‘I met several students in Tokyo’, wrote Feliks Gross to his mentor Bronisław Malinowski in January 1941. Gross was in Japan hoping for a US visa, having escaped Poland through the Soviet Union. Malinowski was at Yale, on sabbatical from the London School of Economics (LSE). ‘Your works are well known here and quoted in lectures’, wrote the younger scholar. ‘The cousin of the King of Afghanistan is studying education here’, Gross went on, affably.Footnote 1
In 1939 Gross had been due to take up a position at LSE at Malinowski’s invitation. Then the war began. Fleeing first the Germans and then the Soviets, from Kraków to Lviv to Vilnius, Gross hoped to get to London. However, following the invasion of Poland, LSE rescinded its offer and Gross’s application for a British visa was refused. Vilnius, meanwhile, was a tenuous refuge at best, and Malinowski threw himself into finding a place for Gross in the United States. He wrote to Oskar Lange, the economist, in Chicago, the New School, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Jewish Labour Bund. ‘My dear Gross’, began Malinowski’s letters – his sculpted English, sounding irony tinged even when sincere, was in sharp contrast to Gross’s headlong Polish. The news was not good, but he saved the worst for his reports to Feliks’s brother Ludwik, whom Malinowski had already helped find a position in the United States: four letters to Fisk had gone unanswered; Tulane, already hosting four refugee scholars, had refused. Only two years into the war compassion fatigue had set in across US academia.
Finally, however, on 26 March 1941, Malinowski wrote to T. B. Kittredge of the Rockefeller Foundation with better news. ‘Dear Kit, … Nature has run its course. Gross escaped from Lithuania, moved across Siberia, went to Yokohama, then to San Francisco. Now he is in New York, so to speak, on my hands’. Using an old English term for ‘counterclockwise’, Malinowski added: ‘his course has run straight against that of the sun. Widdershins’.Footnote 2
Many who knew Malinowski found him abrasive or arrogant, but Gross remembered him with affection and gratitude. As Gross later wrote to Józef Obrębski, another of Malinowski’s former students, Malinowski had been ‘uncommonly friendly [to Gross and his family] and simply good, very good and humane’ (here he used the word ludzki, literally ‘human’ – i.e., a mensch). ‘I won’t write what a great blow his death was, even for us’, he added, ‘already so accustomed to the death of our near ones’.Footnote 3
In this article I explore how two of Malinowski’s Polish protegés, Feliks Gross (1906–2006) and Józef Obrębski (1905–67), sought to rebuild careers in the United States after the Second World War. Reading the scholars’ correspondence of 1946 to 1948, exchanged while Gross was commuting between jobs in New York and Wyoming and Obrębski was conducting fieldwork in Jamaica for the British colonial research council, I analyse the confidence, excitement and sense of discovery with which the two refugees sought to transplant theories and methods, first cultivated in interwar Poland, to new soil. Indeed, Gross and Obrębski optimistically approached exile in the United States precisely as a chance to ‘go global’ with Polish social science. What is so striking, indeed, in the Gross–Obrębski correspondence is the scholars’ conviction of the portability of method, premised on the recognition and knowability of their new surroundings – their confident belief that Jamaica or the Arapaho reservation could, in fact, be thought through Poland. This provided the scholars with an important resource, I argue, for what this issue calls ‘reconfiguring the global’. Here, I consider how the scholars drew on their pre-war experience in East Central Europe to produce new ways of thinking about nationality, globalisation and decolonisation in the post-war world.
Gross and Obrębski did not succeed in transforming US or global social science, although their ideas prefigured both the constructivist and ‘world’ turns that would come to the field in later decades. In a sense, then, this is a history of scientific failure; in particular, the brilliant Obrębski ‘failed’ in the New World to live up to the great expectations of those who knew him. The purpose of this article, however, is not to explain that failure but to explore the significance of place and displacement in social science history, with a particular emphasis on the ‘locality’Footnote 4 of East Central Europe and its meaning for some emigré scholars between the two World Wars.
Malinowski’s own trajectory of displacement lays the groundwork for this exploration. Malinowski belonged to a cohort of intellectuals from the fringes of the multinational Eastern and Central European empires who went abroad as a matter of course to study and build careers in the metropole. With the collapse of those empires many brought their cosmopolitan entanglements back home as teachers and founders of disciplines in the new states created at Versailles. As illustrated by Joanna Wawrzyniak in her article on Stefan Czarnowski in this special issue, such scholars normally dropped off the international radar, although their legacies might extend generations in local intellectual cultures.Footnote 5
By contrast, scholars like Malinowski or Mannheim who remained in the metropole disappeared in a different way: they would henceforth be described as ‘British’ or ‘German’ thinkers, their origins in the poor and politically volatile reaches of central and Eastern Europe ever-so-politely downplayed.Footnote 6 In public, Malinowski’s response to the question of national identity was ironic and performative; as his daughter recalled, he alternated between a British or Polish guise ‘instrumentally and in the spirit of self-mockery’.Footnote 7 Malinowski’s drag performance of the pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing English gentleman was interspersed with self-exoticisation: in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, for instance, he hypothesised to his English-speaking readers that he was intrinsically gifted in participant observation, as ‘perhaps the Slavonic nature is more plastic and more naturally savage than that of Western Europeans’.Footnote 8
