Published: 2017-01-01

Zimą w parku. O kontemplacji antropologicznej

Andrzej Paweł Wejland

Abstract

Anthropology of the everyday as practised in winter (a genuine, properly snowy and frosty one) takes the author to an urban park. Although this park is relatively small and situated in the very centre of an urban agglomeration, in wintertime it offers seclusion and soothing silence; time flows there at a leisurely pace and the noisy environment is truly far away. In this space, the walk turns into an anthropological practice and the anthropologist himself becomes le promeneur – a mindful walker. While strolling around the park, he looks at it with a unique curiosity and a pensive sensitivity. Thus, the gaze of an anthropologist of the everyday becomes a contemplative gaze, i.e. one that penetrates into “the middle of things”. The author presents various modes and forms of anthropological contemplation. He also puts forward the assumption that anthropological contemplation requires a very special attitude, which – following Baruch Spinoza, and especially José Ortega y Gasset, Arne Naess and Jan Kurowicki – may be termed amor intellectualis (an anthropological one). The author’s reflections have an undisguised autobiographical perspective, since the park in which he practises his wintertime anthropology of the everyday is the Sienkiewicz Park in his native city of Łódź, and thus a space with which he was intimately familiar while a child

Keywords:

anthropology of the everyday, winter in the city, the city of Łódź, urban park, the walk, anthropological contemplation, amor intellectualis

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Wejland, A. P. (2017). Zimą w parku. O kontemplacji antropologicznej. Journal of Urban Ethnology, 15, 115–127. Retrieved from https://journals.iaepan.pl/jue/article/view/706

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