Relacje pomiędzy kulturą a etnicznością w tekstach Cezarii Anny Baudouin de Courtenay‑Ehrenkreutz‑Jędrzejewiczowej

Abstract

Relations between Culture end Ethnicity in the Texts of Cezaria Anna Baudouin de Courtenay‑Ehrenkreutz‑Jędrzejewiczowa

The article describes main fields of interest of the outstanding Polish ethnologist, one of the most important researchers of folk rituals and culture in the interwar period. The article analyses her texts dedicated to ethnical and national problems, in which there are deliberations on the research subject of ethnology (whose distinguishing criterion is tradition) and its scientific material, which serve the cognition of culture’s morphology. Research on products of folk culture, mostly from Wileńszczyzna, passed in oral tradition, makes possible such cognition. Interrelationship between ethnicity and culture is present in crucial texts of Cezaria Baudouin de Courtenay‑Ehrenkreutz‑Jędrzejewiczowa collected in the volume The Tradition’s Chain written in the years 1922‑1953, such as: ‘From Studies of Wedding Rites of Polish People’ (1929), ‘A Few Notes and News about Ethnography of Wileński District’ (1930), ‘Two Cultures and Two Sciences’ (1936) and ‘Ethnical Groups on the Territory of the Great Duchy of Lithuania and Three Nations’ (1953). Using the phenomenological method in the research of folk culture on the borderland between Poland and Lithuania, Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa interprets preserved stories, tracks down their main motifs, reveals their genesis and meaning, which has developed over centuries. The article discusses social and cultural determinants of the rural people, such as ties of tradition, ethnical collective consciousness, religion and language.