Ladislav Holy (1933-1997) (Holý in Czech orthography, but Ladislav later adopted the anglicised version of his name) was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and the founder of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University. Born in Prague in 1933, he went on to read Anthropology and Archaeology at Charles University, Prague, from where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1961. During this time, Ladislav met his fellow anthropology student, future wife and partner in research, Alice Fučíková. The couple married in 1956. Ladislav also met at the same time another fellow student, the anthropologist Milan Stuchlik, with whom he collaborated later. Ladislav worked as Assistant Keeper at the Naprstek Museum (1954-56) and then as a Research Officer at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Prague (1956-65), where he had started to introduce more theoretically innovative and politically challenging ideas than might have been expected by the communist authorities. His career took him on a trajectory from museology, folklore and ethnography to British-style Social Anthropology. His connections with British Social Anthropology came through contacts made with the Prague school by a number of eminent Cambridge scholars, especially Prof. Meyer Fortes, for whom Ladislav had acted as a translator and interpreter on Fortes’ trip to Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s.
Ladislav conducted fieldwork first among the Berti of the Sudan during two lengthy research expeditions in 1961 and 1965, and subsequently returned on six occasions over the next 25 years, always accompanied by his wife, Alice.
Having been appointed Head of the African Department at the Czech Academy in 1965, Ladislav left Czechoslovakia in 1967 for a visiting fellowship at Cambridge University before becoming the Director of the Livingstone Museum in Zambia (1968-72), during which time he studied the Zambian Toka. Due to return to the Academy in Czechoslovakia in 1973 after five years in Zambia, he accepted instead on the advice of Meyer Fortes a post of Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Queen’s University of Belfast. In this way Ladislav avoided the prospect of returning to his native country and to the regime which he so despised. His actions provoked censure from the Czechoslovak authorities and he was made persona non grata in his homeland. In Belfast, he met up with his old friend and fellow Czech anthropologist Milan Stuchlik, and the pair forged a formidable intellectual partnership that laid the foundations for a body of theoretical work which emphasised social process and cultural interpretation in contradistinction to the prevailing orthodoxies of 1960s’ social anthropology. Together, they published a number of influential works on anthropological theory and method.
Ladislav moved to St Andrews in 1979 as a Reader in Social Anthropology to establish the discipline at the University, and he was elevated to a Professorship in 1987. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1989 – with some misgivings – for the first time in over 20 years. The research he conducted there resulted in his last monograph, which was on Czech nationalism and cultural identity, eventually published in 1996 and entitled The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation. In 1992, he was awarded the Rivers Memorial
Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, London. He was the author of nine anthropological works and the editor of six thematic collections of essays. After the death of his wife, Alice, in 1990, Ladislav met Kate Mortimer, with whom he spent the last years of his life, and the couple married in 1996, a few months before his death. Ladislav Holy died on 13th April 1997 at the age of 64.
See for more information on Ladislav:
The Independent, Thursday 17th April 1997 an obituary written by David Riches
The Guardian, Tuesday 22nd April 1997 an obituary written by Roy Dilley
For details of the Ladislav Holy Photographic Archive in the University of St Andrews Special Collections see: HERE
For details of a record of the Ladislav Holy ethnographic collection in the University of St Andrews Museum see: HERE
Ladislav Holy’s Books and Edited Volumes (in English)
Masks and Figures from Eastern and Southern Africa. London: Paul Hamlyn, 1967.
Zambian Traditional Art. Lusaka: Zambian Information Services, 1971.
Ed. Social Stratification in Tribal Africa. Prague: Academia, 1968.
Neighbours and Kinsmen: A Study of the Berti People of Darfur. London: C. Hurst, 1974.
Ed. Emil Holub’s Travels North of the Zambezi 1885-86. (Transl. by C. Johns). Manchester: Manchester University Press (for the Institute for African Studies, University of Zambia), 1975.
Ed. Knowledge and Behaviour. Queen’s University Papers in Social Anthropology 1. Belfast: Queen’s University Press, 1976.
Ed. Segmentary Lineage Systems Reconsidered. Queen’s University Papers in Social Anthropology 4. Belfast: Queen’s University Press, 1979.
Ed. (with M. Stuchlik) The Structure of Folk Models. ASA Monograph 20. London: Academic Press, 1981.
(With M. Stuchlik) Actions, Norms and Representations. Foundations of Anthropological Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Strategies and Norms in a Changing Matrilineal Society: Descent, Succession and Inheritance among the Toka of Zambia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Ed. Comparative Anthropology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Kinship, Honour and Solidarity: Cousin Marriage in the Middle East. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989.
Religion and Custom in a Muslim Society: the Berti of Darfur. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation: National Identity and the post-Communist Social Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship. London: Pluto Press, 1996.
Ladislav Holy Memorial Trust - (Home) 