Nr 4 (2015): Neighbourhood as a Cultural and Social Problem

Editor-in-charge of the issue [Redaktor Prowadzący]: Maciej Falski

Complete list of reviewers for the issue 4 [Lista recenzentów numeru 4]

The notion of neighbourhood can envelop a variety of different types of interactions related to different cultural and political contexts. It could be seen as an enclosed network of relations forming a kind of system parallel to the higher level of political organization, as it was the case under the Ottoman rule in the Balkans. It can also transform into the social environment different from the centre, as the borderlands of cultures show in such regions as Podlasie on the Polish-Byelorussian border. Apart from these historical or ethnological perspectives, the notion of neighbourhood could help to analyze a complicated reality of contemporary urban spaces, where traditional ways of living are subject to spectacular change. The neighbourhood is a broad category which is present in sociological and cultural research. Of course, articles of the latest issue of "Colloquia Humanistica" do not exhaust the problem. However, we present crucial texts that relate to rarely undertaken issues and sometimes even pioneering. We hope that they will be inspiring for researchers who are interested in humanities and cultural studies, and once again we are pleased that we were able to create not only a declarative issue, but a truly interdisciplinary, and yet consistent one.

Let us try to present an understanding of the neighbourhood that results from the presented texts. We focus on the connotation of exchange and opening, contact, which on the one hand is based on keeping the borderline of a group – an individual, its own space, on the other hand, on opening to other people and the need for communication during which communities and people define themselves. The neighbourhood and contact are also the basis for the exchange processes and their prevention, as shown by some papers, and lead to the most dangerous phenomena for the functioning of societies.

Maciej Falski