I historici jsou jen lidé… Možnosti „biocentrického“ přístupu ke studiu dějin soudobé české historiografie
Even Historians Are Just People... The Possibilities of a “Biocentric” Approach to the Study of the History of Contemporary Czech Historiography

Summary/Abstract: As in any scientific field, social communication plays a very important role in historiography, too. It manifests itself in the operation of institutions, research directions and, naturally, in the personal lives of individual scholars. In addition to examining paradigms, ideas, concepts and methodologies, it is therefore appropriate to examine the network of social connections within the field. It is in the entanglements of these networks that we may find answers to the questions such as: which generation did these historians belong to? How did they step into the emergence and transformations of research projects of that time? How did they influence the dynamics of institutional networks? These phenomena, we believe, can be appropriately examined through the analysis and interpretation of the life events of specific historians, their opinions and attitudes. At the same time, the period of the 1970s to the 1990s, with the collapse of the communist regime and the transition to democracy, in which a number of continuity and discontinuity elements (methodological, institutional, personnel) became apparent, seems to be the ideal historical climate for such “biocentric” research. Oral history seems to be a very suitable research method for this purpose: interviews with professional historians can reveal much information that has not been recorded elsewhere, and also stimulate new questions. The article aims to show the possibilities and limits of this approach to the history of contemporary Czech historiography.

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