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Part of A journey to Przemyśl thanks to European Academia / Lud, 2016, t. 100

extracted text: Lud, t. 100, 2016

JURAJ BUZALKA
Institute of Social Anthropology
Comenius University
Bratislava
Slovakia

A JOURNEY TO PRZEMYŚL THANKS
TO EUROPEAN ACADEMIA

In this reﬂection I wish to discuss how my professional career was shaped by
ﬁeldwork in Poland and what the conditions were that allowed me to beneﬁt –
along with other East Central European anthropologists of my generation – from
European integration. I believe the generation of academics born in 1970s has
beneﬁted greatly from the post-socialist changes and contributed to the more cosmopolitan proﬁle of their respective national traditions. An important element
of the development of this proﬁle was collaboration and exchange across Europe,
not least between neighboring national academic settings. I think the relatively
successful synthesis of national tradition with Western theoretical debates that
have proliferated Eastern Europe after socialism has been particularly achieved
in Polish anthropology and ethnology.

Polonia Globalis
I began writing this contribution in the city of Binghamton, located in Upstate New York, a three and half hour drive north-west of New York City. The
rented house where I was initially recalling memories of my doctoral ﬁeldwork
was located just a walking distance from the neighborhood called Polish Heaven.
This heaven is part of the larger suburb known as First World. It reminds about
the times when waves of economic migrants from Eastern Europe searched for
a better place to live. Most of these were Poles, Slovaks, and Ukrainians. Their
destiny was analyzed in the classical work Polish Peasant in Europe and America
(Znaniecki and Thomas 1958 [1918]), one of the basic readings in European sociology and anthropology.
The presence of the children and grandchildren of these East European immigrants in the city of Binghamton is nowadays harder to see at ﬁrst sight. One can

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Juraj Buzalka

nevertheless recognize them by having a brief chat in shops, restaurants, or over
a beer in First World Binghamton. The bars and pubs there represent nostalgia
for the golden age of the city before it was affected by most recent intensiﬁcation
of globalization, especially the closing of a shoe making factory, machinery and
computing factories (the famous IBM was founded in the city before it moved
to Silicon Valley) and the reduction of the defense industry caused the effects
that might be easily compared to post-socialist development in many parts of
Eastern Europe. No surprise the winners of 2016 Presidential Primary Elections
in the Broome County, of which Binghamton is the center, were populists Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. One of Trump’s former wives, Ivana, is a Czech
emigrant from communist times and Senator Bernie Sanders was born to a Jewish father who had emigrated from the town of Słopnice, near Nowy Sącz. The
emigrant story of Sanders’s father coming from the multireligious and multiethnic region of pre-war Małopolska especially reminded me about the topic on
which I was researching in 2003-2004 and which also remains the key concern of
contemporary academic analyses, that of modernity and tolerance. As my good
friend from the ﬁeld, Wojtek Kalinowski, used to joke with friends: “Jurek arrived in order to observe us like monkeys. He was paid to drink with us and for
this year-long holiday he is expected to receive his doctorate”.

Context of the ﬁeldwork
I visited my future ﬁeld site for the ﬁrst time in January 2003. Sent by my new
Doktorvater Chris Hann, who accepted me as his doctoral student at the Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (MPISA) in Halle/Saale, Germany, I arrived to observe the Greek Catholic Jordan ceremony. To the best of my knowledge, I have been privileged – or cursed, depending on one’s point of view – to
be Chris Hann’s only student who was sent to revisit the areas he had already
studied (Hann 1985). It turned out to be extremely productive for my ﬁeldwork
to be Slovak by nationality, as neither of the confrontation camps I researched –
Polish or Ukrainian – could have questioned my neutral position in their cause.
I left Slovakia two years earlier before embarking on my doctoral studies. My
farewell with home followed the defeat of the autocratic rule of Vladimír Mečiar
(1994-1998), which changed the position of Slovakia as an isolated country not
only vis-à-vis Western Europe but also with regard to its Visegrad neighbors that
had been at that time far ahead with process of European integration. Thanks to
a scholarship from the Open Society Foundation, British Commonwealth Ofﬁce,
and Sussex University I studied for an M.A. in Anthropology of Europe in 2001
and 2002. As a former graduate in political science and journalism from Comenius University in Bratislava (1993-1999) and Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of
Ethnology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, I was eager to learn about anthro-

