the Informants, Bobowa female lace makers and one male lace maker, as well as the employees of museums (listed below), who participated in the project through filling in the questionnaires, pro-viding information and giving interviews, enabling the queries of collections and who were hospita-ble and kind to the Author in the following places:
Bobowa, Brzana, Ciężkowice, Jankowa, Kraków, Łużna, Nowy Sącz, Sędziszowa, Siedliska, Stróżna, Wilczyska, Zakopane.
The Author also wants to thank the teams of three centres where she conducted museum que-ries concerning Bobowa Bobbin Lace and a gen-eral bobbin lace, i.e. the District Museum in Nowy Sącz, the Tatra Mountains Museum in Zakopane and the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków.
Bobowa Bobbin Lace
Bobowa Bobbin Lace – I use a singular number in this place on purpose to emphasise the coherence of this phenomenon as a culture system. Howev-er, further in the text, I use this expression in plu-ral when I mean an interpretation variant of this phenomenon, i.e. an object itself, a material thing, a result of handicraft – then these are Bobowa Bobbin Laces. But, as the Reader has probably no-ticed, written in upper case. This is also an intend-ed grammatical measure whose objective is to maintain the high status of the above mentioned phenomenon and things, event at the costs of in-consistency with grammatical rules. The usus, in justified situations and for a specific purpose, al-lows to use proper language (spoken and written) tools. And such a tool is majuscule. For this reason, I also use it in the Lace Maker expression.
This ethnographic text certainly was not to be a
“dry” historical or ethnographic text providing only facts or interpretations without any emo-tions. This is quite the opposite. It has the nature of an ethnographic essay with the purposeful and clear subjectivism of interpretation which is not deprived of valorisation and emotionality. The text was created for the intended purpose of de-scribing, clarifying, familiarising, promoting and propagating the object: laces. As a result of the observations of a local community, carried out by the Author of this work as part of the field surveys in Bobowa Commune for the needs of this publica-tion, the Author determined a relatively low (and naming it in the style of the further text – subtle
more than words can say) level of the awareness of the value of Bobowa Bobbin Lace phenome-non, which is understood by the Author not only as the object itself – which is a lace – but also as the system of interpersonal relationships and sym-bols used in communication for the needs of the said relationships. Thus, the Author’s objective is to underline that Bobowa Bobbin Lace should be included in ethnography in two ways: as an object, thing and as a culture system (and therein: a social structure). The said other way of the interpreta-tion and descripinterpreta-tion of this phenomenon assigns to it a rank higher than the object interpretation, a thing and a creation description.
This text is not free of evaluations because its aim is to evaluate its object positively: the phenome-non of Bobowa Bobbin Lace. Despite the purpose-ful evaluating themes included in the text, it is still an ethnographic and anthropologic text. Applying
the motifs of interpretive ethnography, the Au-thor proves that each ethnographic text describ-ing a given culture text, is a subjective work and one of the numerous interpretations of the said culture text, without a higher chance for allegedly possible objectivity. In addition, this interpreta-tion does not have to be coherent as should be an external (functioning outside the described culture system) text of a summarising nature – in fact this text is not to summarise anything but it is only another interpretation with a right to inco-herence. Similarly to Clifford Geertz , the Author is convinced that expecting objectivity and co-herence from the dense description of a selected text (or a phenomenon) of culture is unjustified, concerning the relativity of all the rational or ver-balised interpretations and descriptions arising therefrom, which are quoted interpretations. An ethnographic text is partially a metatext and it is also the element of the system syntax which at-tempts to describe and explain. In the other un-derstanding, this text is also subject to interpreta-tions as the system matter.
The set of interpretations makes a stadium of the entire description; nevertheless, this will never be a finite description since another interpreta-tion may occur at any time. The openness of the interpretive ethnographic description defines its value and respect which is directed to all its ob-jects – the obob-jects of descriptions. Owing to this relatively intimate perspective, it is justified that an ethnographic essay, while fulfilling a specific and intended function in culture with a narrower (lo-cal, semi-public) and wider (public) range, bears a legible feature of the personal interpretation by an ethnographer as a culture researcher. However, it is important that the subjectivity of this description occurred as a secondary step upon the previous, as remote as possible, perspective of the discussed culture text which is Bobowa Bobbin Lace. The Au-thor’s “remote perspective” of this “thing”, as well as her entirely external perception of this “thing”
allowed for a relatively objective conceptualisation of Bobowa Bobbin Lace phenomenon
1 C. Geertz, Dense description - towards the interpretive culture theory, in: Culture research. The elements of anthropologic theory, ed. M. Kempny, E. Nowicka, Warszawa 2005, p. 35.
Bobowa Bobbin Lace
which is surely completely different from the lo-cal one. Therefore, after taking a remote position, approaching and subjectivity is possible and this text is marked deliberately with the above. In oth-er words, the aim of this essay is its subjectivity that originates from objectivity. The said subjec-tivity is absolutely disparate to the subjecsubjec-tivity which forms local interpretations. Thus, the goal
of this text is to instil a distinct subjective attitude towards the object of the description, i.e. the phe-nomenon integrally: a lace and a culture system, which is Bobowa lace craftsmanship with its sub-lime and often unsaid structure. Subjectivity has two varieties here: local (Bobowa) and non-local (of this text’s Author). Perhaps, they will meet up somewhere at the crossroads.
You are touching the lace... You are looking at it...
As many countries, as many laces but THIS is the only of a kind. Because... Bobowa is the only one and it is one of the oldest settlements located in the Biała River Valley, nearby Gorlice. Only in this place THIS lace, which you can see on the boards of this exhibition, is created. It was not manufac-tured on a machine belt. It was not embossed from plastics. It was made with human hands, with threads spun mostly from a wonderful, tra-ditional, Polish plant: a fibre flax. How many hours did that work take? In the case of the largest laces – a few thousand hours. The authors of the laces did not use any drop of glue, did not emit any litre of fumes, all they did was sitting and interlacing, surely sipping a tasty drink. These are beautiful laces, is it not true?