital, biological love, though now freely, openly, universally. That is not love as sympathy, as fellow feeling for a destiny of the same suffering, but of the same glory, or the same victory—the victory over the self-destructive self-centeredness. Biological love is merely an incomplete and inconsistent metaphor of this true and final love. ([1967] 1989, 268) Not everyone is able to envision, much less enact, such an intense physical coming together with another that enables each party a profound moment of inner realization—a giving back to oneself of who one is. Some have indeed achieved this through the intimacy of sex, and some through the power of a simple embrace. Others have, in fact, both found and transcended themselves through the united movement of dance, with each partner, as Kathy Davis puts it, “accepting a loss of self in order to become one with the other” and ultimately creating the momentary sensibility of something much greater (2015, 65; see also Lepecki 2016). We can thus think of broadening Patocˇka’s statement to reflect on how touch more generally can, in the right conditions, lead to transcendence, generating new understandings, or disclosures (in Heidegger’s terms), of the world as the world and of us within it. When it comes, moreover, to the transformative power of the erotic, I would like to suggest that Patocˇka’s statement does not go far enough. Rather than acting as a metaphor for transcendence, in the right circumstances the erotic can, of course, constitute the ultimate act of finding oneself and the world through

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another and engaging with the infinity of life, of enabling, as Patocˇka describes it, “a movement that positively presents the essential—as life universal, giving birth to all in all, evoking life in the other, a self-transcendence toward the other and with him again to infinity” ([1967] 1989, 263). For instead of being a metaphor for the power of life, sex between men and women has the potential of being the very act of creating life itself, linking our traversing together in the deepest way possible to “life universal.”

4 THE NEW EUROPEANS Twenty-First-Century Families as Sites for Self-Realization

The September 5, 2015, headline of the lifestyle section of the popular newspaper Lidové noviny proclaimed, “Children Want Younger Parents” (“Nový výzkum” 2015). The accompanying article focused on a study conducted by the University of South Bohemia that asked children how much older than them their parents should ideally be. The purportedly surprising results were that children would prefer their parents to have been just nineteen years old when they were born. This would be at least eleven years younger than the current national average for first-time mothers, and eleven to fifteen years younger than most first-time fathers (Vavronˇ 2016). The article’s anonymous author then segued from the study results to a discussion of new reproductive technologies (NRTs), suggesting that just as technologies are enabling reproduction to occur later in the life cycle, children are demanding a reversal of this trend. Readers were next introduced to the stories of three sets of older parents who had used in vitro fertilization (IVF): an Albanian man and woman, aged sixty-three and sixty, who had just had twins; a sixty-five-year-old German woman who had given birth to quadruplets; and a Brazilian woman who had had her twenty-first child at the age of fifty-one. Spotlighting the issue of children desiring younger parents is a rather blatant attempt at producing provocative headlines. Reporting on children’s perspectives is important, but if we ask children what the best thing is to eat for breakfast and they say ice cream, this doesn’t usually become leading news. The article is clearly seizing on an adult concern and projecting it through the words of children. Rather than considering the many negative implications that becoming a parent 110

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at nineteen might entail, such as lack of financial stability, the stifling of educational opportunities, and the likely possibility that many nineteen-year-olds may not be ready or want to take care of a child, the author employed children’s perspectives as a launching pad for a poorly veiled diatribe against older parents who use NRTs. That said, articles like this one—as well as NRTs themselves— raise significant questions as to what sort of families we think are appropriate, what the roles and responsibilities of parents are, and at what point reproductive success might signal social failure. NRTs are being utilized across the Czech Republic, often by foreigners (Speier 2016), but increasingly also by locals. Czech women who wish to undergo IVF are subject to strict age limits, which vary based on whether their procedures are paid for by public health insurance (in which case IVF is available up to the age of thirty-nine) or are privately funded (in which case it is available up to the age of forty-nine) (Šmidova, Šlesingerova, and Slepicˇkova 2015, 100). Thus the specter of two parents raising toddlers while they are both in their sixties is not going to materialize unless they make use of reproductive services elsewhere. What is interesting about the article, however, is how the scare factor of depicting parents who are seemingly “too old” to appropriately parent their offspring vividly highlights the intricate interrelationships between cultural values and technology use. Technologies, and the economies that underpin them, change practices, but practices also shape our use of technologies. NRTs are one area in which we see this very clearly, given national regulations concerning the appropriate ages of reproduction; most countries do not push reproductive limits to their biological end points, but set them according to what is thought to be socially appropriate. The science and technology studies scholar Shelia Jasanoff (2004) has referred to this as the process of “co-production” that occurs between technology and society, with each side continually influencing the other. At issue is thus not only how NRTs are reshaping reproductive and parental practices among Czech couples, but what our expectations are of mothers and fathers, and what we envision that a family should be. Just a few weeks after the study results were announced, a popular media outlet featured an interview with a working mother (a partner in a legal firm) who expressed her ambivalence over not being able to spend enough time at home taking care of her three sons, while simultaneously prevailing on Czechs to stop negatively judging mothers who return to work after having children (“Cˇeši musí prˇestat” 2015). The interview reiterated many of the same concerns that had appeared in a cover story in the women’s magazine OnaDnes a few years earlier, about a woman who worked as the manager of a beer brewery and was returning to work when her child was seven months old. In addition to asking her if beer makes women’s breasts grow bigger (“I couldn’t say,” she answered),

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the interviewer grilled the brewery manager on her decision to return to work so early: Did she regret doing that and wonder if she is a “bad mother” (špatná matka)? (She said no.) Did she need to defend her choice to others? Was her husband okay with it? (Tichá 2010). Unlike in the case of the law firm partner, this time it wasn’t the woman herself but the barrage of negative questions from the journalist that indicated that her behavior was considered inappropriate. In fact, the idea that women can, and should, have careers as well as raise children is controversial enough to have been taken up as a 2017 election campaign issue by the right-wing Top 09 party, one of whose billboards asserted, “A woman has a right to a family and a career.” Many Czechs consider it a mother’s duty—and pleasure—to devote herself as much as possible to caring for her children. Mothers are generally seen as “naturally” desiring to devote all of their time, or as much of it as possible, to their families and are often thought to be much more adept at child care than men. Since the end of state socialism, during which women were legally required to be employed unless they were caring for a young child, public attitudes have strongly defended the vision of a “traditional” family in which men are “providers” and “protectors” of women and children (and sometimes, as in the article about the brewery manager, referred to as “hunters” on behalf of their families [Tichá 2010]), while women take care of the home front. In fact, while women were able to take up to three years of partially paid maternity leave during state socialism (Heitlinger 1976, 131), following the 1989 revolution, leave provisions became even more generous when the Czech Republic instituted the most liberal maternity package in the world, enabling mothers to stay at home for the first four years of their child’s life while receiving a sizeable percentage of their former income (Heitlinger and Trnka 1998, 91). Taking several years of maternity leave is, however, quite different from never having paid employment. Despite the fact that women’s earning power has remained poor in comparison to men’s (Mysíková 2012), for most families, the historical ideal of the male partner acting as the main, or even sole, financial provider while the female partner devotes herself fully to the domestic sphere is not sustainable. At the same time, family life is in flux. Perhaps the most significant changes have been to the temporality of familial unions, as couples come together, procreate (in some cases), and then, just as frequently as not, separate. Divorce rates increased dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s and are currently hovering at around 50 percent (“Statistics” 2016). Most divorces occur between couples with dependent children (“Statistics” 2016), and there has been a corresponding expansion of reproductive activities and relationships beyond the initial marital unit. With gay parents, single parents, and divorced and remarried couples raising children, the forms that families take have dramatically shifted.

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That said, twenty-first-century families are arguably best considered alterations rather than transformations, much less a radical unhinging, of what “family” consists of. Reproductive activities, although they involve more players and often more parents, are still at the center of many families. Couples still persist in pooling their economic resources, and property inheritance remains important, and at times importantly divisive, across the generations. Families continue to act as intergenerational units through which care—affective, economic, and other forms of watching out for one another—traverses across multiple directions. Contemporary families also act as an important mechanism for structuring and temporally reproducing relationships focused outside the professional, wage-oriented sphere. Families and family life are heavily influenced by economic structures and workplace demands, but they are simultaneously crucial for giving us a place to develop our identities and interrelationalities outside of the world of work. Czechs often use the term seberealizace, or self-realization, to describe the processes through which people come to develop and fully use their capabilities, whatever they may be. The dominant view depicts Czech families as sites in which women—at least rhetorically, if not always in practice—have the prospect of being able to self-realize. It is, however, becoming more common to see Czech men, particularly younger men, increasingly involved in child care and other facets of domestic life. The widespread rhetoric emphasizing the home as a traditional site of women’s self-discovery thus needs to catch up with the reality of homes as multigendered spaces that enable and disable the self-realization of both men and women. As such, they provide unique and vital sites for people of any gender to traverse toward one another and, ultimately, toward themselves.

Self-Realization under State Socialism The concept of self-realization, as it is used in the Czech Republic, was popularized as part of state socialist political doctrine. According to Marxist ideology, self-realization was to be one of the primary boons of Communism—the only political-economic system, it was argued, that would enable human beings to develop their full potential. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx described how capitalism alienated humans from their labor, thus effectively estranging them from the objects they created (“estrangement of the thing”), from themselves (“selfestrangement”), from their engagements with others, and indeed from their very “species-being” (i.e., the fundamental meaning of being human) (Marx [1932]

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1959, 31). A Communist system, in contrast, Marx and Engels promised, would enable humans to reclaim their natural capacities and realize themselves by partaking in a wide range of activities: “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (Marx and Engels [1932] 2004, 53). Early in the state socialist period, the Czechoslovak Community Party promoted the idea that Czechoslovak citizens could realize the meanings of their lives through the world of work, particularly through the ways their labor contributed to building the socialist system. There was, however, a dramatic shift in emphasis in state propaganda following the 1968 Prague Spring and the subsequent “normalization” period. As the promises of economic prosperity dwindled, the party needed new ways of ensuring acquiescence, and so, as the historian Paulina Bren has noted, it began to heavily promote the notion that the state socialist regime enabled its citizenry to self-realize even outside the world of labor. Bren describes how “during normalization, finding one’s ‘human essence’ was to take priority over more concrete economic concerns. The terms ‘self-realization’ (seberealizace) and ‘self-actualization’ (sebeaktualizace) became favorite catchwords of the regime; both indicated a person’s chance to develop his or her best self and to indulge in whatever activities that would require” (2010, 187). That said, a large proportion of the citizenry was wary of this promise. Many responded to ideologically saturated public space, and workplaces in particular, by dissembling and relegating their “true” and authentic identities and opinions to the private realm, as encapsulated in the popular idea of engaging in “inner emigration” (Wheaton and Kavan 1992, 9; see also Holy 1996, 26). Thus while the public sphere was seen as contaminated by the need to acquiesce to Communist ideology, the domestic sphere was envisioned as a space that was free of politics. One of the results was the valorization of the opportunity for mothers and children to enjoy time together at home, reveling in what were frequently described as largely ideologically untainted childhoods (Heitlinger and Trnka 1998; Trnka 2013, 41). In contrast to women, men, whose identities and capabilities were largely identified as more securely linked to the working world, had no such ideologically free spaces to escape to and were left spending most of their time in a sphere permeated by socialist propaganda. While in popular parlance,

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women could thus “realize” themselves through motherhood, there was no corresponding avenue for men to do so.

Care for the Soul How to collectively and individually achieve self-realization was a philosophical question that troubled not only Marx and Engels but also Patocˇka, whose vision of self-realization arguably aligns closer to those held by many contemporary Czechs. Patocˇka offered an alternative view to his Marxist predecessors through his notion of the “care for the soul,” which posits self-development as attainable through interrelationality and the search for transcendental meaning, highlighting how our relations to others can unveil our relation to the world. Care for the soul consists of a tripartite movement. It begins with the sinking of roots, or anchoring of oneself within one’s “primordial” relationships in the family, the most elemental moment of which is the initial “acceptance of the new-born into human warmth [i.e., the family]” (Patocˇka [1968–69] 1989, 275). Other examples Patocˇka described include the ongoing relation between mother and child, and our relationship to our body. The second movement is that of self-extension through the world of work. Patocˇka noted that “this is the realm in which we live primarily. . . . According to Heidegger, in this realm of meaning our world is one of tools (Zeuge) which point to themselves and so to our possibilities of work and creativity” (276–77). While the first movement is that of “instinctual affective life,” the second movement both extends and reverses “the sinking of roots” as we, as adults, not only tether ourselves to the caring sphere of the family, but recreate it: “Spiritual individuation, release into the world of adults, does not mean leaving the instinctually affective movement behind; it is only a reversal of one’s situation, a repetition of that movement, though not as acceptance but as giving” (275). The third movement is the search for transcendent meaning, “an attempt at breaking through our earthliness” (277). It is achieved, Patocˇka wrote, “not by inventing illusions: rather, detachment from particulars brings us to a level on which we can integrate finitude, situatedness, earthliness, mortality precisely into existence” (277). It is here that the self both transcends and truly discovers itself, through its connection with the global sphere. Once attained, such transcendence will endow one’s life with “rhythm, an overall closure and a global meaning” (274). The three movements are closely intertwined, and it takes engaging in all three for persons to achieve care for their souls, though there is a clear emphasis on the third and final movement as enabling the ultimate grasp of life’s meaning.

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One of the striking facets of Patocˇka’s description of the three movements is his sustained focus on interrelationality. His depiction of being-in-the-world is replete with images of human relationships, such as between a mother and an infant or between two lovers. Indeed, he described our interrelations with the other as the fundamental basis of human life: “In its chief dimension, human life is a seeking and a discovering of the other in oneself and of oneself in the other” ([1967] 1989, 260). Patocˇka was well aware of how his emphasis on interrelationality distinguished him from Heidegger. Heidegger’s portrayal of human being depicts Dasein as inhabiting a world largely made up of objects through the use of which Dasein emerges as a creative, active being. In perhaps his most famous example of being-in-the-world, Heidegger described how a person does not usually stand back and contemplate what a hammer is, but grasps it when the need to hammer something arises: “The less we just stare at the thing called hammer, the more we take hold of it and use it, the more original our relation to it becomes and the more undisguisedly it is encountered as what it is, as a useful thing” ([1953] 2010, 69). Heidegger’s most extended description of sociality occurs in his depiction of das Man, or “the they”—an extremely negative social force that stifles Dasein’s ability to truly know itself and the world. Indeed, das Man, Heidegger contended, forces us into such “averageness” that Dasein loses its authentic self and becomes “the they-self ”: “Everyone is the other, and no one is themselves” (124, 125). Patocˇka’s work strongly opposed this image of society as largely repressive, emphasizing instead that the fundamental relationships that determine who we are in the world are not person-to-thing but person-to-person, beginning with the relationship we have as infants with our mothers. Patocˇka was, moreover, particularly adamant that while we can think of the three movements as distinct, the second and third are actually intimately interrelated with the first; we cannot separate our instinctual affective relations within the family from either our development within the world of work or our search for transcendence. As he put it, The fact that our life, our movement of existing, takes place in a polyphony of three voices, leads to a reformulation of the instinctively affective sphere. In spite of that, the instinctual affective sphere codetermines life in all further spheres, totally and continuously. What is cosmic about life, not simply a matter of relations of utility and labor, is determined precisely by this sphere. . . . It is in great part a function of that first movement that the world is not a mere correlate of labor but spreads out into the distance and into temporal depth, that it bears within it a central vital core, a core of vital warmth which is not only an addition

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to the being of what surrounds us but a condition of the being of our life. ([1968–69] 1989, 275) Following up on Patocˇka’s insights into the fundamental role that the family, “bear[ing] within it . . . a core of vital warmth,” plays in determining life as “cosmic,” rather than “simply a matter of relations of utility and labor,” my interest here is in tracing how the family can play a role in either enabling or deterring our moves toward self-realization and, in some cases, foster our engagement with the transcendental meanings of love and care as constituent facets of life and death. That self-realization should, at times, slip into self-transcendence should not entirely surprise us, as it is by overcoming the bounds of the self that, according to Patocˇka, we can best grasp who we are: “The other is the most powerful component of our experience, revealing to us what we ourselves are and can do” ([1995] 1998, 66). When parents, for example, speak of “finding themselves” through their children (or not, as the case may be), they are referring to self-realization both in its narrow sense of the development of the individual (parent), and in Patocˇka’s sense of transcending or moving beyond the bounds of the self to find ultimate meaning through our interrelationality with others. In looking closely at familial relations as a facet of traversing, it is crucial to consider both the changing nature of family life and the dialectical relationship between family life and the world of work. How we work shapes the kind of family we have, and our familial circumstances shape our work—a fact that twenty-first-century capitalism is increasingly having to come to terms with, especially as more women are taking on increasingly prominent roles in the workforce. But our home life, as so many who lived under state socialism realized, is also a potential haven from work. This does not mean that one cannot find meaning in the world of work; many do. In Czech society, it is not uncommon to hear physicians, teachers, and artists, among others, describe their professions as not only fostering (their own and others’) self-realization, but also engaging them in fundamentally meaningful activity. But not everyone has such a profession, and as wage labor becomes increasingly dehumanized through the rise of the digital age and the imposition of ever-increasing mechanisms of bureaucracy, audit, and flexibility, along with cycles of downsizing and redundancy, our domestic identities and relations become increasingly salient sites for self-realization. However changeable it might be, the family (for now, at least) remains the fundamental basis of producing personhood. And while there continues to be an ideological emphasis on domestic space as a largely female domain, in practice it’s very likely that Heidegger’s hammer would be found stored in the kitchen, as

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Czech kitchen drawers have long held a mix of men’s tools and women’s cooking equipment, revealing just how intimately male and female activities and interests are intertwined in the domestic sphere. In fact, the family is a site where not just mothers but women and men alike can potentially self-realize. They do so in their capacities not only as parents but, more broadly, as interrelational actors constituting identities and engaging in activities that can, for the most part, be unrelated to their professional personas and driven by something other than the economic imperatives of working for a wage. The picture is, however, even more complex, as families are sites where kin relations and corresponding responsibilities to others can simultaneously open up pathways to discovering ourselves and overwhelm us, submerging our sense of being able to engage in self-realization within a nexus of obligations and demands. Care for the soul thus emerges as a careful balancing act, as families often foreclose possibilities while also providing a “central vital core . . . [of] warmth” (Patocˇka [1968–69] 1989, 275) that sustains us in developing who we are and moving toward who we have yet to become.

Contextual Definitions On a Sunday evening, I sat down to dinner with three generations of a family: eighty-year-old Anežka and her eighty-six-year-old husband, Aleš; their fifty-something-year-old son, Mateˇj, and his wife, Beˇta; Mateˇj’s twenty-fouryear-old son (from a previous marriage), Alexandr; and Beˇta’s twenty-twoyear-old son (from a previous marriage), Milan. Alexandr was telling us how his girlfriend’s annual family gathering has grown so much that they are considering going from slaughtering three pigs to slaughtering four. “There were a hundred and twenty people to feed last year,” he explained. This observation provoked much discussion, as people around the table first exclaimed surprise and then, after a bit of reflection, someone suggested, “We would be a hundred and twenty people too.” People began to count the family members, but it proved difficult to know whom to include. Mateˇj, Alexandr’s father, broke in— “If we are discussing how many people are in the family, it depends on what is family”—following which everyone set about going through the different possible constellations of kin. “Beˇta, who came to celebrate your fiftieth birthday?” Anežka asked her daughterin-law, but not everyone in the family who would have been expected to come had actually attended. “And your mother’s funeral?” But again, not everyone had been present, as Beˇta’s sister’s daughter’s graduation was held on the same day

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and the family had agreed that she should be allowed to celebrate this milestone, resulting in her and her parents missing the funeral. As a consequence, on a later date when they spread their mother’s ashes, Beˇta’s sister’s side of the family held a second service, but Beˇta, who knew she could not emotionally handle attending two different funerals for her mother, had stayed away. “What about Saša’s baptism?” someone else tried, referring to a distant cousin’s new child. “How many people came to that?” Again they began to count, but again there were reasons why the “whole family” had not been assembled. I asked how many people come together to celebrate Christmas, but Mateˇj and Beˇta replied that they usually have a very quiet Christmas, with their four sons (two on his side, two on hers) going back and forth between their place and their respective mother’s and father’s homes. “But now that Alexandr is going to be married, he’s likely to be going to his wife’s family for holidays,” Anežka pointed out. Beˇta began to count again, stating authoritatively to Mateˇj, “So we are us two, and both your parents [as both of her parents are deceased], and the four boys, and they all have girlfriends now—so that is twelve people, and then you imagine one day they might have kids . . . and you are easily looking at twenty people in just the immediate family.” The answer to Mateˇj’s question of “what is family” resulted in an ever-shifting rendering of competing ties and obligations, portraying family as something that changes according to context. Alexandr would “come home” for Christmas Eve, except he spends it “at home” at his mother’s house and that appears nonnegotiable until his marriage. Of course, Beˇta’s sister would attend their mother’s funeral, except that it was on the day of her daughter’s graduation. One’s inclusion in or absence from family events at various points reveals how a family remakes itself, further “sinking” or extending affective ties (Patocˇka [1968–69] 1989, 275) with respect to different circumstances. Looking at the phenomenon of families through a longer, temporal dimension throws into relief how we have always recognized that a family is necessarily dynamic and cannot remain stable. Dissolution and regeneration occur as generations pass on and new members enter, be it by marriage or birth, or when a couple divorces and the family becomes children who are here one day and at home somewhere else the next, with a few new ones added into the mix. The image of a “family tree” (rodinný strom) has not yet caught up, still representing relations as largely set and immutable, when in fact families are just as dynamic as we are. This does not mean, however, that we should adopt a purely contextually specific definition of family as an entity that comes together and disperses as necessary. Family just isn’t so simple. Status, nationality, ethnicity, and class still matter,

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as do the internal workings of familial economics. It is within these structures that we create and dissolve families and strive to self-realize both within and outside their midst.

