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Keywords: anthropology; city; urban studies
A proposal of a synthetic presentation of an urban anthropology project, which could constitute a conceptual framework for assorted empirical urban studies sufficiently extensive to encompass an anthropological interpretation of the “world of the life” of a man of letters. The reflections are preceded by an outline of assorted stages in the moulding of the concept of urban anthropology, both in Poland and in Western science, which the author treats as a “self-reflection” motif in urban anthropology (starting with the conception of “expanding the object of ethnography” up to a change in the paradigm of anthropology). In a further part of her text the author seeks structures “merging” numerous and divergent urban themes. The fundamental category of being – place, and in the dimension of the humanities – space and place, is a point of departure for anthropological motifs: the multiplicity of the senses and meanings of places in the town in their social, philosophical (the experiencing of “being in space”) and artistic dimension. The second keystone is time. The statement, recurring in “town planning” literature in the manner of an axiom, namely, that the town is a permanent and complex temporal structure, creates a framework for an interpretation of a considerable part of urban experiences, collective conceptions and social practices: individual and collective memory, commemoration and annulment, revitalisation, nostalgia, etc. The temporal dimension discloses the connection between the town and culture, expressed in an ideological and literary discourse. Yet another fundamental concept of anthropology, i. e. the identity due to people and places, also refers to the past.
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Keywords: anthropology; city; anthropology of the city
(translated by Ewelina Godlewska) In recent decades new theories and practices of urbanism and city planning have coalesced to form a highly visible domain of transdisciplinary discourses for studying cities as both distinct socio-cultural spaces as well as componential parts of wider networked systems, regional and global. One consequence of this development is an increasing awareness on the part of urban scholars that social processes are informed as much by symbolic and discursive practices as they are grounded in capitalist political economic practices. The Urban Imaginary and the Space of the City examines the ways in which the empirical city and its subjectively perceived image in Western culture endures as a complex and discontinuous site of convergent interests rather than a logically or conceptually clarified idea.
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Keywords: anthropology; Targowa; Praga
The author, who lived in Targowa Street (the district of Praga) for 15 years, from 1948 to 1963, presents the reality of the district from that period as seen by a child and a girl. A confrontation of feelings originating in an intelligentsia home and the reality encountered on a daily basis in her closest surrounding.
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Keywords: anthropology; literature; Gdansk
The presented article is an attempt at reconstructing models of the identity of places present in biographical novels and stories by two celebrated authors and leaders of public opinion. The author seeks an answer to the question: which parts of the Tri-City are subjected to the most intense symbolisation in the oeuvre of the two men of letters? Do their works contain recurring combinations of values associated with concrete places in the space of Gdańsk? How is the identity of people perceived within the context of the cultural identity of the place? Paweł Huelle creates a selective and vivid portrait of Gdańsk, which appears to be one of his oeuvre’s “chief protagonists”. Even more extensive descriptions of cities and the author’s experiences are to be found in novels by Stefan Chwin, who pays great attention to his closest surrounding. Both authors symbolically designate Gdańsk by pursuing an archaeology of its residents’ social memory and the micro-politics of local identity, enjoyed by numerous recipients.
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Keywords: anthropology; art; fine arts
The author maintains that a contemporary work of art does not exist as such only in a thicket of words. Today, we are witnessing the presence of several thousand world-outlook conceptions of art, which the artist must know in order to meet the prevailing demands and become a creator for every occasion. The paradox of this situation consists of the fact that someone who is to be the most creative component of this process ceases to be such because the only creative people are those who talk about it while objectifying the artist. An excess of words and artistic undertakings is a feature characteristic for contemporary culture.
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Keywords: anthropology; literature; Fernando Pessoa
The titular “disquiet” is the outcome of an opposition to outside reality, unattainable and highly desirable. Life – symbolised by unpurchased bananas – follows its course outside the windows, in the streets of Lisbon. The civil servant trapped in an office is much too mired in self-reflections and absorbed in revelling in his misery to be able to overcome disquiet and experience the presence of the world...
