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Part of Imagining Poland – doing fieldwork in Poland / Lud, 2016, t. 100

extracted text: Lud, t. 100, 2016

ANIKA KEINZ
Department of Comparative Social Sciences
European University Viadrina
Frankfurt (Oder)
Germany

IMAGINING POLAND – DOING FIELDWORK IN POLAND

When I was asked to contribute a little text to this special issue, I was wondering about the character of it. What should it be like and what tone would be
appropriate? Should it be a personal account of my (ethnographic) experiences as
a (German) anthropologist in Poland? Should it be a report about my ﬁeldwork or
rather about my personal encounters?
The more I thought about it the more ambivalent I felt. I wanted to contribute something but I could not decide on form and content. I went through my
old “ﬁeld notes” and I went through my diary. Recalling curiosity, frustration,
anger, and anxiety, I felt even more ambivalent. I wondered whether I wanted
to deal with and write about these emotions and the difﬁculties I encountered
while doing ﬁeldwork in Warszawa once again (I had devoted a whole chapter on
these difﬁculties from a methodological and epistemological perspective in my
dissertation). It took me a long time going back and forth thinking whether or not
I could or should contribute something.
This is what I came up with.

Eine Vorstellung: Imagination and representation
In German, the noun Vorstellung (and the verb vorstellen) has different meanings.
Ich stelle mir vor means “I am imagining” which means having a notion or
fantasy of something/someone.
Darf ich vorstellen? means “May I introduce you?”.
Eine Vorstellung geben means “to give a performance” (like a theater play)
but it can also mean “to deliver a representation” – as in political, symbolic or
social representation.

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These different meanings and their implications structure my relationship with
“Poland” as much as this contribution. The imaginations that nurtured my view
of Poland might have changed but they continue (as in “linger on”) in the backyards of my memory: I can recall them and they interfere with my perceptions
and observations. Imaginations played a major role in my decision to do research
in Poland. This contribution is a representation of my imagination and my memories, both inﬁltrated by subjective observations, perceptions and experiences
during my stay in Warszawa. They are – as per James Clifford – always partial
truth and true ﬁction (Clifford 1986) and implicated by various power relations
or power structures that may or may not have played into what I experienced,
observed, perceived and wrote down. The represented imaginations, experiences
and encounters are intimately tied to a certain person – me – and to the cultural
and social anthropologist I imagined to become, came to be or am still becoming.
The different work involved in imagining and representing and the different
emotions are resampled as a love story: imaginations and fantasies, real encounters, falling in love and out of love with a city. Warszawa: a city often called
unfriendly and ugly. But no matter how many sins urban planning has committed
– I liked the city. Her energy. Her parks. Her roughness. My favorite place does
not exist anymore like the Baumgart Café.
Looking back sometimes feels like having fallen out of love which ultimately
led to a break up and to separation. However, this separation has been productive
in many ways: it redirected my perspectives and allowed different realities to be
perceived and served a further reﬂection of what was going on “at home” as in
“looking back from Poland to Germany”.

Imagination or Love at ﬁrst sight
My ﬁrst encounter with Poland dates back to the early nineties when I traveled to Kraków for an exchange with a music high school. We stayed individually with families of our Polish counterparts, in my case a young student who
played the violin. During the eleven days in Kraków we practiced six to eight
hours a day Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concert and performed it twice. After
our daily practice we spent the evenings in cafeterias, drank lots of tea and discussed music, history, life and love, hence everything we considered important
and essential at the age 15 to 18.
This stay further nurtured my imagination of Poland as a country full of intellectuals, artists, musicians, and ﬁlmmakers (my favorite one at that time was
Krzysztof Kieślowski) that could easily be described with two words: “avantgarde” and “ever resisting”.
Coming to Kraków came to be an experience of meeting equals: young people
immersed in fantasies about the future – a whole life waiting for us! The future

