About the project
Historical research in the project “Ideological Dimensions of Cultural Landscape. The Semantics of East Prussian Family Cemeteries in the Light of Literary and Non-literary Sources from the 19th to the mid-20th Century” fits into contemporary cultural landscape studies. Their central category of cultural landscape reading is understood as a process in which the relationship with specific space consists in uncovering the traces of various historic imagined realities. A cultural landscape would then be the ground for decoding a palimpsest of past impacting forces, in which the leading role is played by three factors: natural landscape, material heritage and a system of historic, culturally defined meanings.
The above concepts formed the basis for this research project, combining theories from the field of cultural landscape studies and research on the historical semantics of the contemporary material heritage elements. The cultural landscape under examination – the empirical field of such a study – shall be the territory of North-East Poland that was historically part of East Prussia, with its central element, subject to the analysis of meanings, being family cemeteries, established and transformed in the period from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of the former province in 1945 (by family cemeteries we mean both the cemeteries established by aristocratic lines and by the landowners).
The cultural landscape of North-East Poland is distinguished by extraordinarily heterogenic culture and historical multilayeredness, which constitute a substantial advantage of the study. The project combine the empirical analysis of the material heritage elements of the region (including field identification, analysis and documentation of the quickly disappearing remains of the family cemeteries) with the reconstruction of the original social beliefs, the cultural-historical meaning systems that were once part of – to paraphrase the anthropologist Clifford Geertz – the interpretative model of the cemeteries as elements of the cultural landscape and, at the same time, the original model for their construction in a historically appropriate arrangement.
In the light of the above postulates, the project has the following objectives:
- The reconstruction of the landscape concept for the East-Prussian family cemeteries located in North-East Poland and their settings.
- The reconstruction of the ideological contexts (imaginary schemata) that were shaping the establishment and perception of family cemeteries in the East-Prussian cultural landscape from the 19th to mid-20th century.
- The definition and understanding of the multi-layered, multicultural material heritage of North-East Poland, its historical connotations and significance for the contemporary Polish culture and society.