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125

pological perspectives on what to my dissatisfaction political scientists analyzed
as “political culture” and national ethnographers had not had a conceptual clue
about. I also felt very frustrated by the poor opportunities which at that time
academia in Slovakia was able to offer and preferred working with the far more
stimulating think-tank sector with an obviously clear ideological agenda. I very
much appreciated the integration of my country to European Union and although
my perspective on the development of Europe has been expanded since then to
include a far wider set of cultural and economic “variables”, I consider the enlargement of the EU to be to the major beneﬁt of East European citizens and even
more so to academia.
In Bratislava I had good luck to work under the supervision of Juraj Podoba,
a Brno University graduate, who unlike his “folkloristic” colleagues had learned
about Western anthropology. He also introduced me to works by the Czech emigrant anthropologist Petr Skalník, who had tried unsuccessfully to re-establish
himself in the rigid post-socialist Czechoslovak academia. Thanks to Podoba’s
visit to Cambridge in early 1990s, I also learned about his fellow academic from
Poland, nowadays the internationally very well-recognized Michał Buchowski.
When I traveled to London for the ﬁrst time in the very late 1990s in order to
attend language classes, I relied on Polish emigrant networks. A friend of a friend,
whom we called Sejlor, an illegal immigrant from Gdańsk I had never met before,
let me stay in his room and assisted me in ﬁnding the place to stay on my own.
The closeness of our languages helped me greatly at a time when English was
entirely new to me. Juraj Podoba recommended that I contact Frances Pine at
Cambridge, the anthropologist closely tied to Poland, as well as sociologist John
Eade at the University of Roehampton who was very interested in post-socialism.
I did not feel conﬁdent enough to meet Frances Pine at that time, not mentioning
Chris Hann, another anthropologist of Poland (among other countries) whose
works had already been known to some English readers in Eastern Europe but
rather ignored by national ethnographers.
Juraj Podoba is my current senior colleague in Bratislava. He often referred to
his generation as unable to fully beneﬁt from the fall of communism for their professional career. He encouraged me to seek inspiration elsewhere in the West but
also remain active at home and contribute to the domestic academic and public
discourse. I was lucky to meet Chris Hann who consistently held a less critical opinion about the national traditions of ethnology in Eastern Europe than Juraj Podoba
(2005) did. This was certainly because of his familiarity with the far more developed Hungarian and Polish scholarship under socialism and a knowledge of the
peculiar professional history of some GDR academics after the Wende, but also
due to his “Eurasian” project (Hann 2016). This experience (and – thanks to the
EU – the gradual loosening of my dependency on national patrons and ﬁnances
compared to my less internationally experienced colleagues) further immunized
me vis-à-vis tensions between national parochialism and comparative anthropo-

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logy that still affect Slovak academia. This entire educational endeavor obviously
happened thanks to post-socialist changes and the chances some of my generation
beneﬁted from.

From the ﬁeld to book
I applied for a doctoral position with a proposal concerning religion and civil
society. According to my supervisor, the ancient city of Przemyśl was the most
appropriate place for studying the role of Catholicism, nationalism, and politics
in post-socialist Poland, largely deprived of its once ﬂourishing ethnic and religious minorities. The city was a historical and contemporary center of the Roman
Catholic Poles and a small group of Greek Catholic Ukrainians who saw it as
the historical seat of their creed. A narrative by a cosmopolitan historian about
Przemyśl’s past would certainly evoke both an open gate and a crossroads – between East and West, between eastern and western Christianity, between eastern
and western Slavs, and, since 1 May 2004, between the European Union and what
lies beyond its eastern border. Yet some patriotic Poles saw the city as being on
the “eastern wall” (ściana wschodnia) of Poland and Latin Christianity. Poland’s
state boundaries and national histories have been drawn according to the logic
of east-west confrontation, and Przemyśl’s position at the crossroads has helped
shape its very landscape.
South-east Poland was not only interesting in terms of its religious and ethnonational landscape, but also due to its physical, rural surroundings. I was lucky
to begin my research in one of the least industrialized regions of this part of
Europe where the actual peasants did not represent just remnants of the agrarian past, but who to this day have kept cultivating their own land, at least along
with receiving wages elsewhere. I was clear about my interest in the category of
post-socialist people I later called post-peasants; conservative people suspicious
of secular and liberal society but at the same time able to beneﬁt from some of
modernity’s developments.
My book was based on fourteen months of ﬁeldwork I carried out without
interruption from early summer 2003 until late summer of 2004. In my book
(Buzalka 2007) I conceptualized “post-peasant populism”. As I argued, this postpeasant populism is not about the peasantry; rather, it can be deﬁned as a type
of modern political culture based on a non-urban social structure and imagined
rurality. It is opposed to capitalist, cosmopolitan, and secular worldviews and
life-styles, and it offers an alternative “moral” model for economic development.
I argued that the politics of commemoration constituted this post-peasant populism in everyday life. Two elements, a “traditional” social structure surviving
from an agrarian era on the societal scale – with large-scale transformations like
state socialism and post-socialism contributing to the solidity of this structure –

