Ethnography, Memory, Experiment: Towards an Alternative Social History

Research on the self-organization and creative potential of rural communities in Poland suggests several decades of unrecognized conflicts of knowledge and social identity. This article demonstrates how work that is experimental both ethnographically and artistically can help reveal unfixed or absent elements of Polish identity conducted in contemporary village spaces. Rakowski suggests that ethnographic and artistic work can uncover unfixed cultural memories, enabling a completely new perspective on the formation of Polish society.This process paints a different, alternative social history, and atthe same time it suggests a new perspective on issues of citizenship, social subjectivity and our understanding of history in a theoretical and methodological sense.