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Schengen and the Rosary: Catholic Religion and the Postcolonial Syndrome in Polish National Habitus

Author
Bucholc, Marta
Publication date
2020
Abstract (EN)

The article discusses the formation of national habitus in Poland and its recent transformation in the postsocialist period from the perspective of Norbert Elias’s sociology of social processes. The starting point of the analysis is the action “Rosary to the Borders” (Różaniec do granic) of 2017: the article analyses the use of universal Catholic and nation-bound symbolic resources in this action referring to Elias’s symbol theory, in order to indicate the main characteristics of the mechanism of collective memory in this action connecting Catholic symbols to the national ones. Religious imagery of Polishness is then related to a reconstruction of Polish state-formation process, and two uses of national habitus, the internal and the external one, are identified, in which religious symbols play a significant role. The external use is illustrated by the brief overview of German-Polish antagonism. Finally, the postcolonial syndrome of Polis society is identified as source of the framing combining external and internal use of Polish national habitus, especially after 2015.

Keywords EN
Catholicism
Postcolonialism
Rosaries
Prayer
Symbolism
Atonement
Slavic culture
Memory
Religious symbolism
PBN discipline
sociology
Journal
Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung
Volume
45
Issue
1
Pages from-to
153-181
ISSN
0172-6404
Date release in open access
2020-01-01
Open access license
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives