Hunters, gatherers, and practitioners of powerlessness

Titel: Hunters, gatherers, and practitioners of powerlessness : an ethnography of the degraded in postsocialist Poland / Tomasz Rakowski. Translated by Søren Gauger
Verfasser:
Beteiligt:
Ausgabe: first paperback edition
Veröffentlicht: New York; Oxford : Berghahn, 2019
Umfang: xiii, 312 Seiten : Illustrationen
Format: Buch
Sprache: Englisch
Schriftenreihe/
mehrbändiges Werk:
European anthropology in translation ; Volume 6
RVK-Notation:
Schlagworte:
ISBN: 9781789205343

The socio-economic transformations of the 1990s have forced many people in Poland into impoverishment. Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness gives a dramatic account of life after this degradation, tracking the experiences of unemployed miners, scrap collectors, and poverty-stricken village residents. Contrary to the images of passivity, resignation, and helplessness that have become powerful tropes in Polish journalism and academic writing, Tomasz Rakowski traces the ways in which people actively reconfigure their lives. As it turns out, the initial sense of degradation and helplessness often gives way to images of resourcefulness that reveal unusual hunting-and-gathering skills.