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Hunters, gatherers, and practitioners of powerlessness : an ethnography of the degraded in postsocialist Poland / Tomasz Rakowski ; translated by Soren Gauger.
Lippincott Library HC340.3.Z9 P625513 2016
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Rakowski, Tomasz.
- Series:
- European anthropology in translation ; volume 6.
- European anthropology in translation ; volume 6
- Standardized Title:
- Łowcy, zbieracze, praktycy niemocy. English
- Language:
- English
- Polish
- Subjects (All):
- Poverty--Poland.
- Poverty.
- Unemployment--Poland.
- Unemployment.
- Social conditions.
- Poland.
- Poland--Social conditions--21st century.
- Post-communism--Poland.
- Post-communism.
- Physical Description:
- xiii, 312 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : ǂb illustrations ; ǂc 24 cm.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Berghahn Books, 2016.
- Summary:
- The socio-economic transformations of the 1990s have forced many people in Poland into impoverishment. Hunters, Gathers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness gives a dramatic account of life after this degradation, tracking the experiences of unemployed miners, scrap collectors, and poverty stricken village residents. Contrary to the images of passivity, resignation, and helplessness that have become powerful tropes in Polish journalism and academic writing, Tomas Rakowski traces the ways in which people actively reconfigure their lives. As it turns out, the initial sense of degradation and helplessness often gives way to images of resourcefulness that reveal unusual hunting-and-gathering skills. Book jacket.
- Contents:
- An Anthropological Shift in Perspective 1
- The "Culture of Poverty": Getting Beyond the Concept 1
- Social Trauma and Dependency: Shift in Perspective 4
- Hermeneutics and Anthropology 7
- Toward a Method 11
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty-The "Patron Saint" of the Present Ethnography 11
- Method: (Lack of) Ethnographic Knowledge 18
- Pretextual Ethnography 21
- The Most Bitter Side of the Polish Transformation: Fields of Research 27
- The "New Poverty" 27
- Post-Transformation Social Degradation 30
- Postsocialism: History and Experience 33
- The Studied Phenomena 36
- The Field Research 38
- Chapter 1 The Szydlowiec and Przysucha Environs-The Swierokrzyskie Foothills 42
- A World Full of Adversities 42
- Unemployment and the Farming Recession 42
- A Community of the Unemployed: Immobility, Odd Jobs, and "Tragic Scarring" 47
- Motionless Orchards, Motionless Fields: Failure 52
- Dependency and Irreversibility: A Reproof at the World 56
- Second-String Ecology 63
- The New Face of the Jobless Village 67
- Gatherers of Wild Herbs and Undergrowth, Gatherers of Fir Wood 67
- The "New Ecology": The Convertibility of the Environment 70
- Collection, Conversion, Transition 77
- The "Culture of Survival" 83
- Chapter 2 Walbrzych-Boguszów-Gorce 87
- From Destruction to "Empty" Communication: The Liquidation of the Coal Basin 87
- The City and the Mine 87
- The Highly Ambivalent Story of the Walbrzych Basin 92
- Experience and Liquidation: Destruction-The City-The Body 97
- How to Speak of Liquidation? (Auto)aggression-Dialogue-Social Muteness 102
- Externalized Shame: Empty Communication and Internal Spectacles 105
- Facing Reality after the Mines (1) 109
- Complaints-Accusations-Triumphs 113
- A World Affected from the Outside 116
- Bootleg Mines, Diggers, Skills: The Body's Active Knowledge 116
- Rhythm, Jokes, Anecdotes: "Scoffing at the World" 122
- Law and Lawlessness: Interior Spectacles 125
- The Grey Market: Deal-Making and Resourcefulness 130
- The "Internal Circulation" and the Fragmentation of Transactions 137
- Home-Oikos: Internal Circulation 142
- Freedom in the Mines 145
- "Do-It-Yourself" Equipment 145
- Working and Efficiency in Manual Labor: Resources and Deposits 149
- Demolition-Collecting-Objects 153
- Things 159
- Memory 163
- Facing Reality after the Mines (2) 166
- Chapter 3 The Belchatów Brown Coal Mine-The Shadowlands of the Exposed Mine 178
- The Mine/Power Station 178
- The Perfect Balance, an Abrupt Modernization 178
- The Experience of Alienation and Control over the Environment 181
- At the Margins of the Great Industry: Marginalization and Exclusion 185
- The Mine: Orbis Exterior 190
- Violence, Guilt, and the Building Sacrifice 196
- The Consequences of "Excess": Metaphors of Exploitation 200
- The Mine: Orbis Interior 203
- The Players, Their Families, and Their Means of Sustenance 203
- Self-Sufficiency, Subsistence: Gathering and Processing Goods 206
- Hunting and Gathering 211
- Waclaw Okonski-The Stalker, Orbis Interior 221
- Goods and Trophies: The Hunting/Gathering Existence on the Edge of the Mine 226
- Records 231
- Cabinets of Curiosities, Collectors' Museums 231
- The Work of Memory: Reconstructions, Objects, Collections 237
- "The Science of the Concrete": Inscriptions, Journals, Enumeration 243
- Hunters and Gatherers-Practitioners of Powerlessness 250
- Conclusion 260
- The "Reality Testing" 260
- Outcome 264
- Beyond Anthropology 266.
- Notes:
- Translation of: Łowcy, zbieracze, praktycy niemocy. Gdańsk : Wydawnictwo słowo/obraz terytoria, 2009.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- ISBN:
- 9781785332401
- 1785332406
- OCLC:
- 947794932
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