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Part of Exploring the „shadow side” of ethnographic research on aging in Poland / Lud, 2016, t. 100

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JESSICA C. ROBBINS-RUSZKOWSKI
Institute of Gerontology and Department of Anthropology
Wayne State University
Detroit
USA

EXPLORING THE “SHADOW SIDE” OF ETHNOGRAPHIC
RESEARCH ON AGING IN POLAND

As a sociocultural and medical anthropologist, my research focuses on understanding aging across comparative ethnographic and historical perspectives. My
dissertation research focused on aging in the sociocultural and political-economic
context of Poland. I sought to understand how experiences of aging are connected
to the political-economic and sociocultural transformations that have occurred
during the lifetimes of the oldest generations in Poland. I conducted 22 months
of ethnographic ﬁeldwork between 2006 and 2014, with the longest period occurring between 2008 and 2010, in a range of institutional and non-institutional sites
for older people in Wrocław and Poznań. I am currently working on a book manuscript based on this research, in which I argue that similar practices of relatedness exist across diverse contexts. By drawing on theoretical perspectives from
studies of kinship, postsocialism, and memory, the book shows that contemporary desires for “active aging” in Poland exceed standard postsocialist narratives
and instead are rooted in particular national understandings of the links between
person and place.
In a related project, I examine how the production of knowledge about aging
relates to contemporary and historical forms of sociality. I am studying the (pre)/
/(post) socialist histories of the sciences of aging in Poland through an investigation of the connections between contemporary educational institutions for older
persons and the historical development of disciplinary knowledge about aging,
education, and social change. In ethnographic projects that I am currently developing, I also explore questions of age, personhood, kinship, and politics in diverse
post-industrial settings where life is fostered in the face of decline. This includes
a comparative study of urban gardens in Detroit and działki in Poland, and a study
of older adults’ experiences and understandings of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. A common thread running throughout all these projects is my enduring

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Jessica C. Robbins-Ruszkowski

concern with how the life courses of persons both intersect with and are shaped
by the trajectories of broader polities, at the levels of experience, structure, and
imagination.
In this reﬂective essay, I describe my own research trajectory as a set of movements between experiences and aspirations that have been both professional
and personal, both pragmatic and serendipitous. In so doing, I show how my
anthropological interest in aging, care, and social relations has been shaped by
experiences that have transformed my own life course, revealing some of the
“shadow side” (McLean and Leibing, eds., 2007) of anthropological ﬁeldwork.
Indeed, these categories of professional and personal, work and life, often refuse
separation (Behar 1991; Goslinga and Frank 2007). As categories that have become naturalized through the historical conditions of modernity, professional and
personal lives have come to be separated in both experiences and ideologies of
academic life. Yet feminist scholarship (Narayan 2012) has long demonstrated the
constructed nature of such boundaries by showing how one’s personal experience
shapes the conditions and possibilities of knowledge, and how the structures of
professional life exist in such a way that reinforce existing gendered, racialized,
and classed hierarchies. Moreover, I show how the particularities of Polish life,
and my interactions with research participants, have transformed my research
questions and my understanding of the stakes of my work. Although I sought out
Poland as a ﬁeld site in part because it felt distant, I show that the nature of both
ethnographic ﬁeldwork and serendipitous aspects of life itself erased this distance
such that it has also become a place where the personal and professional have
become mutually inextricable.

From the personal to the professional
Although I did not know it at the time, my path to becoming an anthropologist
of Poland began when I was in high school over twenty years ago, sitting with my
family in the living room of my childhood home in suburban Connecticut. The
evening when I learned that my mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer
was the ﬁrst of several transformative moments in my adolescence and young
adulthood that allowed me to conceive of health and illness as sociocultural and
political-economic processes. Biological, of course, but also gut-wrenchingly
emotional – I felt fear and sadness in my abdomen, blurring my unquestioned
boundaries between mind and body. As my mother went through treatment, we
leaned on friends to sustain us through the exigencies of daily life with cancer,
thus refashioning our domestic social relations, both within our family and outside of it. The world as I knew it was never the same.
Over the next several years, other medical experiences similarly challenged
taken-for-granted categories through which I knew the world. I was diagnosed

