Paper short abstract:

The social role of an ethnographic collection established by a retired farmer . This local museum is a resource of maintaining the identity by his children, who emigrated to the United States, as well as by other émigrés and the local community.

Paper long abstract:

The object of the study is a private ethnographic collection, gathered over the past years by Stanisław Iwańczak, a retired farmer, in the village of Niedzica, in the southern Polish region of Spisz, exposed in a former farm building. The collection consists of agricultural tools and crafts, furniture, housewares, costumes, utensils, religious pictures, photographs, books, letters, decorations. The conducted ethnographic research shows that the collection plays an important role for an ancestral identity, but also a wider one - local and regional. It is an example of growing in number wilde Museen (Jannelli), social institutions which counterbalance global, multicultural and ideological projects of world culture museums. It represents the return to an empirical and ethnographic detail. The museum, with collected objects de memoire, seems to be a kind of mental and cultural asylum especially for the members of the family living abroad. The collection is an anchor protecting against losing relationships with the tradition of the old country.