Paper Short Abstract:

Research in ethnically diverse communities, where relationships are often determined by internal conflicts, requires gaining trust. Poorly conducted communication in the field can prevent obtaining reliable research results, because members of local communities take care to select content resulting from the need to maintain good relations within the group. Field research can therefore be an arena of a "battlefield" where conflicting tendencies clash: remembering and forgetting, aimed at establishing a canonical interpretation of the past that allows for the existence of the community. The role of texts transmitted through language here is to organize the imagination, which is the basis of cultural memory. One research issue related to the conference theme ("Unwriting") is: how to gain trust, how to reach the content "forgotten by the community" (Connerton, 2008) and how to remain objective towards different interpretations of the past? The second issue concerns describing “forgotten” narratives about the past in a scholarly book, bearing in mind that certain matters – although they cease to be the subject of public discourse – remain in individual memory and it does not take much to reactivate collective memory and bring forgotten, often very painful content to light. I conduct research in ethnically diverse communities (especially in Polish and Czech Silesia and Serbian Banat), analyzing the connections between language, culture and ethnic/national identity. I draw attention to the role of memory in constructing contemporary identities.

Paper Abstract:

In my research I use a methodological approach called the linguistics of memory, according to which language is treated not only as a code for communication, but in a much broader context - as a "medium", as a system containing the cultural heritage of a given communicative community, and a carrier, transmitter, and set of all the values and norms of conduct of a given community. Studying this medium in the context of memory requires specific research competences, which are acquired through experiences resulting from everyday confrontation with otherness. Such a researcher develops a certain type of being in the world, the basic feature of which I consider to be sociolinguistic competence characterized by permanent self-control of utterances in relations with others, i.e. members of other groups. I call this "communicating using the periscope" - each interethnic relation is burdened with more or less conscious control over the topics discussed or the words used so as not to transgress the rules of social coexistence, to follow the practices accepted in the local community, not to transgress the established social boundaries. Rogers Brubaker illustrated this with the example of Romanians and Hungarians in Transylvania, who avoid uncomfortable topics of the Hungarian minority living in Cluj (Brubaker, 2008). This type of relation, of course, requires knowledge of the boundaries set in the studied community, as well as the willingness to act in accordance with the rules adopted here (I always missed this conversational rule when discussing Paul Grice's conversational implicatures).