Magic in the Social Construction of the Past: the Case of Teschen Silesia

The aim of the paper is to consider such ethnolinguistic categories as magic, connotation, and cognitive blending as possible keys to the following questions: How is it possible that we can perfectly adopt different representations of the past and internalize them as our past? How can we reconcile different representations of the past and how is it possible that diverse representations of the past merge in one social memory? Such amalgamations of various forms of representations and diverse scales of objectification can be clarified by means of the theory of magic, by means of the law of resemblance, and the law of contiguity. Such considerations are supported here by empirical study of the construction of social memories in Teschen Silesia, which was divided between Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1920. On both sides of the new border different state institutions emerged and influenced local memories.