Edukacja międzykulturowa i antropologia pogranicza : wspólnota źródeł i dróg rozwoju

Abstract

Over the last decades, a few subdisciplines of some scientific disciplines have come into being which mostly explore borderlands – e.g. sociology, anthropology, and pedagogy. They could originate only when the specialists in this field had finished their work on the definition of borderland, in which the starting point should be the broad philosophical approach to this problem. Here, the borderland appears as a keyword for modern humanities, referring to many paradigms of contemporary science – it is the meeting of “me” (an individual, group, culture) with the Other, an inevitable encounter which determines the sense of life. The borderland is a meeting of two different paradigms of subjects and every discourse pertains to the relationship Me – You (the Other). The presented study is focused on the shaping of the knowledge concerning the borderland in the contact site between two approaches: of intercultural education as a pedagogical subdiscipline and of anthropology of borderland as a subdiscipline of cultural anthropology. These research orientations seem to be far away from each other – however, in a particular context, the similarities become quite clear. This context is the place where science is practiced – in the unit of the University of Silesia which is located in Cieszyn, in the heart of the Polish-Czech and, therefore, of the Czech-Polish borderland. Education and ethnology as university courses have elaborated – in the process of collaboration and mutual inspiration – original knowledge and interesting research orientations which stem from it. Both disciplines have originated from the same source, their genesis and developmental paths are not only similar but also related. Thus, these aspects of shaping the knowledge of the borderland are worth devoting time and space in a scientific publication.