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145

with a chronic illness, my paternal grandmother developed Alzheimer’s disease,
and a chronically ill friend committed suicide. Each of these experiences was
characterized by its own distinctive horror, sadness, and pain; taken together they
taught me about the limits of biomedical categories to explain the experience
of life made fragile by illness. Although I still looked to doctors as the source
of authoritative knowledge, I did so without the surety that they would provide
answers or cures.
Looking back on these moments now, I see them as the ﬁrst instances in which
I came to see how the world could be otherwise, a task that I now tell my students
in introductory anthropology is one of the central contributions of our ﬁeld. None
of the authoritative frames that I had known thus far (medical, religious) could
fully address the range of problems posed by cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, or
chronic illness – and neither could any of the alternate authorities that I sought
(“alternative” medical therapies, spiritual searching). Yet the very fact of these
alternate authorities sparked in me an interest in how differently power, knowledge, and comfort can be conﬁgured. It is this personal interest in multiple
worlds, ontologies, and epistemologies – and their constructed nature – that spurred me to pursue a career in anthropology.
The topical and geographical foci of my research (aging and Poland) were
motivated by seemingly divergent impulses, simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal, to better understand my own experience in the context of the broader
world. I was deeply affected by the transformations in my family brought about by my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease; with time, I realized that my unease stemmed not only from changes in my grandmother herself but also from
how her position within our family shifted. Before the diagnosis, she was the
authoritative source of knowledge and morality within our family, the person
to whom my parents suggested I turn for advice on making difﬁcult decisions,
the person who composed meticulous schedules of activities for my sister and
me (e.g., visits to the Smithsonian museums, which were not far from their
house in northern Virginia; elaborate arts and crafts projects in a specially designated room in their house). Following the diagnosis, these qualities and stories
faded into the background of our family’s attention; instead we interacted with
her from an evaluative stance, looking for the veracity of her comments on the
mundane facts of daily life. Her possible world shrank from the expansive one
of museums in the nation’s capital to one bounded by the diagnostic criteria and
expected trajectory of a disease. I came to learn that this form of diminished
personhood is common among contemporary experiences of Alzheimer’s in the
contemporary US (Cohen 1998). I was desperate to know how the grandmother whom I loved and trusted had suddenly become a person whose words and
actions had to be interpreted in a radically different manner. Personally, I wanted to understand how such diagnoses could transform and even destroy personhood – and as an anthropologist, I wanted to understand the sociocultural, poli-

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Jessica C. Robbins-Ruszkowski

tical-economic, and historical conditions that made such radical transformations
possible.
Inspired by Lawrence Cohen’s work on aging and Alzheimer’s disease in India (Cohen 1998), and by his critique of the gero-anthropological enterprise (Cohen 1994), I sought to design a doctoral research project that did not presuppose
the meaningful dimensions or categories of aging. For professional and personal
reasons I wanted to do ﬁeldwork internationally. As an American student attending an American university for graduate school, there were more opportunities
for external funding for research abroad than at home. As the granddaughter of
an American woman with Alzheimer’s, and never having lived abroad, the unfamiliarity of a different country and language offered the hope of an escape from
witnessing an experience that felt painfully close to home. These pragmatic and
emotional desires shaped my desires for an international ﬁeld site.
As I was beginning graduate school in 2004, I was paying attention to the
expansion of the European Union to include countries in so-called eastern Europe
that had been under the inﬂuence of the Soviet Union. As a child of Reagan-era
America, the Cold-War binary division between East and West structured my
imagination (cf. Verdery 1996) such that I felt instinctively drawn to wanting
to understand that particular geographic region. Also, memory and age seemed
potentially culturally salient frames for understanding the changes in eastern
Europe at that time, since older people there have lived through such dramatic
political-economic and sociocultural transformations. Although I had no academic, professional, or personal connections to any countries in the region, I quickly learned about the resources of the Copernicus Program and what was then
called the Center for Russian and East European Studies (now the Center for
Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies) at the University of Michigan.
At that time, in addition to offering four years of language training, the university faculty included scholars in many disciplines (sociology, history, political
science, literature and ﬁlm studies) who studied Poland. I was thrilled to learn
from such wonderful scholars and to be surrounded by such terriﬁc institutional
resources.
These pragmatic reasons for choosing a ﬁeld site co-existed with what I now
see as a remarkable hubris: the conﬁdence that I could gain the skills necessary to
show up in a completely unknown place, gain access to intimate places, and build
the trust required for ethnographic ﬁeldwork. These choices were more fortunate
than I knew, since I quickly realized how locally and anthropologically meaningful were the topics of age and memory. Although I thought I had successfully created an etic perspective that would allow for the personal distance that I thought
necessary for professional work, I learned during my long-term research that it
was impossible to leave behind the personal dimensions from which I was trying
to escape. In fact, the more enmeshed I became in the ﬁeldwork and the better
I understood local contexts, the less able I was to maintain distance.

