- Home
- Dystopia's Provocateurs
Preparing your PDF for download...
There was a problem with your download, please contact the server administrator.
Dystopia's Provocateurs
Peasants, State, and Informality in the Polish-German Borderlands
Published by: Indiana University Press
248 Pages, 9 b&w illus., 1 map
- eBook
- 9780253029096
- Published: October 2017
$9.99
Other Retailers:
Toward the end of the Second World War, Poland's annexation of eastern German lands precipitated one of the largest demographic upheavals in European history. Edyta Materka travels to her native village in these "Recovered Territories," where she listens carefully to rich oral histories told by original postwar Slavic settlers and remaining ethnic Germans who witnessed the metamorphosis of eastern Germany into western Poland. She discovers that peasants, workers, and elites adapted war-honed informal strategies they called "kombinacja" to preserve a modicum of local agency while surviving the vicissitudes of policy formulated elsewhere, from Stalinist collectivization to the shock doctrine of neoliberalism. Informality has taken many forms: as a way of life, a world view, an alternate historical text, a border memory, and a means of magical transformation during times of crisis. Materka ventures beyond conventional ethnography to trace the diverse historical, literary, and psychological dimensions of kombinacja. Grappling with the legacies of informality in her own transnational family, Materka searches for the "kombinator within" on the borderlands and shares her own memories of how the Polish diaspora found new uses for kombinacja in America.
Acknowledgements
Note on Pronunciation and Translation
Acronyms
Introduction
1. History's Ghosts
2. Kombinacja's Histories
3. Recovering Territories
4. Magical Stalinism
5. Proletarian Memories
6. Kombinacja's Ghosts
7. Border Memories
Bibliography
Index
Edyta Materka received her PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London.
"
By concentrating on the local strategies of combination in the areas of uprootedness, Materka has made an interesting and valuable contribution to our knowledge of human behavior. References and the use of Polish words for important concepts are exemplary. . . . [H]er collection of narratives provides food for thought on the relation between formal regulation and human ingenuity.
" ~Baltic Worlds
"
Rare and exceptionally well-researched analysis of an invisible practice.
" ~Alena Ledeneva, author of Can Russia Modernise?: Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance
"Materka has produced an eloquently written, exciting, and meticulously analyzed ethnographic history that marks an alternative to the vast majority of strictly archival-based historical literature on the German-Polish borderlands. Within the field of Polish history, this book is also an important contribution as the first extensive work on the critical role of informality in the politics, society, and economy of People's Poland."
~Peter Polak-Springer, H-German
"Indeed, Dystopia's Provocateurs is an unorthodox scholarly work with regard to both content and form. Venturing beyond scholarly conventions, Materka smoothly blends ethnographic analysis with cultural criticism as she dissects the ghosts of kombinacja in post-1989 Poland (p. 173–193) and when she compares the current developments in Pomerania and Silesia (p. 201–210). . . . Dystopia's Provocateurs is a highly inspiring book not only for those interested in the history of East Central Europe, but also scholars working in the vibrant field of informality studies."
~Kornelia Kończal, Hsozkult