Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper examines several narrative practices used by Polish museums and Catholic Church, both seen as institutions safeguarding collective identity. The ways in which they shape historiography as the main reference framework for storytelling is considered. Special focus is laid on prefiguration - a technique successfully used in readings of mythologies. The Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk together with Home Army Museum in Krakow are examples of symbolic transfers where honour, national pride, and cult of ancestors are used to create specific sense of belonging. Other cases will be provided by some manifestations of collective Catholicism with Krakow based St Rita offerings and St Faustina and Merciful Jesus devotion. The final case combining the religious and national aspect will be provided by Wadowice John Paul II Family Home Museum. I argue that prefiguration as a narrative technique enforces the notion of historical imperative, where individuals are objects of precisely conceptualised time flow spanned between the domain of the past, established on the sacrifice of ancestors and the domain of future understood as a reward for everyday efforts and hardships. Prefiguration driven historiography can be also seen as a phenomenon connected with populisms, as it not only deprives individuals of their own liberty of choice but also structures much of chaos experienced in the world after the end of history.