Imaginary Neighbors offers a unique and significant contribution to the contemporary debate concerning Holocaust memory by exploring the most important current political topic in Poland: Jewish-Polish relations during and after World War II.
It is rapacitas. Caterpillage also explores the impact of this message on the meaning of the genre's French name. We use the conventional term nature morte ("dead nature") without giving any thought to how misleading it is. Because so many portraits of still in bloom, are dying, it would be more accurate to name the genre nature mourant. The subjects of still life are plants that are still living, plants that are dying but not yet dead. --Book Jacket.
Offering a rare glimpse into the lives of those who lived through the German occupation of Poland's capital, this important ethnography explores how elderly residents of Warsaw recollect, narrate, and commemorate their experiences, thus showing how the cultural legacies of the occupation reveal themselves in contemporary Polish society. The individuals who are the focus of this study, all long-time residents of the Warsaw neighborhood Zoliborz, responded to the daily deprivations and brutality of the German occupation by joining branches of the Polish underground, ultimately participating in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944—during which their neighborhood was burned, but not destroyed—as soldiers, couriers, and medics. Using life histories and ethnographic fieldwork, Tucker examines the ways that her informants recovered from the rupture of war, arguing that this process was connected to efforts to rebuild the city itself. Remembering Occupied Warsaw makes an important contribution to studies of collective memory. A moving work of oral history, this book will appeal to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, and East European studies, as well as general readers interested in Polish history.
In an age of information and new media the relationships between remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina. Through these cases, the contributors argue for a re-interpretation of Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the contemporary landscape of social memory, arguing that the concept of spectacle might be developed in an age seen as dissatisfied with the present, nervous about the future, and obsessed with the past. Perhaps now “spectacle” can be thought of not as a tool of distraction employed solely by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer Walter Benjamin’s plea to “explode the continuum of history” and bring our attention to now-time.
* Winner: International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Outstanding Book Award 2016 * My Father’s Wars is an anthropologist's vivid account of her father's journey across continents, countries, cultures, generations, and wars. It is a daughter's moving portrait of a charming, funny, wounded and difficult man. And it is a scholar's reflection on the dramatic forces of history, the experience of exile and immigration, the legacies of culture, and the enduring power of memory. This book is for Anthropology and Sociology courses in qualitative methods, ethnography, violence, migration, and ethnicity.
In a small Texas neighborhood, an affluent group of mothers has been repeatedly rocked by catastrophic flooding—the 2015 Memorial Day flood, the 2016 Tax Day flood, and sixteen months later, Hurricane Harvey. Yet even after these disrupting events, almost all mothers in this neighborhood still believe there is only one place for them to live: Bayou Oaks. In Too Deep is a sociological exploration of what happens when climate change threatens the carefully curated family life of upper-middle-class mothers. Through in-depth interviews with thirty-six Bayou Oaks mothers whose homes flooded during Hurricane Harvey, Rachel Kimbro reveals why these mothers continued to stay in a place that was becoming more and more unstable. Rather than retreating, the mothers dug in and sustained the community they have chosen and nurtured, trying to keep social, emotional, and economic instability at bay. In Too Deep provides a glimpse into how class and place intersect in an unstable physical environment and underlines the price families pay for securing their futures.
A lyrical literary memoir that explores the exhilarating, discomforting, and ultimately healing process of Polish-Jewish reconciliation taking place in Poland today Although an estimated 80 percent of American Jews are of Polish descent, many in the postwar generation and those born later know little about their families’ connection to their ancestral home. In fact, many Jews continue to think of Poland as a bastion of anti-Semitism, since nearly the entire population of Polish Jewry was killed in the Holocaust. The reality is more complex: although German-occupied Poland was the site of great persecution towards Jews, it was also the epicenter of European Jewish life for centuries. Louise Steinman sets out to examine the burgeoning Polish-Jewish reconciliation movement through the lens of her own family's history, joining the ranks of Jews of Polish descent who are confronting both Poland’s heroism and occupation-afflicted atrocities, and who are seeking to reconnect with their families’ Polish roots
Reflections on Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” these original essays examine various facets of violence and human efforts to create peace. Religion is deeply involved in both processes: ones that produce violence and ones that seek to create harmony. In the war on terror, radical religion is often seen to be a major cause of inter-group violence. However, these essays show a much more complex picture in which religion is often on the receiving end of conflict that has its origin in the actions of the state in response to tensions between majorities and minorities. As this volume demonstrates, the more public religion becomes, the more likely it is to be imbricated in communal strife.
Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko, known as Jadzia (Yah′-jah), was a young Polish Catholic physician in Łódź at the start of World War II. Suspected of resistance activities, she was arrested in January 1944. For the next fifteen months, she endured three Nazi concentration camps and a forty-two-day death march, spending part of this time working as a prisoner-doctor to Jewish slave laborers. A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps follows Jadzia from her childhood and medical training, through her wartime experiences, to her struggles to create a new life in the postwar world. Jadzia’s daughter, anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer, constructs an intimate ethnography that weaves a personal family narrative against a twentieth-century historical backdrop. As Rylko-Bauer travels back in time with her mother, we learn of the particular hardships that female concentration camp prisoners faced. The struggle continued after the war as Jadzia attempted to rebuild her life, first as a refugee doctor in Germany and later as an immigrant to the United States. Like many postwar immigrants, Jadzia had high hopes of making new connections and continuing her career. Unable to surmount personal, economic, and social obstacles to medical licensure, however, she had to settle for work as a nurse’s aide. As a contribution to accounts of wartime experiences, Jadzia’s story stands out for its sensitivity to the complexities of the Polish memory of war. Built upon both historical research and conversations between mother and daughter, the story combines Jadzia’s voice and Rylko-Bauer’s own journey of rediscovering her family’s past. The result is a powerful narrative about struggle, survival, displacement, and memory, augmenting our understanding of a horrific period in human history and the struggle of Polish immigrants in its aftermath.