The Czechoslovak academic discipline called ‘Ethnography and Folklore Studies’ was impacted and influenced by the daily realities of state socialism in 1969–1989. This book examines the role of the planned economy, Marxist–Leninist ideology, disciplinary hierarchies and clientelist networks, ultimately showing how state socialist features together brought about the discipline’s epistemic stalling. It offers a fresh perspective on the long-standing debates purporting to capture the differences between the Central and Eastern European tradition of ethnology and Western sociocultural anthropology.