The nature of the mass media functioning in the contemporary culture provides new research opportunities for a cultural anthropologist: the analysis of the message content indigenisation process. Drawing on the writings of Arjun Appadurai, the author speaks about indigenisation and not “localisation”, so as not to associate this phenomenon with a specific spatial location, but to put the emphasis on the locality as an indispensable element of human life. The author analyses the process of the “production of locality” under the influence of the mass media. The audience gives meaning to global content by “reducing” it to a comprehensible, “familiar” image of the world; thus, this content differs locally. As the result of indigenisation, the audience share not only the same information but also imagination. The activity of the audience, which maintains sustained communication interaction with the mass media and among audience participants, as well as the culture space making it possible to “create meanings” of approved content, determine the necessity to regularly “sustain” the process of the “production” of locality, and thus to ensure durability of a specific audience. Thereby, new phenomena emerge in the culture: the “production” of locality leads to the emergence of virtual neighbourhoods, and the fan type prevails in the reception of the content of contemporary mass media messages
Contemporary folklore studies use photographs, especially family snapshots, to conduct narrative interviews in the course of a field work. They treat photography, which has broken the monopoly of spoken word in traditional culture, as a carrier of memory, human experiences and emotions, as images supported with words influence ways of comprehending the past and shaping the memory within local communities. New image-recording techniques also affect the method of carrying out field work, makingit possible to perpetuate the situation under investigation not only on a photographic platebut also on video carriers and digital tapes, thus extending the possibilities of interpreting the current folklore sources. Documentation collected in this way may be published on professional web portals along with the text. The fact that image-recording tools have become so widespread also increases the pace of the changes taking place within the domain of traditional family and annual rituals: recordingvarious events (e.g. wedding receptions or Shrovetide ceremonies) on a videotape and then posting those videos on the Internet, especially on YouTube, sets a new area of field work for folklorists and speeds up the process of theatricalization and carnivalization of contemporary culture.
A carnival stands not only for the festive time set by the religious calendar, but also for all games and shows which are part of the urban pop culture. Theoretical reflection on carnivalisation, i. e. a specific model of participation in culture, was initiated by Mikhail Bakhtin. The process of progressive carnivalisation of the urban space is associated with the development of spectator folklorism on the one hand and desementisation of the folk rituals on the other, i. e. with the expansion of festive events, which create common festive activity. The author brings up examples of carnivalisation of the public space in Polish towns from the middle ages until the contemporary times when the said process was joined by local government institutions, cultural institutions and foundations, whose interaction is to expose the emotional bonds with the promoted values among participants of a common, open, street „immediate theatre“.
Researchers in social memory are bound in their work to include the relations occurring between the memory of local communities and the official historical policy of the state. When events retained and exposed in the local memory are persistently passed over in silence, distorted, falsified or removed from the public sphere by means of decisions taken by the censorship, the remembrance of these events takes on the character of concealed memory, which integrates the given social group tightly (e.g., the Siberians, the Silesians). The transformations which followed in Poland after 1989 (liquidation of the Censorship) formally introduced „commonwealths of memory” into the public debate; however, they affected the stereotypes and prejudices held by Poles only to an insigni' cant degree. The ideologization of the state policy of remembrance, which has been gaining strength for some time (among others, the amended act on the Institute of National Remembrance) practically makes it impossible for a free dialogue to function in the public space. If the official (state) remembrance imposes the way of understanding, interpreting and remembering past events and this under the threat of legal repressions, then there again we come to deal with its clash with unofficial (local) memory, in consequence of which the „bearers” of the latter may develop a sense of being excluded from the official historical narration. Such a situation not only hampers conducting studies among the stigmatized or excluded groups, but primarily requires from the researchers to be particularly responsible while interpreting the images of memory which are lived through by these communities.
W artykule zwrócono uwagę na różne sposoby rozumienia kategorii lokalności, na co zdecydowany wpływ miały przemiany kultury współczesnej. W nowoczesnych społeczeństwach, wewnętrznie zróżnicowanych i wplecionych w różnorodne konteksty medialne, zatraca rację bytu rozumienie lokalności jako kategorii przestrzennej, która stanowi paradygmat tradycyjnej społeczności lokalnej. Znaczący wpływ na przemodelowanie i redefi nicję tego pojęcia wywarł Arjun Appadurai, którego koncepcja „wytwarzania lokalności” jako struktury odczuwania wymaga analizowania tej kategorii w powiązaniu z procesem wytwarzania sąsiedztwa, także wirtualnego. Relacje zachodzące pomiędzy tak rozumianą lokalnością a kulturą globalną ujawniają lokalny sposób przyswajania przekazów medialnych, a kategoria lokalności z kolei jawi się jako miejsce skupienia cech globalnych. Odrębnym zagadnieniem jest funkcjonowanie współcześnie kategorii lokalności jako wartości konstytuującej figurę „małej ojczyzny”, wykorzystywania tradycyjnej kultury ludowej do obrony wspólnoty lokalnej i manifestowania jej odrębności poza danym regionem (ideologia tzw. nowego lokalizmu). Wiążą się z tym instytucjonalne i medialne działania służące „praktykowaniu lokalności”, reaktywowaniu dawnych obrzędów, rytuałów i ceremonii współtworzących poczucie tożsamości regionalnej. Proces ten wymaga zredefi niowania zjawiska folkloryzmu w kulturze współczesnej.
EN
The article focuses on various ways of understanding the category of locality, which was mainly influenced by the changes showing in contemporary culture. In modern societies, which are internally diverse and entangled in various media contexts, the understanding of locality as a spatial category – a paradigm of traditional local community – has gradually been losing its adequacy. Arjun Appadurai had a great influence on remodelling and redefining this idea. His concept of “creating locality” as an emotional structure required analysing the category in connection with the process of creating a neighbourhood, also the virtual one. The relations between locality understood in such a way and global culture disclose the local manner of media transmissions reception, and the category of locality, in turn, appears as the place of concentration of global characteristics. A separate issue regards the contemporary existence of the category of locality as the constituting value of “little homeland”, using traditional folk culture to defend local communities and manifesting its uniqueness outside of a given region (the ideology of the so called new localism). This is connected with institutional and media actions used to “practice locality”, reactivate old ceremonies and rituals, which create the feeling of regional identity. This process requires redefining the concept of folklorism in contemporary culture.
The article is dealing with the problem of mass media phenomenon in relation with elements of traditional culture. Electronic media are a constitutive feature of the contemporary cultural context, as they strongly influence transformations, which can be observed within folklore. The contemporary 'information community' can be best observed through Internet, where community groups are naturally activated within the virtual reality. The process of searching for folk elements in contemporary culture dignifies the anthropological folklore from using methods, developed within this field to study contemporary mechanisms of understanding the world. It considerably enriches the knowledge about human beings.
Carnival stands not only for the festive time set by the religious calendar, but also for all games and shows which are part of the urban pop culture. Theoretical reflection on carnivalisation, i.e. a specific model of participation in culture, was initiated by Mikhail Bakhtin. The process of progressive carnivalisation of the urban space is associated with the development of spectator folklorism on the one hand and desementisation of the folk rituals on the other, i.e. with the expansion of festive events, which create common festive activity. The author brings up examples of carnivalisation of the public space in Polish towns from the middle ages until the contemporary times when the said process was joined by local government institutions, cultural institutions and foundations, whose intention is to expose the emotional bonds with the promoted values among the participants of a common, open, street “immediate theatre”.
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