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and what might be observed locally as a combination of identity narratives, collective memories, and rural ideologies jointly made up what I called post-peasant
populism as a mobilizing force.
I believed it was religion – having a form of institutional Roman Catholicism
in south-east Poland – that enjoyed a prominent position in this interplay of local and societal forces. As a guardian of memories, national histories, and moral
order, institutional religion in my view exceeded the conventionally deﬁned “national populism” centered on ethnic nationalism and illiberal politics that were diagnosed the primary malady of post-socialist transformation, especially by political scientists. In line with the research of my colleagues from MPISA, especially
Vlad Naumescu (2007) whose work ran parallel with mine across the border in
Lviv, Western Ukraine, I also argued that although being one of the important
sources of tensions, religion in regions such as south-east Poland nurtured tolerance. My girlfriend of that time, Mira Fornay, now a successful director of two
feature ﬁlms premiered at world-class festivals, prepared some sections of her debut script Foxes (2009) – dealing with emigrant life of two East European sisters
in Dublin – on the basis of observing the kultura małomiasteczkowa of Catholic
Przemyśl that I was studying ethnographically.
Since the completion of my “Polish” book in 2007 I have begun work on
steel workers and local economy in Slovakia. Nevertheless, my interest in Poland has never left me. I have tried to visit Przemyśl every summer for at least
a few days and have developed contacts with academic colleagues across the
country. Over the years I have realized how much this peripheral part of Europe has changed, particularly in terms of infrastructure. Numerous churches that
exclusively dominated the landscape during my ﬁeldwork have gradually been
overshadowed by renovated schools, new pavements and roads heading to the
very last villages, and recently by the comfortable highway connecting the region with more advanced parts of Europe and the border with Ukraine. Both city
center buildings and private homes across the countryside are far more shining
in colors than the previously dominant gray I remember from early 2000s. My
observation of impressive progress contrasts with the general feeling of many
locals in Przemyśl and other eastern peripheries of the EU that not so much has
changed around them and not much can really change in their life. New heating in their houses, new windows and another used car replacing the older, ﬂat
screens and smart phones, not to mention far nicer everyday surroundings such
as public and private toilets, new playgrounds for children, and sport facilities,
pubs and cafes, did not make them feel much better in this most prosperous
part of the former socialist world. Since I began my ﬁeldwork in the region,
south-east Poland has developed into by far the best place with regard to quality
of life. In my current work I am struggling with how to grasp this East European paradox of ongoing grumbling self-pity and apparent prosperity at the same
time.

