Cyfrowa Etnografia

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Part of Summary of articles / Polska Sztuka Ludowa - Konteksty 1999 t.53 z.1-2

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SUMMARY OF ARTICLE
Małgorzata Dziewulska
The Second Life of Objects
Objects in the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor play a specific role. They
cannot be treated as ordinary props, since they constitute rather antiprops. First and foremost, they include used second hand objects,
discovered anew, sometimes extracted from daily life, frequently
associated with the lives of the poor. Those "poor objects", suffused with
emotion, can be abandoned, ignored, degraded, and possess special
merits connected with memory (links with the deceased and childhood
reminiscences). In the Kantor theatre such things perform an ennobled
role; hence, the dramatis personae are often reduced to the status of mere
things, and are empty, dead mannequins. Paradoxically, such "reduction"
is tantamount to ennoblement. The object, matter comprises that which
we encounter when we flee psychology. What is the nature of an object
if it is better than the psyche? It simply must be spiritual, something
concealed within matter, and superior to the latter. Through this material
trait Kantor returned to the spiritual world, and in this specific manner he
restored mythical qualities to cultural contents.

by Piotr Szacki and Tomasz Potkański. The camera built by Stanisław
Łabiszewski was purchased by the State Ethnographic Museum in
Warsaw.

The article by Małgorzata Dziewulska is supplemented by texts
written by the students with whom she conducted courses (1996-1997).
In the majority of cases, the objects were described solely upon the basis
of a filmed version of two spectacles by T. Kantor: Niech sczezną artyści
(May the Artists Perish) and Wielopole, Wielopole: E . Bielawska, 77ie
Camera - Machine Gun, T. Kalczyński, Doors, D. Nowak, 77ie Bed Death Machine, A. Łoboda, The Tablecloth, D. Rembelska, Uncle Stasiothe Exile, K. Rekosz, The Pillory, I. Gorzkowski, The Handcar,
M. K. Tylkowska, The Barrel-organ, and J. Kowalik, The Pool.

Agnieszka Tulik
The Travelling Barbarians
The article presents the material aspects of journeys made by Franks
and Longobards from the fifth century to the mid-seventh century. The
author describes means of transport from the period and a brief history of
particular inventions. She takes into considerations journeys made on
foot, methods of crossing rivers (bridges, boats, fords, horseback, on
shields), lodgings (and the hospitality of the hosts), meals during the
journeys and items taken by the travellers. The source material used as a
base for the study include early mediaeval chronicles: Historia
Francorum by Gregory of Tours, Historia Longobardorum by Paulus
Diaconus and the fourth book of the Fredegar chronicle.

Jakub Szczuka
Per monstra ad sphaeram . Aby Warburg and His Library
The library of Aby Warburg, an historian of art specialising in the
Renaissance, is not a mere collection of books, but a museum of the
imagination and a collection of memories. Its purpose was to indicate the
functioning of social memory, conceived as a force which renders
possible the re-emergence of style, and a recognition of classical
civilisation as a permanent quality. Warburg maintained that the
European civilisation is a process which constitutes the outcome of a
collision of assorted tendencies.
Joanna Tokarska-Bakir
"The Blind Librarian". On the Written Dimension of the Oral
With a tangle of meanings, in which the written word and name
appear in a religious-magic context, as the point of departure, the
presented text demonstrates the possibility of comprehending writing as
concealment (lethe in the Heideggerian sense of the word), and as
"rendering indelible by means of oblivion". Such an understanding of
writing, characteristic for its sacral application, creates the specific style
of culture, which could be described as "oral", in the more extensive,
"ontological" meaning of the term.
Piotr Szacki
The Unusual
The unusual is a subjective and relative classification; in order that it
may come into being, it must be perceived and calls for a background:
the context of ordinariness, convention and norm. It is a sought-after
feature, found almost everywhere (not only in the accomplishments of
visual depictions), albeit with differentiated intensity, type and nature of
effects, decisive for its presence: from natural phenomena to the forms of
objects and scenarios of behaviour. From make-up to oratorical manners,
vocal and instrumental techniques. The presented text accompanied an
exhibition featured under the same title in the State Ethnographic
Museum in Warsaw (November 1998 - January 1999). The category of
the unusual is not one of the categories frequently applied in museum
pursuits. Hence, the exhibition can be treated as a search for a new sphere
of meaning.
Stanisław Łabiszewski
„Camera a la Minute", or a Tale by a "Five-minute Photographer"
Stanisław Łabiszewski (1916-1985) was a self-taught photographer.
Fascinated by photography from his youth he did not devote himself to it
until after his return from forced labour in Germany. Łabiszewski worked
with a camera of his own construction, imitating so-called five-minute
cameras (whose interiors contained an entire "chemical laboratory") the client waited only five minutes for the ready picture. Łabiszewski, a
resident of the Warsaw district of Praga, also painted the screens against
whose background he took photographs in market squares and at church
lairs all over Poland. The presented text is based on a vivid interview held