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From the professional back to the personal
I have experienced doing ﬁeldwork in Poland as a series of kindnesses upon
kindnesses. As I asked family friends and professional colleagues to reach out
to their networks, I was repeatedly overwhelmed by the warm, welcoming responses I received. I am overcome with gratitude to these friends and colleagues,
and their friends and colleagues, who opened the doors that made my ﬁeldwork
possible. At my ﬁeld sites, I was encouraged to feel at home, to feel u siebie,
rather than the interloper, the ethnographer, that I was. Most often, I was greeted
with a sense of surprise, but not distrust, that a young American woman would be
interested in the experiences of older people in Poland. I attribute this not only to
the warmth and kindness of particular individuals, but also to the relative cultural
marginalization of older people in Poland, such that people were surprised that
a younger woman would be interested in spending time with older people. Additionally, the relatively positive feelings that many Poles have towards the US
facilitated my work.
This warmth extended to the academic sphere as well, as I felt welcomed into
Polish academia from my ﬁrst trip to Poland in 2006. In the discipline of anthropology, I am particularly grateful to the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań for an ofﬁcial afﬁliation
in 2008-2010. I appreciated that the anthropology faculty and students there, and
at the University of Lower Silesia in Wrocław, included me in both the academic
and social life of the institution. Through the EASA conference in Poznań in
2009, I came to know many more participants in the vibrant, energetic intellectual
community that constitutes the ﬁeld of anthropology in Poland. I am grateful for
the intellectual, practical, and emotional support of my Polish anthropology colleagues, who continue to inspire me to read widely and engage creatively with the
world around me. Outside anthropology, I appreciated the intellectual stimulation
from my colleagues in the Institute of Pedagogy at the University of Wrocław,
who helped me to see anthropology in a new light. From all these colleagues and
friends, some of whom I would surely omit by trying to name them all, I was
inspired by the genuine collegiality, intellectual curiosity, and energetic mode of
being that pervaded their work and lives.
As I was searching for locations in which to conduct ﬁeldwork, my primary
goal was to achieve a diverse range of ﬁeld sites. Because experiences of illness
in old age can often take on a primary role in determining other aspects of life
(e.g., place of residence, relationships with kin), I sought out ﬁeld sites that would
allow me access to populations with a wide range of health statuses. Speciﬁcally,
my primary ﬁeld sites were a rehabilitation hospital (ZOL) run by an order of
Catholic nuns, a state-run home for the chronically physically ill (DPS), a day
center for people with early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and Universities of the

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Jessica C. Robbins-Ruszkowski

Third Age. This assortment of ﬁeld sites meant that I got to know research participants who lived at home and in institutions, and whose life histories were diverse
in terms of class background, region of origin, and kin relations. Such a range of
experiences also created access to people who were in both the so-called “third”
and “fourth” ages, life stages sometimes used in gerontology to describe the supposed differences between the relatively healthier, younger, “productive” old, and
the relatively sicker, older, and “decrepit” elderly (Laslett 1996). Such diversity
of research participants provides a strong basis for one of the primary ﬁndings of
this research: namely, that despite a polarized moral context in which a positive
old age becomes associated with health and a negative old age becomes associated with illness, there exists a striking similarity in the morality of the texture of
everyday life. Across these diverse sites, I was struck by the similarities in daily
practices of relatedness (Carsten 2000), and particularly in practices of commensality, storytelling, and remembering. Notably, in all contexts, older people told
stories in which they weaved together details of their own lives with the stories of
the Polish nation (Robbins 2013). I have come to understand moral personhood,
for older Poles, as intensely national, in such a way that people create meaningful
understandings of their own lives through placing themselves in the historical,
romantic Polish nation (Robbins-Ruszkowski 2014).
I divided my time between Wrocław and Poznań. My own personal and professional connections were strongest in these cities, so there was a practical dimension to these choices. Intellectually, I was intrigued by the differing roles
each city has played in the nation’s history. How might the symbolism of Wrocław as a city in the Ziemie Odzyskane compare to the symbolism of Poznań as
the seat of the ﬁrst Polish royalty, and how might this matter in everyday life?
How might the histories of migration of older wrocławianie as compared to the
relative multi-generational geographic stability of older poznaniacy shape experiences of old age? However, these questions remain one of the more difﬁcult
aspects of my ﬁeldwork to parse, since I cannot isolate out such a variable in the
way that I had hoped. That is, regional aspects of life histories become difﬁcult to
separate from the complexities of kin relations, labor histories, and other messy
intricacies of ethnographic data. Although I did not ﬁnd a pattern that allows me
claim that “old age in Wrocław is like x; old age in Poznań is like y,” I came to
appreciate the distinctive regional identities that residents of these cities claim.
Were I to design the project knowing what I know now, however, I would have
chosen a rural location for my ﬁeldwork, as signiﬁcant differences exist in the
rhythms of daily life, the structure of kin relations, and access to institutions.
Personally, as an American, I was drawn to places that were not Warsaw or
Kraków, where I feared I would blend into the crowd of many foreigners there.
Once doing my ﬁeldwork, I realized that this concern was both somewhat futile
and unnecessary, since there were sizable ex-pat and foreign student populations
in Wrocław and Poznań too, and because I organized my time around my ﬁeld

