English Summary
The Center for Applied Anthropology and Field Research („CAAT“) engages in research, teaching, and related academic activities and was established by the Department of Anthropology of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. CAAT´s scientific research concentrates on the issues of social and cultural differentiation of populations within modern societies and on how to take full advantage of the results of anthropological research in the development of social and integrative policy, social services, and educational practice.
CAAT´s research can be characterized as “applied anthropology”. In this sense, then, it may be regarded as a subdiscipline of social and cultural anthropology. This approach concentrates on applying anthropological knowledge gathered from traditional forms of social and cultural anthropological field research. This “classical” approach to field research is the crucial methodological tool not only for Social and Cultural Anthropology but also, still more often, for the practice-oriented analysis of social and cultural phenomena within contemporary societies. In addition to developing applications for knowledge gathered form anthropological field research, CAAT also applies “classical” field research techniques to themes that are connected with the problems of social organization, kinship systems, group identification, migration, and social exclusion.
The research activities of CAAT are concentrated in the following areas:
- Social exclusion, marginalization and poverty.
- Nationalism and ethnicity, or more precisely, ethnorevitalizing and identity movements within modern social contexts.
- Multiculturalism and its criticism, problems of social and political integration of disadvantaged populations.
- The shared culture within “Romany” settlements in Slovakia and its transformation by urban migration.
- The Czech Diaspora in East Europe.
- Systems of kinship in contemporary complex societies.
- Social and integrative policy analysis, analysis of social services and the needs of the users of such services.
- Delinquent behaviour associated with social exclusion.
CAAT´s selection of research topics, research projects, and practice-oriented analyses is based on grants, donations, and requests by various submitters – such as academic institutions, funds and institutions of the EU, organs of state administration (e.g. departmental ministries, regional authorities), local governments, non-governmental and non-profit organizations, and commercial entities.
In the area of applied research CAAT primarily specializes in:
- Needs assessment of socially disadvantaged populations in order to outline integrative projects and social service needs for the purpose of (community) planning social services.
- Policy analysis and practice especially directed at issues of social inclusion/exclusion, migration and immigration, integration of aliens and “minorities”, intercultural education, and various forms of political and public response to social and cultural differentiation within contemporary complex societies.
- Situational and case studies of disadvantaged and socially excluded populations (as the potential clients of social and integrative services), of the residential formations that are being segregated and mostly inhabited by “Romany” families; and of case studies of the social networks of immigrant communities.
In the area of “classical” research we especially focus on:
- The study of principles of social organization of “Romany” populations.
- The analysis of kinship systems (above all of the character of kinship networks and relations within “Romany” populations).
- The problems of “compatriotic communities” abroad (and, above all, of the mechanisms for forming and transforming national, religious, and territorial identification) and of repatriation of these diasporas.
- The study of linguistic, conceptual, and political practices linked with the assertion of ethnic and national “identities” within the context of contemporary complex societies.