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While visiting Przemyśl I often tried to contact the director of Południowo-Wschodni Instytut Naukowy and historian at Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Zawodowa, Stanisław Stępień. Dr. Stępień helped me with initial contacts, especially
among local Ukrainian elites. As I was particularly interested in the life of ordinary people, I had been lucky to meet a local journalist Olga Hrinkiw – who
currently employs three women in her charming craft bakery on the main square
– who introduced me to the life of the local Ukrainian community. I had also
a chance to spend substantial periods of time traveling through rural areas with
a Ukrainian philologist and journalist Bogdan Huk. My contacts in the ﬁeld were
also developed thanks to the friendship with Wojciech Kalinowski at Przemyska
Biblioteka Publiczna (who since 2006 has been the editor of “Przemyski Przegląd
Kulturalny”), as well as his circle of friends and colleagues. I received a lot of
help from Polish philologists Andrzej Juszczyk and Agnieszka Kluba, both local
activists and intellectuals, whose activities have been challenging the religious-conservative image of the city.
My most vivid memories from the ﬁeldwork are also those I spent with
young Ukrainians. We used to travel across the entire Podkarpacie County, from
the Bieszczady Mountains to Hrebenne. We visited former Ukrainian villages,
tserkovs, and cemeteries, religious and ethnic festivals, attended private parties.
We took hikes in the hills but also looked for remains of the Ukrainian past in the
towns such as Jarosław and Sanok. We were eating kiełbasa, żółty ser and bread,
drinking vodka and singing folksongs on main squares as well as in borderland
pine forests. Contact with clergymen was more complicated, especially the Roman Catholic ones. I found it more difﬁcult to interview them even in comparison
to the local Polish nationalists especially known for their anti-Ukrainian activity
in the early 1990s.
Another type of memories is related to intellectual scene of Przemyśl. Contacts with locally based painters, historians, and linguists also made my ﬁeldwork
in Przemyśl intellectually stimulating. The repertoire of local cuisine and public
services has signiﬁcantly improved since I lived in the city, but very good Galician specialties have always been available in local restaurants. The wine lists
have progressed a lot since I was choosing wine in taverns according to color.
The skills of locals in making nalewka – particularly cytrynówka made of spirytus, honey and lemon juice – and the home-made śledź w sosie śmietanowym
z jabłkiem i ogórkiem that tastes so good on dark bread with chilled vodka will
always remain prominent in my sensory memories. One of my less pleasant experiences of ﬁeldwork took place at the border crossing in Medyka when I was
returning from Lviv. On a bus ride the local mrówki – as the petty commodity
traders are called – felt offended by my refusal to help them with smuggling some
contraband vodka and cigarettes. They reported me as a suspect smuggler to the
custom ofﬁcer and I had to go through a humiliating frisking.

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Academic contacts
It was only after I returned from the ﬁeld and began working on my dissertation that I learned more about Polish colleagues. At that time Professor Michał
Buchowski approached me in ﬂuent Slovak in Halle. The discussions with him
have always been pleasant and stimulating. He deﬁnitely does not conﬁrm the
stereotype of grumbling East European professor and as the most visible representative of anthropology from our region he does an excellent job in the ﬁeld of
European academic diplomacy.
The ﬁrst from among the Polish colleagues of my generation with whom we
have established fruitful collaboration is Agnieszka Kościańska. I met her at
a conference in Halle organized by Frances Pine and João de Pina-Cabral in May
2003 when we both were Ph.D. students. We have collaborated on several smaller
projects, including summer schools and exchange of students between our departments, but have always been hoping to prepare something bigger, based on
our long-term partnership. The hope is still with us despite our growing engagements with management at our departments and our own research agendas. In
Warsaw I have also had good contact with Ewa Klekot and Łukasz Smyrski.
Discussions with these colleagues have made me aware of the strong legacy
of Polish ethnology and I have also learned a lot about the recent social history of
the Polish capital thanks to them. The materials from rural areas around Tarnów
provided by Anna Malewska-Szałygin (2008) – offering a perspective on politics
that is innovative in “our” tradition of ethnology – made me look again on my
own conceptualizations. My former colleague from MPISA, Agnieszka Halemba,
who joined the Warsaw Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, has
been a great source of advice and help for more than a decade. I greatly welcomed
her decision to undertake new ﬁeldwork in Eastern Slovakia and Transcarpathian Ukraine (Halemba 2015). Thanks to all my colleagues in Poland I have realized their national tradition of ethnology is more elaborate in terms of topics and
theoretical inspirations than the one my colleagues have cultivated in Slovakia.
I have also realized that this national tradition does not necessarily need to be
considered contradictory – or eventually mutually exclusive – to cosmopolitan
anthropology.
Over many years I have regularly visited and consulted with colleagues Jacek
Nowak and Marcin Lubaś at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Waldemar Kuligowski from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań became one of my favorite
Polish academics, especially after I had a chance to discuss our common interests with him over the beer while attending the meeting of Polish Sociological
Society in 2004. I particularly regret that Ewa Grzeszczyk (2003), the promising
sociologist with whom I had a chance to meet several times, tragically passed

