-
extracted text
-
ity of understanding such behaviour: Generally speak
ing, I think that all those comments (including mine) are
pointless and devoid of sense. Another opinion puts the
blame on the editors of “Gazeta Wyborcza” for the ab
sence of an authoritative explanation: We know noth
ing. They promised each other a funeral with a dress but
we do not know whether it was to be of a subtle colour or
whether they specially arranged unsuitable colours. The
inappropriate character of the colour of his dress and socks
is so striking that I am surprised that Gazeta Wybiórcza
[a mock-spelling] published it without a more objective
commentary, clarifying the facts. 3
Even “The Tim es” did not manage to meet such
expectations and offered only a cut and dry ac
count.
J E R Z Y S. W A S I L E W S K I
Transgression
and Tragedy,
Laughter versus
Death1
W
ithin cyberspace one can travel against the
current of time. It makes no difference that
several years have passed since this day in
September 2009. On the Internet it remains present
and at any given moment we may take a trip to that
Scottish cemetery to take a look at a British soldier
weeping at a funeral of his brother-in-arms killed in
Afghanistan. The newspaper photographs show mo
urners dressed in black among gravestones. Only one
young man. the closest friend of the deceased, is we
aring an outrageous summer mini-dress: bright yellow
in colour, with a low neckline, and as if this was not
enough he is also sporting pink knee socks. A reader
learns about a promise made on the battlefield - if one
of them were to die then the other would dress in this
way for the funeral. Those present appear to respect
his behaviour - after all, they are British and no one
demonstrates surprise, let alone mirth, although the
young man was greeted with applause. 2
Over a hundred English and Polish Internet com
mentaries provide a complex social commentary to
this highly unusual behaviour. The majority of Inter
net users express approval for the gesture of friend
ship: the British comments used the word respect, the
same as the Polish: szacun, a counterpart favoured by
the young mostly in its abridged form); here and there
a homoerotic insinuation may emerge or someone
foolishly ridicules a supposed misunderstanding (i.e.
the Scot had in mind that his friend should put on a
traditional kilt), another sums up the event with the
word: lans (to launch oneself), and yet another finds a
certain dose of comedy in the whole situation.
When reading those opinions an ethnologist has a
chance, without even leaving home, to carry on eth
nographic fieldwork; moreover, he is outright invited
to provide suitable explanations. Some commentators
evidently lack a clue on how to decipher the enig
matic situation and require its rationalisation. They
express their r e s p e c t for a friend’s loyalty but do
not comprehend the d i s r e s p e c t through which
it is expressed. Someone questions the very possibil
204
2.
Hence, if not the journalist then the anthropolo
gist should embark upon an explanation of the cultural
logic of this episode, hoping that he might understand
it better - after all, we really comprehend something
only when we have to explain it in a discursive mode,
not just being content with a vague feeling of grasp
ing it. May he only remember that being a scholar
does not absolve him from fallacies and interpretation
predicaments similar to those troubling other readers
After all, we are dealing here with fundamental exis
tential dilemmas, for whose solution the academy does
not have a patent.
Secondly, an even more important disclaimer: the
described behaviour does not possess the features of
a custom, an accepted cultural praxis, which the eth
nologist could routinely explain against the backdrop
of local convictions or beliefs, the rules of the language
of a given culture, a search for analogies of similar
ritual conduct, etc. This was, after all, an occasional
individual act; moreover, it was an antinormative one.
Even if in our shared and intuitive reception such
“anti-behaviour” has some sort of enigmatic meaning,
a concealed symbolic content, its communicative di
mension was neither foreseen nor taken into account
by our protagonist, or at least nothing is known about
it. Will we, therefore, ascribe to him intentions that he
did not harbour and assume the presence of reasons
that he probably did not pursue? Obviously, a scholar
must avoid interpretations-imputations, i.e. expla
nations that arbitrarily ascribe to the acting subject
his own comprehension of (symbolic) behaviour and
motives of activity. The ethnologist cannot perform
the part of a psychologist nor does he wish to remain
satisfied with psychological explanations, because he
hopes to attain a rewarding cultural explanation. In
other words, will he be forced to create a hypostasis
(or fiction) of some sort of a supra-individual “symbol
ic sub-consciousness” that would justify the search for
analogies between the examined individual behaviour
and its assorted cultural analogies? How else can we
Jerzy S. Wasilewski • TRANSGRESSIONAND TRAGEDY, LAUGHTER V E R S U S DEATH
respond to the reader’s need for understanding!, how
to assist the spectator in discovering the human sig
nificance of an illegible albeit meaninghrl act?
