'We All Know That, Don't We?': Situating Scholarly Knowledge about the Czech 'Folklore Movement'

This chapter is a reflexive contemplation of the 'common sense' in Czech music folkloristics/ethnology from the point of view of the Czech ethnomusicologist whose personal as well as research experience has, significantly in this context, been formed outside the Czech folklore and folkloristics/ethnology practices and discourses. Partly based on reflexive ethnographic observations of the ongoing research project 'Weight and Weightlessness of Folklore: The Folklore Movement of the Second Half of the 20th Century in the Czech Lands' (2017-2019) hosted by the Ethnological Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, partly based on autoethnographic self-inspections of the author's experience of the 'alien affect' towards the dominant Czech folklore discourse in the Czech-German 'borderlands' of the 1980s and the 1990s, and partly discussing the post-1989 folkloristics/ethnology versus anthropology debate and the less pronounced, but no less acute music folkloristics/ethnology versus ethnomusicology debate in the Czech Republic, the text formulates what it hopes to be the key questions for understanding the positionality of Czech music folkloristics/ethnological knowledge and creates an intellectual space for self-reflexive disciplinary discussion which it sees as critical for the future of Czech music folkloristics/ethnological research.(1)