Could Poland be loved after transformation?
Michał Buchowski
Presence of transformation
One of the most frequently repeated notion in the area stretching from the Elbe River to the Yellow River is transformation. Over and over again, politicians, journalists and scientists keep dwelling on this subject. We live in a magic world of transformation, although we do not know exactly what it really is. The idea, hammered in our heads, has been taken for granted. However, transformation means change, which is an inseparable feature of life of societies and affects their history. What, if not a huge transformation, was establishing socialism in Eastern Europe and then the evolution from totalitarian, through authoritarian, to unstable and collapsing system. But we do not perceive the era of socialism as the time of transformation.
Therefore, what makes us think of ourselves as of the generation living in Transformland? The term transformation has been usually referred to special reformations in special periods in the recent history of Poland and post-Communist countries. The specificity of current transformations is to be based on transgressing from controlled to free market economy and from authoritarian system to democracy. It is the systemic character of transformations that affects their uniqueness and the common consent to this fact, repeated by us in the media, at school, home and yard makes it supposedly undeniable truth. For ordinary people, such Transformation has its good and bad sides. For some it means anxiety about work and social security, for others, professional career and a decent standard of life. An infrequently mentioned aspect of recent changes lies also in episodes of life; we are in a constant rush, we do not smoke at home, we wander around shopping centres, attend private schools, drink less alcohol, eat mandarins not only at Christmas, travel to work by car, we work seasonally abroad, like once we worked lifting potatoes...
The collapse of communism marks the beginning of Transformation understood in this way. But when our transformation reaches the point when we’ll announce triumphantly that it has been completed and at the same time, the beginning of a New Era, ideologists will say that its end means the return to ‘normality’, although the latter is impossible to be defined. There is no ideal system nor the end of history. Life goes on, subject to constant transformation and so do we. But it is us who cause changes and we are responsible for their shape. One day we will say that the Transformation has completed, but this will not mean the end of anything, because the transformation is always present – transformation of us, in us and around us.
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The presented album whose author is Mariusz Forecki is an attempt to capture the recent changes of our life. It is a documentary told by a photographer. It captures moments which we often miss, or – if it were not for his camera lens – would have been lost forever. On one hand, it is in a way an affirmative attempt of describing reality around us. On the other hand, it is reflexive and full of irony. However, Poland is always depicted as a place and people that you love. It is not about pompous patriotic slogans, but about expressing our fascination with what is happening around us, what we capture, understand at once, what we feel comfortable about and what we want to comment, as this is close to our hearts. Only that and as much as that. Poland, in this album, is a case study illustrating the report of someone who is sensitive to the surrounding world. It is not easy to comment the artist’s viewpoint. I think that the most appropriate and fitting the form of the album and its content will be to zoom in several characteristic points of Polish presence in the world, cast some light on a few elements which together define our condition. More such leading threads could be distinguished here, but I would like to focus on three: relationship with Europe, the gift of freedom and relationship to ‘the Other’. Each of these issues is taken lightly and in form of points, as if they were paintings created on the basis of the photos included in this book.
European Myth
Europe, the noun declined in all possible forms, is repeated in our discussions, publications, advertisements. The reason for such popularity is obvious: historic events in which we have all been involved more or less actively since our accession into the European Union, preceded by national referendum – all these facts stimulate imagination. Overnight we became part of a community of nations stretching from the river Bug to the Atlantic Ocean, and from the North Sea to Cyprus. Essentially, this is to be about Europe and our Europeanism, but I would like to start from the Hawaiians and captain James Cook.
During his journey around the world in January 1779, Cook with his small fleet reached Kaelakekua bay in Hawaii. He was welcomed heartily and generously by local inhabitants, and during a short stay on the island, his marines tasted all attractions of an exotic paradise. Soon farewell time came and Cook’s crew left in peace, satiated, happy and under the impression of the stay. Bad luck caused that soon after that, the main mast of Cook’s ship broke down. Like it or not, they returned to the hospitable bay in order to repair it. To the European crew’s surprise, former Hawaiians’ hospitability suddenly transformed into hostility. As a result of a fight, captain Cook was stabbed in his back and died. The natives treated his corpse decently, even worshipping it as if he had been a god and returned the body to the scared visitors. As Marshall Sahlins, an American anthropologist, one of the most outstanding theoreticians of contemporary culture argues, rapid change in ‘savage’ behaviour was not just a whim. At the moment of Cook’s arrival, the Hawaiians were celebrating an annual ceremony devoted to the god named Lono, who, in accordance with their beliefs, was to come by ship (after all, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean coming by ship is not an unusual thing). This coincidence led to the situation where Cook was welcomed like a god. However, after the ceremonies in his honour the god should have left, what our protagonist did, and should have not come back until the following year. Arriving suddenly, the visitors behaved against a mythological scenario, changing from guests into intruders. By doing this, they disrupted the mythological structure, which was adapted to local relations of power. God Lono represented in the first place the conquered stratum of people and the return of his incarnation as a human being would have been treated by the ruling class as a threat to their dominance. Therefore Cook died and even had to die,. This was commanded by the myth.
What on earth do Cook and Hawaii from the period 250 years ago have to do with the inhabitants of Poland at the beginning of the 21st century? I declare that Polish ‘yes’ for the European Union is not a matter of a rational choice, but, similarly to the Hawaiians at the moment of meeting Cook – the fulfilment of a myth, which has been present in the national awareness and repeated in a countless number of discourses: in everyday conversations, oral traditions, literature and poetry, in school handbooks and an unwritten quasi-mythological history. The myth concerns the place of Poland and its citizens on the mental map of the world. I would like to emphasise the word ‘mental’, and not geographical in its strict sense, as according to school-based geography, we have been (at least since the times remembered by chronicle writers and reconstructed by archaeologists and historians) and we are in a predictable future that will be based on the continent called Europe. European integration is the act confirming the presence of Polish ‘imaginary community’ in the ‘family of European nations’. It is the accession into the European Union, which, on the basis of rooted mental patterns, is identified with Europe as such, that becomes the realisation of deeply rooted structure of ‘long existence’, as the representatives of French ‘new history’ would say. What elements account for this myth, for which so many generations fought and even sacrificed their lives?
Mythological icon is complex and multilayered, but some of its elements are quite easy to distinguish. In this image, for centuries Poland was functioning as antemurale christianitatis – bulwark of Christianity. It’s us! We defended Christian Europe from Mongolians, Tatars and Turks. Who of us, from history lessons, does not remember the image of Jan III Sobieski defeating ‘pagan’ Muslims at Vienna in 1683? Did Mr. Wołodyjowski not fight with masses on Dzikie Pola and Janissaries in Kamieniec Podolski? It’s us too! We defended Europe from the flood of Bolsheviks. The miracle of the Vistula river was the mutual action of Providence and the ‘Christ of Nations’. The further element of this image is the image of ourselves as the defendants of Western Christianity from Orthodox and at the same time Asian Russia. It’s us! After all, we are the bridgehead of the West flooded by wild waves of the East, the fortress of civilised Occident, standing face to face with barbarian Orient. The climax of this pro-European process was defeating by us! The communism brought on the bayonets of Red Army soldiers, who had no idea of European values, had no respect for human life and even technological inventions, such as a bicycle or a watch, were something new to them. Among others, this kind of mythological images present in our collective, national awareness led us to the moment when we were voting ‘yes’ for the European Union, which essentially means, as I mentioned, due to contamination – ‘yes’ for Europe. The myth has become reality. At the same time, something that seems so unreal, fictitious, mythological, is displaying its down-to-earth, real power. Captain Cook had to die. We had to join Europe. The myth was the basis for such a scenario and we were its compulsory executors. No appearances that each of us made their own, premeditated decision.
