Paper long abstract:

My paper takes up some of the methodological and epistemological issues that are faced by anthropologists who deal with local communities in contemporary post-socialistic cities.

As a specific example I propose a part of the district of Wola in Warsaw, Poland, where the Jewish ghetto was located during the II World War. Almost completely destroyed in the war, rebuilt afterwards, the district is currently a place of rapid social, economic and spatial changes. Intensifying processes of migration are inseparably connected with the historical context of social and demographic disaster.

The paper aims at understanding the characteristics of the rapid changes of contemporary East-European post-socialist localities/communities in the context of the crisis of anthropological methodology.

What is an anthropologists answer to Bruno Latour's questions: "how many are we": the methodological question concerning the definition of "the social". "Can we live together": which is in fact the political problem of living in multicultural society.