Paper Short Abstract:

The paper presents an ethnographic record of a researcher who was not a professional anthropologist. Irena Czechówna, participant of a field expedition in the then Polish, today Belarusian region of Polesie, documented a comprehensive female narrative on everyday village life, full of poverty and violence. Her archive reveals also information on sex and family life usually unavailable to male researchers.

Paper Abstract:

My paper points to the importance of the role of female ethnographers in the study of traditional communities, where due to gender restrictions the sphere of women was hardly available to male researchers. Irena Czechówna (1911-1970s) was an assistant of the social anthropologist Józef Obrębski, who conducted a field expedition in the eastern Polish region of Polesie (today Belarus) in the 1930s. In 1937 Czechówna participated in collecting materials on youth and families in the village of Olmany. She was at the time a journalism student, not a professional anthropologist. Nevertheless, she proved to be an outstanding ethnographer. Her record (showing proficiency in East-Slavic dialect) comprises almost 300 pages of transcription of conversations and interviews, mainly with women, all of them illiterate. This female narrative focuses on the disintegration of patriarchal family, sex life of the youth, poverty and violence. It not only shows a vivid picture of everyday life in a pre-war Orthodox village, but also contains information omitted in traditional ethnographic/folkloristic documentation, which deconstruct a romantic picture of idyllic village. The archive of Irena Czechówna, stored in the „Obrebski Collection” of UMass Archives in Amherst, undoubtedly deserves to be published, and its author to be remembered.