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would be ours, yet still an expectation, a seduction and a destination. Then and
there connected through music and youth, full of hopes and wishes for the future
to be, a future still distant but surely to come, we were deeply immersed in the
moment: a presence and awareness, which only occurs when one is deeply curious about and affected by “the other” as in “being in love”. Those who thought
alike and felt similarly estranged by their surroundings found each other. Drinking
tea, discussing life and ﬁnding out how much we had in common made me feel
in the right place at the right time. I felt a sense of belonging, which was beyond
reason.
I believe this sense of belonging was possible because we shared the moment as
much as we shared a feeling towards the future. This presence connected us, despite
the difﬁcult history Germany and Poland share. Due to this sentiment we were able
to talk about this history instead of shying away from talking to each other.
When I came to Warszawa a few years later for a summer school during my
studies in social and cultural anthropology I felt a similar sense of belonging as
a few years earlier. The musicians were replaced by anthropologists, the drinks
had changed from tea to beer, wine and wódka and the discussions would circle
less around music and more around “Europe” and its future, around borders and
boundaries, about transformation and hopes linked to those.
To me, Poland remained a destination – a place where I had the most intense
conversations with people who were eager to discuss and exchange ideas. To me,
the sweetest seduction has always come through engaged conversation that easily
bridges a variety of subjects and issues from politics to poetry or more precisely,
from the politics of poetry to the poetry of politics.
This was the imagination I returned to when I went to Poland to do ﬁeldwork
for my Ph.D. thesis in 2004. I was interested in how women’s roles and women’s
positions in Poland had changed or were in the process of changing during the political and social transformation processes after 1989. I was interested in how the
political, social and economic transformation worked on gender roles and gender
positions, hence how men and women were affected differently (still sticking to
the binary gender order).
As it goes even with the great loves of our lives: longing and desire leave,
adventure dissolves, reality comes in.

Ideas and notions
During my research stay in Warszawa, Poland entered the European Union
(May 2004), the Pałac Kultury turned 50 (2005), the “Polish” Pope Jan Paweł II
died (April 2005) and PiS won the elections (October 2005).
Two words were all around in politics as much as in everyday conversation:
democracy and normalcy. Both were contested, debated, negotiated, interpreted,

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claimed, linked to different ideas, terms and ideologies by different actors. Free
market economy and neoliberal ideas, competitiveness, national sovereignty,
freedom and tolerance, minority rights, gender in/equality, human rights. Often
lines or seemingly clear-cut boundaries between “us” and “them” were set – but
who was “us” and “them” changed according to one’s standing.
While in the beginning I was interested in how the political and social transformation processes had structured and restructured particularly women’s lives
in two cities, Łódź and Warszawa, I soon had to give up this idea due to ﬁnancial
reasons as much as due to do-ability or rather non-do-ability. I turned to women’s
NGOs and informal women’s networks, their actions, programs and strategies as
well as to parliamentary debates on the so called women’s (and less so gender)
issues. Moreover, this change of direction and perspective had partly to do with
what was going on in Poland at the time and had caught my interest.
While in the early 1990s, debates over reproduction and family politics served
as coded arguments for the political legitimization and the morality of the new
state as well as the dissociation from the “immoral communist system”, during
my stay in the 2000s additionally “gender issues” became increasingly contested and the visibility of homosexuals in the public sphere increasingly caused
heated debates about what freedom of speech and tolerance means, values that
are increasingly associated with contemporary deﬁnitions of liberal democracy.
I became interested in these different debates and arguments as I saw both as
indicative for the broader transformation processes and closely connected to the
making of Poland’s future, either by rediscovering or reconstructing the traditional or by referring to discourses of “Europeanness” and human rights. The so
called transformation and EUropeanization processes from socialism to democracy and free market economy were increasingly codiﬁed in moral discourses
that implied speciﬁc (albeit different) visions of Poland’s future as well as images
of the proper Polish citizen and demanded the reconstitution of democracy and
the nation-state as much as the reformulation and re-imagination of citizenship
identities, intimately tied to notions of rights and responsibilities of both the state
and its citizens.
At the same time mechanisms of exclusion and forms of othering became
increasingly salient. Some individuals and groups were marked as others to the
nation albeit they were Polish citizens, mostly white and Catholic. Following
these observations I inquired into the national self-understandings and sexual and
gender(ed) politics which inform(ed) the political, social and cultural reconﬁgurations in post-socialist Poland. I observed that the conﬂicts about gender policies and sexuality were central for the negotiations of democracy and notions of
belonging to the Polish nation in the context of EUropeanization and transformation. Moreover, the profound cultural, social, economic and political restructuring from a socialist to a capitalist society and the requirements of the European
Union had created tensions between national and supranational norms. I followed

