Material Culture and Kinship in Poland by Siobhan Magee

Author:Siobhan Magee [Magee, Siobhan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, History, Europe, Poland, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781000185478
Google: 10fpDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-05-27T05:01:50+00:00

Working to become a person

In the church nearest to my flat's online 'intention book' (ksigga intencji), supplications themed on career success outnumber prayers for sisters to receive the self-control to stop drinking excessively and for grandchildren to stay safe when travelling abroad. These prayers take a similar form whether they are asking for a nervous teenager to do well in her high school finishing exam or for a long-unemployed son to show the best of himself at a job interview the following day That family members, and mothers in particular, authored these prayer requests on behalf of their kin demonstrates how unemployment is not an individuals problem but a worry for the entire family

Paid employment is equated in importance only with having children in achieving adulthood (see Mayblin 2010). However, while infertility or not finding a partner with whom to have children is perceived as tragedy and choosing not to have children is considered rather unusual, yet an increasingly familiar part of 'modern life', unemployment is almost unspeakablyterrible. 'Whatever the problems with socialism,' I was told over and over again by people of a range of ages and levels of financial stability, 'no one was unemployed' (also seie Pine 1998). Being unable to find a job is a challenge to one's personhood, and people working in the fur business and those I knew in my neighbourhood felt deep pity for the unemployed.

Tropes surrounding emigration from Poland exemplify the ways in which some of the men and women I knew considered unemployed people to be both lacking in skills and knowledge cjf how to behave respectably in public. Informants belonging to relatively elite strata of Krakowian society, not particularly wealthy but respectable and bourgeois, drew class-based distinctions between young people who 'wanted' to work abroad and those who 'must' work abroad. Those who wanted to work abroad in order to improve their knowledge of foreign languages, to become worthy of promotion on their return to Poland or to experience travelling for leisure were sometimes considered especially hard working because of their intrepidness. Bourgeois fur industry people spoke of these people with familiarity If they were not their sons and daughters, then they were their nieces and nephews. In some cases, fur industry people were prompted to talk about 'work trips' they had made to fur auction houses and of visits to Chicago or London in the 1970s before the imposition of Martial Law. This type of 'elite migration' was conceptualized as 'working abroad' (praca za granicq),denoting that such an arrangement would end when the person in question wanted to come home. Those who 'had to' move away were more often described as having emigrated, implying that there would never be jobs for them in the competitive working environment of contemporary Poland. I sometimes heard comparisons of people of different classes' behaviour in the form of memories of life in public. 'When I was on a London bus, I would hear people speaking Polish but they were swearing so. much, they sounded so stupid .

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