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Keywords: anthropology; Gesamtkunstwerk; modernism
The article addresses the question of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a key-word with which to describe the ideal of modern culture. The programme of a Gesamtkunstwerk was first explicitly formulated in the mid-nineteenth century by Richard Wagner in his essays Art and Revolution and The Artwork of the Future written in exile in Zurich after the failure of the German revolution in 1849. Traditionally seen as the invention of the nineteenth-century, the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, has been applied to a great variety of phenomena, ranging from the theatre, music, architecture, urban projects and political systems. Despite the elusive nature of the concept, some attempts have been made to set forth its essential characteristics; Harald Szeemann’s exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunswerk. Europäische Utopien seit 1800 (Zurich, 1983) is a case in point. As Odo Marquard notes, the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk is already implied in Schelling’s philosophy of art and its identity system: the system (das Gesamte) becomes an artwork and the artwork becomes a system. Although the early German Romantics did not use the term itself, Friedrich Schlegel’s famous Athenaeum Fragment 116 is also considered as an anticipation of the nineteenth-century concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. The Romantic claim for the synthesis of the arts and poeticization of life opened a path for a modern utopia, where art has been endowed with a ‘redemptive’ power, and had far-reaching consequences for the development of modern aesthetics. Although the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk now seems archaic or ‘suspicious’ – especially in the context of postmodernism and its valuation of the fragmentary – it has reappeared in the expanded field of contemporary art and architecture, especially in happenings, installations and projects in public spaces
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Keywords: literature; anthropology; reminiscence
Continuing his series of reminiscence entitled The Old River Valley published in “Konteksty”, the author based himself on post-war home economics and focused his attention on the attitude of the intelligentsia towards money and ownership as well as its economic life and sources of livelihood.
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Keywords: anthropology; Praga; photography
A brief introduction to the history of a photographer’s studio, once working in 78 Targowa Street.
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Keywords: anthropology; Paris; city
Le Livre des passages is strange work and must be read in an equally unusual manner: this is a book which opens itself on a page of its own choice and compels the eye of the reader-flâneur to delve into a certain fragment, particle or voice. A Book of Passages written by a tramp calls for a reader who is a vagabond, a brigand, and an assailant. For Benjamin, just as for Balzac, Nerval and Baudelaire, Paris was a book of signs endowed with an inexhaustible narration potential, resembling a generator of the senses, working incessantly and at top speed. The task of the poet-flâneur consists, therefore, of indicating the multi-voice, ungrasped and ungraspable richness of simultaneously transpiring narrations.
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Keywords: folk art; anthropology; art brut
Reminiscences about Stanisław Zagajewski, whose oeuvre was a negation of folk art, difficult to grasp or classify. Zagajewski’s works were associated with his personality and visions; self-generated, they were close to the concept of Art Brut. Without succumbing to the impact of culture they remained independent of styles and models. Zagajewski was a compulsive sculptor and art constituted the sense of his life. He was featured at numerous exhibitions and became the topic of several films, albums and numerous texts in assorted books.
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Keywords: art; anthropology; province
The author outlines the artistic biography and geography of the titular artist, whose life followed two courses – between the large city and rural existence. The artist became acquainted with the towns of Italy, France, Spain and The Netherlands, while simultaneously immersing himself in the life of the Polish province, where he worked. Sempoliński experienced the landscape as a sign of an energy that creates being and as ontological knowledge about the construction of space and matter
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Keywords: ethnographic laboratory; anthropology; Praga
A brief introduction to the problems and range of the titular research project, realised as part of an ethnographic laboratory conducted in the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Warsaw University in 2004-2006. The studies, concentrated on places with a diverse identity, were carried out in Warsaw and its environs. They include research by Agata Chełstowska, Katarzyna Gmachowska, Katarzyna Kuzko and Magdalena Majchrzak.
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Keywords: Benjamin; city; anthropology
Throughout his whole life Walter Benjamin created mini-portraits of towns, synthetic “images of thought”, sometimes no larger than the text on a postcard. They mark the places in which the life of the author of Le Livre des passages merges, as closely as possible, with writing and the text. This is the place where that which is theoretical and that which is experienced are already inseparable and undistinguishable. Benjamin’s images of cities are never a journalistic “capturing of life”: following the example of the poet Stefan George, he introduced the concept of denkbilder, which contains tension between the past and the present, between recollection and experience. Benjamin believed in the cabalistic power of the word. Just as Proust treated names, so he conceived the names of towns as symbols: Berlin, Jerusalem, Marseilles, Moscow, Naples, New York, Paris, Riga, San Indignant...
