What the Field Needs: On Arrested Epistemologies and the Ethics of Engagement

Pages: 264 - 282

Language: eng

This essay engages with the concept of epistemic arrest as introduced by Nikola Balaš in his monograph Ethnographic Chiefdom: Epistemic Arrest and Knowledge Production in Czechoslovak Ethnography (1969–1989) (2025), using it as a point of departure for a broader critique of anthropology as an epistemic field in Slovakia. While Balaš focuses primarily on Czech ethnography during late socialism and its aftermath, this essay examines how analogous patterns of intellectual stagnation and selective appropriation have manifested within the Slovak context. It argues that epistemic arrest is not merely an outcome of ideological constraints, but also of disciplinary mimicry, structural dependencies, and unexamined theoretical genealogies. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory (1986, 1987, 1990), Soviet ethnographic thought, and the often-overlooked legacy of figures like Yulian Bromley and Vladimir Bogoraz, the essay proposes that the Slovak field’s relative autonomy paradoxically enabled theoretical insularity. Rather than a conventional disciplinary history, this text adopts a reflexive and generative stance, advancing a methodological argument for lateral engagements across traditions and for the ethical responsibility of anthropologists to create epistemically open spaces. Writing from a position of critical distance, the essay treats disciplinary narratives not as archives to be preserved, but as prompts for reconfiguration. It calls for a reimagining of the field beyond inherited limitations, toward more plural and accountable futures.

Panáková, J. 2025. What the Field Needs: On Arrested Epistemologies and the Ethics of Engagement. In Slovenský národopis / Slovak Ethnology, vol. 73, no.2, pp. 264-282. 1335-1303. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/SN.2025.2.22

Panáková, J. (2025). What the Field Needs: On Arrested Epistemologies and the Ethics of Engagement. Slovenský národopis / Slovak Ethnology, 73(2), 264-282. 1335-1303. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/SN.2025.2.22

Publisher: Ústav etnológie a sociálnej antropológie SAV, v. v. i.

CC BY