ISSN 2084–1418
The paper edition of the Anthropology of History Yearbook is the definitive version
2012, No. 1 (2), Anthropology / history of the Contemporary World
Marcin Brocki
Anthropology and History in the Face of Mythicising the Past
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Keywords: history, anthropology semiosis, mythologization, problem of representation.
Abstract: The experiences of People’s Polish Republic are available through their representations. These representations do not constitute data that tell something of themselves, they are not a neutral medium conveying facts, but they are subject to selection, and are related to other facts, thus rather than generating the past then reproducing it within the medium of the texts. Sometimes the nature of so produced past is determined by a small shifts in the usage of metaphors by which we describes some events. Thus it becomes important who makes the selection and who places "facts" in “an appropriate” network of relations, what language is used and what are the selected elements of the past on which the focus is given. The article aims to show the difference in reconstructing the past by anthropologists and scholars representing the discourse of history. In anthropology, an interest in the past is generally dictated by the fact that the present is more understandable by the way it “looks at the past”, for the history the present is the result of the past. In anthropology the common version of the past (usually oral), is subject to the reconstruction and interpretation, while for the history it is usually treated as an alternative version of past. Western historical discourse insists that the history relies on the written, while the oral is a matter of tradition. Fiction (the common version of the past) does not interest most historians, because we understand what is "real and true" differently. For anthropology, the "real" relates to what is real for certain people, for the history the "real" is what historians declare as such. Anthropologists are less interested in "what really happened", but rather in the process of signification of the past. Thus, ethnography of history differs greatly from the history taught in schools, sometimes becoming criticism of such a history. However, both academic history and anthropology are forms of semiosis of the past. But it is important to distinguish which of the representation of the past is more representative of it and to distinguish between the process of semiosis from the mythologization of the past on the grounds of both sciences.
About Author:
BROCKI MARCIN - ethnologist, cultural anthropologist, director of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.