The Making and Unmaking of Political Subjectivities in Post-Socialist Poland
The Making and Unmaking of Political Subjectivities in Post-Socialist Poland

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the ways 'history' is commodified in post-Socialist Poland, and especially the articulations between consumption and the broader political processes of nation-state building. In Anthropology, the interconnections between consumption and national identity have been discussed for over a decade, and the analysis of post-Socialist consumption has played a central role in revealing the dynamics of the transformation of relationships and institutions (Patico and Caldwell 2002: 291). Anthropologists conducting research in the countries of the former Socialist bloc have highlighted consumption's role as a domain through which people create and negotiate cultural meanings and social relations (Humphrey 1995), most notably the part that the consumption of goods and objects plays in conferring an identity that sets an individual off from Socialism (Verdery 1996: 29). Yet more recent research conducted in post-Socialist settings has turned to the analysis of how consumer practices redefine national belonging, and has shown that specific commodities may represent the media through which social actors reconfigure their relationships to the rapidly changing world in which they live (Caldwell 2002; Fehervary 2002; Lankauskas 2002; Patico 2008). At a time when international aid agencies and political advisors encourage post- Socialist and other governments to redefine the role of the state as a 'consumer state' as opposed to a 'citizen state', post-Socialist citizens are exposed to a new hegemonic ideology of neoliberal privatization, and become vulnerable to '…corporate decisions that undermine an established sense of what citizenship is worth' (Ong 2006: 160). In the context of these transformations, consumption plays a key role as a sphere mediating people's encounters with the state and as a political arena in which values, ideologies, and identities are shaped (Greenberg 2006; Ozyurek 2006; Klumbytė 2010). Yet while a considerable amount of ethnographic literature on post-Socialist consumption has examined the ways in which people's relationships to material goods produce social and moral value, attention has also been paid to the consumption of images and representations, and to the ways in which it constitutes consumer identity and belonging (Greenberg 2006). In what follows, I explore the commodification of Polish history as an integral part of the process known as the 'privatization of politics', and focus on the consumption of images and ideas as a medium through which the Polish State reasserts its role in the face of global transformations.

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