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Ethnographers’ Self-Depiction in the Photographs from the Field. Post-War Ethnology in Poland
attention to the issues of implication of the medium in the multilevel and mul¬
tifaceted process of recognition and relationships. Sol Worth (1981) has already
pointed out that one should distinguish between photography as a “record about
the culture” and photography as a “record of culture”. Through which category can
one describe the photographs presenting ethnographic work in the field? Are they
a record “about culture” or rather a “record of culture”? And last but not least, how
one can “read” those photographs and how do they become “anthropological”?
It might be useful to contextualise the analysis with written and published mem¬
oirs of ethnographers by Leszek Dziegiel (1996) and Przemystaw Burchard (1964),
who participated in the fieldwork in those days. Their voices are important because
they not only describe the purposes and daily life of the camps but also shed light
on self-positioning of young researchers in situations of ethnographic fieldwork.
Both of them also illustrate their stories with photographs depicting participants of
the camps and their work.
The Phenomenon of Research Camps
Looking at those photographs it is difficult not to pay attention to the phenom¬
enon of the research camps,’ which were held in different parts of Poland since the
beginning of the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century. At this point it is worth
referring to the sociopolitical contexts in Poland and the period of communist
“ideologization”. The dominant feature of Polish ethnography during the commu¬
nist regime was a huge emphasis on fieldwork, which was the result of the urge to
document disappearing traditions. Therefore, one of the most important tasks was
the documentation of perishing “traditional” folk culture (Burszta & Kopczyriska¬
Jaworska 1982). Focusing on research on traditional folk culture was consistent
with existing interests of ethnography (which was “responding to the needs of the
moment”) and one of the accepted social tasks—appreciation of groups that did
not fully participate in the life of the nation (Jasiewicz 2006). Thus, ethnography
after 1945 has had a distinct political function as far as it was associated with in¬
fluential ideologies. As a result of the documentation of traditional folk culture,
where folk culture was treated as a survival form in earlier times, was to organize
a large-scale research team’s conducting massive field research carried out as part of
the aforementioned research camps. Those times resulted in “ethnology losing its
theoretical independence and its entire transformation into historical and (mainly)
descriptive ethnography” (Jasiewicz & Slattery 1995: 193) with a particular em¬
phasis on the study of material culture (Burszta & Kopczyriska-Jaworska 1982).
The first research camp was held in 1949 near Opoczno and in subsequent
years the camp was extended to the areas of central and southern Poland. The ofh¬
> In contemporary Polish anthropology we no longer have to deal with this phenomenon called research
camps. Commonly used to describe practices in which the students are participating is the concept of
research practice, or fieldwork exercises.
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