Etnografia w archiwum. Chłopskie podania o ziemię poniemiecką w gminie Łazisko w centralnej Polsce. Antropologiczny przyczynek do Historii Alternatywnej reformy rolnej (1944)

• Main Author: Sebastian Latocha
• Format: Article
• Language: Polish
• Published: Lodz University Press 2019-12-01
• Series: Zeszyty Wiejskie
• Subjects: land reform; german settlers; polish peasants; ethnography; alternative history; rural studies
• Online Access: https://czasopisma.uni.lodz.pl/zwiej/article/view/7101

The article – by probing / pipetting method – presents the Polish peasants’ applications for former German land in the Łazisko commune from the period of land reform (1944). It opens a problem area and shows that the ethnographic / anthropological reading of documents, which are peasant applications for land, attempts to illuminate an old problems with a new light. The article is a contribution to the Alternative History of land reform, the axis of which is to examine the peasant experience of land reform in the context of relations with German settlers who disappeared from the common local cultural landscape. The alternativity or anthropology of the approach used is based on: shifting the perspective from a macro historic to a micro historic one, focusing on documents located on the border of formality and informality (objectivity and subjectivity, facts and sphere of emotions), deriving history from national borders (for the purpose of focusing on universal suffering), the discourse of counter-history.