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Download PDF (577.6 Foreword The book in reader’s hands looks at manifestations of magical thinking in everyday lives of denizens of Cieszyn Silesia (Teschen Silesia, Těšín Silesia) in the premodern era� In the book, I recreate the magical dimension of routine and habitual ways of perceiving and thinking about reality, and therefore of the magical dimension of conceptualizing and ordering reality during the pre- modern era by means of works of narrative folklore collected by local folklorists between the 1950s and the 1980s of the twentieth century� The book, which was published by the University of Silesia in 2008, is an attempt to recreate the mag- ical image of the world shared by the broadest social strata of Cieszyn Silesia� It is also an attempt at finding an answer to the question of the role that magical thinking played in social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann 1989) in the premodern era� When presenting a book dedicated to the English- speaking reader, we should first explain why in an anthropological study looking at magical thinking as part of social construction of reality, we choose to refer to relatively obscure region of Cieszyn Silesia, one of Silesian provinces, which constituted part of Habsburg’s monarchy since 1918� The Duchy of Teschen territory mentioned in contempo- rary anthropological, sociological and linguistic literature in English is known most commonly as the borderland� Works dedicated to Cieszyn Silesia typically focus on the study of processes that shape collective identities and processes of linguistic change, and the study and demonstration of the influence of national borders on these processes (Hannan 1996)� The previous Duchy of Teschen was divided between two states in 1920: Poland and Czechoslovakia� During the years of the border crossing the area (lasting, with one break, from 1938 to 1945), the Cieszyn Silesia used to be a multi- language and multi- ethnic terri- tory, which was a common phenomenon across the regions of Eastern Europe at that time� The territory was dominated by the population, which identified with the Polish language aside populations that identified with German or Czech and a population that identified with two or more languages simultaneously� The Czechoslovakian Poles who inhabited the Czech part of the former Duchy of Teschen are one of the luckier ethnic minorities of Central- Eastern Europe that managed to survive the Second World War on its territory and the following mass displacements of entire populations� The Polish minority exists in the Czech part of the Cieszyn Silesia to this day, even if due to assimilation, its num- bers have dwindled� Jan Kajfosz - 9783631840351 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 12:52:47AM via free access 8 Foreword Ethnic conflicts in that territory, which from the end of the Second World War took on a character of a competition between the Polish and Czech eth- nicity (after eliminating and relatively marginalizing the German language), are the reason for the wealth of folklore materials collected between the 50s and the 80s that is almost unmatched� The motive behind these long term and intense ethnographic field studies conducted by the Polish Cultural and Educational Association in Czechoslovakia (PZKO) was an attempt to collect proof for the ethnically Polish character of the municipalities which, at the time of being inducted into Czechoslovakia, were mostly inhabited by populations speaking in Silesian- Polish dialect and identified with the standard Polish language� Under the guise of the official friendship between the communist governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia an unofficial Czech- Polish kulturkampf con- tinued� It focused, among other issues, on winning domination over the nar- rative regarding the linguistic and cultural past of the area� One of the main tools of that struggle over the image of the past wielded by the local Poles was folklore studies focused on recording and documenting oral folklore of different genres� Thanks to that effort, today, we have very precise samples of the local, historical folklore at our disposal, which are representative enough to use them for reconstructing with great detail local models of life- worlds� For a long time, in ethnographic discourses of Central-Eastern Europe, texts of the oral folklore have been looked at from the perspective of aesthetics or the question of collec- tive identities, but they could be treated as a relevant source for reconstruction of the magical image of the world of the premodern era, regardless of the fact that similar texts across Europe and including metropolitan cultures, were collected at the turn of an epoch that we call postmodernism� Due to the fact that the folklorists living in the Czech part of Cieszyn Silesia inhabited by the Polish minority – the so-called Zaolzie – focused on folklore narratives of the oldest generation of people living in the least urbanized areas, we may suspect that the materials they collected constitutes at least a partial rep- resentation of the premodern world, even if the storytellers themselves lived in an already modern, heavily industrialized, and urbanized country of the Eastern Block� The switch from premodern to modern world initiated by the industrial revolution did not happen simultaneously in all parts of Europe and did not encompass all social strata and all spheres of everyday life at the same time� Even if we were to connect the beginning of modernism with the industrial revolu- tion, the change from the premodern to modern epoch had a form of a multi- dimensional evolution that, with varying speeds, took over different aspects of social practices� In the Cieszyn Silesia area, the premodern templates of culture held for the longest among the plebeian strata, mostly in respect to everyday life, Jan Kajfosz - 9783631840351 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 12:52:47AM via free access Foreword 9 and mostly those that did not require a lot of reflection, or verification� Cieszyn Silesia’s folklorists managed to collect an interesting material during times when the remains of magical thinking in its premodern form functioned at least among some of the members of the oldest generation of farmers and laborers as a natural way of spontaneous perception and interpretation of the world, while in other circles they have been already recognized as an element of ancestral tradition that is worth recording� Magical thinking as such has an obvious uni- versal dimension (Sørensen 2007) that pertains to the modern and postmodern world, however, there are no more characters of the socially reproduced system of ordering of the world� At this point, we must ask how it is possible for mutually exclusive paradigms that condition the perception and interpretation of the world to exist next to each other and do not lead to cognitive dissonances and conflicts� The answer could lie in the phenomenological theory of everyday knowledge proposed by Alfred Schütz (Schütz 1944)� Everyday knowledge differs from scientific knowl- edge by not having the prerequisite of being consistent� It also does not have to eliminate contradictory views and attitudes� Not all its elements activate simultaneously, but rather interchangeably follow the changing circumstances, which repeatedly decide about the hierarchy of importance of the objects of our interest� On the plane of the everyday, the way of perceiving the world that fits one set of circumstances could be replaced by a different way in a different situ- ation without the need for any revisions� The consistency of attitudes and beliefs does not constitute a necessity in this case, while interpretations, which within a reflexive overview would be mutually exclusive can, instead, complement one another within the sphere of spontaneously adopted worldviews� As an example, let us take a theater play, in which an actor playing the main protagonist is killed with a dagger and dies, while remaining alive to give another performance and, once again, “die�” In the spontaneous experience of the audience member, one does not exclude the other and even within the framework of reflective view a similar contradiction does not have to be noticed and does not have to consti- tute an epistemological problem� Within the sphere of everyday life, the magical order of the world can exist besides the positivistic one, or any other order, as long as each of them finds use in specific circumstances� The magical order of cognition takes on the form of unobserved, tacit routine when new information corresponds with reference framework (or: background knowledge) to a point where there is no longer a need for a blunt legitimization� In this book, we work with the notion of folklore as proposed by Peter G� Bogatyrev and Roman Jakobson (Jakobson and Bogatyrev 1980)� As under- stood by these authors, the verbal folklore is a poetic text that exhibits a repeatable Jan Kajfosz - 9783631840351 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 12:52:47AM via free access 10 Foreword meaning structure that corresponds with aesthetic and cognitive habits (refer- ence frameworks) of the members of the communication community under- stood as a more or less broad social environment� In that sense, folklore is a relative phenomenon, due to diversity of social environments and changeability of historical circumstances that are tied to patterns of fictionalization and per- ception, including evaluation and ordering of the world� In that sense, we could speak of historical folklore of a given territory, or a social environment
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