Thursday, November 18, 202112:15 PM - 1:45 PM (Pacific Time)
Photo: "Pond Amongst Trees" by Huw Morgan from FreeImages. Published under FreeImages' Content License Agreement.
Abstract
After 1945, Poland was moved westward, gaining new regions at the expense of Germany. These lands were presented as “recovered.” The German inhabitants who used to live there for centuries were replaced with new settlers. The settlement went hand in hand with the attempts of the Polish authorities to get rid of any signs of Germanness in the acquired lands. How did the entangled, multilayered presences and almost-existences of Poles, Germans, Jews, and Soviets create a particular landscape of the Recovered Territories? What was the role of disturbing objects and how did they influence the creation of this landscape? In this talk, I attempt to address these questions by applying anthropological sensitivities to analyze memoirs left by the Polish settlers and by showing how this landscape was spectrally transformed.
Author
Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska is a faculty member at the Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Geography Department, UCLA. Author of Remembered in Landscape: Czech-German Borderlands in the Times of Change (Warsaw, 2017), she investigates how new cultures emerge in places subjected to forced migration in Central Europe. She has published in East European Politics and Societes and Cultures, Die Welt der Slaven, and Bohemia: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder.
About CPSC
Culture, Power, and Social Change (CPSC) is concerned with a broad range of issues in sociocultural anthropology and is housed at the UCLA Department of Anthropology. CPSC is particularly interested in how the workings of culture and of different forms of power and inequality play out in the contemporary world. Behind these two issues are questions of social change, that is, of the ways in which the rapidly changing world of today impacts people’s lives, and in turn, how people in different circumstances seek to bring about change in the world.
Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Anthropology, Culture, Power, and Social Change (CPSC)