CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2010
| Author | Poblocki, Kacper |
|---|---|
| Title | The Cunning of Class: Urbanization of Inequality in Post-war Poland |
| Summary | This study traces the history of Poland against the backdrop of the four world hegemonies as analyzed by Giovanni Arrighi. Each (Italian, Dutch, British and American) version of capitalism produced in Poland a distinct socio-economic system. Different material landscapes shared, however, an underlining social structure. In Part One, I analyze how the Biblical “curse of Ham” was localized in Poland in the 16th century, and how it fossilized class boundaries and engendered a social stratum of chamstwo - unskilled agricultural laborers. During the Dutch hegemony chamstwo was a racial category. During the British-style industrialization it became associated with ethnicity, and employed to stigmatize the nascent German and Jewish urban nouveau riche. After 1945, when Poland turned from an agricultural to an urban society, chamstwo ceased being associated with a specific social group, became psychologized, and nowadays it denotes uncouth, disrespectful, and boorish behavior in public, mainly urban, space. Part Two describes the intense struggles over the right to the city in the immediate postwar period, and how the spontaneous mixing of groups and milieus propelled old class divisions to reemerge on a new turf. Part Three describes how the “secret” of modern chamstwo, the fear of physical proximity, spurred new forms of material separation in projects of urban renewal, suburbanization, proto-gentrification and refashioning of inner-city that took place in the period I call “the long 1960s” (1956-1976). Since it was followed by a protracted crisis (1980-2003), Polish cities, and the modern Polish society, I argue, were largely shaped back then. The post-war urbanization of chamstwo reveals that although material landscapes “melt into thin air,” they always are anchored in deep-seated and largely abstract class structures. The astonishingly protean nature of chamstwo, its ability to adapt to new circumstances and reinvent itself, and facilitate both spatial and temporal uneven development in the longue durée, is what I call the cunning of class. |
| Supervisor | Kalb, Don; Bodnar, Judit; Buchowski, Michal; Smith, Neil |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/sphpok01.pdf |
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