Etnografia Polska (Dec 2014)
NATIONAL DIMENSIONS OF PERSONHOOD AMONG OLDER PEOPLE IN POLAND
Abstract
Older people in Poland are often discriminated against in both practice and imagination, thus threatening their very status as moral persons. Personhood is especially threatened in institutional care; however, educational institutions (e.g., Universities of the Third Age), where older Poles perform a modern, European, contemporary elder personhood in which health is an unspoken assumption, offer the possibility of inclusion. Across these contexts, older Poles create moral personhood through practices of remembering that involve national memory. As these practices of remembering – which are simultaneously practices of relatedness – invoke the nation, they also invoke citizens of that nation. Practices of relatedness therefore include forms of citizenship, suggesting that we should analyze kinship and citizenship together. Ethnographic research in educational and medical institutions in Wrocław shows that different national imaginaries offers different possibilities for personhood, such that the moral valences of different political periods can adhere to individuals. However, even in contexts that promote a transnational individualized kind of personhood, shared suffering as part of the national past remains the grounds for creating relations and maintaining personhood. This article explores everyday practices of care, memory, and relatedness, thereby elucidating the moral connections that are created between persons and nation. The lasting importance of the national has implications for thinking about the limits and possibilities of European identity in Poland.
