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Title
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Prospects for the Polish Ethnological Society at the Treshold of Its Centennial / LUD 1995 t.79
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Description
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LUD 1995 t.79, s.21-26
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Creator
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Jasiewicz, Zbigniew
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Kopczyńska-Jaworska, Bronisława ;
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Date
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1995
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Format
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application/pdf
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Identifier
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oai:cyfrowaetnografia.pl:1976
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Language
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ang
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Publisher
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Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze
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Relation
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oai:cyfrowaetnografia.pl:publication:2128
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Subject
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Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze
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Text
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Lud, vol. 79, 1995
BRONISŁA WA KOPCZYŃSKA-JAWORSKA
Institutc of Ethnology
Łódź University
ZBIGNIEW JASIEWICZ
Institute of Ethnology and Cultural
Adam Mickiewicz Univcrsity
Poznań
Anthropology
PROSPECTS FOR THE POLISH ETHNOLOGICAL
SOCIETY
AT THE THRESHOLD
OF ITS SECOND CENTENNIAL
[n the present considerations we will make an attempt to answer three
fundamental questions:
l. What should the Society be for its members?
2. What role should the Society play in Polish science?
3. What social challenges should it respond to?
1. The Society and its Members
Answering the first question we would like to refer to the oplllIOn of
Aleksander Kamiński, the most outstanding theoretician of the idea od
societies, nota bene a member of our Society at the time when he worked in the
·Łódź University. According to Kamiński, in the modern civilization which
witnesses the loosening and disappearance of traditional communities, the idea
which lies behind founding societies is to' establish "a neighborhood of your
choice", an affiliation that meets the need of being a member of a certain group.
Moreover, a society should also help to satisfy the need of expression, provide
its members with possibilities of expressing their thoughts, judgments, and
opinions, and, last but not least, play an integrating role of an institution that
bridges the gap between the family and the local community on the one hand
and the nation and the human community in generalon the other. The last
function should make it easier to overcome the barrier between the small and
the great world.
How has our Society fulfilled, both in the past and in the present, the above
expectations? What mistakes did it make and what should be changed?
It seems that the Ethnological Society, as many other organizations of this
kind, has experienced the results of its expansion which Kamiński described as
a phenomenon of "enlargement" whose major consequence is the weakening of
the ties binding the rank and file members and sections of the Society with the
society as a whole.
Most often the inspirations came from the top; there were few grass-roots
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initiatives, or in other words, the neighborhood of choice ceased to play an
important role. The Society came back to life only for a while during the
annual meetings which with time were convened less and less often due to
financial problems and misunderstanding of the role of the delegate (the regular
members often believed that the meeting was exclusively for the delegates l).
Because of the lack of both time and interesting initiatives, members of local
Sections met less frequently too. Also, since many profound changes took place
in our discipline which tended to develop very rapidly, its members time and
again had no common interests. This was related to a growing differentiation of
the members of our Society, where beside professional practitioners and
theoreticians there were many "fans" - amateurs or representatives of other
disciplines.
Another important factor that contributed to the above was a sudden
generation change among the nominal members of the Society. On the one
hand, some of the old faculty members of universities and the Academy of
Sciences stopped to participate in the activities of the Society, and on the other,
the involvement of young scholars was moderate.
Accepting the diversity of members of the Society and treating it as an asset,
we are trying to pay more attention to the specific needs of its particular
groups. In line with this trend has been the development of "circles of
interests". It seems, however, that the Society should provide a wider range of
possibiblities of acting not only to the "circles of interests" but also to sections
or specialist groups of other kinds. In this way our Society might become
a confederation of smaller groups and follow the path already taken by some
academic societies in the world. We are strongly convinced that the Polish
Ethnological Society which has an established tradition of attracting people
with different interests may guarantee understanding for individual needs as
well as for research specializations and as such constitute an attractive platform
for a discussion and integration above the level of particular institutions and
local groups.
2. The Scientific Role of the Society
Before considering the scientific role of the Society, we must concentrate for
a while on the general problems of our discipline. At present the situation of
the humanities is rather difficult. Discussing the problem in depth would reach
beyond the limits of this address, especially that recently many papers have
appeared which stress the breakthrough that took place in science in general
and in the humanities in particular, and as a consequence also in Polish
ethnology.
The expansion of methodological reflection and the discovery of new
cognitive possibilities in our discipline provoke us to raise a questionn about
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the role that in this specific intellectual revival should be played by our
Society. How to reconcile the research tradition of our Society some members
of which from the beginning of its existence have been collecting many
interesting and valuable observations even though they had no academic
background but only the desire to adhere to observation in a positivistic sense
of the word, with the contemporary methodological challenges? These transformation are taking place with different intensity in different centers (regardless of the type of organization and age limitations), thus generating different
needs and possibilities for particular individuals and groups even when
nominally they represent the same level of fundamental professional expertise.
It seems, therefore, that our Society should make a specific attempt at
developing modern ethnological ideas within the range of its statutory
activities, and - let us not be afraid the word - disseminate these ideas
among Polish ethnographers no matter where they work. After all, it is the
responsibility of our Society to create conditions conducive to both comprehensive academic criticism and development of new ideas, and thus reject the
often heard opinions that it is the stronghold of scientific traditionalism or even
conservatism!
