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Paper short abstract

Centring sensing bodies in post-socialist Warsaw's anthropocene, I focus on embodied communality (Rakowski 2013): co-presence/co-creation against Capitalocene predations (Malm 2016). Inspired by co-city and intangible heritage, Varsovians reforge rituals for future urban utopias (Harvey 2000).

Paper long abstract

Centring the sensing bodies in Poland’s capital, Warsaw, this paper probes generative epistemic gaps in post-socialist lifeworlds that persist today, intersecting with anthropocene crises demanding novel communal forms of being. David Harvey (2000) posits "living labour" as the foundation of hopeful urban utopias – collective action transforming space amid capitalist predations. Yet, in post-socialist Warsaw and Anthropocene/Capitalocene realities (Tsing 2005; Malm 2016), hope resides in embodied communality: bodies needing co-presence, co-creation, and co-action (Rakowski 2013), forging not mere community but active city-making actors able to react and create against crisis.

The paper investigates how Warsaw's diverse resident populations: autochthonous Varsovians, internal economic migrants, and international newcomers from various countries and continents collectively constitute the urban fabric of the capital and its body. They enact spatial and experiential practices that remain largely uncharted in existing scholarly analyses, producing the social product of urban space (Lefebvre 1974). Employing the conceptual framework of intangible cultural heritage, I draw on phenomena inscribed on Poland's National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage and the "co-city" model (Schreiber, Klekot 2020). I want to illuminate how local histories of "heritage protection" meet global norms of heritage governance in complicated ways (Taylor 2009).

In the post-socialist city amid the precarious anthropocene epoch, intangible heritage emerges not as static relic but as a space for constructing the future. Through an ethnographic lens on senses, and embodied knowledge, I examine how Warsaw’s intangible heritage is contemporaneously created, recreated, and constituted by sensing bodies and decision-makers.