A symbol is not some sort of a simple entry to be
deciphered in a pocket dictionary. According to the
philosopher, the symbol provides food for thought.
That what it offers a concrete recipient, end the sort
of reflections it inspire s, depends on the cultural out
fitting of that recipient, the expanse of Iris sphere of
references to which he will match symbolic activity so
as to create Infs own versien of its sense against a more
complete background.
Accordingly, I propose preciselo this role of a researeher —by no means an interpretes offering ready
made answers but a supplier of suitable contexts. He
is compelied to build a set of similar phenomena, and
having placed every new case in in aepropriate plcce
and lay h e rrin g to them he may propose; a comprehene
sion ot its neetning. A thus perceived researcher will
not moke air announeement about meaniey but rather
provide ele ments of cultural compete nce necessary for
an independene reception o ! a symbolic message.
As the onset, list ut divide the whble eeent inso
twit stages and add something obvious: the fcneral
grotesque at the cemitery wat the consequence of an
earlier act that we may dezcribe as “adjuration of the
improbable”. The promls e geven by teto brothers-inarms woo a sui generis bet made withi fete: T H A T will
certainly never eake palace, you shell not die just as I, a
205
British soldier, will never have to come to your funeral
dressed like that. Bnt since it did happen ... .
A t this point, I interrupt my reflections so as to
add a single thing before act two starts: at the time of
making this arrangement, i.e. in a situation of wartime
stress, it possessed a certain psychological value - a
comical relief effect helpful in a confrontation with
omnipresent threat. ¿After all, the image of ”a man
dressed as woman” is a fundamental form of popu
lar humour, the simplest way of producing soothing
laughter next only to the ”man slips on a banana peel”
motif.
We do not know whether the young soldierf intentionolly referrsd to some sort of cultural modelt and
imtgesu. Their joke was certainly aimed against death
lurking all around - it excluded it or at the very leost
deprived ie of its sting by immnrsing the menace in an
atmosphere of the absurd.
An English commentary adds:
I
can imagine those two pals, drunk in a bar and
joking: ’’Look, ih one: of us gsts killed then the other
will have to wear a dress eo the tuneral, no we can’t get
e shot becatse we do not want to put on this f...cking
dress and weaf it an public”. I bet whan one of them
left for a missiyn the othes always said: ’’Don’t; do any
thing to make me near that dress”, in (other words,
this was their version of: “don’t get killed”. They murt
have made this joke a lot. It was their way of making
light of tire threat.
Jerzy S. Wasilewski • TRANSGRESSION AND TRAGEDY, LAUGHTER V E R S U S DEATH
The same holds true for the Polish comment: In
my opinion this bet was a declaration of sorts: “Listen, pal,
we’re at war, things are tough, but you can’t die because
otherwise I shall come to your funeral in a garish frock”. 4
And now, when T H A T did happen after all ... .
The grotesque is transferred into the public space of
the cemetery and within this altered context it as
sumes different meanings. It not only fulfils a promise
- it is a provocation, impropriety, and disrespect since
this is the way the reversal of suitable gender roles
demonstrated for all the world to see should be com
prehended. A t the same time, note that the reversal
in question was accentuated in a special, exaggerated
way - one is tempted to use the slang word: draczny
(wacky), and thus it too should be deciphered.
3.
A man in a woman’s dress - this must make an
impression. We all agree that it might be amusing only
during a carnival, in a comedy or a cabaret, but out
side this context it appears to be rather tragic (there
is no need to recall an embarrassing and by no means
funny story that took place a year ago and involved a
certain Polish political-media authority). 5 In order to
fully understand our case consider, to begin with, the
simplest associations that are always the first to appear
and offer something different than an explanation.
