Badacz i jego rozmówcy - poznawanie czasów zmian (Polacy na Białorusi w końcu XX i na początku XXI wieku)

ENChange, including social change, its directions, sources and consequences has long interested many researchers. Since the 19th century, the social costs of such change have been described. As one of these, the phenomenon of cultural trauma, analyzed among Poles in western and central Belarus, allows us to draw conclusions about the internal diversity of minority groups and to indicate what is common to them. During field research our interlocutors introduce subjects of moment to them of their own accord. Among others, the rebirth of religious life after the Gorbachev perestroika, the recovery of church buildings, the need to teach Polish. Studies show that the political transformation brought about a deepening of divisions into us local folk and strangers, where the locals are family members and people of the same nationality and strangers are new arrivals. Respondents view the times when Leonid Brezhnev was in power as positive and the period after the fall of the USSR as bringing about social disintegration manifested by widespread drunkenness, socio-economic polarization, disappearance of disinterested neighbourly help. A recurring motif in the interviews was the deep divisions in the Union of Poles in Belarus. Studies in the Belarusian-Polish and Beiarusian-Lithuanian borderland were an opportunity to observe how the populations inhabiting geographical and cultural borderlands function. The research represents a study trend referred to as the anthropology of transformation, which describes individual ways of experiencing changes and their cultural after-effects.