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.
Analysis and intepretation of film art is primarily domain of the film studies; approach of this discipline could be also supplemented by applied folkloristics. Folkloristic methodology used for analysis of folktales and legends could be used to analyse plots and sujets of popular mainstream movies and to better understand their meanings and their appeal to audiences worldwide. The study presents, on several examples, how the method inspired by structural-functional morphology of folktale can be used to classify and interpret popular movies, regardless if they use folkloric sujets consciously or unconsciously. Examples of the most popular mainstream movies from last 40 years are used.
There is some basis to the perennial fear that folklore draws every day nearer to extinction. But this is true not so much because the traditional sources of folklore are disappearing; it is so rather because the very idea of folklore has fallen on hard times. Folklore is less popular in the public sphere than it once was, but it is also less popular among scholars, who have been gradually abandoning folklore studies for other fields or have been renaming and redefining folklore studies, with the result that the discipline is decreasingly identifiable as the study of something called “folklore”. This essay takes such criticism of folklore as its point of departure, offering its own proposal for critically reexamining and reconceptualizing – but not abandoning – the idea of folklore. The author argues that a serious engagement with the idea of “the folk” may serve as a point of departure for understanding the symbolic ambiguity as well as the social significance and political power of what scholars call (or used to call) folklore. Scholars should neither uncritically accept the ideology of the folk, nor hastily banish the idea to the safe realm of the emic as if it had no bearing on the way we as scholars think. If the study of folklore has relevance in today’s world, it is above all because of the unusual notion that some kinds of expression are conditioned by some kind of social entity that can be called a folk, which continues to provide the most productive basis for a scholarly discipline studying folklore.
The article submits a chronologically explained development of the Swiss ethnology with an emphasis on the development in the 19th century through the 1960s, whereby the interest in cultural diversity as well as that defined in other ways in older periods is partially included as a theme. Great attention is paid to key personalities in the history of the Swiss ethnology, in particular to Eduard HoffmannKrayer and Richard Weiss, and to how they influenced the theoretical and methodological as well as thematic shifts in the orientation of the discipline. Further significant persons and important works of the Swiss ethnology are mentioned as well, and the institutional basis of the discipline is described. The author presents the Swiss ethnology as quite a peculiar and progressive research discourse. This was formed under a strong influence of the German Volkskunde, but evolving in a country featuring a specifically multiethnic composition of the population, a significantly different historical development, as compared to Germany, and special, even extreme natural and geographical conditions that contributed to the survival of many archaic elements of the socalled folk culture until the 20th century.
This article is an attempt to take a critical look on Oskar Kolberg’s works in the context of modern methodological standards, which are accepted in the folklore research. The analysis of specific qualities of Kolberg’s material, (e.g. the way of obtaining ethnographical data, organizing them and preparing for print) leads to a few conclusions. An ambitious and innovating project (an attempt to show the connections between folk texts and folk culture in general) was partly realized, because in Kolberg’s works there is a characteristic dissonance. Some texts are placed in the group with descriptions of habits, beliefs and rituals, some in the separate sections associated with literature (e.g. “Folk novels”, “Songs”, “Proverbs”). And the third group consists of dances. The entire material is divided in two basic sections. The first one includes texts, which are recognized as closely connected with cultural context and this connection is emphasized. The second section includes texts, which are treated as autonomous and their links with other elements of folk culture are omitted and marginalized. It appears that Kolberg, despite his very modern, holistic approach to culture research, stayed in the strong influence of philological and musicological paradigms. They were not harmoniously combined, but competed which each other and gained “local victories” in particular areas of research.
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 referred to the textbook patterns of studies conducted abroad. However, it was not long that he proposed his own understanding of research problems in the history of culture. He refers to the category of colloquial thinking schemes and the vision of culture as a structured semiotic chaos. His rejection of the culture viewed as a coherent and organized whole dynamizes the model of historical culture that he accepts. What makes one of the expressions of that trend is the accepting the situational definition of cultural experience and organization of the world. In the last years before his death, Piotr Kowalski applies a multi-variant research model, in which philological, folkloristic, and anthropological competences are originally included into the task of identifying alien historical re-constructed worlds. His final image of the research method or a bundle of research methods reflects the motives crucial for his studies, mostly in the sphere of the tension between the standing and the change, repeatability and dynamization, as well as individualization of reading the world in historical cultures. The subject of his last studies is formed by the civilizational process, understood in its widest scope, happening in the space of cultural constructs, and watched by a researcher in the micro- and macroscale at the same time. What makes a crucial historical source for the research presented in that way is a narrative text.
