ABSTRACTSubmitting an invited text for the Anthropology and Humanism festschrift “Hundreds for Katie,” I experienced cognitive dissonance between the objectives of ethnographic writing championed by Kathleen Stewart and the journal's submission requirements. The insistence that every submission must contain keywords and an abstract signifies deeper issues with academic writing. Specific forms of writing enforce the disciplinary norms of Thomas Kuhn's “normal science.” To “write difference”, we may need to write differently. The paper draws inter alia on works by Kathleen Stewart, Lauren Berlant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Winch, Walter Benjamin, James Clifford, Georges Bataille, and members of the Mass–Observation group.

SummaryThis contribution to the special section “100s for Katie” attempts to communicate the depth and breadth of the hatred infecting contemporary America in one hundred words.

Previously unpublished, “From the Body Politic to the National Interest” was presented at the Mellon Symposium in Historical Anthropology at California Institute of Technology in May 1987. We are publishing it in the Journal of Historical Sociology for the first time to honor Philip Corrigan's memory. The essay was an attempt to expand upon arguments in Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (1985) under two main rubrics: (1) “routines and rituals of rule” and (2) “regulated representations and the making of ‘the’ public.” In both cases we went beyond our treatment of these topics in The Great Arch, to which this paper should be seen as a supplement.

The Prague Address, for the European International Studies Association (EISA) 12 th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Prague, September 12, 2018. What we call “progress” is confined to each particular world, and vanishes with it. Always and everywhere in the terrestrial arena, the same drama, the same setting, on the same narrow stage – a noisy humanity infatuated with its own grandeur, believing itself to be the universe and living in its prison as though in some immense realm, only to founder at an early date along with its globe, which has borne with deepest disdain the burden of human arrogance. Auguste Blanqui (1872, as quoted in Benjamin, 1999: 25)

In "The Winter's Tale", Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline - a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered in the margins of other people's stories. In this book, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a history of the Czech people that is also a history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy centre. Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theatre of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavonic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition. Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored. It draws on literary, musical, visual and documentary sources, ranging from banknotes to statues, museum displays to school textbooks, funeral orations to operatic stage-sets, murals in subway stations to censors' indexes of banned books. It brings us into contact with the ever changing details of daily life - the street names and facades of buildings, the heroes figured on postage stamps - that have created and recreated a sense of what it is to be Czech.

Considering the differences between the superficial orderliness of the English/British table of royal succession and the apparent anarchy of its Bohemian counterpart, this essay questions aspects of the analysis of English state formation offered in Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer's 1985 study The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Rather than providing a contrast to England's institutional political continuities over centuries, Bohemia's manifestly fractured history furnishes a vantage point from which the ideological character of such claimed historical continuities becomes clear. E. P. Thompson's image of a “great arch” of state formation attributes far too much shape, solidity, and coherence to a process that was always, whether in England or Bohemia, a matter of flux and fluidity – a landscape in constant erosion, upon which coherence is only ever imposed in momentary retrospect.

Setting out to recover the roots of modernity in the boulevards, interiors, and arcades of the “city of light,” Walter Benjamin dubbed Paris “the capital of the nineteenth century.” In this eagerly anticipated sequel to his acclaimed Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, Derek Sayer argues that Prague could well be seen as the capital of the much darker twentieth century. Ranging across twentieth-century Prague’s astonishingly vibrant and always surprising human landscape, this richly illustrated cultural history describes how the city has experienced (and suffered) more ways of being modern than perhaps any other metropolis. Located at the crossroads of struggles between democratic, communist, and fascist visions of the modern world, twentieth-century Prague witnessed revolutions and invasions, national liberation and ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, show trials, and snuffed-out dreams of “socialism with a human face.” Yet between the wars, when Prague was the capital of Europe’s most easterly parliamentary democracy, it was also a hotbed of artistic and architectural modernism, and a center of surrealism second only to Paris. Focusing on these years, Sayer explores Prague’s spectacular modern buildings, monuments, paintings, books, films, operas, exhibitions, and much else. A place where the utopian fantasies of the century repeatedly unraveled, Prague was tailor-made for surrealist Andre Breton’s “black humor,” and Sayer discusses the way the city produced unrivaled connoisseurs of grim comedy, from Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek to Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel. A masterful and unforgettable account of a city where an idling flaneur could just as easily be a secret policeman, this book vividly shows why Prague can teach us so much about the twentieth century and what made us who we are.

American politicians' xenophobic attitudes to refugees generate international controversy, while similar sentiments expressed by politicians in Prague pass largely unnoticed. Professor Derek Sayer argues that we should not ignore events in the Czech capital as, despite the efforts of historically inspired protestors, they increasingly reflect the dangerous spirit of 1939 rather than the more hopeful one of 1989.