https://doi.org/10.31261/SEIA.2025.25.01.05
This study is located in the realm of Slavic emigrantology and memory studies. It addresses the fundamental question whether an émigré is doomeed to blur his/her original identity in a multiethnic/multicultural society, and in particular, whether the Tatra highlander who changed mountain pasture for shop floor is doomed to experience erasure of his/her original culture in the New World. This crucial question, posed mainly by scholars representing socio-historical orientation, has not received a satisfying answer, especially against the understanding of heritage as cultural capital for which ethnographic-folkloristic-anthropological analyses are poorly represented in studies of the culture of American Polonia. Ethnographic material for exploration of this problem is provided by the Tatra highlander ethnic subgroup in USA which has been present in the culture of this country for over a century. Its status has been always “betwixt and between”, and its collective identity – regional, ethnic and civic – encompassed multiple kinds of liminality inscribed in its institutionalized forms of artistic expression, verbal and non-verbal. An outline of the nature and determinants of this complex identity, viewed as both private and public “faces” of ethnicity, would precisely define some general tendencies characteristic of mosaic societies in the contemporary world where crossing territorial and mental boundaries by both immigrants and the host community does not imply total de-anchoring of the cultural experience from its traditional ports.
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2025
Published: 2021-07-20
10.31261/SEIA
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
English
Język Polski