Before I turn to any justification of this view, one more thing needs to be commented on. We are not alone in our belief that we are the saviours of the European civilisation. Similar beliefs are held, starting from the south, the Greeks, who not only survived the Ottoman storm, but were and still are the cradle of culture and science of the entire Western world. Bulgarians, Serbs, and Macedonians have always faced the Turkish occupation threatening Europe for ages. Croatians and Hungarians not only fought Muslims, but also opposed to Orthodox Church with its cradle in the Byzantium. Austrians and Italians represented e.g. by brave Venetians, defended from the attacks of the Islam and Orthodox Church, but also barbarian Slavs. Never-ending story... stretching as far as to the Iberian Peninsula where this domino could have ended, if it had not been for the fact that it was brave defenders of true faith who chased away Maurs, Mahomet believers, and then Jews, Jahweh believers. As one can see, the candidates to European and Christian Virtuti Militari are in abundance. It is surprising that so many nations are reluctant to enter a note on Christian traditions in the European constitution.
Time for the promised arguments. In the course of discussion about Europe, Europeism and the result of referendum, virtually all commentators missed one important detail. If you look at the opinion of Polish citizens (deliberately, I am not talking about the Poles, as apart from them, representatives of many other nations live here at our and their place together, of which many of us seem to forget) about the benefits of European integration, the opinions held by majority of them are sceptical or negative. I am not going to quote specific data, but it is enough to take a deeper look at any poll on this subject, conducted by a generally known poll centre, to see that usually half of the respondents thought, both before and after the referendum, and before and after 1st May, that accession into the European Union would be more favourable for the EU member states that for Poland. Only one person in ten thought that joining the EU would be more favourable for ‘us’ than for ‘them’, and a quarter that it would be equally favourable for both parties. Also in the individual perspective, only every third citizen of the Republic of Poland thought that being part of the EU would be favourable for them, and every fifth thought that the benefit would be very moderate. On the other hand, four out of ten of our fellow countrymen perceived being part of the EU in a more optimistic manner, and approximately every seventh person had no fixed opinion on this issue. I know that such data are mundane, but they are indispensible to state the final argument. If only two fifths of voters were convinced that we, as a community, would be better in the EU, if merely one third thinks that they, as individuals, will be better, why only four out of five (precisely 77.45%) of us voted supporting the EU accession. This means that vast majority (depending on what data will be regarded, between a third and two fifths) of us, so-called rational, balancing all pros and cons, aware and rational human beings living between the Oder and Bug Rivers, the Tatras and Baltic Sea, behaved against their own common sense. Millions of people were acting against what their minds were telling them. And it’s good, because in their seemingly irrational attitude there was nothing irrational.
Can one explain this paradox? Naturally, additional circumstances need to be taken into consideration, such as mass advertising campaign persuading us to vote for joining the EU, open support for integration expressed by the ‘Polish’ Pope, a belief, quite hypothetical, that being in Europe will be beneficial, if not for us, then for the future generations. Nevertheless, I state that the myth of Poland as a country which immanently belongs to Europe has had a significant meaning. It is thanks to mytho-logics, the same mechanism that appeared in the 18th century Hawaiians, which contributed to the fact that we are today part of the European Union. There is some sense behind this madness, a bit different from what scientists say, based on its ‘glass and the eye’. The society and social responses cannot be accounted for by charts and rows of digits arranged into formal patterns. The society is people engaged in their everyday activities, sharing stereotypes, bearing collective memories, emerged in mytho-history. Useless seem to be explanations for those who, paraphrasing Adam Mickiewicz, one of the leading authors of our national mythology, ‘see dead truths, unknown for the people, see the instant world, in every glimmer of the star, do not know living truths, will not see the wonder’. In our perception of the world, also of what we do every day and of what is surrounding us, it seems obvious and sometimes not understandable at the same time, sometimes a bit of imagination will do, which will let us ‘have the heart and see into the heart’. This imagination will let us not only interpret the unconceivable, but also see that we are not so far away from the Hawaiians encountered by captain Cook.
Freedom and social corset
Press reported on the matter as follows: it is May 2008, holiday season has not started yet, and in Szczecin seaside resort called Arkonka two ladies are sunbathing wearing only lower parts of swimming costumes. No one bothers about it, except two alert guardians of the law, who, apparently intrigued by the view, or appalled, told the ladies to put on their bras. When the ladies refuse to do so, the police officers give them tickets which they refuse to accept. As a result, the police lodged a motion to the Municipal Court to punish both of the ladies for sunbathing topless; the court found them guilty, gave them reprimand and charged them with the costs of legal proceedings.
One of them appealed against the decision and recently the Regional Court in Szczecin exonerated the two ladies, as it stated the deed was not indecent, because the behaviour of the sunbathers was not met with indignation nor outrage of any other beach guests sunbathing there.
This seemingly petty social scene illustrates an important phenomenon of the life of any group, concerning the definition of behaviour which is socially acceptable, the scope of social control, and at the same time the boundaries of our freedom. As it turns out, social practices in this area tend to differ substantially, which proves that what is permissible is to a great extent a matter of social agreement. The freedom is not granted to us, and it is dosed by the society. Freedom has its symbols which can be used to fight for it.
In the period of Stalin’s reigns, there was a range of ‘crimes’ which were punished very severely. Capital punishment was adjudicated not only for serious common crime, but also for imaginary high-treason or spying, and, as court records from 1951 prove, even for ‘being a beatnik’. It was a lifestyle allegedly following bourgeoise American and Western European patterns. In 2001, the History Institute of the Polish Academy of Science published ”Combating the American threat in the Stalin period’, whose author is Zbigniew Romek. We learn from this work that, among others, two young people were sentenced to long imprisonment for being part of a beat generation and petty crimes and two other people were nearly hanged. People’s Power showed its mercy changing death for life imprisonment. The most severe sentences for travelling by taxis, going to dance clubs and reading western press! According to Leopold Tyrmand, even colourful socks were an eyesore for communist rulers and jazz was a forbidden fruit.
Mary Douglas, British social anthropologist, showed on coordinate axes dependencies between group control, an individual and the freedom of thought. The pattern shows that groups which strongly control behaviour of an individual at the same time share restrictive view of the world. Everyone has to do what needs to be done, but also think like everyone else. In this type of groups there is a rigid social structure, and the life is full of dos and don’ts. Tribal communities of this type included Tallens from Ghana in the colonial period. Everyone knew what and when to wear, how to comb their hair, what to eat and with whom. The norm was above everything else and the rebels required ritual curing. Similar dependencies can be found in pre-modern Christian societies in Europe, in which rigid social structure was in line with restrictive obligation of sharing the same view of the world. The smallest heresy meant death or excommunication. Naturally other religions were known and tolerated, e.g. the Jews, but the own group had to be socially and ideologically coherent. Uniformity of ideas of the ruling and the ruled was expressed by the popular expression cuius regio, eius religio, i.e. who owns a country, owns the religion. The conflict concerning the way of saying goodbye with two or three fingers split forever the Orthodox believers into Old Believers and propagators of Nikon Patriarch reforms. The former, who wanted to pray and say goodbye in their own way, were sentenced to exile and had to search for shelter outside Russia. As one can see, in such an arrangement there is no room for deviations and any signs of accepting other way of thinking should be destroyed in embryo, as it compromises the structure.
Douglas opposes the aforementioned model with the community of Pygmies from tropical forests of Zaire. They form loose groups, whose composition is flexible, and in everyday life there is room for individual actions and loose interpretation of facts. Beliefs are not defined strictly; there are few taboos, dos and don’ts. It turns out that functioning of a group does not require uniformity of view of the world, it would even do harm. Thinking is the matter of an individual, and actions expressing certain way of thinking do not result in punishment, nor do they appal the others.
