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
Rafał Kleśta-Nawrocki
History: Democracy and Contemporary Times
PDF version
Keywords: history, modern historiography, democracy, democratization, modern times.
Abstract: The objects of analysis in the present article are historical images created by historians and, in particular, by historiographers and methodologists of history. Thus, its aim is to show the process of democratisation within the discipline at the background of the socio-cultural dispute about democracy itself. The material presented enables the revelation that there is a correlation between the image of history and political democracy: the former is dependent on political democracy, and at the same time it creates democracy. Through the knowledge that it generates, through the forms it takes and the content it communicates, history participates in a democratic discourse and constitutes the efflux of existing democratic practices. At the same time, it uses these diversified definitions to describe modern times. Democratic transformations preclude historical writings and knowledge to be isolated in an ivory tower of Academia: through its internal diversity, history becomes the practice aiming at the precise definition of democracy’s meanings. Analogically, modern times seem indispensably useful for history.
About Author:
Kleśta-Nawrocki Rafał – ethnologist, anthropologist of culture, political scientist. He taught classes in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
