Antropologia hermeneutyczna wobec tradycyjnych tekstów kulturowych : przykład interpretacji wyobrażeń naukowych o Tatrach i góralach tatrzańskich do połowy XIX wieku

Abstract

In debates conducted in Poland for years on the ways of researching cultural anthropology/ ethnology the attention is paid to among other things, the need to find the right way to further development which, on the one hand, would guarantee it modernisation, that is the adjustment to the currently biding international standards, and on the other, allow for maintaining one’s own disciplinary and national specificity. It also aims at preventing Polish cultural anthropology/ethnology from becoming just a provincial copy of western cultural anthropology. Such a way is to lead to the anthropologization of ethnology, no matter how paradoxical it is, through changes in the ways of looking at culture and in research fields, reinterpreting, deconstructing and ethnohistorical coming back to old sources at the same time in order to look at them again from the anthropological perspective. The very work, as intended by the author, is meant to creatively combine the already existing ethnological studies with an anthropological approach to the interpreted cultural identity. The very conditions can be met by hermeneutic anthropology, being a combination of philosophical tradition with the interpretation of cultural texts, according to the principles of hermeneutics. The elements of hermeneutic tradition, understood as a certain way of understanding, were always present both in the past and present cultural anthropology/ ethnology in some way. Hermeneutic anthropology is especially close to an interpretative anthropology, propagated by Clifford Geertz, and his several co-workers, and differs as to among other things a conscious reference to few-century-long experiences of the European humanist hermeneutics. The first chapter covers an outline of the history of humanist hermeneutics — one of the two main (apart from deconstructivism) strategies of interpretative humanist disciplines at the time of the so called postmodernity — mainly from the post-Gadamer perspective. Going to the source-textual and philosophical-speculative foundations and the explication of the main problems of hermeneutics in a diachronic perspective are vital above all because of the fact that a postulate to reach a maximum self-knowledge of scientists, being aware that it is impossible to reach it fully, is today one of the most important methodological imperatives. It is also important because of the fact that Polish cultural anthropology/ ethnology is still dominated by a quasi positivist paradigm of knowledge whose duration takes place not only on the basis of inertia, but sometimes even at the conscious attempts of its defense, among others through pointing out the weaknesses of postmodern perspectives. The second chapter treats about some fundamental methodological issues dealing with alternative ideals of scientific knowledge, research and interpretative methods used on their basis, as well as their functioning in the culture, influence on world perception and generation of cognitive dissonances. The attempt to make a “pre-modernist” and “modernist” epistemy aims, among other things, at showing the historicity of science ideals and related relativity to what is considered as scientific, rational, objective, real, etc. Besides, it aims at an introduction into presenting what a hermeneutic interpretation and understanding of traditional cultural texts consists in. Agreeing with a thesis that theoretical considerations are justified on the basis of cultural anthropology/ethnology in the form of the comment on particular studies (not necessarily field ones) in the context of which they receive their suggestiveness and reliability a further reading shows how different ideals of a scientific knowledge influenced getting to know mountains, highlanders and images related to them. The third chapter presents the history of interests in the Tatra mountains and Tatra highlanders from two alternative, though mutually permeating, perspectives: a naturalist, perceived as a process of their cognition in accordance with the postulates of natural history, and a symbolist one, that is, referring to categories, notions, values, etc. functioning in the culture often in an unconscious way. Analysing the sources for making empirical claims, the images of the mountains functioning in the so called literature and extra-discursive forms of communication (as plastic arts or music) were omitted. In conclusion, showing cognitive dissonances deriving from accepting the two differing ways of looking at the mountains and highlanders, one tries to maintain a lost harmony of the very events at the same time. In other words, cultural images, explicitated from traditional scientific texts treating about the Tatra mountains and Tatra highlanders are used to their interpretation in the context of previously reconstructed ideal of cognition. It aims at discovering sensual images, understanding their symbolic logic. Thus, only the one, as Mircea Eliade wrote, who can go into an insight of a given phenomenon, going beyond the sphere of appearances, automatisms, really contributes to the growth of culture. The rest only prolongs the tyranny of dead forms.