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Keywords: anthropology; architecture; city
Patrycja Cembrzyńska In Search of a Celestial Haven – a Cosmic Odyssey The dialogue Timaeus by Plato remarks that we should direct our thoughts towards the realm of the eternal stars, and that our spirit is not at home here, on Earth. Its true homeland is the heavens: “[…] we are a plant not of an earthly but of a heavenly growth”. Is it possible to live differently than on Earth? Fantasies of celestial cities were pursued by Jonathan Swift, Georgiy Krutikov, and Wenzel Hablik. Subsequently, the era of space flights led to dreams of discovering a Promised Land in the universe. The Stanford Torus inter-stellar colony conceived by NASA inspired Jarosław Kozakiewicz, the author of Satopticon, which instead of being a New Atlantis turns out to be a penal colony.
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Keywords: Pandora; Nerval; literature
The author discusses the origin and history of the publication of Nerval’s Pandora and accentuates the differences between the narrator traversing the city (flâneur) and the insane narrator in Pandora
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Keywords: anthropology; city; literature
The presented essay contains a historical-literary outline of Polish adaptations of Les mysteres de Paris by Eugene Sue during the second half of the nineteenth century. The author analysed Tajemnice Warszawy (The Mysteries of Warsaw, 1908) by A. W. Koszutski, Tajemnice Krakowa (The Mysteries of Cracow, 1870) by Michał Bałucki, Tajemnice Nalewek (The Mysteries of Nalewki, 1889) by Henryk Nagiel and Tajemnice Warszawy (The Mysteries of Warsaw, 1887) by Bojomir Bończa within the context of the development of popular literature. The article indicates the fundamental elements of the genre: the fairy-tale structure with a morally satisfying end, the one-dimensional protagonists, the didactic commentaries and frequent passages addressed to the reader, the motif of love and money as the prime motor forces of the plot, the expanded dialogues and, first and foremost, the specific feature of mystery in the depiction of the city, the protagonist and their past. By resorting to the instruments used by the sociology of literature, the author proposes a critique of the assessment of the Polish mystery novel undertaken by Józef Abhors, and sketches the mechanism of the functioning of this genre of popular literature. In doing so, she shows the method of involving the reader into the course of the narration by means of a created illusion of reality, and thus discloses its persuasive strategy.
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Keywords: history; Praga; Warsaw
The uniqueness and character of the Praga district in Warsaw are determined by a number of features, unchanged for centuries. Owing to its location the district remained in an unsymmetrical configuration vis ŕ vis the City on the left bank of the Vistula, and in an outright opposition expressed in the social composition of the residents, the origin of the population (a large percentage of Russians and Jews), an increased crime rate, and specificity consisting of an intentional, frequently cultivated and stressed distinction compared to other parts of the capital. This phenomenon remains discernible up to this day: Praga, together with the fast disappearing but still existing Różycki Bazaar, the domes of the Russian Orthodox church of St. Mary Magdalene, or the ludic atmosphere around the Zoo, is a separate world. The social climate and brogue of the local residents appear to hold their own, challenged by the process of transforming, right in front of our eyes, old factories into a cultural Mecca of the capital, thus offering the district a chance for promotion, which will either overwhelm it or became the reason why Praga will lose its natural ambiance without gaining a new image in its stead.
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Keywords: anthropology; fine arts; Kazimierzowski Palace
The history of the titular edifice goes back to the first half of the seventeenth century when its construction was initiated by Zygmunt III Vasa. Originally, the building fulfilled the function of a suburban villa, regarded as a supplemement of the official royal residence at the Royal Castle. The palace was erected in the Baroque style, but successive redesigning changed its appearance to Late Baroque and Classicistic. Totally damaged by fire in 1944, the palace was reconstructed after the second world war. The large number of the transformations of the palace solid makes it impossible to recreate the sculpted decorations, but basing himself on archival information, iconographic material, and preserved elements of the embellishment the author brings the reader closer to this interesting iconographic programme.
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