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away. At various conferences I have enjoyed conversations with the sociologist
Tomasz Zarycki from Warsaw University. His recent account (Zarycki 2015) on
dual stratiﬁcation order in Poland, prepared in reaction to the perspective offered
by the renowned scholar of Poland, David Ost (2015), belongs to sorts of readings every academic enjoys.
Among more recent ties with Polish academia, I particularly appreciate my
emerging collaboration with historians. Two distinguished scholars, Jerzy Kochanowski and Włodzimierz Borodziej from Warsaw University, made me rethink some ideas about local economy I attempted to develop while reading the
works of anthropologists dealing with late socialism. After starting to read Kochanowski’s work on the black market in socialist Poland (2015), I realized once
again how much beneﬁt the collaboration between anthropologists and historians
can bring.
Compared to Slovak or even Czechoslovak ethnology – but also sociology
or history – the Polish world is far larger. I began to realize this fact soon after
learning how important the academic literature in Polish was for those Czechoslovak intellectuals during normalization period (1969-1989) who wanted to do
their jobs more honestly. As the case of Czechoslovak ethnology shows, one of
the solutions of this political pressure was the escape to the national past (Scheffel and Kandert 1994), but this had costs during the post-socialist period. Although Polish (but also Hungarian) works were later replaced by Western scholarship, the neighboring national “islands” of relative academic freedom, contrasted
with Czechoslovak normalization, remain important reference points for those in
my country who wished to overcome socialist and post-socialist academic parochialism.
Being a member of a rather marginal community of anthropologists in Slovakia that pushes its ambitious members to cross disciplinary as well as linguistic
boundaries, I nevertheless also see some limitations of the far more populous
Polish academia. The high numbers of Polish translations of key anthropological
texts one can ﬁnd in bookstores signal not only the vitality of national market but
also certain level of self-subsistence ignoring the hierarchy of global academic
knowledge. Some interesting proposals by Polish colleagues I have had a chance
to evaluate conﬁrm this potentially unbalanced ethnocentric tendency.
Nevertheless, due to the fruitful synthesis of cosmopolitan anthropology
and national ethnology in Poland – on the symbolic level visible in at least
two Polish departments (in Warsaw and Poznań) representing the largest anthropological institutions in the EU east of Germany – I see the transformation
of East European academia more clearly. It has been my pleasure to partially
witness and very slightly participate in this European success of Polish anthropology.

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REFERENCES
Buzalka J.
2007

Nation and Religion: The Politics of Commemorations in South-East Poland, Berlin, Münster: LIT.
Grzeszczyk E.
2003
Sukces: amerykańskie wzory – polskie realia, Warszawa: Instytut Filozoﬁi
i Socjologii PAN.
Halemba A.
2015
Negotiating Marian Apparitions: The Politics of Religion in Transcarpathian Ukraine, Budapest, New York: Central European University Press.
Hann C.M.
1985
A Village Without Solidarity: Polish Peasants in Years of Crisis, New Haven: Yale University Press.
2016
A Concept of Eurasia, “Current Anthropology” 57: 1, pp. 1-27.
Kochanowski J.
2015
Tylnymi drzwiami. “Czarny rynek” w Polsce 1944-1989, Warszawa:
WFoksal.
Malewska-Szałygin A.
2008
Wyobrażenia o państwie i władzy we wsiach nowotarskich 1999-2005,
Warszawa: DiG.
Naumescu V.
2007
Modes of Religiosity in Eastern Christianity. Religious Processes and Social Change in Ukraine, Berlin, Münster: LIT.
Ost D.
2015
Class after Communism: Introduction to the Special Issue, “East European
Politics and Societies” 29: 3, pp. 543-564.
Podoba J.
2005
On the Periphery of a Periphery: Slovak Anthropology behind the Ideological Veil, in: C. Hann, M. Sárkány and P. Skalník (eds.), Studying Peoples
in the People´s Democracies. Socialist Era Anthropology in East-Central
Europe, Berlin, Münster: LIT, pp. 245-271.
Scheffel D., Kandert J.
1994
Politics and Culture in Czech Ethnography, “Anthropological Quarterly”
67: 1, pp. 15-23.
Thomas W.I., Znaniecki F.
1958 [1918] The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, New York: Dover.
Zarycki T.
2015
Class Analysis in Conditions of a Dual-Stratiﬁcation Order, “East European Politics and Societies” 29: 3, pp. 711-718.

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