Abstract
In a series of sociological studies conducted in Poland since the 1970s researchers have concluded that family is the most widely accepted social frame of reference and the nation occupies second place. The contemporary Polish family continues to straddle the boundary between private and public spheres in a manner that permits it to take on certain public functions of other institutions. Given its historical role, the family possesses a legacy of norms that have placed the family in the space belonging to national society, which since 1989 has operated within the structures of a sovereign state. The stock of memories in certain families "pushes" members of those families into life in local communities even as other families limit, block, or withdraw their members from participation in the world beyond the family. Using the results of field research this article analyzes the family in terms of how its members remember the family's past: first, by taking into account the two ways of interpreting family memory, that is, object-oriented (focused on material memorabilia from the past) and subject-oriented (focused on the orientations and attitudes of the family's members toward its past); second, by concentrating on those elements of memory that pertain to the family's broader social environment, that is, local and regional community as well as national setting. We then conclude this review of local variations of family memory in Poland actively rooted in a local setting with a brief discussion of the phenomenon of collective memory deficit. Individuals characterized by such a deficit long for the era of the communist system, demand welfare guarantees from national and local authorities, objectify themselves, and ultimately exclude themselves from local communities.
Journal Information
The International Journal of Sociology makes available to the English-speaking reader a selection of serious sociological research from many countries. The journal focuses on macro-sociological studies with special attention to comparative work and cross-national research using data from such sources as the World Values Survey, the European Social Survey, and the International Social Survey Program.
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