About the Journal

Since 1947 "Konteksty" magazine has appeared regularly as a quarterly sponsored by the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Konteksty is an interdisciplinary publication, embracing different areas from folklore, avant-garde art, aesthetics and anthropology to drama, the plastic arts and mass culture.

"Konteksty" also presents the achievements of minority cultures - we have published special issues devoted to the Jews, Gypsies and Lemkos as well as a special issue on Lithuania. Our magazine is addressed to culture anthropologists, humanists, students - and anyone else interested in humanism. A specialist magazine, it is nevertheless accessible to the broad public and should be of particular interest to all who wish to deepen their knowledge about culture and its mechanisms. Our aim is to outline the leading contemporary humanistic trends, the many facets of today's culture as well as the origins and traditions of well-known contemporary social phenomena. In our work we also translate foreign-language texts.

"Konteksty" is published in editions of 700 copies and can be found in major libraries in Poland and abroad. Several special editions of the journal have been sponsored by the Culture Ministry, the Stefan Batory Foundation (Fundacja im. Stefana Batorego) and the Culture Foundation (Fundacja Kultury). Konteksty received extremely favourable reviews, among others in Res Publica, Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita, Tygodnik Powszechny, Literatura Ludowa and Życie.

Among our contributors are the most eminent Polish and foreign humanists, including professors Frank Ankersmith, James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, Juri Lotman, Marylin Strathern, Maria Janion, Wiesław Juszczak, Zbigniew Raszewski, Teresa Grzybkowska and Zygmunt Kubiak.

Our monographs concerned topics like ecology, mass culture, symbolic culture, holiday traditions, eschatology, psychopathic art, the anthropology of drama, film and photography, relations between nature and culture, the anthropology of literature, anthropology vs. history and Polish regional cultures.

In 1997 we began a regular column devoted to the diaries of Bronisław Malinowski (written during his research in the Trobriands and earlier) and features on the Polish-British anthropologist's life and work. This was crowned by the Malinowski - Witkacy. Photography: Between Science and Art exhibition (of which we were the main organizer) and a quadruple bilingual edition of our magazine containing texts on the anthropologist Malinowski and the artist, playwright, photographer and philosopher Witkiewicz (Witkacy). Both were important representatives of 20th-Century science and art and, for a time, the closest of friends. This confrontation between a scholar and an artist active in the first half of our century was also an attempt to seek new paths of cognition on the threshold of the 21st Century, a century in which science and art will not be treated separately but as complementary methods of gaining knowledge about humanity and reality.

ISSN: 1230–6142 (Print), 2956-9214 (Online)

Since 2023 selected texts from "Konteksty" are available in open access (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International).

Entire issues of our magazine can also be reached at the Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL).

Publishers: Institute of Art, Polish Acedemy of Sciences / LIBER PRO ARTE. Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.