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the overlapping discourses, speech acts, reference frames and actions of diverse
actors within and outside Poland and inquired into the negotiations of national
concepts (at stake), but also newly emerging cultural spaces and subjectivities in
the arena of national, European and feminist politics.

Trust and Power
Particularly in the ﬁrst months of my stay in Warszawa it was difﬁcult to ﬁnd
women – even in NGOs – who were willing to talk to me. In my dissertation
I reﬂected about these difﬁculties of doing ﬁeldwork in Warszawa. I was trying to explain (myself?) why it had been so difﬁcult to reach people and talk to
them. I was wondering what kind of trust issues or power issues were involved
(that would possibly go beyond the usual trust issues) in ethnographic research.
I thought about anthropological myths about doing ﬁeldwork and the power relations in ethnographic writing, particularly when it comes to research in the so
called complex societies: the history of Poland, the historical relation between
Poland and Germany, ﬁnancial resources, the situatedness of my questions regarding gender, democracy and normalcy, the different positions and positionalities, the various forces, connections and imaginations that played into or shaped
my encounters and structured my perception as much as how the women I sought
to talk to perceived me. The literature I had read, the perspectives I took and the
theories I applied structured what I could see and perceive, what I chose to include, neglected and analyzed. I thought about in which ways our own subjectivity was/is implicated by power relations, which again structure our research ﬁeld.
Social differentiations are certainly constitutive for all relations, but they gain
particular meaning in (ethnographic) representations. I understood that there was
a strong resistance and mistrust towards being represented by a foreigner, maybe
particularly by a German anthropologist. I became aware of the discourses and
material differences that structured the whole research process as much as the
interaction with those I sought to have contact with.
During the struggles with what I had constructed as “my ﬁeld” I came closer
to the various realities that structured the “ﬁeld” and my encounters. I don’t want
to go into details of these methodological and epistemological thoughts and reﬂections. What I later came to think is this: what I had come to love about “Poland” – an attitude I had perceived and described as “ever resisting”, the idea
of Polak potraﬁ, the stubbornness, the “we do it our way” had a ﬂipside. It was
the resistance towards being represented by a strange foreigner – no matter how
much I tried to become transparent and seen less an anthropologist and more
a person or to put it differently: become a vulnerable subject.
During my ﬁeldwork people were often skeptical, unwilling to share experiences, information, stories. They always claimed to have “no time” or ﬂatly

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refused to talk to me. Some advised me to do an internship in an NGO (which
I had tried) or “buy myself into” an NGO. Of course, this was out of the question. How could I “buy” information and what kind of researcher, more so what
kind of anthropologist would I be if I bought myself an internship as someone
suggested to me? In my opinion, I had offered what I could offer – translations,
any assistance they could or would need and could not afford to pay for, but
nothing worked. Their knowledge seemed increasingly exclusive, almost esoteric. “Membership has privileges”, I sometimes thought. I was not a member.
For a long time I had difﬁculties ﬁnding access to what increasingly seemed like
a secret circle or a very close-knit family.