The overview study focuses on a brief outline of the history and disciplinary identity of North American folklore studies (folkloristics, folklore) with an emphasis on the field of verbal culture. Major research themes, research schools, and personalities are presented, as well as the history of the institutionalization of the field at the U.S. universities after World War II After a brief introduction to the origins, when North American folklore studies did not differ significantly from British and Continental scholarship, its development during interwar period and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when its emancipation took place, mainly because of unique American emphasis on study of folklore performance, is described. Critical overview text thus presents basic contours of this specific academic field, practiced mainly in the U.S.A and Canada, which in many aspects represents a unique scientific discipline with close ties to international folklore studies, European ethnology, and anthropological fields in general.
The contribution deals with the overview of more significant literary-folkloristic studies that paid their attention to the analysis of prosaic folklore phenomena developed and/or spread during World War I both in the battlefields and in the hinterland zones. While some texts of folklore nature drew researchers’ attention nearly immediately (prophecy, folk beliefs), the analyses of some others began several years later (demonogical legends, jokes, folk graffiti) – a part thereof came to a more thorough analysis only at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries (rumours and contemporary legends). Within European folkloristics, World War I proves to be a period that drew researchers’ attention mainly because of an unexpected increase in “irrationality” in both rural and urban environment. At that time, this phenomenon was most often interpreted as “tradition revival” and welcomed as a mean for revitalization and legitimacy of a discipline focused on the documentation of ostensibly disappearing folk culture associated with traditional rural areas. Although this concerned quite isolated partial studies in the most cases, yet as a whole these helped increase the interest of European folkloristics in the texts circulating in the current oral tradition. The texts of that time devoted to the interpretation of World War I paved the way for the later researches into contemporary folklore to a certain extent. This research direction was made more topical again at the end of the 20th century as it served as an inspiration for the contemporary study of the World War I folklore, which was based on the exploration of more types of source materials.
W artykule wskazano cechy historii mówionej (HM), które łączą ją z dialektologią i folklorystyką, oraz zaprezentowano elementy, które zbliżają HM do etnolingwistyki. Autorka przypomina genezę programu HM, omawia jej metodę badawczą oraz sytuuje ją w relacji do przedmiotu badań i celów etnolingwistyki. Przypomina amerykańskie początki tej metody datujące się na połowę XX wieku, także niektóre inicjatywy europejskie, w tym polskie. W samym Lublinie są aż trzy tego typu ośrodki: Ośrodek Brama Grodzka -- Teatr NN, Radio Lublin oraz UMCS. W tekście poruszony został także problem roli badań narratologicznych w programie HM. Zwrot ku narracji jako przedmiotowi badań, ogarniający dziś wiele dziedzin naukowych, zauważalny jest również w etnolingwistyce.
EN
The article lists the characteristics of spoken history, which link it with dialectology and folklore studies. It also presents elements through which spoken history approaches ethnolinguistics. The author reviews the origin of the spoken history research, its methods and relationship to the subject matter and the goals of ethnolinguistics. She recalls the American beginnings of the field from the mid-20th c., as well as certain European, including Polish, initiatives. Three centres of this kind can be found in Lublin alone: the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” Centre, Radio Lublin and Maria CurieSkłodowska University. Another problem is the role of narration studies in relation to spoken history. A “narrative turn” present in many disciplines can also be recognized in ethnolinguistics.