The equivalents of the two models of societies can be easily found in our modern world. There are countries and regions where, in a way similarly to Tallens, absence of a beard or a moustache in a man may result in body punishment and publically revealed face of a woman may mean her death. There are societies which very severely refer to behaviour against the authority and ethics, whether it would be religious or socialist. Apparently proletariat dictatorship was a similar, ‘iconic’ type of culture. Everyone has to behave according to the social norm, and the coherence of behaviour is the reflection of moral uniformity and the same view of the world. Death to the beatniks, because they don’t think the way they should! Resounding ‘no’ to naked breasts! Yet we are not very far from the Pygmeian model. Its foundations can be found in post-modern liberal society based on huge freedom of thought and actions. Behaviour of individuals is restricted by actually one condition – it cannot violate the rights and freedom of other persons. A matter of consensus is the norm that you must not appear naked in public places, as not everyone may enjoy watching our body and its hidden genitals. However, the outfit is a discretionary matter and colourful socks, fancy hair-dos and frivolous hats are permissible. In our society on the verge of controversy, is a question of topless sunbathing in suitable places. Interestingly, the issue concerns only women, as men can be half naked even in the centres of big cities. Is this another, not identified as such, a sign of gender discrimination? What is more, in liberal societies we can think what we want, we can even say what we want, provided we do not insult someone else’s dignity. This does not undermine group solidarity. Contemporary beatniks are not a nuisance for the system, as there is no relation between their behaviour and the social order. They are a nuisance only for those who, thinking ‘iconically’, are of the opinion that behaviour and thinking other than their own is a violation of a universal order known only to them. As we know, there are many signs of such thinking also in a pluralist society. They see godless persons in everything: those who wear different clothes, who live in lascivious cohabitation, who believe in a different religion or do not believe in any god, those who suffer from AIDS or who are part of the European Union.
Totalitarian attitudes did not finish in our part of the world together with Stalin’s death. In ‘the Beatles’ times, a wisp of long hair was still met with dismay. It was not about the communist power but also about social attitudes. As late as in the 1970s the head management combated any hair longer than a matchstick. I was one of the few who opposed to the order. The headmaster, defending the social policy of the people’s power in school, but also a true believer in this idea, did not want his students to look like monkeys. Told off, I replied that monkeys created the science, like Copernicus, whose images were displayed everywhere in school on the occasion of 500 anniversary. The battle of freedom to wear long hair was won and the next autumn it was hard to tell boys and girls apart in school. And what? Nothing, the world is still in its place. However, it might have been a sign of alertness, as for integral systems any concessions like this are the beginning of erosion of authoritarian power. It was at the beginning of the 1980’s that, Jurij Andropov, one of the two short-lasting first secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in his speech warned the youth not to wear ideologically strange jeans. He was right to be afraid that if you take out a pebble, you can run an avalanche.
As it can be observed, both the abundance of dress and the length of hair may be connected with an issue of freedom. Hair, from a symbolic point of view is a very comfortable manner of expressing attitudes and thoughts, as it is easy to manipulate. Charles Hallpike, another anthropologist, claims for instance, that cutting hair is the expression of social control. In Christian tradition, there are two kinds of monks – anchorets and coenobites. The former live alone, grow long, rough hair, do not cut their nails and are not controlled by anyone. Saint Jerome, who appears so often in Christian iconography illustrates this case. Cenobites are typical monastery monks, their hair is cut short or completely shaved off, they are subject to monastery discipline and authority of their superiors. St. Augustine will be the right person to refer to here. Traditional tonsure in priests, quite frequent in Poland in the half of the previous century, also entailed submission to the church hierarchy. A similar rule refers also to nuns, who conceal their hair scrupulously. In Buddhist tradition, in turn, monks have their heads shaved off, and fakirs, who ‘forget’ about the entire world surrounding them, do not know such words as a barber or hairdresser, and avoid the comb like the devil bewares of a blessed water. The Bible knows a lot of similar examples, let me quote just two here. In the Genesis, Ezaw is a hunter and wears long hair, and Jacob, his brother, is a ‘civilised’ man and his hair is cut. Prophets such as Eliah and John the Baptist are always depicted wearing long hair and animal furs.
This kind of thinking about long hair has survived in our culture for ages. The ceremony of putting a cap on the bride has been celebrated in Slavic countries. Rarely practiced today, it meant nothing but submission of the bride to her husband. Only unmarried women could wear long, usually plaited hair. Wishing to meet the Pope, a woman had to cover her head symbolically. Several elements of this symbolism of social relations, especially submission to the group or someone else’s authority, have been preserved in our layman life until today. One can ask what is done to the hair of an imprisoned person, in the army or a newly recruited gang member. No wonder that beatniks and the long-haired have been irritating those in power who aim at monopolising the outlook on the world, because, like Tallens, religious reformers and strict guardians of social or post-social morality do not tolerate freedom expressed by this fact.
Looking at this issue from a different perspective, a question arises, namely what people wearing long hair are customarily tolerated? They are artists, freelancers, the long-haired such as hippies, young and independent people. Some may say that at present it has more to do with fashion and identifying oneself with specific cultural trends. This is certainly true, because hair and clothes, as it was said before, are a handy material expressing our attitudes and the rebels often aim at declaring their separateness from the standard, even in such a contrary wise manner as shaving the hair off completely.
However, the attitude towards these seemingly marginal types of behaviour such as the hair and clothes is a probe of social acceptance for the dissimilarity and diversity. It is impossible to avoid discussions, but beware of any ‘orthodox’ who will always find arguments supporting their views. Yet we need to remember that Nikons, Talibans, police officers from Szczecin Arkonka seaside resort, supporters of ‘racial purity’, those who are afraid of ‘the end of white race civilisation’, defenders of ‘the only one faith’ , ‘ideological uniformity’ and ‘closing our national ranks’ are present in each society. They perceive their mission as constantly cleaning the mess among ‘wild Pygmies’, the long-haired, indecently clad and differently minded. Triumph of their views imposed on others is to be the sole condition of building the true happiness and freedom for all. Yet mindless and orthodox application of the views is the essence of freezing any social initiative and mobility, senseless restriction of freedom and leads to enslavement of minds.
„The others” and Bamboo the Chocolate Boy
Almost every representative of the older generation knows one of the most popular poems ‘Bamboo’ written by Julian Tuwim, from an old elementary book: Bamboo, the chocolate boy lives in Africa, the fellow is black skinned’. The further part tells us that his mom wants to make him drink milk, and he ‘runs away and climbs a tree’, and when she calls him to take a bath, he is afraid of ‘getting white’. A few seemingly innocent verses contain so much racism. A black boy, like many of us, his white peers, does not necessarily have to like milk, and his skin will remain black forever, and – finally, in emergency he runs and hides in a tree, where his ancestors come from. On one hand, he is so similar to us, but on the other, he is ‘just’ a Negro boy. Naturally, it is not the only example visualising our way of thinking of people other than the Europeans. Friday Man from William Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Kali from Henryk Sienkiewicz’s In Desert and Wilderness – they are other protagonists which we know from popular children’s books. Until today many sophisticated people have been using the argument in discussions that what others say is the effect of ‘Khali logics’ or that someone murders a language like – nomen omen – the same Kali. A person may also be, as opposed to a rational Englishman from Victorian England, childish, unmanageable and moody like Friday Man.
Fed on such images since childhood, we are becoming involuntary the expressionists and at the same time carriers of views classifying people according to racial criteria and place of origin. The subject of such thinking is also Jarosław Kaczyński, who not so long ago has been quoting Gabon as an example of... well, example of what? From what I heard, it was an example of nothing, and Gabon is for him simply a tool for depreciating the actions of his political opponents. To achieve this, the president of Law and Justice party stimulates popular beliefs we hold about Africa and other so-called Third World Countries. The very expression ‘The third” is not neutral. In the beginning, it was supposed to refer to countries which were neither developed capitalist countries, nor socialist ones. Eventually it turned out to be the label for the world which was not sufficiently involved, or better say wealthy to be perceived as the ‘first’, or even ‘second’. After all, socialist Mozambique or Angola have never been classified to the group of second world countries. In the second part of the 20th century Negros and Africans could not belong to the league of somehow self-appointed privileged countries.
