Elise Richter Fellow

Poland's answer to the cahiers de doléances: "social memoir" (pamiętnikarstwo społeczne), or autobiographical writings by youth, workers, peasants, immigrants, the unemployed, and others, gathered by sociologists in memoir-writing competitions. Like the cahiers de doléances in prerevolutionary France, social memoir accompanied broader discourses of crisis and reform in the Second Polish Republic. The article explores how complaint was framed and conceived as a meaningful speech act by both sociologists and memoirists, arguing that memoirists turned grievances drawn from everyday experience into demands rooted in a moral understanding of social justice. As such, social memoir has much in common with what, in other contexts, we would call witnessing or testimony, and was embedded in cultural assumptions about truth telling and the rights and obligations of citizenship. While critics of the social memoir genre complained that it was too full of complaints, memoirists presented their ability to complain as evidence of their subjecthood: I complain, therefore I am.

This article explores how two of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski's Polish protegés, Feliks Gross (1906-2006) and Józef Obrębski (1905-67), sought to rebuild careers in the United States after the Second World War. Reading the scholars' correspondence of 1946 to 1948, exchanged while Gross was commuting between jobs in New York and Wyoming and Obrębski was conducting fieldwork in Jamaica, it examines the confidence, excitement and sense of discovery with which the two refugees sought to transplant theories and methods first cultivated in interwar Poland to new soil. Arguing that Gross and Obrębski approached exile as a chance to 'go global' with Polish social science, it emphasises the role of both place and displacement in intellectual history. In particular, it looks at how the scholars drew on prewar experiences in East Central Europe to produce new ways of thinking about nationality, globalisation and decolonisation in the postwar world. 'I met several students in Tokyo', wrote Feliks Gross to his mentor Bronisław Malinowski in January 1941. Gross was in Japan hoping for a US visa, having escaped Poland through the Soviet Union. Malinowski was at Yale, on sabbatical from the London School of Economics (LSE). 'Your works are well known here and quoted in lectures', wrote the younger scholar. 'The cousin of the King of Afghanistan is studying education here', Gross went on, affably. 1 In 1939 Gross had been due to take up a position at LSE at Malinowski's invitation. Then the war began. Fleeing first the Germans and then the Soviets, from Kraków to Lviv to Vilnius, Gross hoped to get to London. However, following the invasion of Poland, LSE rescinded its offer and Gross's application for a British visa was refused. Vilnius, meanwhile, was a tenuous refuge at best, and Malinowski threw himself into finding a place for Gross in the United States. He wrote to Oskar Lange, the economist, in Chicago, the New School, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Jewish Labour Bund. 'My dear Gross', began Malinowski's lettershis sculpted English, sounding irony tinged even when sincere, was in sharp contrast to Gross's headlong Polish. The news was not good, but he saved the worst for his reports to Feliks's brother Ludwik, whom Malinowski had already helped find a position in the United States: four letters to Fisk had gone unanswered; Tulane, already hosting four refugee scholars, had refused. Only two years into the war compassion fatigue had set in across US academia. Finally, however, on 26 March 1941, Malinowski wrote to T. B. Kittredge of the Rockefeller Foundation with better news. 'Dear Kit,. .. Nature has run its course. Gross escaped from Lithuania, moved across Siberia, went to Yokohama, then to San Francisco. Research for this article was partially funded by the Austrian Science Fund. I am grateful to Andrew Lawrence, Małgorzata Mazurek and Joanna Wawrzyniak for their comments, feedback and conversation and to Carol Bohmer for research assistance.

The events of 1914 initiated the redrawing of many boundaries, both geopolitical and intellectual. At the outbreak of the war the London-based anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski was at a professional meeting in Australia. Technically an ‘enemy alien’ (a Pole of Austro-Hungarian citizenship), he was barred from returning to Britain; stranded in Australia, under surveillance by authorities and with insecure finances, Malinowski began fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands that would result in his groundbreakingArgonauts of the Western Pacific(1922).1Argonauts’ influence rested on its compelling portrait of the anthropologist as ‘participant-observer’, the insider/outsider uniquely poised to decode and recode cultures and meanings.2Malinowski thus adeptly retooled his own ambiguous status into a paradigm of the ethnographer’s optimal subject-position – quipping that he himself was particularly suited to this role, as ‘the Slavonic nature is more plastic and more naturally savage than that...

Erica L. Tucker's Remembering Occupied Warsaw: Polish Narratives of World War II is based on fieldwork that the author, an anthropologist, conducted in the Warsaw neighborhood of Żoliborz in the late 1990s. Drawing on some 25 life-history interviews, Tucker asks "how older ethnic Poles recollected and narrated the outbreak of war, the German occupation, and postwar recovery" in a series of chronologically organized chapters (4). Żoliborz, of course, is not just any Warsaw neighborhood. Famous before the war for its modern housing and fashionable inhabitants (including many intellectuals, officers and civil servants), today it stands out as one of the few districts to have withstood the Nazis' destructive frenzy: whereas 92% of Warsaw's left bank was in ashes by 1944, Żoliborz, miraculously, survived largely intact. Today, strolling among its pre-war villas and flower-filled courtyards, one has the feeling of having stepped back into a vanished world, and Tucker...

Krahelska was a writer and activist best known for her advocacy for women and young people in interwar Polish industry. This entry provides a brief biography and overview of Krahelska's feminist thought and a translation of her 1937 essay, 'The Roots of Changing Sexual Mores'.