Mapping Skeuomorphic Artifacts among Polish Young Adults:
A Semantic Differential Study of Sculptures at the Licheń Pilgrimage Centre
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1
Opole University of Technology]
2
University of Lancaster
Publication date: 2013-06-21
Polish Sociological Review 2013;181(1):103-128
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
Surprisingly little is known about the religious attitudes of young adults in Poland. Existing
scholarship is usually written from a prescriptive view: how young people should behave or what they should
do. Quantitive studies, where the researcher’s voice is not heard, but, rather, young people have a chance
‘to speak’ for themselves, appears to be lacking. This article aims to redress this gap to some extent by
quantitatively studying young adults’ attitudes to sculptures erected in Poland’s largest modern pilgrimage
venue (Licheń). The paper also aims to contribute to understanding how the sacred is negotiated in
a contemporary Catholic pilgrimage venue.We show how respondents actively create the sacrum dimension
and how it correlates with the axes of Potency / Activity / Evaluation. We posit a semantically amorphous
structure for the sculptural objects at the Licheń centre and use a semantic differential technique to extract
affectively oriented dimensions in attitudes towards these skeuomorphic objects. The results highlight
important implications for the understanding of religion in post-modernity and of the phenomenon of
modern mega-centers of religious worship. They also support the view of secularization and sacralization
as two additive concomitant processes, and of ‘sacred’ / ‘profane’ as gradient, rather than binary features.
SD has been widely used as an analytical tool in sociological research to measure metaphorical meaning
and societal attitudes to brands and particular products (e.g. Osgood 1981; Minato 1983). However, it has
rarely been applied to investigate the boundary between the sacred and the secular, or ways of objectifying
the sacred (e.g. Muthén 1977). We explore this possibility, drawing on a dataset of 100 questionnaires
administered to undergraduate students in a middle-sized town in Poland in October-December 2012.We
hope our research will contribute to an understanding of the wider issue of what societal products like
material objects can tell us about experiencing the sacred in contemporary society.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our special thanks to Joanna Lubos-Kozieł for letting us use her documentation of the LicheńCentre—photos marked “JLK” in the text. All the remaining photos are my authorship, MHG. We wish to express our gratitude to Polish Sociological Review anonymous reviewers and to Thomas Anessi. All translations
from Polish are mine, MHG.