Čeští etnologové 50. let v přední linii boje za vědecký ateismus?

The 1950s were a period of profound changes in Czechoslovak science, both on an institutional level and with respect to its ideologization and indoctrination. These changes also applied to ethnology and ethnography. The reasons for this development are not hard to fi nd: under the new regime, the goal of any investigation of ‘the people’ was to legitimise plans for the establishment of a new people’s democracy and to produce a detailed scientifi c report about the society’s historical journey towards communism. In this new environment, a totalitarian regime thus assigned these sciences a specifi c function: its goal was not only to ideologize these sciences, but also, and above all, to indoctrinate the population and to promote atheism. This contribution follows the life and work of some of the leading personages of Czechoslovak post-war ethnology and ethnography, such as Otokar Nahodil, and the careers of these sciences’ main institutional representatives, such as Otokar Pertold, the long-serving departmental head at the Charles University Faculty of Arts. Special attention is paid to the new regime’s popularisation strategies which involved post-war ethnologists and ethnographers. Mention is also made of Antonín Robek, Josef Macek, and Jiří Loukotka. The main objective of this contribution is to use a brief excursion into the development of post-war ethnography and ethnology in order to describe the phenomenon of education towards scientifi c atheism. Special emphasis is on the communication channels which the Communist leadership used to secure for its propaganda the broadest impact possible and on describing the role which scientists played in this effort.