In private, Malinowski took a more sociological approach to the question of origins and intellectual formation. As his biographer Michael Young has shown, the anthropologist described his childhood as a ‘double life, at least’, suspended between two worlds. One was his familial milieu of declassé nobility in Kraków; the other, the village where he spent his summers in the Beskid Mountains. At home in the ancient, gracious city, his family used French at home, imagining itself into the far-flung community of civilised Europe. In the mountains he ran barefoot with the peasant children, speaking their dialect, ‘looking after sheep and cows, running away for days, learn[ing] fairy tales’. One of those fairy tales was of ‘paved roads and carriages’: to his friends in the isolated village, everyday life in Kraków could be imagined only as myth. This, he wrote, was his first ‘experience of duality, of the multiplicity of the world of culture’ upon which ethnological exploration rested.Footnote 9
The strangeness of the familiar, and the familiarity of the strange: this was the lesson, according to Malinowski, he had learned from Poland’s uneven developmental landscape. One could travel to another world without leaving home. Between the wars, at Malinowski’s urging, both Obrębski and Gross turned their ethnographic gaze on the near abroad, on the ‘other’ who was a ‘brother’: Obrębski, on Macedonian villagers and Slavic minorities in the Polish border region of Polesie; Gross, on orthodox Jews in Kraków’s Kazimierz neighbourhood and in Vilnius. As Grażyna Kubica has suggested, Malinowski, ever alert to the epistemological value of an insider/outsider position, should perhaps be considered one of the earliest proponents of ‘anthropology at home’.Footnote 10 By looking at how two of Malinowski’s students took ‘home’, in this sense, with them into exile, I hope to complicate familiar narratives of intellectual exile that privilege alienation as a source of intellectual innovation, suggesting a more complex and nuanced dynamic of physical, cultural, and epistemological dis- and re-placement.Footnote 11
Not Why, But How
Malinowski once quipped that Feliks Gross’s family, despite being Jewish, was so well regarded in Kraków as to enjoy the respect even of local anti-Semites. For the ‘true Krakauer’ Gross, the ‘paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion’ would indelibly mark his life in Poland.Footnote 12
Gross completed his doctorate in law in 1930 at the Jagiellonian University under the noted legal historian Stanisław Estreicher, writing on criminal law in ‘primitive’ societies. While working on his dissertation, he spent six months in Geneva and Paris at the International Labour Organisation and Institute for International Problems, respectively, before conducting further research in Germany, on the basis of which he completed a habilitation on nomadism with Estreicher, published in 1936.Footnote 13 At Estreicher’s suggestion, Gross contacted Malinowski, who agreed to contribute an introduction to the book. Malinowski also invited the younger scholar to London, where he visited the LSE anthropologist’s famous seminar.Footnote 14 According to Kubica, Gross’s meeting with Malinowski ‘changed his entire life’. Gross resonated strongly to Malinowski’s Krakovian sensibility and sense of humour; even the older scholar’s intelligent nastiness, Gross felt, made him, too, a ‘true Krakauer’.Footnote 15 Their close bond would endure until Malinowski’s death in New Haven, at which time he and Gross were working on a study of nationalism together.Footnote 16
Malinowski’s support was especially meaningful for Gross in light of the two disadvantages he faced in the 1930s: his Jewishness and his politics. Gross had become involved as a student in both the Academic Union of Pacificsts and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), extending his activism to pro-bono legal defence of destitute and political clients in the late 1930s.Footnote 17 He simultaneously worked with the PPS’s adult-education wing, or ‘Workers’ University’,Footnote 18 coordinating a sociological seminar in which participants carried out research in their own workplaces and communities.Footnote 19 It seems likely that Malinowski’s 1930 application to the Rockefeller Foundation for Gross to conduct ethnographic fieldwork at the Syria–Palestine border was turned down because of these political activities.Footnote 20 By the late 1930s, furthermore, anti-Semitic quotas in Poland had dashed Gross’s hopes of a university appointment.Footnote 21 Speaking of this in a letter to Malinowski, Gross noted that ‘the reckoning of us [Jews] as foreign is already our own personal drama’. While predicting that ‘this wave, too, will pass’, Gross nonetheless saw emigration, at least in the short term, as the best way ‘to preserve both one’s dignity and enthusiasm for scientific work … and stay faithful to one’s beliefs and to science’.Footnote 22
Malinowski tried to help Gross, making another (unsuccessful) application to the Rockefeller Foundation and, finally, to his employers at LSE. The outcome of the latter was Gross’s appointment to lecture on urban cultures of Eastern Europe; to secure it, Malinowski had to guarantee the university that he would see to Gross’s departure from Britain in the event of war or worsening anti-Semitism in Poland. The offer, however, lifted Gross’s spirits tremendously, as he wrote to Malinowski, especially as he had learned that a position promised him at the Free Polish University had gone to ‘Obremski’ (although, Gross hastened to add, ‘he completely deserves it and will be a very good scholar’).Footnote 23
As Gross’s misspelling suggested, the paths that would ultimately bring him and Obrębski together in the New World had crossed little before then. Unlike Malinowski and Gross, with their roots in the cosmopolitan Habsburg city of Kraków, Obrębski came from what is now rural Ukraine and Belarussia, in an area under Russian rule. Like Malinowski, however, Obrębski had experienced the duality of a childhood split between the Polish dwór, or manor-house, and the Slavic village, and he spoke fluent Belarussian, Ukrainian and Russian. Upon Polish independence Obrębski would experience yet another duality: that of being an ethnic Pole who felt ‘at home’ among Eastern Slavs, minorities subject to the young nation state’s drive to Polonise the borderlands.Footnote 24
Obrębski completed his MA in Slavic ethnology at the Jagiellonian University with Kazimierz Moszyński in 1930. His thesis on farming implements in the Balkans, based on fieldwork in 1928–30 in Bessarabia, Dobrudja, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, reflected Moszyński’s ‘critical evolutionism’, which by studying variations in material culture attempted to reconstruct the geographic spread of cultural forms over time.Footnote 25 Obrębski later expressed frustration with this approach, commenting that ‘our entire university training … detached us from direct issues of social and cultural life’. The search for signs of long-ago cultural contacts and concurrent lack of interest in present-day realities meant, Obrębski wrote, that ‘going to the Krakovian village, we did not see the Krakovian village, but we saw here Tibet, here China, there Northern Africa’. In 1930 he broke with Moszyński, applying for Rockefeller funding to conduct Ph.D. studies with Malinowski at LSE, ‘mainly in a sociological direction,’ as he wrote to Malinowski, ‘and based on your methods, known to me from your work, from which I have benefited a great deal’.Footnote 26
