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Dystopia's Provocateurs : Peasants, State, and Informality in the Polish-German Borderlands by Edyta Materka is a book available to read on EtoBox.

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

Oral histories on life in the eastern German region annexed by Poland following World War II.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, Mat

Author

Edyta Materka

Publisher

Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Published

2017

Language

EN

ISBN

9780253028877

Subjects

Science, Economics, History