Reshaping Poland's Community after Communism

Ordinary Celebrations

Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319787343
• eBook ISBN: 9783319787350
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Harnessing a cultural sociological approach to explore transformations in key social spheres in post-1989 Poland, Chmielewska-Szlajfer illuminates shifts in religiosity, sympathy towards others, and civic activity in post-Communist Poland in the light of Western influence over elements of Polish life.

Reshaping Poland's Community after Communism focuses on three major cases, largely ignored in Polish scholarship: (1) a hugely popular, faux-baroque Catholic shrine, which illustrates new strategies adopted by the Polish Catholic Church to attract believers; (2) Woodstock Station, a widely known free charity music festival, demonstrating new practices of sympathy towards strangers; and (3) the emergence of national internet pro-voting campaigns and small-town watchdog websites, which uncover changes in practical uses of civic engagement.

In exploring grass-roots, everyday negotiations of religiosity, charity, and civic engagement in contemporary Poland, Chmielewska-Szlajfer demonstrates how a country's cultural changes can suggest wider, dramatic democratic transformation.

© The Author(s) 2019

Helena Chmielewska-SzlajferReshaping Poland’s Community after Communismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78735-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer¹

(1)

Koźmiński University, Warsaw, Poland

End Abstract

“[T]he social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. (…) This understanding is both factual and ‘normative’; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice” (Taylor 2004, pp. 23–24). Inspired by Charles Taylor’s idea, I place new cultural practices and their rising visibility , a dimension of the systemic change of the 1989 transformation to democracy in Poland, at the center of this book. Although too often ignored in academic research on Poland, the uniqueness of everyday cultural practices as a subject of sociological investigation lies in the fact that their study gives the opportunity to reveal the shaping of cultural communities people build and identify with. In this particular case, through new cultural practices, people create stories and beliefs that inform Poland’s still new, post-1989 social imaginary. These stories and shared assumptions, in turn, show how people imagine their social life as a democratic society, built around existing traditions but exposed to inspirations coming from the opening to the outside world. This volume focuses on three new sites and practices in the realm of religious life, charity-oriented music festivals, and citizens’ electoral as well as community-oriented mobilization. In my opinion, they provide important insights into sociocultural changes that have been taking place after 1989 , concerning power , community , and agency . In the first case, I explore a religious sanctuary , centered around the currently largest Roman Catholic church in Poland. In the second case, I focus on a charity-based rock music festival, one of the biggest of its kind in Europe. In the third case, I study grassroots nationwide pro-voting campaigns and small-town government monitoring websites, created by ordinary citizens, both of which encourage civic monitoring of authorities. I investigate these sites of religious, cultural, civic and political engagement as what I call “ordinary celebrations”: shared, practiced expressions of larger imagined narratives, viewed by the participants as self-evident, performed in a specific time and space, almost 30 years after the launch of democratic transformations . Rather than just a description, I use ordinary celebrations as an analytical tool to study usually well-known, repeated cultural practices intended to support particular shared ideas that reveal bigger changes in the Polish society’s imaginary after the democratic transition of 1989 . I see them as commonplace cultural practices that—while enhancing lives of citizens—both reinforce and reinterpret ideas about the place of Catholic religiosity in the new democratic state, generate recognition of others, and reinvigorate civic engagement in post-1989 Poland. I am looking at such ordinary celebrations as testing grounds where different ideas of religious, recognizing, and civic community are shaped and integrated into the contemporary Polish social imaginary. From a broader perspective, these new sites illuminate transformation within existing national narratives and beliefs. Thus, they modify Polish society’s social imaginary , the way—as Taylor writes—people imagine their social existence through the relationship between practices and norms.¹