Indeed, Malinowski’s functionalism, oriented toward the present and a holistic understanding of culture, had developed in many ways in reaction against evolutionist and diffusionist approaches like Moszyński’s. It sought to understand, in Malinowski’s words, how ‘beliefs, ideals, and practices are welded into bigger systems’, approaching culture as ‘a vast apparatus by which man is put in a position the better to cope with the concrete, specific problems which face him in his adaptation to his environment in the course of the satisfaction of his needs’.Footnote 27 While Malinowskian functionalism was subsequently much criticised, the anthropologist Elizabeth Colson stressed its heuristic aspects: ‘we were trained to look for interconnections across fields of action in a systematic fashion and to ask, “If this changed, what else would happen?” … While functionalism never was very much a theory, it provided a good working method’ that in another time might have been called ‘developing working models, or writing thick description, or adopting a holistic approach’.Footnote 28 Gross would recall that in seminar, Malinowski asked participants to discuss not ‘why’, but ‘how’.Footnote 29 Equally important, and not coincidental, to the learning experience was the seminar’s eclectic mix of ‘Jews, white [and black] colonials, continental Europeans, women, and reputed leftists’.Footnote 30
After Gross’s return to Poland he attempted to apply Malinowskian functionalism close to home. Following the rejection by Rockefeller Malinowski had suggested that Gross conduct fieldwork in the Kraków ‘ghetto’, the historically Jewish district of Kazimierz. In a letter to his mentor Gross described how he was ‘trying to approach the Jewish quarter as a whole made up of interdependent and functioning elements irrespective of their origin’. Like Obrębski critiquing Moszyński, he dismissed the historical method of American anthropologist Melville Herskovits, aimed at discovering the roots of different cultural elements; this ‘would not show the ghetto of today’. For Gross, rather, ‘this whole medieval system, this enclave, functions as in a motor with elements of contemporary culture, which express themselves through it’.Footnote 31
Nonetheless, the secular, cosmopolitan Gross had some doubts. Kazimierz was, to be sure, an intriguing new world: he described with excitement one of his new acquaintances, a sofer (Torah scribe), and his discovery of ‘whole schools … followers of particular rabbis/wise men, who visit “stiblakh” (something between a synagogue and a club or society) and hold fierce discussions’.Footnote 32 Although he had acquired some Yiddish, he felt that his previous distance from traditional Jewish life was a handicap. ‘I never had doubts, or very few, about writing about the proletariat. I studied the environment for many years, saw many incidents and events, knew all the literature on the subject. It’s different with the ghetto’, he wrote, noting that gaining a reasonable familiarity with talmudic literature, for instance, would take years. ‘On the other hand, the fact that I come to it as an outsider, but also a Jew, allows me to make some rather interesting observations’.Footnote 33
At Malinowski’s urging, meanwhile, Obrębski would also not go to Tibet or China to ferret out unusual cultures and practices but to Macedonia, completing a dissertation on ‘Family Organisation among Slavs as Reflected in the Custom of Couvade’ (1933).Footnote 34 The dissertation shows very clearly how functionalism, in addition to everything else, offered Malinowski’s eclectic mix of students a weapon against assumptions of white Western European civilisational and racial superiority. Through what could be called a thick description of Macedonian family structure and gender ideology, Obrębski offered a functionalist reading of couvade, a custom in which a husband symbolically enacted childbirth while his wife was in labour. Obrębski located couvade within what he called the ‘paradoxes of the patriarchal regime’. Male attitudes toward women in Balkan cultures often led to marital conflict, but couvade served as a counterweight, ‘appealing to marital solidarity and contributing to the cohesion of the parental group’. Couvade thus understood was not the bizarre oddity it seemed to Western observers, but consistent with a universalist view of culture, whose wellsprings, whether ‘in a nomadic tribe in a virgin forest or in a civilised community of sky-scrapers and broadcasting’ consisted in human beings’ drive to survive and propagate.Footnote 35
Whether or not it had been Obrębski’s conscious purpose, the topic of couvade was well chosen to maximise a putative contrast between ‘civilised’ West and ‘savage’ East. Obrębski acknowledged the discomfort that couvade’s gender transgressing performance might provoke among his readers, apparently defying ‘all that in our European opinion passes for decent, reasonable and serious’. The idea that such a ‘sensational … drastic, absurd, and even ludicrous’ practice could have any positive, creative purpose, he admitted, might be difficult for the ‘convinced representative of the Western European civilisation’. Turning the tables, however, he stated that it was easy for him: ‘I am, after all, a Slav myself, born and brought up in the most archaic and primitive parts of Eastern Europe’.Footnote 36
Unlike Malinowski in Argonauts, though, Obrębski referred to his own semi-savagery to make a larger epistemological point. The problem with existing anthropological theories of couvade, he argued, and with many other ‘far-fetched’ theories about exotic cultural practices, was that they assumed a ‘savage mentality … entirely different from ours’. As a Slav himself, with knowledge derived not just from anthropological observation but ‘intimate bonds of friendship’ in the regions studied, he could not share this assumption.Footnote 37 In short, only when ‘unhampered by the inherent belief of the Western European in the superiority of his rational outlook and civilised habits’ could anthropologists hope to find explanations for ‘absurd’ customs that were not themselves absurd.
