Tysiąc słów: Jedno zdjęcie z „Albumu Orbis” Cypriana Kamila Norwida i jego  antropologiczne konteksty

Bogdan Zemanek

doi:10.36744/k.2788

Worth a thousand words

One photograph from Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s ‘Album Orbis’ and its anthropological contexts

Bogdan Zemanek

bogdan.s.zemanek@uj.edu.pl
Instytut Bliskiego i Dalekiego Wschodu Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7952-3378

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36744/k.2788

Abstract

This paper presents inter- and extra-textual contexts of a photograph of an Eskimo woman, which seems to be out of place in the grand narrative of world historiograpy of Norwid’s picto-textual artistic sketchbook. The picture originally came from the C. Hagenbeck’s „ethnographic show”, one of the first of so called „human zoos”. Such shows had a very strong colonial and imperialist context, with „more civilized” people watching „human specimen” of „primitive and exotic” kind. The Eskimos presented in the show were minutely measured by leading German and French anthropologists and came to typify their people in many ethnographic and anthropological textbooks. Norwid did not see the shows and did not comment on them, but probably read about them in the press. He also followed popular-scientific writing, which since 1850s – for the first time in human history – became widely accessible. The – highly accurate according to the 19th cent. knowledge – placing of Eskimos’es pictures in his sketchbook among other Asiatic „yellow races” constitutes an example of the influence of modern science, highly visible in Norwid’s works. The analysis shows that Norwid was very much “a man of his era”, which is important to interpretation of his works in their historical-cultural context and for modern reinterpretations; modern people face the same questions of vast access to new knowledge, ethical considerations of research and exhibition, and finally – of treating „the Other” human as just „a thing”.

Keywords:

Norwid, Album Orbis

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Published

2025-02-05

Cited by

Zemanek, B. (2025) “Worth a thousand words: One photograph from Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s ‘Album Orbis’ and its anthropological contexts”, Konteksty, 347(4), pp. 185–193. doi: 10.36744/k.2788.

Authors

Bogdan Zemanek
bogdan.s.zemanek@uj.edu.pl
Instytut Bliskiego i Dalekiego Wschodu Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7952-3378

Bogdan Zemanek – wykładowca w Instytucie Bliskiego i Dalekiego Wschodu UJ, antropolog kulturowy, zajmuje się kulturą Chin i Tajwanu, a także historią kontaktów Chiny–Europa i „odkrywaniem” Dalekiego Wschodu przez Europejczyków w XIX wieku.