A turn to betterment: Angela Merkel and the elections in 2005
The national elections in the fall of 2005 marked a turning point: at that time,
I had spent almost 18 months in Warszawa. Many women already knew me and
had noticed that I was around a lot. Many of them feared the results of the elections in Poland. It was also the year Angela Merkel was elected German chancellor. The women involved in the so called women’s issues became more open and
willing to talk to: they sort of knew who I was, they were interested in sharing
their thoughts and fears about the elections and what would happen afterwards
to women’s issues and issues of gender equality and they were interested to hear
what I thought about the female chancellor in Germany. For many of them a female chancellor was a good sign, a sign of progress and maybe even a turn to
advancement/betterment.
By that time I had also met two young anthropologists from Warsaw, Ph.D.
candidates like me and also busy with their dissertations and we discovered that
we lived in two neighboring buildings. Again I loved the discussions about research, literature and music, having dinner and afternoon tea. Through them I met
Ukrainian writers and poets and with them I traveled to Lviv/Lwów. Through
a seminar at the Polish Academy of Sciences I met a young American Ph.D.
candidate (also anthropology) and she joined our anthropology circle and the two
of us – both foreigners – shared our difﬁculties of doing ﬁeldwork in Poland and
comforted each other through the bad times.
Quite a few circumstances led to the departure from my earlier ideas I had
had about my research topic. What I had in mind when I came to Poland to do research was in many ways different from what I actually ended up doing and what
my book in the end was about. And how could it be otherwise? In many ways we
are dependent on our ﬁelds, on the people we talk to or the people who are willing
to talk to us and of course unforeseen events sometimes redirect our perspectives
and the ethnographic gaze. In the end I wrote a book titled: Polands’ Others (in
German: Polens Andere, Keinz 2008).

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Poland’s Others
The title of my dissertation was a result of the di-visions which were at play
at the time of my research. I observed the naming of those who seemed not to ﬁt
into what was declared “Polish”, who did not ﬁt the image of the Polish woman
or the heterosexual person; those who refused to play the role they were assigned
to. The book is about those who – sometimes wanted, sometimes unwanted –
disagree with a certain imagination or image of the good citizen and those who
(re)demanded the rights the new democracy took away. It is about those
who seem(ed?) not to ﬁt into the (the then so much wanted) normalcy. Those who
transgressed what was said to be normal and crossed what was doomed appropriate, transgressed the boundaries of what was declared Polish.
These Others are not just the production of an anthropological mind. They
were named numerously. I found them in media articles in Poland as much as in
international newspapers, in parlamentary debates, in discussions among friends,
in side remarks and calls in the street; in basement appartments and government
ofﬁces, in NGOs and abroad. Most of those who were named or marked as others,
did not perceive themselves as other (to the nation), but sometimes as “differently
thinking”: modern, emancipated, European – all but contested terms.
In the title of my dissertation I used the term “Others” because I had observed
how persons were constituted as “other” against a speciﬁc historical and political
background. I was not only interested in the construction proccesses of these
others and the kinds of exclusion processes observed. What I found particularly intrigiuing was that in Poland (at the time!) they were “insider-outsiders” or “familar
strangers”, to use a term – albeit from a different context – from Begoña Aretxaga
(2003). These “others” seemed to be seen as uncontrollable or – to put it differently: they were those who marked what would remain uncontrollable. They marked
the boundaries of the appropriate and “normal” by transgressing them.
My intention was by no means to give them voice. In fact they did not need
me. They could speak for themselves. I was rather interested in what their voices
caused. I was interested in the interactions and interdiscursivities that appeared
when someone raised his/her voice, spoke up, stood up and became visible.
When I went to Warszawa in April 2004 I had no intention to seek “others”.
But during my ﬁeld research I could observe how individuals and groups were
“othered“ and hence became “others”, insider-outsiders or familar strangers.
I followed the discourses and mechanisms which made certain individuals and
groups “strangers” and ultimately marked them as “others to the nation”.
“The Others to the nation” at that time – and different from the now – were
not visible. They could not be identiﬁed at once. It was not their bodies, the surface of their bodies or their skin color. They could not be racialized and were not
excluded because of racism. They were mostly white (and Catholic) Polish ci-

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tizens. In fact, they had not much to fear. They could not lose their civil rights
or their status. They did not differ much from any other Polish citizen. They
only differed in their attitude: “how they imagined Poland’s future and how they
imagined themselves in this future”. It was an attitude towards life, a life style,
a sexuality, a way of thinking, a relation to Poland, to Europe, to politics or to
culture. Those traits – which can remain invisible (different from racial/racist
markers) – became decisive in the moment they turned into social and political
interventions: they became visible when they were unwanted and invisibility was
demanded or even coerced.
In my book I followed namings and new markers, terms and voices. I listened
to them and followed their tracks. I observed what they caused and what they left.