Natives’ Views, Opinions and Utterances
If the study of couvade had allowed Obrębski to bring the world to Eastern Europe, turning the gaze of global anthropology on one small region of the Balkans, his work on Polesie brought Eastern Europe to the world, turning Poles’ attention to the dynamics of colonial domination on their own doorstep. Polesie, a marshy territory straddling Poland’s borders with the Belarussian and Ukrainian SSRs, was considered the most ‘backward’ region of the Polish Second Republic. Obrębski’s growing reputation in interwar Poland upon his return from London in 1934 was based largely on his work in this region. As Gross somewhat mildly put it, Obrębski’s ‘findings [in Polesie] were in a certain sense revealing. The Poleshuks at that time did not show ethnic identification of the kind which was expected both by the administrators and scholars’.Footnote 38
Obrębski referred to himself an ‘ethnosociologist’,Footnote 39 and beyond simply signalling his departure from diffusionist or evolutionist models the moniker accurately described the institutional and methodological range of his work in this period. Such disciplinary convergence was facilitated by the fact that both Malinowskian functionalism and interwar Polish sociology privileged the dimension of subjective meaning. While Malinowski stressed the importance of collecting and confronting ‘natives’ views and opinions and utterances’, the sociologist Florian Znaniecki cultivated the study of autobiographies, collected through prize-competitions, to gain access to the interplay of subjective and objective forces – the process through which, he had argued with W.I. Thomas in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, social reality was constructed.Footnote 40 This so-called Polish (or autobiographical) method of memoir based research was taken up by a number of prominent Polish research centres in the 1930s. As assistant director of the Institute for Rural Culture from 1936–9, Obrębski helped organise the most extensive competition of the interwar period, directed at rural youth.Footnote 41 Gross, too, conducted a memoir competition through TUR’s sociological seminar, resulting in the compilation Workers Write.Footnote 42
Obrębski’s interest in autobiographical method had its corollary in his developing theories of nation and ethnicity. Obrębski lambasted Polish scholars and officials who treated the Uniate Catholic population of the marshes as ethnically Polish but ‘pre-national’, based on studies of so-called ‘objective’ criteria of nationality such as dress or language.Footnote 43 By contrast, Obrębski focused on the emerging subjective national identification of peasants in Polesie, understanding the nation as an ‘imagined … creation’:
The community that exists among its members is based on the fact that a series of cultural values are recognised as common group values. … The deciding factor in membership to a nation is not this or another quality or characteristic of a person, but his feeling of connection to the whole group and expressions of solidarity with it through collective actions.Footnote 44
Although such a constructivist approach had already been developed in the work of contemporary Polish sociologists like Znaniecki, Obrębski’s innovation was to apply it in a well-researched case study of a ‘nationally indifferent’ group.Footnote 45 Obrębski’s findings were damning: with the ‘Pole’ already deeply embedded in Polesian folk culture as a figure of conquest and exploitation, he showed, local peasants’ alienation had only increased since independence. Adversarial encounters with Polish police officers, tax collectors, settlers and teachers meant that a Polesian ‘national world-view’, rather than a Polish one, was the likely outcome of Polish state building in the eastern borderlands.Footnote 46
Reminding readers that the history of Polesie was one of conquest and enserfment, Obrębski criticised widespread nostalgia for an idealised golden age of Polish aristocratic life in the so-called ‘Kresy’, or eastern borderlands. (Referring to the archetypal Polish dwór – the sort of manor-house his own ancestors would have possessed – he drily noted that, ‘although not every manor resembled Versailles, each had something in common with the Bastille’).Footnote 47 Obrębski saw the power-ridden dynamics of contact and conflict in Polesie, in this respect, as similar to that in other global societies including ‘Eurasian Soviet villages, the tribes of Congo and the societies of Morocco, Indochina and Siam’.Footnote 48
Obrębski’s writings on Polesie echo some of Malinowski’s thoughts on what the older anthropologist called ‘transculturation’, that is, cultural change resulting from contact between Europeans and colonised peoples. Malinowski increasingly felt this process could be understood only with reference to colonial violence, racial domination and economic exploitation.Footnote 49 Obrębski, however, would go further, postulating the impact of transculturation not just on colonised peripheries but also on the centre itself. In particular, he would theorise the cultural creativity of marginal and subaltern groups as a kind of engine for democratic change, an idea that would become central to his work in Jamaica and to his ‘sociology of rising nations’.
Our Jamaican Jungle
Gross planned to leave for England in November 1939. On the fourth day of the war, he and his wife Priwa fled Kraków for Lwów with a rucksack of belongings, and then (following a tip-off about Gross’s impending arrest by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) for Vilnius. In a letter to Malinowski Gross described the collapse of Polish authority during the September campaign: ordinary soldiers’ suicidal attacks on tanks, officers fleeing in requisitioned cars, streams of refugees, burnt villages, wells drunk dry. In the course of their flight he came across ‘“sociological time capsules”’, Jewish shtetlakh ‘where progress has halted since the 16th century. … But there was no time for study because I was part of a great terror which chased us from place to place’. Apart from the horrors witnessed en route, ‘there were many sad news items’. Gross named a number of prominent academics who had been killed by the Germans, including his mentor Estreicher. Gross also mentioned, misspelling his name again, that he had ‘seen Obremski’ while fleeing Poland.Footnote 50
After LSE withdrew his invitation and his British visa was denied Gross wrote to Malinowski that he had ‘channelled all his energies into studying the Jewish quarter in Vilnius’. He was spending much of his time at the Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO), which was providing a small but welcome salary in exchange for some work with students. In Vilnius, Gross admitted, he was coming to grips with the existence of traditions that seemed to have no functional purpose – traditions qua traditions. He admitted not knowing, for the time being, how to make sense of this.Footnote 51 However, the time for solving this conundrum was running out. Slightly more than a year later Gross was in New York and the Jewish community of Vilnius was destined for annihilation.
