Material Culture and Kinship in Poland: An Ethnography of Fur and Society 9781501345623, 9781350084926, 9781350084902

Citation preview

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Also available from Bloomsbury: The Inbetweenness of Things, edited by Paul Basu Material Culture in Russia and the USSR, edited by Graham H. Roberts Material Culture and Authenticity: Fake Branded Fashion in Europe, Magdalena Crăciun

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland An Ethnography of Fur and Society Siobhan Magee

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Siobhan Magee, 2019 Siobhan Magee has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Oppenheim, Meret (1913–1985): Object (Le dejeuner en fourrure), 1936. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon; cup, 4 3/8ʹ diameter; saucer, 9 3/8ʹ diameter; spoon, 8ʹ long; overall height 2 7/8ʹ. © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Magee, Siobhan, author. Title: Material culture and kinship in Poland : an ethnography of fur and society / Siobhan Magee. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019002803| ISBN 9781501345623 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350084902 (epdf) | ISBN 9781350084919 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Fur garments–Social aspects–Poland. | Material culture–Poland. | Kinship–Poland. | Poland–Social life and customs. Classification: LCC GT2070 .M34 2019 | DDC 306.09438–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002803 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4562-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-8490-2 ePub: 978-1-3500-8491-9 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction 1 Of grandmothers and gratitude: Inheriting fur, inheriting class 2 Working at home 3 Fur families 4 Experiments in fur 5 An excess of the normal Conclusion

1

Bibliography Index

43 61 85 109 127 147 157 172

Acknowledgements I am writing this almost a decade after I began this project. I am happy to have the opportunity to thank some of the people who have helped me with my work. My first debt is to those in Kraków who were so generous with their time. I was humbled and inspired by the humour, work ethic, style and warm-heartedness (and patience) of both the people with whom I established friendships and those whom I met only once or twice, such as through interviews or meetings or because they were friends of friends. I extend this gratitude to those I met when I travelled to other Polish cities, to my hosts at Kopenhagen Fur and to a representative from the UK fur industry whom I interviewed in London. I am also grateful for having been granted an affiliation by the Jagiellonian University. Fur’s political sensitivity, on top of anthropological convention, means that I have changed research participants’ names and, sometimes, identifying biographical details. The fieldwork on which this book was based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council UK (ESRC). I am also grateful for a year spent as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH). Thank you to the journals which have allowed me to use previously published work in this book. A similar essay to Chapter 2 appears in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute as ‘Of Love and Fur: Grandmothers, Class, and Inheritance in a Southern Polish City’ (2015). Chapter 5 is substantially the same as my Journal of Material Culture article, ‘An “Excess of the Normal”: Luxury and Difference in Polish Fur Critique’. Snippets of Chapter 3 appear in an article forthcoming in Ethnos. At Bloomsbury, I would like to thank Miriam Cantwell for her openness to my project and to Lucy Carroll for her guidance in preparing the text. Thank you too to my reviewers for their time and insight. Magdalena Crăciun revealed herself to be one of these reviewers, and I have particularly benefited from meeting with her at workshops and conferences over the years. Similarly, it was great meeting Jessica Robbins in person after so enjoying reading her work from afar. Janet Carsten is obviously an inspiration to both those whom she has mentored, taught and worked alongside and those who have been influenced

Acknowledgements

vii

by her written contributions to the discipline. What I would like to acknowledge here is that beyond being an intellectual, Janet has consistently had a very down-to-earth concern for the at once everyday and profound pressures (several of which are also privileges) of family, health, finances and crises of confidence, that impact her colleagues. This is much appreciated. Lynn Jamieson, Frances Pine and Maya Mayblin offered many perceptive comments on my work, and I thank them for their time and for their tact. Out of those who are or have been at the University of Edinburgh I would particularly like to thank Lucy Lowe, Luke Heslop, Landon Kuester, Sarah Walker, Kim Sigmund, Sylvia Seldon, Evangelos Chrysagis, Lucy Bull, Marcelo Gonzalez Galvez, Bethany Honeysett, Tristan Partridge and Gaia von Hatzfeldt. I am lucky to have had friendship and (whether they realized it or not!) mentorship at various points from Katie Dow and Jennifer Speirs. Meeting and sharing an office with Angelina Mattijo-Bazugba and Vinnarasan Aruldoss provided me with so much fun. More recently, it has been a joy meeting Chisomo Kalinga at IASH and either deepening friendships with or meeting for the first time my wonderful fellow postdocs on the marriage project: Hsiao-Chiao Chiu, Eirini Papadaki and Koreen Reece. In Kraków, the particular friendships of the following people brought me a lot of laughter and comfort: Katherine, Brian, Monika, Jola, Joanna, Magda, Kamila and Lani. A great pleasure during fieldwork was having friends visit, and I would like to thank for coming to see me Olivia Gifford, Felicia Lindfield, Kat Lovett, Jo Northedge, Tom Paul, Beth Rendell, Kimberly Sigmund, Jen Stewart, Imogen Thomas, Michael Whitham and Josh Wilson. My wonderful parents, Rosemary and Patrick, have been constant sources of unconditional love and encouragement (in addition to financial help). I thank them for being such interested and interesting people and for their deep and inspiring kindness. Equally hard to express adequately is my appreciation of Corey Gibson’s friendship and love. Corey not only spent a great deal of time reading and commenting on my work, but was understanding of my going to live in Kraków. I am so grateful for all of the adventures we have had together. I would also like to thank his parents, Joyce and Wallace, and his brother and sister, Fife and Ione. Mamie Gibson has brought new joy to our lives (and the lives of many others besides). It may sound strange to say that a toddler has brought inspiration when writing a book, but it is not untrue.

