Janusz Barański

Practising Spisz Regionality: On the Discourse of Cultural Heritage, Part I

The text is the first part of an article on mechanisms of creating the regional cultural heritage of Polish Spisz. The area under discussion is a small part of a historical region whose main territory is part of today’s Slovakia. For hundreds of years, it was part of the Kingdom of Hungary, hence its specific character and cultural distinctiveness. The first part of the article discusses the processes of aestheticization, reconstructionism and patrimonization of cultural heritage, while the second part discusses the processes of fossilization and articulation. As a result, contemporary regional cultural heritage becomes a kind of metacultural practice and commentary on the regional cultural legacy.

* Projekt został sfinansowany ze środków Narodowego Centrum Nauki przyznanych na podstawie decyzji nr UMO-2017/25/B/HS3/00043.

Anthropologist as a researcher or activist?
There are a number of sub-disciplines of humanities and social sciences which represent a kind of „non-scientific”, engaged attitude to human being and culture, to name only a few: applied anthropology, action anthropology, public anthropology, cultural critique, cultural policy, cultural animation, socio-cultural animation. For the purpose of this presentation the relation between applied anthropology and action anthropology is of crucial importance. The previous one is rooted in the colonial ideology of using an expert knowledge in supporting colonial policies, although these days it is also used by business, the media, governments or other institutions. The purpose of the latter is ideologically and emotionally oriented as a tool of helping endangered native or ethnic cultures, supporting various kinds of minorities or implementing important educational policies. One might suggest that these two approaches represent respective attitudes: objectivity and solidarity, according to Kirsten Hastrup. However, it seems impossible to separate them, therefore one should agree with an epistemological conclusion that every anthropological thesis consists of a portion of an emotional, critical attitude which seems unavoidable. The crucial thing is to take this truth into account in order to avoid as much as possible misunderstandings and misuses of gained knowledge and to agree that every anthropology is in this or other way „engaged”.

The mystical dimension of flood

The article presents a suggestion for a new approach towards ritual, one of the key anthropological concepts. Generations of anthropologists have used the term to describe and interpret cultural practices related to different types of liminality and transgression (social relations, religious beliefs, theatrical practices, etc.) in a rigid meaning limited to describing a formalized scenario of symbolic behavior, sanctioned with ancient beliefs and values cherished by a given community. This case makes room for similar symbolic practices, thinned down and scattered among the whole cultural reality (e.g. in fashion, politics, ways of spending free time, etc.), which serve the same purpose, but are deprived of formalized scenarios and boundaries of tradition. Because of all this, a new term – rituality – needs to be used to better convey the essence of the numerous modern-day rituals. This advance in terminology helps to interpret and understand several cultural practices, and to create new terms, necessary for describing the fast-changing modern cultural landscape. Accepting a broad meaning of rituality requires an interdisciplinary approach, in which classic anthropological theories by Malinowski, Redcliff-Brown or Geertz are equally important as Goffman’s symbolic interactionism, Austin’s speech acts philosophy, Rothenbuhler’s social communication, or Csikszentmihalyi’s emotional flow psychology.