Project Leader: Dr. Kamil Adamczak
Project Overview
Traditional historical research, which often remains confined to prevailing conceptualizations and accepted historiographies, proves insufficient for understanding the multifaceted nature of human experience in the past. It becomes essential, therefore, to explore alternative narratives, material artifacts, and traces of memory and non-memory both in the past and within contemporary socio-cultural groups.
The project “EXPERIENCING THE PAST: Materialities – Memory – Narratives” (EtP) creates a space for building a transdisciplinary platform for collaboration among humanities scholars interested in studying how the past was experienced—both historically and in the present. It addresses various dimensions of historical and social time-space and diverse configurations of discourses and sources. The material framework of the past must be animated and contextualized through humanistic inquiry, requiring collaboration across anthropology, sociology, ethnology and ethnography, religious studies, and other disciplines that examine human material culture as well as the natural and geographical environments in which human activities took place.
Recognizing the existence of diverse forms of past experience, including those that go beyond logocentric and textual forms, allows for consideration of less-explored contexts, such as landscapes, marginalization, objects, the body, smell, taste, and affectivity.
EtP is a project focused on the study of past experiences, while simultaneously reflecting on the broader status of the humanities and the ways in which experiences of the past are conceptualized and articulated within them.