Enthusiastic youth volunteers were a common sight on Poland's ‘great building site of socialism’ of the Stalin era, the steelworks and new town of Nowa Huta. Paradoxically, however, the succesful mobilisation of youthful labour in Nowa Huta was accompanied by failure to socialise volunteers in their attitudes and behaviours after hours. Preferring jazz to mass songs and speak-easies to ‘red corners’, brigade members gained notoriety as ‘hooligans’, and many encountered difficulties adapting to ‘civilian’ life in the new town. The regime's inability to bridge the gulf between itself and Nowa Huta's youth volunteers, the author argues, reflects Polish Stalinism's critical failure to secure legitimacy among its potentially strongest supporters.

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 of Western Europeans’.3

No abstract

Between the World Wars, Polish sociologists gathered thousands of autobiographies by workers, peasants, and other "ordinary" people. The resulting body of "social memoir" can be read as an argument about social rights: authors simultaneously drew on Enlightenment ideas of subjecthood to press for enfranchisement and portrayed the limits of liberal citizenship, insisting on the embodied experience of poverty. While World War II heightened the urgency of life-writing in Poland (e.g. as testimony), however, postwar personal narratives came to be embedded in new, transnational rights discourses, through which they lost traction as arguments about specifically social rights.

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 pre-war experiences in East Central Europe to produce new ways of thinking about nationality, globalisation and decolonisation in the post-war world.