An interpassive and ideological dimension of the politics of cultural heritage



Abstract

A basic question that should be answered in the context of cultural heritage concerns its reinforcement in a social practice in line with all political implications. In view of the collapse of great narrations and a postmodernist distance of any engagement, directing towards an „identity constantly built”, the only form of a real engagement is cynical distance. The same is true of characters created for the purposes of a virtual game; their emotions are not simply false, but on the contrary, they sometimes reflect the state of their creators. At the same time, a virtual reality allows for maintaining a minimum of a distance thanks to the fact that we can withdraw from it any time we want. This distance is crucial when it comes to shaping a cultural identity these days. When we look at the functioning of local societies wielding power over an identity discourse of a community, two relationships appear. The first one consists in the functioning of regional societies in a social practice as original disponent of memory and identity. The second describes the attitude to societies of remaining inhabitants who, due to transferring the pleasure of awareness of their subjectivity to a local organization can deal with other issues. The very relationship is known as interpassivity. Political and ideological implications of both of them have been traced on the basis of Nie wszystko jest oczywiste, a book by Czesław Robotycki. A theoretician should notice here two important political reservations. Firstly, transferring of the pleasure of one’s own awareness is accompanied by the renouncement of making decisions on its shape so even though we convince ourselves that we are independent subjects (a cynical distance), in a social practice, objectively speaking, we behave as if we believed because of some “other” (local organizations). Secondly, building a local identity must be based on a tough theoretical basis because otherwise it will boil down to just folklore curiosities and ethnographic relics (though, in a conscious politics they are very important). The aim of my considerations is, thus, the evaluation of something that is as enigmatic as a cultural heritage in the context of modernity, and showing political dangers in the renouncement of one’s own subjectivity.



Published : 2012-02-20


RauszerM. (2012). An interpassive and ideological dimension of the politics of cultural heritage. Studia Etnologiczne I Antropologiczne, 12, 56-66. Retrieved from https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SEIA/article/view/9059

Michał Rauszer 
Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach Instytut Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej  Poland



The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.

1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

2. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

3. User Rights

Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

4. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.