The National Programme for the Development of Humanities (Pol. NPHR) has announced the results of the first round of the 14th edition of the Uniwersalia 2.2 competition. Among the nine winners are two scientists from the University of Gdańsk. Dr Barbara Brzezicka from the Institute of Romance Studies at the Faculty of Languages will translate and analyse Elisabeth de Fontenay's book, while dr Filip Rogalski from the Institute of Anthropology at the Faculty of History will introduce Polish readers to the works of Philippe Descoli.
Under the Uniwersalia 2.2 module, funding is available for long-term projects involving the publication in Polish of the most important works in the humanities, with a view to introducing them into Polish cultural circulation. The maximum duration of a funded project is 60 months.
The main objective of dr Barbara Brzezicka's project is to prepare a Polish translation of Le silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l'épreuve de l'animalité - the working title in Polish is Milczenie zwierząt. Filozofia wobec doświadczenia zwierzęcości (The Silence of Animals: Philosophy and the Experience of Animality) – a groundbreaking work by the eminent French philosopher Elisabeth de Fontenay. The original book was published in 1998, when the foundations of non-anthropocentric humanities were being laid and issues related to animal subjectivity were only just entering the field of scientific interest. For this reason, the publication of the translation nearly thirty years later will require the use of a critical apparatus: footnotes and an extensive scholarly introduction pointing to the historical and cultural contexts relevant to the work's creation and explaining the categories central to de Fontenay's reflection and the pioneering nature of her insights.
The aim of the project carried out by dr Filip Rogalski is to translate and scientifically edit two books by Philippe Descola, with the working titles ‘The Spears of Twilight’ (original publication 1993) and ‘Beyond Nature and Culture’ (original publication 2005). Philippe Descola (born 1949) is one of the leading contemporary social anthropologists. He began his academic career as an ethnologist, researching the Achuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon. In his research, he challenged the dominant belief in the 1970s and 1980s that Amazonian cultures were merely the result of human adaptation to the environment. The book ‘Spears of Twilight’ combines ethnographic description, theoretical analysis and a reflective account of the field experiences of the author and his wife, Anne-Christine Taylor, also a distinguished anthropologist.
Since the 1990s, Phillippe Descola has been developing his own general anthropological theory of cultural diversity, which disregards the distinction between nature and culture. His theoretical proposal distinguishes four ontological systems (animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism) that determine how different peoples organise similarities and differences between themselves and their environment. Beyond Nature and Culture contains the main lecture on this concept.
As part of the project, Dr Filip Rogalski will translate Beyond Nature and Culture and prepare a scholarly commentary on both translations. Katarzyna Marczewska will translate 'The Spears of Twilight".