KIERUNEK – WSCHÓD! A PERSONAL DISCOVERY OF POLAND
KIERUNEK – WSCHÓD! A PERSONAL DISCOVERY OF POLAND

Summary/Abstract: Having conducted fieldwork among such diverse groups as anarchists, border guards, expellees and ministry officials in Poland over recent years, I have been asked by the editors of “Lud” to come up with a not so much a scholarly, but rather personal account of my experiences of doing fieldwork in Poland. I am grateful to “Lud” for the opportunity to reflect upon my personal Polish-German history and my encounter with Poland and Polish anthropology. In effect, this has become less a story about Polish ethnology and cultural anthropology, and instead one about encounters, processes of learning and gradual development on my – West-German – part. I will begin my personal account not with a fieldwork episode but with the early encounters and imageries of Poland that framed my expectations. These, I argue, were not particularly specific to me but mirror a widespread attitude towards the Eastern neighbor.

• Details
• Contents