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sites themselves, where I was the only foreigner. Upon reﬂection, I wonder if this
desire was part of a quest for some “authentic” Poland, in the orientalist tradition
of seeking some supposedly pure Other. Of course, this quest was doomed from
the outset by its problematic epistemological premise. Indeed, facing my own
personal connections to my work became more necessary as time passed. In other
words, despite my best efforts at designing a research project that felt sufﬁciently
foreign, the realities of doing ﬁeldwork meant that I could not actually maintain
such distance.
This closeness to my work developed in several ways. First, between preliminary ﬁeldwork in the summer of 2006 and when I returned for long-term
ﬁeldwork in 2008, I met my husband, who grew up in Poland and whose family
still lives there. Thus during my long-term ﬁeldwork, I had family who lived
nearby, meaning that I had a place to go for holidays – and, in the eyes of some
research participants, a more plausible reason for conducting research in Poland.
Second, it turned out that I could not escape memories of my own grandmother,
especially during my ﬁeldwork at the Alzheimer’s center. Certain attendees’ facial expressions or manner of interaction evoked her presence. For instance, one
woman barely spoke but often judged others’ behavior, evident in the furrowing
of her eyebrows and pinching of her lips in response to another attendee’s speaking out of turn. Such expressions recalled times when my own grandmother had
not seemed to have been paying attention to the social interactions happening
around her, but all of a sudden made a comment, often of disapproval, that revealed that she was in fact aware of social conventions. I interpret such moments as
efforts to remain engaged in the social world, despite the disintegration of social
relations that otherwise occurred. These were hard moments during ﬁeldwork, as
I felt drawn into my memories and away from the interactions happening at hand.
Listening and speaking in Polish, however, provided some degree of emotional
distance that helped me remain present in the ﬁeldwork interaction. More difﬁcult were moments without language, such as one time I remember when sitting
with a patient at the rehab center, a woman in her late 90s whom I had come to
know well, after she had dozed off. The silence provided a time for reﬂection,
not only on the events of the day, but also on the sensory elements of sitting with
a person in precarious health. The silence offered a time to focus on the sight of
a fragile, elderly body in pain, to take in the mingled smells of cleaning supplies
and excrement that ﬁlled the air. This meditative mode of engagement blurred the
boundaries I had tried to construct between the various parts of my life. In those
moments, I was simultaneously an ethnographer and a granddaughter, both an
observer and part of the context. Somehow the dampening of the linguistic mode
allowed the other parts of myself to come forward more fully. Such a sense of
my own personhood as integrated, rather than split between a professional and
personal self, became ever more the case during my ﬁeldwork and the years that
have followed.

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Jessica C. Robbins-Ruszkowski