Jan Gondowicz
"A Naked Man on a Naked Earth"
This reflection by a micro-essayist concerns things and their
classification. An ambitious systematist would be compelled to say that
things create around us a sphere without which it is impossible to exist
without friction, as in the favourite example cited by physicists. To
possess nothing is a sign of depersonalisation, the loss of human
condition, the antechamber of death. The contradiction of the naked man
on a naked Earth is a person surrounded with all possible sorts of things,
and situated on an Earth transformed totally into an entity of useful
objects. The coming century will be encumbered with the task of
describing this globe, whirling in the Universe and composed of chairs
and holy pictures, oil refineries and plush teddy bears...

Krzysztof Cibor
A Non-existent Film, a Non-existent Town, a Non-existent Life.
Propaedeutics of Wanderings beyond a Dictionary
An attempted interpretation of a certain film about a journey to
Venice. The fact that this film was never made does not stop the author
from pursuing reflections about connections between the cinema, myth
and life. Such deliberations possess the features of a journey during
which we encounter, i. a. Thomas Mann, Witold Gombrowicz and Walter
Benjamin, although to the end we are uncertain whether there exists any
destination. The answer is: probably not. At the very last moment we
become deported, sharing the lot of the heroes of the described film. That
which cannot be reached comprises the concealed theme of the article.
Artur Maciej Setniewski
Dayroom, or about Two Kingdoms
A description of travelling in a commuter train on the Warsaw-Pilawa
line (about 60 kms.) The destination is both known and dangerous, and
the journey itself is indispensable and run-of the-mill. The author delves
predominantly into two kingdoms, mutually permeating and embroiled
in a constant war. This battle is won by one side, but the other side must
be the victor too.
Friedrich Engels divided time and the activities performed in it into
the Kingdom of Necessity and the Kingdom of Liberty. The commuter
train is a place in which the author and his fellow travellers spend time
that belongs to the Kingdom of Necessity. The passengers are primarily
peasants working in town and school children. Since it links two worlds:
that of the Mazovian village and the capital of the country, the train
should be called rural. It was precisely the petty peasants from the
suburban villages, travelling to their additional jobs in town, who
performed a breakthrough in time and its activities by introducing a
journey into the Kingdom of Freedom. For this purpose, they made use
of a compartment which they named the Dayroom.
Maksymilian Dawid Rejmer
Holy Time and Holy Space
The moment of crossing the French-British border is approaching.
The magical dimension of activities encountered by every person passing
through this frontier are decisive for its very nature. This is an excellent
example of a place where we are dealing with contact between the
sacrum and the profanum. Crossing this border, the author felt that he had
arrived from an indefinite space and was entering a territory of
exceptionally intense sacral qualities.
Thanks to the fact that Hereford became the central spot in the
definition of space, delineated by the "picker", it is here that he should
seek the mythical beginning. The "picker" returned to a "holy" place, or
at least a highly exceptional one, since everything started here. The

