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Paper short abstract

In this paper I revisit my long term research in Poland in relation to changes in political economy, regional differences, and shifts in anthropological theory. I focus on how we bring together individual personal narrative and dominant discourses of social change.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I look back at ethnographic research I have conducted since 1977 in Poland, in terms of different registers of change: effects of changing political economy during late socialism, economic restructuring followed by early 'cowboy capitalism' and new (or re-emergent?) forms of social inequality, and finally EU accession and yet another face of political economy. My own research over this period was situated in very diverse regions: the southern highlands (Podhale), the industrial/post industrial city of Łódź, and the eastern Lubelskie region. I concentrate on different contexts of change and sites of re-visitation. First and foremost, how do big processes of social, economic and political change, set into motion at the national and international level, influence the lives of citizens in different kinds of regions, and within specific regions or areas, on citizens of different status, generation, gender and ethnicity? How do these different levels or contexts of change interact with and have impact on each other, generating new processes (both positive and negative) or reproducing and reinforcing existing structures? These questions in turn relate to anthropological methods, theory and imagination. How does the anthropologist, returning and revisiting areas undergoing profound, externally generated, change manage to understand and interpret what is occurring, how do longstanding personal relationships unfold and develop, how does the anthropologist revisit past understandings and perhaps reinterpret them, and how do changes in our discipline's wider theoretical, methodological and ethical approaches influence these ethnographic processes of current, historical, retrospective analysis and interpretation?