Ethnography and anthropology in fragile times
The longer that I have been studying Poland, the more deeply I have come
to feel the stakes of political, social, and cultural struggles there. I felt this most
intensely during my ﬁeldwork in the summer of 2014, when a series of public
scandals and private ﬁeldwork encounters brought forward my whole self into
my ﬁeldwork in a new way. I had returned to Poland to conduct follow-up research with older persons who neither resided in institutional care nor participated
in Universities of the Third Age, but instead participated in activities that were
less marked, such as allotment gardening or neighborhood senior clubs. I was
again overwhelmed by how quickly some people would share intimate details of
their life stories with me. One woman was particularly notable in the length and
intensity of her narrative style, talking for over six hours without a break. Like
many older people I met, she told her life story in a way that was deeply national,
weaving together national details and moments of her own life as she demonstrated to me that she had special powers to predict the future. Although she was
almost entirely blind, her near-constant companion was Telewizja Trwam, the
television station that is part of the conservative nationalist priest Tadeusz Rydzyk’s media empire. As evidence of another event that she had predicted, she
told me about the tragic plane crash in Smoleńsk in 2010. In her telling, however,
it was not merely tragic, but also evidence of a plot by then-prime minister Donald Tusk in collaboration with Vladimir Putin to kill Lech Kaczyński. This was
not the ﬁrst time I had been told this version of the plane crash by a research participant, and I recognized this conspiracy theory as a result of listening to Telewizja
Trwam. However, I felt increasingly less able to hear such stories with the sort
of distanced ethnographic empathy that had previously come easily to me. When
previously I would not have minded the six-hour interview, at that time I felt my
patience wearing thin.
Indeed, since the beginning of my ﬁeldwork with older people in 2006 I had
sometimes heard comments that were not just contrary to but anathema to my
own worldview: anti-Semitism, conservative Catholic views of abortion and homosexuality. However, something changed in 2014. That summer, the national
news was dominated by the afera podsłuchowa, the deklaracja wiary, and the
ﬁring of medical doctor Bogdan Chazan. In Wrocław, I witnessed a march organized by Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny; in Poznań, the Malta theater festival
cancelled a performance of the controversial play Golgota Picnic. At the same
time, I learned new aspects of friends’ and research participants’ daily struggles.
One friend had recently given birth to a child with severe disabilities, for which
the best treatments were not fully covered by NFZ (National Health Fund). The
stipend she received to compensate for her full-time care of the child was not
enough to subsist on, but neither could she work, thereby further binding her to

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an abusive partner. A longtime research participant had developed Alzheimer’s,
which had advanced to the point that he could not be left alone for long; his
previously calm relationship with his wife became strained such that they were
regularly raising their voices at each other. Somehow what felt to me like the
increasing radicalism of the national-level political and cultural context shaped
how I felt about the daily struggles of people whom I had come to know well, to
change the stakes of my feelings and my scholarship.
The intense and sometimes exclusionary national sentiments of the older people with whom I spent time has long felt like one of the deﬁning features of my
ﬁeldwork. However, until that summer, I had felt secure in one of the contributions of my work being to humanize people who were otherwise marginalized,
discriminated against, and suffering. Indeed, I do think that this is still an important contribution of this work in particular and of anthropology more broadly.
Earnestly conveying the views of people with whom we disagree on fundamental
political and existential levels is a core contribution of our ﬁeld. However, in the
contemporary context of increasing radicalization, not only in Poland but also
across Europe, the US, and other parts of the world, it is easier to see the consequences of the worldview of my research participants. Empathetic understanding
feels easier when I feel more removed from such perspectives. Thus, I turn to
a more distanced type of questioning to ask: What does it mean that older people ﬁnd belonging through an exclusionary politics? Given that an exclusionary
nationalist narrative is central to the politics of the contemporary ruling party in
Poland, what does this mean for the futures of belonging in Poland? Through this
rhetorical mode, I am ﬁnding a way towards maintaining ethnographic understanding despite the closeness that this work requires. It seems paradoxical that the
closeness that often accrues during the course of ﬁeldwork is also the very thing
that can make it harder to do the work. Perhaps by tacking back and forth from
closeness to distance, and by exploring the “shadow side” of ﬁeldwork through
considering how we both shape and are shaped by our research, ethnographic
practice can better achieve its ideal of merging etic and emic perspectives.

REFERENCES
Behar R.
1991
Carsten J.
2000

Death and Memory: From Santa María Del Monte to Miami Beach, “Cultural Anthropology” 6: 3, pp. 346-384.
Introduction: Cultures of Relatedness, in: J. Carsten (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, Cambridge, New York:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-36.

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Cohen L.
1994

Jessica C. Robbins-Ruszkowski

Old Age: Cultural and Critical Perspectives, “Annual Review of Anthropology” 23, pp.137-158.
1998
No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goslinga G., Frank G.
2007
In the Shadows: Anthropological Encounters with Modernity, in: A. McLean,
A. Leibing (eds.), The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred
Boundaries between Ethnography and Life, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. xi-xviii.
Laslett P.
1996
A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age, London: Macmillan
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McLean A., Leibing A. (eds.)
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The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred Borders between
Ethnography and Life, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Narayan K.
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Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Robbins J.
2013
Shifting Moral Ideals of Aging in Poland: Suffering, Self-Actualization, and
the Nation, in: C. Lynch, J. Danely (eds.), Transitions and Transformations:
Cultural Perspectives on the Life Course, New York: Berghahn Books,
pp. 79-91.
Robbins-Ruszkowski J.C.
2014
Thinking with “Postsocialism” in an Ethnographic Study of Old Age in Poland, “Cargo: Journal for Social/Cultural Anthropology” 12: 1-2, pp. 35-50.
Verdery K.
1996
What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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