Umykanie. Pomyślenia z etnografii życia
Escaping: Thoughts from within the ethnography of life

Author(s): Wojciech Józef Burszta, Marcin Kafar
Subject(s): Philosophy, Ethics / Practical Philosophy
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: ethnography of life; remembering; open work; death and dying; mourning
Summary/Abstract: The work is a two-author project oriented around the concept of “ethnography of life,” proposed by Wojciech J. Burszta, then taken up and developed by Marcin Kafar. The ethnography of life is a hermeneutic tool for working on one’s own memory (it is captured by the metaphor of the “cadastre”), which–in the process of thinking and writing about it–allows the author/authors to reach events experienced in the past, but today renewed in the constant process of searching for meanings. Its main goal is an attempt to give meaning to one’s own life as a narrative unity (Paul Ricoeur), in the presented work stretched between two mutually complementary poles: private life and professional/scientific life (related to the activity undertaken in the world of the Academy). The distinguishing feature of the publication is its “open form” (Umberto Eco), generated by the specific circumstances of its creation. While the main part was written by Wojciech J. Burszta, the rest of the text was prepared after his death in 2021. The formula of “openness” was then saturated with additions of “blurred genres” (Clifford Geertz), taking the form of auto/biographically oriented explanations showing multiple aspects of the “life and work” of Wojciech J. Burszta. They include e.g. (i) the path of precipitating the concept of “ethnography of life,” taking into account its anthropological and educational nature, (ii) the formative background for exploring the key issues of the variant of Polish humanities at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, expressed through dialogue-constructed passages, and (iii) highly personal (culturally and socially conditioned) ground for understanding the self-human as facing the inevitability of one’s own finitude.

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