The first part of the article follows the recent anthropological critique of the widely held assumption that links people to territorial roots. In this sense, cultural identities have to be mediated by particular places, nevertheless these places does not necessarily have to have character of local cultural communities. Current conditions of deterritorialization are producing cultural identities that link people to homes and homelands that often have no territorial base. The following section makes the outlined critique deeper by claiming that cultural identities are also mediated by places that do not have the character of homes or even deterritorialized homelands. The theoretical precondition of this claim is explicated by a classificatory model that distinguishes between four types of life in motion -exile, immigration, pilgrimage, and vagabondage -and by this means establishes an analytical fairness between the perspectives of sedentarism and nomadism. KEY WORDS home, identity, nomadism, place, transnationalism Aadam Aziz se jednoho jarního rána rozhodl, že se už nikdy více nepokloní žádnému bohu ani člověku. Bylo to v roce 1915, poté co ztroskotal jeho pokus o ranní modlitbu: jak se skláněl k modlitebnímu koberci, narazil nosem na trs trávy. Tehdy si uvědomil marnost své vlastní snahy předstírat sám před sebou, že se po jeho návratu domů nic nezměnilo. Jeho modlitba byla neustále narušována vzpomínkami na Heidelberg. Nemohl nepřemýšlet o svých heidelberských přátelích, o společných debatách, které je rozdělovaly. Jako čerstvě vystudovaný medik se po pěti letech vrátil do Kašmíru a onoho rána už si musel přiznat, že jeho domov není, jaký byl. Neboli i když vše bylo jako dřív, Aadam se na svět díval jinýma očima. Všiml si, že krásné údolí, v němž stojí jeho rodný dům, je vlastně úzké -uvědomil si uzavřenost tohoto světa. A musel se vyrovnat také s tím, že jeho návrat a jeho vzdělání nevzbudily v jeho domácím prostředí žádné nadšení, spíše naopak. Uvědomil si, že nemůže dále ignorovat svou vlastní proměnu. Co však vědět nemohl, co ovšem nám čtenářům autor Dětí půlnoci (1995) Salman Rushdie naznačuje, je to, že jeho rozhodnutí už se nikdy nemodlit v něm zanechalo prázdnotu. Nemohl se modlit k Bohu, v jehož existenci zároveň nemohl úplně nevěřit. Vrátil se domů na místo, kde po svém návratu už nikdy nebyl doma. Salman Rushdie ve své knize představuje vzorec pohybu, ve kterém se návrat domů ukazuje být jednou z podob nekonečného putování na nová místa. To, co se nám obvykle jeví jako ukončení dočasné podoby pohybu, získává nomádskou povahu putování bez konce. Sociální studia. Fakulta sociálních studií Masarykovy univerzity, 1/2006. S. 145-160. ISSN 1214-813X.

If sociology of transnationalism is to remain innovative as a branch of knowledge, it should be able to encourage a reflexive analysis of its own critical projects. Theories of transnationalism both focus on transnational phenomena and explore the ways how national phenomena is theorized in social science. The former offers promises for understanding how social conditions and cultural processes constitute transnationality. The latter allows theories of transnationalism to capture the way in which relations of domination are encoded into conceptual frameworks and theoretical perspectives of academic discourse. I have focused here on theoretical dilemmas generated by the critique of methodological nationalism. The hermeneutic reconstruction of the first attempts to analyze methodological nationalism in the 1970s, I have carried out here, put emphasis on three attributes of this early critique: Firstly, it focused on the argument that methodological nationalism is necessarily interrelated with a particular theory of social change which accentuates the immanent dynamics of society. Secondly, it payed attention to a theoretical dilemma resulting from conceptualizing nations as social units. Thirdly, it addressed itself to the theoretical dilemma of conceptualizing the nation-state beyond methodological nationalism. By taking seriously reconstructive interpretation of earlier form of critique of methodological nationalism, this text fully recognizes the importance of theoretical logic in sociology and conceives the question of methodological nationalism in terms of a conflict between alternative theoretical frames.

This article reviews the current discourse on urban struggles to bring to the surface strategies of interpretation, which deal with theoretical concerns insinuated by the situated existence of struggling subjects. The first part, concentrating on the domain of "negative places," contrasts interpretive strategies distinguished by their orientation to the phenomena of local solidarities, alternatively, solidarities organized by collective projects. The second part turns from "negative places" to "other places" to consider the strategy of interpretation operating with the concept of affective solidarities. The article argues for a critical reinterpretation of affective solidarities in reference to Foucault's idea of "other places" to disclose how the disobedient subject's transfiguration into collective subjects of solidarity is entwined with the diversity of modes in which the corporeal existence of subjects is situated in the world.

The analysis of language, knowledge, and interpretations -and the practical consequences of this knowledge and these interpretations -forms the basic theoretical presupposition of all sociological inquiries into the phenomenon of "race." All forms of knowledge dealing with "race" are necessarily linked with practices of power constituting hierarchical orders of classification. Racist ideology by means of these orders constructs its objects and subjects, i.e., those who are racists and those who are stigmatised. Racist representations of the Other are closely interrelated with the discursive construction of the body as a space in which symbolic boundaries of impurity, hatred as well as health and desire are situated. The discursive regime of racism is not a by-product of modernity but one of its main cultural forms. The ideology of racism played a crucial role in legitimizing the emerging nation-state both in its internal efforts to normalize society and external attempts to colonize new lands.

This article attempts to analyze controversies over a former armament factory called Zbrojovka Brno. The area, full of various and often contradictory symbolic meanings, constitutes a significant urban memory space. We claim that this brownfield forms a part of urban memory that extends beyond its built materiality, mainly through its symbolic presence in the practices of various social actors. The article encompasses two closely interlinked aspects of contemporary urban memory practices addressing the past lives in the city: those shaping what is remembered as well as those influencing what should be remembered in the future. The first consists of narratives circulating in the discourse of the actors who are engaged within this brownfield, and the second is represented by forms of justifications and critiques that are considered legitimate in disputes about the future of "Zbrojovka." The analytical framework used in this research draws on the theoretical contributions of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, especially their pragmatic theory of justifiable orders of worth pluralism.