Memory Gate-Keepers. Autobiographical narration and normative aspects of culture in Stonava, Teschen Silesia
Abstract
Social memory embodied in symbolic stories, passed on within the society, take part in determination of present time, because it lays normative claims to the society and shows a formative power. The structuration of the time we find in autopbiographical stories reflects the understanding of history, and its present interpretation.
The autobiographies don't employ only individual time, but there appears also a social dimension of life. The individual "breakibg points" that emerge in the embodiement of the past not only divide quantitatively the differently experienced time periods, but they also indicate the existence of different "communities of shared memory".
The text deals with the situation in the village Stonava in the Czech part of Cieszyn Silesia. Just here we find the highest number of Polish victims of the Czechoslovak-Polish armed conflict of January 1919 that died in one village.
The remembrance of this event or its forgetting, as well as placing these events to the broader interpretative f