Studia Ethnologica Pragensia (Jun 2017)
Nositelé paměti nebo zdroje falešných představ? Naučné stezky v ČR v etnologické perspektivě
Abstract
Educational trails are marked tourist trails placed in naturally or culturally remarkable places where selected significant phenomena and objects are specifically explained. On the most general level, we can understand educational trails as an expression of a modernist relationship to the natural and cultural heritage. The oldest educational trails were built in Germany and the USA in the 1920s and 1930s, the oldest Czech educational trails date from the late 1960s. After 1990, resp. 2000 we can observe, due to the strong wave of new regionalism and environmentalism in the Czech Republic and the mass support of building educational trails from various subsidiary programs, an unusual boom in building educational trails. Their number on our territory can be estimated at almost 1000. Academic attention that has been devoted to the educational trails so far can be described as quite inadequate. The study is therefore, on one hand, introduction into the study of educational trails and, on the other hand, demonstration of one of the possible interpretative approaches to this phenomenon through a case study focused on the content of two trails in central and western Bohemia. The initial method of the study is content analysis (or comparison of content analyzes) of relevant educational trails. The aim is both to verify the „truth“ of the facts presented on the trails, and to find out what role they play or can play in identifying and perceiving cultural (especially historical) and natural phenomena by tourists and other „users“ of these trails. In the study, we try to verify the hypothesis of a different concept of the presentation of historical events and historical cultural landscape in the areas affected by the transfer of the German-speaking population after Second World War and traditionally Czech inland areas where the transfer did not take place. On the theoretical level, the contribution is based mainly on the critical epistemological positions of the anthropology of landscape and historical ethnology, historical and ethnological study of memory and partly of the recent ethnological works devoted to the relationship of tourism and historical memory in Central Eastern Europe.
