Miscellanea Anthropologica et Sociologica

Borders – The Tao of Mestizaje

Carlos Morton — 2023-06-25

This is an essay version of Carlos Morton’s keynote address delivered at the conference organized by the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Migrations held at the University of Gdańsk in September 2021. The prolific Chicano playwright had been asked by the IBSC to speak about his life on the borderlands. His life story is told in the first person, in anecdotes and observations, revealed in a vibrant dialog with processes in the world around him. Morton is a cultural historian, essayist and a humorist in the tradition of José Antonio Burciaga or Carey McWilliams. Morton relishes paradox, seeks facts, and connects the subjective of the private life with the events of the world. His testimony is playful, associative, Taoist. Morton’s vision is cosmopolitan and culture specific. The “Tao of Mestizaje” is to suggest that Morton’s mestizaje is a type of consciousness, a way of life. The text as well as its accompanying artworks by Ricardo Duffy or other photos are also its iterations.

Transgressing Aesthetic Borders: Art, Sex & Marriage in Santa Barbara’s Courthouse Murals

Maiza Hixson — 2023-06-25

This article centers the aesthetic re-staging of Santa Barbara after the devastating earthquake of 1925 in order to interrogate how the city mythologized a white heteronormative patriarchal version of California’s history that persists today. Critiquing Santa Barbara’s Courthouse Mural Room through a queer, postcolonial lens, I argue that contemporary wedding ceremonies held in the Mural Room can destabilize fixed borders between California’s fantasy heritage past and present. Indexing sexuality as Western imperial history through the Courthouse Murals enables my analysis of Mural Room artist Daniel Sayre Groesbeck’s “scenarios of encounter” between the Spanish and indigenous Chumash in 1542. I draw on scholar Valerie Traub’s geo-spatial construction of race and sexuality in the Renaissance to explore Groesbeck’s murals as erotic signifiers of white fantasy projections of a socially and erotically “stable” Santa Barbara onto indigenous bodies. Traub’s reading of early modern European cartography as visual evidence of the elision of indigenous genders and sexual identity in the “New World” informs my critical intervention in Santa Barbara’s contemporary marriages and material production.

(Re)Envisioning Borderlands: Towards a More Productive Paradigm

Grzegorz Welizarowicz — 2023-06-25

This is a theoretical essay inspired by the crisis of the central concept of American identity – the idea of the frontier – and by the belief that in a crisis lies a chance for a new beginning. Thus, the goal is to propose an image/narrative model of alternative universal borderlands. To do this I first briefly explain the notion of the frontier in American imagination. I then evoke archaic imagination and outline how the frontier and its epistemology first came into being and crossed the ocean ushering in a type of modern subjectivity. I then contrast this with local cartographies that had existed in the Americas before European contact. Together the two cartographies engender the transfrontera space. This both actual and mytho-poetic space engenders “contact subjects” and is explained by examples from works by Creole and Chicano theater artists. A third spatial imagining is then proposed after Native American storytelling and theater methodology. Circles upon circles upon circles is an epistemic/ procedural model of how the world is (re)made through stories in the Native worldview. The essay is subtly experimental: as it charts multiple spatio-subjective models it hopes to work on the imagination of the reader, to build imaginary cognitive maps and, perhaps, effect a slight shift in consciousness, taking the reader to the borderlands.

The Figure of the Seer as an Example of Contacts and Crossing the Boundaries Between Mesopotamian and Hellenic Civilizations

Krzysztof Ulanowski — 2023-06-25

The idea of contacts and boundaries between civilizations, cultures and people is as old as the notion of civilization. These physical (economical, personal) contacts accompanied the more subtle religious, spiritual and ideological borrowings, imitations, and exchanges of thought. Additionally, both these phenomena have taken place simultaneously but at a different pace. In this article, the author focuses on the figure of the seer who stood as an authority for people and institutions in antiquity. According to Cicero, divination played the decisive role in societies of the ancient Near East, Greece, Rome etc., as its role in many civilizations was extremely important in religious, political and civil spheres of life. This article focuses only on the religious-military activities of the seer. In spite of the great differences in terms of functioning of the Eastern, often called Oriental (Mesopotamian civilization) and Western (Hellenic civilization) worlds, which have been recorded in our understanding of history, the author presents a different picture, in which the influences of different civilizations and religious impulses flowed from East to West over the centuries.

Oceania Is at War with Eurasia: The Stalemate of the Polish Government and the Catholic Church in Poland Over the Polish-Belarusian Border Zone

Izabela Morska — 2023-06-25

This text discusses the growing tension in relations between the Polish government and the Catholic church in Poland over the plight of refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border that reached a critical state in August 2021. Although the Conference of Polish Episcopate (KEP) emphatically encouraged prioritizing the value of Christian mercy, the government insisted on a dehumanizing narrative (people as tools of war) to conclusively replace the Gospels with a new object of worship: the border. With the state of emergency imposed on November 9, 2021, altruistic activities were defamed, organized humanitarian support removed, and the right of residents to privacy suspended. A new verbiage, such as “weaponization of migrants” and “tightness of the border”, justified stop-and-search procedures within “the zone”, performed by various uniformed forces operating concurrently and acting with unconditional authority. Over the course of the fall and winter of 2021/2022, a parallel universe emerged, enforced by local authorities in small towns and villages located along the border with Belarus. What consequently unraveled was an impromptu narrative of a dystopian crisis rooted in the premise that migrants are the enemy in a war that is not hybrid but holy. Moreover, this text traces similarities between the evolving alternative reality experiment on the Polish-Belarusian border and the constricted world of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, as a vision of a society harnessed to the task of perpetuating political fiction, while the state apparatus produces an incessant flow of propaganda, effectuating the state of unrest and danger at the border.