The Society should become an ethnological forum for the discussions that
are held - as it is commonly known - in informal groups or in other
collective bodies such as the Section of Social Anthropologists at the Polish
Sociological Society or in the editorial boards of such journal as "Polska
Sztuka Ludowa. Konteksty" ["Polish Folk Art. Contexts"]. The publishers
affiliated at our Society are also undertaking some efforts to the same effect (it
is worth mentioning some of the volumes -of the series "Prace Etnologiczne"
["Ethnological Papers"], the recent issues of our journal "Lud" ["Folk"] or
numerous articles which have been published already for many years in the
"Literatura Ludowa" ["Folk Literature"]), yet irrespective of these initiatives
we see the need to develop new organizational forms for scientific discussions.
These discussions should be initiated by Sections interested in particular
subjects and prepared by them, also in cooperation with the above mentioned
organizations and in collaboration
with the Committee of Ethnological
Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, always open to diverse needs of
scholars, yet because of its statutory regulations accepting only senior faculty
members and at present even not all of them. One of the possible initiatives
might be the foundation of sections - and here we are referring to the
previously expressed thoughts that are in line with the interests of particular
groups of members and needs of our discipline - gathering people from
different departments of the Society. The objective of these sections would be to
discuss essential questions, either methodological or related to important
scientific problems, e.g. regionalism, the question of ethnicity or folk art and
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handiwork, or the wide field bordering on religious studies and the study of
rites and customs.
We personally think that such an ambitious plan would attract more of our
colleagues who at present do not see any field for their activity in the Polish
Ethnological Society.
3. The Society and its Role in Public Life
Considering the role of our Society in the social and cultural life of our
country, we may notice that one of the fields of activity of our Society that has
been developing all the time, despite many financial problems and with much
success, is publishing of the achievements of Polish ethnologists and presenting
the Society to the outside world.
The publishers of our Society take into account different educational
backgrounds and different interests of our readers, publishing documentary
materials (beginning with Oskar Kolberg's works), papers and the aforementioned methodological articles in special series as well as popular providing
information about folk costumes aod artists, etc. Among our publications of
special value is "Biblioteka Zesłańca" ["Library of Exiles"] which stresses the
importance of the so-called personal documents and supplements our knowledge oat only of the unknown periods of Polish history, but also - in a universal
sense - about human life under extreme circumstances.
One flaw of our publishing activity are too small numbers of published
copies, which reduces our audience. Another drawback, which is closely related
to first one, are high prices of our publications, which again is the reason why
many potential readers cannot afford them. The most important reason why
the distribution of our publications is not wide enough is not, however, the
aftermath of the two drawbacks mentioned above, but rather ignorance of
what ethnology actually deals with! Thus, dissemination of knowledge about
ethnology should be the main task and responsibility of the Society.
Recently, our hopes for the improvement of the situation have been related
to the involvement of some of the representatives of our discipline in the reform
of school curricula and to the new idea of fostering in schools the interests in
the problems of the traditional culture of the region. Still, the contributions of
ethnologists to more popular magazines are much too rare. There are too few
ethnological commentaries on various urgent issues of our contemporary life!
Ethnologists should express their opinions in the discussions about the needs of
the local government, ecological problems, or cultural planning both in the
micro and macro-scale. With no intention to belittle the.achievements of many
different ethnographic or folklore studies and their needs to develop, we should
inform the public opinion that these two are not the only fields of interest of
our discipline. A step in this direction is the common tendency to change the
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names of ethnographic institutions into "ethnological" or dealing with "cultural anthropology". This apparently formal procedure has been also considered in the circles of our Society with reference to the change of its historical
name, i.e. "Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze" [The Society for Folk Studies], which
does correspond to the contemporary pursuits of our discipline. What solution
can reconcile respect for aur IOO-year tradition with the need to inform what
contemporary ethnologists are doing now?
Concluding this short introduction to our discussion about the future of the
Polish Ethnological Society - the discussion which we all very much need on
the threshold of its next century - we wish to emphasize the immediate
interest and usefulness of some traditional values which have been long present
in the works of our Society. Among them, we would like to mention the ability
of our Society to combine research and popularizing goals, cognitive tasks and
those of immediate socia-cultural importance; the broad cognizance of folk
studies - ethnology that is close to the concept of cultural anthropology; the
acceptance of many schools and approaches to research; the dissemination of
beliefs in the values of folk culture which constitute the heritage of nations as
well as humanity in general; and, at last, the conviction that science should
oppose ethnocentric attitudes and xenophobia, which is so important at the
moment of bridging gaps between nations and cultures. One hundred years
ago, in the first volume of "Lud", a cofounder of our Society and an
outstanding Ukrainian ethnologist, Ivan Franko, wrote that ethnological
works may "contribute to elevating us into the bright and pure sphere of
tolerance and understanding" where mistrust and ethnic hostility will become
impossible.
The traditions of the Society may turn out to be a valuable factor
stabilizing ethnology - a science about which Professor Anna Kutrzeba-Pojnarowa wrote in the text published posthumously in the jubilee 78th
volume of "Lud" that "it has always been as if in statu nascendi". For the future
development of Polish ethnology and of the Society, and for its proper place in
scientific and cultural life, the joint intellectual and organizational effort of all
of us concerned about ethnology and the Society will be of great importance.
Translated by Marek Wilczyński
