The book deals with manifestations and relics of magical thinking in the narrative folklore of Cieszyn Silesia (Teschen Silesia, Těšín Silesia). The point of departure is a phenomenological and ...social constructivist approach to human cognition. The author follows the cognitive dimensions of pre-modern folklore and popular texts in general. They are conventional in the sense that they are repeated in many variants inside one communicative group. Habituation based on more or less accurate reproduction of stereotypes (and corresponding experiences), motives, action scenarios, rationalizations, and motivations, is the source of relatively stable world image. The key concept developed in the book is redefined categorization understood as the simplification and stabilization of too complex and changing reality through shared narratives.
The aim of the paper is to identify a specific type of cognitive conduct, whichcan be called magical-mythical perception and thinking. It is based on a relevanthabitus and its principle is ...indistinctness (blending, blurring), where differencesbetween diverse phenomena, memory images and notions disappear in perceptionand imagination, as well as between denotation and connotation. Suchan indistinctness can have considerable impact on social memories. The authoridentifies in such a cognitive conduct the possible key to the following questions:How is it possible that we can perfectly adopt different representations of thepast and internalize them as our past? How can we reconcile different representationsof the past and how is it possible that diverse representations of the pastmerge in one social memory? Such amalgamations of various forms of representationsand diverse scales of objectification can be clarified by means of the theoryof magic and by means of Roland Barthes´ theory of myth. The main propositionof the paper is to identify, for the first, the unconscious structure (a habitusformed in the historical process), which defines a manner of experiencing theworld, speaking about the world and making choices in that world. For the second,the criteria a person uses to select and evaluate narratives about the past.
This paper attempts to answer two questions: first, how aestheticization and mediatization of representations of the past affects the possibility of their transmission between milieus distinguished ...by incompatible social memories, identifications or value and symbolic systems; second, how aestheticization of narratives of the past can affect the ability of their recipients to distinguish between individuals and collectives. The key concept is the degree of reification of collectives and the impact of such reification on the possibility to communicate representations of traumatic experiences of individuals. The author focuses on some feature films and analyses their ability to promote or inhibit dehumanization of individuals.
The aim of the paper is to identify a specific type of cognitive conduct, which can be called magical-mythical perception and thinking. It is based on a relevant habitus and its principle is ...indistinctness (blending, blurring ), where differences between diverse phenomena, memory images and notions disappear in perception and imagination, as well as between denotation and connotation. Such an indistinctness can have considerable impact on social memories. The author identifies in such a cognitive conduct the possible key to the following questions: How is it possible that we can perfectly adopt different representations of the past and internalize them as our past? How can we reconcile different representations of the past and how is it possible that diverse representations of the past merge in one social memory? Such amalgamations of various forms of representations and diverse scales of objectification can be clarified by means of the theory of magic and by means of Roland Barthestheory of myth. The main proposition of the paper is to identify, for the first, the unconscious structure (a habitus formed in the historical process), which defines a manner of experiencing the world, speaking about the world and making choices in that world. For the second, the criteria a person uses to select and evaluate narratives about the past.
The aim of the paper is to consider such ethnolinguistic categories as magic, connotation, cognitive blending as possible keys to the following questions: How is it possible that we can perfectly ...adopt different representations of the past and internalize them as our past? How can we reconcile different representations of the past and how is it possible that diverse representations of the past merge in one social memory? Such amalgamations of various forms of representations and diverse scales of objectification can be clarified by means of the theory of magic, by means of the law of resemblance, and the law of contiguity. Such considerations are supported here by empirical study of the construction of social memories in Teschen Silesia, which was divided between Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1920. On both sides of the new border different state institutions emerged and influenced local memories.
The aim of the paper is to consider such ethnolinguistic categories as magic, connotation, and
cognitive blending as possible keys to the following questions: How is it possible that we can perfectly
...adopt different representations of the past and internalize them as our past? How can we reconcile
different representations of the past and how is it possible that diverse representations of the past merge
in one social memory? Such amalgamations of various forms of representations and diverse scales of
objectification can be clarified by means of the theory of magic, by means of the law of resemblance, and
the law of contiguity. Such considerations are supported here by empirical study of the construction of
social memories in Teschen Silesia, which was divided between Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1920. On
both sides of the new border different state institutions emerged and influenced local memories.
The European society is getting older and nobody knows how to deal with this problem. There are different models from family care, special housing for elderly to professional institutional care, ...which has the disadvantage of being very expensive. In Germany we have noticed in the last two or three years a special trend to send old people suffering from dementia to foreign countries, because these people need intensive care and the social services for example in Poland have a high standard. The aim of our survey is to dismantle, by the example of the private care institution situated in Poland, Upper Silesia which specializes on German customers, the social practices associated with placing the elderly in such institutions and also the methods of constructing meanings of these practices providing clarity in the various groups that take part in this process. To reach this aim we used qualitative field research, including discourse and narrative analysis of various materials (interviews, promotional texts, websites), which beside other things allowed us to reconstruct the media image of the surveyed residences for the elderly and show it in a wider context.
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