During the course of my ethnographic fieldwork in northwest Poland, I had the opportunity to meet Mr. W. (and Basia the pregnant horse who) happens to be the last gospodarsz (or self-sufficient small-scale farmer) who still performs free services for the families who gave away their inventories and land back to the Communist government in [...]
Poland
American Flag From Norway
While embarking on a fieldwork-related errand one day, I asked Mrs. S., a local mushroom-picking expert, if she knew what that head scarf represented. She quite frankly admitted that she had no idea but that it was a remittance hand-me-down from her family of migrant workers who worked on large private farms in the Norwegian [...]
Potato Thieves
This is a field which prior to 1989 was a 100+ hectare PGR (a state farm). These PGRs had their workers living on the state property. After 1989, the PGRs became privatised but the PGR workers stayed on the property (some purchased their PGR homes, while others are still paying “rent” to the government Agencja [...]
The Warsaw Times
During the course of holding Visiting Scholar positions (July 2009) at the Polish Academy of Sciences under Dr. Slawomir Kapralski and Collegium Civitas under Dr. Dariusz Stola, I had the opportunity to explore the lingering Communist “feel” of Warsaw.