The Big-Man from the “White House.”

Negotiating Power in a Slovak Post-Rural Community

Authors

  • Dana Bittnerová
  • Martin Heřmanský
  • Hedvika Novotná

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14712/12128112.3610

Keywords:

rural anthropology, post-socialism, status, power, Southern Slovakia

Abstract

This paper deals with the issue of negotiating power and exerting authority in a contemporary post-rural community. It analyzes various strate¬gies of village representatives by which they build their influence and create obligations among the villagers. At the same time it shows how the village inhabitants deal with incurred moral and economical dependence on village representatives. The issue will be addressed through the lens of the dynamics of the rise and fall of the village’s main representative. The big-man theory, proposed by Marshall Sahlins, will be used as the explication framework.

Author Biographies

Dana Bittnerová

is an ethnologist, having earned her doctoral degree in ethnography at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. Currently she is working as a research and teaching fellow at the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Education, Charles University in Prague. She is interested in several issues which intersect at various levels. Besides her research of the post-rural community, her research interests comprise migration and minorities (integration and education of minorities) and children’s culture (especially children’s folklore).

Martin Heřmanský

is a socio-cultural anthropologist working as a teaching fellow at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. Besides ethnographic research of the post-rural community in Slovakia, his research interests include North American Indians, youth subcultures and body modifications. In his PhD dissertation he addresses the issue of body piercing as a transgressive practice in youth culture and its commoditization in contemporary Czech society.

Hedvika Novotná

is a social anthropologist, Head of the Department of Social Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. In her PhD dissertation she focuses on the issue of the Jewish minority in Czechoslovakia after World War II. She also addresses the discursive framework of individual and collective memory in ethnographic team research of the Slovak postrural community. To a lesser extent she is also concerned with various issues of urban anthropology (subcultures, continuity and discontinuity of city space).

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Published

2010-07-01

How to Cite

Bittnerová, D., Heřmanský, M., & Novotná, H. (2010). The Big-Man from the “White House.”: Negotiating Power in a Slovak Post-Rural Community. Lidé města, 12(2), 309-329. https://doi.org/10.14712/12128112.3610

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 2 (2010)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.