WERONIKA ŚLĘZAK-TAZBIR (author of photographs)
MAREK S. SZCZEPAŃSKI (project manager)

University of Silesia,
Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Sociology,
Division of Sociology of Development;
ul. Bankowa 11, 40-007 Katowice
e-mail: weronika.slezak-tazbir@us.edu.pl

Description popularizing the research project

In the first decade of life we recognize our place in the world when we rush to the rescue because they fight with our boys. In the second decade our place in the world is the park benches, trees and fountains where we fell in love and were loved. The next decades are the trodden paths from home to work and back again. Yet maybe we recognize our place because the battles of our youth and first kisses, still remain vivid in our memory. Maybe it is something else? The least doubt we have at the end of the journey when we show our children where we want to be buried. It is amazing how often it is the place so close to the battlefields where we used to fight with "them". Some of "them", and our friends as well, are already there resting in peace...
People create the strongest bounds. The living, these who have just gone and those who have remained in our memory for generations. It is important to cultivate the memory and calling it back to life by naming schools, by planting trees: oaks and yews because they live long.
Important events also bind us and our memory. They are commemorated with plaques that read "In this spot in…' or "In this house lived...". Not the whole country must know the very tenant of the house. It is important so the children from a local playschool come here with their teacher.
We welcome every opportunity to return to our place in the world and we think about what we left behind with nostalgia. And what about psychology? Is it the idyllic time of the worriless childhood with no bad memories to cast a shadow over it? Indeed talking about the battles fought decades before moves equally "us" and "them". Unaware we relate our life decisions and choices to these places and people that we call ours. When we realize that - we engrave a stone. A grave stone. A real one or an immaterial one on the plinth of eternal memory.

Abstract

Initially, we are all "local" in the most literal sense of the word. Everyone is born in a particular place and this is where their experience of the world begins, and expands as they grow older. The place defines our identity, allows us to answer the question of "where do I come from?" and, indeed, another one of "who am I?". That is how our primary identity or, to quote Stanisław Ossowski, the sense of belonging to a private fatherland is formed. Sociologists know that real life stories always happen locally, that one needs to be enrooted in and ascribed to a specific place, even if they are a real rolling stone. The life of a local community is correlated with a general trajectory of individual fate. A man is born, studies, works, relaxes, falls ill and, eventually, dies. A cemetery is, therefore, a special form of social remembrance, an anchor of local identity. Every necropolis, to use a metaphor, gathers together those who have left the local community, those who remain its members and, last but not least, those who will come and join it. Apart from the cemetery, the history of local communities consists of more or less significant events and local heroes, whose lifeline is rarely the point of interest for an academic professional. What matters are also real and legendary traces left behind by outstanding figures who joined the local community either accidentally or purposefully. What we have to face here is a long lasting community with its vast layers of facts, myths, group-formed images and preconceptions, customs, habits, individual experiences and family fortunes. The identity of a place is formed by tradition, history, yet primarily, by social memory, dwelling in a variety of artefacts - monuments, buildings, particular places within a city.
The aim of the research was an attempt to define the factors determining current identity of tamed places, i.e. cities. Various cities of Poland. What was used for the illustration of the research presented were either photographs of places characteristic to particular Polish cities, or pictures of artefacts, where the inhabitants' social memory dwells, shaping and influencing the identity of the people as well as the places. The pictures have been taken since 2006 in a number of Polish cities, like Szczecin, Poznań, Toruń, Cracow, Warsaw. This urban roaming never comes to an end, just like the stories of particular places and people, who keep on writing them every day in the diaries of their lives.