Personhood in Places: Aging, Memory, and Relatedness in Postsocialist Poland.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the practices of relatedness through which the moral personhood of older Poles can be created, transformed, or dismantled. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in medical and educational institutions in Wroclaw and Poznan, Poland, this dissertation shows how practices of relatedness that link older Poles to certain places and times can sustain, transform, or threaten moral personhood. Connections between older Poles and the Polish nation can diminish their status as moral persons through association with the socialist past, yet can also provide possibilities for inclusion through alignment with the European Union and the mythological national past. These connections between person and nation happen through everyday practices of storytelling, remembering, learning, and commensality. Ethnographic investigation of these practices shows that health, class, education, gender, and place of residence create different possibilities for achieving or sustaining moral personhood, such that some older Poles come to understand themselves and be understood by others as wise, respected, and valued, while other older Poles understand themselves and come to be understood by others as devalued, irrelevant, and marginal.

Analyzing practices of care and relatedness reveals how moral personhood can be sustained in contexts in which it is under threat, thus suggesting ways to ameliorate structural inequality in old age. Processual attention to practices of sociality shows how people with Alzheimer’s disease, who are so commonly treated as exceptional within studies of aging, sustain personhood and relatedness through practices of memory—exactly that which they are thought to lack—that are similar to those of older people in other contexts. This dissertation thus works against marginalization and suggests the need for holistic ethnographic perspectives on old age.

By integrating perspectives from kinship studies, medical anthropology, and postsocialist studies, this dissertation has ramifications for understanding how the wars and dramatic sociocultural and political-economic transformations of the last centuries in Poland have shaped individuals and social relations, and continue to shape generational expectations of the life course.