THE ILLITERATE CULTURE AND ITS ENEMIES. PROBLEMS OF 'ORALITY' IN THE POLISH VILLAGE IN THE 19TH CENTURY

• Authors: Boncza-Tomaszewski N.
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The culture of Polish peasants before 1918 is characterized by mass illiteracy, and for this reason the peasant community can be called an 'oral' community. The author analyses problems connected with the 'orality' of the village, such as regional linguistic differentiation, problems with the propagation of writing and the influence of national language concepts advanced by the intellectuals about the spoken word. It should be emphasized that illiteracy was also the basic barrier to social integration, modernization and nationalization of the Polish village. On a mass scale, peasants were illiterate until the First World War (despite a rapid intellectual development initiated during the 1905 revolution). Didactic concepts modelled on the teaching methods used in a classical school and the weakness of folk schools (bad teachers, lack of resources, bad teaching methods) were the factors that hampered the struggle against illiteracy. However, the slow dissemination of writing in villages was mainly due to the peasants' reluctance to writing and to the information that writing carried along, treated as belonging to the world of the 'Lords'. This distance to the written culture is characteristic of all the 'oral' societies.

Keywords

EN

'ORALITY' IN POLISH VILLAGES (19THC.); MASS ILLITERACY

Discipline

• ETHNOLOGY: ETHNOLOGY

• Publisher: Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze
• Journal: Lud
• Year: 2005
• Volume: 89
• Pages: 71-89
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Boncza-Tomaszewski N.

• N. Boncza-Tomaszewski, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Instytut Historyczny, ul. Krakowskie Przedmiescie 26/28, 00-927 Warszawa, Poland

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

07PLAAAA03036209