EN
The paper deals with the history of scientific thought in ethnology in Slovakia in the period immediately after the establishment of the Communist regime, i.e. the second half of the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s. This relatively short period was characterised by rapid changes in definition of the research subject, theoretical and methodological approaches, scientific goals, and even the discipline's very name. The paper focuses on the implementation of the new methodological orientation, which was named Marxist ethnography. The authors investigate how Slovak scholars approached the new orientation and what theoretical concepts appeared during the period. Furthermore, they explore the question of how the new methodological orientation was made operational, i.e. how it was used in research projects and daily scholarly routine. The authors study scholarly practice as a social process. They examine the activities of scholars, the relations within the scholarly community, and the relations between scholars and society. They attempt to answer the question of whether and how the implementation of Marxist ethnography influenced ethnological research in Slovakia and whether and how it contributed to changes in scholarly thinking.