Satisfaction Despite Precarity. Applying the Concept of Flexibility to Understand Tricity Uber Drivers’ Attitudes to Their Work

Bartosz Mika — 2023-06-25

App-mediated work-on-demand is a socio-economic phenomenon which can be successfully analyzed using the concepts of borders and boundaries. In the article, a perspective from the sociology of work is implemented in connection with an international ride-hailing company in the Polish labor market. The boundaries that are present in the flexible/ precarious work of Uber drivers will be examined. Based on twenty-one semi-structured interviews with Uber drivers conducted during the first wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Europe, this article analyzes answers given by drivers concerning their level of satisfaction with work co-existing with poor working conditions. Using the concept of flexibility, workers positions in the platform economy are characterized according to a typology proposed by Don Jonsson. In conclusion the flexibility/stability distinction is supplemented by the boundary between labor power and work as a process. The main observation resulting from the analysis points to the fact that Ubers drivers praise flexibility not because they inadvertently understand their position but because they are under pressure from transformations taking place in the social division of labor. As a result of this, drivers and other on-demand workers are in a situation of variability to which the flexibility provided by the platform is – from their point of view – one of the few possible solutions.

“Good Care Means That You Make People Happy”. A Qualitative Study on Perceptions Regarding Good Dementia Care Among People with Different Ethnic Backgrounds in Norway

Elżbieta Anna Czapka — 2023-06-25

The purpose of this study was to explore perceptions of good dementia care among people with different ethnic backgrounds in Norway. The study had a qualitative design. Individual semi-structured interviews were carried out with twenty family caregivers with different ethnic backgrounds, five representatives of immigrant communities, and five representatives of health and care personnel working with people living with dementia. Thematic analysis was used to identify themes in the interview material. Data analysis revealed five themes related to the elements of good care: combining institutional and family care; attributes and formal/informal competencies of caregivers, ensuring patient- centered, holistic care; dignity-preserving care and the special role of food. Most of the study participants emphasized elements of care that constitutes what can be described as patient-centered care. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first Norwegian study on the perceptions of good dementia care among people with different ethnic backgrounds.

From the Concept of a Third Culture to the Reality of a Third Space. A Possible Model for a Research Practice That Traverses Disciplines

Martin Blaszk — 2023-06-25

In the article, the proposition of a third culture is discussed in connection with research practices that exist on the borderlands between disciplines. In the first part of the article, an outline of the third culture is presented, as well as its significance and relevance for present- day forms of inquiry. In connection with this, an image from Translation Studies is given where networked knowledge is described, which is seen to be a productive way of viewing the possibilities for a third culture. This proposition is then linked to a strategy that arises from performance inquiry – research-based practice (RBP) – which exists within a third space. In the second part of the article, an outline of this third space inquiry is given in terms of the focus of its research and its basic concepts. The model is then applied to the author’s research into performative education – happening as a form of investigation and research in secondary and tertiary education – in order to elucidate its concerns and the mechanisms that underly it. In the conclusion, a third space for inquiry is viewed to be a productive concept, while the concept of a third culture, although outdated, still serves as a provocation to thought about possible strategies for research practices that do not fit comfortably into one particular branch of human inquiry or the disciplines that exist within them.

“The Leaky Boundaries of Man-made States”: Post-normal Science as an Approach to Inquiry into the Nature of Boundaries in Environmental Governance

Marta Skorek — 2023-06-25

Global environmental governance challenges, such as the climate crisis, ocean pollution, deforestation, desertification or biodiversity loss, are among the most pressing and complex issues in the contemporary world. Both real and constructed, the challenges need to be governed in a multi-level, multi-actor and multi-sector manner. The situation is further complicated by the fact that traditional science has lost some of its credibility due to oversimplified models and simplistic claims, illegal manipulation of information, and the inadequate handling of uncertainty and complexity in the process of making scientific predictions. However, the process of scientific knowledge production may also be approached through the lens of post-normal science (PNS), particularly in the context of complex environmental governance challenges. In connection with this, the aim of this theoretical study is three-fold: to highlight the complex nature of environmental governance challenges, to outline the major tenets of the post-normal approach to science, with special emphasis on the science-policy interface, and to demonstrate the appropriateness of PNS as an approach to inquiry into the nature of boundaries in environmental governance. Primarily intended as an introduction to PNS, the article summarizes the post-normal approach to scientific knowledge production and highlights its relevance to environmental governance challenges through the notion of boundary. For this reason, PNS has not been analyzed through a critical lens, while certain issues relating to its contextualization are beyond the scope of this article.

The Boundaries of the Basque Language

Katarzyna Mirgos — 2023-06-25

The object of this article is to reflect on the concept of boundaries in relation to the Basque language (Euskara). The starting point is the Basque endoethnonym and the concepts which point to language as a marker of distinctiveness and a barrier to others. The article discusses the situation of the Basque language as a minority language, which is broken down into dialects, the phenomenon of diglossia and multilingualism in the region, and contemporary challenges faced by the language. Attention is also paid to the importance of knowledge of the Basque language in the studies of Basque culture, and in the integration of immigrants.

Review of the Book by Gerd Hentschel, Jolanta Tambor, István Fekete Das Schlesische und seine Sprecher. Śląski lekt i jego użytkownicy

Monika Mazurek — 2023-06-25

Introduction

Grzegorz Welizarowicz — 2023-06-25

World Atlas by Maiza Hixson

Maiza Hixson — 2023-06-25