Narratives (witnesses testimonies) in a cultural anthropologist’s workshop. Memory and anthropology

The article is divided into three parts. The first one (“The past is a foreign country [L.P. Hartley] History and Anthropology. Meeting points) is devoted to bringing history and anthropology of culture closer together, since in both of them a great deal of attention is paid to the issue of memory. In the second part (Problems with relations), by means of examples from ethnographical studies, we are presented with some of the difficulties that memory researchers can encounter when doing fieldwork. The last part of the text contains theoretical ponderings on the matter of memory as presented from the perspective of anthropology of culture. The problem of memory is discussed: the way it is understood by today’s anthropologists and what role it plays in the cognitive processes (memory as a source of anthropological knowledge, memory as a subject of knowledge, memory as a cognitive tool)