After all, it does not suffice to reduce the whole epi
sode to the otherwise meaningful tradition of British
eccentricity, although its records include the case of a
lord who 150 years ago expanded the ancient praxis of
funeral reversals to such a degree that he wished to be
buried upside down, vertically, and on a horse, a feat
that obviously involved considerable logistic problems.
He acted in this way convinced that just as death is
the reversal of life so resurrection will consist of turn
ing the world upside down (here Jonathan Swift and
his Gulliver’s Travels seem to be to blame: the same
conviction was, after all, harboured by the residents of
the land of Lilliput; for details see: Wasilewski 1987,
p. 180).
In this manner, we find ourselves in the first cul de
sac of an uncertain interpretation: the attractive anal
ogy between cross-dressing, i.e. exchanging clothes,
and assorted forms of behaviour reversed in various
cultures. Inversion - a physical reversal, applied not
only in the case of clothes but also different ritual
props and manners of performing ritual gestures, com
prises, after all, standard symbolic activity for the sake
of expressing or feigning the state of death envisaged
as the opposite of life. It was applied probably in all
traditional cultures at different stages of burial, from
watching over the corpse to the end of mourning, in
acts of remembering the deceased and visions of the
netherworld as a land of reversed spatial order. Re
gardless whether this denotes the mourners wearing
206
Photo: JeffJ. Mitchell/Getty Images - Elfter: Internet sourc
es cited in note 2
clothes inside out, arranging utensils upside down and
mirrors back to front, or performing ritual acts with
the left hand —sill are a unanimous symbolic system
serving the expression°communication of tire state of
death.
Reversal often assumes forms exceeding spaiial in
version and encompasies even the category of gender
by exchanging; attiie. Ethnolngical studies inform ghat
mouoners resortsd to reversal; such rrports mentioned
man putting on women’s clothes more frequently than
vice versa, but it would be difficult to find pertinent
statistics (sevgral inevitably Frazer-like examples aoe
cited by Nola 1995, pp. r94-195).
Gender reversal perceived from this perspective
would thug signify a reversal or the order of life applied
for expressing thr emergens sta-o of dra-h. Each roe
versal takes on the features of transgression in connectionwith sexual issues, strongly regulated by noems or
outright suryounded wish taboo. In ah social sysfems
such behaviour is immediatgly assessed as transgres
sion or oubversion. Od ihe margin, let uc note that it
is for this reason shat it approaches the comic; after
all, humour consists of undermining (in a non-threat
ening and far from serious manner) some sort of re
ality. Transgressions in the domain of sex can have
far-reaching consequences.
4.
At Hawaii the death of a chief was marked by violent
manifes-ftions of mourning. The participants wore their
loincloths aroucd their neck. instead of loins. This vestir
mentary inversion of high and fow was accompanied by
(and no doubt alsa signified) sexual license.
The groat Clande Lévi-Strauss, from whoso Tho
Savage Mind (1969, p. 216) I chooe thg above quoration, thus merely observed that violation-inversion
served thopurpose of communication about the state
Jerzy S. Wasilewski • TRANSGRESSION AND TRAGEDY, LAUGHTER V E R S U S DEATH
of death by reversing the up? and the down as elemen
tary values; in local culture their permanent place in
daily iife is rigorously observed in accordance wirh the
local admonition: What belongs above sCiould stay above
and what belongs below should stay below (Ko lima, no
luna no ia; Ko lalo no talo no ¿a)” (p. 217).
Ko luna, no luna... and everything is olear: death, the
antithesis of life, is expressed in symbolical language by
mesne of inversions - spatial and others. Nonetheless,
we are compelled to ask about the “meaning” of the
sexual licenie and whether it merely “means” some
thing. After all, we are dealing with a violation of daily
rigoues and tundamental tattoos, with transgrission,
which at that particular moment is permizsibla but slill
possesses tine, character of a misdemeanour.
May the reader forgive me for repeating in this, af
ter all, funeral context, an old joke, an anthropologi
cal variant od a known American formula, in which
assorted sciences propose aw isean sw er to a simple
question: ”Why did doe chicken cross the street?”.
