The article is dedicated to philosophical and religious aspects of the work of Russian writer and thinker Mary (Skobcowa). The aim is to investigate the key concepts that shaped her writings such as the problem of creativity, asceticism, the problem of the person. Particular attention was paid to the religious roots of her works. Her ideas are examined in the context of the theological thought of the twentieth century. Mother Mary synthesized the Sergiei Bulgakhov’s ‘philosophical system’ and the existentialist analysis of Nikolai Berdiayev. Special attention was paid to a critical rethinking of nineteenth-century Russian monastic tradition as well as polemic in the academic tradition of the early twentieth century.

The aim of the article is to discuss the written legacy of Philaret Drozdov, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Moscow (lived 1782–1867), in the context of human freedom and the freedom of the imperial Russia’s system – the autocracy. The basic research material constitutes of four homilies by Philaret Drozdov written in the years 1849–1856. To present a certain evolution of the Russian thought the author of the article also cites works which were created in earlier periods, i.e.: in the Moscow Russia time and in the time of Peter I. First, the author presents the orthodox anthropology as the ideological base for Philaret Drozdov’s considerations of freedom and power. Then, individual texts are discussed in detail in order to define the view of the Metropolitan of Moscow on the foregoing issues. At the end, the author sums up the carried out analysis and presents conclusions.

Prof. Wojciech Burszta from the PAS Institute of Slavic Studies discusses what has remained of the ideals of the cultural revolution that took place in the 1960s.

Historical reenactors are not merely mad eccentrics; they are also earnest history aficionados eager for us to learn from the past – says Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska from the PAS Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology in Warsaw.

The article describes the relationship between the local community and the primary school considered as “place” within the meaning derived from the book by yi-Fu Tuan “Space and place: The perspective of experience”. The article compares the cases of two schools in the city of bielsko-biała (the city has a population of 175 thousands inhabitants). One school is overcrowded, yet its future existence has been secured. The second school, however, was first transferred to another location and it eventually went into liquidation in 2012. The article demonstrates then underlying reasons and consequences of losing the school as place. Moreover, it indicates potential problems emerging in such cases altogether with a set of possible solutions.

The main contradictions, between hypotheses posed by physical anthropologists or geneticists, and the hypotheses put forward by archaeologists or historians, regarding the origin and spread of the Slavs, concerned and still concern the following: (a) the state and biological dynamics of Slavic populations (the capacity for population expansion) , (b) diversity and biological similarity of various groups living in Central Europe at the end of antiquity and in the early Middle Ages, (c) migration movements and their intensity, (d) directions of migration and their importance in the formation of Slavic “ethnos”. On the basis of the results of anthropological research, it can be concluded that: (a) both in the late antiquity period and in the early Middle Ages, the regional diversity of the populations inhabiting the Odra and Vistula basins was maintained, (b) there was a geographical gradient in the variability of morphological features of the skull from west to east of Europe, (c) populations belonging to the Germanic population and populations living in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages clearly differed in terms of morphological features of the skeleton from the population of Western Slavs inhabiting the Odra and Vistula basin. On the other hand, the emergence of a clear geographical gradient in the variability of morphological features of the skeleton, in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages, in Central Europe, allows to conclude that there were no intense migratory movements and the population exchange between late antiquity and the early Middle (d) results of the skeletal morphological features and state and biological dynamics of the population from the Roman period and the Middle Ages indicate a similar level of adaptation of these groups of people to living conditions. This result does not confirm the thesis put forward by some archaeologists and historians that the cultural system of the Slavs was characterized by poverty and a low level of material culture.

The article is an attempt to reflect upon the way in which some terms coming from modern anthropology (local knowledge, thick description) can be used in studies regarding proper names in the cultural and social perspective. This anthropological way of thinking has been presented in Artur Rejter’s new book “Proper Names in (Con)texts of Culture”. The author of the article shows that studying culture through proper names must entail the widening of the variety of scientific methods and strategies and adding those used in social studies and humanities.

