Students of Polish politics and society have become increasingly disturbed by the prevalence of sentiments and opinions incompatible with modern liberal democracy. Since the Polish economy has performed consistently well in the last two decades, the rise of populism, exemplified by the Law and Justice Party (PiS), the ruling party since 2015, cannot readily be attributed to declining material conditions. Anna Malewska-Szałygin's book, first published in Polish in 2008, provides both graphic illustrations and intriguing answers to this puzzle. According to the traditional world view of villagers in the Podhale region (immediately north of the “real” highlanders of the Tatra Mountains), it is the task of the state to provide for its citizens according to the same basic principles that hold the head of a family is responsible for all its members. The gospodarz should carry out this function not so much through strong forms of care (though these are apparently important in other regions of Poland) but above all through ensuring the availability of paid work, always scarce in these poor upland villages. Since the disintegration of the socialist economy and the downsizing of local factories, these basic duties have been neglected.
Of course, these fiercely independent, strongly Catholic villagers would never self-identify as socialists. Malewska-Szałygin argues against stereotypes such as “homo sovieticus” and also the “postsocialist” approaches of western anthropologists. Rather, we need to understand persisting rural “social imaginaries” (a concept borrowed from Charles Taylor) since the late nineteenth century. Drawing on the classical study of the Polish peasantry by William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1918–20), she asserts that the state first made itself felt in villagers’ consciousness as a mysterious “superhuman” order in the wake of feudalism. In the course of the twentieth century it was “tamed.” In comparison, however, with respected leaders of the socialist era (Edward Gierek and also Wojciech Jaruzelski, who acted in the nation's best interests), the new political elites lack credibility. In the present “post-traditional” (Anthony Giddens) or “post-peasant” society, politicians are perceived as feudal “lords,” who accumulate wealth without honest work. Worse, liberals are readily identified with Jews and excluded altogether from the national community. The pages detailing populist antisemitism are prescient in light of Polish politics today. Translating her informants’ obscenities into the language of academia, the author notes drily that these representations are indicative of “a deep crisis of the government's legitimacy” (140).
The central imaginaries are explored empirically in five substantive chapters devoted respectively to the state, the authorities, the nation, democracy, and participation in public life. Vivid transcriptions are littered with exclamation marks, hilarious humor mingling with fascist bigotry. These chapters make depressing reading for those who value parliamentary democracy, tolerance of others, and the rule of law, but in her lengthy introduction Malewska-Szałygin explains why it is important to understand these voices, no matter how repugnant they may seem. She offers a sophisticated discussion of relevant theory and methodology, including a who's who of Anglophone political anthropology and a subtle engagement with narrative theory and the awkward “common sense” of those whose views are seldom registered by opinion pollsters or social scientists. Her methods rely primarily on teamwork with students. When interviews in villagers’ homes in 1999 proved unsatisfactory, later expeditions focused on the marketplace of the county town, where conversations flowed more freely. The next task was to impose order on the resulting 450 unruly transcripts (including twenty-two mysteriously lost, according to the list provided in an Appendix). This feat was accomplished by means of the source metaphor “as on the farm, so in the state” (74). The resulting analysis flows very well. It is leavened with plentiful references not only to celebrated American anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai, Clifford Geertz, and Marshall Sahlins, but also to Polish intellectuals such as Leszek Kołakowski on myth, Józef Tischner on ethics and work, Zdzisław Krasnodębski on the difference between liberal and republican, participatory variants of democracy, and Jadwiga Staniszkis on Poland's historic inability to accomplish the “mental revolution of nominalism” (117) that permitted modern forms of polity to emerge elsewhere in Europe.
Even if the market crowd is unrepresentative and the colorful exaggerations of loudmouth highlander extroverts (mostly male) interacting with liberal Warsaw undergraduates (mostly female) are not necessarily a reliable guide to their voting behavior, let alone their deeper values, I find the interpretations offered in this book largely convincing. It is a welcome addition to the English-language literature on contemporary east European politics (an index would also have been welcome). It might be suggested that, since these data were collected when the chaos of 1990s “shock therapy” was still a vivid memory, they provide little guidance to the significantly different cleavages observable in Poland today. Yet the Podhale villagers who voted enthusiastically for PiS in 2005 seem to have blazed a trail for the rest of the country. Following EU access, many Poles have again found work abroad, especially in Britain. But deep-seated dissatisfaction with those managing the Polish state has evidently not gone away. Anna Malewska-Szałygin notes that those who experience more cosmopolitan forms of life elsewhere through migration do not change their values and opinions concerning problems at home; these tend to remain anchored in the traditional world view.