Reproducing Czechs—Appropriately As the newspaper article on NRTs and fears over aging parents reveal, in popular parlance “reproduction” does not always equate with “appropriate reproduction.” In most public forums there remain very restricted views of “appropriate” reproductive relations in terms of not only gender but also ethnicity and class. Legally, same-sex partnerships can be registered, but they are not granted the same parenting rights as male-female couples. Publicly, gay relationships are not widely discussed, particularly with respect to same-sex parenting. In terms of status and class, people still speak of “marrying down” when there is a disparity in economic backgrounds. Marriage across ethnic groups is also sometimes frowned on, especially if the resulting children are viewed as “not Czech.” There is a myriad of problems related to being viewed as “not Czech.” It is assumed, for example, that most children born in the Czech Republic will have Czech first names, making it unusually difficult to register names that are neither Czech nor preauthorized by state officials. In fact, in many families, first names as well as surnames get passed down, fusing together multiple generations. Sons carry their family surname, while daughters and wives take on the suffix “ová” to denote belonging to the family—Trnková, for example, is the feminine of Trnka, but also denotes belonging to a father or husband named Trnka. Frequently, however, a firstborn son or firstborn daughter will also take on their father’s or mother’s Christian name. Consider, for example, the name of arguably the most famous contemporary Czech American, Ivanka Trump: Ivanka is actually named “Ivana Trump” (“Ivanka” being a very common nickname), sharing both her first name and surname with her mother. Whether they are passed down directly from a parent or not, the most common names are those that appear on the government registry of Catholic saints’ names. Having a saint’s name is not only useful for celebrating “name days,” on which you can meet up and drink with similarly named strangers in the pub, but also facilitates the legal process of obtaining a birth certificate. Czech naming laws require children to have a first name that either is included on the official list of Catholic saints’ names or is one of the previously approved exceptions. Otherwise parents must pay to have the one and only official name registry expert, the linguist Miloslava Knappová, approve their individual suggestion. Interethnic couples can sometimes run into trouble, particularly if they do not uphold

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assumed gender and ethnic norms, as in the recent case of a Czech man and Romanian woman I know who applied to have their son receive a Romanian first name, thus privileging the linguistic and cultural background of his mother rather than his father—a notion that initially baffled Czech bureaucrats. Antipathy to interethnic marriages and multiethnic children is also fueled by overt racism. There is a widespread assumption that all Czechs are “white,” and the existence of Czech children who are neither Roma nor white is considered unusual enough that in 2014, a popular newsmagazine, Magazín DNES, ran a cover story about a Czech woman who has a white Czech mother and an African American father. The article revealed that when she started working as an anchor for a popular television channel, she received hate mail for “taking away jobs from Czechs,” as viewers (as well as the anonymous journalist, given the wording he or she used) assumed that as a dark-skinned woman, she was not a real Czech (“Zuzana Tvaru˚žková” 2014). Similar acts of racial othering also surface between kin. For example, a couple in their seventies expressed great dismay as they showed me photographs of their son, his Chinese wife, and their children. The children, the elderly couple repeatedly told me, “are half-Chinese.” “But this one,” the grandfather said, pointing to one little girl, “looks almost European; the Chinese features are not that predominant. But the other little girl,” he said, his tone notably changing to one of sadness, “well, she looks Chinese.” Of course, concerns over phenotypical differences aren’t the only issue at stake when it comes to cross-ethnic relations. Animosities between Czechs and Germans, which were heightened during World War II, resurfaced post-1989 with the added dimension of economic resentment. My husband, a German American, and I discovered this the hard way when we went traveling around the Czech Republic with our first child in the early 1990s. My husband didn’t know much Czech at that point and tried communicating in German. But the backlash this instigated wasn’t directed only against him, but also against me; being taken as a Czech woman married to a German, it wasn’t uncommon for me to be asked (by Czech men) if Czech men weren’t “good enough” for me. A ticket collector on a train, for instance, glowered at me and said, “At least you can still speak Czech even if you can’t marry a Czech.” This was just one instantiation of much broader concerns about Czech women “marrying out,” most of which are not necessarily based on ethnic animosity, but stem out of some Czech men’s concerns about their diminishing economic status and ability to provide an acceptable standard of living. As we have seen, the image of a man as the sole economic provider is still a vital part of social imagination, even if many men (or women) cannot generate an income large enough to solely enable the kinds of lifestyles their families wish for. The

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result can be a great deal of anxiety over the prospect of women looking for (wealthier) partners elsewhere. A case in point is my friend Ondrˇej, a married businessman in his midfifties. Ondrˇej was between jobs, and likely feeling very uncomfortable with the fact that the household’s only income was his wife’s, when he told me all about the problems he thought Czech women who married foreigners after the borders opened up in 1989 are experiencing. We had been discussing the marital woes of a mutual friend, a Czech woman married to an Englishman. But the problem, Ondrˇej asserted, is actually much broader. “A lot of Czech women,” he said, “married foreigners after 1989 and they thought they were moving up in life, both in status and financially. But then many of them moved back here [to the Czech Republic] with their husbands and they were so disappointed. The foreign husbands are not like Czech husbands who fix up the apartment or house all day. No, they go off drinking with their friends or they are self-centered and work all the time, and the women feel left out, without their husbands around. Or they don’t know how to tell a woman she is beautiful, to make her feel special, and women need that from their husbands. The English men just don’t know how to do that.” “What about the men?” I asked. “How do they feel about their marriages?” “Oh, many of them are pleased that they have such a beautiful wife, because Czech women are much more beautiful than English women. So the men, they can show off to their friends who admire them—‘I have a beautiful car, a beautiful house, and now a beautiful wife’—much more beautiful than the English women their friends married. So they are happy with the arrangement. But the women are not. Some say, ‘Well look, he gives me all these things—a vacation every year, a nice house, et cetera. I am financially well off so I need to accept that I miss the kind of closeness a Czech husband would give me.’ But many of them can’t accept that.”

Economics through the Generations Ondrˇej was on a bit of a roll, and a few days later, he shared with me some more of his thoughts on marriage. “The younger generation today, people who are thirty or thirty-five, are very different [from us],” he said. They have a totally different way of relating—they don’t marry each other. They live together and have children, but they don’t marry. They have separate bank accounts and separate mortgages. They don’t even know how much the other person earns! He has the mortgage for the apartment and the wife takes a loan for all the items in the

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apartment: the flat-screen TV—because they always need a huge, flatscreen TV—and whatever else they may have. And when they go on vacation, they split the cost fifty-fifty and she will say, “But this isn’t fair, you paid for the hotel and I paid the airfare but the airfare costs more.” And he says, “Yes, that’s true, so when we get home I will buy the new vacuum cleaner, even though you were going to be the one buying it, to even out the cost.” And then they get divorced. There are so many divorces now! People get together, have one or two children, and [it all ends when they] have their first big problem, because they don’t learn how to deal with life problems. Say he gets laid off from work, then off she goes! She will say, “You aren’t working and making money, so I am going to go live with my [male] colleague from work instead!” Ondrˇej was lamenting the fact that couples were no longer as closely bound together as they had been in the past. Rather than acting as an interdependent financial unit, the couple in Ondrˇej’s story dissolved their union when one of them was in financial trouble and no longer able to contribute, much less contribute fifty-fifty. It is, moreover, not surprising given Ondrˇej’s financial insecurities that his fears would suggest that the woman would be the one who moves on, leaving her husband to take up with a man who, in contrast, is making money. Reasserting itself in the midst of a description of “new relationships” is the very old concern over whether a man will prove himself to be a good-enough provider. The labor of creating and sustaining a family here has explicitly gendered dimensions, something that Patocˇka alluded to in his evocations of the “sinking of roots” but did not give us a language to conceptualize, much less critique. Similar sentiments led another of my fifty-something male friends, Adam, to lament the passing of a time when multigenerational families, including husbands and wives, were economically bound together through both dependence and legal obligation. We were touring a Central Bohemian exhibition of mideighteenth to early twentieth-century homesteads, and Adam was avidly relating to me his understanding of the inheritance laws that were in operation at that time, according to which the homestead would always be bequeathed in full to the eldest son and only very rarely divided. Inheritance, he said, often took place before the son’s parents passed away, and prior to it taking effect, the aging couple would procure a legal document detailing their rights once their son took over. The document would list the most minute specifics—the elderly couple were to get this much food, they would be able to stay in this little add-on to the house, they would have the right to walk through this door to get to their room—so that there would be no confusion about their rights once the inheritance took place. Marriages, Adam told me, were also of a different flavor, as arranged marriages

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were a common strategy for conglomerating land. When I asked what he thought of arranged marriages, Adam shrugged and said, “It would be better if the wife wasn’t thinking there are other possibilities but came into the marriage knowing that this is permanent,” the implication being that if the wife’s attitude was that this was how it was and she could not move on, she would be more dedicated to making things work. In an attempt to cope with their own insecurities, Adam, a man whose first wife left him for a more economically secure partner, and Ondrˇej, who is struggling to come to terms with being jobless, were both indicating that they would like to see a return to families that are more economically interdependent, with, in particular, women being once again much more economically reliant on men. Instead both men appear to be stuck in a middle position, providing for their families but not enough to “realize themselves” in the role of sole, or even primary, provider, unable to achieve what historically, as well as in the contemporary social imagination, was a common source of masculine identity. But while there is increased flexibility in contemporary families’ financial arrangements, most long-term couples have much more complex economic interdependencies than Ondrˇej allowed for in his colorful characterization. Wage-earning or trade-related labor is no longer structured according to family life (outside of family-owned businesses, few inherit an occupation or focus their work on the family homestead), but there remain significant economic dimensions to how “family” is made meaningful. Just one example is the division of family property, particularly across generations. In many families, the future of family homes, as well as of the chata, or family cottage, remains a site of both legal and interpersonal cooperation and contention.

Homes to Inherit Mateˇj loves his house. He has already inherited it from his parents even though they are both still living (and without legal provisions requiring them continued access). Initially they all lived there together, while he married, had children, divorced, remarried, and acquired more children. As his family grew, his parents moved out into one of the socialist-era prefab apartments, or paneláky, that line the outskirts of the city. Ever since he reached adulthood—that is, for the past thirty-five years—he’s been working on the house, refurbishing rooms, redecorating, constantly tinkering. When I talk to Mateˇj about his ongoing dissatisfaction at work, he tells me he could look for another job but he would never consider leaving Prague, as it would mean losing his house. “Sure, if I lived in a panelák, I could do that,” he said. “I would put my furniture in another panelák

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in the same way, no problem. But here, I know every centimeter of this house; I have worked on it with my bare hands. I can’t leave this house for a job.” Mateˇj and Beˇta told me that for years, they dreamt that one of their four sons would return home, live in the house, and help out with its upkeep, with the idea that he would be the next one to inherit it. And then they got their wish. A few years after the discussion of “what is family,” Alexandr, now married, moved back into the family home, taking over the top floor. Mateˇj was delighted because, as he put it, “it means we have someone to help with fixing things. He is very handy.” For the young couple, the move was a financial necessity; both had recently started new jobs, which meant they could not afford a mortgage on an apartment, but they hope to buy their own home in the future. Mateˇj, on the other hand, hopes they stay for a long time. This, then, is also part of what it means to constitute a family: homes that not only house us but require our labor and give us rights and responsibilities, not only to others but to things. Mateˇj has had a good experience in terms of his inheritance, and hopefully so will Alexandr. Others are not so lucky. My friend Alois’s father recently died. In his late eighties, he had spent most of his adult life hoarding material objects, and when he died, the rooms of his apartment, his chata, and the five garages he had built on the chata’s surrounding property were all packed with things: two or three hundred hair spray lids stacked together, right next to piles and piles of carefully cleaned plastic forks, alongside which stood a stack of hundreds of paper plates. He had bought items of clothing in multiple iterations; never worn, they were carefully stored away in case he might need them. After his father’s passing, Alois and his mother inherited the mess. They started clearing it out one May and were still going strong later that year in September. They were depositing so much clothing—sixty big trash bags at a time—into the local charity box that the box, which used to be emptied every four months, was now being emptied every two weeks. It was a time-consuming task. “The problem is that you need to go through the items one by one,” Alois explained. “You can’t just use a shovel and throw it all out, because somewhere in the three hundred hair spray tops—maybe in the two hundred and fiftieth—there will be a ring or some money he stored away. Occasionally, you find something worth keeping.” Alois considers his father to have suffered from a psychological disorder that was exacerbated by the fact that throughout the decades, Czechs have been encouraged to collect things. Putting the condition into political context, he told me, “Czechs in previous generations, for example under Austro-Hungarian rule, had very little money or goods, so everything was made use of. Then under Communism people had money but nothing to spend it on. You couldn’t just call someone up and have them come and fix something. You had to pull the replacement pieces together from the bits

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you had on hand, so you were always saving, storing, collecting materials from which to create what you needed.” I asked how things could have gotten so bad—didn’t his family try to stop him? “We all knew, but no one could stop him,” Alois replied. Alois’s mother managed to assert that the kitchen and living room were her spaces and could not be used to store any of her husband’s collections, so at least there was some viable living space in the apartment. But she was unable to stop him from converting all of the other rooms into storage spaces. Sometimes she threw things out only to later realize that he had gone back and retrieved them from the garbage. “She will say, ‘I know that handbag, I threw it out,’ when we uncover it in the pile,” Alois said, adding, “She was a good wife, and so she couldn’t go against him.” This, then, was the nature of Alois and his mother’s inheritance. Things, and the meanings we attribute to them, are closely linked with the roles and obligations that structure our interrelationality. Houses are valued when they are deeply loved and worked over, each centimeter reworked through careful tending. Houses become a burden when they are deeply loved and worked over, each centimeter crammed with yet another carefully cleaned and stacked piece of garbage. Families become what they are when wives stand by husbands to the point of watching them destroy their domicile. Families become what they are when husbands fret over losing work and fear their wives are looking elsewhere for much-desired financial support. These two extremes—the wife who respects her husband to the point of living around his obsessive illness and the wife who leaves the minute there is the whiff of the first “life problem”—represent a wide range of instantiations of husband-wife relations that constitute part of what it is to be a family. And while they are extreme, they reflect a sense of changing relations and ideas of family as well as changing possibilities for traversing toward self-realization, raising critical questions about what exactly families are meant to provide. What is that “central vital core” of familial “warmth” that is “a condition of the being of our life” (Patocˇka [1968–69] 1989, 275) thought to consist of?

The New Europeans In the midst of old and new familial economic arrangements, one thing that has decidedly shifted is the vision of what family life should be. When the state socialist order gave way, there emerged a new domestic ideal. Aligned with the principles of flexible, decentralized neoliberal capitalism, it was also closely associated with the democratic rallying cry of “returning to Europe” and embracing European values (so much so that during the years that initially followed

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the 1989 revolution, there was very little differentiation in popular discourse between the effects of capitalism and incorporation into “Europe”). Today the new European ideal is one of families that are financially secure, with parents engaged in professional occupations, and children receiving top schooling and well-versed in a range of creative endeavors. This, however, requires money, and not just a little of it. On a Sunday afternoon in mid-October 2016, I was sitting in a packed café. There were romantic couples looking at each other longingly, older women meeting one another for tea or a glass of wine, and at the table next to me, a mother, father, and their son, who seemed to be around six or seven years old. They had obviously just come from a Halloween festival, as the boy had a small pumpkin painted on his face. A big wizard’s hat sat perched on his head, rather like the magical “Sorting Hat” in the Harry Potter books. His parents studied the menu for some time and then ordered themselves shots of egg liquor, alongside a beer (for the father) and a glass of white wine (for the mother). Two coffees also appeared on their table. Meanwhile their son was larking about, taking his hat on and off, posing as his mother took photograph after photograph of him with her phone. When she put down her phone, mother and son both laughed as they realized his father had been simultaneously filming him/them on his own phone, making for a double-mediated moment. Suddenly one of the phones rang and the mother answered, telling the caller that they were just sitting down to have a kafícˇko, an endearing term for a coffee, having just come back from a Halloween event that was really “super.” She gave the phone to the boy, who talked to what seemed to be his grandmother. Such a moment—unwinding on a weekend afternoon, over a coffee alongside a couple of glasses of alcohol in the warmth of the café (it was October and getting chillier outside), marking the event on your mobile phone(s)—encapsulates the hallmarks of an ultramodern familial lifestyle, both cosmopolitan (taking part in children’s festivals that had previously been unheard of in Central Europe) and steeped in traditional notions of luxury and comfort. What was also notable was the palpable sense of unity and shared pleasure among the three of them. It takes work to create such a lifestyle—work to make those relationships and keep them harmonious, even if only momentarily (who knows what their life is like on a Monday morning?); to earn the money that enables multiple drinks in a city café and multiple phones recording your afternoon together; to give you the time and space to head off to a Halloween festival on a Sunday. Theirs was the embodiment of a performative but also affective ideal to which many families can only aspire. Perhaps this family caught my eye because of how relaxed they seemed. Other families I spend time with seem a lot more rushed, racing from one activity to

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another. The old values of raising children to respect discipline and hierarchical authority, including parental authority, are still prominent, but now there is the additional proviso of needing to fill almost every hour of children’s days with very intensive structured learning, with the result that children’s time—and thus very often their parents’ time—is tightly circumscribed. My friends’ children seem to be running from one activity to another, be it judo, swimming, rock climbing, visiting adventure parks, hasicˇský krouzˇek (firefighting trainings and competitions), taking care of terrarium animals, or extra language lessons in English, French, or German. Recently, the media have been particularly keen to point out the rising costs of not only children’s schooling but also all of their seemingly necessary afterschool activities (e.g., Rˇeznícˇková 2017). Prior to 1989, there were free activities for children, such as popular gymnastics groups. Children who were especially talented in sports, music, or the arts were further supported in these endeavors by the state. In contrast, today, most after-school activities must be paid for by parents, though there is some disagreement about the morality of this. One Friday night in 2015, a TV news program ran a tongue-in-cheek story about how health insurance companies are helping to support children’s extracurricular programs. The Czech Republic’s main insurance company, Všeobecná Zdravotní Pojišt’ovna, or VZP (Universal Health Insurer), was offering families a whole—“Guess how much?” the news anchor taunted, before replying, “You guessed it, five hundred crowns [about twenty-three US dollars] a year”—to spend on children’s activities (Prima TV 2015a). The story focused on how

FIGURE 4.1. A family making their way across a rope bridge at the Mirakulum adventure park in Milovice. Photograph by John M. Correll.

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ludicrously small this amount was, given the thousands of crowns it costs for a child to take up a common sport like soccer. A VZP representative came on the air to state that the company was insulted by the public’s negative response to its offer. “If someone gives me something for free, I don’t ask for more,” he said. “I say thank you.” He then added that if the annual five hundred crowns VZP was making available wasn’t enough to cover children’s activities and families were finding it prohibitive to fund the rest, it was the responsibility of the state to step in and pay the difference. After all, he explained, it is necessary for children to stay active in order to fight the obesity epidemic. But no one really expects the state to pay out, and currently, parents are left to foot the bill as best as they can. Concern is thus growing over the financial toll extracted by all of this extra schooling, training, and staying healthy. Tellingly, in the midst of paying for and running around to all of their scheduled “leisure” activities, families often have little time for real leisure; in 2015, it was reported that over 40 percent of Czechs did not take as much as a week’s vacation from work, due to lack of both time and money (Prima TV 2015b). Many parents consider after-school activities to be a fun way to keep their children entertained. Others, however, particularly those whose economic circumstances are more insecure, told me that the driving force behind such activities is to cultivate children’s various potential gifts in the hope that they will turn out to be extremely talented, becoming a genius in science or revealing an extraordinary flair for tennis. Is this, I wonder, another form of laying down possible pathways toward self-realization? Or is it merely a means of trying to gain leverage—for the family, as well as for the specific child—in a very competitive economic context?

Finding Oneself (through Motherhood, For Example) Whether or not children are being given the tools to self-realize, families are considered to be the primary site where women self-realize, though not necessarily by being able to “indulge in whatever activities . . . [foster] a person’s chance to develop his or her best self,” as Bren’s (2010, 188) description of self-realization would suggest. Rather, for many women self-realization appears to be firmly linked to fulfilling a very prescribed role—namely, that of the “good mother.” In the not-so-distant past, a generation or two ago, taking care of children, including sorting out their extracurricular activities (if any), was considered to be solely women’s work. Today, despite men actually providing much more in terms of hands-on child care than they used to, the bond between a mother

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and her children is deeply cherished, signaling an intensity of engagement that it is widely believed cannot be matched by other kin relationships. This includes relationships between fathers and their children, or even grandmothers and grandchildren—a connection that used to be extremely socially significant two or three generations ago (Heitlinger and Trnka 1998, 161–62). Many mothers stay at home during the first few years of their children’s lives. Czechs frequently describe the act of putting a child under the age of three or four into institutional care as “inhuman.” Forty-five-year-old Dana, mother of three, spoke for many when she told me that preschools are “poison,” as they do not enable the development of an appropriately intense bond between adult and child. Having a child-care worker who comes to one’s house is much more palatable, but still not advisable, in addition to being very costly. The ideal is a stay-at-home parent, and that parent is generally the mother, with one 2017 study suggesting that for every stay-at-home father, there are more than fifty stay-at-home mothers (Koucká 2017). Mothers will routinely describe “a good mother” as one who does everything for their children, devoting themselves to feeding them, playing with them, teaching them, and doing all they can to nurture them and mold them into who they should be. Mothers frequently fret when their child isn’t developing properly or fast enough, often placing the blame on themselves. Mothers also assume a huge responsibility for taking care of the minutiae of their child’s daily life. As scholars have noted, in many Central and Eastern European societies there is no model of a “good mother,” much less of a “good-enough mother,” but only of the “perfect mother,” who is able to do everything for her child and fulfill all of his or her needs (Kale¯ja, Linde, and Mileiko 2011). Men often speak of telling women to take a break and not get so engrossed with their children, but at the same time they suggest how much they admire mothers’ wholehearted attentiveness. One new father told me how he chides his wife, Sofia, telling her that it’s all right to let their newborn cry a little, but she can’t seem to take a moment to herself. His father-in-law interrupted, saying, “Yes, when Sofia and the baby came to stay with us, we too kept telling Sofia to sit down and finish her lunch. But she is much too focused on taking care of the baby [to do that]. But her mother was that way too, when Sofia was young,” he said, beaming at his wife. Women themselves perpetuate similar expectations, sometimes in the most mundane ways. The day before Easter I went to a grocery store and asked the clerk if there were any white eggs available. Clearly I was looking for eggs for my children to color. She stared at me silently as an angry expression crossed her face, and then hotly exclaimed, “You forgot! You forgot the eggs for your children!” It felt like being told I was the worst mother in the world. I muttered something about having searched in several stores but not being able to find

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any, and still she looked at me angrily, as if wondering whether she needed to reprimand me a second time. Some mothers construct much of their lives through their children, leaving them little else aside from this intense form of interrelationality. In a self-reflective moment, forty-year-old Olinka told me that she knows that she “lives through her kids, focusing every moment on them” and that sometimes she has the uncomfortable sense that she’s not tending enough to herself or her husband. She worries when she looks at her eldest daughter, who is now twelve, and realizes she is already “missing” the intense intimacy they shared when she was younger. She doesn’t know what she will do when all four of her children leave home, and she is fearful of who she will be in the future. At the moment, though, she says her life with her children is extraordinarily rich and happy and provides her with a sense of meaning that she knows she could not acquire anywhere else. Elsewhere I have written in detail about mothers’ caregiving activities— including caring for sick children, cooking food that will bolster their children’s health, being attentive to their children’s differing needs as they grow, and fostering their children’s education—as inspired by a sense that children need to be tended and, in some sense, grown, rather than being allowed to grow freely (Trnka 2017a, chap. 4). Such activities are undertaken with dedication and concern; while they can become a source of anxiety, they can also give women a tremendous sense of competence when their efforts are deemed successful. Most women I speak with describe feeling extremely affirmed when they know they have fulfilled the needs and desires of their children. Katuška, who is in her midthirties, described how delighted she is to be able to stay at home with her two young daughters: “It is not that I don’t like my work. I am a trained economist and I do like my work but it is not where I achieve self-realization [seberealizace]. I realize myself with my children. Otherwise, why have them? Why have them, if you [i.e., you and your husband] are both working and don’t get home until eight p.m. to put them to bed? My husband works so that I can [afford to] be at home with them. I am a bit of a traditional mother in this.” Many other mothers concur, similarly using the phrase “traditional mother” to evoke the deep sense of satisfaction they derive from focusing on their home lives.