In what contexts does Gabon appear? We can learn for example, that it is supposedly famous for peanuts which are the basis of its economy, that it is a small African country and that we do not have to be afraid of a military attack from there. A lot of these ‘facts’, especially about the peanuts, have turned out to be completely ridiculous and those who expressed their opinions on the subject had a very vague idea even of the location of Gabon on the map. All of the opinions were always accompanied by more or less hidden smiles. The whole thing was an amusement to the journalists, who with some irony, started to show Gabon rappers. They were surprised that in such an exotic country there was a television which was as efficient as TVN24 station and statistically four out of five inhabitants have a cellular phone. This oasis of peace in this part of Africa has been ruled by the same president for 42 years – an unfulfilled dream of our Polish politicians. Naturally, Mr Kaczyński, Gosiewski and Cymański are not the only people who reach for such metaphors full of European superiority. MP Palikot wants to send there his adversary, thinking that Gabon, like Mars, is a place where you can throw losers away. This is exactly like pre-war nationalists, who wanted to send the Jews to Madagascar. Not so long ago quoting Bangladesh by Andrzej Lepper and several other former politicians could also be striking. To him, not knowing why, the country was a negative prototype of everything we should avoid. ‘Here, we are not in some kind of Bangladesh’, the local cultural hero fulminated even from the Seym platform, ‘and it is only in Bangladesh where such things can be possible that are happening now in the Polish healthcare’, he claimed during his visit to Poznan in February 2005. He never mentioned anything about the professional level of MPs there. I am quite curious where this kind of national megalomania comes from, combated long ago by Jan Stanisław Bystroń and Witold Gombrowicz. The opinion on peanuts sounds as if this product could not be possibly as valuable as any other commercially sold product, such as chewing gum or computer chips. What is a peanut in comparison with a huge beetroot or potato on which the power of Polish agriculture is built? Nothing! What is a relatively small African Gabon compared with such a ‘powerful’ European Poland? An unimportant political organism with population of only 1.5 million. What is a military power of Gabon compared with our national armed forces bringing peace in other Third World countries, from Chad to Afghanistan? Nothing that we could be afraid of and we should fear Martians more than them. Finally, what is such Bangladesh in comparison with the land of milk and honey stretching from the Bug to the Oder? An unimaginable misery. Certainly, Poland is the hub of the universe indeed, also due to the fact that such outstanding intellectualists live there and are capable of expressing this kind of words and sharing this kind of opinions.
True, we are not alone in this spontaneous ethnocentrism and unrealised feeling of superiority. For ages, Europe has been created as an ideal of civilisation and white man was to be the materialisation of virtues: intelligence, diligence, morality and good taste. Christian faith was unrivalled, as monotheism itself has an advantage over fetishes of other religions and Islam is discredited by obscurantism and polygamy. Monogamic family is to be ‘natural’ framework for civilised procreation and life in small groups and it is simply not true. Science, a flower of European thinking, is the most efficient way of dealing with the surrounding reality, which gives the control over the material world. Technological inventions such as muskets and machine guns, steamers, armed trains brought about our domination over the others, who were too weak to resist to us. Isn’t it a tangible proof that Western civilisation is better than others? This is also supposedly an irrefutable argument for the superiority of the White race over the others, who were not capable of creating such technologically and bureaucratically advanced societies.
In a way, in a spirit of Christian proselytism the lands were conquered but also the groups living there were made totally submitted. In this way, slavery was becoming a fully justified form of exploitation of human beings, whose ages had been defined using notions analogical to the descriptions of animals for the purposes of scientific classification in the Linnaeus system. Believe me, that comparing African inhabitants to monkeys as a missing element of evolution was a popular practice over a century ago. This was the premise of Gobineau’s theory of races. The traces of such a way of thinking can be still found in imbecile jokes about the Others which I will not quote here so as not to repeat and ennoble them. The echoes of such thinking is also quoting the examples of African, Latin-American, or Indo-Chinese societies as alter ego of ourselves, as provoking sympathy or laughter, as supposedly they exceed the ‘standards’ of our standards. The latter appears to be the European ‘Sevres meter’, as a universal measurement for peoples and their social and economic systems. Nothing more parochial.
A completely different idea explaining the expansion and ruling was sometimes a sentimental mission of enlightening the ordinary innocent people of this world. After years of abolitionists’ struggles motivated by the Bible, slavery was abolished as a sanctioned and blatant form of ruling over Others. Let me remind you that in various European countries it was done as late as in the first half of the 19th, and in the USA in the second half. Nevertheless, open dominance was easily substituted by its more sophisticated form – the views of cultural superiority of the White race. Dominance was seen in allegedly unbeatable discrepancies which justified apartheid and other forms of discrimination still known in the southern states of the USA in the 1960s and in the Southern Republic of Africa as late as at the turn of the 80s and 90s.! South-African freedom from decreed forms of racism is actually contemporary with the III Republic of Poland . Millions of Zulu, Herero, Kosa and Mdebele peoples remember until today the times when the public space was divided into places only for the White people. It is the same as, some Poles still remember, inscriptions like ‘nür für... [Deutsche – only for Germans]’
The most permanent are hidden, often unrealised, seemingly innocent forms of hierarchisation of people, societies and cultures. Often they are shaped into complex forms of intensifying opinions, views and obviousnesses. They form discourses which are difficult to change, also in the countries which take pride in the absence of colonial traditions. Their splinters are innocent opinions such as those about Gabon and Bangladesh but essentially written into the framework of sustaining ethnocentrically created inequalities. Therefore, they always need to be revealed and discredited as much as possible, especially if between the lines one can discern racial innuendos. In the country where people are so sensitive to cultural hegemony which makes it possible to create better and worse national images, mental map of places and people which are more valuable – e.g. Eastern and Western Europe, this is particularly important. We are easily abhorred in situations in which our dignity is offended. We do not want to be the country in which King Ubu from Alfred Jarett’s play rules, we are indignant with jokes of lost cars which are found in Poland or Harald Schmidt’s sense of humour. Some were angry when they were compared to potatoes. Perhaps they would have been mute if instead, peanuts had been drawn and poems had been created such as ‘Polack the Potato dwells on the Warta River’. As it can be seen, reciprocity and symmetry in treatment of other people as well as oneself is recommended and we must not forget the old adage: ‘Treat your brethren like you would like to be treated by them’,
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To sum up, these three motifs are only a loose commentary on this album. There are more essential things to be said here: youth, generation gap, piety, consumerism, celebrating ... The reader can add more on their own, as Poland, like no other country, is the source of inexhaustible inspirations for those who understand it. In order to show it, you have to love such a country, be able to read it and depict in a manner which is intriguing to others. This is not an easy job, but Mariusz Forecki has certainly done it well.
Michał Buchowski
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Michal Buchowski, a social anthropology professor at the Poznan University and Viadrina European University in Frankfurt on the Oder River. He has been, among others, a scholarship holder of Fulbright, Kościuszko and Humboldt at many universities (Cambridge, California, Virginia, Kansas, Berlin) and worked for Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris as well as Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. He has been a Visiting Professor at Rutgers universities in New Jersey and Columbia in New York. His area of interest is anthropology of religious systems and post-socialist transformations. He is the author of over 120 articles published in books and Polish and foreign professional magazines, as well as he published several books such: Rationality. Translation. Interpretation (1990), Magic and ritual (1993), Reluctant Capitalists (1997), The Rational Other (1997), Rethinking Transformation (2001) i Understand the Other (2004). He is a co-editor of The Creation of the Other in Central Europe (2001) and Poland Beyond Communism (2001). He is the President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the President of the Polish Ethnographical Society.