Obrębski was reticent about his wartime experiences and we know little about them. The younger sociologist Stefan Nowakowski remembered the Obrębski villa in Warsaw’s Mokotów neighbourhood as an ‘open’ house during the war, where anyone needing a bed and a meal was welcome, and a collection point for conspiratorial publications. The house was destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising.Footnote 52 A copy of Tamara Obrębska’s c.v., written a few years later, is suggestive. Tamara had studied with Malinowski, Harold Laski and Jean Piaget in the mid-1930s and worked as a researcher and lecturer in economics in Warsaw. After listing her academic achievements and work experience, under ‘Other Experiences’, she included ‘the short periods I spent in Russian and German prisons, my experience as a destitute person and passive and active participation in a few minor battles’. These, she added, had ‘contributed greatly to deepen[ing] my understanding in the fields of sociology and social psychology’.Footnote 53
Obrębski spent the first year after the war in Łódź. In 1946 he was offered a professorship at the University of Warsaw; before accepting the post, however, he travelled to Oxford on the invitation of E. E. Evans-Pritchard to present a series of lectures on ‘The Changing Peasantry of Eastern Europe’. These synthesised several of Obrębski’s main research interests heretofore. As in his work on Polesie, he took up the transformation of rural culture under the impact of modernisation. This he theorised as transition away from a (pre-modern) system based on ‘structural dichotomy of the national society, divided into an upper class living in the national civilisation system, and the peasant mass, atomised into its village communities’. Since the end of feudalism, however, the peasant, as a paid labourer, migrant or, most recently, (notional) citizen, ‘was part of the national scene; but he was not admitted as a full participant in the values, activities and institutions of the nation’. Peasants occupied the physical space of the nation, but not its social space.Footnote 54
One of Obrębski’s key examples was cultural conflict around education in rural communities. Obrębski traced the ‘slow, cumbersome and roundabout way’ that education was not only embraced by peasants in the 1930s but also creatively mobilised as a tool for transforming national culture. Many peasant families, he wrote, had resisted sending their children to school, failing to see the value of an education that had no obvious connection to rural life. In the end, however, the ideal of education penetrated village society not at its strongest point (the family), but its weakest – among children themselves, or specifically the shepherd ‘play-group’. Out of these unregulated, rather gang-like groups of shepherds arose extremely active and effective peasant youth organisations, which embraced education and spearheaded the creation of village libraries, agricultural improvement courses and so on. Finally, youth groups served as the foundation for networks of so-called ‘peasant universities’, experimental, egalitarian high schools for rural youth aimed at meeting the needs and reflecting the values of rural society. ‘National civilization’, then, had ‘penetrated the peasant community through its most exposed periphery’.Footnote 55
Instead of taking up his professorship in Warsaw following his stay in Oxford, Obrębski joined the West Indian Social Survey (WISS), headed by former Malinowski student Edith Clarke and funded by the British Colonial Social Science Research Council, for the study of family structure in rural Jamaica. On 3 May 1947 Obrębski wrote to Florian Znaniecki in Illinois that he had no desire to return to Poland. ‘I have no illusions about the prospects for the development of Polish sociology in the current situation’. He was also, however, uninterested in pursuing a career in England. ‘I confess that only after my last sojourn in London did I fully understand how much we all in Poland owe [you for developing the field]. … I don’t feel up to reforming English sociology on my own [earlier in the letter, he had mentioned that British sociology was affected by “a flood of statistics” and “reportomania”], and I don’t desire to share the fate of that tragic nation. Truly, their leading elites are merely “well brought up people” in the most unfortunate sense of the term. … Even Mannheim was lost on them’. Meanwhile, however, working with Tamara in Jamaica, ‘the biographical and ecological method that we are applying is producing splendid results’.Footnote 56
In an undated letter to friends in the United States Obrębski reiterated the exhilarating sense of discovery that he and Tamara felt in Jamaica and the conviction that they had brought over a priceless theoretical and methodological toolkit. Describing life in their ‘Jamaican jungle’ (although not much of the jungle was actually left in the literal sense, he noted, the human and ‘civilisational’ one was extraordinary), Obrębski explained, ‘we have the ability here to study the capitalist system in its most dismal form: in a society shaped by purely economic manipulations’, one whose ideology, values and social structures had been stamped by slavery and its ‘inextinguishable traditions’. In the course of these studies, he added, ‘the methods that were developed and refined in Poland haven’t let us down’. Sometimes, he joked, he and Tamara thought their discoveries might rival those of Columbus (but with ‘less tragic’ consequences). Adding that the war seemed to have turned them into ascetics who cared only for their work, he noted, ‘my interests do not go beyond the confines of “backward” societies on the verge of transformation into national societies’.Footnote 57
The best-known output of the WISS, and one with a long-lived impact on West Indian anthropology, was Clarke’s book, My Mother Who Fathered Me (1957).Footnote 58 While widely criticised for its lack of theoretical and methodological rigor, the book nonetheless received mostly glowing reviews.Footnote 59 Praise focused on its illumination of the supposed terra incognita of West Indian family life, particularly its supposedly high levels of sexual promiscuity and illegitimacy, a decades long obsession of British colonial officials and reformers.Footnote 60 Through three community studies My Mother Who Fathered Me attempted to discover how the ‘contemporary situation … made it impossible for [Jamaican lower-class] men to perform the roles of father and husband, as these roles are defined in the society to which they belong’.Footnote 61 Based in strongly normative assumptions about gender roles and family structures, the book seemed to offer ‘scientific’ backing for stereotypes of feckless, absent West Indian fathers and ‘masculinised’ female heads-of-household,Footnote 62 contributing to what one observer called ‘an emergent transnational discourse of family dysfunction in the African diaspora’.Footnote 63
Clarke and Obrębski were notoriously at loggerheads throughout the survey. While British sources unflatteringly depicted Obrębski as having poor English and mostly ‘sitting in the window of his room reading newspapers’, the conflict clearly reflected a deep clash of world-view and scientific approach. The Obrębscy transgressed ‘subtle racial etiquette’, for example, by allowing eight-year-old Stefan to play with local children.Footnote 64 This, of course, is exactly what Obrębski – and Malinowski before him – had done as a child: play barefoot with local peasants. Moreover, Obrębski’s research conclusions were fundamentally at odds with Clarke’s.Footnote 65