The Creation of Happiness Care is the underlying feature of mothers’ engagements with their children, and often with other family members, in terms of its many valences of tending or “caring for,” watching out for, and having an investment in or “caring about.” Women’s domestic endeavors are frequently directed toward creating the

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palpable sensibility of being cared for, particularly with respect to constituting a sense of pleasure and comfort, such as the happy feeling that emanated from the family in the café after their Halloween celebration. Creating happiness is no small feat, and it is one that Czech women take extremely seriously. For example, in attempting to describe what is so wonderful about her relationship with her two-year-old son, as if this were possible to put into words, Maria told me, “When I walk into a room, he looks at me and his whole face lights up.” Such a moment of bringing joy to another is both as mundane as life can be and infused with the recognition of life as beyond life that Patocˇka elucidated in his description of the third movement. Whether thought of as tapping into what is ultimately meaningful or relegated to a much lower position on the scale of importance, bringing such pleasure to another is considered a precise art, and many women will concern themselves with the smallest of details of the most mundane activities in order to ensure their children’s, other family members’, or close friends’ happiness. There are, moreover, right and wrong ways of doing it. I was in the kitchen of my cousin Magda’s house (where I was living at the time), preparing a picnic lunch for myself and my old friend Klára, when I asked Klára if she wanted some tomatoes in her sandwich. “I don’t need them,” she said. “Yes, but do you want them?” I prompted. “Of course she wants them,” interrupted Magda. “Czechs will never say what they want. Here, put them in.” Klára laughed as the tomatoes were added to her sandwich. Magda then said that we must take something to drink along with us. “Don’t worry about that,” I said, eager to set off for the park where we were planning to picnic. “We don’t need it.” Magda insisted, however, and handed a water bottle to each of us. “And here are two blankets you can use,” she added. “We don’t need blankets,” I started to explain, but again she insisted that we take them. “Well, maybe just one then, so it fits into my bag,” I said, compromising. “But they are small and you will only get to really stretch out if you each have one,” Magda declared, thrusting the two blankets toward me. Klára laughed and said, “Zuzana and I haven’t seen each other for a while, so we are happy to sit close to each other on the same blanket.” But Magda insisted we would be a lot more comfortable on our picnic with two blankets, and we ended up packing them both. It was a minor event, but it underscored the feeling I often have of women’s dedication to ensuring comfort and happiness, coupled with a distinct lack of recognition for alternative ways of doing things. Maybe Magda would have

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wanted two blankets if she were going on the picnic. We didn’t, but that wasn’t allowable. For Magda, two blankets are more comfortable than one and therefore we should have two. I have witnessed many similar arguments over what is considered to be the actual nature of reality (rather than over which of two or more competing viewpoints is superior): things are better this way, one party asserts, while the other adamantly refuses to accept that this is so. “That soup is better with a bit of parsley added to it and therefore the parsley must go into your pot, even if you don’t cook it that way,” one woman asserts to another. In this way, women have a sense not only of taking charge, but of affirming their ability to create a certain kind of feeling, inculcating pleasure through the (culinary, childrearing, picnicking, etc.) methods that they know are best.

Fatherhood If mothers and children are thought to share a uniquely intense bond, fathers’ relationships with their children are frequently overshadowed, sometimes to the point of fathers being restricted in their opportunities to develop deep, positive connections with their children. On my visit with the Nováková family, I spent most of my time in the upstairs part of the house occupied by the older couple. One afternoon, their son, Jakub, who lives in the flat downstairs, joined us with his six-month-old daughter, while his wife, Adélka, stayed downstairs, busily cleaning their bedroom after a pipe leak caused extensive water damage. For a good hour, Jakub sat silently watching as his mother, Otýlie, rocked his crying six-month-old daughter, but the baby refused to settle. Everyone was relieved when Adélka finally joined us and quieted her. I mentioned to Adélka that I would have happily taken a turn rocking the infant but assumed she would be more comfortable being held by either her father or her grandmother, at which point both mother and grandmother laughed heartily and said that the baby had been left “alone” with her father—that is, without her mother—all of two times in her life and this was one of them. Other fathers engage more centrally in care; I have sat next to several fathers who more than competently rocked their infants to sleep. But even when fathers are close to their children, the bond between mother and child is commonly described as surpassing anything men can possibly achieve. Olinka, the forty-year-old stay-at-home mother who mentioned to me her concern that she perhaps focuses too much on her children and won’t have anything left when they grow up, happily recounted the wonderful qualities of her four children, describing her intensely rewarding relationships with each of them, before criticizing what she referred to as her husband Jirka’s incapacity to

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have a good relationship with any of them. I was surprised, then, that when his wife wasn’t present, forty-year-old Jirka described his family relations to me in terms of his deep connection to his children, remembering with great pleasure how a few weeks prior, he had taken his children away with him to their chata and for three days, they all sat together and watched Harry Potter movies that he had downloaded onto his laptop. During my stay with their family, I was acutely aware of Jirka’s keen involvement in the children’s activities. He kept reminding them to do their homework and individually went over their lessons with them. When their youngest son, David, who was five, fell off his bicycle and bumped his head, it was Jirka who rushed around getting the car ready in case they needed to take him to the hospital. “He is always the one who takes the children to the doctor,” Olinka explained, as she doesn’t drive. The next day, Jirka told me David had climbed into their bed in the middle of the night. In the early morning, when his mother was up and making breakfast, David had just started stirring, and Jirka asked him how his head felt. Still halfasleep, David initially murmured, “‘fine, fine’ [fajn, fajn],” Jirka said, “and then suddenly he realized he wasn’t lying next to his mother and it wasn’t Olinka who was asking him how he felt, and he quickly jumped out of bed to go look for her!” Jirka laughed, making light of his son’s expectation that care and concern over his injury would best come from his mother. When Jirka drove me to the train station at the end of my visit, he told me that Olinka could finally be finishing up the university degree she had worked so hard on if she had only agreed to send David to preschool, “but her maternal instincts, which she has a lot of, don’t let her do that. She doesn’t want to rob [ošidit] him of anything.” I could not help but think that her striving to be the ultimate caring mother who never-endingly focuses on making home life a sustaining, nurturing force, as Patocˇka ([1968–69] 1989, 275) so eloquently depicts it, is, in some ways, hurting them all in the end.

Temporalities of Care Like Olinka and Jirka, many families judge what they and others give to their families not only in terms of economics (i.e., the allocation of resources), but also, and perhaps even more significantly, in terms of the care given to them. Care is, moreover, often evaluated in terms of (among other things) time spent together. Olinka might not have time for university, but that is because she is spending her time on something more precious—namely, tending to her children. Jirka, who works sixty hours a week as a paramedic in both the Czech

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Republic and Germany (thus bypassing laws that limit how long he can be on call for, in order to make more money), has less time to spend, but similarly highlights that he devotes what he can to his family. Time has become the new currency of care not only between parents and children, but also within couples. When Ondrˇej caricatured the kinds of family life that “the younger generation” engages in, he also described how little time they spend together: “The younger generation also go on separate holidays. The male partner goes off with his friends. He says, ‘I have time off from work Monday through Friday next week so my [male] friends and I are going to go fishing in Norway.’ And off he goes! And then she says, ‘My [female] friends and I are going away for a week to go do yoga in the mountains, so I’m off and you just better find something to do with the children [i.e., find someone to leave them with].’ And off she goes!” Indeed, the more time I spend with Ondrˇej and his family, the more I hear him and his wife explaining to their sons that fathers need to be involved with their children and how bad it is when fathers work too much and have no time for their families. But such assessments are not about the equivalency of gendered care, as what a father spends his time on is seen as necessarily more variable than what a mother does with her day. In contrast, it is very rare for Ondrˇej and his wife to explicitly reflect on mothers who don’t spend enough time at home, as they seem to assume that this doesn’t happen very much. So I’m not surprised that in his story, the father is told to find someone (else) to take care of his children when the wife goes away, but when the father leaves, it is just assumed that the mother will be there to take care of them. These differing expectations permeate the lives of even those couples who are seemingly attempting to split their children’s care between them. In Tobiáš and Amélie’s household, both parents have full-time jobs and seem to be equally focused on facilitating their children’s hectic educational and after-school schedules. Tobiáš complains that he barely has time during the week to be with their children, as he is always working, driving to and from work, or driving the children to and from school. Then when he gets home, they do their homework and go to bed, while he has brought home extra work from his office to finish up. Amélie seems similarly run off her feet between her job, taking care of her elderly parents, and caring for her children. Tellingly, however, when it came time for me to schedule a get-together with them, Tobiáš referred me to his wife, claiming that she is the only one who knows the family schedule. Getting to know their family life better revealed further gendered demarcations of who does what at home. Neither of them likes to cook. When I once casually asked what they’d had for dinner the night before, Tobiáš cried out, “What is dinner? I didn’t get anything for dinner last night,” and directed a scowl at Amélie. “You had dinner,” she barked back.

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“All I had was an old bread roll for dinner,” he murmured. “Maybe you guys had dinner.” She shrugged and admitted that she had taken herself and the children to KFC before he got home from work. The previous summer, though, she told me with glee, he had had to cook. While Tobiáš made a face, she explained that each of them has four weeks of annual vacation leave, while the children have nine weeks of summer vacation, so they split their time between them—four weeks with him and four weeks with her (and no vacation time together, she pointed out). “During his weeks, he had to cook!” she exclaimed delightedly. “So one night he made spaghetti topped with ketchup, and the next night, potatoes topped with cottage cheese, and then he rotated the two recipes. . . .” Like men of many ages, Tobiáš has an extremely limited repertoire in the kitchen, as no one in his natal family thought to teach him how to cook. The one man I know who regularly cooks learned how to do so as an adult from his wife. It is by far the norm for men, particularly those over the age of thirty or so, to be limited in what they can do in the kitchen, just as they tend to be limited in terms of other housekeeping skills. Unlike in previous generations where extended families were more common and there was often a live-in grandmother who helped out with domestic labor, in many contemporary families, the mother is the lone person who does most of the housework—and thus has the knowledge and the skills it takes to do it. I have watched household after household descend into confusion when the mother gets sick and no one knows how to prepare a meal or even where to find basic ingredients. On one of my visits, a man desperately asked me if I could show him how to turn on the washing machine, as his wife had been down with the flu for over a week. This sort of radical incapacity means not only that women are the ones responsible for doing these activities, but also that, in many cases, they gain a real sense of competency and purpose from the knowledge that they are the only ones who can comfort a crying child, clean up a messy house, or prepare a meal more flavorful than spaghetti with ketchup. This doesn’t mean that women are content doing most of the domestic labor or that they think things should necessarily be this way. Rather, it is to suggest that many women find doing such tasks a meaningful way of constituting themselves as engaged, thoughtful, and creative beings, tapping into values of love and care that enable them to both concentrate on the mundane and traverse beyond its boundaries.

Across the Generations Families, however, are not just about parent-child or marital relations but involve other kinds of relationships as well, including being cared for by, and taking care of, older generations.

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Otýlie is very careful not to give too much advice to her daughter-in-law, Adélka. She explained to me with a self-deprecating laugh, “I am her motherin-law, I live in the same house with them [her son and daughter-in-law], I am a trained pediatrician and a child psychiatrist. I am the last person she needs to hear from.” In fact, Otýlie has helped Adélka with the baby quite a bit. Adélka is finishing her training to be a teacher, and whenever she has her exams in Prague, Otýlie travels up with her and takes the baby out for walks. Otýlie deeply enjoys these moments with her grandson. But as she well knows, there is a strong cultural stereotype of mothers-in-law (tchyneˇ) as being too involved and meddling in their daughters-in-law’s households. The very word tchyneˇ is often charged with intensely negative feelings. Partly this may be due to the fact that even when a wife does not join her husband’s extended family in the family home (though this still frequently occurs in rural areas), the husband is caught between two families—both giving and receiving care to and from his mother, and sometimes his father, while fostering his relationships with his wife and children. Olinka and Jirka have recently moved out of her mother-in-law’s home, but Olinka still criticizes Jirka for his intense bond with his mother. He generally sees her almost every day, and when he can’t see her, he phones her for about an hour-long talk every evening. “He can’t fault her for anything,” Olinka grumbled. But isn’t this the very same intense bond she is building with her own children, including her three sons? In my friend Ema’s case, it was her obligations to her widowed father-in-law that caused her the most angst. When Ema was sixty-one and about to retire, she lamented to me that she wasn’t “ready to be old.” Her neighbor and her fatherin-law, both of whom were in their eighties, were saying how thrilled they were that she would soon be at home with them. “‘We can spend time together now,’ they say. But I need to resist the pressure they put on me to be old like them,” Ema said. “I need to stay true to who I am. My life is with [my husband] Radislav [who is three years younger than she is]. I want to enjoy my life with him.” Ema’s sense of the potentialities of self-realization is clearly interrelational (cf. Patocˇka [1968–69] 1989), but some relations open up possibilities for her to be herself, while others foreclose them. A year later when I next visited, Ema was recently retired. She told me she was already bored at home, doing nothing but just puttering around. Radislav, who was still working, added that all she did was watch TV. Ema explained that before she retired she had ideas about all the projects she would do, but she now felt no motivation, no pressure, and thus no need to do them. The problem, she said, was that her day had no routine. Before, when she was working, she might take an afternoon off and do something around the house—now she could not find the motivation to complete the same task even if she gave herself a week to do it.

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Radislav also had his own worries, focusing on how to keep his job, given an upcoming round of layoffs in his company. “If I get laid off,” he exclaimed to me, “I’ll have two retirees around my neck! What will I do with them?” Ema got very upset at this statement—the two retirees, she explained to me, would be herself and Radislav’s father. “But we are in entirely different positions in life,” she asserted, explaining that even financially there were huge differences; academics like her father-in-law had been paid very little during state socialism and, as a result, now received very small pensions, making her secretarial pension much more significant. More importantly, her father-in-law was unable to take care of himself. “For over fifty years he lived with his wife and is now finding it incredibly difficult to go on without her,” she said. “He isn’t the least bit helpful around the house and just adds to the burden.” Ema then complained about the hands-on care she needed to provide her father-in-law due to his physical infirmities. The worst moments were when he went to the bathroom somewhere other than in the toilet and didn’t clean up after himself. “He shits himself and doesn’t even tell me, much less clean it up,” she said flatly. At one point, she had demanded that Radislav tell his father to please clean up after himself, but Radislav had refused to broach the subject with him, finding it too humiliating. So instead she raised it herself with Radislav’s two sisters (who didn’t live in the same house), but they were appalled that she would openly discuss such an issue, let alone complain about it. So now, she told me, not only did she do all the work of taking care of Grandpa, but she was the “black sheep” of Radislav’s family. “Grandpa drinks a lot too,” she added, to which Radislav interjected that his father did not drink too much, but who could blame him if he was at home all day and wanted to have a few drinks? Ema shook her head and said, “Most of the time he smells, because he just drinks and drinks all day. He drinks beer and slivovice [fruit brandy], keeping a bottle under the table all day. He’s begun falling down and I can’t go anywhere or leave the house for very long, because what if he hurt himself?” When Radislav left the room, Ema upped the ante to tell me how sickening she found the old man. “I do everything I can to avoid him in the [two-bedroom] apartment,” she said. “He walks around in the morning without a T-shirt on, in just in his underwear, and his stomach hangs out and he looks repulsive. The problem is that he is so similar looking to Radislav, and yet he makes me feel so sick.” A few years later when I visited again, Radislav’s father had died. Despite her having recently broken her leg, Ema’s mood was nothing less than ecstatic. She repeatedly told me how well it had all worked out. She and Radislav had bought

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tickets to go on vacation to Thailand without sorting out who would come and take care of Grandpa. “We didn’t tell him we were going, we didn’t dare, and then he died in time for us to go!” she exclaimed. “It was so great, so convenient,” she added, and she didn’t say it tongue-in-cheek. Radislav sat quietly listening to her and didn’t react. Ema’s joy was, however, somewhat diminished by the fact that the cast on her leg meant she could not visit her son and grandchild. Usually she helps her daughter-in-law once or twice a week with the child care. She can talk about her granddaughter for hours, describing the vacations she and Radislav take her on, the dinners she cooks for her. “If she doesn’t see her [granddaughter] for a fortnight, she is totally despondent,” Radislav told me. Ema was caught in a nexus of care relationships involving herself and her husband, his father (before he passed away) and his sisters, and her son, daughterin-law, and their child. While frustrated, and in some cases furious, with the obligations she faced, she also constituted a sense of meaning by fulfilling the roles of wife, daughter-in-law, and mother-in-law. Although she was initially fearful of losing herself—moving in the opposite direction of self-realization—by becoming prematurely old, her ongoing care for her husband and her granddaughter gives her a palpable sense of purpose and achievement. Being involved in the care of her father-in-law, on the other hand, felt like it was stripping away all of her agency and control over her life. It also reminded her of the possible negatives of traversing through time, as she looked at her elderly neighbor and her fatherin-law and envisaged herself growing old, while shuddering at the image of her still-handsome husband grotesquely reflected in his father’s visage. Ema’s antipathy toward her father-in-law was extreme. But the trepidation and sadness she felt in watching him age are indicative of many women and men’s struggles to care for elderly relatives, particularly during the ends of their lives. For some, such caregiving may constitute another potential avenue toward self-realization, while for others it feels burdensome, and others still may feel both. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to reflect on such activity as another facet of how self-realization can be both cultivated and stymied through the relationships of care and obligation that structure family life, making changing demands of us as the constellations of relationships in which we find ourselves alter over time.

Traversing through Time Due to their temporal nature, families are always shifting, embracing new perspectives and different ways of thinking and acting as people come and go.

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Traversing through time within a family requires taking on and shedding roles, be it as a daughter, a wife, or a mother-in-law. It can also mean adopting different ways of tracking time, as temporality is structured not only by one’s own activities, but by activities that occur across the generations. Ema wanted to put off retiring so as not to get old too soon, and then once she retired, she wanted time to move faster to see her through to the end of her father-in-law’s care. In Mateˇj’s family, there is collective concern among the older generations that time seems to be moving too slowly. A few years ago, Mateˇj bought a piano, and when I complimented him on it, he and his mother, Anežka, began to reminisce about the piano teacher who had taught him when he was a young boy. “Is she still alive?” he wondered, before calculating that she would need to be about ninety years old by that point and was thus most likely deceased. They began to reflect on the passing of the generations and how differently time seems to move now that they are older. “When I was fifteen,” Anežka said, “I thought twenty-five was old. I thought [in reference to a possible romantic liaison], What is that man thinking—he is much too old for me!” “I even thought twenty was old when I was fifteen,” Mateˇj said. Anežka continued. “And then as you get older, you stop seeing the gap so much, so that by the time you get there, thirty and fifty are roughly the same age really. And then you stop tracking age and years altogether when your children become adults.” Given our own age difference, Mateˇj’s wife, Beˇta, thought she should clarify for me what her mother-in-law was trying to convey. “You will see this, Zuzano. Now you see your youngest child going from grade one to two to three, but then when he turns thirty, you won’t see the year-by-year changes anymore, and time will stop moving so fast.” “So now I don’t even know when school starts anymore!” Anežka lamented. “There used to be children living down the street who went to school and I would see them from my window and say to myself, ‘Oh, it’s September again,’ but now those ‘children’ are too old for school.” “And then when you get to be really old, it changes again,” Mateˇj mused, “and you see how other people suddenly age before they pass away.” “And then it feels like time is speeding along for them, but we stay the same and it isn’t really passing for us. We stay young while everyone else gets older,” Anežka said. She went on to describe how during her now-thirty years of retirement, it feels as if one year is morphing into the next: it all seems to flow together into a huge amount of time that isn’t extracted, counted, or lived like days were lived when she worked or went to school.

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“Maybe,” Beˇta offered, “when Mateˇj and I have grandchildren [i.e., Anežka’s great-grandchildren], time will start moving for all of us again.” What had once been their role—to make time move on—has now been passed on down the generations.

Family as a Site of Self-Realization Families are about interrelations and roles that are composed of affect, engagement, obligation, and care that run not only horizontally but vertically across a number of generations. Families hold out the possibility of both finding and losing oneself in a nexus of relationships, and not just for women or children, but also for men. As Patocˇka noted, the family is our first form of interrelationship and thus is fundamental to our sense of personhood. We belong to certain kinds of families, whether we all share a name in common or not. While families are no longer the primary site of production, there remain economic pressures on families to constitute themselves in particular ways. Families also contribute to the making of certain kinds of persons, with an eye to negotiating the economic realities in which we find ourselves. Nonetheless, families remain an important buffer against the possibility of identities and self-knowledge based only on being workers, enabling a site of self-realization of different kinds of abilities, roles, and modes of interrelationality. The twenty-first-century family remains focused on reproduction: reproduction in terms of making babies, but also in terms of reproducing ourselves in the sense of producing a particular form of life. It is necessarily a malleable form of life, as political and economic circumstances alter how we live, but families also preserve a sense of continuance as we traverse through them, perpetually exchanging, enhancing, and in some instances redefining roles, while things such as names, houses, the marking of time, and even garbage are passed down from one generation to another. While Patocˇka’s three movements highlighted the centrality of familial relations, his work did not go far enough in probing the complexity of these relations, offering only a glimpse of the possibilities of how we may be able to not only find ourselves but transcend ourselves within the familial realm. We must also not overlook the work that goes into nurturing interrelations, work that some are taking note of more attentively now that divorce rates are rising. To overlook this is to overlook how the negotiated nature of familial relations both enables and stymies our moves toward self-realization. Any self-realization, much less

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self-transcendence, that occurs within the domestic sphere is bounded by obligation and responsibility, and is not one in which we can pursue whatever paths we might choose. To say this, however, is not to detract from the power of domestic relations and of home as, for some of us, a potential site for achieving a sense of the ultimate, transcendent meanings of our lives. Families are the forces that not only literally create us, but form us as mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, with a unique knowledge of where we came from, who we are, and, just as crucially, pace Heidegger, who we might yet be.