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author came to experience another adventure and perhaps to earn some
money, but he brought back experiences which will enable him to
understand the appearance of holy space in the contemporary, secular
world, and to experience holy time.
Wiesław Szpilka
Journey: The Sheltering Sky
The author analyses vacation travels, universally present in
contemporary culture. The scale and dimension of this phenomenon
appear to testify that we are dealing with a particular type of cultural
behaviour which discloses the essential features of Western mentality. By
means of a comparison of holiday travels with the journey undertaken by
the heroes of Bertolucci's film The Sheltering Sky, the author accentuates
a certain common feature: the periodical longing for freeing oneself from
one's world and the structure of the rite of passage.
Marzena Gierga
Syracuse - The Town of Great Women (Part II)
Syracuse is a town created by deities, saints, historians, travellers,
apologists, theologians, photographers, and, primarily, its own residents.
It comprises a phenomenon located above a division into an urban and
social subsystem, an area of eloquent meanings, a space for the realisa­
tion of concrete and specifically identical attitudes.
The metaphorical, mystic-symbolic space of Syracuse is that of three
women. This is the birthplace of Artemis, the refuge and site of the eter­
nal rest of Arethusa, and the town of the birth, life and martyrdom of Lu­
cia. By demonstrating the constant presence of the patron in the life of
the city, which provokes assorted forms of group imagery, a process of
rendering space mythical, and a creation of a world of values shared by
its residents, Syracuse gains new meaning. It appears as a town of light,
a land of purity, saintliness and glory, a city of luminescence and joy. Its
topography is superimposed upon that of its inhabitants, and vice versa,
while observed behaviour is granted a double meaning, and comprises an
example of the observation of a distinguished place, but also of a trans­
formation of a myth into a ritual, frequently without social awareness. Its
outcome assumes the form of the specific dramaturgy of the everyday li­
fe of the population of Syracuse, whose sense of existence is restricted to
an encounter with the three patrons, advocates, guides and friends, a fact
which entitled the author to describe it as "the town of great women".
The presented cult of St. Lucia is more of a cult of her image than the
worship of a saint, while a version of the hagiographic legend becomes
a reference to a myth. That what, at first glance, appears to be contradic­
tory, is encountered on the ethical level of a symbolic structure. By refer­
ring to an analysis of the fundamental structure of those transmissions,
with different contents but similar form and meaning, the author demon­
strates the symbolic continuum of elements characterising Syracuse
across the ages. The point of departure for such journeys was the ascer­
tainment of the "strangeness" of this place, disclosed by the omnipresent
cult of St. Lucia and her pagan companions in assorted aspects of cultu­
re. Their outcome assumed the form of a co-existence of the literary-me­
taphorical topos of Syracuse and its real, magical-ritual counterpart.
Marek Oziewicz
What's so to be Found in Wardrobe? Parallel Worlds of C . S. L e ­
wis's Chronicles of Narnia (Part II)
The autor attempts to analyse parallel worlds describes by Lewis in
his Chronicles of Narnia and focuses particularly on the issue of passa­
ge from one world to another. Having initially classified "other realities"
of the Chronicles into secondary and parallel worlds, the author concen­
trates on their status and characteristic features of their spatiotemporality. Attention is then drawn to magic places in which parallel realities
overlap or cohere which broad background allows to examine the mecha­
nics of the characters' passages from one world to another. This done in
the light of Eastern (and partly medieval) theory of the elements: space,
air, fire, water and earth.
In the main part of his work, the author proposes a classification of all
instances of passage between different worlds present in the Chronicles
into four categories: direct volitional, indirect volitional, direct nonvolitional and indirect nonvolitional. The division between volitional and nonvolitional passages is constructed upon the feelings which present themse­
lves to the characters during the procedure of passage, whereas the divi­
sion between direct and indirect ones—upon mutual relationship of the
worlds between which the passage takes place. Drawing on examples
from the Chronicles, the author endeavours to substantiate his thesis ap­
plying in his analysis the technique of gradation of sensory impressions.
Dariusz Czaja
Chair. A Sketch to a Portrait
The author proposes a new and fresh look at this very ordinary,
familiar and tame object in our daily life. A reference to poetry (Herbert,

