Abstract
The Licheń pilgrimage center, managed by the Marian order, is a phenomenon in Poland beyond classification and a subject of hot controversy. Media attention has indicated various issues that remain unclear behind the construction and management of the center (see, e.g., Kwiatkowska-England 2007; Dzienisiewicz 2002). Studies by ethnographers show how its legend is being made ad-hoc, often with the help of local artisans (e.g., Marciniak 1999). The opinions of artists show a unanimous abhorrence of the artistic aspects of the statues and paintings located there. Nevertheless, the center continues to grow, burgeoning at an unprecedented rate. It claims to attract (data from 2008) some 1.5 million of visitors a year. This paper offers a semiotic ethnography of Licheń's alternative microcosm. Having carried out an exploration of some of the ways in which boundary issues are manipulated in the precincts of the center, the author proposes that the creation of a surrogate reality there may be one of the factors for Lichen's success. Using ethnographic material gathered during fieldwork in 2010, the paper investigates divisions of the phenomenological space at the center. The divisions are proposed to be rooted in the Batesonian concept of the double bind (cf., e.g., Newman 2004, 2009) coupled with the TartuMoscow version of cultural semiotics.
About the author
Małgorzata Haładewicz-Grzelak (b. 1966) is a senior lecturer at Politechnika Opolska 〈m.haladewicz-grzelak@po.opole.pl〉. Her research interests include cultural semiotics and Beats-and-Binding phonology. Her publications include “Panoptical defragmentation of Stalinist microcosm in post-war Poland” (2012); “Semiotic value in the adverts in Silesian Catholic periodicals in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (with J. Lubos-Kozieł, 2012); and “Boundary mechanisms in Silesian Catholic periodicals from the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (with J. Lubos-Kozieł, 2013).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
