There is some basis to the perennial fear that folklore draws every day nearer to extinction. But this is true not so much because the traditional sources of folklore are disappearing; it is so rather because the very idea of folklore has fallen on hard times. Folklore is less popular in the public sphere than it once was, but it is also less popular among scholars, who have been gradually abandoning folklore studies for other fields or have been renaming and redefining folklore studies, with the result that the discipline is decreasingly identifiable as the study of something called “folklore”. This essay takes such criticism of folklore as its point of departure, offering its own proposal for critically reexamining and reconceptualizing – but not abandoning – the idea of folklore. The author argues that a serious engagement with the idea of “the folk” may serve as a point of departure for understanding the symbolic ambiguity as well as the social significance and political power of what scholars call (or used to call) folklore. Scholars should neither uncritically accept the ideology of the folk, nor hastily banish the idea to the safe realm of the emic as if it had no bearing on the way we as scholars think. If the study of folklore has relevance in today’s world, it is above all because of the unusual notion that some kinds of expression are conditioned by some kind of social entity that can be called a folk, which continues to provide the most productive basis for a scholarly discipline studying folklore.

The aim of the article is to show conspiratorial thinking combined with technophobia. The author presents the similarities and relations between conspiracy theories and other narratives (present in popular culture), which emerged as the aftermath of the Cold War and apocalyptic fears. The article presents three options for the perception of the relation between technology and conspiracy theories: in the context of dystopian and utopian cultural texts, and in the context of space as no-place, in which there operates a community centered around conspiracy theories.

 The Polish national cinema is famous for its critical approach towards the government and official authorities and implicit references to the current social and political situation. The Polish Film School, The Cinema of Moral Concern or the works of such great auteurs as Andrzej Wajda or Krzysztof Kieślowski (esp. in his early work) bear that mark and must be analyzed in the context of politics. With the exception of historical movies, after 1989 Polish filmmakers openly distanced themselves from politics. The few exceptions that were released employ genre formulas to express political views. In my article I would like to focus on the usage of conspiracy paranoid cinema in Entanglement (2011), Traffic Department (2013), Closed Circuit (2013), and Secret Wars (2014). A brief history of paranoid conspiracy thinking in Poland precedes the analysis of the aforementioned movies. I also address the question to what extent the genre formulas shaped the world vision and ideology that inform those productions.

The situation of Zaolzie, a historical and geographical part of Cieszyn Silesia, is complicated. Despite the years of appurtenance to Czechia and Chechoslovakia there is still active Polish residence and both nations continue to share their history. In this article I intend to show the tense Polish-Czech relationship in Zaolzie presented in Dziennik. Zapiski bibliofila i dziejopisa 1963–1995 by Jerzy Pilch, a writer and essayist from Ustroń. This will be shown in the context of local memory and activist memory stressing the Polishness of the region. It will be possible to analyze how the ideological dimension of the identity is interwoven with an effort to bring about a narrative restoration of Zaolzie, divided by an arbitrary border.

In the environment of the current Czechia the phrase “politics of the fourth price category” is quite frequent, mainly in the parlance of politicians and journalist. The foundation of the phrase is in the technical term “the fourth price category” which in the period of the so-called socialism indicated pubs, or public houses of the lowest category. Their “folk” environment was greatly popular in wide layers of population, but at the same time, this category has become a symbol of dubious quality. After 1989, this classification of pubs was abandoned due to radical changes in the form of their ownership. The term the fourth price category, however, survived in public awareness as the unofficial designation of a pub and, in particular (in conjunction with the policy) as a negative symbol used primarily by politicians and journalists to dishonest political opponents. This term thus seems like a clichéor settled, automated template which the Czechs have become accustomed to and some of them have included it in their spontaneous speech.

The article presents selected forms of the practical use of anthropology. The main aim of text is not an attempt at a complete presentation of practical anthropology. Fragmentation of the description is testimony to the fact that there have been selected only two categories belonging to the broad context of practical anthropology: applied anthropology and the project which extend their range beyond academic discourse. However, the character of anthropology is used to achieve their objectives. The publication is primary concerned with the status of the practical form of anthropology in anthropological discourse, its thematic and methodical range. Attention has been devoted to the historical conditions of the selected forms of anthropology.