Roman Ingarden’s work is widely taken as promoting a philosophical anthropology in which considerations from philosophy of ecology, that is, ecophilosophy, have no secure place. I think this contention is too hasty, even though Ingarden himself did not undertake reflections on the responsibility of humans for their natural environment. It is true that here and there he was giving explicit expression to his conviction of the unimportance of biological origins of humans, and was putting a strong emphasis on culture and other intentional creatures of humanity. In my paper I have tried to trace and describe Ingardenian understanding of humans in relation to their environment, and especially to nature. I have made an attempt to show how free human actions are possible, which in turn enforces on humans some responsibility for their actions, including those that impinge upon the nature around them.

The aim of this analysis is to determine whether Marx’s diagnosis of alienated work applies to work that is performed in our time, and whether the concept itself is useful for philosophical anthropology. Marx assumes that there is a link between alienation of work and alienation of the worker. The author asks if these premises lead to further questions, such as: Is the phenomenon of alienation of work characterized unambiguously and precisely? Can it be useful for analyzing social phenomena occurring outside the proletariat? Is it relevant to apply this phenomenon to the philosophical discourse on man conducted independently of the historical perspective assumed by Marx? Will abolition of private ownership of means of production eliminate the phenomenon of alienated work? Which is more nearly true: Marx’s idea that private property is the result of alienated work, or the opposite, that private property is its cause?

The anthropology of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is strictly theological. Its basis is Christocentric theocentrism. The whole approach is embedded in ecclesiology. The question of who a man is and how to be a man must be directed to God. His answer, which is heard in the Church, is Jesus Christ. The Body of Christ is the space of the communion between God and man. Thus, Christ is God’s tool for the transformation of human existence – its liberation and fulfillment. Man is not an independent being. He comes from God. He exists because he is loved. Being created in God’s image determines the relational - dialogical - nature of his being. A scratch on God’s work is made by sin which undermines the truth about creation. Asking about who he is, man should turn his eyes to God’s perfect image, Jesus who is both God and man. The categories of sonship, childhood and pro-existence are characteristic here. All this is available by entering into the existence of the Son of God, which is done through baptism in the Church. There, man can realize his relational existence. The liturgy, however, provides us with the access to our eschatological destiny.

Pedagogy is not an autonomous science, independent in terms of cognitive theory and methodology from other sciences. Both the subject – man, the method – a specific way of explaining and justifying key statements, and the goal – the fullness of a person’s personal life, are not formulated without a philosophical, especially anthropological reference. Each of the existing pedagogical concepts naturally assumes a specific vision of the world and man, which remains beyond the competence of pedagogy. Pedagogy only assumes it, makes it a starting point for further discourse in the area of its research. It follows that pedagogy is not an autonomous science in relation to philosophy. Therefore, the educator must be aware of what kind of philosophy it is and whether it meets the criteria of rationality and reasonableness of scientific discourse. In the face of the contemporary confusion of thinking about man, referred to as the “anthropological error,” especially when confronted with the dynamically spreading ideology of the so-called multiculturalism proclaiming the equality of different anthropologies and different theories of education, there is an urgent need to recall and critically rebuild the tradition of personalistic pedagogy. Upbringing should be anchored in ethics as a theory of morality and understood as the actualization of human potential in the perspective of “being-for-others.”

Like all religions Islam, too, has substantial ethical contents. The unique character of Islamic ethics, however, comes from the fact that it is entirely rooted in religion and so cannot be separated from it. Thus it is formed by the teaching of the Quran, to which the way of life of the Prophet Muhammad (sunnah) offers explanations. Man’s behavior in this sense is an act of either obedience or disobedience to God himself. It is also true that in the Muslim world a philosophical conception of ethics has evolved mainly due to Islam’s encounter with Greek culture. The central concept of Islamic ethics is character (khuluq), which is the state of man’s soul. It is in his character that man develops a tendency to perform either good or bad actions. Such understanding of human dispositions has much to do with Aristotle’s perception of man’s inner state that guides him to good or evil actions. These preliminary basic clarifications on Islamic ethics are then followed by brief accounts of select issues of moral life. Among those there are three main virtues (justice, kindness, charity) and vices (indecency, wickedness, oppression), marriage and the family, or the sanctity of human life (implying an ethical rejection of abortion and euthanasia).