Presence of transformation
One of the most frequently repeated notion in the area stretching from the Elbe River to the Yellow River is transformation. Over and over again, politicians, journalists and scientists keep dwelling on this subject. We live in a magic world of transformation, although we do not know exactly what it really is. The idea, hammered in our heads, has been taken for granted. However, transformation means change, which is an inseparable feature of life of societies and affects their history. What, if not a huge transformation, was establishing socialism in Eastern Europe and then the evolution from totalitarian, through authoritarian, to unstable and collapsing system. But we do not perceive the era of socialism as the time of transformation.
Therefore, what makes us think of ourselves as of the generation living in Transformland? The term transformation has been usually referred to special reformations in special periods in the recent history of Poland and post-Communist countries. The specificity of current transformations is to be based on transgressing from controlled to free market economy and from authoritarian system to democracy. It is the systemic character of transformations that affects their uniqueness and the common consent to this fact, repeated by us in the media, at school, home and yard makes it supposedly undeniable truth. For ordinary people, such Transformation has its good and bad sides. For some it means anxiety about work and social security, for others, professional career and a decent standard of life. An infrequently mentioned aspect of recent changes lies also in episodes of life; we are in a constant rush, we do not smoke at home, we wander around shopping centres, attend private schools, drink less alcohol, eat mandarins not only at Christmas, travel to work by car, we work seasonally abroad, like once we worked lifting potatoes...
The collapse of communism marks the beginning of Transformation understood in this way. But when our transformation reaches the point when we’ll announce triumphantly that it has been completed and at the same time, the beginning of a New Era, ideologists will say that its end means the return to ‘normality’, although the latter is impossible to be defined. There is no ideal system nor the end of history. Life goes on, subject to constant transformation and so do we. But it is us who cause changes and we are responsible for their shape. One day we will say that the Transformation has completed, but this will not mean the end of anything, because the transformation is always present – transformation of us, in us and around us.
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The presented album whose author is Mariusz Forecki is an attempt to capture the recent changes of our life. It is a documentary told by a photographer. It captures moments which we often miss, or – if it were not for his camera lens – would have been lost forever. On one hand, it is in a way an affirmative attempt of describing reality around us. On the other hand, it is reflexive and full of irony. However, Poland is always depicted as a place and people that you love. It is not about pompous patriotic slogans, but about expressing our fascination with what is happening around us, what we capture, understand at once, what we feel comfortable about and what we want to comment, as this is close to our hearts. Only that and as much as that. Poland, in this album, is a case study illustrating the report of someone who is sensitive to the surrounding world. It is not easy to comment the artist’s viewpoint. I think that the most appropriate and fitting the form of the album and its content will be to zoom in several characteristic points of Polish presence in the world, cast some light on a few elements which together define our condition. More such leading threads could be distinguished here, but I would like to focus on three: relationship with Europe, the gift of freedom and relationship to ‘the Other’. Each of these issues is taken lightly and in form of points, as if they were paintings created on the basis of the photos included in this book.
European Myth
Europe, the noun declined in all possible forms, is repeated in our discussions, publications, advertisements. The reason for such popularity is obvious: historic events in which we have all been involved more or less actively since our accession into the European Union, preceded by national referendum – all these facts stimulate imagination. Overnight we became part of a community of nations stretching from the river Bug to the Atlantic Ocean, and from the North Sea to Cyprus. Essentially, this is to be about Europe and our Europeanism, but I would like to start from the Hawaiians and captain James Cook.
During his journey around the world in January 1779, Cook with his small fleet reached Kaelakekua bay in Hawaii. He was welcomed heartily and generously by local inhabitants, and during a short stay on the island, his marines tasted all attractions of an exotic paradise. Soon farewell time came and Cook’s crew left in peace, satiated, happy and under the impression of the stay. Bad luck caused that soon after that, the main mast of Cook’s ship broke down. Like it or not, they returned to the hospitable bay in order to repair it. To the European crew’s surprise, former Hawaiians’ hospitability suddenly transformed into hostility. As a result of a fight, captain Cook was stabbed in his back and died. The natives treated his corpse decently, even worshipping it as if he had been a god and returned the body to the scared visitors. As Marshall Sahlins, an American anthropologist, one of the most outstanding theoreticians of contemporary culture argues, rapid change in ‘savage’ behaviour was not just a whim. At the moment of Cook’s arrival, the Hawaiians were celebrating an annual ceremony devoted to the god named Lono, who, in accordance with their beliefs, was to come by ship (after all, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean coming by ship is not an unusual thing). This coincidence led to the situation where Cook was welcomed like a god. However, after the ceremonies in his honour the god should have left, what our protagonist did, and should have not come back until the following year. Arriving suddenly, the visitors behaved against a mythological scenario, changing from guests into intruders. By doing this, they disrupted the mythological structure, which was adapted to local relations of power. God Lono represented in the first place the conquered stratum of people and the return of his incarnation as a human being would have been treated by the ruling class as a threat to their dominance. Therefore Cook died and even had to die,. This was commanded by the myth.
What on earth do Cook and Hawaii from the period 250 years ago have to do with the inhabitants of Poland at the beginning of the 21st century? I declare that Polish ‘yes’ for the European Union is not a matter of a rational choice, but, similarly to the Hawaiians at the moment of meeting Cook – the fulfilment of a myth, which has been present in the national awareness and repeated in a countless number of discourses: in everyday conversations, oral traditions, literature and poetry, in school handbooks and an unwritten quasi-mythological history. The myth concerns the place of Poland and its citizens on the mental map of the world. I would like to emphasise the word ‘mental’, and not geographical in its strict sense, as according to school-based geography, we have been (at least since the times remembered by chronicle writers and reconstructed by archaeologists and historians) and we are in a predictable future that will be based on the continent called Europe. European integration is the act confirming the presence of Polish ‘imaginary community’ in the ‘family of European nations’. It is the accession into the European Union, which, on the basis of rooted mental patterns, is identified with Europe as such, that becomes the realisation of deeply rooted structure of ‘long existence’, as the representatives of French ‘new history’ would say. What elements account for this myth, for which so many generations fought and even sacrificed their lives?
Mythological icon is complex and multilayered, but some of its elements are quite easy to distinguish. In this image, for centuries Poland was functioning as antemurale christianitatis – bulwark of Christianity. It’s us! We defended Christian Europe from Mongolians, Tatars and Turks. Who of us, from history lessons, does not remember the image of Jan III Sobieski defeating ‘pagan’ Muslims at Vienna in 1683? Did Mr. Wołodyjowski not fight with masses on Dzikie Pola and Janissaries in Kamieniec Podolski? It’s us too! We defended Europe from the flood of Bolsheviks. The miracle of the Vistula river was the mutual action of Providence and the ‘Christ of Nations’. The further element of this image is the image of ourselves as the defendants of Western Christianity from Orthodox and at the same time Asian Russia. It’s us! After all, we are the bridgehead of the West flooded by wild waves of the East, the fortress of civilised Occident, standing face to face with barbarian Orient. The climax of this pro-European process was defeating by us! The communism brought on the bayonets of Red Army soldiers, who had no idea of European values, had no respect for human life and even technological inventions, such as a bicycle or a watch, were something new to them. Among others, this kind of mythological images present in our collective, national awareness led us to the moment when we were voting ‘yes’ for the European Union, which essentially means, as I mentioned, due to contamination – ‘yes’ for Europe. The myth has become reality. At the same time, something that seems so unreal, fictitious, mythological, is displaying its down-to-earth, real power. Captain Cook had to die. We had to join Europe. The myth was the basis for such a scenario and we were its compulsory executors. No appearances that each of us made their own, premeditated decision.
