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For the last few years of his life, Piotr Kowalski returned to the city where a few decades earlier he studyed Polish philology and worked as a professor at The Institute of Journalism and Social Communication at the University of Wrocław. During his time in Wrocław, he wrote a very inspiring article named „Reflections on the anthropology of media". One of the main ideas was that historical anthropology...
The article starts with a brief overview of the problems of the media studies approach to Polish Romanticism. The aim of the introductory remarks is to pinpoint possible research directions in this respect. Then I elaborate one of them in the main argument of my text. The media studies approach (following W. Ong, E. Havelock and J. Goody) is used to view Cyprian Norwid's oeuvre as a literary reflection...
The article aims at presenting and analysing peasants’ experiences of the agricultural reform conducted in Poland by a decree issued by Polish Committee of National Liberation on the 6th of September 1944. The article is mostly based on the peasants’ personal sources: materials from diary competitions (including the original ones that have not been used before in studies on the agricultural reform)...
Piotr Kowalski’s impressive work, the content of all his books (thematically varied) considered as a whole, provides us with what was his conscious intention: ‘the history of understanding the world’. That consists of descriptions of ‘magic culture’ and ‘popular culture’ (postmodernity) as the ones which are separate beings; there is no historical continuity between them as if ‘the history of mentality’...
This paper analyzes the ways in which post-memory is manifested in these works and compares these to a series of interviews conducted by the author. It begins with a contemplation of Lawrence Langer's Holocaust Testimonies and a discussion of the ways in which Holocaust memory as a field can inform other post-memory and oral history studies. I then apply insights from Langer and from Ewa Hoffman's...
The article discusses Latin names of the body parts that could be included a taboo ban. This refers to the places such as head, heart, liver, or substances as blood, tears, sperm, which were considered to be the centres of the soul or the magic power. In the opinion of the linguist Franz Specht there were some Indo-European names of body parts that contained the u vowel. That phoneme was thought to...
For few hundred years Lublin developed as a multiethnic city, where Jews – among other minorities – played an important role, participating in process of creating the city's political and economic institutions and public life. Jews had inhabited a separated district, Podzamcze, since the 16th century and, after 1862, the Old Town and other districts as well. While Jews eventually could be found throughout...
The scientific interests of Piotr Kowalski, a literary scholar, folklorist, and cultural researcher, include the phenomena and specific events that impose on the researcher the status of an "unintended" or at least "non-specific" recipient. The multi-layered, erudite treatise Prośba do Pana Boga. Rzecz o gestach wotywnych (A Plea to God: Topics in Votive Gestures) originates from...
The prime objective of the article is to reconstruct basic assumptions that accompany the historical anthropology practiced by Piotr Kowalski. The last decade of Kowalski’s work is dominated by that type of studies and therefore they form a conceptionally mature construct that combines lifetime experience of that culture researcher. At first, when entering the field of historical anthropology, Kowalski...
The Panoan and Tacanan languages belong to relatively small linguistic families of the Western Amazon. This paper aimed to examine briefly the terms and meanings related to pottery and ceramic vessels comprised within the lexicon of these languages against the ethno-archaeological context. The results of studies presented in this article indicate an existence of common words referring to the shape...
Popular literature has always been raising many different emotions and research issues. One of the research groups, represented by Piotr Kowalski, criticized popular literature thoroughly. A new wave of scientists emerged in the nineties. They tried out different research methods, criticizing popular literature (especially fantasy) much less than might be expected. This met with a huge degrees of...
The starting point for considering the possibilities of using folklore sources in historical research is the ambiguity of the term "folklore" and the multitude of interpretative perspectives appearing on the grounds of Polish folklore studies. Following the historical development of interest in this subject in various fields of the humanities, the author tries to answer the question of why...
The article deals with the oldest Goth images of death and funerary rituals. Apart from the archaeological sources connected with the Wielbark culture of the Roman period, their important documentation is also made by some relics of the Gothic language. Using a comparative approach, some discussions and ethnologic commentaries were provided for the following Gothic terms: death and dead people (maurþrjan:...
The article is a short sketch of the typical interdisciplinary scientific work of Piotr Kowalski that embraces the space between folklore studies, history and cultural anthropology.Within Polish scholarship, it is a model that hardly fit any clearly defined structure of a particular discipline or school and therefore forms an extremely original program, deeply ingrained in cultural anthropology.
In this article, I made use of auto presentation included in the documents presented by Piotr Kowalski in the professional situations connected with his academic career, in its initial stages. Kowalski`s scientific way led from investigations on popular literature and mass culture to the anthropology of history and media. In his observations and analysis of contemporary culture, he always had taken...
The article analyses graffiti from pews in Roman Catholic churches in Bydgoszcz, gathered by the author in the years 2014-2017. The method of contextual analysis and case study has been applied in the research. Inscriptions from the Bydgoszcz churches have been analysed in the context of the selected examples of inscriptions in sacral space (a church with its premises and buildings), those that are...
The article concerns the motif of beaver in the medieval literature. The first part of this study is an attempt at genetic criticism of the antique roots of this motif; we demonstrate a plurality of approaches to describing this animal and a profound connection of early Christian writings and ancient pagan texts. Furthermore, it is impossible to trace, with all certainty, the origins of this topos,...
The article discusses the coexistence of three types of historical narratives – academic, everyday and educational – that create the basic context for establishing a synthesis of national history in how the recent past is being taught today both in Poland and in other European countries. This specific conglomerate, a mix of different types of narratives that expose the logic of history, that has a...
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