To start, Obrębski rejected the very premise of widespread illegitimacy in Jamaica. In a 1956 conference paper Obrębski described two competing and concurrent familial patterns among Jamaican peasants: paternal (or ‘parental’), headed by a father, and maternal, headed by an unwed mother. This distinction, he argued, rather than legal wedlock or its absence, was what counted in village society. Indeed, in a given ‘paternal’ family unit, the cohabiting parents could be either married or unmarried; in either case, however, the arrangement was patrilineal and patriarchal. Furthermore, even in maternally headed families, many offspring (the so-called ‘outside children’) were not ‘illegitimate in the social sense’: these were children whose paternity was recognised by the community, who carried their father’s name and who were entitled by social convention to his financial support.Footnote 66
Marriage, in short, had no functional role as a regulator of sexuality and procreation in the Jamaican village. Like Clarke, Obrębski saw the institution of marriage as a reflection of class and wealth, but also of race and gender. For instance, concubinage, the least desirable familial arrangement from a woman’s point of view, was most common between wealthier, lighter-skinned men and poorer, darker-skinned women. While showing, then, that Jamaican family practices were far from ‘disorganised’, Obrębski nonetheless posited ‘striking structural paradoxes and … dysfunctions’ within them. The problem was not that too few couples married; it was that the ‘grammar’ of the family system taught ‘acquiescence with a regime of social inequalities … of sex, colour, economic condition or circumstances of birth’.Footnote 67
Obrębski used the case at hand to reflect further upon the implications of globalisation (or what he called the ‘global process’) for functionalist theories of culture and vice-versa. Functionalism, he explained, had first developed in the study of societies that had evolved gradually over time; such societies exhibited a ‘high degree … of functional adequacy’ or internal consistency between institutions and values. Generalising from such cases, functionalist theories had posited such consistency as a universal attribute. That in reality some cultural practices (such as those observed among Orthodox Jews by Gross) could seem to have no functional purpose, or even appear incoherent or even destructive (such as some of those observed by Obrębski in Jamaica), resulted from changing historical processes since about 1500. This change was distinguished everywhere by the sudden decrease in the cultural ‘self-containedness’ of collectivities, but its character varied tremendously. In some areas it led to the absorption of ‘folk-masses’ into the ‘national structure’, a process that was, according to Obrębski, essentially inclusive and democratic; in others, like Jamaica, it was regressive, leading to the creation of ‘secondary peasantries’. These ‘infant formations’ evolved in a compressed timeframe and in a context (e.g., slavery) that was ‘culturally discordant, incongruous, and lacking coherence of human relationships’.Footnote 68
Yet the take-home lesson was one of human agency and creativity, not pathology. For all its malintegration, the Jamaican family system was ultimately an ‘achievement in human values’. If slavery had degraded the family, Obrębski wrote, Jamaican peasant culture, returning the family to a central place in the social structure, represented its ‘revindication’: ‘the people have built their own social and cultural system in the pursuit of elementary values of human existence and in defiance of a deviant Western pattern hostile to them’. For this reason it seemed likely that the Jamaican family would continue to evolve to the point where it could form the basis of an egalitarian national society.Footnote 69
A Car is Good as Long as it Runs
In correspondence with the Obrębscy, many of their friends in North America in 1946–8 discussed the burning question: return to Poland, or stay in the United States? For Gross the answer was clear. In October 1946 Gross wrote to Obrębski, possibly put in touch by their mutual friend Oskar Lange, advising him on how to get a position in the United States. ‘I would really like you to come’, Gross wrote. ‘We could collaborate a little on anthropology and sociology. Whatever happens back home, the right place for you is in the States or England. Back home those honourable know-it-alls will drag you down, simply out of fear that you’ll go over their heads. Our Republic was always thus – [Kazmierz] Dobrowolski [another of Malinowski’s students, about whom Gross had earlier made some unflattering comments] stayed in the country; [Ludwig] Gumplowicz, Malinowski, Znaniecki [went] abroad’.Footnote 70
Gross kept up his sales pitch over the next two years, offering encouragement and doing what he could to smooth Obrębski’s way. His strategy was threefold: to suggest the possibility of institutional research arrangements for Obrębski that would reproduce pre-war Polish conditions but on a transnational scale, to demonstrate that his and Obrębski’s values were alive and well in the United States and – a kind of secret weapon – to bring Obrębski on a visit to an Indian reservation.
This latter offer was repeated multiple times throughout the correspondence. Judging from anecdotal evidence, the prospect of such an excursion was highly attractive to Polish social scientists newly arrived in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 71 For Gross, spending time on an Arapaho reservation in Wyoming in the summers of 1947–8 meant fulfilling Malinowski’s once-expressed hope that Gross would conduct fieldwork on nomadism, an opportunity scuppered by his failed funding bids of the 1930s.Footnote 72 Gross published some loosely edited field-notes on Arapaho migratory practices in the journal Ethnos. Asking why the Arapaho, who had readily adapted a multitude of Western technologies, were resistant to farming, which would have brought clear economic benefits, he showed that it would have interfered with the migratory festivals and events (not just the traditional Sun Dance or peyote celebrations, but, for example, the rodeo) that Gross’s informants so greatly enjoyed. For the time being, anyway, Gross concluded, a nomadic system of values trumped Western-style economic rationality.Footnote 73
The English of the Ethnos piece is relaxed and folksy; Gross seems to have had an ear for the local idiom (although he did perhaps misjudge his audience in describing one national park as ‘as long as the whole Western border of pre-war Lithuania and half of Latvia’).Footnote 74 Simultaneously, there was an outsider’s eye for detail. Gross showed great interest in the famous ‘American way of life’ seen both on the Indian reservation and in US cities. On the reservation, Gross noted the washing machines, frigidaires and automobiles (no matter if they were old and ‘rattled mostly like rattlesnakes. … A car is good as long as it runs’).Footnote 75 Fresh off the boat from Yokohama, when he and Priwa had eaten at a dockyard workers’ cafeteria in New York, he had been amazed to see that pineapple, a luxury by European standards, was workingman’s food. In a 1946 brochure entitled Humanist Socialism Gross took aim at fellow leftists who begrudged the worker’s ‘American dream [of having] his own home, car, and comfortable possessions’. This was a vision of ‘society [as] some sort of dead economic machine’ with ‘no place … for human feelings and passions’, in which ‘one person [was] as similar to another as two drops of water’.Footnote 76 One senses his admiration for the Arapaho, who – buoyed by shared oil profits since 1947 – seem to have cracked the system, having their ‘American dream’ and eating their peyote, too.
