Wiedza o przeszłości – perspektywy na przyszłość

Knowledge of the Past: Future PerspectivesThe purpose of this article is to present trends and research perspectives that have dominated the various avant-garde tendencies of contemporary historiography and multidisciplinary research of the past, and an attempt to sketch the trajectory of their development in the future. Based on extensive research of the contents of the latest volumes of almost three hundreds periodicals published in various fields of the humanities and social sciences, the author argues that the future of reflection on the past is fundamentally linked to the progressive efforts to build a holistic and complementary knowledge, which is non-anthropocentric, post-European and post-human. Its aim is to connect the humanities and social sciences with the natural sciences (life sciences, biological sciences) and techno sciences as well as to include indigenous knowledges. This new knowledge is highly influenced by effects of inquiries from the life sciences, cognitive science and neurosciences. Hence, peripheral, most current and often radical trends, such as transnational / transcultural history, environmental or ecological history, multispecies history, indigenous history, big history, biohistory and neurohistory have a chance to become in the future the most dynamically developing subdisciplines of historical research. The author ends the article proposing a new definition of history as inquiry into the rules of co-existence of various (also multispecies) communities inhabiting the Earth, in the past and the present, and endowing them with meanings according to present and future needs.