5 MAKING MOODS Food and Drink as Collective Acts of Sustenance, Pleasure, and Dissolution

Tucked away in the village of Prˇerov nad Labem, about a half-hour drive from Prague, stands a popular skanzen, or open-air ethnographic museum, comprising over thirty historical wooden houses, barns, and storage facilities dating from the mid-1700s up to the early twentieth century. The structures contain displays of historical artifacts and life-size figures of peasants, organized into dramatic scenes of “typical” family life that illustrate historical processes of smoking herbs, storing and cooking food, and baking bread. During my visit, I was struck not only by the wealth of carefully labeled objects on display but also by the level of intense sociality the figures evoked. It seemed as if each house was teeming with peasants enjoying food and festivities, producing and consuming together. On my walk through the skanzen, I was accompanied by my friends Radana and Miloš, high school history teachers who made for very knowledgeable tour guides. Most of the exhibits focus on the intricate details of food production, storage, preparation, and consumption, and as we strolled through the various households, we debated the pleasures and challenges of living in each of the time periods represented. Miloš and I mainly argued over issues of taste. While I noted the comparatively limited array of foodstuffs (with cabbage featuring as a dietary mainstay), he positively reveled in the wide variety of preservation and production methods on display. For Radana, a much more important issue was how food operated as a calendar, providing a sense of rhythm, with annual periods of fasting punctuated by the slaughtering of animals and feasting that 143

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FIGURE 5.1. An exhibit inside a house at the Prˇerov nad Labem ethnographic museum. Several houses in the open-air museum contain displays of domestic scenes from various historical periods of village life, complete with life-size figures. Photograph by the author.

took place during major holidays. The cycle itself, she suggested, would lead to variety, anticipation, and excitement. Both of them wholeheartedly agreed that food “back then” would have tasted better than today’s does. As we looked into some of the more modern houses, Radana and Miloš pointed out historical items that they either used when they were young or still use today—“We had a milk jug like that and I used to bring it to a farmer and collect milk from him”; “We had a cabbage grater just like that—it is still somewhere in the cellar.” On the one hand, our visit to the museum was about encountering past lifeworlds, and we speculated a great deal about what it would have been like to live during particular moments in history. But at the same time, Radana and Miloš directly related what they saw to their own personal pasts, drawing connections between the items on display and the things they had, or still have, at home, recounting not the deep past (“My mother or father used to . . .”) but a much shallower one (“I used to use that cabbage grater”). They also eagerly pointed out objects related to the historical-food revivals that are gaining in popularity across the Czech Republic, such as the repopularized practice of baking your own bread

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or making homemade gingerbread (perník) for Christmas. For them, the past contained in the museum exhibit seemed both distant and porous, much like the ways that people walk through Prague, traversing the Prague of old through the Prague of today. In Being and Time, Heidegger made a compelling argument that what makes a museum piece a museum piece is not the thing in itself, but the fact that it speaks to a different lifeworld. It may thus still be of use in some contexts, but it signifies the past: What were the “things” [in a museum] that they no longer are today? They are still definite useful things, but out of use. However, if they were still in use, like many heirlooms in the household, would they then not be historical? Whether in use or out of use, they are no longer what they were. What is “past”? Nothing other than the world within which they were encountered as things at hand belonging to a context of useful things and used by heedful Dasein existing-in-the-world. That world is no longer. ([1953] 2010, 362) The objects that caused the most curiosity in the skanzen were those that exist both in and out of museums, representing past lifeworlds that people are actively trying to reconnect to and bring into the present, intimately linking themselves to these histories and making them part of contemporary identity. The phenomenology of engaging with these objects is precisely what we cannot see or feel from such exhibits unless we have some prior knowledge of (handling) them. As they are displayed, the dead objects of the museum (even if still very much alive in certain contexts) do not tell us about the sensibilities that were formed from and around them, unless we ourselves have engaged with them as part of our own lifeworlds. Thus, while I initially took Miloš and Radana to be responding to the exhibits in markedly different ways—he focusing on flavor while she discussed temporal structure and rhythm—I later realized they were both interested in the same thing: namely, tracking histories of pleasure through the objects on display. They could do this because they were accustomed to seeing the artifacts as part of recognizable, pleasurable lifeworlds—lifeworlds that are different from their lifeworlds today, but that nonetheless intersect in recognizable ways with the emotional and temporal structures of their own lives, their own gingerbreadfilled Christmases, their own uses of cabbage graters. I could not interpret these objects in such a way. I did not feel connected to them and, not knowing how to locate these objects in a phenomenology of food and drink, struggled over whether to view the various pasts represented here as times of pleasure or acute hardship.

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We employ food and drink as technologies for making ourselves into certain kinds of persons, literally with respect to the sustenance they provide (extending or shortening our life spans), as well as symbolically in terms of the kinds of persons we become by ingesting them. But food and drink, as Radana observed, also structure—and, significantly, are consciously used to structure—different kinds of temporalities and moods, marking and reshaping the rhythms and sensibilities of our being-in-the-world (Douglas 1971; Seremetakis 1994). As Heidegger and Patocˇka both observed, human beings engage with the world through various affective states or moods, such as anxiety, fear, or curiosity (Heidegger [1953] 2010, div. 1, sec. 5; Patocˇka [1995] 1998, 43). As we traverse through the world, we may move from one affective state into another. At the same time, moods move through us—they “assail” us, as Heidegger ([1953] 2010, 129) put it—and yet also seem to constitute us, seemingly appearing, according to C. Jason Throop, as “neither precisely of the self nor of the world” (2017, 201). Wherever their origins may lie, moods move us, sometimes compelling us to act, sometimes invoking a sense of stasis. But just as moods move us, we also move moods, producing different feelings or sensations in ourselves and in others. Moods are created through our dynamic engagement with the world (Heidegger [1953] 2010, div. 1, sec. 5; see also Throop 2014) and even though emotions and sensations are sometimes experienced as private, internally produced phenomena that we first feel and then express to one another, being-in-the-world is necessarily interrelational. So too are our affective states. Sometimes these processes can be subtle—for example, when we react to an emotion or sensation that is being experienced by others, feeling a sensation of shock, anger, or elation in response to what they, knowingly or unconsciously, have conveyed to us (Rosaldo 1980). Emotions or sensations may also be collectively generated. We can see this, for example, by observing a crowd at a demonstration or a festival, noting how individuals’ moods change depending on the dynamics of the collective (Durkheim [1895] 1966). There are also social practices that intentionally produce collective sensations and emotions, such as taking part in a religious pilgrimage that is consciously structured to provoke initial feelings of pain and frustration, followed by relief, and then joy and love for the divine (Daniel 1987, chap. 7; see also Turner [1964] 1979); or telling a joke that leaves its listeners shaking with laughter (Trnka 2019). In similar ways, we employ food and drink as part of the deliberate, intersocial production of affect. Arguably one of the main goals we hope to achieve is to make and consume substances that impart pleasure. But as the anthropologist Paul Stoller (1989) reminds us, food—and, I would add, drink—can also easily lend itself to spreading antagonism and discontent, particularly if its foul taste or

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negative effects are seen as intentional. More often than not, however, food and drink are consciously utilized out of the desire to create positive emotional and sensory engagements. Gastronomic pleasure can be very complex. It usually takes place within a limited economy, restricted by either the ingredients at hand or the economic realities that underpin what one can and cannot buy—how many eggs can be used to create the foam of a cake, how many beers are within the budget of an evening out. It is, moreover, a form of pleasure that is often historical in nature, one that we not only create but hope to recreate, as the sensation itself is frequently layered with memories of the pleasures of previous tastes (Seremetakis 1994; Sutton 2001). Like all pleasures, it is necessarily ephemeral; it may linger, but it does not stop and settle. Within the vast array of foods and drinks, alcohol deserves special mention. Perhaps more intimately linked to pleasure and pain than any other food substance, alcohol is one of the most widely employed means of fostering social interaction while also shifting consciousness (Dietler 2006). Getting drunk can be a very mundane or very profound act of achieving clarity and/or disassociation. It can be a means of attempting to control time, compelling us to step out of our usual temporal structures and live through a different kind of rhythm. It can be a strategy for creating emotional highs and lows, keeping (one’s own and others’) lives interesting, engaging, and dramatic, while also being intensely debilitating. It can constitute an act of attempting to step outside oneself, toward another place, another time, another way of being, even to the point of obliterating ourselves. Our uses of food and drink alter, sometimes radically so, our modes of traversing, reconfiguring our ways of seeing, experiencing, and moving through the world as well as the kinds of people we become. They are central to the kinds of movements we make in the world, be it how we move through time and space, how we move toward and away from one another, how we stand in relation to ourselves, and our attempts to gain or create an understanding of the world we live in. Focusing on how we endeavor to constitute pleasure thus requires taking into account both the mundane, day-to-day pleasures of eating and drinking and creating food (Patocˇka’s first and second movements) and the more profound pleasures that imbue us with a sense of surpassing quotidian life (Patocˇka’s third movement). What is key is that the affective dimensions of food and drink take place within a realm that is both intensely embodied and interrelational. As Patocˇka ([1995] 1998) noted, our being-in-the-body takes place in an interactive milieu. We are never persons alone. But more so, what we ingest and how we ingest it are rarely determined by the relationship of food or drink solely to our own bodies, but

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are in large part, as the rooms full of figures at the skanzen show, intensely social acts. In exploring these issues here, my interest is in considering commonplace practices of food and drink that, like objects in a museum, conjure up certain kinds of lifeworlds, and the pleasures and despairs to which they lead.

Beyond Sustenance: Food and Drink as Collective Movements I was sitting in a cheap beer hall in the working-class district of Smíchov, known for its strong, unfiltered brew. The tables were overflowing and I’d been seated at the same table as a couple who were just starting their dinner. The man, who was probably in his midfifties, had been brought a massive plate of chips, sausages, fried cheese, and fried eggs. He took a few bites and then said to his companion, “What a good day this makes! I didn’t know I was going to have such a good day at the start of it!” He paused and then added, “It is much too simple a thing that makes people happy, you know, a good meal like this.” I was struck by both his obvious delight and his open reflection on the difference between what actually grants him pleasure and what he thinks should grant him pleasure—it’s too simple a thing, he declared, suggesting that it really should be something more substantive, more morally important, that transforms a mundane day into a decidedly good one. And yet, today for him, it was something as simple as an unexpected good meal that made the difference. At the same time that many Czechs embrace a satisfying meal or revel in the pleasure of drinking, there is a lingering sense that focusing too much on bodily pleasures may border on the uncivilized and unrefined. As Mikhail Bahktin (1984) captured in his discussion of “the grotesque body,” as part of moves toward modernity, European elites rejected the ability to enjoy life by embracing “simple” or “noncerebral” bodily pleasures, preferring to cultivate “higher-brow” activities such as reading, creating art, or engaging in philosophic thinking. In doing so, they shored up class and educational distinctions regarding how bodily pleasure is viewed, embraced, or denied. Bahktin, however, also showed how the very existence of certain forms of bodily pleasure reveals dimensions of life we all share together, and thus threatens (or is seen as threatening) to level social hierarchies. In Czech society, as elsewhere (Goody 1982), the specificities of what one eats or imbibes demarcate class position. Food is also a marker of family identity, as reflected in family-specific tastes, recipes, or techniques, many of which are passed down through the generations. Thus, while at its most basic level, food is about sustenance, it is also about producing and sustaining a certain kind of person who is interlinked in very specific ways with his or her family, social position, and domicile (Appadurai 1988; Sutton 2010). Moreover, pleasure may not

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necessarily be determined only by what a food or drink tastes like, but by what it signifies to us. Indeed, what it signifies may change how it actually tastes, as the sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) so brilliantly argued in his examination of how taste is constituted not only through the sensations on our tongues, but also through the ways in which culture, class, gender, and education predispose us toward liking some flavors and textures and not others. Nonetheless, just as certain identities are thought to transcend others, particular acts of embracing food and drink are viewed as overcoming social divisions and demarcating “what it is to be Czech.” Eating goulash or drinking Czech beer, for example, are taken as markers of national identity, and while they are greatly enjoyed, they are simultaneously devalued for not being highly cultured. Czechs will note that the whole world knows the French enjoy fine wine while the Czechs prefer a good beer, highlighting a culinary tradition that feels comparatively a bit embarrassing but also, in local thinking, makes us “us.” In a process the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld refers to as “cultural intimacy,” certain cultural characteristics are hailed as distinguishing a specific group of people as a nation and providing the “assurance of common sociality,” regardless of whether they are deemed positive or negative, or both ([1997] 2005, 3). Creating good-tasting food is a sign of cultural knowledge, skill, and care. In the Czech Republic, the task of producing such pleasures is predominantly enacted by women. And many women, particularly those with children, take their obligations in the kitchen very seriously. When mothers will not be available at mealtimes, they will often prepare food for their children and husbands in advance, whether they are going to be missing a single meal, going away for the weekend, or planning a protracted absence. I have seen women who are ill and about to go to the hospital for surgery busily stocking up their freezers and refrigerators so their husbands and children will have all their meals pre-prepared while they are away. Women frequently pass not only culinary tips to one another, but advice on where to procure the best, but also cheapest, ingredients. When I asked one of my aunts how to bake a bábovka, or Bundt cake, we started by walking from one side of town to the other, as the first lesson was where to purchase the eggs, butter, and flour—namely, from three different shops in order to get the best prices. Only then could we undertake the actual baking. While we were whipping up the egg whites, my aunt recounted how when her father-in-law was alive, she would need to lie about how many eggs she used in order to make her baking appear more economical. “If I said it was six eggs that I made this out of,” she said, pointing at the pile of whipped egg whites, “he would say, ‘Oh, only that much foam from six eggs?’ But if I said it was five, well, then he would be impressed at how well I had done!”

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In families where men step out of the role of kitchen critic to actually cook, their participation is often a source of great pride and much commentary. “He is my saint, my sunshine,” Ema exclaimed about her husband, Radislav. “He is such a good cook and sometimes he even cleans.” Radislav immediately qualified her statement. “I am a chef,” he declared, recasting himself in the role of a professional. “Next time, tell me what to cook for you and I will,” he offered. Like many, Radislav has recently turned his attention to recreating “traditional” Czech dishes, many of whose complex modes of preparation were in danger of being widely forgotten given the ease with which one can purchase pre-prepared versions. For years, factory-produced knedlíky, or bread or potato dumplings, have been spread around the city by knedlíky trucks. Various varieties of premade knedlíky can also be bought in the local supermarket, and for those who are keen to experience making one themselves, there are packets of premeasured mixes. But now the new trend is to recreate knedlíky at home from scratch. There is also a boom in TV shows such as Prostrˇeno (literally, “the table is set”), the Czech equivalent of the UK’s Come Dine with Me, which features amateur

FIGURE 5.2. One of the knedlíky (dumpling) trucks that deliver dumplings across the city. Photograph by the author.

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cooks often grappling with traditional cuisine. One week, for example, each contestant was required to produce the traditional foods of the region of Moravia and Silesia. As a result, every evening the dishes were dominated by pork and špek, a style of cured pork similar to prosciutto, much to the dismay of one contestant, a Muslim immigrant (whose years of living in the Czech Republic meant he spoke perfect Czech), whose distress highlighted his “outsider” status and seemed to have been spotlighted as part of the show’s ostensible entertainment value. At the same time, however, there is a growing social awareness and concern that relying too much on a traditional diet can negatively impact health. Postrevolution, there has been a notable decrease in meat consumption and an increase in the consumption of fruits and vegetables, and in cities one can find a huge range of international restaurants and food choices (Haukanes and Pine 2003; Jarrett 2006). But there are still many Czechs, particularly among the middle-aged and elderly, whose diet remains largely focused on meat, potatoes or dumplings, sugar-based treats, beer, and coffee. One man’s description of his seventy-five-year-old mother’s food habits characterizes many of her generation: “She drinks black coffee all day long, smokes, and basically all she eats is potatoes and meat. She thinks the vegetable is on the plate for decoration, not to be consumed.” That said, there is a growing awareness of diabetes and obesity as nationwide problems. For those who already have these conditions, or appear to be on the verge of them, coping strategies tend to focus on making individual lifestyle changes. Decisions around the specific foods and timing of foods that one eats, are not, however, always up to an individual but are often interlinked with the social rhythms of households and extended friends and family. When I went out to lunch with my friend Leoš, who has been warned that his blood-sugar levels are too high, he ended up trading his meal for his eight-year-old son’s (after his son complained he didn’t like it) and consuming more than half of his eleven-year-old daughter’s dessert just so it would not be thrown away. As we saw in the skanzen, food production and consumption are often intensely intersocial acts, a collective mode of traversing or moving in and through the world that not only grounds us in our bodies but highlights how our bodily being is interlinked with the lives and bodies of others (cf. Patocˇka [1967] 1989, [1995] 1998).

Sociality and Shared Pleasures If food is about constituting pleasure, this does not necessarily mean that one always has a choice in what or how one eats. We often ingest and imbibe as much to please other people as to please ourselves.

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Sitting in my own kitchen in New Zealand, I have an incredible range of choice in what I cook. As long as I take into account the proclivities of my husband and three children, no one is looking over my shoulder. In the Czech Republic, however, I have much less of a sense of freedom with respect to food. My nexus of relationships there is larger and includes many who feel responsible for feeding me and making sure I am feeding myself and my family appropriately. In return, I feel responsible for pleasing them through my acts of (joyful, satisfied, and appropriately satiated) consumption. But there are times when I simply cannot eat fatty food without incurring severe stomach problems. This can make taking part in social engagements in the Czech Republic complicated. One might think it is a simple thing to tell your hosts in advance what you can and cannot eat. But my hosts’ desire to create a shared sense of pleasure, and what often amounts to their attempts to compel me to enjoy what they are convinced must be enjoyable, can often mitigate any claims I may make. I have sat through many a long day with older female relatives who insist that if I only eat what they recommend and make for me, all will be well. All the while they constantly monitor my, and others’, food consumption, to make certain we are deriving as much pleasure as possible. When I share such stories with my Czech friends, they all have similar accounts of being steered to eat and feeling ungrateful and unworthy if they reject the food offered to them. As a result, I sometimes find myself hiding what I do and don’t eat. When my cousins take us to an evening of outdoor sporting activities, I don’t expect it to include dinner. As we sit around a campfire roasting fatty sausages (klobásy), at first there is much consternation that I am not eating any of them. If I were to say that I cannot consume them (and will eat something else for dinner when I get home), my hosts would be frantic trying to find some other source of appropriate food for me. Finally, as it grows dark, I simply pretend to eat, piling bread, mustard, and sausages on my plate and counting on my husband and son to surreptitiously slip the meat onto their own. My friend Alena is not always so lucky. She has extreme reactions to both gluten and dairy that make socializing with anyone outside of her immediate family and very close friends very challenging. “I bring my own food whenever I go to someone’s house, but you really can’t do that in Czech culture,” she told me. Indeed, those who do not want or are unable to consume a wide range of Czech foods are frequently marked as other or alien—thus the comments about Muslims needing “enzyme therapy” if they are to remain in the country. Tensions over food can also exist within families and are particularly frequent across extended households, buoyed by obligations to reciprocally feed and consume as well as concerns over not wasting valuable resources. Michaela and her mother-in-law both live in a village on the outskirts of Cˇesky´ Krumlov, where her

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mother-in-law’s garden contains a large orchard. In the summer and autumn, her mother-in-law harvests a variety of fruits and produces about three to four large trays of kolácˇe, or fruit pastries, every day. One afternoon when I was at Michaela’s house, her mother-in-law turned up with the daily delivery of three giant trays of pastries. I was initially in awe of the gesture, remembering how I once spent a couple of weeks staying in Michaela’s mother-in-law’s house, watching as she spent each and every day in the kitchen baking, taking obvious pride in her careful craft. But Michaela is often troubled by what to do with so many sweet pastries. “She feeds them to my daughter, she feeds them to my husband, but no one should eat so many kolácˇe every day,” she told me. “Even the doctor said last week that my daughter is looking a bit fat. My father is quite fat and at the age of seventy-two, he clearly does not need to be eating pastries every single day. . . . But what is my mother-in-law supposed to do when there is all this fruit around?” That same evening, Michaela was busy baking a plum pastry. She had to use up the bags of fruit her friend Lenka had collected at her chata and passed on to her. “I am not like my mother-in-law,” she asserted, clearly aware of how similar this looked. The next day, we ate about half the plum pastry she’d made, plus the remainder of her mother-in-law’s pastries from the day before. The day after that, Michaela was busily baking another pastry out of apricots so that when her father came to visit that afternoon, she could offer him a choice of plum or apricot pastry. There wasn’t a day during my weeklong visit that some sort of fruit pastry was not on the menu. Michaela has told me that she considers her mother-in-law’s daily presentation of pastries “a form of control,” as it stops Michaela from laying down her own (healthier) food practices in her household. However, even without her motherin-law’s involvement, it’s unclear how much would change. On the one hand, food empowers Michaela within her family and her broader social circle, giving her a means of demonstrating care and thoughtfulness to others, providing pleasure, and securing the reputation of being (like her mother-in-law) a fine pastry maker, and thus a fine homemaker. On weekends, there is an almost festive air in her kitchen, as people continually walk in and out, consuming Michaela’s food and commenting on her creativity and care. On the other hand, food is an aspect of her family’s life over which she cannot exercise as much control as she would like, and she feels constantly thwarted in her hopes of moving her family toward healthier fare. I understand Michaela’s sense of feeling overwhelmed by gifts of food whose flow she cannot control. When I went to stay with some of my distant cousins, I kept a list of the foods that I was encouraged to consume over a five-day period, realizing how each day was punctuated with two or three different cakes and four or five rounds of coffee. Clearly, there was a desire to host me and host me well,

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with what constitutes being “well hosted” determined by the cultural and social values that govern appropriate interactions, and not by the actual appetites, proclivities, or, in some cases, needs of one’s guests. Indeed, when I look back at the diaries, letters, and field notes that reflect the thirty years I have spent traveling to and from Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, I am struck by how overwhelmed I have felt when visiting households that insist on consumption levels far beyond what I am comfortable, or even capable of, ingesting. One entry reads, I am struggling with dealing with how much [alcohol] people drink and how to be social with them and have a few drinks without letting it turn into having too many drinks. Smoking is everywhere, and again it feels like you either resist or dive in and join people. And the food—sugar, sugar, sugar, cheese, cream, more cream, in addition to all the meat. I feel like between the alcohol, cigarettes, food and polluted air, my body is in a bit of shock. The current trend to eat more healthily focuses on the enhanced flavor of fresh foods as well as their health benefits, but not so much on the timing of consumption. Czech healthy-living shows highlight the benefits of homegrown produce and unprocessed foods, telling us all about vegetarianism or Paleo diets. What gets largely ignored is the rhythm of food intake over the course of a day or a week (as opposed to, for example, the “slow food” movements that have gained in popularity elsewhere). They also appear to miss the fact that we use food not just to sustain our bodies or to feel pleasure, but also to generate and mark sociality (Stoller 1989; Sutton 2001). In particular, they avoid discussing how adopting a Paleo, vegan, gluten-free, or even nonalcoholic or low-fat diet might impact not only the dieters, but their ability to be active members of social groups, creating and sharing moods, moving together through time and space.

The Garden Party I always enjoy my visits with Ivan and Petra, two of my distant relatives. Whenever I am in town, we meet up for a meal, usually in their back garden. If we don’t start by “grilling” (barbecuing), we usually end with it. Whenever there are other relatives around, they are invited, and the table in the back has been known to hold up to twenty people. Petra once told me she gets ready for these events days in advance, sorting out the menu, making the dishes that can be preprepared. Our meals, which usually last for three or four hours and consist of several courses, are generally punctuated with discussions of politics, jokes (often about politics), and family stories. There is always more food and drink than anyone could possibly consume, though between them, Ivan and Petra make a concerted effort to keep them moving (“Have another dish. Have you tried this one yet?”). On one occasion, we

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were joined by their daughter-in-law’s parents, who are diabetic and spent a good bit of time explaining what might happen if they ate too much sugar, before repeatedly piling their plates with savories. If we are lucky, the evening will end with Ivan pulling out his guitar and playing campfire songs, as we grill the last bits of meat and vegetable. I usually stay and help Petra clean up, stacking plates into the dishwasher and packing away the inevitable leftovers. There is always too much, as it would not be a proper feast if it had all been eaten. On one memorable occasion, Ivan said laughingly to the last remaining family members, “You did well. You were under pressure, I know. Petra and I kept telling you to eat more, but only in a gentle way, offering up all the dishes and making sure you got your share. And you did well, nearly clearing the table!” Putting on such a feast requires a huge amount of work. When such moments succeed, they are about the creation of collective pleasure—pleasure from the flavors we eat, satiety, and the sense of fullness in our stomachs, as well as from the feeling of having created a moment of significance. This dinner was an Event. It was an Event because Petra and Ivan made it so. Much as the anthropologist C. Nadia Seremetakis (1994, 13) has described the act of a man stopping each day to savor his cup of coffee as a moment of “stillness,” Ivan and Petra’s feast created a sense of being part of a distinctive movement in and out of time, when we both partake in what is going on and are aware of engaging in a larger set of meanings. But in contrast to Seremetakis’s lone coffee drinker, we undertook this act collectively, with some—most notably Petra and Ivan—doing much more of the work than others, but all of us nonetheless collaborating together to create a different kind of sensibility. In doing so, we became part of an Event that centered on food and drink as pleasure, intersociality, and for a brief moment or two, a sense of transcending the normal, ordinary run of time to mark and celebrate life. In Patocˇka’s terms, we were grounded in the mundane activities of the first and second movements, producing and consuming food, and through this, creating a sense of familial warmth and collective conviviality. But at some point we also stepped momentarily into the third movement, getting a glimpse of the larger unity of being that we and our activities were a part of. In a state of attunement, however briefly, we were of and with the world, without ever leaving the garden.

