„Codzienność peryferyjna”. Pamięć o PRL mieszkańców Ustronia – studium przypadku
Peripheral Daily Life”. Memory of People’s Poland among the Inhabitants of Ustronie – a Case Study

Summary/Abstract: The article presents a micro-historical interpretation of daily life in the People’s Republic of Poland comprehended as peripheral research space contrasted with macro social historiography. The source basis is composed of oral accounts possessing the features of biographical narrations, collected at the time of research carried out in Ustronie, a frontier locality in Cieszyn Silesia. The text includes two divergent case studies of the experiences of a “woman from here” and an “alien” in Ustronie. The first instance makes it possible to analyse daily life and the role it plays in the construction and shaping of local identity. In the second case, the centre of attention is focused on the process of building and the functions fulfilled by apocryphal memory. A comparative analysis of the interviews indicates a genuine need for embarking in Poland upon micro-historical studies of the epoch as well as a redefinition of daily life, up to now described in historiography with the assistance of traditional sociological methods that reduce a person to a number and a statistical variable. In the context of contemporary historiography, the protagonists of history – people and places – are subjected to multiple marginalisation. First, the local experiences of the epoch of the People’s Republic of Poland are recorded via the adaptation of a model devised by political history on a macro scale. Secondly, the protagonists undergo a double marginalisation – as the inhabitants of geographical peripheries and as individuals.

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