Autobiografia Literatura Kultura Media

This paper explores the ways in which storytelling and the discovery of private history are constructed in the (auto)family biography Ksiądz Kaingba, mój dziadek by Ewa Kraskowska (2021) and the accompanying research blog “Kaingba” (2015–2021). We pose the thesis that the analysed material constitutes a form of autoethnography, a research-writing practice, combining features of literary creation, reporter’s technique, work with archives, anthropological research and self-analysis. The narrative on the Rev. Kaingba and his family is part of the resurgence of family stories visible in the humanities today, which often fall on the borderline between personal documentary and fictional literature. The methods we used belong primarily to cultural research methodologies – transmedial storytelling, cultural anthropology and cultural genre studies. An analysis of both the literary material and tracing the process of Ewa Kraskowska’s work on the book makes it possible to include Ksiądz Kaingba into the field of autoethnographic texts in several dimensions: literary strategy, creative practice and autocreation, personal anthropology and family (auto)ethnography, and a form of auto-therapy. In Kraskowska’s work, family microhistory is combined with History and the personal experience of the author – researcher, scientist, writer, woman, daughter and granddaughter. Ewa Kraskowska’s family history creates an amalgam of autoethnography, autobiography, confession, family saga and online genealogy blog.