This study attempts to reconstruct key elements in the thought of literary critic and folklorist Bedřich Václavek. Václavek is generally recognized as a prominent figure in interwar literary development and as a researcher who examined genres of popular tradition that had previously eluded scholarly attention. Yet his thought is not well known as a synthetic whole. The reception of his work is divided into two separate fields, and interpreters have paid little attention to the importance of his folkloristic work on his understanding of literature, and to the importance of his literary theory on his understanding of folklore. Václavek’s work as a whole remains little known. Nevertheless, Václavek dealt with parallel issues in his two main fields, elaborating complementary conceptual frameworks, each of which contributed to the originality of the other. If we view Václavek only as a literary critic, we may see him as a figure who voiced and confronted crucial challenges of his times, but who does not particularly stand out from among the many other critics of his day who made similar attempts to bridge the experimental literary ambitions of the avant-garde and the social objectives of those political movements that the avant-garde most frequently embraced. And if we view Václavek only as a folklorist, we may see him as a careful scholar who contributed to the development of his discipline, but who did not go beyond its boundaries to lay out the more general social importance of this work. It is only when we look at Václavek’s work in its entirety that we perceive the conceptual innovation he brought to literary criticism from folklore studies, as well as the social importance acquired by folklore studies when it is connected to the overall aesthetic expression of the people in society. What emerges from a synthetic reconstruction of Václavek’s thought is his systematic attempt to explain the concept of "people" and its role in aesthetic development, both in the literary sphere and in the sphere of oral tradition - and (perhaps even more importantly for Václavek) in the space between the written and the spoken word, where literature and folklore meet and general “culture” emerges from this fusion.
CS
Studie usiluje o rekonstrukci klíčových momentů myšlení literárního kritika a folkloristy Bedřicha Václavka (1898–1943). Václavek je obecně uznáván jako významná osoba meziválečného literárního vývoje a rovněž jako badatel, který zkoumal žánry lidové kultury, jež dříve unikaly vědecké pozornosti. Jeho myšlení však není intepretováno jako syntetický celek. Přítomná studie usiluje o vnímání jeho díla v jeho celistvosti. Pouze tal se plně vyjevuje originalita Václavkova příspěvku k estetické teorii, resp. k obecné sociální sémiotice. Podle autorova soudu se Václavek stává zajímavějším marxistou ve chvíli, když je jeho marxistická práce nepřímo doplňována jeho svéráznou teorií lidové tradice; a stává se zajímavějším folkloristou tehdy, když bereme v úvahu politicko-kritický význam jeho výzkumu folkloru. Navrhuje vnímat toto dílo jako na snahu o vnímání písemnictví a lidové tradice coby dvou stránek jediného sociálně-estetického procesu.
This text is based on a catalogue of demonological legends, i.e. a work of folklore, incorporating an implied folkloric conception of literary work and method that is applied to examine folkloric literature. This method is compared with the literary studies method and indicates how on the basis of the various methods, both literary studies and folkloric, the very concept of literature and associated key categories are transformed, i.e. the author, text, genre system and so forth. The text also provides information on catalogues of folk literature in general and on this particular catalogue of demonic legends.
CS
Text vychází z katalogu démonologických pověstí, tedy z práce folkloristické, resumuje implikovanou folkloristickou představu o literárním díle a metodu, kterou na zkoumání literatury folkloristika uplatňuje. Tuto metodu srovnává s metodou literární vědy a ukazuje, jak se na základě různých metod, literárněvědné a folkloristické, proměňuje samotný pojem literatury a příbuzných základních kategorií: autora, textu, žánrového systému aj. Text je zároveň informací o katalozích lidové slovesnosti obecně i o konkrétním katalogu démonických pověstí.
The article deals with critical analysis of contemporary acceptance of the intangible cultural heritage concept in field of European ethnology. European ethnology has strong historic experience with making the key analytical terms of its study (“folk”, “traditional folk culture”, “folklore”, “tradition”) problematical. In its long history, these terms were more times redefined, deconstructed or even fully abandoned. In the last years, external as well as internal criticism of this traditional ethnological terminology led to a quick acceptance of an applied and originally political term “intangible cultural heritage” that was primarily created for the UNESCO international agenda. Unlike the above mentioned traditional ethnological terms, this concept features a lot of undoubted advantages (modern understanding of culture as a process and practice, not only as a product; social construction of its meaning; taking into consideration the community’s and society’s decision about its passing down from generation to generation; international consensus about its meaning). On the other hand, however, it brings about a lot of problematical facts (derivation from an unclearly defined applied concept of “heritage”; nature of a mere enumeration of designates; weak theoretical reflexion of the concept in the contrast with its strong political and ideological background). On a ground of the concise overview Begriffgeschichte, i.e. a brief history of the European ethnology’s terminology, the essay tries to find a corresponding position for this concept and to contemplate its role for this unusual discipline that is located at the boundary line between historiography, social sciences and humanities.