Biedne miasto Łódź
The Poor City of Łódź

Author(s): Inga B. Kuźma
Subject(s): Cultural history, Local History / Microhistory, Culture and social structure
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: ethnographic archive; workers' culture; Łódź; memories; poverty
Summary/Abstract: The author deals with the problem of exclusion and poverty in Łódź during the modernist period, extending this period to 1939. She relies on oral sources from field ethnographic research, which are based on the memory of the history of working-class families. This type of evidence is provided by the B. Kopczyńska-Jaworska Ethnographic Archive, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Łódź. Research on working-class culture preserved in the Archives concerned, among others, the lifestyle and everyday life of working-class families, changing cultural patterns of migrants from the countryside to the city, and the formation of a new social layer and the phenomenon of urbanity in its Łódź variant. Poverty or poverty was not a topic directly addressed and isolated during ethnographic research, although this topic appeared indirectly, e.g. in memories of crises, including those in the family or on the labor market. Poverty, however, can be included among the themes that constitute the structure of the long-lasting specific myth of Łódź as a "bad city". On the other hand, it is important to understand poverty to find descriptions of its experience in order to consider whether it is possible to talk about changes in the experience of poverty over a long period of time.

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