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612-822-4611
Dystopia's Provocateurs: Peasants, State, and Informality in the Polish-German Borderlands

Dystopia's Provocateurs: Peasants, State, and Informality in the Polish-German Borderlands

Paperback

AnthropologyGeneral World HistoryGerman History

ISBN10: 0253028965
ISBN13: 9780253028969
Publisher: Indiana University Press (Ips)
Published: Oct 1 2017
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.76
Height: 0.54 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Toward the end of the Second World War, Poland's annexation of eastern German lands precipitated one of the largest demographic upheavals in European history. Edyta Materka travels to her native village in these Recovered Territories, where she listens carefully to rich oral histories told by original postwar Slavic settlers and remaining ethnic Germans who witnessed the metamorphosis of eastern Germany into western Poland. She discovers that peasants, workers, and elites adapted war-honed informal strategies they called kombinacja to preserve a modicum of local agency while surviving the vicissitudes of policy formulated elsewhere, from Stalinist collectivization to the shock doctrine of neoliberalism. Informality has taken many forms: as a way of life, a world view, an alternate historical text, a border memory, and a means of magical transformation during times of crisis. Materka ventures beyond conventional ethnography to trace the diverse historical, literary, and psychological dimensions of kombinacja. Grappling with the legacies of informality in her own transnational family, Materka searches for the kombinator within on the borderlands and shares her own memories of how the Polish diaspora found new uses for kombinacja in America.

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German History