Since antiquity, genealogy was practiced mainly in the noble families. It has been treated as a tool of legitimization of social and political range. People often used to refer to mythical origins of a family as an imaginary sphere of references to the common past. This paper concerns the idea of amateur genealogy in the present-day Poland and societies of Polish roots. The overall objective is that increasing interest in the search of ancestors is related to specific 'fashion" and the need for people's own place in the so-called 'Great History'. From the perspective of cultural anthropology, the amateur genealogy responses to the identity crisis in the contemporary world and the process of democratization of the collective memory. In Poland, this phenomenon took a significant form, resulting from the history of the Polish nation and still actual problems with social identification: resentment towards the noble past and, very often, the need for having gentry roots. On the other hand, more and more Poles decided to discover their family past and give a voice to their ancestors who were excluded from the traditional historiography: peasants, craftsmen, burghers etc. The first results of ethnographic research (carried out by using classical methods: interviews, participating observation, etc. as well as the virtual-ethnography) show that in Poland, amateur genealogy seems to be the mirror of Polish identity and the mythologized history. What is more, it is also a phenomenon reflecting universal mechanisms of family memory as a unique system of narrations.
Our knowledge of shields in Celto-Germanic societies north of the Danube River -especially among people of the Przeworsk culture, the most 'militarized' archaeological culture in this part of Barbaricum -comes mainly from archaeological sources dated to the beginning of the Roman Period (mainly the first three centuries AD), as well as ancient texts (especially Tacitus' works). However, due to the incompleteness of material relics (lack of wooden elements, etc.) and difficulties in interpretation of Roman references (as a result of their propaganda character, literary qualities), the sources are highly fragmented. It is therefore crucial to find archaeological analogies from different regions, and other kinds of sources, in order to come to know not only the appearance of barbarians' shields, but primarily their sociocultural importance. As well, some ethnographic and historical analogies (relating to the Celtic, Anglo-Saxon or Norse cultures of the early medieval period) can be also taken as an explanation of ritual and symbolic functions of shields, and ways in which inhabitants of Central Europe could have used them in their ritualized forms of behaviour during the Roman period. Shields, as it turns out, were intended to signal identity of members of a retinue, family, or clan, to protect a warrior in combat, and to ward off evil (for example, by using them as apotropaic objects in funerary rituals), as well as to emphasize high social position, power and prestige of individuals. Finally, richly decorated shields could have served as valuable goods in ritual gift-exchange.
The aim of the article is to reconstruct the ‘lived space’ of emigrants from the Kingdom of Poland to Brazil and the United States during the journey between home and the European port in the years 1890–1891. The sources were letters found by Witold Kula, compiled and published for the first time in the 1970s in the book Listy emigrantów z Brazylii i Stanów Zjednoczonych 1890–1891 (1973). The article contains an anthropological interpretation of the changing and meaningful relationship between migrants and space, and an indication of stages of the journey as elements of migrants’ geobiographies on the basis of letters from the road.
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