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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how agrarian communities in eastern Poland live at the “end of worlds,” where poisoned air, rebelling nature, and a sense of lost futures shape everyday practices of sense-making and situated re-worlding amid ecological and political crises.

Paper long abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic research among agrarian and post-agrarian communities in Podlasie (eastern Poland), this paper examines how rural inhabitants experience living at what they describe as the “end of worlds.” In a region sometimes framed as Poland B, narratives of environmental and moral degradation, and political abandonment articulate a sense that social and agrarian worlds have been progressively un-made through postsocialist transformation, EU agricultural politics, and contemporary ecological crises.

I analyse locally circulating end-times imaginaries centred on toxicity, bodily fragility, rebellion of nature, and the loss of a viable future. Recurrent motifs of “poisoned air,” illness, and weakening bodies are explained through overlapping temporal and cosmological frames: Cold War nuclear catastrophe (Chernobyl), present-day environmental contamination, post-pandemic life, and Christian moral idioms. These narratives resonate with older, quasi-medieval understandings of disease and danger as emanating from the air, while simultaneously indexing Anthropocene anxieties about more-than-human agency and the limits of human mastery.

Engaging anthropological debates on worlding, un-worlding, and re-worlding (Haraway; Tsing; de la Cadena), risk and crises, and the loss of the future characteristic of catastrophic societies (Berardi; Fisher), I argue that these narratives constitute practices of sense-making and partial re-worlding, with “healthy rural food” and agrarian moral economies acting as material and symbolic forms of repair amid perceived endings.

By tracing how ecological, political, and more-than-human crises are lived and negotiated in a peripheral agrarian context, the paper contributes to anthropologies of end-times by foregrounding everyday forms of endurance, moral recalibration, and world-maintenance in a polarised world.