Shifting Direction—Alcohol as a Mode of Traversing through Space, Sociality, and Time There is something unusual about Petra and Ivan’s attitude toward food: they hardly ever drink alcohol. But as proper hosts, they always ensure their guests have plenty of beer and wine on hand.

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Drinking is ubiquitous across the Czech Republic. On weekends it is not uncommon for people to start drinking early in the morning. On the Saturday 10:00 a.m. ferry that travels through Prague to the zoo, families pile on and the adults head down to the bar and order a beer. By midafternoon on a Saturday or Sunday, it is not uncommon to see young men vomiting on a street corner, and by evening this is almost expected in the city. But drinking, and drinking to excess, is not limited to weekends by any means, and many Czechs drink daily. Some start their day off with a shot, drinking Becherovka (an herbal liqueur) or other spirits such as vodka or rum to give a kick start to the day, much like a strong cup of coffee. As one newly retired woman put it to me, “I have a shot every morning as there isn’t much else to do.” Alcohol is widely reputed to have medicinal properties, particularly in terms of allowing people to release their emotions and lift their sprits. Thus few people found anything remiss when, in 2017, Saint Norbert’s, a brewery attached to the eight-hundred-year-old Strahov monastery, advertised its autumn brew with the slogan, “Saint Norbert’s antidepressant: Amber Ale.” Alcohol is also thought to be beneficial for gastric health. When friends heard I was having stomach troubles and carefully watching what I ate, they bought me a bottle of Becherovka, swearing that if I wake up and have a shot first thing each morning, my stomach will be all right for the day. Another friend told me that at the Karlovy Vary health spa she attended for her gallbladder treatment, there were twelve different sources of spa water, each with different curative powers, that patients were assigned to drink depending on their various conditions. But the “thirteenth source” that everyone drank was Becherovka (which is locally produced in the spa town). It is not uncommon today for women to drink in pubs, and an increasing number also drink heavily at home. Public drunkenness to the point of incapacitation is, however, not usually seen among women. In contrast, it is not unusual to see heavily inebriated men in public, often engaging in what would otherwise be considered socially inappropriate behavior. However, as the anthropologist Mac Marshall (1979) has shown, what is allowable and indeed expected behavior of those who are intoxicated remains culturally determined; it is hardly the space of “anything goes” (see also Gefou-Madianou 2002). That does not mean the effects are not profound; in the Czech Republic, male drunkenness can often radically change how one moves through, much less lingers in, public (as well as private) space. On a glorious autumn evening in the middle of the working week, traveling from one side of the city to another with my elderly mother and my young daughter, I was struck by the number of drunken men staggering around and how often they interrupted our journey. First we crossed a bridge where five or six drunken men loitered in the middle of the pavement, so that we had to weave our way

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between them to get past. We then caught a tram and a heavily inebriated man stood swaying right above my daughter’s seat. His head was bowed, his eyes were closed, and he had a sick-looking expression on his face. I had to physically insert myself between them so he wouldn’t fall on her or, God forbid, vomit on her head. We left the tram and at the next street crossing, another drunken man smiled at us as he swayed on the edge of the pavement. I was afraid he might fall into the stream of traffic, but as the light changed he straightened up and with a flourish gallantly announced how nice it would be for all four of us to cross together. We made our way through Malá Strana, passing a group of men who stood eating ice cream on a street corner. At first they seemed harmless, but they broke into drunken, obscene catcalls as we walked passed. It was a single journey and most likely marred by bad luck, but it was not unrepresentative of the ways that drunken men can come to reframe the nature of navigating through public space. Another evening, the scene was much more innocuous. I was traveling home alone on a tram when two drunken men who appeared to be in their early twenties got on and sat down in the row behind me. One of the young men was telling his friend, who sported a mohawk, that he would walk him home, as the man with the mohawk was likely too drunk to be able to find his own house. The man with the mohawk then tried to stand up, perhaps to show he wasn’t so drunk after all, but in doing so, he banged his head against a tram window. He fell back down, was silent for a moment, and then started shouting a soccer slogan. He explained to his bemused friend that he wanted to see if he could provoke someone on the tram into a fight. His friend thought this was extremely funny and wryly pointed out, “But we are Czechs and even if we have different loyalties in soccer, people don’t usually fight over soccer in this country!” The man with the mohawk persisted, however, starting to sing a song championing the Sparta soccer team, but no one on the tram even looked his way, much less took up the invitation for a fight. Drunken men are a sad mainstay of public life. Much like Marshall’s “weekend warriors,” whose alcoholic excesses enable them moments of masculine assertiveness, they engage in behaviors—from trying to rile up other men or women to being sexually obscene, or just completely incapacitated—that are otherwise foreclosed in public space (Marshall 1979). They are just one extreme, however, of a culture that broadly embraces drinking and has a complicated attitude toward the pleasures and pains of inebriation.

“Ješteˇ Jedno Pivo Prosím” Beer and hard alcohol, primarily slivovice (fruit brandy), vodka, rum, or Becherovka, are the main drinks of choice. That said, Moravia has a long history

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of wine production, and interest in wine is expanding nationally. Burcˇák, or young wine that is only partially fermented, has always been considered a specialty. From mid-August through November, signs announcing its sale dot the city landscape and long lines appear outside pubs, wine stores, butchers, and delicatessens—wherever there is the possibility of dispensing this highly prized drink. It is usually siphoned off into what look like empty Sprite bottles: big, green, one- or one-and-a-half-liter plastic containers. Burcˇák comes in red and white varieties (though white is the most prevalent). It tastes sweet, almost like lemonade but packing an alcoholic punch. It is not particularly strong (with 1–7 percent alcohol content), but its taste can be deceptive, and there are plenty of warnings to tourists to stay away from the stuff. The late September festival of Saint Václav, who was the patron saint of wine as well as of Bohemia, is one of many occasions when men and women sit in or walk through city parks, imbibing this specialty. The bottle is usually drunk in one go, due to the ongoing fermentation process. When I first bought burcˇák, I asked the woman who was dispensing it (in our local butchery), “How fast do we need to drink it?” Before she could speak, the man standing in line behind me

FIGURE 5.3. Buying burcˇák (young, partially fermented wine), in both white and red varieties, on a city street. Photograph by the author.

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cried out, “You drink it as fast as you can!” The woman laughed and explained that burcˇák will last three to four days but we needed to start “airing” it—that is, loosening the plastic bottle’s screw top—within thirty minutes or so, or the fermentation would cause the bottle to explode. But I think the man was right, as it would appear that most people drink it as fast as they can. As you walk along the city streets, you can pretty much guess people’s state of mind—that is, their level of inebriation—based on how many are huddled around each bottle: one or two, or in a rare case three, sitting or walking together, drinking all the while. While burcˇák is beloved, beer is the predominant drink of choice. Czechs’ interest and pride in the nation’s beer matches those of the tourists who sport T-shirts with slogans like “Czech Beer Drinking Team” or make Prague the site of their bachelor or bachelorette parties. Most tourists say with chagrin that the only phrase they learned during their visit was the cliché “Ješteˇ jedno pivo prosím”—“One more beer, please.” Among Czechs there are intense debates over which brand of beer is actually, really, empirically the best. Everyone has opinions on who owns the local breweries (Czechs or foreigners) as well as how they are run. On a Sunday in Cˇ esky´ Krumlov, after my sixty- and seventy-year-old hosts took me along to church, we visited the local beer factory and drank a sample. But according to them, this wasn’t “good beer” and we were only there to watch the production process. In order to ensure that I got to taste “good beer,” my hosts sent me off with their son to a pub for lunch, with strict instructions to get me something better to drink. But our discussions afterward revealed that their son had a decidedly different view on beer than did his father, and that he, in fact, had ordered “the wrong beer” for me (even though I quite liked it). So his father insisted on all three of us going out together to another pub, so I could experience “good beer.” In this case, my host’s actions were not about getting us inebriated or marking a particular event, but about ensuring that I saw and tasted the right things and came away with a positive opinion of Cˇesky´ Krumlov. But in many other social situations, alcohol is the linchpin of creating a particular kind of affective, intersocial space and rhythm.

Conviviality Alcohol is central to much of adult sociality. Still today, but more so in the recent past, part of being welcomed into a family home can consist of sharing shots together. Alcohol sometimes also used to be given out when visiting a professional office—when I went to interview a lawyer in the early 1990s, for example,

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I was offered a shot of hard alcohol at eleven o’clock in the morning. Today the equivalent gesture is the offer of coffee. Rates of alcohol consumption are high. According to 2010 data from the World Health Organization (2014, 206), out of 191 countries surveyed, Czechs have the ninth-highest level of alcohol consumption. For most adults—and it is estimated that over 90 percent drink—alcohol often marks the evening, setting the tempo for food and conversation. It’s not at all unusual to be asked over for dinner and find oneself at an all-night drinking party. My forty-yearold friend Alena, who cannot drink alcohol due to her severe gastric problems, finds socializing without drinking—or appearing to drink—incredibly difficult. On most social occasions, she puts apple juice diluted with water into a wine glass so it looks like she’s drinking white wine, or in a room that is not well lit, she will drink Coke in a wine glass, passing it off as red wine. “In this society,” she told me, “there is such pressure to drink that it is easier to pretend than to explain.” A popular TV series on social etiquette similarly suggests that even if one does not drink alcohol, it is impolite to decline a glass of wine at the start of a party or reception. “It is normal practice to pretend to drink it” and dispose of it later, viewers are advised (Cˇeská televize 2004). So strong is alcohol’s reputation for fostering positive social relations that to not consume (or appear to not consume) it is considered akin to turning one’s back on the collective effort of creating sociality. My friends Ema and Radislav are the kind of people it is hard to convince that one cannot drink, or even that one cannot drink a lot. On one visit to Prague, I asked them to meet me in town for a quick beer, but they insisted I come over and have a glass of wine with them in their apartment first. After that, we headed to a nearby pub for “a beer,” but Radislav kept ordering more and more rounds, so we each ended up drinking three half-liter glasses. We went back up to their apartment for dinner, which started with a gin and tonic, followed by glass after glass of cheap wine, the kind that’s dispensed in reused plastic Coke bottles. The wine was supposed to be interspersed with shots of homemade slivovice, but I found I simply could not drink them. I thought I could handle hard alcohol pretty well, even in large amounts, but this was something I literally could not swallow. It turned out that Ema and Radislav have the slivovice distilled to order, personally bringing all the fruit they collect at their chata to the distillery. After much encouragement to drink up (which I simply couldn’t do), an argument ensued over its strength, during which Radislav explained that when the slivovice is given back to them “raw” from the distillery, it has an alcohol content of 74 percent, but then he personally dilutes it so by the time they are actually drinking it at home, the alcohol content is only 52–54 percent. (The alcohol content of store-bought spirits varies considerably, but commonly tends to be around

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40 percent.) When I apologized and said that I still could not drink it, they wondered if maybe this batch wasn’t properly diluted. Radislav tasted it, declared it to be perfectly well diluted, knocked back his own glass, and told me to go ahead and just gulp it down. “We need to make you drunk so you have a night to remember,” he claimed. When I still refused, he shook his head in confusion, saying, “Even Grandpa drinks this.” Initially, when I was in my midtwenties and before I had children, I would occasionally visit Ema and Radislav and happily fall with them into a haze of alcoholic warmth. After the first gentle sips, a warm, expansive feeling of relaxation would drift through my body, soon giving way to immense satisfaction and happiness. Various other visitors would come along to their house and I would be amazed at how, through the use of alcohol, the couple created a certain kind of atmosphere—moving themselves and us into a very different sense of time, rhythm, and emotion. As I got to know Ema and Radislav better, I came to realize that through drinking, my friends were attempting to control time—to arrest its everyday rhythms and create a different kind of pace of life for themselves and the others in their midst. Some of this was about carving out a time that belonged to them, a time that was not already allocated to work or taking care of other family members—that is, their time to be drunk (cf. Driessen 2002). But it was also about making that time feel different, full of emotional highs and lows, as if those moments were somehow more profound than what we normally went through. Through their use of alcohol, they asserted that the intensity of our traversing through space and time, of being alone or moving toward one another, was malleable and could, in fact, be made better. In addition to being seen as central to the creation of pleasure (i.e., “having a good time”), alcohol is widely viewed by many Czechs as a means of reaching a profoundly different sensibility of oneself and the world around us—a way of altering our being-in-the-world and being-toward-the world, if only momentarily. Czech films, plays, and stand-up comedy are replete with drinking jokes that underscore the fine line between drunken profundity and stupidity, embracing the power and potential of alcohol while at the same time recognizing its drawbacks. As I listened to more and more of Ema and Radislav’s stories about being drunk, I realized their life together had become a play of sorts, with an emotional intensity I otherwise rarely encountered. When they were drunk, rules were broken, acts of transgression took place as women and men kissed (and not just within established couples), fights broke out. A colleague they went out drinking with came back to work the next day with a broken jaw. Marriages (but not theirs) dissolved.

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Ema has already left two husbands who drank too much and beat her, and with Radislav she is happy to have found one who drinks until he passes out and has never raised a hand against her. In fact, Ema always describes their drinking adventures as terribly funny. I called her once to suggest we get together and she said she would love to see me but not that day, as Radislav had come home after a night out with his friends from work, one of whom was celebrating his birthday. “There was roasted boar and they were carrying on until late at night and the men all bought him a shot [panák], one after another,” she told me, “so how could he say no? He doesn’t drink hard alcohol, you know, but really he could not tell those men no. He came home around one thirty a.m. and wouldn’t even come into the bedroom.” She described how she’d had to undress him in the hallway and he still wouldn’t go to bed but sat naked on the radiator, muttering all night that his backside hurt (from the radiator). “He is my sweet little boy,” she murmured, “and today, he is just sleeping.” On other days, Ema laughingly related stories of how Radislav got drunk and tried to sit on a shelf in the kitchen and tore it out of the wall. Or how he got drunk at the chata and decided to prune the top branches of a tree only to fall off it, injuring himself. Her stories make him sound like a perennially silly, naughty little boy who constantly breaks the rules and keeps her amused with his antics. It was a few years after these events that I realized Ema and Radislav drink large amounts every day. As luck would have it, the bottom floor of their apartment building has been renovated into a pub that serves Radislav’s favorite beer (Pilsen)—he particularly appreciates the fact that they keep it stored in the cellar so it is “just the right temperature” when it’s dispensed from the tap. Radislav stops in every day when he comes home from work, and calls Ema on his mobile phone to come down and join him. The restaurant now has a table set aside for them. They have friends, they tell me, who drink too much. A friend of Radislav’s who would drink a bottle of hard liquor every day died of liver failure. “You know how it happens,” Radislav explained. “You start with one shot, then two, and pretty soon you need to drink half a bottle a day for the same effect, and then you go up to a whole bottle!” Another man in his office was like that. “He drank a whole bottle of rum like it was nothing!” he told me. They particularly like to relate stories about “alcoholic men who dragged their wives down with them,” which, they pointed out, is nothing like them. I’ve heard these sorts of comparisons before, both from men who drink a lot and from those who generally refrain. As his wife, Jarmila, smiled at him, my friend Alois once told me, “You know, when I first met Jarmila, I was lucky because both she and her roommate at university were in love with the same man, but her roommate won him and so I got Jarmila. But the other man ended

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up turning into an alcoholic, so it was Jarmila who won in the end!” He went on to relate how when they went on their first date, he ordered a bottle of wine to share. That was enough alcohol for him, but then Jarmila suggested, “How about another one?” so they drank a second bottle together. At the end of the date, he “pretended to walk her home,” but really he was so drunk that she escorted him home and then turned around and walked home by herself. “But that was what made him endearing to me,” she explained. “Knowing he was a man who could not hold his drink.” In Radislav’s case, he repeatedly points out that he knows he doesn’t drink too much, because he only drinks wine and never hard alcohol (ignoring the slivovice and gin). He is also never drunk at work. Over time, year after year of my visits accumulate, much like the drink in their lives. I watch as Radislav and Ema grow more financially secure, but it is increasingly unclear to me how they enjoy themselves other than to drink. They travel. They like good food. They enjoy sports. But when they describe these activities, much of their enjoyment seems to revolve around how much drinking goes on during them. They have chosen to move through life in an all-encompassing haze, viewing the world from a radically different kind of perspective. In Heidegger’s terms, this is no longer a shift in mood (Stimmung), but rather a more fundamental shift in their disposition toward the world (Befindlichkeit).

Cutting Back In the past few years, there has been a growing awareness in the Czech Republic of the advisability of not drinking to excess. I notice that in restaurants today, waiters will happily bring you a big (half-liter) beer, and then when you’ve drunk it, immediately ask if you want another, but unlike in the past, there are usually no more follow-up offers. Nonalcoholic beer is now an item on many menus. Some men I know talk about going out with their friends for meals—Chinese dumplings, for example—rather than spending the night together in the pub. Other men and women openly strategize to keep their inebriation down, starting the night with a nonalcoholic beer or two before switching to an alcoholic option. There are many differences of opinion as to when being drunk is morally disgraceful. For the past several years the nation has been engaged in a long debate over the allegedly drunken behavior of its president. “Zeman was on TV last night,” my friend Klára told me sadly, “and he was obviously drunk at the press conference, slurring his words. It is such an embarrassment!” Another friend of a different political persuasion complained to me that President Zeman has been widely abused, being called a drunkard when it was recently revealed that he gets

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dizzy because he is diabetic and he also has a foot injury that affects his walking, making his movements unsteady and thus giving him the appearance of being inebriated when he is perfectly sober. For the most part, Ema and Radislav don’t suggest that their drinking is questionable, though it’s clear that alcohol has started to fuel some of their arguments. I went over for dinner one night and they told me that a few days before, they’d had some friends over and they all got very drunk together. Their drinking session took place three days after Ema had fallen and twisted her ankle, so she was still on crutches. After drinking quite a bit that evening, she went to the bathroom and fell backward, bumping her head. She wasn’t badly hurt—“Drunk people have luck” (Opilci mají šteˇstí), she kept repeating to me— but she also complained that since she was on crutches, Radislav should have taken better care of her and followed her to the bathroom to make sure she was all right. Repeatedly she tried to move me to agreement, much to Radislav’s discomfort. On another day when I came by, Ema recounted to me how Radislav had been “punished” for drinking too much, but her tone was gleeful. She was suffering from yet another respiratory illness and blamed it on Radislav’s carelessness. Their granddaughter, age five, had been staying overnight with them. Radislav drank two liters of wine, and when she and the little girl were already asleep, he decided to make goulash out of some deer meat he found in the fridge. He prepared the meat and put it into the pressure cooker. It was supposed to cook for just forty-five minutes, but he fell asleep due to all the alcohol. Four hours later, at three in the morning, he woke up and went into the kitchen to find grease and meat sprayed all over the walls and smoke billowing through the room. “We were so lucky the pressure cooker didn’t blow up and we didn’t all die!” she exclaimed. But because of the stench they had to leave the windows open for three weeks while waiting for the painters to come and repaint the walls. Every time she went into the kitchen, she felt the draft. That is why, she told me, she was now sick. “This is his punishment.” That same evening, it was clear that Radislav was actively trying to stop Ema from drinking, or at least slow her down. A few years earlier, when she had been taking care of his elderly father, she was regularly drinking a few shots with Grandpa every day, for which Radislav had gently chided her. Now he openly argued with her about how drinking wine made her cough even more, and criticized her for buying yet another bottle of hard alcohol, which he had found in the liquor cabinet. Later that evening, he brought her some herbal cough syrup, saying, “You should have a shot of this instead tonight.” I was particularly worried by the cough, as a few years before, Ema had had lung cancer. She recovered, but her respiratory health remained worrisome. Both

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of them used to smoke, but now only Radislav lights up. Many Czechs smoke, with surveys suggesting smokers make up roughly a quarter of the adult population (Cˇeská televize 2014). But it is a point of contention between Ema and Radislav, as despite smoking only in the kitchen and in the bathroom, he has to keep all the windows in the apartment open to air out the fumes. Radislav is well aware that neither the cold nor the smoke is good for Ema’s health. But he has repeatedly told me he cannot be moved to stop smoking. When we first spoke about Ema’s illness, he was in tears when he related how awful it had been to visit her in the hospital’s respiratory unit. “Some of the other women in there looked like they might really die,” he said. “It really gives you a sense of the dangers of smoking.” Ema had been more lackadaisical, stating that of course her doctors told her she should stop smoking, “but they weren’t terrible about it, because they smoke themselves.” In the end, however, she had her last cigarette in the hospital and then quit. Back then, I spoke to Radislav about the possibility of him joining her, but he was adamant that quitting would be impossible. When Ema was ill, he said, he was stressed and started smoking even more. Recounting how his father had quit smoking in 1968, he made it quite clear that one needs to have the will to quit before there is any chance of actually doing it. “When the Russians came into the Czech Republic, my father, who used to smoke sixty cigarettes a day, said, ‘The Russians are killing me, so why I should help them and kill myself ?’ And that day, he stopped smoking completely. It was hard, but he set his will [vu˚le] to it and so he managed.” So even though Ema’s doctors offered Radislav a nicotine patch as well as some tips on how to stop, he told them that until he really wants to quit, there is no point in trying.