The paper focuses on two cases: the allotment gardens and the cooperative movement. “The allotment” and “the cooperative” are two areas examined by the author in her pursuit of the manifestations of cultural resistance. The text begins with a short history of the allotment gardening. However, the main purpose of this part of the article is to examine what kind of practices of the allotment gardeners seem to challenge the “liquid modernity” and whether those practices could be defined as a cultural resistance. That resistance, nested in the modern city, would evoke tensions and therefore make the city an “agonistic public space”. In the second part of the text the author explores the topic of the cooperative movement—starting from its history. Then she shares her visit to the one of Warsaw cooperatives. The story is an attempt at understanding the idea of the resistance on which this movement is built.

The heretofore undescribed case of a ruined Łódź villa from the thirties of the twentieth century, known as the so-called the House of Wasiak, binding with different images, still operates in the narrative of the residents of the Marysin area, and “the House of Wasiak” itself as a link in the local discourse—an element whose meaning is conditioned by the existence of another powerful signifier—should be regarded as the key to the understanding of the mechanisms shaping the complex picture of local relations. Relations that are standard for the Polish context of social, political and urban changes today being as they are a result of a truly palimpsestic buildup of stories and traumas.

Ethnoanimation connects ethnographic research and culture animation. This method has been developed for ten years by Tomasz Rakowski, The Field Collective and author of the text. The last project where the method was tested was the laboratory known as the “Local dimensions of cultural participation. Ethnographic action research”, Warsaw University within a larger framework of a Ministry of Culture grant “Creating bottom-up culture”. In this project students and The Field Collective created an ethnoanimation project in the villages of Zaława and Cukrówka in Poland. They reflected upon them by putting them on an “animation zip” diagram according to the level of cohesion between animation and ethnography in their projects. The “animation zip” as an useful tool that may be interpreted inthe context of “best practices” of culture animation defined by National Culture Centre to define typical features of ethnoanimation practices. In this text the author tries to answer the question–what makes an ethnoanimation project most effective.

The relations between cultural anthropology and art constitute their shared history. This article is an effort to establish methodological expertise, linking ethnological research with the practices and tools of contemporary art. Taking as a point of departure shared research conducted during social engaged art activities I will try to present that situation, created by such actions which reveal particularly “thick” ethnographical realities which allows the discovery of heretofore unrecognized dimensions of culture.

The aim of this article is to show Edinburgh as a city identified by its festivals. Two of them—Edinburgh International Festival and Edinburgh Festival Fringe—influenced cultural landscape of Scottish capital the most, and therefore they were analyzed extensively in this study. I intend to show how the concepts of “space” and “place” surface in the reception of the Edinburgh festivals. I’m presenting both—the residents’ and visitors’—perspectives. I’m trying to better understand how the city, art, and people collide, cooperate and—in the end—coexist.

Kuduro is a type of music and dance which was created in the capital city of Angola (Luanda) at the end of 1980’. It combines batida with electronic music such as techno and house and also with rap, originating from US. The paper presenting this type of dance starts with its general characteristic, then continues describing factors influencing current shape and functions of kuduro. Next, we present in details the movements of this dance and conclude with an overview of the dance forms and the definition of kuduro dance which summarize the information presented in the paper.

 In this paper I discuss the possibilities of interpreting the archival materials of the Polski atlas etnograficzny by means of modern theories of memory. Referring to the theory of representation, memory locations or microhistory, new contexts of the functioning of phenomena or behaviours that are studied may be found in the records that were collected. The value of the source materials is not only in their substantive content but also in the scale of research with which they were collected. The atlas data, despite all their limitations, provide ample opportunities for the interpretation of such representations of the past, being a true reservoir of them. In many cases they require an individual approach, the knowledge of the specific context and a presentation of the interpretations in the form of a specific microhistory. Some, however, are experienced by a larger group of people, thus legitimizinginferences of a more general nature.

New Caledonia, located in the South Pacific, from 1853 remains under the authority of the French government. Although the economy of this territory is mainly based on the extraction of nickel, in the case of the Isle of Pines tourism plays a key role. Contemporary issues related to the development of the tourism industry on the island have to be referred to the very peculiar political, social and cultural context. In the article the author describes various aspects of the tourism activities in New Caledonia and analyzes the socio-political local situation in the context of custom and customary law.