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Białoszewski, Rymkiewicz and Brodski) and to examples from the fine
arts (Bendnarski, Mickiewicz, Pągowska, Kantor) shows that underneath
the shell of ordinariness, automatic associations and modes of thinking
about a chair, there remains embedded an unrecognised, strange and
mysterious reality.
Agnieszka Makarewicz
The Ball
What is a ball? The author tries to answer a question concerning the
nature of this object by referring to The Ball, a poem by Rilke, and to th­
ree short films by Zbigniew Rybczyński: Tango, New Book, and The Du­
el. She brings forth and comments on motifs associated with the ball,
from obvious ones such as sport and entertainment, to metaphorical and
symbolic ones: game, life, motion and sacrum.
Danuta Bolikowska
Smoke
This impression was inspired by Smoke, the film by Wayne Wang,
and ideas contained in, i. a. studies by M. Eliade, R. Barthes and
B. Bettelheim. The resultant long poem considers meetings of people
bending over an album containing photographs of their small homeland
or lost love, and bonded by cigarette smoke. The author follows the fate
of the heroes of Smoke by employing Freudian psychoanalysis and the
outcome of research by the American psychiatrist Rollo May. Resorting
to tales and myths, she identifies conscious and subconscious longings,
wishes and strivings, which prove to be contemporary America's "plead
for a myth".
Katarzyna Kuszyńska
Cigarette and Ashtray
Cigarette advertisements suggest that we should choose between
smoking and health. With the text of a ministerial warning that
accompanies adverstiements as her point of departure, the author recalls
the historical origin of the appearance of this stimulant in Europe and
ensuing problems.
In a further part of her study, which refers to literary texts
(Sosnowski, Stasiuk, Baran, Swietlicki) and films (Smoke, Brooklyn
Boogie, Coffee and Cigarettes), she discloses the metaphorical meaning
connected with the cigarette. Emphasis is placed on its ontology
(permanence and elusiveness) and, chiefly, its paradoxical symbolic,
which combines the essence of vitality and reflections on death.
Marceli Zagała
Fumare Humanum Est. A Brief Lexicon of the Tobacco Stimulants
Around Us
Tobacco is omnipresent. It succumbs to culture as well as creating it.
Propagated or persecuted, it continues to exist, leaving no one indifferent.
By citing several ways of using tobacco (smoking, snuff, chewing) and
intentionally exaggerated examples, the author tries to draw attention to
the whole gamut of "tobacco" behaviour, full of delicate hues and loca­
ted between the two extremities. The article is a sample of an M. A. dis­
sertation written in the Chair of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology
at Warsaw University.
Krystyna Gieryszewska, Marvin Szporko
Green Leaves in the Streets of Berlin
This text is the outcome of research conducted by a Summer School
in the Chair of European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Already superficial studies on the consumption of hemp products disco­
vered a multi-aspect application. The stimulants obtained from hemp (ha­
shish and marijuana) are only a fragment of the extensive usage of hemp
in Berlin. Hemp is consumed directly - as a stimulant, fabric and clothes,
and a component of paper, beverages, cosmetics, etc., as well as in a sym­
bolic dimension. The symbol of the hemp leaf became, to a certain de­
gree, a designate of a pro-ecological lifestyle which, according to propo­
sed self-definitions, remains alternative vis a vis technical civilization.
Adherents of an all-sided consumption of hemp argue that as a crop,
hemp is "environment friendly", and as raw material it has multiple
(50 000) uses. The residents of Berlin are supplied with hemp products
(with the exception of stimulants) by rather numerous specialized shops
(Hanf Hauses). The Berlin Hemp Museum, opened in 1994, and a spe­
cial unit of the Green Party, which supports the legalisation of hemp as
a stimulant, are examples of institutionalised interest in the positive
aspects of the consumption of this plant.
Ireneusz Kamiński
Bus
According to Red Vonnegut a bus is a box used for carrying people
from one place to another. Applying such "objectivised" images of the
bus present in art (i. a. Nowa książka /New Book/- a film by Zbigniew

Rybczyński, the paintings by Bronisław W. Linke and the book by Red
Vonnegut Na klęczkach /Kneeling/) as well as his own observations the
author proposes a cultural-sociological study of the phenomenon of the
bus, and the behaviour and customs associated with bus rides.
Jarosław jot-Drużycki
"Vlepka" or the Interpretation of a Bus
"All faces on a bus look the same", claims a "vlepka". A "vlepka" is
a sticker, with a short text, poem, slogan or drawing, placed in the back
of Warsaw buses. The author describes this new phenomenon (19961998) of the local subcultures, drawing attention to the places in which
the vlepka appears (the back of the bus - the appraisal of the rear...), the
need for a community, which signifies also a common enemy (the
"battle" waged by the persons placing the stickers and those tearing them
off, reflected in the texts of particular vlepkas) as well as unintentional
reference to futuristic traditions.
Jacek Olędzki
The Fleeting Art of Innocence
The author draws attention to vlepki, stickers bearing small pictures
and inscriptions, and placed in buses. Thanks to the activity of the young
creators, municipal transport turns into a scene witnessing an exchange of
thought. Olędzki examines the undertakings of one of those groups, which
is by no means restricted exclusively to buses and appears in the streets.
Chana Pollack
To and from Ostrowiec - via PKS
The leitmotif of the text are journeys by bus (the titular PKS)
between Warsaw and Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, made by the author (a
Fulbright Research Scholar) for the purpose of gathering data for a film
about her grandmother, a resident of Ostrowiec up to emigration in 1923.
Letters written in 1920-1923 to a husband seeking employment and a
new home in the U. S. A. and Canada constitute a source of inspiration
for the film and important material utilised therein. The presented text
combines experiences from those travels with more general reflections
about the fate of the Polish Jews and the traces, frequently enigmatic, of
the once thriving Jewish culture in Poland.
Janusz Barański
Pluralis non maiestaticus, or People as Things
At least from the time of Sapir and Whorf it is known that language
is a medium which acts as an intermediary of the relation between our
consciousness and all that which remains beyond it. This feature is
particularly vivid in the case of assorted forms of the emotive use of
language, including its application in a magical or rhetorical function.
The author interprets a device known to scholars dealing with rhetorics,
namely the so-called pluralis, envisaged as an expression of a magical
world outlook that is by no means a domain exclusively of so-called
traditional societies, but is present equally forcefully in modern and
postmodern culture, especially in the realm of politics. Pluralis appears
as a rhetorical costume for draping political clans in axiologically
valorised meanings. On the one hand, manipulation with the names of
political opponents exhausts the symptoms of magical operations and, on
the other hand, comprises part of a larger whole, i. e. the political game,
a contemporary ritual of sorts.
Dorota Hall
Escape into the Screen
This brief essay comments on the view expressed by Leszek Kołakow­
ski: "Who needs seventy television channels? Everyone, since it is manner
way of fleeing from absurdity into absurdity". The author considers whe­