The study of these three sites of cultural transformation reveals how the past is being renegotiated vis-à-vis the new possibilities and the competing visions of the democratic Polish society. The book tries to capture and examine some aspects of the new social imaginary in which aspirations of “catching up” with the West² are mixed with religious conservatism, and the persistence of a national tradition of struggles for a sovereign nation-state, which have all gained momentum in the recent years.³ The post-1989 transformation has been rapid, as people rushed to embrace the West they had idolized under Communism . I believe this speed has also made the changes, as well as the conflicts caused by them, more visible—especially when compared with established Western societies historically undergoing gradual transformation , with more time to absorb changes. At the same time, these changes reveal deeper transformations taking place in terms of power , agency , and community in contemporary Poland. The cultural lenses—which emphasize culture as the “webs of significance”⁴ people are immersed in and which they create—allow observation of how notions of the past and future are reshaped and filled with new meanings within a transitional society in the course of people’s ordinary celebrations. I look at the three studied sites as meaningful parts of social reality that both reflects and shapes people’s understanding of their society, as elements of an emerging post-1989 social imaginary in Poland. Thus, Taylor’s concept of social imaginary, characterized as “what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society” (2004, p. 2), is particularly helpful in the study of these ordinary celebrations: the familiar, routine, but also special practices that support particular values in society. Yet, it is also an “imaginary” because it resides in narrative forms such as images, stories, and myths concerning a certain time and space, shared by society as a whole, and becomes visible through its practices. The aim of studying ordinary celebrations is to highlight these shared understandings, which are often “felt” rather than articulated, and practiced rather than analyzed. What makes ordinary celebrations different from other types of cultural practices, however, is that people take part in them to support certain shared ideas. “If the understanding makes the practice possible, it is also true that it is the practice which largely carries the understanding,” Taylor writes (2004, p. 25). In this volume, I focus on the transformations of practices, hoping to contribute to further general understanding of the systemic transformation taking place in Poland.

In my first case, I explore a particular religious site, seeing it as an example of a strategy on the part of the Catholic Church to maintain its long-time authority over Polish society. I look closely at a specific place, a Marian sanctuary with a recently built basilica—one of the five largest in Europe—and I follow wide popular discussions about it in the national media. The second case of my study is a free open-air summer music festival known for generating and cultivating empathy between the mostly young generation of Poles, the concert-goers. It is an impressive event, one of the biggest rock festivals of that kind in the world, organized by a nationally celebrated organization, which raises funds for hospital equipment for newborns and, recently, the elderly. Despite its size and the associations the general public has with the kind of music played there, it is one of the safest events held in Poland. The third case, the study of civic engagement through grassroots internet -based pro-voting campaigns and through the emergence of local watchdog websites monitoring local self-governments, offers an insight into one of the post-1989 examples of civil-society mobilization. On the one hand, the internet is used as a medium to promote voting as a basic form of civic activity . On the other, the facelessness the websites provide proves useful for local communities , as their members are given space to voice opinions and influence authorities via a medium accessible to all, without the fear of being identified and harassed by local officials, a practice common in local communities all over Poland. Furthermore, in each of these cases, I offer an interlude of sorts—some of them explicit, others implicit inspirations—coming from, or at least partially based in, the United States: the Holy Land Experience , a religious theme park in Orlando, Florida, vis-à-vis the Catholic sanctuary in Licheń ; Live Aid charity concerts vis-à-vis Woodstock Station festival; and Rock the Vote pro-voting campaigns vis-à-vis grassroots national and local civic activity. While Rock the Vote is openly described as an inspiration by the creators of the Polish pro-voting campaigns, Live Aid remains a clear reference point for Woodstock Station . Finally, Holy Land Experience, while not directly an inspiration for the sanctuary in Licheń , offers noteworthy parallels in adopting pop-cultural entertainment for a spiritual effect.

These three Polish strategic sites reveal different aspects of cultural transformation after the dismantling of Communism , as they present spaces for new commonplace yet celebratory practices that are linked to both inherited traditions and new ideas coming from Poland’s opening to the outside world. These practices are “ordinary” because people engage in different forms of religious practice, acts of recognition , and civic activities on a daily basis, yet they are also “celebratory” because the sites emphasize and further support the values and shared beliefs these practices are based on. They each contribute to the new social imaginary that shapes and orients life in post-1989 Poland. At the center of the book are new social practices and the shift in meanings provoked by them, which exposes new ideas of community as it is practiced, mediated, and imagined. Thus, these three sites can be seen as particular sources exerting influence over the shaping and conditioning of society in Poland, the country that has gained access to democratic freedom and choices coming with it still less than 30 years ago, and is currently strongly divided on the performance of democracy as such.⁵ Though these practices of religiosity , recognition , and civic engagement do not exhaust the elements needed to constitute a society, they are important factors that contribute to the reshaping of a society as a whole, providing a glue for community . Furthermore, they reveal the broader underlying issues of agency , community , and power , as they are negotiated in Poland today. Thus, this work explores the many, at times conflicting, contemporary perceptions and ideals, and some efforts to implement them—all of which contr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Licheń Sanctuary: Practicing Aspirations of the Polish Church Community
• 3. Woodstock Station Festival: Practicing Recognition
• 4. National Internet Pro-voting Campaigns and Local Watchdog Websites: Practicing Civil Society Online
• 5. Conclusion: Ordinary Celebrations in a “Pluralistic Situation”
• Back Matter