„Los granicznej krainy” Śląsk Cieszyński w socjologicznej refleksji Jana Szczepańskiego
“The fate of the border land”: Cieszyn Silesia in the sociological reflection of Jan Szczepański

Summary/Abstract: The article is an attempt to reconstruct the image of Cieszyn Silesia contained in the works of Jan Szczepański. The author presents the most important elements of the image of Silesia (the Polish part of Silesia, i.e. the Silesian Voivodeship at that time) drawn by Szczepański in the interwar period, and the image of Cieszyn Silesia in the post-war period. In his opinion, the essence of Silesian reality is conflict and struggle. Treating Cieszyn Silesia as a borderland area with a strongly outlined cultural, religious (Protestant) and aesthetic distinctiveness, he argues about its Polishness, emphasizing that it is a misunderstood region in Poland. The author believes that in Jan Szczepański’s deliberations on Cieszyn Silesia, it is not possible to identify a clear “thinking style”, while Szczepański’s way of thinking about Cieszyn Silesia, despite its fragmentary nature and many understatements, is part of the two most important research paradigms identified in the sociology of Silesia: borderland and multiculturalism.

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