From mentalities to anthropological history. Theory and methods

The specificity of anthropological history in Poland is being torn between its craving for originality, i.e. for creativity of new qualities in historical studies, and its sense of a being of epigones, imitative with respect to the already classical historiographical models that had emerged many years ago. On the one hand, anthropological historians are aware of great achievements and value of Polish scholarship, on the other hand, they see the need to catch up world historiography, to fill the gap through research on such issues as mentality, everyday life, cultural patterns etc.