Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness

Foreword
Jan Kubik

Acknowledgments
Preface

Introduction: The Anthropologist as a Poverty Inspector

• An Anthropological Shift in Perspective
• The 'Culture of Poverty': Getting Beyond the Concept
• Social Trauma and Dependency: Shift in Perspective
• Hermeneutics and Anthropology
• Towards a Method
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty - the 'Patron Saint' of the Present Ethnography
• Method: (Lack of) Ethnographic Knowledge
• Pre-textual Ethnography
• The Most Bitter Side of the Polish Transformation: Fields of Research
• The "New Poverty"
• Post-socialism: History and Experience
• The Studied Phenomena
• The Field Research

Chapter 1. The Szydlowiec and Przysucha Environs (The S¿wie¿tokrzyskie and Radom Foothills)

• A World Full of Adversities
• Unemployment and the Farming Recession
• Community of the Unemployed: Immobility, Odd Jobs and 'Tragic Scarring'
• Motionless Orchards, Motionless Fields: Failure
• Dependency and Irreversibility: A Reproof at the World
• Second-string Ecology
• The New Face of the Jobless Village
• Gatherers of Wild Herbs and Undergrowth, Gatherers of Fir Wood
• The 'New Ecology': The Convertibility of the Environment
• Collection, Conversion, Transition
• The 'Culture of Survival'

Chapter 2. Walbrzych - Boguszów-Gorce

• From Destruction to 'Empty' Communication: The Liquidation of the Coal Basin
• The City and the Mine
• The Highly Ambivalent Story of the Walbrzych Basin
• Experience and Liquidation: Destruction - The City - The Body
• How to Speak of Liquidation? (Auto)aggression - Dialogue - Social Muteness
• Externalized Shame: Empty Communication and Internal Spectacles
• Facing Reality after the Mines (1)
• Complaints - Accusations - Triumphs
• A World Affected from the Outside
• Bootleg Mines, Diggers, Skills: The Body's Active Knowledge
• Rhythm, Jokes, Anecdotes: 'Scoffing at the World'
• Law and Lawlessness: Interior Spectacles
• The Grey Market: Deal-making and Resourcefulness
• The 'Internal Circulation' and the Fragmentationof Transactions
• Home-Oikos: The Internal Circulation
• Freedom in the Mines
• 'Do It Yourself' Equipment
• Working and Efficiency in Manual Labor: Resources and Deposits
• Demolition - Collecting - Objects
• Things
• Memory
• Facing Reality after the Mines (2)

Chapter 3. The Belchatów Brown Coal Mine -- The Shadowlands of the Exposed Mine

• The Mine/ Power Station. The Perfect Balance, an Abrupt Modernization
• Causative Alienation and Control over the Environment
• At the Margins of the Great Industry - Marginalization and Exclusion
• The Mine: Orbis Exterior
• Violence, Guilt, and the Building Sacrifice
• The Consequences of 'Excess': Metaphors of Exploitation
• The Mine: Orbis Interior
• The Players, Their Families, and Their Means of Sustenance
• Self-sufficiency, Subsistence: Gathering and Processing Goods
• Hunting and Gathering
• Waclaw Okon¿ski - The Stalker, Orbis Interior
• Goods and Trophies: The Hunting/Gathering Existence on the Edge of the Mine
• Records
• Cabinets of Curiosities, Collectors' Museums
• The Work of Memory: Reconstructions, Objects, Collections
• 'The Science of the Concrete': Inscriptions, Journals, Enumeration
• Hunters and Gatherers - Practitioners of Powerlessness

Conclusion

• The 'Reality Testing'
• Outcome
• Beyond Anthropology

Bibliography
Materials