ther (and how) is it possible to seek refuge in television in an era of omni­
present simulation and a postmodern world devoid of a centre, and discus­
ses the nature of the absurdity which is the destination of the escape.
Dorota Gut
On the Other Side of the Screen
The presented texts deal with the Internet, virtual reality and other
phenomena associated with computer technology, showing that behind
the computer screen there starts a world which introduces its own spatial
divisions and establishes its own laws. The author describes the
topography of this world and the ways of travelling across it.
Magdalena Radkowska
The Hyper-reality of Lara. The Lara of Hyper-reality
The author discusses Lara Croft, heroine of one of the most popular
computer games (Tomb Raider). This super agent, endowed with extraor­
dinary physical prowess, is capable of tackling all conditions and every
enemy. Her admirers accentuate her uncommon beauty - voluptuou­
sness, a long braid, perfect make-up and fashion style: a silicone blouse,
shorts, combat boots and a belt with an attached gun, with which she ne­
ver parts. The author considers the popularity of Lara, who appears on
numerous Internet pages, in comic books, a video clip and, in the near fu­
ture, will star in a film. In real life, she is enacted by an English actress.
Many girls pretend to the role of the earthly representative of Lara, and
dream about becoming her embodiment. The story about the virtual he­
roine is also a pretext for reflections on the phenomenon of hyper-reali­
ty (Baudrillard) and the relation between the text (in the wide meaning of
the word) on the computer screen and the traditional text from the age of
the Gutenberg galaxy.
Dorota Kołakowska
The Planet Diana - an Attempted Analysis of Reactions to the Death
of the Princess of Wales
An analysis dealing with the extraordinary phenomenon of worldwi­
de reactions to the death of Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales. The text is
bases on press reports from the period immediately after the death of the
Princess (31 August - 6 September 1997). The author concentrates atten­
tion predominantly on individual reactions registered by reporters - the
object of the analysis are, therefore, quotations from official statements
(speeches, condolence letters) and private comments and opinions, gathe­
red from people in the street. Such material produces an image of the
Princes as a sui generis consumer commodity, a specific virtual creation
of the media. The attitudes accompanying her death (pseudo-religious
adoration, the need to confirm one's own existence and a desperate se­
arch for community bonds) appear to be an attempt at deceiving the emp­
tiness generated by a confrontation of this "safe" creation with reality, the
concrete and irreversible fact of individual death.
Tomoho Umeda
Audiophilia
In the article Audiophilia the author analyses the concept of hyperreality upon the example of the titular phenomenon. His reflections
concern the perception of hyper-reality owing to assorted reference
systems, i. a. semiological and hermeneutic.
Olga Łobaczewska
A Visit in the Kingdom of Lilia
This realm is situated in a humble village cottage in the Belorussian
region of Polesie. Its queen is the naive painter Lilia Szpakowska
(Shpakovskaya), who lives in an imaginary, fairy-tale world of her
imagination.

SPROSTOWANIA
W poprzednim numerze (3-4/1998) w nocie o Profesor Marii Janion w tytułach dwóch książek wkradły się błędy. Tytuły te powin­
ny brzmieć Humanistyka. Poznanie i terapia oraz Odnawianie znaczeń.
W tekście Tomasza Rakowskiego pt.: Trzy miesiące w fitness-klubie. Historia Ładu, jego Choroby i Nieznanego brakuje dwóch pozy­
cji w bibliografii. Oto one:
Mikołaj z Kuzy
1997 O oświeconej niewiedzy, tłum. Ireneusz Kania, Kraków
Witruiwiusz
1956 O architekturze księg dziesięć. Warszawa
W ilustracji do tekstu Ciało prześwietlone. Radiografia i jej magia tegoż autora, zamieszczonej na stronie 129 znajduje się błąd w pod­
pisie. Zamiast „... płata płuca..." powinno być „... płata tarczycy...".
Autorów i Czytelników serdecznie przepraszamy.
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