Field in the cultural anthropology is still a predominant symbol of a discipline, notwithstanding its meaning is changing. But regardless of the continuing expansion of the conceptual domain of the field as a word, it is impossible to revoke its legacy, invoked as time and space of different non-symmetric status. This ontological asymmetry and direct relationship with disciplinary practices, involvement in the colonial worldview as well as connection with militarism is precisely what determines the oppressive nature of the Field (the author suggests writing the first letter in uppercase as “the Field” – which is the expression of an attempt to construct the concept embracing the consciousness of its ideologization). Refl ection on the ideological separation of the Field from the world cannot be considered only in terms of the social sciences, but it must also take into account the fantasmatic nature of such action and concept. The Field as a locus of the empirical Other (subjected to repressive observation of the researcher) is a special place indeed, also because of an idea described in psychoanalitic theory as the gaze of the big Other and, engendered in a researcher, a question regarding Other’s intention, which is also a determiner of researcher’s fantasy.
The heretofore undescribed case of a ruined Łódź villa from the thirties of the twentieth century, known as the so-called the House of Wasiak, binding with different images, still operates in the narrative of the residents of the Marysin area, and “the House of Wasiak” itself as a link in the local discourse-an element whose meaning is conditioned by the existence of another powerful signifier-should be regarded as the key to the understanding of the mechanisms shaping the complex picture of local relations. Relations that are standard for the Polish context of social, political and urban changes today being as they are a result of a truly palimpsestic buildup of stories and traumas.
Relacje łączące antropologię kulturową Claudeʼa Lévi-Straussa z psychoanalizą Jacquesa Lacana, nie doczekały się do tej pory w literaturze antropologicznej krytycznej analizy. Tymczasem opublikowane w 1949 roku prace poinformowanego psychoanalitycznie Lévi-Straussa odegrały kluczową rolę w Lacanowskim „powrocie do Freuda” w duchu językoznawstwa strukturalnego. Dokładniejsze badanie tych tekstów, jak również centralnych koncepcji antropologii strukturalnej i psychoanalizy lacanowskiej, uwzględniające nie tylko historyczny rozwój tych ostatnich, ale także ich etnograficzne i kliniczne źródła, rodzi zasadnicze pytania o falsyfikowalność, spójność, moc wyjaśniającą oraz prawdopodobieństwo strukturalistycznycznych hipotez. Kierunek inspiracji był określony i prowadził zawsze od strukturalizmu antropologicznego do psychoanalitycznego, przy czym ten pierwszy formowany był w oparciu o nieuzasadnione analogie, faktograficzne nieścisłości i nadmierne generalizacje, a ten drugi dodatkowo o manipulacje obecne zarówno w pismach Freuda, jak i Lacana.
Presented in 2017/2018 in the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography in Łódź the LostRegained. The Story Continues... exhibition was the result of the restitution of artefacts from the non-European ethnographic collection of the Łódź Museum plundered during the German Nazi occupation of Poland. The history of this collection and its creators dates back to the early 20th century and is directly connected with the turbulent events of the last century: European domination in the colonies, World War II, the Cold War division of Europe and its end. Looking at this past through the prism of the exhibition of the restituted African, American and Asian objects, gives a unique opportunity to ask questions about the origins of the Łódź ethnological tradition, as well as the current state of anthropological and museological discussions about the circumstances in which Polish pre-war, non-European ethnographic collections were created.
Alfred Irving Hallowell (1892–1974), a seasoned researcher of the Ojibwe culture, is known today primarily as a precursor of the anthropological theory of the “new animism”. A student of Franz Boas and a friend of Edward Sapir, he was not only a prominent figure of the culture and personality school, but also proved to be one of the most interesting psychological anthropologists of the 20th century. His works on the Ojibwe indigenous taxonomy prefigured the achievements of ethnoscience, and those on the evolution of human behavior adumbrated the development of sociobiology. Conducted in the 1930s, Hallowell’s fieldwork among the Berens River Ojibwe resulted in numerous academic papers, one of which – the 1960 Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View – years later became particularly influential in anthropological research on animism. This article presents Hallowell’s intellectual biography and discusses his research on the Ojibwe culture along with the concepts he used or developed, concepts that for many researchers became the key to unlocking new conceptualizations of the problem of animism.
The extent to which personal narrative is seen as a valid component of ethnography has been debated by generations of anthropologists. Critics contend that self-reflection trivializes the text, while supporters assert that self-reflection mediates contradictions between personal and scientific authority inherent in the discipline. Through such self-reflection and description, this essay challenges the basic fieldwork narrative in which notions of distance/nearness and foreign/native are imagined as bounded categories of experience.
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