Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Auto/narrative as a Means of Structuring Human Experience
- Autobiographical Strategy and Attitude of Halina Birenbaum as a Form of Passing on a Witness of the Holocaust
- Discursive Analysis of Auto/biographical Narratives: On the Basis of Prison Camp Literature
- Identity and Dignity in Narrative Biographical Episodes of Contemporary Polish ‘Non-migrants’
- Autobiographies of Macedonian Refugees
- Anthropological Study of Memoirs of Ethnic Minority Members (On the Example of the Lemko Diaries): Methodological Proposals
- “Writing is as much as Picking out and Passing over”: Traces of a Diary in Ryszard Kapuściński's Lapidarium
- Narratives on the Choice of Studies as Cultural Stories: On the Example of Interviews with the Alumni of the Warsaw School of Economics
- Notes on Contributors
Anthropological Study of Memoirs of Ethnic Minority Members (On the Example of the Lemko Diaries): Methodological Proposals
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Auto/narrative as a Means of Structuring Human Experience
- Autobiographical Strategy and Attitude of Halina Birenbaum as a Form of Passing on a Witness of the Holocaust
- Discursive Analysis of Auto/biographical Narratives: On the Basis of Prison Camp Literature
- Identity and Dignity in Narrative Biographical Episodes of Contemporary Polish ‘Non-migrants’
- Autobiographies of Macedonian Refugees
- Anthropological Study of Memoirs of Ethnic Minority Members (On the Example of the Lemko Diaries): Methodological Proposals
- “Writing is as much as Picking out and Passing over”: Traces of a Diary in Ryszard Kapuściński's Lapidarium
- Narratives on the Choice of Studies as Cultural Stories: On the Example of Interviews with the Alumni of the Warsaw School of Economics
- Notes on Contributors
Summary
The basis of this article are reflections on the analysis of the Lemko personal document literature, which was the subject of my Ph.D. thesis dedicated to the collective memory of the Lemko community in Poland and Ukraine. Lemko people, displaced from the Low Beskid Mountains in the years 1944-1947 to Soviet Ukraine and to the western and northern regions of Poland, inspire numerous sociologists, ethnologists, and historians. For years, certain problems in this regard have been thoroughly exploited, especially those concerning the national identity and ethnic renaissance. On the other hand, some issues are omitted and neglected, for instance the issue of memory (used by the Lemkos for the self-affirmation purposes), increased drive for self-discovery and the efforts undertaken by the Lemkos to take a stand towards the commemorating practices made by he Polish and Ukrainian society. Scrutinizing the Lemkos' memory was my primary objective.
I analyzed Lemko autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, chronicles, and collections of memoirs. The set of texts that I have collected includes 66 publications, published as separate books in Poland and Ukraine, after 1989 and 1991, respectively. These accounts have one or more authors and were published in Polish, Ukrainian or Lemko.
I dealt with the narrative practices applied by the Lemko—their structure, content and ways of using them in group self-presentation strategies. As a self-presentation I understand here the cultural representation of the group and its past, where it is the past whose preservation is a prerequisite for the subsistence of the group.
For an anthropologist, individual memoirs are a valuable source of ethnographic nature. Treated collectively they represent a multi-voice message of a minority group. Following the assumption of the cultural self-presentation of the minority group, I aimed at investigating the mechanisms of constructing the images of the past—within the so-called memory communities (cf. Nijakowski, 2006, pp. 32-33)—co-ordination of the content of these images and using them for the purposes of the community.
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- Scientific BiographiesBetween the 'Professional' and 'Non-Professional', pp. 91 - 108Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2014