The article is based on a thorough reading of one of the latest anthropological contributions to the study of demographic behavior and a demographic change. Reviewing the essays contained in the book is a springboard for exploration of the nature of a presumed "epistemological crisis" within demography and the possible refreshment of the discipline that might have come from anthropological theories and methodologies. By doing so, the examples of anthropological reformulations of the fundamental demographic concepts, presumptions and methods are presented, and the benefits and pitfalls of the liaison between anthropology and demography are discussed.

Wojciech Józef Burszta (1957–2021) was one of the most prominent Polish anthropologists. He specialized in the theory and methodology of ethnology, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, folk and popular culture, and anthropology of the present. He is the author of several hundred works in these fields. The importance of his achievements for cultural studies is unquestionable. His researches largely defined the shape of Polish cultural anthropology. In 1979, he graduated from ethnography at the Historical Faculty at Adam Mickiewicz University. In 1984, he received his PhD in Ethnology. In 1993, he obtained a readership (habilitation) and in 1998 he became a professor. He played an important role in the community of cultural researchers. He was a member of the Committee on Ethnological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Committee on Polish Diaspora of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Cultural Sciences Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences (member and chairman). His activity in scientific life also included participation in scientific societies: the Polish Folk Society and the Polish Cultural Studies Society, the Polish Sociological Society and the European Association of Social Anhtropology. He worked in scientific councils and editorial committees of Polish and international journals.

This article is an attempt to outline a model of spiritual iconography. The main purpose of the article is to justify the thesis that this model appears to be formulated in the statements of a Moscow icon painter: A. Sokolov (died 2015). Initially, we assume that an icon has four main aspects: ecclesiastical (related to worship), theological, spiritual, and artistic, which closely relate to each other and determine its essence – iconicity. According to them, we can distinguish four models of iconography: each contains the whole iconicity, but each of them is dominated by a different dimension of it. On this basis, we assume the existence of a model built on the dominance of the spiritual element – a model that interprets iconography as spirituality. In order to show that this model is implemented by iconography as interpreted by Sokolow, we show that it has the structural features of spirituality. To this end, we refer to contemporary interpretations of ancient philosophy, which see it as spirituality (P. Hadot, M. Foucault); from them we draw the structural features of spirituality and indicate them in Sokolov’s formulations on iconography.

This article aims to reconstruct Max Scheler’s conception of three types of knowledge, outlined in his late work Philosophical Perspectives (1928). Scheler distinguished three kinds of knowledge: empirical, used to exercise control over nature, eidetic (essential) and metaphysical. I review the epistemological criteria that underlie this distinction, and its functionalistic assumptions. In the article’s polemic part I accuse Scheler of a) crypto-dualism in his theory of knowledge, which draws insufficient distinctions between metaphysical and eidetic knowledge; b) totally omitting the status of the humanities in his classification of knowledge types; c) consistently developing a philosophy of knowledge without resort to the research tools offered by the philosophy of science, which takes such analyses out of their social and historical context (i.e., how knowledge is created in today’s scientific communities).