Before I turn to any justification of this view, one more thing needs to be commented on. We are not alone in our belief that we are the saviours of the European civilisation. Similar beliefs are held, starting from the south, the Greeks, who not only survived the Ottoman storm, but were and still are the cradle of culture and science of the entire Western world. Bulgarians, Serbs, and Macedonians have always faced the Turkish occupation threatening Europe for ages. Croatians and Hungarians not only fought Muslims, but also opposed to Orthodox Church with its cradle in the Byzantium. Austrians and Italians represented e.g. by brave Venetians, defended from the attacks of the Islam and Orthodox Church, but also barbarian Slavs. Never-ending story... stretching as far as to the Iberian Peninsula where this domino could have ended, if it had not been for the fact that it was brave defenders of true faith who chased away Maurs, Mahomet believers, and then Jews, Jahweh believers. As one can see, the candidates to European and Christian Virtuti Militari are in abundance. It is surprising that so many nations are reluctant to enter a note on Christian traditions in the European constitution.
Time for the promised arguments. In the course of discussion about Europe, Europeism and the result of referendum, virtually all commentators missed one important detail. If you look at the opinion of Polish citizens (deliberately, I am not talking about the Poles, as apart from them, representatives of many other nations live here at our and their place together, of which many of us seem to forget) about the benefits of European integration, the opinions held by majority of them are sceptical or negative. I am not going to quote specific data, but it is enough to take a deeper look at any poll on this subject, conducted by a generally known poll centre, to see that usually half of the respondents thought, both before and after the referendum, and before and after 1st May, that accession into the European Union would be more favourable for the EU member states that for Poland. Only one person in ten thought that joining the EU would be more favourable for ‘us’ than for ‘them’, and a quarter that it would be equally favourable for both parties. Also in the individual perspective, only every third citizen of the Republic of Poland thought that being part of the EU would be favourable for them, and every fifth thought that the benefit would be very moderate. On the other hand, four out of ten of our fellow countrymen perceived being part of the EU in a more optimistic manner, and approximately every seventh person had no fixed opinion on this issue. I know that such data are mundane, but they are indispensible to state the final argument. If only two fifths of voters were convinced that we, as a community, would be better in the EU, if merely one third thinks that they, as individuals, will be better, why only four out of five (precisely 77.45%) of us voted supporting the EU accession. This means that vast majority (depending on what data will be regarded, between a third and two fifths) of us, so-called rational, balancing all pros and cons, aware and rational human beings living between the Oder and Bug Rivers, the Tatras and Baltic Sea, behaved against their own common sense. Millions of people were acting against what their minds were telling them. And it’s good, because in their seemingly irrational attitude there was nothing irrational.
Can one explain this paradox? Naturally, additional circumstances need to be taken into consideration, such as mass advertising campaign persuading us to vote for joining the EU, open support for integration expressed by the ‘Polish’ Pope, a belief, quite hypothetical, that being in Europe will be beneficial, if not for us, then for the future generations. Nevertheless, I state that the myth of Poland as a country which immanently belongs to Europe has had a significant meaning. It is thanks to mytho-logics, the same mechanism that appeared in the 18th century Hawaiians, which contributed to the fact that we are today part of the European Union. There is some sense behind this madness, a bit different from what scientists say, based on its ‘glass and the eye’. The society and social responses cannot be accounted for by charts and rows of digits arranged into formal patterns. The society is people engaged in their everyday activities, sharing stereotypes, bearing collective memories, emerged in mytho-history. Useless seem to be explanations for those who, paraphrasing Adam Mickiewicz, one of the leading authors of our national mythology, ‘see dead truths, unknown for the people, see the instant world, in every glimmer of the star, do not know living truths, will not see the wonder’. In our perception of the world, also of what we do every day and of what is surrounding us, it seems obvious and sometimes not understandable at the same time, sometimes a bit of imagination will do, which will let us ‘have the heart and see into the heart’. This imagination will let us not only interpret the unconceivable, but also see that we are not so far away from the Hawaiians encountered by captain Cook.
Freedom and social corset
Press reported on the matter as follows: it is May 2008, holiday season has not started yet, and in Szczecin seaside resort called Arkonka two ladies are sunbathing wearing only lower parts of swimming costumes. No one bothers about it, except two alert guardians of the law, who, apparently intrigued by the view, or appalled, told the ladies to put on their bras. When the ladies refuse to do so, the police officers give them tickets which they refuse to accept. As a result, the police lodged a motion to the Municipal Court to punish both of the ladies for sunbathing topless; the court found them guilty, gave them reprimand and charged them with the costs of legal proceedings.
One of them appealed against the decision and recently the Regional Court in Szczecin exonerated the two ladies, as it stated the deed was not indecent, because the behaviour of the sunbathers was not met with indignation nor outrage of any other beach guests sunbathing there.
This seemingly petty social scene illustrates an important phenomenon of the life of any group, concerning the definition of behaviour which is socially acceptable, the scope of social control, and at the same time the boundaries of our freedom. As it turns out, social practices in this area tend to differ substantially, which proves that what is permissible is to a great extent a matter of social agreement. The freedom is not granted to us, and it is dosed by the society. Freedom has its symbols which can be used to fight for it.
In the period of Stalin’s reigns, there was a range of ‘crimes’ which were punished very severely. Capital punishment was adjudicated not only for serious common crime, but also for imaginary high-treason or spying, and, as court records from 1951 prove, even for ‘being a beatnik’. It was a lifestyle allegedly following bourgeoise American and Western European patterns. In 2001, the History Institute of the Polish Academy of Science published ”Combating the American threat in the Stalin period’, whose author is Zbigniew Romek. We learn from this work that, among others, two young people were sentenced to long imprisonment for being part of a beat generation and petty crimes and two other people were nearly hanged. People’s Power showed its mercy changing death for life imprisonment. The most severe sentences for travelling by taxis, going to dance clubs and reading western press! According to Leopold Tyrmand, even colourful socks were an eyesore for communist rulers and jazz was a forbidden fruit.
Mary Douglas, British social anthropologist, showed on coordinate axes dependencies between group control, an individual and the freedom of thought. The pattern shows that groups which strongly control behaviour of an individual at the same time share restrictive view of the world. Everyone has to do what needs to be done, but also think like everyone else. In this type of groups there is a rigid social structure, and the life is full of dos and don’ts. Tribal communities of this type included Tallens from Ghana in the colonial period. Everyone knew what and when to wear, how to comb their hair, what to eat and with whom. The norm was above everything else and the rebels required ritual curing. Similar dependencies can be found in pre-modern Christian societies in Europe, in which rigid social structure was in line with restrictive obligation of sharing the same view of the world. The smallest heresy meant death or excommunication. Naturally other religions were known and tolerated, e.g. the Jews, but the own group had to be socially and ideologically coherent. Uniformity of ideas of the ruling and the ruled was expressed by the popular expression cuius regio, eius religio, i.e. who owns a country, owns the religion. The conflict concerning the way of saying goodbye with two or three fingers split forever the Orthodox believers into Old Believers and propagators of Nikon Patriarch reforms. The former, who wanted to pray and say goodbye in their own way, were sentenced to exile and had to search for shelter outside Russia. As one can see, in such an arrangement there is no room for deviations and any signs of accepting other way of thinking should be destroyed in embryo, as it compromises the structure.
Douglas opposes the aforementioned model with the community of Pygmies from tropical forests of Zaire. They form loose groups, whose composition is flexible, and in everyday life there is room for individual actions and loose interpretation of facts. Beliefs are not defined strictly; there are few taboos, dos and don’ts. It turns out that functioning of a group does not require uniformity of view of the world, it would even do harm. Thinking is the matter of an individual, and actions expressing certain way of thinking do not result in punishment, nor do they appal the others.
