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Volume 39

2011 Next

Publication date: 31.05.2011

Description

Our journal has been published since 1963. Until now, 37 issues came out. From the beginning the journal presented the achievements of the employees of Chair of Ethnography of the Slavs and current Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. It also informs about the scientific and organizational activities by publishing materials from the sessions and conferences organized by the Institute. From the 90s the journal is thematically profiled and has been published continuously. Among older issues, it is worth recalling the ones on the history of ethnographic museums in Poland, gift, ethnography among the humanities, the pragmatics of statements in ethnography. Recent issues were devoted to Slavic national symbols, memory, The People‘s Republic of Poland, ethnicity in Central Europe.

Licence: None

Editorial team

Secretary Patrycja Trzeszczyńska

Issue content

Zbigniew Libera

Ethnographies, Volume 39, 2011, pp. 1-25

https://doi.org/10.4467/22999558.PE.11.003.0932

By reminding the criteria of separation of Boyko Land as a cultural and historic territory and the Boykos as an ethnographic group the author aims to convince that we are not dealing with history of exploring the ethnographic areas, but the history of inventing them. Talking about the Boykos in Boyko Land is synonymous with commitment to a number of ideas from the history of science, the old concepts of culture, folk culture, ethnicity, cultural-historical school and anthropogeoghraphy, physical anthropology, and physiognomies, folklore and ethnography. Contrary to Boyko Land researchers the author claim that since the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day in Ukraine they deal not with a great ethnic group – the Boykos, but with many local communities of Ruthenian mountaineers – the ethnographic groups. The old and popular in the north-eastern Carpathians depreciating words related to the alien, such as “Boyko” or “Lemko”, were released from the meaning by the intellectuals who were engaged in science, literature and politics in order to apply them to name the groups and their territories.

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Grzegorz Demel

Ethnographies, Volume 39, 2011, pp. 27-36

https://doi.org/10.4467/22999558.PE.11.001.0930

The article describes the process of so called „Soviet nation” building. Using the contemporary western theories (multiculturalism, invention of tradition, constructivist approach to the nation-building process), the author discusses this process as a trial of political nation building but – at the same time – neglecting of the policy of recognition. The catalogue of common “soviet people’s” values promoted by the Communist Party (common communism building, victory over the fascism) and the specific characteristics of “socialist nations” are also presented.

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Janusz Barański

Ethnographies, Volume 39, 2011, pp. 37-44

https://doi.org/10.4467/22999558.PE.11.002.0931

The subject of the article is Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of mystical participation, which was used by him to explain “strange” non-European cultural phenomena from the perspective of the European scientific rationality. This approach, modified by Stanley Tambiah, was used in the article to explain a natural disaster, here – floods, which took place in southern Poland in 2010. The empirical material are the discussions on the Internet, which perceive the cause of flooding in the interference of various external forces, which are ascribed the extraordinary characteristics (the government of one of the neighboring countries, the divine punishment, etc.). This mode of thought is similar to the structures of magical thinking present in non-European societies described by Levy-Bruhl. The above leads to the conclusion that the idea of mystical participation is not characteristic only for primitive pre-logic, but is present in the minds and practice of contemporary Westerners.

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