Social Imaginaries of the State and Central Authority in Polish Highland Villages, 1999-2005
This book argues that common-sense convictions of rural Polish citizens are “post-peasant” or “post-agrarian”, rather than post-socialist or post-communist. In so doing, it offers a departure from the established terms of scholarly literature on the Central European transition that has focused on such concepts as “homo sovieticus” or the “post-communist mentality”.
It draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the early 2000s in the highland region in the south of Poland, focusing on local knowledge about the state, power, politics, and democracy. It describes how rural social imaginaries translate categories derived from the organisation of life and work at the farm into ideas about politics. In this regard, the state is seen as a huge farm, the authorities as the farmer or manager, and the nation as the farmer’s family. Politics is perceived as a dishonest but profitable profession and democracy as a political system that could only work in the Garden of Eden.
Anna Malewska-Szałygin is Associate Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw, Poland. She specialises in political anthropology, with a focus on rural common sense, local knowledge about politics and public affairs. She has carried extensive ethnographic fieldwork in rural Poland since the time of the post-socialist transformation. She is the author of around 80 publications including two monographs (both of which won the Clio Award), three edited volumes, many articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Ethnologia Europea, Ethnologia Polona, Polish Sociological Review, and Anthropology Matters, and numerous book chapters. She is an experienced academic teacher and supervisor of postgraduate dissertations.
"Translating her informants’ obscenities into the language of academia, the author notes drily that these representations are indicative of “a deep crisis of the government’s legitimacy” (140). The central imaginaries are explored empirically in five substantive chapters devoted respectively to the state, the authorities, the nation, democracy, and participation in public life. Vivid transcriptions are littered with exclamation marks, hilarious humor mingling with fascist bigotry. These chapters make depressing reading for those who value parliamentary democracy, tolerance of others, and the rule of law, but in her lengthy introduction Malewska-Szałygin explains why it is important to understand these voices, no matter how repugnant they may seem. She offers a sophisticated discussion of relevant theory and methodology, including a who’s who of Anglophone political anthropology and a subtle engagement with narrative theory and the awkward “common sense” of those whose views are seldom registered by opinion pollsters or social scientists.Her methods rely primarily on teamwork with students. When interviews in villagers’ homes in 1999 proved unsatisfactory, later expeditions focused on the marketplace of the county town, where conversations flowed more freely. The next task was to impose order on the resulting 450 unruly transcripts (including twenty-two mysteriously lost, according to the list provided in an Appendix). This feat was accomplished by means of the source metaphor “as on the farm, so in the state” (74). The resulting analysis flows very well. It is leavened with plentiful references not only to celebrated American anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai, Clifford Geertz, and Marshall Sahlins, but also to Polish intellectuals such as Leszek Kołakowski on myth, Józef Tischner on ethics and work, Zdzisław Krasnodębski on the difference between liberal and republican, participatory variants of democracy, and Jadwiga Staniszkis on Poland’s historic inability to accomplish the “mental revolution of nominalism” (117) that permitted modern forms of polity to emerge elsewhere in Europe."
- Chris Hann (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology ), Slavic Revie
Anna Malewska-Szalygin
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