The equivalents of the two models of societies can be easily found in our modern world. There are countries and regions where, in a way similarly to Tallens, absence of a beard or a moustache in a man may result in body punishment and publically revealed face of a woman may mean her death. There are societies which very severely refer to behaviour against the authority and ethics, whether it would be religious or socialist. Apparently proletariat dictatorship was a similar, ‘iconic’ type of culture. Everyone has to behave according to the social norm, and the coherence of behaviour is the reflection of moral uniformity and the same view of the world. Death to the beatniks, because they don’t think the way they should! Resounding ‘no’ to naked breasts! Yet we are not very far from the Pygmeian model. Its foundations can be found in post-modern liberal society based on huge freedom of thought and actions. Behaviour of individuals is restricted by actually one condition – it cannot violate the rights and freedom of other persons. A matter of consensus is the norm that you must not appear naked in public places, as not everyone may enjoy watching our body and its hidden genitals. However, the outfit is a discretionary matter and colourful socks, fancy hair-dos and frivolous hats are permissible. In our society on the verge of controversy, is a question of topless sunbathing in suitable places. Interestingly, the issue concerns only women, as men can be half naked even in the centres of big cities. Is this another, not identified as such, a sign of gender discrimination? What is more, in liberal societies we can think what we want, we can even say what we want, provided we do not insult someone else’s dignity. This does not undermine group solidarity. Contemporary beatniks are not a nuisance for the system, as there is no relation between their behaviour and the social order. They are a nuisance only for those who, thinking ‘iconically’, are of the opinion that behaviour and thinking other than their own is a violation of a universal order known only to them. As we know, there are many signs of such thinking also in a pluralist society. They see godless persons in everything: those who wear different clothes, who live in lascivious cohabitation, who believe in a different religion or do not believe in any god, those who suffer from AIDS or who are part of the European Union.
Totalitarian attitudes did not finish in our part of the world together with Stalin’s death. In ‘the Beatles’ times, a wisp of long hair was still met with dismay. It was not about the communist power but also about social attitudes. As late as in the 1970s the head management combated any hair longer than a matchstick. I was one of the few who opposed to the order. The headmaster, defending the social policy of the people’s power in school, but also a true believer in this idea, did not want his students to look like monkeys. Told off, I replied that monkeys created the science, like Copernicus, whose images were displayed everywhere in school on the occasion of 500 anniversary. The battle of freedom to wear long hair was won and the next autumn it was hard to tell boys and girls apart in school. And what? Nothing, the world is still in its place. However, it might have been a sign of alertness, as for integral systems any concessions like this are the beginning of erosion of authoritarian power. It was at the beginning of the 1980’s that, Jurij Andropov, one of the two short-lasting first secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in his speech warned the youth not to wear ideologically strange jeans. He was right to be afraid that if you take out a pebble, you can run an avalanche.
As it can be observed, both the abundance of dress and the length of hair may be connected with an issue of freedom. Hair, from a symbolic point of view is a very comfortable manner of expressing attitudes and thoughts, as it is easy to manipulate. Charles Hallpike, another anthropologist, claims for instance, that cutting hair is the expression of social control. In Christian tradition, there are two kinds of monks – anchorets and coenobites. The former live alone, grow long, rough hair, do not cut their nails and are not controlled by anyone. Saint Jerome, who appears so often in Christian iconography illustrates this case. Cenobites are typical monastery monks, their hair is cut short or completely shaved off, they are subject to monastery discipline and authority of their superiors. St. Augustine will be the right person to refer to here. Traditional tonsure in priests, quite frequent in Poland in the half of the previous century, also entailed submission to the church hierarchy. A similar rule refers also to nuns, who conceal their hair scrupulously. In Buddhist tradition, in turn, monks have their heads shaved off, and fakirs, who ‘forget’ about the entire world surrounding them, do not know such words as a barber or hairdresser, and avoid the comb like the devil bewares of a blessed water. The Bible knows a lot of similar examples, let me quote just two here. In the Genesis, Ezaw is a hunter and wears long hair, and Jacob, his brother, is a ‘civilised’ man and his hair is cut. Prophets such as Eliah and John the Baptist are always depicted wearing long hair and animal furs.
This kind of thinking about long hair has survived in our culture for ages. The ceremony of putting a cap on the bride has been celebrated in Slavic countries. Rarely practiced today, it meant nothing but submission of the bride to her husband. Only unmarried women could wear long, usually plaited hair. Wishing to meet the Pope, a woman had to cover her head symbolically. Several elements of this symbolism of social relations, especially submission to the group or someone else’s authority, have been preserved in our layman life until today. One can ask what is done to the hair of an imprisoned person, in the army or a newly recruited gang member. No wonder that beatniks and the long-haired have been irritating those in power who aim at monopolising the outlook on the world, because, like Tallens, religious reformers and strict guardians of social or post-social morality do not tolerate freedom expressed by this fact.
Looking at this issue from a different perspective, a question arises, namely what people wearing long hair are customarily tolerated? They are artists, freelancers, the long-haired such as hippies, young and independent people. Some may say that at present it has more to do with fashion and identifying oneself with specific cultural trends. This is certainly true, because hair and clothes, as it was said before, are a handy material expressing our attitudes and the rebels often aim at declaring their separateness from the standard, even in such a contrary wise manner as shaving the hair off completely.
However, the attitude towards these seemingly marginal types of behaviour such as the hair and clothes is a probe of social acceptance for the dissimilarity and diversity. It is impossible to avoid discussions, but beware of any ‘orthodox’ who will always find arguments supporting their views. Yet we need to remember that Nikons, Talibans, police officers from Szczecin Arkonka seaside resort, supporters of ‘racial purity’, those who are afraid of ‘the end of white race civilisation’, defenders of ‘the only one faith’ , ‘ideological uniformity’ and ‘closing our national ranks’ are present in each society. They perceive their mission as constantly cleaning the mess among ‘wild Pygmies’, the long-haired, indecently clad and differently minded. Triumph of their views imposed on others is to be the sole condition of building the true happiness and freedom for all. Yet mindless and orthodox application of the views is the essence of freezing any social initiative and mobility, senseless restriction of freedom and leads to enslavement of minds.
„The others” and Bamboo the Chocolate Boy
Almost every representative of the older generation knows one of the most popular poems ‘Bamboo’ written by Julian Tuwim, from an old elementary book: Bamboo, the chocolate boy lives in Africa, the fellow is black skinned’. The further part tells us that his mom wants to make him drink milk, and he ‘runs away and climbs a tree’, and when she calls him to take a bath, he is afraid of ‘getting white’. A few seemingly innocent verses contain so much racism. A black boy, like many of us, his white peers, does not necessarily have to like milk, and his skin will remain black forever, and – finally, in emergency he runs and hides in a tree, where his ancestors come from. On one hand, he is so similar to us, but on the other, he is ‘just’ a Negro boy. Naturally, it is not the only example visualising our way of thinking of people other than the Europeans. Friday Man from William Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Kali from Henryk Sienkiewicz’s In Desert and Wilderness – they are other protagonists which we know from popular children’s books. Until today many sophisticated people have been using the argument in discussions that what others say is the effect of ‘Khali logics’ or that someone murders a language like – nomen omen – the same Kali. A person may also be, as opposed to a rational Englishman from Victorian England, childish, unmanageable and moody like Friday Man.
Fed on such images since childhood, we are becoming involuntary the expressionists and at the same time carriers of views classifying people according to racial criteria and place of origin. The subject of such thinking is also Jarosław Kaczyński, who not so long ago has been quoting Gabon as an example of... well, example of what? From what I heard, it was an example of nothing, and Gabon is for him simply a tool for depreciating the actions of his political opponents. To achieve this, the president of Law and Justice party stimulates popular beliefs we hold about Africa and other so-called Third World Countries. The very expression ‘The third” is not neutral. In the beginning, it was supposed to refer to countries which were neither developed capitalist countries, nor socialist ones. Eventually it turned out to be the label for the world which was not sufficiently involved, or better say wealthy to be perceived as the ‘first’, or even ‘second’. After all, socialist Mozambique or Angola have never been classified to the group of second world countries. In the second part of the 20th century Negros and Africans could not belong to the league of somehow self-appointed privileged countries.