Looking back from Poland to Germany
While looking back from Poland to Germany during my research stay in
Warszawa I closely followed German politics that seemed at this point in stark
contrast particularly regarding the so called sexual minority rights. While the
much contested civil partnership act had ﬁnally been introduced in 2001, in 2005
the citizenship test was introduced.
Debates on integration and immigration increased and indicated that speciﬁc
values and ideas were used to newly designate what the “national” and/or the
European adhered to and/or entailed. The tolerant handling of sexual minorities
and some rights concerning mainly homosexuals increasingly became a marker
of difference not only in Germany but in EU-Europe, a criterion for belonging
to the European (read: Western) hemisphere respectively. Equality was increasingly deﬁned in regard to gender, sexuality and secularism, while class and race
were (and still are) largely neglected. Deﬁnitions of democracy increasingly included concepts of equality and sexual freedoms. The newly introduced antidiscrimination directives and the demands of the member states to incorporate
them as well as the recommendations of the European Court of Justice, show
how gender and sexual issues have become an essential component of European
integration (read: identity) politics. While I embrace/d these progresses in Germany and some other European countries, they had a ﬂipside: the construction
of “strange bodies” along newly invented criteria and the emergence of new discourses of dis/belonging. Sexual democracy became an essential part of national
and EU integration politics. I felt in a paradoxical situation as the lines of in- and
exclusion I observed in Poland and Germany at that time could not be more different. But what seemed so progressive in Germany and some other European
countries when it comes to the “sexual turn” in the European Union, the language
of equality and antidiscrimination included differently politicized and racialized
homophobia. So while looking from Poland back to Germany, I decided for the

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141

next research topic: the emergence of sexular (sexual and secular) democracy
in Germany.
Today I am situated at the Polish-German border at the European University
Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. I am working as a Junior Professor for Cultural and
Social Anthropology of late-modern societies and teach courses on migration,
gender, sexualities and racism, particularly in regard to discourses of dis/belonging and notions of democracy and normalcy in EU-Europe. I enjoy the international atmosphere with students coming from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and other
countries and particularly working together with Polish colleagues.
Last but not least I love to be able to take a short walk over the bridge to
Słubice and take a look down the Oder river and from Poland to Germany. I enjoy
the view from any side to the respective other side. Both views continue to shape
and redirect my questions such as whether the contemporary speciﬁcs of racism
signal a shift regarding the function of “the other” and what kind of new criteria are produced for marking difference, and in which ways these new criteria
change the function of difference (and vice versa). Particularly of late, I wonder
how bodies become marked by difference and how the materialization of bodies
in time and space involve techniques and practices of differentiation. From an
anthropological point of view, these questions do not just intend to examine the
function of differences or reading differences on the surface of the body, but to
inquire into how bodies “come to take certain shapes over others, and in relation
to others” (Ahmed 2000: 42).
These questions are salient both in Germany and in Poland.

REFERENCES
Ahmed S.
2000

Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, London, New
York: Routledge.

Aretxaga B.
2003
Maddening States, „Annual Review of Anthropology“ 32, pp. 393-410.
Clifford J.
1986
Introduction: Partial Truths, in: J. Clifford, G.E. Marcus (eds.), Writing
Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, University of
California Press, pp. 1-26.
Keinz A.
2008
Polens Andere. Verhandlungen von Geschlecht und Sexualität in Polen
nach 1989, Bielefeld: transcript.

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