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Paper short abstract

In this paper we revisit long term research in Poland/Czechia respectively in relation to changes in political economy, regional differences, and shifts in anthropological theory, bringing together individual personal narrative and dominant discourses of social change.

Paper long abstract

In this paper we reflect on ethnography and temporal change over several decades of research in Poland and the Czech Republic respectively, in terms of different registers of change: effects of changing political economy during late socialism, the dismantling of state socialism in the early 1990s, EU-accession in the early 2000s, and most recently financial and energy crises and social and politico-economic insecurity after the invasion of Ukraine. We concentrate on different contexts of change and sites of re-visitation. How do big processes of social, economic and political change, set in motion at national or global levels, influence the lives of citizens in different regions, and within specific regions , 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? 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 we observe and analyse social transformation and change and equally important, of continuity, in places and among people we know well? We end with reflections on questions of entitlement and representation in anthropological research in terms of our own transitions from uncritical "participant observation " to less certain and more reflexive positions from which it is increasingly problematic to represent other people’s lives, even with their knowledge and consent.