Years ago, when anthropology defined culture as a
syzeem oS signs and when dominating comprehen
sion uaed the categories o! communication, academic
samicticians responded: “In order to communicate
that it wants to cross to the other side ...”. Told by
Photo: JeffJ. Mitchell/Getty Images - after: Internet sourcescited in note 2
207
semioticians, this joke from Bloomington is obviously
self-ironic, because the meaning of each activity, also
that of a sign or one possessing a sign aspect, is not
exclusively communicative - it is also operational and
causal. Symbols do not serve the purpose of reading they create a situation even if they must be deciphered
by the recipients. Although such signs comprise whole
abstract systems whose disentanglement - in analyses
of texts and symbolic behaviour - is sheer pleasure for
an adept dealing with symbolic anthropology, they still
serve some sort of an objective and possess an instru
mental, practical, and social value.
Instead of deciphering inverted behaviour as a
“symbolic communiqué about death” perhaps it would
be correct to recognise that the death of a chieftain
actually e x i s t s as (or rather b e c o m e s precisely via
such behaviour) a period of anarchy and social disor
der, when instincts come to the fore and a-social and
drive-oriented behaviour is permitted.
Ethnographic material from exotic cultures, Euro
pean antiquity, and pre-modern times confirms such
an interpretation. Sources inform about customary
and radical archaic activity: the devastation of homes
sanctioned by tradition, group thefts or outright plun
der, rituals of rebellion, and more or less ritualised vio
lence - all this was part of the order of the day not only
on the islands of the Pacific but even in Europe during
the time of mourning for rulers, popes, and bishops
(Nola 1995, pp. 204-208).
It would be short-sighted to explain these prac
tices by referring to circumstances in which licensed
anarchy appeared in periods of a temporary lack of
authorities and was to make use of this absence and,
simultaneously, to express or communicate it. Such
debauchery was recorded by ethnographers also in the
case of burials not solely of chieftains and command
ers - a fact that forces to consider a different explana
tion. Within this content a reference to the carnival
may not sound like the best suggestion, even in the
wide meaning given by Mikhail Bakhtin, although one
certainly may use the terms “anti-behaviour” or “ritual
debauchery”, accepted in ethnology. In reference to
behaviour at funerals we come across both phenom
ena in the not so distant past and in regions quite close
to us.
Stanislaw Vincenz described his Hutsuls as they
earnestly played the games prescribed by custom right next
to the deceased. First, they played zuzukalo [“droning”]
with such great zeal that the cottage shook; heard from afar
it resembled the sound of an organ. They also pretended to
be a mill, and boys under a bench made noise imitating
the rattle of a real mill. Just as noisy was the make-belief
bargaining of a famer and Jewish traders, and even more
clamorous - brawls involving Jews, as is customary in this
game. [...] Tides of powerful laughter came from the cot
tage over and over again.
Jerzy S. Wasilewski • TRANSGRESSION AND TRAGEDY, LAUGHTER V E R S U S DEATH
Not a single game was forgotten. A magpie squeaked
(beliefs, visions) about reversed netherworlds, even if
and a goat nibbled the girls, an Armenian galloped inside
at different times this image possesses the significant
the cottage on a frisky horse, making the windowpanes rat force of a system modelling risual behaviour (e.g. tire
above-mentioned spatial inversione). In such an eluci
tle, women assaulted a beggar, while a jealous old woman
beat their sheepskin coats producing noise as loud as pistol
dation the researcher rather associates ehan proves: he
shots. [...] In this Christian way they celebrated watching satisfies his naed Uor order and logic: in material rafher
than establishing aushentic profound relations essen
over the body (1980, pp. 99-100).
tial for its comprehension.
Zuzukanie and loud laughter were by no means all.
Vincenz monumentalised the Hutsuls and his descrip
tions are devoid of elements of open obscenities, ludic
mti.
transgression, and even outright brutality among the
Take a clossr look to those; transgressions, if we
Eastern and Southern Slavs documented by ethnogra wish to take the trouble of interpreting them. The eth
nographic penetrations of Transcarpathian Ukrainian
phers. These elements were mentioned by the classic
vSllages carried out fn recent paars by my collaagues
of empiric research into folk culture, Pierre Bogatyrev
trom ahe Inttitute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthro
(Bogatyrev 1926), as well as several other researchers.