In his first letter Gross updated Obrębski on his activities since leaving Poland. He wrote about his work as co-founder and secretary general of the Central and Eastern European Planning Board and involvement with Polish socialist and labour organisations in New York. He described his teaching duties at NYU and Wyoming – ‘together modest earnings but the pleasantest of work, which sometimes allows one to forget about the tragedies’. His one regret, voiced repeatedly in his letters, was that he was ‘recognised [in the United States] more as an expert on international politics and area studies’ than on sociology and ethnography. ‘Life’, very simply, had pushed him in the direction of contemporary affairs, ‘although anthropology still pulls at me’.Footnote 77 The Wyoming research would be his last anthropological fieldwork in a conventional sense.
In December Gross mentioned two possibilities that might interest Obrębski. First, Gross hoped to establish, together with Robert McIver at Columbia, an international institute of social science – which, he explained, would be like ‘our IGS’, only on a global scale. (The IGS, or or Institute for Social Economy, directed by the prominent leftist sociologist Ludwik Krzywicki, had conducted innovative research on economic and social conditions in interwar Poland.) Gross had proposed Obrębski as a consultant for the future organisation’s agrarian division. Second, he mentioned plans for an international research centre on ‘agrarian (peasant) issues’. Clarence Senior at the University of Puerto Rico had tried to organise support for such a centre among Polish agrarian leaders, among others; it would have been ‘completely up your alley’. Although it had fallen through, Gross urged Obrębski to drop in on Senior in Puerto Rico, so long as he was in the neighbourhood. Closing the letter, Gross congratulated Obrębski on his lectures at Oxford and more generally ‘on your great scientific achievements – you’re modest and perhaps don’t recognise them’. With atypical formally, he added, ‘it makes me truly glad that we will have in you a new Bronisław Malinowski’.Footnote 78
In January 1948 Gross apologised for the delay in responding to Obrębski’s last letter; he had been busy helping his sister, a Ravensbrück survivor, who had been ill and had moved back to Poland. He complained again that his own work was constantly deflected from anthropology to politics, but in the summer Gross hoped to make a trip to the reservation (‘I would happily bring you along to my Shoshone’). Gross then turned to his main subject. First, whatever Obrębski might have heard about universities in the United States was probably wrong. ‘Universities here are not reactionary’, he assured him. ‘On the contrary, [they’re] very progressive, more so than ours – and the liberals here are sincere’. Explaining that the United States had strong radical agrarian and labour traditions, Gross noted that some 80 per cent of his students were working and studying at the same time. ‘It looks different’, he added, ‘from up close’. He was not only convinced that Obrębski would feel at home in the United States but also that his work would be highly valued. Comparing it favourably to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the American Male (‘ultimately Kingsley [sic] discovered that in New York there is some sexual life, especially on weekends’), he bemoaned that ‘here everything is packed up in statistics. An intelligent study like yours of rural colonial issues would have a big impact’.Footnote 79
In the last letter of the series, dated May 1948, Gross yet again apologised for a long silence; he had just finished correcting the proofs for his book European Ideologies.Footnote 80 Obrębski had sent him an outline for an unnamed study that Gross found ‘excellent – hugely interesting question – rural city, as you called it – a completely new approach. … I, too, thought that the autobiographical technique … could be very interesting’.Footnote 81 Gross mentioned that he would soon be returning to Wyoming (‘I hope that from there, I’ll yet again go to the Arapaho reservation’), but that he had been much occupied by political themes, including ‘the social implications of the discovery of the atom’.Footnote 82
Gross’s comments point to a paper Obrębski presented at the First International Congress of Sociology in Zurich in 1950 called ‘The Sociology of Rising Nations’. The essay wove together many of the themes he had been developing since the break with Moszyński: processes of change and modernisation within traditional societies and their methodological implications; the persistence of a ‘structural dichotomy of the national society, divided into an upper-class living in the national civilisation system and the peasant [or native, or colonised, or ex-slave] mass’ that was excluded from that system; and the cultural creativity that arose from the margins of the ‘folk’ society, and that led to organised, self-conscious movements aimed at transforming and assimilating national life to its values.