Dissolution and Recovery Willpower is also widely seen as central to being able to stop or cut back on drinking. Czech psychiatrists commonly suggest that curing alcoholism requires individual effort, as it entails the alcoholic’s being willing to engage with his or her underlying problems. Former alcoholics and families of alcoholics tend to agree that the only way to go down this path is to really want to do it—in other words, to adopt, as a fundamental outlook on the world, an attunement or disposition (Befindlichkeit) in which cutting back really matters (cf. Heidegger [1953] 2010, 126–34; see also Zigon 2017, 2018). “You have to want to get well, to recognize this is the problem yourself. Or your family recognizes it and tells you and you need to have at least the goodwill to follow them,” a woman whose husband died of alcoholism in his fifties explained to me. “But even so,” she added, “in recovery some people will try and not take the medicines given to them.” Without the

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desire to move oneself into a different way of being, it is often thought that there is no point in undergoing treatment. Recently, however, there has been increasing attention paid to the societal factors that may make it hard for some individuals to find the willpower to stop drinking. Much of the focus is on men since, as one antialcoholism website explains, drinking alcohol is often considered to be part of a man’s “social responsibility,” necessary for having a collective good time with his friends (“Muzˇ a alkohol” n.d.). The increasingly popular “Suchej únor” (Dry February) campaign was initially set up to support men who wish to refrain from imbibing even “a drop of alcohol” throughout the month of February (Suchej únor 2016). As one of the campaign’s organizers explained to me, the key is to focus on engaging people and making such efforts seem lighthearted and fun, rather than shaming them into feeling they must stop drinking. But behind all the joking banter (“Why February?” “Because it is the shortest month in the year!”) is a carefully thought-out attempt to help individuals shift their disposition, by doing it interrelationally. Little, however, is said by the organizers with respect to the many pressures on women to drink, particularly if their husbands or partners are heavy drinkers and expect them to spend their alcohol-filled evenings, or days, together. Nonetheless, the Dry February campaign’s social media site, which attracts primarily young and middle-aged participants, is inundated with posts by women. Like their male counterparts, many are rethinking their drinking habits and hoping that by joining in a collective effort, they might be able to make their way toward adopting a different point of view. While the Dry February campaign gets a lot of press coverage, for the most part the media tends to glamorize drinking, asking celebrities to share the names of their favorite bars and alcoholic drinks. Stories questioning the rate of drinking among Czechs as compared to other Europeans often challenge drinking statistics, suggesting that quantitative methods are problematic, and that if we tweak the statistics this way or that, it actually doesn’t look so bad (“Alkohol v Cˇesku” 2017). While the desire to dig deeper into how statistical results are actually produced deserves to be lauded, it is notable that this is one of the few areas where there seems to be widespread public discomfort with what such numbers seem to be suggesting.

Traversing Together toward a Different Outlook Radislav, Ema, and I share a mutual friend, Ly´die. At one point I mentioned to her that I was worried about their drinking. She responded that “people say beer is healthy” and changed the subject. I was surprised, as Ly´die has frequently talked

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about the detrimental role alcohol has played in her own life. Before he died, her husband was repeatedly hospitalized for long periods, and many in her family think this was directly due to his alcoholism, though they usually do not speak openly about it. Ly´die has related to me how he died while having alcohol-induced hallucinations. She called the ambulance when she could no longer understand what he was raving about and then regretted it almost immediately, wishing she had found another way of soothing him. She told me the hospital had said his death was due to cancer, but she was sure the underlying cause was his diabetes. Ly´die, who is now in her midseventies, drank for decades, but a knee operation kicked off an enforced, long-term stay in the hospital. Without ever mentioning alcohol, she told me about the delusions she had when she was transferred into one of the long-term recovery wards (most likely a substance abuse ward), describing how she felt her bed was climbing up the wall while a big hole was opening up under her feet, ready to swallow her up. She said she started shouting and cursing at the people around her, but the nurses gave her something that put her out. And then, over time, she began to feel better. Nearly a year after her knee surgery, she was told it was time to move back home. I cautiously asked her if she’d had anything to drink since she left the hospital three years earlier. Ly´die, who lives on her own, shook her head and explained that drinking is all about being with other people. “My husband and I used to share a bottle of wine after dinner, sitting here [at the dinner table] together, talking. After the wine, we might follow up with some beer. But I wouldn’t drink on my own now. Why would I do that?” I took it that she meant that for her, alcohol was a means of traversing through a different sense of time and space together. She then told me that when she first came home, she didn’t even want to drink. When her nephew brought over some wine for her birthday, it tasted awful. Another time she had a strong urge to drink a beer and mentioned this to her daughter, who went out and bought some Pilsner beer for them to share. They opened it up together over a pizza, but again she hated the taste. Ly´die didn’t mention whether there were any other negative side effects when she tried to drink again. I don’t know if she was taking any antialcohol medication when she left the hospital, such as Antabuse, which is commonly prescribed to recovering alcoholics in the Czech Republic (as it is in Russia; see Raikhel 2016). I don’t think she knows if she ever took Antabuse or not. Czech doctors often give out prescriptions without people being aware of what they are taking. Indeed, there is a whole other set of consumables in the struggle for mental wellbeing that many people need to contend with—prescription pharmaceuticals. Like many in a similar position, Ly´die would never embrace the identity of an alcoholic (recovered or not). Rather, she is living life without alcohol now. There

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are certainly other, more conscious ways to give up drinking. Alcoholics Anonymous has chapters in the Czech Republic (as does Al-Anon), but they are not widely taken up by Czechs. There are also psychiatrists that specialize in rehab. But Ly´die’s is in many ways not an anomalous story—not of a woman who has taken control of her life by overcoming alcohol, but of a woman shattered by the loss of the love of her life, kept in a medical institution with little communication as to why or how long she was going to be there, who now lives a relatively happy life without alcohol. She has both moved and been moved from one place to another. How much of it was of her own volition is less important to her today than the fact that she feels absolutely no desire to ever go back. In the past, Ly´die and I have sat and looked at the cocktail of pharmaceuticals she takes (blood pressure pills, antianxiety medications, sleeping pills, etc.), and it has been clear that despite repeated arguments with her family physician over her wanting to know what she takes and why she takes it, she wasn’t getting many answers. I wanted to work out what all of these different drugs were, what their effects are, and, more importantly, what their effects are when they are all taken together. Ly´die has a much more straightforward understanding—“The less drugs I take, the better life is for me.” I was only a little taken aback when I got up to leave after a visit one day and Ly´die reached into the cupboard and handed me a bottle of Becherovka to enjoy during my stay. I only have another week left here, I thought, eyeing the full, two-liter liquor bottle. She noticed my hesitation and remarked, “It’s supposed to be very healthy.” While she’d clearly left behind that mode of being, she assumed it would still be helpful to me. Whether it was to aid my digestion, improve my emotional wellbeing, or lubricate my movements through Czech society (or all three), I did not want to ask. “Would you drink it?” I asked her. “No, of course not. Why would I want to drink that?” she said. Like the historical objects in the skanzen, alcohol belongs to a distant lifeworld for Ly´die. After her husband’s death and her enforced hospitalization, alcohol no longer has a place in her framing of the space and time of everyday life; it belongs to a “world [that] is no longer” (Heidegger [1953] 2010, 362).

Glimmers of Transcendence Food and alcohol are technologies of pleasure, sustenance, and dissolution. They grow and sustain us as individual bodily beings and foster particular kinds of interrelationalities. They underpin our being-in-the-world. Depending on how

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we use them, we can change our sense of time, both elongating and truncating our lives and changing their sense of rhythm. Food can be a way of creating pleasure, expressing creativity, and bringing people together. Alcohol can do the same, acting simultaneously as an escape and a form of social engagement. Both can bring us to the center of life, sustaining our very being, while, in some cases, threatening to dissolve it. As in other cultural contexts, most of Czechs’ experiences with food and drink are on the level of mundane pleasures. At times, however, they are suggestive of Patocˇka’s notion of transcendence in terms of his “third movement,” through which we access a sense of our lives as having a larger purpose or meaning. Indeed, in some instances, food, alcohol, and the sociality they enable can lay the groundwork for creating an Event that transports us outside the ordinary. Harnessing the power of both food and drink, we transcend our quotidian experiences while keeping sight of the contingencies of everyday life; in Patocˇka’s terms, we remain rooted in the mundane (movements one and two) but simultaneously stand above it, momentarily turning our attention to the universal (movement three). Alcohol is often the most profound element in the mix, due to its ability to delight us, imbue us with a sense of euphoria, and appear to enable us to surpass the normal bounds of temporality. As the anthropologist Michael Dietler has noted more broadly, “Because of their psychotropic properties, alcoholic beverages often have a heightened valuation in ritual contexts, and they frequently even serve as a crucial indexical sign of ritual” (2006, 232). Among many Czechs, an offer of alcohol often signals an upcoming shift in sensibility that may involve increased pleasure, or at times, dissolution and despair. Wherever it might lead, however, the desired outcome is generally to achieve something better than the usual physical and emotional sensibilities of daily living. While they would never use such language, Ivan and Petra arguably construct their afternoons of grilling in the garden with such aims in mind. Employing food and drink as technologies of pleasure, they attempt to produce a space in which they and their guests both revel together in the mundane and, for a moment, traverse across its boundaries to acknowledge our place in something much greater. When it all goes well, we come together to eat and drink, talk and sing—and together, we mark out that we are alive.

6 RECONNECTION Between the Power Lines and the Stars

In the global city of our civilization, girded by the high tension of our powerlines, we have abolished the night. There the glare of electric light extends the unforgiving day far into a night restless with the eerie glow of neon. We walk on asphalt, not on the good earth; we look up at neon, not at the marvel of the starry heavens. Seldom do we have a chance to see virgin darkness, unmarred by electric light, seldom can we recall the ageless rhythm of nature and of the moral law which our bodies and spirits yet echo beneath the heavy layer of forgetting. Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars

The answer to the problem of civilization’s dislocation, according to the Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák, is to embrace nature in whatever ways we can. It is an answer that Kohák shares with Heidegger and Patocˇka, both of whom similarly looked to the earth and to the heavens to find solutions to the woes of contemporary life.1 All three writers eschewed the technologically driven worlds we live in, warning us of the dire future ahead if we do not recast our understanding of our place in the universe, recognizing how we traverse within and across a world of which we are also a fundamental part. Declaring that “everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (1977, 3), Heidegger embarked on a stringent critique of technology as separating us from nature and thus from our understanding of being and the world. Nonetheless, as we’ve noted, Heidegger also indicated that it is not technology itself but its “essence,” or the ideas and principles that underpin it—our ways of “enframing” technology—that constitutes the real danger. We must, therefore, not pretend that we can solve the problem by somehow divorcing ourselves from technology. Rather, if we are able to be saved, the “saving power,” according to Heidegger, lies in a correction to our thinking (1977, 10–15). For Patocˇka, however, what is needed is not only a conceptual but a moral transformation, as encapsulated in his description of the transcendence of the 170

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self during the third movement, wherein we rethink our relationships not only to one another but to the world, recognizing ourselves as part of the wider universe and acting on this by extending our attention and care to the world at large. Kohák (1984) later referred to this as the recognition of nature as itself already inherently moral. The means for achieving such conceptual and moral transformations is seemingly quite easy, and yet, like many seemingly easy things, simultaneously very challenging and potentially incredibly profound. Simply put, Heidegger, Patocˇka, and Kohák each advocated for the vital need for all of us to spend time immersed in nature, both actively experiencing the natural world and thoughtfully reflecting on our place within it. Many Czechs wholeheartedly agree that “civilization” and, in particular, urban living extract a huge physical and psychological toll. They also suggest that the many negative facets of modern life, including pollution, traffic, poor air quality, and disease, are best countered by spending time outside the city. Indeed, spending time in the great outdoors is a veritable cultural obsession. In spring, summer, and autumn, just about everyone, but especially the middle-aged and elderly, heads off into the forest on mushroom expeditions, collecting bag after bag of wild fungi. Children take part in scouting or outdoor sports; the young and middle-aged engage in “tramping,” or hiking and camping in rural areas; and people who have recently been ill head off to health spas to soak up the natural healing properties of the beautiful outdoor surroundings. Those who have chaty (cottages) spend as much time as possible there, escaping the pressures of modern life. These activities are saturated with significance. The chata, for example, isn’t merely a place, though the actual physical structure of the cottage as well as the land it stands on are intensely important to those who own it. But even more importantly, the chata encapsulates the idea that by spending time away from the city we can return to what we have lost—regaining our knowledge and experiences of the world and engaging in ways of being that (re)connect us with the earth we live on and our own natural state. Similarly, tramping isn’t just about walking through nature and camping in tents or rudimentary wooden shelters. It is, at heart, the understanding that there is much to be gained by getting away from the trappings of technology and immersing yourself “in nature,” no matter how technologically mediated this activity may actually be. It is a form of traversing that intentionally focuses on attempting to reconnect with the heaven above our heads and the soil under our feet. For many Czechs, “being in nature” represents a radically different form of habitus, or way of being—one that stands apart from the experiences of both urban life, with all its technological opportunities and stresses, and village life,

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which can involve deeply intimate relations with one’s neighbors. (In many villages, residents necessarily maintain a certain kind of decorum so as not to be subject to community gossip. I know of village women who dare not sit down and read a book at home, in case they are spotted through the window and thought to be idly lolling about, instead of working.) Tramping, camping, or visiting a chata are unique for enabling one to escape the pressures of city life while relaxing the performance of village life, providing the possibility of a different kind of temporal engagement with the natural world, with others, and with oneself. During the state socialist period, getting away on a tramp or heading off to the chata had the added significance of offering a respite from the intensive oversight of socialist authorities (Franc and Knapík 2013, 348–55). Both then and now, people describe feeling free and relaxed, able to focus on their own work or on other projects, talk with friends, eat a good meal, or just enjoy the beauty of the countryside. There is a wide range of avenues Czechs can take up to experience such a sense of escape. Some are institutionally organized, while others are much more personal endeavors. In many cases, the actual practices are significantly more mundane than the symbolic meanings attached to them. There are several programs that take children, particularly those who live in the city, for extended excursions into nature. Perhaps the best known are school nature camps (prˇírodní tábory), which have exposed generations of Czech schoolchildren to the outdoors. For two or three weeks, entire classrooms are transported to the countryside, where students spend their mornings working on their usual lessons but devote their afternoons to going on nature walks, visiting parks, or playing outside. In a similar spirit, a number of private camping programs provide children with additional opportunities for outdoor education and endurance activities, such as living in a tent for a week. Parents good-humoredly complain that some of these camps stretch the idea of “communing with nature” a little too far. As one mother put it, at the camp her daughter attended, “the kids could only shower in rainwater they’d collected, which means they basically didn’t shower a single time for a whole week.” Other camps are even more intense, dropping groups of adolescent boys or girls off into the wilderness on their own, requiring them to pitch their own tents, build fires, cook their own dinners, and spend the night without any adult supervision (but with their mobile phones available in case of emergency), in the process (hopefully) discovering that they do in fact have the wherewithal to survive a night in the outdoors. Such experiences teach them not only how to “be in nature,” but also what, in Czech culture, constitutes “nature,” as well as how to value it (according to particular social and historical perspectives).

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Another popular option for communing with nature is a multiweek visit to one of the country’s health spas. Established primarily during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, dozens of spas are spread across the country, boasting of healthy air, therapeutic waters, and the benefits of “climate therapy” (klimaterapie), or exposure to the outdoors (Trnka 2017a, chap. 6). Breathing in the country air is widely considered to counteract the debilitating influences of urban smog, and being physically active outdoors through any sort of movement, from strolling along a country lane to horseback riding or swimming, is thought to “toughen” visitors by acclimatizing them to the effects of various kinds of weather, improving their immunity and strengthening their physical constitution. Other forays are much more individualized, be it heading out of the city for a forest walk or spending the weekend at one’s chata.

The Chata In both the media and popular discourse, the chata is depicted as a quintessentially Czech invention, though other cultures have similar institutions (for example, the Russian dacha [Caldwell 2010] or the New Zealand bach). Whether for a day, a week, or the whole summer, going to the chata means time spent away from your office or apartment, escaping the noise, commotion, and pollution of the city. It means tinkering in your own space, having a place to grow your own food, being able to walk through the countryside—in other words, immersing yourself in the midst of nature. A friend of mine who owns a chata in Šumava once spoke of how amazed she is by the beauty of the surrounding mountains. “It’s like a fairy tale out here,” she said to me when my husband and I came for a visit, “when there are feet and feet of snow covering everything and you cannot go anywhere or do anything, but just stare out the window at the snow.” She asked me to make sure I translated her words to my husband and tried to convey to him “the immense sense of calm you can experience in such a place.” Sometimes, however, the actual environs of a chata don’t seem radically different from what you would find in the city. In order to visit another friend’s chata, we took the Prague metro to the end of the line and found ourselves in an area that looked very much like an American strip mall—rather than “nature,” there was a highway lined by big multinational fast-food outlets such as KFC. After a short drive to the far end of the nearest town, we were shown to the family chata: a two-story, multiroom, modern home on a half-acre garden. My then ten-year-old daughter, who spent much of her childhood in New Zealand where it is not uncommon to find oneself the only person in a wooded area or

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along a strip of beach, kept asking, “Where is the countryside? When do we get away from all the people?” At times, the chata’s surroundings are as polluted as the urban environments that one is trying to escape. One elderly couple told me that when they were younger, they used to go every weekend to their chata in Krˇivoklát in central Bohemia. But amid the beautiful scenery and lovely walks, they had to deal with the dangers of breathing in pollution from a nearby charcoal processing plant. “It got frustrating having to always keep the chata’s windows shut so none of the dirty air could come in,” the wife, Mirka, complained. That said, places considered to be “in nature” are usually lauded for their unique (natural) beauty and beneficial effects, no matter how developed or polluted the actual setting may be—for, at the very least, they are seen as offering an escape from an even-morepolluted city. Like other forms of travel, such as tourism, the experience of simply being somewhere other than at home or at work can constitute a pleasurable sense of what John Urry calls a “departure” from one’s regular activities ([1990] 2002, 2; see also Graburn 1983). But escape does not necessarily connote rest (unless, by that, one means simply taking a break from urban or village life). A visit to the chata often results in industrious activity: gardening, cleaning, baking, sewing, tinkering with the house, fixing machinery, harvesting, and so on. An American expat told me that when she initially visited her husband’s family’s chata, she suggested putting up a hammock in the garden, only to be corrected by his mother, who told her that the garden was a place for working, not resting. This is not, however, to imply that visiting a chata is not relaxing; for the most part, it is. Rather, the work that is undertaken is done for yourself or your family and is thus seen as much more pleasurable and meaningful. Though it is utilitarian (focused on harvesting fruit or keeping the house clean), it is part of an activity aimed toward a larger purpose—namely, creating a space that exists outside the regular rhythms of domestic and working life. To draw a comparison to a popular American activity, it is one thing to wash dishes at home and another to wash them at a campsite, because camping is (supposed to be) fun. Even if the latter is much more onerous (at home there is often a dishwasher, or at least guaranteed hot water), washing dishes at a campsite is more meaningful because it is part of the larger experience of engaging with the outdoors. The work undertaken at the chata is similarly infused with a different kind of meaning. This is work that is focused on immediate and tangible effects, creating the space of the here and now and enabling people to live naturally in the moment as it is constituted before them. The garden that is cleared of debris

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becomes the place where you later sit, enjoying the twilight. Families consume the food they have grown in their own gardens, adding to their meals both flavor and pride. Traversing here involves a deep sense of engagement in the natural cycles and rhythms of production and harvest that are out of reach in the city. This is work, but work that grounds people in the land, in the cycles of the seasons, in the challenges, failures, and successes of their own endeavors and the foibles of nature. To borrow Kohák’s terms, this is work done under the stars.

The Reluctant Beekeeper Getting back to nature does not, however, mean ignoring the utility of technology. At the chata, an old-fashioned water pump is likely to be supplemented with piped water. Chaty on larger parcels of land might have a tractor nearby for hauling in produce. “Old” technologies combine with “new” ones to enable a different lifeworld, deemed more “natural” due to its inherent interconnections with the land. For my friend Mojmír, such a sense of reconnection with nature was spurred by his hobby of beekeeping. A banker in his fifties whose chata stands on over an acre of land that abuts the property of his mother- and father-in-law, Mojmír told me that he came up with the idea of setting up beehives after he stumbled on a TV documentary about beekeeping and realized that it was a very easy way of getting in touch with nature, achievable despite his very hectic schedule. “It takes very little investment of time,” he explained, “since you only need to tend to the bees every two or three weeks or so.” He looked up the details of beekeeping on the internet, read a few books, and then set to work. Setting up the hive was easy, but getting the bees to thrive in it was not. Despite his having read all he could about beekeeping on the internet, it was really only when his mother-in-law stepped in that things came together. In her youth, Mojmír’s mother-in-law, Sveˇtlana, was a reluctant beekeeper. Her family had owned agricultural land that was taken away during the state’s collectivization drive during the 1950s, when she was just out of primary school. The black mark on her family (as former owners of private land) meant she could no longer qualify for an academic-focused education. When she reached the age of fifteen, she was forced to drop out of school and take up a manual-labor apprenticeship. After considering her options, she decided to train as a beekeeper and worked in that profession until her marriage at the age of nineteen. Speaking to me when she was in her late seventies, she reflected, “I suppose it wasn’t so bad after all. I was outside. I learned how to do something. It was better than sitting in an office. But I would have preferred to go to an academic high school and study until I was eighteen.”

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More than sixty years after she got her training, she was teaching Mojmír and his nine-year-old son, Tomáš, how to take care of bees. They were just starting out and had only four hives of bees, totaling about six hundred insects. The operation needed to expand at least twice in size before they could collect any honey. When I visited them at the chata one weekend, Mojmír and Sveˇtlana spent hours together debating the sugar-water ratio of the bees’ feed. When they went out to the hives, the three of them huddled around the boxes, wearing their net-covered hats. Sveˇtlana carefully instructed Mojmír and Tomáš on how to lift the lid, move this, turn that, spray the bees with smoke just now. Later that afternoon, Mojmír avidly explained to his son that bees have been around for more than 120 million years, working collectively and never needing anyone to lead or instruct them. What we were observing in their hives today was thus “the bees’ true nature, as the bees would be doing the same thing if we left them alone.” Mojmír seemed truly in awe of how production could occur without the foibles of human relationships, later telling me, “Bees are the perfect workers. They never take vacations, they work from birth until death, working all the time. They aren’t distracted by sex or by power battles—they just work for the queen and produce honey.” Despite her initial reluctance to return to the skills she had once disliked so much, Sveˇtlana was extremely pleased to see Mojmír’s bees thrive. And even though there wasn’t yet any harvestable honey, the bees were already making an impact: next door, she had grown a bumper crop of peaches because of all the bees pollinating her garden. After they finished for the day, Mojmír told me that on a previous occasion when they had visited the hives together, Sveˇtlana had picked up a handful of bees in her bare hands, letting them slide down between her fingers, commenting on how “well behaved” they were as not a single one stung her. The amazement in his voice suggested he was describing something magical—not so much with respect to the bees’ behavior, but his mother-in-law’s. Shaking his head in admiration, he remarked, “You can’t learn how to do that on the internet. She knows so much.” For Mojmír, the bees represent a dual recapture of knowledge. He is rediscovering the knowledge of how bees behave, finding himself in awe of their almost mystical ability to manage themselves in ways radically disassociated from the working world that he regularly inhabits. He is similarly inspired by his motherin-law’s long-repressed knowledge of how to interact with bees. Both of these facets—the natural world’s astounding beauty and complexity and the need to reclaim humans’ lost knowledge of nature—drive not only Mojmír’s encounters with the outdoors, but those of many Czechs.

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FIGURE 6.1. Making the most of the outdoors, even in the central city. Photograph by the author.

