Writing the History of Sport in Poland. The Underestimated Potential of the Cultural History Perspective

Abstract

Polish historiography of sport bases its work on the nineteenth-century historiographic tradition: the resulting research and publications descriptively present the history of institutions, organizations and the achievements of sportspeople. Whereas this is work that comprehensively delves into the origins of sport and physical culture, describing in detail the oldest phenomena and events, the practice strays away from modern trends in the humanities with regards to interpretation or research methodology. In order to envision the scope of potential which the cultural perspective can offer Polish history of sports, the paper analyzes the recent historiography of Polish sport during the communist period. Discussing one of the Polish works that had been declared by its author as ‘anthropological research on history of sports’, the paper poses questions about notions of anthropological history in Polish scholarship, discusses what ethnographic sources can tell us when they are approached as ‘facts’ from the past, and in what other ways the same sources can be interpreted when perceived as traces in the palimpsest of our contemporary culture.