Exploring Your Wendishness

Description

Exploring Your Wendishness by Arnošt Muka (Wendish Research Exchange Publication)

From 1884 to 1886 the Sorbian ethnographer, linguist and founding father of Sorbian studies, Arnost Muka, published one of the most influential texts in Sorbian journalism to this day: the “Statistika luziskich Serbow”. Its importance lies primarily in the statistical material on the Upper and Lower Sorbian population at the end of the 19th century. But the book is much more than a set of figures. It is a fascinating source for folklorists, historians, sociologists, genealogists, local historians and local chronologists. It is a reference from a Sorbian perspective that is still valid today when it comes to the bilingual Lusatia on the threshold of the industrial age in the late 19th century.

In order to make Muka’s work more accessible to the scientific and general public in Lusatia and Germany, Robert Lorenz translated it into German and to make it more accessible to most of the rest of the world, Peter Barker and Weldon Mersiovsky translated it into English. The work is preceded by a historically and ethnologically classifying, work-critical foreword. A new index of places and an attached map help you find your way around the book.