Paper short abstract:

During the Warsaw Ghetto, Jewish activists produced and collided material in the Ghetto about the Ghetto, which is nowadays know as the "Ringelblum Archive". This paper explores the work of this group not so much as an "Archive", but more as "The Results of the Oyneg Shabes Action Research Group".

Paper long abstract:

During the existence of the Warsaw Ghetto, a group of Jewish activists produced and collided a body of 35.000 pages of material in the Ghetto about the Ghetto, which is nowadays know as the "Ringelblum Archive". Without negating its context of activism, nor its value as a historical document, this paper explores the work of this group not so much as an "Archive", but more as "The Results of the Oyneg Shabes Action Research Group". The influences on this group can be traced, for example, to the scholarship in the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO) founded in Berlin and situated at the time in Vilnius; to engaged US American Sociology and Anthropology in the 1930s, to historical work in real time by Jewish historians and ethnographers on the pogroms in Ukraine 1917-1919, to Yiddish folklore studies, or to Pre-war Marxist social research. These traditions merged in a unique hybrid of realtime-history, ethnography and sociology; of outcry, activism, criminal investigation, and distanced research; of original material and analysis; of collaboration and centralisation; of Marxist framing and liberal practice. As such, it has striking resonances with contemporary transdisciplinary, collaborative, (auto-)ethnographic, activist research. This talk explores such resonances, while trying to evade the pitfalls of projecting contemporary practices into the group, or retrospectively inserting it into an ancestor gallery of sorts. Instead, it aims to explore an example for engaged social research in the trenches of nationalism, and asks what we can learn from it for current engaged anthropology in crisis situations.