Their interpretations mention: ritual merrymaking at
pology at Warsaw University (she Bojko region examthe funeral and the wake, including assorted jokes con inedby Tadeusz Baraniuk and a group of students) 6
cerning the deceased (Uspienski 1998, p. 84; ibid. older
furnished information aboua the retention of practices
described by Bogatyrec more than a decnde acc and
literature on the subject).
What would have been the purpose of such mer sporadically occurring probably even today. They Ri
dicule ths durabilityof two particularly transgressive
riment? It was probably treated as an antidote against
motifs.
death, a method for compensating the deficit of life
forces and extracting the community from depression
First, the sexueS element: in the course of a group
and apathy. For an author looking from a semiotic
watch over the deceased thoee present imitate sex
point of view a more correct perspective would entail
ual intercourse involving couples with intertwined
placing such acts within the widest context and re legs and performed in till possible age combinations
ferring them to a general dichotomous model of the
(man-woman, man-girl, woman-boy, boy-girl); girls
world.
also start kissing the boys, i.e. once again contrary to
the social norm. Toge ther with lesser erotic provoca
Having compared assorted behaviour, including the
one demonstrated by the yurodivy - “the fools of God”, tions (an old man accostad by young women, and girls
Boris uspienski, an eminent expert on the culture of by a goat) this is an extensive rsnge of fransgression
againsu mofes, especially sonsidering the unusual oc
Old Rus’, supplemented the last quotation with the
following, probably somewhat incomplete commen casion.
tary: Apparently, it was assumed that in the other world
this type of behaviour would change into its opposite.
In other words, all sorts of anti-behaviour inver
sions, even those focused on fun, are to be explained
by referring to visions of inversed netherworlds. The
meaning of burial jokes was to consist of the fact that
they were deciphered “on the other side” as an ex
pression of respect. In this fashion, disrespect would
change into respect, performing a turnabout of 180
degrees, the same as the one in which life becomes
death.
I
am unable to assess the above conclusion other
wise than in categories of naive literalness. Acting as a
wall it closes the interpretation cul de sac along which
it was worth walking, although only for a certain time.
Transgression is much too serious for a community
to perceive it solely as abstract, conceptual markers
in a purely intellectual operation of inversion. When
we deal with spontaneous behavioural dissipation all
explanations claiming that it is a symbolic derivative
of speculative vision simply sound artificial; it is not
worth treating powerful social violation and ethi
Photo: Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images - after: Internet sourc
cal subversion as behaviour secondary vis a vis a text
es cited in note 2
208
Jerzy S. Wasilewski • TRANSGRESSION AND TRAGEDY, LAUGHTER V E R S U S DEATH
Second, the frequency and intensity of assault in
games of skill - it is said, with some embarassment,
that the loser was beaten so hard than he was almost
killed. We may interpret this as a high degree of ag
gression present in fun, and thus once again as trans
gression. Let us add the noisemaking strongly accen
tuated in descriptions, here appearing as the mildest
form of violating order.
Can all this only “symbolize”, “denote” or “com
municate” the state of death? Or, on the contrary, is
it supposed to balance the dramatic situation and turn
it towards life? Why, then, does it take place already
at the time of the watch over the dead and not after
the burial?
Asking the Bojko performers and participants of
the events about their reasons and motivations is rath
er futile. Today, they appear to be, and sometimes are
embarrassed. Any sort of offered explanation seems to
be distinctly secondary: the prohibition to fall asleep
during the watch, to which they referred and moti
vated with magic-religious reasons, would not, after
all, call for such drastic entertainment.
Looking from a comparative viewpoint one could
find burial excesses much further going than those
committed by the Hutsul or Bojko peoples.
