Making modern social science: The global imagination in East Central and Southeastern Europe after Versailles
January 2019
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Journal article
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Contemporary European History
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 groundbreaking Argonauts 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.2 Malinowski 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
The Polish peasant on the sugar plantation: Bronisław Malinowski, Feliks Gross and Józef Obrębski in the New World
December 2018
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Journal article
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Contemporary European History
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.
Letter from Linz: an archive story
January 2017
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Journal article
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Shoah: Intervention. Methods. documentION
In 2015, I discovered a previously unknown letter from Simon Wiesenthal, sent to his wife Cyla upon learning she was alive in 1945, in the Wiesenthal archive in Vienna. This essay is an ‘archive story’ about this serendipitous discovery and my time spent in Wiesenthal’s former office in Vienna’s Salztorgasse, just before it was dissolved and the collection was moved to its new home at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute. Focusing on the materiality of the archive and its traces of a ‘Polish’ Wiesenthal, embedded in a network of Polish Jewish survivor-documentarians, it asks which biographical narratives were made visible or invisible by the old archive. Grappling with the nostalgia many historians feel for the materiality of traditional archives, moreover, it considers how the move to digitally based research might enable some forms of serendipity yet foreclose others.
Halina Krahelska’s Warsaw Chronicle (1941-1943): Documenting the Holocaust on the Other Side of the Wall.
February 2016
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Chapter
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Als der Holocaust noch keinen Namen hatte / Before the Holocaust had its Name Zur frühen Aufarbeitung des NS-Massenmordes an Jüdinnen und Juden / Early Confrontations of the Nazi Mass Murder of the Jews.
La voix et le regard : les régimes visuels des concours d’autobiographies polonais, 1930-1984
July 2015
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Journal article
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Critique Internationale
Autobiography as Complaint: Polish Social Memoir between the World Wars