Eastern Europe thus became the template for a broadly comparative, global model, for its social realities, Obrębski implied, were more representative of the global norm than those few societies with ‘all-inclusive national structures’ like the United States or northwestern Europe. Obrębski called both for the elimination of disciplinary boundaries between anthropology and other social sciences (‘the transformations which non-literate societies and their civilisations undergo in our contemporary world gradually deprive anthropology of its raison-d’être as a distinct discipline’) and for comparative study of phenomena rarely grouped together. This included such processes as the ‘annihilation of indigenous folk-groups’ and their replacement or absorption by settler groups, as in the New World; ‘full transformation of pre-existing social structures through the rise of new social classes and the growth of new cultural forms’, as in Communist China or Eastern Europe; the ‘growth … of new national culture groups from the peripheries of European civilisations and from their slavery systems imposed upon imported African populations’, as in the Caribbean; or ‘the disintegration of … indigenous folk-cultures under the pressure of Western economy and the influence of Western civilization’, as in Africa. Obrębski put forward the autobiographical method, finally, as the best technique for studying these processes.Footnote 83
Malinowski’s Children
By the time of giving his paper in Zurich Obrębski had been living in the United States for two years. He, Tamara and Stefan arrived in New York on 11 September 1948, a journey that Tamara described in a detailed letter home: the flight via Cuba and Miami, the view from their Manhattan hotel room, the price of shirts, the layout of their ground-floor Queens apartment. Everyday life fed sociological reflection: slightly amused by all the ‘little buttons’ in her fully electrified kitchen, Tamara planned on getting a camping stove, just in case – and wondered at her American neighbours’ blithe unconcern about the possibility of a power outage.Footnote 84 (Two years later Gross would note that the harnessing of energy had created unprecedented social interdependence: ‘in this sense a peasant in the Balkans who is using a candle for his light, wood for heating, water from his well and a horse as traction power is much more independent’.)Footnote 85
Meanwhile, Stalinism was in full swing in Poland. A letter from sociologists (and former participants of Malinowski’s seminar) Maria and Stanisław Ossowski in 1952, requesting books and medicine for the failing Stanisław, wistfully described the ‘true pleasure’ that Tamara’s last letter – full of ‘colourful, lively, exotic’ news – had brought them. The stamps on the envelope, depicting Party leader Bolesław Bierut and the massive industrial project of Nowa Huta, respectively, spoke volumes.Footnote 86 Poland was no longer any place for Polish sociology, attacked as a ‘bourgeois science’ under high Stalinism. But what was?
Obrębski worked at the United Nations as senior social affairs officer of the Trusteeship Council until 1959. From 1962 he taught at the C.W. Post College of Long Island University. He was invited to spend 1968–9 in Warsaw organising the Department of Ethnography there but died unexpectedly in 1967 at the age of sixty-two. Obrębski’s work never had the ‘great impact’ Gross had predicted. Unlike Gross himself, who published some twenty books, Obrębski’s post-war publications were largely limited to unattributed studies for the UN. In an obituary Gross argued that Obrębski’s ‘publications did not adequately reflect his talents and work. … He was a kind of perfectionist, never satisfied with his own work, always in need of additional revision and editing’. Recalling the intellectual atmosphere of the 1930s, when Obrębski had been a rising star, Gross evoked his brilliance in conversation and his deep humanism.Footnote 87 His comments are reminiscent of Obrębski’s own description of the ‘personality ideal’ of the East European intelligent as someone measured not by personal achievements, but by ‘educational qualifications and personal values’.Footnote 88
Obrębski’s perfectionism, however, cannot be blamed for the failure of his and Gross’s project – a vision (admittedly, the ebullient Gross was always more optimistic about this) of building a new city on a hill, exploiting Polish methods and American freedoms. Obrębski rediscovered his Polesian peasants in the Jamaican hills, Gross his working-class scholars in Brooklyn. Exile was not tragedy. First, because the real tragedy had already taken place, on Polish soil. Second, because Gross and Obrębski came from a long line of émigrés, including Gumplowicz, Znaniecki and, of course, Malinowski. Their homeland was theory and method, and it was portable. The United States of ‘area studies’ and development economics, however, resisted infection by their enthusiasm.
East Central Europe as a geographical concept is premised on its ‘betweenness’ in relation to East and West. For thinkers like Gross or Obrębski, however, Poland’s temporal suspension between two historical moments was in some ways more salient than its spatial betweenness – a position clearly expressed in Obrębski’s historicising revisions of structuralism. What today we would call interwar Poland’s uneven development made it a harbinger of globalised modernity, a fruitful terrain for ‘reconfiguring the global’.
Meanwhile, Gross and Obrębski experienced their own ambivalent suspension between (or among) multiple subject positions. Polish ethnographers did not have to travel far to see ‘savages’, and those savages were at the same time fellow Slavs. This raised questions about how much (or what kind) of critical distance was possible between researcher and subject. The Jamaican hills may have been the last place Obrębski truly felt at home. Malinowski told Gross, while conducting research in Mexico in his last years, ‘you know, it’s so pleasant in these small towns. There is mud, dirt roads, just like in the old country. … It’s nice to see that again.’Footnote 89 Whiffs of sentimental identification with the dispossessed and trampled – a reverse snobbery of sorts – can be found throughout the letters between Gross, Obrębski and their interlocutors.
But that identification, as an ethnologist would know better than anyone, went only so far. Back in pre-war Poland, in relation to those Slavic peasants, the researcher was still pan (master), the representative of feudal power. Once, during the war, Malinowski made some dismissive remarks to Gross about Polish American immigrants. Gross countered with praise for the ‘intelligent, dedicated, and progressive people’ he had come to know in the immigrant labour movement, adding, ‘you may not know them’. Malinowski ‘thought a moment and said curtly: “I know them. One of my ancestors was cut in half with a saw in Rabatsia”’ – referring to the peasant uprising against the Galician nobility in 1846. The distance from gentry dwór to rural hovel, however short measured in footsteps, was a vast field of power, conflict and unfinished business.Footnote 90
For Malinowski’s post-Versailles children, the putative beneficiaries and stakeholders in a modernising, developmentally conscious nation state, it was abundantly clear that ‘ethnographic work has indeed been enmeshed in a world of enduring and changing power inequalities, and it continues to be implicated. It enacts power relations. But its function within these relations is complex, often ambivalent, potentially counter-hegemonic’, as James Clifford put it.Footnote 91 They brought this message to the United States when positivism was at its apogee in US social science, precisely when such reflexivity was least wanted. Later, with the rediscovery of biographic methods in sociology or the ‘world turn’ in anthropology, their voices might have resonated more.Footnote 92 But in the early post-war years, Obrębski and Gross, with their ‘Old World’ ways and thoughts, must have seemed like relics of a strange, backward corner of Europe, not harbingers of a new vision. They were, like the peasants of Polesie, ‘yesterday’s people’. Widdershins.
