Dzieciństwo w rodzinie robotniczej międzywojennej Łodzi. Perspektywa etnograficzno-pedagogiczna
Childhood in a working family in interwar Łódź. An ethnographic and pedagogical perspective

Author(s): Anna Deredas, Joanna Sosnowska
Subject(s): History, Social Sciences, Education, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: childhood; kid; workers’ family; memories; ethnographic material; interwar Łódź (1918–1939)
Summary/Abstract: The book entitled Dzieciństwo w rodzinie robotniczej międzywojennej Łodzi. Perspektywa etnograficzno-pedagogiczna (Childhood in a Working Family in Interwar Łódź. An Ethnographic and Pedagogical Perspective) was intended to present the source materials kept in the Bronisława Kopczyńska-Jaworska Ethnographic Archive of the Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology Institute of the University of Łódź. Those materials, which include biographies, memories, records of conversations, and stories, were collected from people from a working class background in the 1970s. and 80s. for the purpose of a large-scale study on the working class culture in Łódź initiated by the circle of Łódź ethnographers. Men and women who took part in the study were former workers from Łódź factories, aged app. 60–80 at the time of the study. The Łódź researchers were interested in issues related to the life of workmen in pre-war Łódź (before 1939), taking into account the issues such as a family, neighbours’, and social circle, an employment environment, work and free time, conditions of existence, everyday life and holidays, folk lore, customs and ceremonies, and social and political activities. The contents of the collected source materials enabled the authors to recreate, or rather to present – considering the adopted concept of the book, where the interviewees reach back to their memories of the past – the image of the childhood in a working family in interwar Łódź. The intention of the authors was to “give the floor” to people from a working class background who experienced (or observed) the childhood stage (of their own or of their children) in interwar Łódź. It is their statements presented in the form of quotations taken from the archive materials that fill most of the book pages. The ethnographic and pedagogical perspective of both the study and the book written as its result is, from the viewpoint of an interdisciplinary cooperation, desired and valuable. The issues of the functioning of a child in working families, their birth, nurturing, care, conditions of development, education, spending of their free time, participation in family and annual ceremonies, and maintaining the customs of working class culture are issues close to both ethnography and pedagogy (pedagogy and ethnography). That “closeness” influenced the arrangement of the book contents. It is divided into nine chapters, each of them consisting of several sections encompassing the most important childhood stages and events. The monograph is dedicated to the memory of Professor Bronisława Kopczyńska-Jaworska (1924–2016), head of the Ethnography Department of the University of Łódź in 1970–1994, who studied the issues of working class culture in the history of Łódź.

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