Page 70 [70]
OCR
68 Zbigniew Libera, Magdalena Sztandara cial organizer of these research projects was the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (or PAN, established, respectively, in 1953 and 1951) and its branch in Cracow (Jasiewicz & Slattery 1995). ‘The field research was led by Roman Reinfuss, who according to Przemystaw Burchard had “a lot of energy and creativity and sense of organization” (Burchard 1964: 18). These projects described by their participants as “research events” (Ibid.) were characterized by intensity, massive scale, and versatility. It is worth mentioning that a large group of young researchers came to the selected “headquarters” in the village and they included students of ethnology, art, and architecture and besides them the photographer, driver, a cook, and tutors.* Usually research camps lasted a month and had a specific rhythm and regular schedule. According to the recollections of Burchard and Dziegiel: “one day we spent in the field, next one at the ‘base’ handling the data” (Burchard 1964: 16); “from dawn till dusk we wrote reports from our observations and interviews” (Dziegiel 1996: 225). On the very first day, each of the young ethnographers was assigned a specific topic to research. Most often it was folk architecture, folk art in general, weaving, clothing, and various crafts (carpentry or pottery) and a wide range of material culture. At the same time, drafters and photographers, who basically worked for various ethnographers were supposed to document these items and artefacts in a fast and professional way (cf. Burchard 1964). It seems that there were two purposes of the ethnographic camps taking place in the second half of the last century, which encompassed three concepts: sentiment, authenticity, salvage. The first purpose was preserving the observed and audible facts from the traditional culture and enriching the ethnographic archive. The second was directly connected with preserving the “authenticity” of culture and making the field research into something particularly important and salutary. ‘The necessity of rapid and ground exploration focused primarily on material culture could be reduced to what George Marcus described as a mode of “salvage ethnography”. In this model, the ethnographer takes the role of the one who is able, despite the fundamental change, “to salvage a cultural state on the verge of transformation” (Marcus 1986: 165). The guides and mentors (in particular Roman Reinfuss) of young ethnographers in the field quite persuasively, as it seems, explained the need for this type of research. He emphasized inter alia, that procession of urban civilization displaces, destroys and causes the decline of traditional folk culture (Burchard 1964). The answer for the coming threat was a quick but thorough grounding search of traditional artefacts in order to save and rescue them from destruction. One can guess that each of the camps brought huge “yields”: thousands of pages of interviews and thousands of drawings, plans, sketches, and photographs. However it is difficult to forget that the supposed mass scale and speed of conducting * Camp in 1952 in two-week batches counted 88 participants and every two days 4 trucks left the base.
