WORD ABOUT WOMEN AND WORD OF WOMEN. PROPOSAL OF FEMINOLOGICAL APPROACH IN INTERPRETATION OF A CHOSEN ASPECT OF RELIGIOUSNESS

• Authors: Kuzma I.
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The article aims at sketching feminological perspective considered by the authoress as a specific perspective in the studies on the Catholic religiousness. She gives up the term 'women's studies' which is accepted in Poland and is applying the term 'feminology' instead. The latter refers to one of the types of methodology. The authoress wonders to what extent the anthropologist can use the scientific tool and procedures of discipline included in the feminological approach. In her opinion the most interesting is the issue of women's experience in general and religious experience in particular. One of the suggestions concerns the method of peculiar 'reading', i.e. decoding both texts written by religious women (especially the saints and the blessed) and texts telling about such women. Such reading is in some ways 'alternative' with regard to common schemes and stereotypes in perceiving and studying women, their religious experience and spirituality. The best material for such 'alternative' reading seems to be hagiographies, biographies and spiritual autobiographies of godly women. The suggested order of the 'reading' goes according to two main stages. The first one includes critical analysis of the texts - deconstructing the given symbols and meanings in order to reveal their specific cultural context. By cultural context author understands all the processes and mechanisms modeling the language, representations and images which exist in the studied culture and describe women and their experience of 'sacrum'. In the next stage positive procedure is suggested-reconstructing the women's experience, uncovering their 'language' (something like a 'dialect') covered under the layer of general cultural discourse modeling or even concealing it. Such texts represent heteroglossy. They make up a heterogeneous and complex whole due to their numerous communicative, stylistic and structural layers as well as numerous subjects. According to the feminist approach it is androcentrism that leaves its mark on that complexity in the first place. That is why the feminological approach often aims at finding ways of overcoming the modes of writing and interpreting dominating and obligatory in a particular tradition.

Keywords

EN

FEMINOLOGY - RELIGIOUS STUDIESFEMINOLOGY-RELIGIOUS STUDIES-ANTHROPOLOGY-METHODOLOGY

Discipline

• ANTHROPOLOGY: ANTHROPOLOGY

• Publisher: Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Etnografia Polska
• Year: 2006
• Volume: 50
• Issue: 1-2
• Pages: 51-72
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Kuzma I.

• I. Kuzma, Uniwersytet Lódzki, Instytut Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej, ul. Jaracza 78, 90-243 Lódz, Poland

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

07PLAAAA03246715