The aim of the article is an attempt to trace the fate of several appellatives grouped in the lexical field around the hyperonym świnia ʽpig, swine’ (wieprz ʽhog’, knur/kiernoz ʽboar’ and prosię ʽpiglet’) as the motivation of many names in Polish onymy, mainly in anthroponymy and toponymy. My research has been conducted along the lines of historical anthropology. Proper names in this approach play an important role in the reconstruction of the past. The field of interest of this article includes mainly names belonging to the old onymic layer. Proper names arise from the lexicon of a given language, which is why my analysis is based on lexical and semantic methodology. My point of departure is the meaning (often reconstructed) of appellative lexical units, including their semantic modifications in the proprial layer. I interpret proper names on the basis of findings regarding their origin and motivation. The first names motivated by the lexeme świnia were associated with the economic organization of the Piast state. In the article I present the history of their creation. I go on to discuss the other lexemes which became the basis of many names belonging to different naming categories. The presence of etymons of interest to us in so many proper names during the Middle Ages allows us to draw the conclusion that pigs played an extremely important role in the lives of our ancestors.

The article directly and indirectly refers to anthropological and philosophical texts which strive to discover and present the gender factor as important in the light of the humanities. The author refers to “Literackie nie-nazywanie. Onomastykon polskiej prozy współczesnej” (Literary Not-naming. Onomasticon of the modern Polish prose) by Magdalena Graf and indicates the femininity factor as a relevant one also in onomastics.

This article is an analysis, based on school textbooks, of the norms governing literacy practices in elementary education. These latter are treated as a kind of ritual: the symbolic behaviour impacting not so much the manner of the mental representation of reality as the corporeal-perceptive organization of experience. The aim of the article is to show that (1) contrary to classic literacy theory, writing is not always a tec because in many situational and institutional contexts writing practices are not instrumental but ritual practices, and (2) writing is not solely a tool of the intellect corresponding to a set manner of conceptualizing the world, language, and the self, but also a kind of social tool for the discipline of the body: the acquiring of a certain corporeal-perceptive disposition.

The author presents the output of Eduard Makarian, a Russian cultural anthropologist, featuring his contribution to the problem of origin of culture. The development of Makarian’s scientific research has been presented from the understanding of systemic character of culture to the research on the origin of culture; from reflecting upon the first principles of culture development to the concept of system evolution as anthropogenesis, social evolution and cultural evolution, to the understanding of the origin of culture as a creative core of culture (cultural heritage, dynamics of cultural traditions, “tradition”–“change” dichotomy, hypothesis of “cultural genes”, etc.). The scientist moved from the issue of the origin of culture in the prehistoric times through the issues of permanent creation and dialectic self-revival of culture to the problems of culture in contemporary world. His research was of key importance for the establishment of philosophical and cultural approach in the research of the origin of culture in Russia.

Inspired by the Chicago School sociology and anthropology of Mary Douglas authors of the article show the special cultural status of new urban peripheries in comparison to villages, old urban peripheries and city centers. Critically they relate to the thesis that new urban peripheries are “cultural deserts” or “bedroom/dormitory suburbs”, considering them as a form of collective organization or sustained activity patterns that replace an original kind of culture. According to Mary Douglas villages are characterized by low level of social energy and high degree of collective control, and the city centers are characterized by high level of energy and low collective control. Referring to this classification the authors of the paper claim that new urban peripheries are characterized by both low energy and low collective control. A more detailed characterization of a new urban periphery is presented in the article on the basis of materials collected in several qualitative sociological research projects. In the light of the empirical material, it can be revealed that in new urban peripheries direct forms of collective control have been replaced by social non-interference, development of individualistic self-control and privatization of micro-spaces of living and transporting. It was noted that the intensive development of individualized outdoor activity leads to gradual formation of the new body type of a new urban periphery resident.

Contemporary anthropology deals with a lot of topics that go beyond the traditional area of anthropological research. However, the problem of lying remains on themargins of anthropological analysis, although lying is generally considered to be an everyday factor in the life of many people. In this article, the author considers the possible reasons for this neglect. She argues that the omission cannot be explained in terms of the apparent lack of connection between lying and socio-cultural factors, but rather by the difficulty of conducting research on lying from the perspective of anthropology. Then she discusses her own approach to the study of lying, which she applied in researching the community of the Catholic Crisis Intervention Center. In this regard, she refers to Els van Dongen’s and Sylvie Fainzang’s idea, which emerged on the basis of medical anthropology.