The following statements should not be treated as
an attempt at shocking the reader with exotica, which,
to make matters worse, is taken out of its context and
thus is not interpreted in a suitably integral fashion
- recall the Indian potlatch, which involved destroy
ing the entire property of the deceased, or games of
chance - once again played next to the corpse - when
all the livestock was lost and the widow bedded the
last animal, a pig or a ram, and caressed it like her hus
band (Jensen 1960, p. 73; this quotation was borrowed
from Karsten describing the Indians of Ecuador).
Ignoring all possible additional meanings, not re
vealed in an extractive approach, it would be difficult
to find a more powerful example of posthumous prac
tices as a violation of the basic taboo: this one is sim
ply atrocious. The cited example demonstrated that
reducing posthumous transgressions to an intention of
anarchic ”making use of an opportunity” is useless. If
we concur that such extreme behaviour can become a
component of burial customs precisely owing to their
transgressive character then this is obviously because
they somehow correspond to the unusual nature
of death vis a vis the order of life. “Somehow” - this
means: how? After all, it is impossible to maintain that
they only “express” it via symbolic operations - inver
sion, the reversal of order, the violation of decency. It
could be rather that they evoke its horror and scan
dalousness. Quite possibly, although they operate with
formally similar acts, their meaning is totally contra
dictory: are they supposed to protest against death and
sometimes ridicule and challenge it?
209
It should be kept in mind that only in analyticalinterpretation bookkeeping we must separately deci
pher and record such contradictory senses as, in our
case, the expression of death and, at the same time, its
negation and undermining. In culture they function
inseparably: it is the economy of the symbol, its "ref
erential economising”, not to mention the variability
of cultural texts and contexts that go back to prehis
tory, that is the reason why the same act may express
various and even contradictory intentions. Incursion
and disorder may both articulate and overcome death.
Forms of culture did not come into being in order to
smoothly enter our academic interpretation compart
ments.
6.
Back to the Scottish cemetery. As I mentioned, the
female costume of the soldier features a striking exag
geration: we are dealing not only with the keeping of
a promise but with some sort of excessive demonstra
tion. There appears something that could be colloqui
ally described as wacky, an intentional provocation,
also of the aesthetic kind. The “inappropriate colours”
that irritated the commentators so much, those child
ish knee socks as an accessory - the very act of their
selection and the preparation of the attire in this most
grating version must have been accompanied by in
tending to attain maximum enhancement of the ab
surd. Everything appeared to signal: “don’t take this
literally”, “I’m not pretending to be a woman - I’m
pretending to pretend in order to express something
else”.
A t this point one could apply such semiotic for
mulae as "quotation mark expressions” or, in the lan
guage of the Russian formalists: ostranieniye, or the
Brechtian
Verfremdungseffekt. I, however, opt for “wacki
ness”, because the soldier did this for fun, for show.
Why? Only within the context of the above-cited
ethnographic material could we hazard the following
assumption: he did so in order to go the whole way
in expressing his protest, to put on a wacky show for
the whole world to see. After all, there has to be a
way of reacting against the absurdity of death, and this
can be achieved only with equally absurd activity. The
scandalum of death can be exceeded or repulsed exclu
sively by means of the scandal of one’s indecency.
Or could it be that this solitary soldier resembled
yet another protagonist demonstrating a similar form
of anti-behaviour - the mentioned Old Russian “God’s
fool”, the yurodivy? He too behaved scandalously in
the face of the sacred: he threw stones at a church
and genuflected in front of a tavern. In a polemic with
explanations of such acts as a parody Uspienski wrote
correctly that conduct of this sort was a form of in
dicating the devilish sinfulness of the world: for the
Jerzy S. Wasilewski • TRANSGRESSION AND TRAGEDY, LAUGHTER V E R S U S DEATH
yurodivy the world ceased being the work of God and
became a world reversed by the devil, and this is why
one should behave à rebours. One could say that in his
individual episodic behaviour man can allow himself
to disagree, to dramatically protest again the painful
ness of the world, in contrast to ritualised social acts
compelled to accentuate normalcy and inevitability
(even death) in order to offer comfort or the process
of coming to terms. This is why the anthropologist can
decipher the symbolic content of funeral transgression
in different ways: in an individual case he should per
ceive in it depravation and rebellion, and in a group
act - the extension of the state of death, its acceptance
and overcoming. Such strictly ritual behaviour may be
described as “ridiculing death” (see: Todesverlachen,
e.g. Wolff 2009; “ridiculing the world” in: Tadeusz
Baraniuk, 1999). In the case of our point of departure
it would be difficult to speak about laughter, although
the applied form brings to mind derision. Reversal and
undermining, the grotesque and the unsuitable, all are
a cry of protest against the ontical absurdity of death,
which itself is the most terrible transgression. If jok
ing sometimes possesses a vector precisely and person
ally directed against someone then in this instance we
know who this was joke aimed at with all its force: this
is a joke directed against death. 7
One last glance at the young man in the florescent
dress, kneeling and sobbing next to his friend’s grave,
and we shall no longer have any doubts that his clothes
say: "Here I am at Your funeral and demonstrate with
my behaviour that Your death is totally absurd and
unacceptable and that I too act in a manner as absurd
and unsuitable as possible”.
