Keywords: anthropology; literature;
A successive fragment of The Old River Valley, describing the amusing history of a security issued by the Domestic Economy Bank and bequeathed to the author by his aunt.
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Keywords: anthropology; Warsaw; art
A conversation with an outstanding artist and painter about anthropology, painting, pre-war Warsaw, the Praga district and photographs by the artist’s father, Leonard Sempoliński.
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Keywords: anthropology; Sarajevo; war
This anthropological story deals with Sarajevo, a town submerged in war, where contrary to all odds life continues to follow its course; daily events are salvaged thank to human ingenuity and “the texts of culture”. The author paid special attention to analysing the topos of the “closed town”, with its logic of a “world turned upside down”, a characteristic suspension of “normal” time, and a special comprehension of space. In doing so, she shows the similarity between the descriptions of time and space of wartime Sarajevo and Leningrad under siege.
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Keywords: anthropology; architecture; Warsaw
The author delves into the identity of a place in urban space exemplified by the Warsaw Housing Cooperative (WSM) in the district of Żoliborz – a model of the town planning tendencies of modernism, emerging from the retrospective accounts by its residents. The context for an attempt at evoking the subjective experiencing of this particular place is the discourse held until this day and concerning the foundations of such ideological projects as the WSM and their consistent realisation.
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Keywords: Wadowice; pope; anthropology
The article describes the visual surrounding of the hometown of John Paul II from the vantage point of the pope’s person, and including commemorative plaques, monuments, and information. With this purpose in mind the author applied the concept of the iconosphere, with photographs as an essential element of the article. Signs referring to papal qualities may be arranged in circles of the dissemination of the sacrum, whose centre is the parish church of the Presentation of the Holy Virgin Mary in the town market square. The first circle is thus the square itself, with the municipal office building featuring an inscription: “The Wadowice self-government ever faithful to John Paul II”. The market square also includes a Museum – the Family Home of John Paul II and a Municipal Museum, which at the time of the research displayed an exposition on the pope. A separate part of the space is composed of shops offering devotionalia dominated by likenesses of the pope. The second circle is the town. Within this range the papal narration is organised by the Karol Wojtyła Route composed of sites important in the life of the future pope and accompanied by numerous uncoordinated references. The third circle is the John Paul II Rail Trail, linking Wadowice and Cracow by means of a special “papal” train. The fourth and fifth circles of the dissemination of the sacrum encompass Poland and the whole world. Apparently, symbols of papacy constitute the myth of Wadowice conceived as a papal town.
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