Online lecture by cultural anthropologist, Prof. Anna Niedźwiedź

Anthropological approaches to “heritage” and “space” treat both categories as dynamic, multi-layered, interrelated and contextual. In this talk Professor Anna Niedźwiedź will discuss (a) how heritage sites are created by specific historical trajectories and heritage regimes and (b) how they form a performative, embodied and experiential domain connected with lived emotions and bottom-up practices. Using examples from ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kraków she will focus on sites recognized as related to the “national sacred” and analyse how they function as sources of heritage polarisation and/or hybridisation.

Anna Niedźwiedź is associate professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. As a visiting professor she taught in the USA, at SUNY Buffalo (2006-2007) and Rochester University (2011). Her research focuses on anthropology of religion, anthropology of space and the heritagization of religion. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Poland and Ghana. Between 2016 and 2020, she served as a Principal Investigator of the Polish section in the international consortium HERILIGION founded by HERA.