Playing Cowboys and Indians For those like Mojmír who have the means to own a cottage, the chata enables a space outside the usual pressures and exigencies of daily life, a place where one can “return” to old rhythms and old knowledge (with or without added insights gleaned from the internet). That said, there are many people who do not have access to a family cottage and have to find other ways of fostering engagements with nature. Many who live in urban apartments make frequent use of public parks in order to walk or picnic outdoors, or rent a small garden where they can “breathe good air” while growing their own vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Others who are lucky enough to own city houses on small plots of land focus their labor on the outdoor spaces around their homes, growing vegetables, pruning fruit trees, and in the summer evenings, sitting outside to “grill,” or barbecue. But perhaps the most colorful and experientially distinctive attempts to restore society’s disconnection from nature occur at trampers’ settlements. Throughout the summer and early autumn, tramping camps dot the natural landscape. Tents, tepees, and ramshackle wooden cottages punctuate forests and fields. Clusters of friends, often donning camping or military-themed gear, their backpacks filled with food and drink, gather on public transport as they make their escape from the city.

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Since at least the interwar period, youths and young adults—mainly but not exclusively young working-class men—have gravitated toward tramping as a way of cutting loose from conventional society and recreating for themselves the fantastical adventures of cowboys, Indians, and other “outlaw” figures.2 Upholding the ideals of living close to the land and working collectively (often as members of a tribe or frontier community), early trampers fostered alternative social collectives, promoting artistic freedom, creativity, friendship, and egalitarianism. Founding temporary settlements, or osady, in rural spaces and developing identifiable slang and music, their regular journeys to the countryside were hailed for releasing them—or, at the very least, temporarily distancing them—from the demands and expectations of urban life. Both then and now, Czech tramping iconography has been dominated by mythical figures from the American Wild West. Tapping into a global media imaginary of the late nineteenth-century American frontier, many of the images trampers draw on stem from dime-store novels and cinematic fantasies of the Wild West that are produced not only in the United States but also in Germany, where similar imaginative reenactments of “Indian lifeways” remain popular today (Buscombe 2006, 215; Eddy 2014). Among these are the books of the prolific and

FIGURE 6.2. Trampers’ settlement in Korno, Beroun. Photograph by ŠJu˚, available on Wikimedia Commons.

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hugely popular late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century German novelist Karl May. May’s novels, of which an estimated two hundred million copies have been sold worldwide (Connolly 2012), include a widely beloved adventure series about a (fictional) Apache chief, Winnetou, and his loyal German friend, Old Shatterhand. The circulation of images such as Winnetou and Old Shatterhand throughout central Europe has shaped, and continues to shape, visions of not only what the Wild West may have looked like but, just as significantly, what it might be made to stand for, in terms of providing a counterpoint to contemporary sociality, urbanity, and society’s perceived detachment from nature. Historically, the first groups of Czechoslovak trampers often integrated both cowboy-themed items and discarded military gear into their apparel, transforming old hats into mock Stetsons, fashioning sheriffs’ brass stars, and donning wide, studded belts (Pohunek 2011, 21). Some communities used so-called “sheriffs” to maintain law and order, but many focused on Native American motifs, setting up campsites around a totem pole, for example. The movement was symbolized by the “Indian-inspired” image of a circle with buffalo horns, and many tramping settlements took part in what they referred to as potlatches, or collective meetings around the campfire, that were infused with “sacred” status (Pohunek 2011, 22). While today the symbolic associations with cowboys have waned, calls on Indian identity abound, with contemporary indiánské tábory (Indian camps) gaining in popularity. Some of these are highly organized, commercial affairs that advertise on the internet and would be unrecognizable in terms of the egalitarian ethos of the early tramping movement, but others are made up of loosely organized collectives of friends and acquaintances who join together to regularly reenact their understandings and fantasies of Native American ways of life. I visited one popular reenactment site just outside Cˇesky´ Krumlov, where a yearly gathering of “Indians” is held in early autumn. The settlement’s origins are modest—in the late 1970s, four schoolboys frequently met up to “play cowboys and Indians” together in a field near their homes, one of their mothers explained. As the boys grew, so did their games. When they reached adulthood in the early 1990s, they pooled together enough funds to purchase their own parcel of the land. There, their “games” continued but on a much larger scale, as people started to journey from all across the country to partake in weekend-long reenactments of Indian life. On a weekend in September 2010 when I visited the camp, its organizers estimated there were more than two hundred men, women, and children on-site. I arrived at the height of the activities on the final day to find all of the men, but only a few of the women and children, dressed in a mixture of military-style clothing and so-called “Indian costumes,” most of which were made up of various

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mismatched Western-style items. By the time I arrived, it was coming up on late afternoon and the women were taking a break, many of them assembled around an open fire, roasting (store-bought) sausages for an afternoon snack. Their children ran around wearing feathered headgear, colored “war paint” dabbed across their faces. The men, however, were engaged in much more serious pursuits, the camp’s organizers explained. About seventy men were competing in a two-day trial of their field skills, which culminated in an obstacle course composed of “Indian” challenges, such as shooting arrows at targets and attempting to spear a cardboard bison that two men pulled across a field along a metal line. That night, the winners of the various challenges were awarded commemorative plaques and trophies, as well as more coveted prizes such as feather headdresses. The extra value accorded to objects, events, or behaviors deemed “actually Indian” was significant. While for most participants visiting Indian camps constitutes a one-off or occasionally repeated event, those who are very involved in reenacting Indian ways of life often participate in multiple camps each summer, traveling from one site to another across the Czech Republic. These more dedicated members are easily identified, as they don full-length, coordinated Indian costumes that mirror the clothing of the specific Native American tribes with which they explicitly identify. In Cˇesky´ Krumlov, a few of these members had also slept in tepees that they had erected, in contrast to the majority of the camp’s participants, who had spent the previous night in regular tents. When I first remarked on this minority group’s striking appearance to Olga, the wife of one of the camp’s organizers who has been involved in hosting these annual meetings for nearly a decade, she seemed embarrassed and responded, “We do it just to have fun, but some of these guys take it very seriously.” But later, when I asked Olga what she’d enjoyed most about the weekend, she recounted two events that had struck her as “really special.” One was when the whole group collectively lit the central campfire by rubbing two sticks together. The other occurred early on the first morning, when some of the more devoted male participants rode up on horses and performed what she referred to as a “ritual Indian greeting.” “That was really amazing,” she said, with a notable tone of reverence. In Anglo-Saxon countries such attempts at cultural recreation are likely to be deemed offensive due to their stereotypification, simplification, and frequent misrepresentation of Native American cultures. Such concerns are not, however, common in Czech society, and for Olga (and, I gathered, for several other of the camp’s participants) these acts were both thought to be “fun” and at times met with awe and admiration for seemingly bringing the participants closer to being “at one” with nature.

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Hand in hand with the desire to get closer to nature through Indian reenactments is the longing to cultivate and maintain a collective ethos derived from the (imagined) social mores of the American Wild West. Inspired by images in Western novels and films, trampers often uphold the Wild West as emblematic of equality and rugged individualism as well as a collective sense of justice (cf. Hartmut 1990; Mitchell 1996). The frontier is depicted as a site of “freedom,” where the State and the Law did not meddle so much in individuals’ lives and aspirations, but where men nevertheless endeavored to uphold morality and engage in ethical conduct. Czech tramping sites evoke these ideals through their use of symbols of “Indian” and “cowboy” culture, as well as of the American culture within which Indians and cowboys are imagined to have operated. Thus campsites and other areas used by trampers were historically often endowed with American monikers such as “Idaho,” “Florida,” or “Utah,” or, even more revealingly, (in English) “Liberty.” Of course, one can never truly reenact actual Indian lifeways, much less “become” a Native American, and the multiple discrepancies and disjunctures that occur as part of Indian reenactments are par for the course; everyone is fully aware that what they are performing is a fantasy. Ruptures in the enactment are expected and, in fact, ironically enable the moments when the performance appears more closely aligned with an (imagined) Indian reality to strike participants as “amazing.” At the Cˇesky´ Krumlov Indian camp, for example, the fact that the sausages roasted over the open fire were first purchased at a local supermarket did not interrupt participants’ sense of the camp as a performance of “Indianness,” but rather heightened the impact of seemingly more “authentic” moments, such as the Indian ritual greeting on horseback or the lighting of the campfire by rubbing two sticks together (an act that remains for many an iconic childhood fantasy of what it means to “be an Indian”). Discrepancies, moreover, exist not only in people’s clothing (due to the general mismatch of items) and in their behavior, but also in the very environments they inhabit. Just as it is clear to everyone that Native American squaws did not buy food and drink at the supermarket, no one considers the natural environs that Czech trampers move through to reflect the actual environment of the American Wild West. However, as the names of tramping sites such as “Idaho” and “Florida” suggest, trampers endeavor not only to get close to the land they stand on, but also to imaginatively transform it into the far-off places where they would rather be. In doing so, they further romanticize and exoticize the landscape. Through the construction of activities like the obstacle course with its bison spearing, they make a distinctly cultivated landscape—a field on the outskirts of a suburban housing development, for example—appear more treacherous, suggesting that

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one must be prepared in case one suddenly encounters a dangerous (albeit cardboard) wild animal crossing one’s path. Getting closer to nature in this case thus requires nature to be explicitly reconstructed, so that the wild becomes truly wild and a landscape that is familiar and normally experienced as unassuming becomes overlaid with images of the fantasized frontier. Like the performance of “Indianness” that cannot go wrong because mistakes are tolerated and indeed expected, the highly constructed nature of this “natural space” is not a failing. Rather, it is precisely because the “Czech Wild West” is recognized as necessarily a collective fabrication that it becomes the staging ground for imaginative play and enables its participants to move toward a different sense of themselves in relation to nature.

Philosophical Perspectives The participants in the Indian reenactment in Cˇesky´ Krumlov obviously share a very imaginative idea of what nature is. To say this is not to differentiate them from those who get to know nature through school camps, spas, or chaty, but rather to emphasize their commonality. In fact, the Indian reenactments throw into relief what is happening across all of these sites in terms of the social construction of nature. Our understandings of “nature” are always cultural. As Bruno Latour (1993) pointed out in his explication of “purification,” it is human thinking— specifically human acts of categorization—that divides the cultural and the natural into two distinct entities, rather than what exists in the world per se. Instead of the world being characterized by a nature-culture divide, it is, according to Latour, made up of nature-culture hybrids. Today we argue over when the Anthropocene began, but the idea that the earth has been fundamentally altered because of human activity is not in question. In each case of going “back to nature,” be it school camps, spas, chaty, or tramping campsites, we can see how nature is constructed out of cultural activity and, moreover, the central roles that technology—from the very construction of the house we call a chata or the car we drive to get to it, to websites where we find out how to set up a beehive or get ideas on where to go for a decent tramp—plays in enabling us to commune with nature. If we recognize this as not a criticism but merely a statement of fact, where does it leave us? How do we “return to nature” if there is no such bedrock as “the natural” to return to? Kohák, Patocˇka, and Heidegger, each of whom recognized the world as always necessarily historically constituted, are again useful here in terms of their shared emphasis on recognizing degrees of technologization,

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as well as the importance they placed on one’s outlook and thinking about the world and technology’s place within it. Heidegger clearly embraced the countryside as a counterpoint to the woes of urban living. He often retreated to his family “Hütte” or hut—what one would call a chata in Czech—in the Black Forest Mountains of southern Germany. There he would write, think, and generally separate himself from the bustle of university life in Freiburg. He also encouraged his staff and students to take part in nature camps, where they would be involved in a mixture of manual labor and philosophical contemplation (often while wearing SS or Brownshirt uniforms); according to the German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski, the “scholars’ camp” that Heidegger initiated “was intended to be a mixture of a scout camp and Platonic academy” (quoted in de Beistegui 2005, 159). Heidegger’s most comprehensive articulation of the importance of nature appears in his writing about the “fourfold”—the earth, the sky, mortals, and divinities. Heidegger posited the fourfold as the central elements of the universe that collectively create the conditions for being. They come together in phenomena such as material objects; arguably, the most famous example of this is Heidegger’s depiction of a jug in “The Thing”: “In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell. . . . In the gift of the [jug’s] outpouring, mortals and divinities each dwell in their different ways. . . . In the gift of the outpouring earth and sky, divinities and mortals dwell together all at once. These four, at one because of what they themselves are, belong together. Preceding everything that is present, they are enfolded into a single fourfold” ([1971] 2001d, 170–71). As Heidegger evokes in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” the earth and sky are just as central as humans (and divinities) within this understanding of being: Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal. . . . The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year’s seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether. . . . The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead. . . . The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. . . . This simple oneness of the four we call the fourfold. Mortals are in the fourfold by dwelling. ([1971] 2001a, 147–48) Recognition of the fourfold requires breaking away from what Heidegger envisioned as the conformity of thinking and acting demanded by das Man. Heidegger attempted to elucidate how to go about making such a radical break

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in many of his texts, including through his invitation to the readers of his book What Is Called Thinking? to move away from the assumptions about the world and our place in nature that we have learned from science, and instead go out and meet a tree for ourselves: We stand outside of science. Instead we stand before a tree in bloom, for example—and the tree stands before us. The tree faces us. The tree and we meet one another, as the tree stands there and we stand face to face with it. As we are in this relation of one to the other and before the other, the tree and we are. . . . Where have we leapt? . . . On that soil upon which we live and die, if we are honest with ourselves. A curious, indeed unearthly thing that we must first leap onto the soil on which we really stand. . . . When we think through what this is, that a tree in bloom presents itself to us so that we can come and stand face to face with it, the thing that matters first and foremost, and finally, is not to drop the tree in bloom, but for once let it stand where it stands. (1968, 41–44) Some of these depictions echo Heidegger’s earlier use of natural images in Being and Time to describe the disclosing of ideas. For example, Heidegger repeatedly used the image of country “paths” (see Gadamer 1979) that lead to a “clearing” (in German, Lichtung—which is commonly used to refer to a clearing or glade in the forest) where light is let in and an understanding of the world is thus imparted (Heidegger [1953] 2010, 129). Unlike city streets, the paths that Heidegger embraced crisscross the countryside, not necessarily directed toward a particular end point but creating a space for wandering. Such wandering enables both discovery and the possibility of getting lost as part of the processes of walking, thinking, or, better yet, walking and thinking together. This does not mean that Heidegger eschewed technology. Instead, as we have noted, he argued for both the yes and the no of embracing technology. Heidegger did not, however, give us a clear-cut means of weighing up our relationship to technology, such as an amount, a set of characteristics, or a formula we can use to assess our dependence. Rather, arguing that we need to be attentive to the underlying mode of calculative thinking that our use of technology derives from, he promoted a return to meditative thinking, which will lead us to greater awareness of our place within the universe. If we take this as our starting point, we can be attentive to the ways that roasting supermarket sausages over a campfire ties in with capitalist profit making, but also recognize our own participation in roasting sausages as a moment of stepping out of calculative thinking to contemplate other modes of interrelationality with the earth, the heavens, and one another.

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But if this is our starting point, then where might our end point lie? For the most part, Heidegger refrained from directing where meditative thinking should take us. As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote, invoking again the metaphor of paths, “When Heidegger, towards the end of his life, looked back upon what he had achieved, and when he planned a kind of introduction to the complete edition of his works that he prepared, he chose as its motto: ‘Paths, not works.’ Paths (Wege) are there to be walked upon, to be left behind and to bring you forward; they are not something static on which you can rest or to which you can refer” (1979, 89). However, there are some significant exceptions. As previously noted, in Discourse on Thinking, Heidegger directed us along a very unilinear view of the meaning of the earth, proposing that meditating on the soil beneath our feet would lead us to recognize the power of autochthony and the need for Germans to reclaim their homeland. In his words, “We grow thoughtful and ask: does not the flourishing of any genuine work depend upon its roots in a native soil?” (Heidegger [1959] 1966, 47). Following this, Heidegger went on to interpret and endorse Hebel’s message that, “[as] the poet means to say: ‘For a truly joyous and salutary human work to flourish, man must be able to mount from the depth of his home ground up into the ether’ ” (47). Here Heidegger’s return to nature heralded prejudice and hatred of the nonautochthonous, however they come to be classified as such. Patocˇka offers us a different perspective. For him, our recognition of the significance of nature is part of a larger realization of ourselves as existing within the world as a whole and the need for us to work for the good of the universe. In many ways, Patocˇka’s delineation of the world in which being takes place appears to mirror Heidegger’s, but with human interrelationality replacing the divinities. First there is the earth: The referent of our personal acting, realizing stream—which is a movement in the most primordial sense of the word, a movement lived from within—is the unmoving constant substrate—the earth. . . . The earth is the prototype of everything massive, corporeal, material; it is the universal body of which all things are in some sense a part. . . . The earth rules the heights and the depth. . . . The earth, however, is the power even in everything living which draws on it, once again, for all its strivings against it. . . . Ultimately, it is she, with her elements, that sustains life, that is life as well as something other than life. She bears it, sustains it, lets it arise and perish. (Patocˇka [1967] 1989, 255–56) Next there are the heavens: “The heavens, the light, the heavenly lights and bodies, all that encloses our horizon without closing it in. . . . As the earth gives

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to everything primarily its ‘where,’ the heavens give its ‘when,’ for the sky is the sphere of light and darkness, of the day and the night and of their coming and passing” (Patocˇka [1967] 1989, 256). Finally, there is interrelationality and our contact with others. These three elements come together to create our world: “Contact with others is the primordial, most important component of the center of the natural world whose ground is the earth and whose periphery is the sky” (Patocˇka [1967] 1989, 258). What is distinct about Patocˇka’s vision is that he goes a step further than Heidegger, moving beyond recognizing the world-as-it-is (i.e., ontology) to taking a moral stance and declaring that our care for ourselves is ultimately aimed toward transcending the self and extending care to the whole. As Patocˇka put it, “Thus at the center of our world the point is to reach from a merely given life to the emergence of a true life, and that is achieved in the movement that shakes . . . our bondage to life . . . [and] then . . . positively presents the essential—as life universal, giving birth to all in all, evoking life in the other, a self-transcendence toward the other and with him again to infinity” ([1967] 1989, 253). Only by following this route to transcendence, Patocˇka suggested, can a human being reach the point where he or she “can live in truth, can choose between life in the anxiety of its roles and needs and life in relation to the world,” ultimately enabling the self to finally “be at home with itself ” ([1995] 1998, 177). This is, moreover, for Patocˇka, the defining quality of what makes us human. All of the living elements in the world are not equal, and in Patocˇka’s vision, human beings occupy a special role given their ability to choose to overcome themselves for the benefit of the larger whole (Tucker 2000, chap. 3). Emblematic of Patocˇka’s third movement, acts of transcendence—including the interrelational modes of sex, love, care, pleasure, and being in nature we have considered here—are both a part of and surpass everyday living, as one transcends not only the self but also others as others with whom we have distinct relationships, to engage with the world as it is. Like movement itself (Lepecki 2006, 124), such transcendence is ephemeral, a space we move in and out of, in which our very presence signals its absence. It is through cultivation of our conceptual (following Heidegger) and moral (following Patocˇka) awareness that we may begin to extend and refine our visitation here. This kind of engagement with nature and the cosmos, echoes of which reverberate through Kohák’s contemporary writing, shifts us away from national identities and ethnic boundaries and into a more cosmopolitan view of the soil under our feet as one aspect of a universe with which we are united. The concerns over Germans returning to their homelands that troubled Heidegger are eclipsed by a vision of the world as homeland, a vision in which defining differences between countries holds little meaning. After all, as the trampers’ enactments of their

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place in nature suggest, how do we know that it is the soil of Cˇesky´ Krumlov under our feet, when it could just as well be Idaho we are standing on? In distinct ways, then, Heidegger’s articulation of the fourfold and Patocˇka’s third movement (as well Kohák’s [1984] more recent examination of “the moral sense of nature”) offer us visions of the self not only as living on or in the world, but as united with the world. And this unity is why technology must be kept in its place.

Embracing the Untouched in the Age of the Anthropocene For many Czechs, the best way to come to terms with technology is to embrace the outdoors, even though such an embrace is necessarily technologically mediated. The promise of a “timeless nature” that exists alongside but outside the hustle and bustle of everyday life is ironic, as the very ground on which we stand is permeated with human intervention. Many Czechs, and not only philosophers, are, however, very aware of this, noting how environmental damage has necessarily changed the “nature” to which we are attempting to return. “The Communists caused it,” my acquaintance Michal, the taxi driver, declared to me as he described the flood damage that occurred in Prague in 2002. At first I was taken aback, as the Communists were hardly in power then, but he explained that he meant that during state socialism, “the government eliminated many of the natural barriers that protected land from flooding. They didn’t just hurt people; they hurt nature as well. They rearranged nature, getting rid of things that had been around for hundreds of years and not thinking about the damage it might do.” The earth is shaped by us, and never again will nature be entirely natural. The solution to the detriments of technology cannot be embracing an antitechnological stance. Rather, in saying yes and no to technology as Heidegger proposed, we must remain attentive to how taking part in different kinds of technologically mediated engagements with the natural world can reveal lifeworlds that everyday urban living cannot provide. Many of the thinkers whose writings we have engaged with in this book advocated immersing ourselves in nature as a means of getting a glimpse of another kind of way of being, one that we are otherwise in danger of becoming blind to. For Heidegger, recognition of the fourfold forces us to acknowledge the dangers of enframing: it is hard to continue to mistake the earth for “a gigantic gasoline station, and energy source for modern technology and industry” ([1959] 1966, 50) if we recognize the fundamental interrelation of humans, the earth, the sky, and the divinities. For Patocˇka, recognition of our interrelationship with the

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earth, the heavens, and others reveals to us how human destiny is a vital part of the universe; care for the soul is fundamentally connected here with care for the other, and through this act, with care for the whole or totality. Humans have always created objects in the world, be it a hammer or a computer. Dwelling is inherently about building. Engaging in a life lived close, or closer, to nature does not mean living without technology. Nor will such a life solve all of our problems (Kohák 1984). But it can relieve some of technologically driven society’s pressures. One can still become unhealthy from eating too much homegrown produce, especially if one feels compelled to make pastries out of it every day. In a chata, people get drunk, fights happen, children are hurt, and marriages can come to an end, just as they do in cities or villages. Nonetheless, nature—however mediated it may be—can provide a site for different forms of living, including different modes of interaction with oneself, with others, and with the soil we ultimately stand on. It affords us new paths to traverse, reconstituting ourselves outside cityscapes’ and villagescapes’ demands on personhood. Having to dash back and forth to enable children’s multiple after-school activities; the endless consumption of information, news, and entertainment on the internet; the endless consumption of one beer after another; and the inculcation of career-focused values do not disappear but fade a little against the horizon as we come to embrace other ways of thinking and moving in the world, taking us both into and beyond the self, so that we remember that being is always in fact becoming.3 A life is never lived to its finitude while it is being lived. We live our life by traversing, necessarily moving from one place to another. We move toward ourselves, we move toward others, or shy away. We may walk in unison or turn to pace in a different direction, retreading the footsteps of those who came before us, laying down paths for those who will come next. However we choose—and are able—to move, the body’s dynamism propels us through ever-changing spaces and times. At times decidedly striding forward with purpose, and at others being carried along, to be alive requires movement. Culture, history, corporeality, and technology mold the possibilities of our embodied dynamism, as do the constraints and freedoms of love, care, violence, and the needs and attentiveness of others. Traversing grounds us in the relationships that make us who we are, compels us to constitute a life of work and engagement with the world of daily living, and propels us to look toward the possibilities of something even greater. Traversing is our way both of navigating our thrownness and of trying to surpass it, however fleetingly. Embracing nature—however historically, culturally, and technologically mediated that “nature” is—is one possible route toward reconnection and toward

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grasping a glimpse of what lies both beyond and within the quotidian tasks and worries that often largely structure our everyday existence. So too, potentially, is embracing a lover, caring for a child, or converting a garden party into an Event that reconstitutes our sense of space and time. Each of these acts holds within it the possibility of enabling us to transcend the ordinary, just long enough to see where it is that we are actually (momentarily) standing. What we come back with enables us to live as thoughtfully as we can, amid both the power lines and the stars.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Geertz didn’t actually coin the phrase “deep hanging out” but was responding to the negative connotations associated with it in Clifford’s book, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Clifford (1997, 351), in turn, offers a different origin point, tracing the first use of “deep hanging out” to a 1994 conference at which Renato Rosaldo used the phrase to question how much engagement is sufficient to generate ethnographic knowledge. 2. Husserl wrote to a former student later that year, “The perfect conclusion to this supposed bosom friendship of two philosophers was his [Heidegger’s] very public, very theatrical entrance into the Nazi Party on May 1 [actually May 3]. Prior to that there was his self-initiated break in relations with me—in fact, soon after his appointment at Freiburg—and, over the last few years, his anti-Semitism, which he came to express with increasing vigor—even against the coterie of his most enthusiastic students, as well as around the department” (Husserl [1933] 2007). 3. Similar moves were later carried out by anthropologists employing Heidegger’s work (e.g., Throop 2010; Zigon 2009, 2018). 4. In many respects, it seems particularly apt to use the work of a Czech philosopher to examine Czech culture, but while there is a clear connection between the social and cultural milieu out of which Patocˇka developed his ideas and many of the phenomena described in this book, it is also important to note that, like Heidegger, Patocˇka intended his ideas to be applicable to the human condition, and it is in this spirit that I adopt, interrogate, and experiment with them here. 1. FOOTSTEPS THROUGH THE CITY

1. But there exist excellent accounts of these histories, for example at Prague’s Jewish Museum. 2. It was unclear whether Viktor was referring to Communist control of Czechoslovakia or of Russia. Either way, he was incorrect, as by the time Orwell finished writing 1984 in December 1948, the Communist Party had already been in power for almost a year in Czechoslovakia. The party had obviously been in power in Russia for much longer, predating the publication of both Animal Farm (in 1945) and 1984. 2. DIGITAL DWELLING

1. Being connected does not, however, mean being reliably connected, and there are reports of significant problems with sustained connectivity outside major urban centers. 2. The Sokol was a popular, collective gymnastics organization that enabled children, men, and women of various ages to exercise together. Founded in 1862, it was closely linked to the nationalist movement (Nolte 1993). While the Sokol as an organization was suspended during state socialism, gymnastics classes remained popular, and many people referred to them as “Sokol” even though they were no longer associated with this organization. 191

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6. RECONNECTION

1. In “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel takes up similar issues regarding the dangers of technology, but unlike Heidegger, Patocˇka, and Kohák, he does not elaborate on the need for a philosophical reconnection with nature. Instead, Havel focuses on how we might counter technological destruction by means of “a moral reconstitution of society” that will enable “the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love” ([1978] 1990, 117, 118). 2. The anthropologist Jan Pohunek suggests that tramping began immediately prior to World War I, with “a significant increase after the end of the First World War” (2011, 20). In contrast, Milan Knižák (2011, 27), the general director of the National Gallery and curator of a major exhibition on tramping, locates the start of the phenomenon after World War I. Both agree, however, that tramping was well established by the 1920s and grew in popularity during the 1930s. Participation remained strong throughout the socialist period, when tramping was eyed suspiciously by the authorities. While many of the individuals who took part in the early tramping movement of the 1920s were avid supporters of the socialist movement, trampers’ clubs soon swelled to include a broader class base, and by the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s had adopted an outwardly nonpolitical stance (Knižák 2011; Pohunek 2011). Nonetheless, trampers were subject to disapproval and, in some cases, harassment by Communist authorities for what were deemed to be their antisocial attitudes and activities (see also Trnka 2015, 290). 3. As Heidegger put it, “As long as Dasein is, something is always still outstanding: what it can and will be” ([1953] 2010, 224).

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Index

Page numbers in bold refer to images. affective states. See moods agency, 4, 58, 59, 67, 71, 78–79 men, 82, 95, 97 women, 18, 139 alcohol, 138, 147, 154 beer and wine, 91, 127, 149, 155, 156, 157–59, 158, 160, 162, 163, 166–67, 188 conviviality, 159–63 curing alcoholism, 165–66, 167–68 cutting back, 163–65 Czech alcohol consumption, 160, 166 as a mode of traversing, 155–57, 161, 163, 167–68, 169 algorithms, 78 American Wild West, 178, 179, 181–82 See also Native American lifeways ArcelorMittal Ostrava, 36–37 Aristotle, 83 autochthony, 33–34, 52, 53, 185 ballroom dance classes, 80–84, 107–8 clothing requirements, 89 erotics, 92–95, 107 etiquette and politesse, 81, 85, 89–90 heterosociality, 82, 84–86, 90–92 learning to dance, 88–89, 91 parent and parent-child interaction, 84–85, 86, 87, 90, 91–92 the stampede and promenade, 86–89, 87, 94 beekeeping, 175–76 being-in-the-world, 3, 4, 5, 17, 76–77, 78–79, 188 cultural contexts, 6–7 food and drink, 146, 161, 168–69 Heidegger’s philosophy, 5, 13–14, 15, 16, 56, 58, 83, 116, 185 Patocˇka’s philosophy, 5, 14–16, 83, 116, 185–86 See also corporeality; dwelling; interrelationality; movement; time and space; traversing being-with-one-another. See interrelationality books, 61–62

bridges, 29 burcˇák, 158, 158–59 calculative thinking, 33, 56–57, 67, 78, 184 capitalism, 16, 24, 25, 37, 41, 52, 113, 117, 126–27, 184 care, 56, 186 temporalities, 134–36 care for the soul, 39, 115–18, 186 See also living in truth; self-realization censorship, 12, 46, 59 Cˇeský Krumlov, 24, 35, 44–48, 159, 179, 180, 181, 182, 187 Charles IV, King of Bohemia (later Holy Roman Emperor), 25, 26, 34, 37, 43 Charta 77 (Charter 77), 12 chaty (cottages), 11, 124, 125, 134, 153, 160, 162, 173–75, 176 escaping pressures of city life, 19, 171, 172, 175, 177, 183, 188 getting back to nature, 171, 173, 182, 188 utility of technology, 175, 182 children after-school activities, 128, 128–29, 135 citizenship, 10 games, 70–71, 72 multiethnic children, 120–21 names, 120 online activities, 62, 71, 72 outdoor activities and education, 171, 172 relationship with fathers, 77, 92, 99, 100, 103, 129, 130, 133–34, 135 relationship with mothers, 14, 83, 100, 115, 116, 129–32, 133–34 See also schooling choice, 13–14, 29, 52, 59 Christianity, in the contemporary state, 23, 33, 38, 51–52 cities, 34 citizen-state relationship, 23–24, 38–41, 43, 48, 52 See also Communism; state socialism class, 43, 75, 81, 119, 120, 148, 149, 178

205

206

INDEX

collective movements, 5, 24, 40, 82, 146 food and drink, 148–51, 160, 166 Communism, 9, 10, 34–35, 36–37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 46, 54, 65, 113–14, 125 See also state socialism consciousness, 11 conviviality, 159–63 corporate social responsibility, 37 corporeality, 3, 4, 5, 14, 15, 19, 30, 50, 55, 58, 83, 100, 188 corruption, 35, 41, 43–44 critical thinking, 6, 15 culture, 4 cultural intimacy, 149 cultural values and technology use, 111 mediation of movement, 4, 16, 19, 30, 188 Czech national identity, 85, 149 Czechoslovak Community Party, 114 Czech Republic history, 16, 20–21, 23, 25–29, 33–35, 47 lives of contemporary citizens, 4, 10–11, 16–19 religion, 38, 48 Czech Statehood Day, 21, 51 dance classes. See ballroom dance classes Dasein, 4–5, 13–14, 116, 145 das Man, 13, 14, 116, 183 deep hanging out, 7, 9 Derrida, Jacques, 12 digital natives, 54–55 digital technology use, 57–58 for entertainment, 60–61, 63–64, 66–67 for school studies and interactions, 60, 62, 65–66 by teenage boys, 59–69 time constraints, 61, 62, 66–67, 73 See also gaming; internet access and use; online environments dignity and indignity, 25, 40–42, 43 divorce, 112, 123, 141 domestic violence, 82, 101–2 toward children, 102, 103 drink. See alcohol; food and drink Dry February campaign, 166 Dubcˇek, Alexander, 9 Duka, Dominik, 52 dwelling, 4, 13, 19, 29, 30, 56, 57, 59, 79, 183 building and thinking, 5, 56, 57, 188 digital dwelling, 57–58, 63, 76–77, 78 economic disparities, 43 Prague, 24–25 email, 73–74

embodiment. See corporeality enframing, 56–57 Engels, Friedrich, 114 English language, 64, 66, 69, 70, 76, 77 erotica, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105–9 in dance classes, 92–95, 107 ethnographic fieldwork, 6–9 short-term fieldwork limitations, 9 etiquette and politesse, 81, 85, 89–90, 160 “eureka” moments in fieldwork, 7 exclusion, 24, 43–44, 47–53 Facebook, 64–65, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 88 family affective relations within the family, 113, 115, 116–17, 118 care of older generations, 77, 135, 136–39, 140, 141 changing economic aspects, 122–24, 128–29, 141 changing forms, 112–13, 119, 126 contextual definitions, 118–20 Czech marriages, children and names, 120–22 European ideal, 126–29 food and drink, 135–36, 148, 152–53 homes, 124–26 roles and obligations, 77, 118, 124, 126, 129, 139, 140, 141, 142 self-realization, 113, 117–18, 120, 126, 129, 131, 137, 139, 141–42, 153 temporalities of care, 134–36 “traditional” family, 112 traversing through time, 139–41 twenty-first-century families, 113, 141 See also children; parents fathers and fatherhood, 80, 84, 91, 125–26, 137–39 child care and relationship with children, 77, 92, 99, 100, 103, 129, 130, 133–34, 135 constraints on time with family, 134–36 physical force against children, 102–3 femininity, 106 fertility rituals, 100 Florián, Petr (Pedro), 69–70 food and drink alteration to modes of traversing, 147, 155–57, 161, 163, 167–69 as collective movements, 148–51, 160, 166 emotional and sensory engagement, 146–48 a garden party, 154–55 health aspects, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 160, 162 history, 143–45

INDEX

sociality and shared pleasures, 149, 151–55, 159–63, 168–69 traditional Czech dishes, 150, 150–51, 152 See also alcohol fourfold, 57, 182–85, 187 freedom, 19, 40, 41, 188 frontier communities, 178, 181 link to material conditions, 43 of movement, 62 in online environments, 55, 58–59, 62–65, 72, 74, 76, 77–78 with respect to food and drink, 152, 153–54, 160 gaming, 2, 60, 61, 63–64, 69–72, 74, 77, 78 Geertz, Clifford, 6–7, 9 “Being There,” 7 gendered socialities, 82, 95 invitation to dance, 86–87 Google Maps, 1–2 grandparents, 68, 75, 99–100, 136 relationship with grandchildren, 130, 137, 139 guilt, 29 Gypsies. See Roma happiness, 131–33 Havel, Václav, 6, 24, 39, 47, 52 concerns about technology use, 55, 58 “The Power of the Powerless,” 6, 40–41 health spas, 173 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 16, 19, 34, 39, 83, 108, 115, 142, 146, 163 advocacy of nature, 170, 171, 183–85 Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), 5, 11–12, 14, 145, 184 choice making, 13–14, 29, 52 concerns about technology, 29, 55–59, 77–78, 170, 182, 184 Discourse on Thinking, 33, 52–53, 185 embodied approach, 15 fourfold, 57, 183–84, 187 hammer metaphor, 5, 14, 83, 116, 117 Husserl’s personal relations, 11–12 Nazism, 12, 29, 33, 53 situatedness of existence, 4–5, 13, 29 thrownness, 14, 29 What Is Called Thinking, 184 See also Dasein; das Man heterosexuality, 96, 97 in dance classes, 82, 84–86, 90–92 history, 3, 4, 16, 19, 29, 52, 182, 188 Czech Republic, 16, 20–21, 23, 25–29, 33–35, 47

207

Holocaust, 45 homeland, 52–53, 56, 185, 186 homelessness, 24, 25 homosexuality, 106 Husserl, Edmund, 11–12, 14, 29, 39, 83 indignity. See dignity and indignity inheritance, 123–26 Instagram, 61 internet access and use, 54, 78 news sources, 76 online shopping, 76, 77 See also online environments interrelationality, 59, 75–77, 126, 137 in dance, 92, 107–8 in families, 113, 118, 126, 141 father and child, 77, 92, 99, 100, 102–3, 129, 130, 133–34, 135 food and drink, 147–48, 149, 151–55, 159–63, 168–69 mother and child, 14, 83, 100, 115, 116, 129–32, 133–34 with nature, 56, 57, 184, 185–86, 187–88 Patocˇka’s focus, 5, 14, 15, 57–58, 83, 115, 116, 117, 141, 185–86, 187–88 pleasure, 19 role in being-in-the-world, 4, 5, 14, 55 in time and space, 4, 17, 18, 63, 67, 75–77, 189 walking, 30 interview-based ethnographies, 9 intimacy, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 107, 108, 131, 172 cultural intimacy, 149 dance classes, 82, 84, 86, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 107 in vitro fertilization (IVF), 110, 111 Jackson, Michael, 8 Kjellberg, Felix (PewDiePie), 60, 70 Kohák, Erazim, 39, 43, 170, 171, 175, 182–83, 186 labor issues, 15, 37, 46, 48, 113, 114, 116, 117, 123, 124, 125, 136, 177, 183 See also work Libuše, prophet, 25, 34, 37, 43 life universal, 109, 186 living in truth, 6, 15, 23–24, 39–42, 52, 186 personal and collective dimensions, 5 See also care for the soul; social justice love, 108

208

INDEX

magazines, 56, 57 Malinowski, Bronisław, 6 marriage, 120, 121–24, 161–62 Marx, Karl, 113–14 masculinity, 106 mass communication, 56, 57, 82 May, Karl, 179 meditative thinking, 33, 56, 57, 67, 78, 184, 185 men agency, 82, 95, 97 domestic skills, 135–36, 138, 150 dominance, 82, 97, 98–99, 101–5, 106–7 drinking, 156–57, 166 providers and protectors of women and children, 112, 123, 124 violence, 82, 101–3, 107 See also fathers and fatherhood mobile phones, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 72–73, 162, 172 for photography, 70, 84–85, 127 moods, 146, 163 collectively generated, 146 interrelationality, 146 moral transformation, 170–71 mothers and motherhood, 105, 106, 112, 114–15 domestic work, 135–36 relation between mother and child, 14, 83, 100, 115, 116, 129–32, 133–34 self-realization through motherhood, 129–31 working mothers, 111–12, 114 See also parents movement, 4, 16, 19, 29–30, 55, 59, 83 conceptual dynamism, 83 cultural mediation, 4, 16, 19, 30, 35, 188 in dance, 82, 83, 88–89 freedom of movement, 62 three primacy movements (Patocˇka), 14–15, 83, 141, 147, 155, 169, 171, 186, 187 through time and space, 3 toward and away from one another, 3 toward ourselves and the earth, 3 See also collective movements museum objects, 145 Muslims, 151 prejudice against, 23, 43–44, 49–52, 152 Národni du˚m na Vinohradech (National House of Vinohrady), 84, 85–86, 87, 88–90, 91–92 national identity, 85, 149

Native American lifeways, 178–80, 181 nature, 170–75, 176, 177–82, 187–89 cultural understandings, 182 Heidegger’s advocacy, 170, 171, 183–85, 187 Patocˇka’s advocacy, 170, 171, 185–86, 187–88 Nazism, 12, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 45, 46, 53 neoliberal, 126 new reproductive technologies (NRTs), 110, 111, 120 nondirected engagement, 7–8 online environments dwelling concept, 57–58, 63, 76–77, 78 false dichotomy of online versus offline, 58 freedom and agency, 58–59, 62–65, 72, 74, 76, 77–78 impacts on young people, 54–55 language issues, 64, 66, 69–70, 76, 77 physical world as material foundation, 58 real-time collaboration at spatial distance, 63–64, 66 See also digital technology use; gaming; internet access and use online shopping, 76, 77 Ostrava, 24, 35–39 outdoor activities, 171–82, 177 parents, 66, 68, 70–72, 73, 112, 113, 117, 120–21, 124, 127, 135 authority, 62–63, 103, 128 at ballroom dance classes, 84–85, 86, 87, 90, 91–92 young and older parents, 110–11, 120, 123 See also children; fathers and fatherhood; grandparents; mothers and motherhood Paris, 1, 2 paths, 9, 29, 34, 129, 142, 184, 185, 188 Patocˇka, Jan, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12–13, 15–16, 19, 29–30, 43, 52, 83, 108–9, 146 advocacy of nature, 170, 171, 185–86, 187–88 care for the soul, 39, 115–18 concerns about technology, 55, 58, 170–71, 182–83 living in truth, 5, 23, 39–40 three primacy movements, 14–15, 83, 100, 141, 147, 155, 169, 171, 186, 187 Pedro (Petr Florián), 69–70 PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg), 60, 70

INDEX

phenomenological reduction, 11, 12 pleasure, 145, 186 collective pleasure, 155 gastronomic pleasure, 147, 148–49, 151, 152, 155, 168–69 political leadership, 21, 23, 25, 26, 34, 39, 43 pornography, 63, 96 poverty, 21, 25, 34 power relations, 65, 68, 82 Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” 6, 40–41 See also dominance: men Prague, 1, 9–10, 12, 67–68, 70–72, 81–82, 85, 95, 124, 159 city as a space for life, 24–25, 26, 27, 28, 29–30, 31, 32, 32–35 history, 25–29, 32–35 negotiations of old and new, 28–29, 145 Saint Václav’s Day and Czech Statehood Day, 21–23 Prague Spring 1968, 9, 114 Prˇerov nad Labem ethnographic museum, 143–45, 144 privacy and private time, 72–74 racism, 121 retirement, 74–77, 137–38, 140–41 Ricouer, Paul, 12 Roma, 73, 121 prejudice against, 43–45, 48–49 roots, 185 rootedness, 14, 33 sinking of roots, 83, 100, 115, 116, 123 same-sex partnerships, 106, 120 schooling choice of schools, 65–66, 67–68, 74, 127 cost of schooling and after-school activities, 127, 128–29 digital technology use, 60, 62, 65–66 school nature camps (prírodný tábory), 172 Seidel, Josef and František, 46–47 self-actualization, 114 selfies, 70, 77 self-projection, 14–15 self-realization, 83, 107, 129 in families, 113, 117–18, 120, 126, 129, 131, 137, 139, 141–42, 153 under state socialism, 113–15 self-transcendence, 15, 18, 83, 108–9, 115, 116, 117, 141, 142, 168–69, 170–71, 186, 189 sexual harassment, 98–99

209

sexuality, 82, 95–99, 105–6, 107–9 in the domestic sphere, 99–101 and male domination, 103–5, 106–7 situatedness, 4–5 Skype, 76 smoking, 164–65 Snapchat, 63 social class, 43, 75, 81, 119, 120, 148, 149, 178 sociality, 14, 116 food and drink, 147–8, 149, 151–55, 159–63, 168–69 heterosociality in dance classes, 82, 84, 86, 90–92, 95 See also gendered socialities social justice, 23–24, 34–35, 37–39, 43–44, 52 See also living in truth Sokol, 68 solidarity, 47 sovereignty, 58, 59 space and time. See time and space state socialism, 6, 9, 11, 34–35, 47, 51, 52, 73, 81, 117, 138, 172 abuse of Roma, 49 censorship and restrictions on information exchange, 12, 54, 59 dissidents, 6, 12, 40 European values, 126–27 Havel’s views, 6, 40–41 industrial expansion, 35 1989 “velvet” revolution, 10, 16, 25, 40, 127 positive views, 40, 43, 46 regulation of Christianity, 38 self-realization under, 113–15 women’s employment, 112, 114 See also Communism Strathern, Marilyn, 8 Sudetenland German expulsions, 46, 47, 48 Syrian refugees, 49–51, 52 taste, 149 technology, 4, 16, 19, 56–57, 80–81, 175, 187, 188 cultural values and technology use, 111 dwelling, 5, 56, 57, 188 Heidegger’s concepts, 5, 13, 17, 29, 55–59, 77–78, 170, 182–83, 184, 187 impact on the landscape, 29 Patocˇka’s concern, 55, 58, 170–71, 182–83 role of technology in communing with nature, 171, 175, 182 See also digital technology use; internet access and use; online environments

210

INDEX

television, 56, 57 thinking modes, 33, 56–57, 67, 78, 184 thrownness, 4, 13, 14, 15, 29, 53, 188 time and space in childhood, 72, 128–29 dwelling, 29 Heidegger’s ideas, 4–5 on- and offline, 77–79 Patocˇka’s ideas, 5 privacy and control, 72–74, 76–77 relationships with others, 4, 17, 18, 63, 67, 75–77, 189 in retirement, 74–77, 137–38, 139, 140–41 See also traversing totalitarianism, 37, 40–41 touch, 82, 88, 92, 99, 100, 101, 108 tramping and tramping camps, 171, 172, 177–82, 178 transcendence, 11, 15, 16, 19, 39, 77, 82, 149, 155 self-transcendence, 15, 18, 83, 108–9, 115, 116, 117, 141, 142, 168–69, 170–71, 186, 189 traversing, 15–16, 19, 55, 59, 77, 188 in ballroom dancing, 82 embodied practice, 3–4 in families, 117, 126, 139–41 in nature, 170, 171, 175, 188–89 uses of food and drink, 147, 155–57, 161, 163, 167–69 See also corporeality; dwelling; interrelationality; movement; time and space Trigger, David, 8 Trnka, Lukáš, 1, 61, 67, 69

urban living, 171, 173, 174, 177, 183 U˘stí nad Labem, 49 Václav, Saint, 20–21, 23, 25, 26, 34, 37, 38, 43, 51, 158 violence, 82, 101–3, 107 virtual environments, 1–2 Visegrád Four, 51 vloggers, 60–61, 66, 69–70 walking, 30, 32–33 web 2.0, 61 women agency, 18, 139 beauty, desirability and allure, 95, 97–99, 103, 104–7, 122 Czech women marrying foreigners, 121–22 deference and submission, 101, 103–5, 107 economic dependence on men, 104, 124 food preparation, 136, 149, 152–53 objectification, 82, 97, 99, 105, 107 viewed as sexual beings in public space, 99 See also domestic violence; mothers and motherhood work, 15, 83, 114, 115, 116, 117, 127, 131, 134–35, 174–75, 188 See also labor issues World War II, 28, 34, 46, 47, 81, 121 YouTube, 60 Zeman, Miloš, 21, 23, 33, 51–52, 53, 163–64