PL
Knowledge about culture – as an unfinished projectSince 1972 there is a unique faculty in Poland, dedicated to learning about culture. It was created by professor Stanisław Pietraszko (1928–2010) at the University of Wrocław, and now it is present on over forty Polish universities together with relevant scientific institutions (which publish i.a. this journal). Nevertheless, the aim of Professor’s initial project was above all to establish a a specific method of learning about culture, and the new university faculty was supposed to be merely a means to achieve this goal. So far, the aim has not been accomplished – there is no substantial specifics of this knowledge about culture, which is practiced in these faculties. Therefore, we can speak of an “unfinished project”.According to this project, it is essential to learn culture as a historically changing axioticity (axiotic dimensions), characteristic for human world. Such concepts and studies, leading in the long tradition of thinking about culture, were dispersed in various fields of the humanities (e.g. H. Rickert’s ideas on the realization of values, M. Weber’s studies on the role of protestant values and ethics, A.L. Kroeber’s “value culture”, etc.). The suggested approach differs from the perspectives and subjects typical for traditional disciplines, and from new approaches (anthropology, sociology, semiotics, various philosophies, Kulturwissenschaften, “cultural studies”, et al.), which are interested in non-specific aspects of the axioticity, or even equate culture with something else. Therefore, Stanisław Pietraszko named this isolated knowledge on the specificity of culture and the relevant studies with a different, difficult to translate term “kulturoznawstwo” (knowledge about culture, culturology). Within this field of knowledge various general “paradigms” (Th. Kuhn) are possible, e.g. scientific, interpretive or postmodernist, as well as many theories of its subject – just like in every discipline. In recent years in Poland among researchers working under the “aegis” of this kind of knowledge on culture numerous discussions and ideas emerge concerning the character and identity of the discipline they practice. Some formulate concepts of interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity etc. (which seems to be an apparent solution), others identify this knowledge as one of the existing disciplines, most frequently with anthropology (but then why a different name?), and still others postulate the establishment of a separate discipline – which refers to the initial, unfinished project of general knowledge on culture.