Was There Ever a Polish Peasant? Historical Imagination and the People’s History of Poland (original) (raw)
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The nationality issues of interwar Poland’s eastern borderlands ("Kresy") have been a popular theme in post-war Polish historiography. A considerable part of this historiography has continued the debates of interwar experts and political activists, which revolved around the two interwar censuses and the question of ethnic identity. For this reason, scholars have given priority to statistical evidence in order to determine the national belonging and categorize the inhabitants of the eastern borderlands into particular ethnic and national groups. What is more, they have drawn their conclusions on the assumption that identity is objectively definable by blood ties. I argue that peasant identity in these borderlands was driven by "localness," that is, a specific symbolic universe, set of values, and conventions typical of peasant culture. Thus, identity cannot be comprehensively described through ethnic categories alone. In the article, I explore some practices of localness such as the malleable roles people ascribed to others in everyday life. For large groups of peasants, they were of vital importance in the reception of nation-building projects.
The following article will discuss Polish national attitudes among peasants in Eastern Galicia in the light of memoirs of peasant youth that the sociologist Józef Chałasiński collected in 1937 and analyzed in his seminal work "Młode pokolenie chłopów". It starts with a discussion of differences in processes of the integration of peasants into the Polish nation in Western and Eastern Galicia until World War I. The article arguea that Western Galician peasants, represented in the Polish peasant parties, embraced the idea of being “pillars of Polishness” while for Roman Catholic or Polish speaking peasants in Eastern Galicia that remained rather an ascription by nationalist circles of the Polish intelligentsia. This condition, as Józef Chałasiński’s collection of memoirs showa, does not seem to have changed much during the interwar period.
Khmelnytsky and Szela. Radical Romantics Struggling with Peasants’ History of Poland
As an intellectual movement romanticism has, for a long time, been generating extreme emotions: from despair of those who focus on semantics (think of the difficulties with defining this concept) to the concerns of political realists of all kinds. Nonetheless, the Polish imagination is very strongly marked by romantic thinking since Central Europe reached modernity in its deeply spiritualized version. Modernity is difficult to imagine when there is no mass political agent. In the Polish context which was marked by the experience of the partitions, the enlightened Reason could not be granted the task to invent a new form of political “us,” as was the case for example in France.
2015
and all other staff members, which made my research vi possible. My warm thanks go to Anna Wolińska and Katarzyna Wierzbicka from Lexicon (Warsaw) for their great help in supplying crucial research materials. I would like to thank the faculty and graduate students at the University of Notre Dame for including me into their intellectual community. I particularly want to thank Alexander Martin for his thorough reading and comments on several chapters of my work and on my talks, for our always inspiring conversations, and for inviting me to the Dissertation Writing Group at the Department of History. My work owes him, among other things, an awareness of Russian history. I'd like to thank John Deak for reading the second chapter of my dissertation and providing insightful comments from the perspective of Austro-Hungarian history. My very special thanks go to Julia Adeney Thomas for all of her steady encouragement, positive energy, enthusiasm, her belief in me, and all of our inspiring conversations. I am grateful to the Dissertation Writing Group at the
2017
Studies in shifting ideas of community and society throughout a thousand years of Polish history. As a European polity, Poland can look back on more than a thousand years of history. Over the centuries, however, its territory, contexts of political power, and demographic structure have varied greatly. The authors maintain that these societal developments and differentiations cannot be clearly discerned through a national or macro-political lens, and as such have kept the perspectives of nation and state in the background, focussing instead on considerably smaller political, social, or cultural units. The conceptual impetus for this volume has generated questions about how people within Polish society imagined their world, and how such perceptions, images, and ideas of community and society have changed over time: Did shifts in political power have an impact on local communities? What were the criteria that determined membership in the political or cultural elite? What alternatives or competing ideas of community can be identified? How were ethnic boundaries defined? Were multiple loyalties part of political culture? In what ways did socially or politically marginalized groups organize themselves? How did war and migration influence social change?
Italian Sociological Review, 2020
I want to indicate that the international conference ‘The Polish Peasant in Europe and America 1918-1920. W.I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki’s Research: Development and Future Perspectives for Sociology’ (Salerno, 30-31 October 2019) has been important, and the following publications will be also important, for improving understanding of the contemporary study of migration from the humanistic perspective. Humanistic sociology was the perspective that Florian Znaniecki propagated with his analysis of culture and values and cultural change and also it was the perspective of William Thomas with his analysis of the definition of the situation of many unprivileged persons and social groups. [...]
On Forgetting, Displacement, and Historical Error in Polish History
The Polish Review
Singling out Polish-Jewish relations as the major problem has come quite late in the millennium or so of Polish history. The present essay approaches Polish history from a different angle, considering its very nature as well as some important yet inconvenient facts that have been forgotten or displaced. What actually constitutes Polish history is presented as problematic. The historic divide between the nobility (Sarmatians) and the numerous peasantry (Roman Catholic Slavophones, the ancestors of most of today’s Poles) is shown to be a central problem that needed to be papered over, were a modern Polish nation to embrace the entirety of Polish speakers. In the nineteenth century, the two groups’ shared Roman Catholic faith was perceived as a bridge to unity. The subsequent weaponization of anti-Semitism by integral nationalists and Roman Dmowski’s creation of the category of “half-Poles” to label those who opposed him have repercussions to this day.