Monika Golonka-Czajkowska

Between Cosmopolitism and Localness: Selected Issues Concerning Dress Culture of Stary Sącz and Surrounding in 1860–1918. Some Exercises of Reconstruction

Reconstruction practices are one of the most popular legitimacy strategies, used in process of making cultural heritage. Customers treat them with a great esteem, and they are expected to bring to reconstructed elements desired importance of authenticity. A contemporary ethnographer/anthropologist is usually diffident when facing such practices, and he focuses on critical description and deconstruction of the practices. But what can he do when local activists ask him to actively participate in the experiment as a so-called expert, whose task is e.g. to reconstruct local folk dress? Of course, his or her decision will depend primarily on research interests and chosen specialization, but the most important issue will be his or her understanding of the ethnographer/anthropologist profession. Thus, some researchers would be sceptic and refuse any assistance, and thereby avoid criticism of their own professional environment, accusing them of mythologization, reification, being peasantry-lover etc. Others will take on the role of full-time experts, who would join different types of bodies and committees, and decide what is and what is not proper in the spectacle they would observe, thus becoming the guardians of the regime of truth folklore. The third strategy, which in my opinion can help to break the deadlock described above, is the participation in the project considered as an open dialogue. Thereby we can try to avoid being an authoritarian arbiter and we can become a real consultant, a person who – according to the Latin root consultare – discusses with partners (creators of a project) the results of the reconstruction as deeply as possible. When working on the reconstruction of dresses, ethnographer/anthropologist can show their complexity, place them in a local context as well as in wider social, cultural and historical context, and avoid narrow and problematic definitions of folk costume. The decision concerning the final form of representation – an album, a staging or a dance etc. – however, should be made by our partners, equipped with not only a solid dose of knowledge, but also with important sensitivity to various epistemological issues behind the process of reconstruction.
 

To See Invisible: Poland's Wedding to the Sea

Policies are not only being expressed by symbols and rituals, but their transmission and the use are being shaped by symbolic meanings. They teach how to understand world, putting it in order and help to overcome feeling of the chaos. To a large extent a so-called political reality is being created by symbolic meanings, even if it is hard for us to be reconciled with it. With the help of the appropriate selected set of multi-sensual, dramatic measures the political ritual allows more or less to capture participants and shape social imagination according to intentions of his organizers. Reconstructing or confirming existing political order the official ceremony with its performative nature tries with similar power as the ritual to involve its participants, seeks to generate feeling and images preferred by the authority.
10 January 1920, in accordance with provisions of the Treaty of Versailles the Republic of Poland took back Pomerania (annexed by Kingdom of Prussia in 1772 during First Partition of Poland). According to this, the special celebration was organized on the Puck Bay one month later. An episode with throwing the platinum ring into waters of the Baltic, called Poland’s Wedding to the Sea became soon the most important event in the great national story about the return of Pomerania to the motherland. It established the paradigmatic pattern for another state celebrations, which confirmed the northern boundary of Poland symbolically and state’s territorial integrity. Events in 1945 and 2010 were the variants of Poland’s Wedding to the Sea settled in their own historical context. On the one hand these ceremonies served as performative instruments for national legitimization of the power, but on the other hand they were used by political elites for creating and playing their own, different vision of the state.

 

“We Are Building Socialism” in the pherypheries