Baraniuk Tadeusz
1999 Prześmiewanie świata. O przebierańcach za
pustnych na północno-zachodnim Mazowszu, Warszawa.
Bogatyrev Pierre
1926 Les jeux dans les rites funèbres de la Russie Subcarpathique, “Le Monde Slave”, no. 11, pp. 196-224.
Nola di Alfons M.
2006 Tryumf Śmierci. Antropologia żałoby, transl. J.
Kornecka et al., Universitas, Kraków.
Jensen Adolf
1960 Mythos und Kult bei Naturvölkern, Steiner,
Wiesbaden.
Lévi-Strauss Claude
1969 Myśl nieoswojona, transl. A. Zajączkowski,
PWN, Warszawa.
uspienski Boris
1998 Historia i semiotyka, transl. B. Żyłko, Słowo/
obraz terytoria, Gdańsk.
Vincenz Stanisław
1980 N a wysokiej połoninie. Prawda starowieku,
PAX, Warszawa.
Wasilewski Jerzy S.
210
1987 Święty Paweł —nawrócenie, odwrócenie i nie
pewność, “Polska Sztuka Ludowa”, 41, no. 4, pp. 177
183.
Wolff Stefanie
2009 Todesverlachen. Das Lachen in der religiösenund profanen Kultur und Literatur im Frankreich des 17.
Jh., Frankfurt am Main.
Endnotes
1 The author is working on Non Seriousness, a study on
comical transgressions..
2 Internet editions of “The Times”, 16 September 2009,
“Gazeta Wyborcza” 15 September 2009, http://www.
timesonline.co.uk/ tol/news/uk/article6836190. ece#none; http://wyborcza.pl/duzy_kadr/ 1,97904, 7042324,
Przyjacielu_gdy_zgine_przyjdz_na_moj_pogrzeb_w_
sukience.html.
3 See: www.wykop.pl/link/236222/przyjacielu-gdy-zgineprzyjdz-na-moj-pogrzeb-w-sukience.
4 Resp.: http://www.drudge.com/archive/125177/bestfriend-dresses-up-soldiers-funeral and http://www.
wykop.pl/link/236222/przyjacielu-gdy-zgine-przyjdz-namoj-pogrzeb-w-sukience. I would like to thank Daniel
Brzeszcz for finding both quotations.
5 Actually, we should also ask whether we are not progres
sing towards reactions totally indifferent to such osten
tatious sexual-costume manipulations, to coin a term.
This is the conclusion one may reach while observing in
the world media No Pants Day, when members of both
sexes walk around only in their underwear, without pro
ducing (the probably) intended shock. Underwear is
also accentuated as part of the fashion for sagging - the
wearing of radically drooping trousers
6 I owe the below presented details to Katarzyna
Kosciesza.
7 At this point, while associating an ostensibly distant
fact, albeit belonging to a similar register or tone, recall
the famous letter B turned upside down in the inscrip
tion: Arbeit macht frei, which, as we know from the
explanations offered by its maker, a concentration camp
locksmith, was supposed to be a jest, the only sort that
he could make to oppose the machinery of the Auschwitz
gehenna.
