Obraz przeszłości w percepcji magiczno-mitycznej, czyli pamięć w działaniu
The Image of the Past in Magical-Mythical Perception, or the Memory in Action

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the paper is to identify a specific type of cognitive conduct, whichcan be called magical-mythical perception and thinking. It is based on a relevanthabitus and its principle is indistinctness (blending, blurring), where differencesbetween diverse phenomena, memory images and notions disappear in perceptionand imagination, as well as between denotation and connotation. Suchan indistinctness can have considerable impact on social memories. The authoridentifies in such a cognitive conduct the possible key to the following questions:How is it possible that we can perfectly adopt different representations of thepast and internalize them as our past? How can we reconcile different representationsof the past and how is it possible that diverse representations of the pastmerge in one social memory? Such amalgamations of various forms of representationsand diverse scales of objectification can be clarified by means of the theoryof magic and by means of Roland Barthes´ theory of myth. The main propositionof the paper is to identify, for the first, the unconscious structure (a habitusformed in the historical process), which defines a manner of experiencing theworld, speaking about the world and making choices in that world. For the second,the criteria a person uses to select and evaluate narratives about the past.

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