The Folk Bible of Central-Eastern Europe

ISBN: 978-3-631-80104-8
Liczba stron: 456
Rok wydania: 2019
Wydania: 1 / TRANSLACJE / Peter Lang / tł. Aniela Korzeniowska, Stefan Sikora

Magdalena Zowczak

Ethnographer and Anthropologist. Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. Head of Theory and Study of Contemporary Cultural Practices Unit (from 2016; Head of Ethnology of Poland and Europe Unit 2003-2016). Area of interest: anthropology of religion, the Apocrypha, prayer, sacrifice, contemporary religious expression and its connections to identity in various milieus and social groups.

This is the first Polish ethnological monograph to present how biblical themes function in folk culture in the context of rituals, customs and iconographic records and is based on ethnographic sources collected in Polish rural communities from central Poland to diasporas in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine in 1989–96. It shows how biblical plots used to undergo interpretation, at the same time, infiltrating common sense knowledge. The novelty here is the joint analysis of themes from both Testaments, presenting the narrations in accordance to the way the local community perceived its identity. The biblical typology, influencing culture through tradition and liturgy, inspired a symbolic order adjusted to cyclic conceptions of time and space, characteristic of rural culture