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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the phenomenon of an émigré anthropologist, close student of Malinowski, who left Poland soon after WWII. Despite the possibility of entering the anthropological mainstream, his academic trajectory broke down and he remained a marginal figure albeit a remarkable scholar.

Paper long abstract:

This paper, based on archival sources, is an attempt at expounding the motivation, choices and fate of an émigré Polish anthropologist, whose position seems to have been marginal and mediating at the same time. Józef Obrębski (1905-1967) left Poland in 1946, on the eve of the takeover of the Polish field of social science by the Communists, according to the Soviet pattern. He was neither a DP nor a political refugee in the strict sense. He left the country legally. His colleagues from Malinowski’s seminar at the London School of Economics, in which he participated in the early 1930s, invited Obrębski to deliver lectures in Oxford and afterwards to conduct fieldwork in Jamaica in cooperation with the West Indian Social Survey. This project could have resulted in establishing his position in the field of Western anthropology. But it never came to fruition and instead Obrębski worked at the UN Trusteeship Department in New York as a Polish representative. He maintained close contacts with his colleagues in Poland, mainly sociologists, and considered returning to Warsaw after the 1956 revolution. Only in 1964 did he receive US citizenship. For the last decade of his life he taught sociology and anthropology at several NYU colleges, but he never found himself in the mainstream of American anthropology. In this paper I am analysing the phenomenon of Obrębski’s marginality in connection with the breakdown of his academic trajectory. This analysis can be seen as a contribution to the history of East European ethnology/anthropology in exile.