Przestrzenie ludyczne miast pogranicza jako przykład miejsc kontaktów kulturowych

Abstract

The processes taking place in the space of towns and mega-cities are also a subject of interests of ethnologists. Almost half of the population of the world lives in cities. According to prognoses, 60% of the world population will have lived in an urban environment by 2030. Systematic researches into the urban reality will thus contribute to a better understanding of an urban reality. The article is a reflection on the cultural contacts revealing in the ludic spaces of a city in the cultural and ethnical borderlands. It determines the adopted understanding of a cultural contact, urban spaces, ludic behaviors and borderland. It includes a proposition of a typology of the urban ludic spaces. It takes up the issue of transformations of the spaces of a city taking place under an influence of the realized ludic behaviors. It illustrates what social phenomena reveal in relation to the cultural contacts between individual groups, realizing different ludic behavior in the common space of a city. The culturally determined ludic behaviors and the created or used fun spaces can be analyzed as components of a cultural contact. Each community produces its own forms of ludic behaviors. Their juxtaposition is casting light on the character of their relations — from conflict through isolation to assimilation. The analysis of patterns of ludic behaviors is useful especially in the researches into the phenomena and processes taking place in the cultural and ethnic borderlands. Ludic behaviors become clear signs of the individuality of at least two different cultural, ethnic or national groups in the space of coexistence. The borderland is thus an exceptional place for a research into particularism and universalism of fun and into the autonomy of the realized patterns of ludic behaviors, emphasizing the peculiarity of the entirety of the culture of a given area.The article also presents the project of a research into the contemporary patterns of ludic behaviors and fun spaces of individual groups inhabiting Cieszyn and Czeski Cieszyn — the city, which is characteristic of an exceptional borderline location. The description and comparison of the ludic urban spaces, realized ludic behaviors and accompanying cultural contacts between Poles, Czechs, and Zaolzianie, reveal a possibility of researching into the culture of this borderland from the view of ludic issues.