In what contexts does Gabon appear? We can learn for example, that it is supposedly famous for peanuts which are the basis of its economy, that it is a small African country and that we do not have to be afraid of a military attack from there. A lot of these ‘facts’, especially about the peanuts, have turned out to be completely ridiculous and those who expressed their opinions on the subject had a very vague idea even of the location of Gabon on the map. All of the opinions were always accompanied by more or less hidden smiles. The whole thing was an amusement to the journalists, who with some irony, started to show Gabon rappers. They were surprised that in such an exotic country there was a television which was as efficient as TVN24 station and statistically four out of five inhabitants have a cellular phone. This oasis of peace in this part of Africa has been ruled by the same president for 42 years – an unfulfilled dream of our Polish politicians. Naturally, Mr Kaczyński, Gosiewski and Cymański are not the only people who reach for such metaphors full of European superiority. MP Palikot wants to send there his adversary, thinking that Gabon, like Mars, is a place where you can throw losers away. This is exactly like pre-war nationalists, who wanted to send the Jews to Madagascar. Not so long ago quoting Bangladesh by Andrzej Lepper and several other former politicians could also be striking. To him, not knowing why, the country was a negative prototype of everything we should avoid. ‘Here, we are not in some kind of Bangladesh’, the local cultural hero fulminated even from the Seym platform, ‘and it is only in Bangladesh where such things can be possible that are happening now in the Polish healthcare’, he claimed during his visit to Poznan in February 2005. He never mentioned anything about the professional level of MPs there. I am quite curious where this kind of national megalomania comes from, combated long ago by Jan Stanisław Bystroń and Witold Gombrowicz. The opinion on peanuts sounds as if this product could not be possibly as valuable as any other commercially sold product, such as chewing gum or computer chips. What is a peanut in comparison with a huge beetroot or potato on which the power of Polish agriculture is built? Nothing! What is a relatively small African Gabon compared with such a ‘powerful’ European Poland? An unimportant political organism with population of only 1.5 million. What is a military power of Gabon compared with our national armed forces bringing peace in other Third World countries, from Chad to Afghanistan? Nothing that we could be afraid of and we should fear Martians more than them. Finally, what is such Bangladesh in comparison with the land of milk and honey stretching from the Bug to the Oder? An unimaginable misery. Certainly, Poland is the hub of the universe indeed, also due to the fact that such outstanding intellectualists live there and are capable of expressing this kind of words and sharing this kind of opinions.
True, we are not alone in this spontaneous ethnocentrism and unrealised feeling of superiority. For ages, Europe has been created as an ideal of civilisation and white man was to be the materialisation of virtues: intelligence, diligence, morality and good taste. Christian faith was unrivalled, as monotheism itself has an advantage over fetishes of other religions and Islam is discredited by obscurantism and polygamy. Monogamic family is to be ‘natural’ framework for civilised procreation and life in small groups and it is simply not true. Science, a flower of European thinking, is the most efficient way of dealing with the surrounding reality, which gives the control over the material world. Technological inventions such as muskets and machine guns, steamers, armed trains brought about our domination over the others, who were too weak to resist to us. Isn’t it a tangible proof that Western civilisation is better than others? This is also supposedly an irrefutable argument for the superiority of the White race over the others, who were not capable of creating such technologically and bureaucratically advanced societies.
In a way, in a spirit of Christian proselytism the lands were conquered but also the groups living there were made totally submitted. In this way, slavery was becoming a fully justified form of exploitation of human beings, whose ages had been defined using notions analogical to the descriptions of animals for the purposes of scientific classification in the Linnaeus system. Believe me, that comparing African inhabitants to monkeys as a missing element of evolution was a popular practice over a century ago. This was the premise of Gobineau’s theory of races. The traces of such a way of thinking can be still found in imbecile jokes about the Others which I will not quote here so as not to repeat and ennoble them. The echoes of such thinking is also quoting the examples of African, Latin-American, or Indo-Chinese societies as alter ego of ourselves, as provoking sympathy or laughter, as supposedly they exceed the ‘standards’ of our standards. The latter appears to be the European ‘Sevres meter’, as a universal measurement for peoples and their social and economic systems. Nothing more parochial.
A completely different idea explaining the expansion and ruling was sometimes a sentimental mission of enlightening the ordinary innocent people of this world. After years of abolitionists’ struggles motivated by the Bible, slavery was abolished as a sanctioned and blatant form of ruling over Others. Let me remind you that in various European countries it was done as late as in the first half of the 19th, and in the USA in the second half. Nevertheless, open dominance was easily substituted by its more sophisticated form – the views of cultural superiority of the White race. Dominance was seen in allegedly unbeatable discrepancies which justified apartheid and other forms of discrimination still known in the southern states of the USA in the 1960s and in the Southern Republic of Africa as late as at the turn of the 80s and 90s.! South-African freedom from decreed forms of racism is actually contemporary with the III Republic of Poland . Millions of Zulu, Herero, Kosa and Mdebele peoples remember until today the times when the public space was divided into places only for the White people. It is the same as, some Poles still remember, inscriptions like ‘nür für... [Deutsche – only for Germans]’
The most permanent are hidden, often unrealised, seemingly innocent forms of hierarchisation of people, societies and cultures. Often they are shaped into complex forms of intensifying opinions, views and obviousnesses. They form discourses which are difficult to change, also in the countries which take pride in the absence of colonial traditions. Their splinters are innocent opinions such as those about Gabon and Bangladesh but essentially written into the framework of sustaining ethnocentrically created inequalities. Therefore, they always need to be revealed and discredited as much as possible, especially if between the lines one can discern racial innuendos. In the country where people are so sensitive to cultural hegemony which makes it possible to create better and worse national images, mental map of places and people which are more valuable – e.g. Eastern and Western Europe, this is particularly important. We are easily abhorred in situations in which our dignity is offended. We do not want to be the country in which King Ubu from Alfred Jarett’s play rules, we are indignant with jokes of lost cars which are found in Poland or Harald Schmidt’s sense of humour. Some were angry when they were compared to potatoes. Perhaps they would have been mute if instead, peanuts had been drawn and poems had been created such as ‘Polack the Potato dwells on the Warta River’. As it can be seen, reciprocity and symmetry in treatment of other people as well as oneself is recommended and we must not forget the old adage: ‘Treat your brethren like you would like to be treated by them’,
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To sum up, these three motifs are only a loose commentary on this album. There are more essential things to be said here: youth, generation gap, piety, consumerism, celebrating ... The reader can add more on their own, as Poland, like no other country, is the source of inexhaustible inspirations for those who understand it. In order to show it, you have to love such a country, be able to read it and depict in a manner which is intriguing to others. This is not an easy job, but Mariusz Forecki has certainly done it well.
Michał Buchowski
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Michal Buchowski, a social anthropology professor at the Poznan University and Viadrina European University in Frankfurt on the Oder River. He has been, among others, a scholarship holder of Fulbright, Kościuszko and Humboldt at many universities (Cambridge, California, Virginia, Kansas, Berlin) and worked for Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris as well as Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. He has been a Visiting Professor at Rutgers universities in New Jersey and Columbia in New York. His area of interest is anthropology of religious systems and post-socialist transformations. He is the author of over 120 articles published in books and Polish and foreign professional magazines, as well as he published several books such: Rationality. Translation. Interpretation (1990), Magic and ritual (1993), Reluctant Capitalists (1997), The Rational Other (1997), Rethinking Transformation (2001) i Understand the Other (2004). He is a co-editor of The Creation of the Other in Central Europe (2001) and Poland Beyond Communism (2001). He is the President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the President of the Polish Ethnographical Society.