viii

Introduction

This book is an account of the time I spent between 2009 and 2011 carrying out ethnographic research about a specific material – fur – in a specific city – Kraków. I had wanted to learn about ‘everyday’ experiences of kinship and relatedness and was struck by how material culture and kinship seemed to co-produce each other. Temporality is central to both kinship and material culture and, in what follows, local understandings of fur are frequently constructed in relation to familial and national histories. Fur, as a type of clothing, sticks in people’s minds because it is unusually expensive and because of its animal origins. However, it also figures in people’s attempts to make sense of how politics and society work both now and in the past because, despite its categorical strangeness, it is mundane: a mainstay of the street, the shop, the cafe, the church, the home. What follows tells of how, in each of these places, I found that people commonly spoke of fur in relation to generation and inheritance. This says something about fur but also about the context in which I did the research. Namely, that it was one in which people were very invested in relationships with kin of different generations and saw them as both enjoyable and morally important but where generational difference was also frequently framed as the root of many tensions in Polish society. I was often told that that generational differences exist all over the world, but that, in Poland, the quite quick (not to mention, relatively numerous) political changes in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries had accentuated these differences. This book does not enter in depth into the ways in which fur is or has been understood outside of Poland. However, when reading other scholars’ work, I am consistently struck by the depth of fur’s involvement in monumental societal tensions, from the plight of First Nations people (Emberley 1998) to debates in the UK about how animal rights discourses also bring to the fore battles over class-based inequality, urban–rural divides, and sexism and misogyny. Clothing is always political (Tarlo 1996) because clothes mean bodies: of those who wear them but also of those who make or sell them. To add another layer

2

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

of complexity, of course, fur clothing constitutes bodies themselves. One of the things this book shows is that the tenet that nominally different ‘domains’ of life – relationships, personhood, politics, economy, faith – are connected (or that they are not different domains at all) is far from a merely academic point of interest but a very ‘local’ one (see also McKinnon & Cannell 2013). What follows shows how this often becomes apparent through people’s experiences with the uncanny, the ironic and the confusing. Fur, as unusually evocative material culture, is but one ‘guide’ through these connections and it is the one that I have chosen here (or the one that chose me).

Generation and style in the city ‘Let’s look in this one – it’s my favourite – but there might not be any space … Oh right, good, there are free tables.’ Removing her cupped hands from the window, Ula leads me down several stairs into a low-ceilinged cafe-bar just off Kraków’s Main Square. It’s a weekday afternoon in mid-November and crisp outside so piles of woollen scarves and leather gloves compete for table space with espresso, sparkling water, slim flutes of beer and snacks – apple pie, toasted bagels with pots of hummus, tumblers of salt-encrusted breadsticks: paluszki. As we order at the bar we chat about our mutual friend, Aneta, a woman with whom Ula went to high school but whom I met while I studied and she worked as a secretary in Edinburgh: one of the large number of young Poles who lived and worked in the UK following Poland’s 2004 accession to the European Union. Ula alludes to the local understanding of such movement as a mixed blessing. Moving to Glasgow or Manchester lacks the feeling of finality – of, as Ula puts it, ‘the need to say goodbye except for through letters’ – palpable in the previous two centuries’ waves of migration to New York or Chicago (Pine 2007; Znaniecki & Thomas 1918). Furthermore, it is understood that the point of working in an Anglophone (or sometimes German-speaking) country is often to improve one’s language skills in order to get a more prestigious job in Poland, and also to experience adventure rather than to live abroad for good. Aneta, however, is now living with a partner (also Polish) whom she met in Edinburgh and has been in Scotland for three years and counting. For Ula, this gives rise to a question posed most commonly but not exclusively by anti-EU factions of the Polish media: ‘What will happen to Polish families and therefore Poland if young people do not return?’ Ula tells me that she herself is considering studying for part of her medical degree abroad. ‘This would be less of a worry for

Introduction

3

my family’, she says, ‘to know that I was away for a clear amount of time – like one year – not indefinitely like Aneta’. Although born not in Kraków but in a sleepy village two hours’ bus journey away, 23-year-old Ula possesses the virtues-cum-lifestyle central to middle-class Krakowian habitus. She has the erudition and drive necessary for medical training (and the background: her mother is already a family physician). But she also has a timetable overflowing with activities considered to be both sociable and key to cultivating the right sort of adult personhood. Ula is modest about her voluntary work with a community garden project and with outreach programmes for older people, saying that they are facilitated by her church and the university respectively, and therefore were not ‘chosen’ by her as such. Her already busy schedule includes several quite ambitious activities: language classes (Ukrainian, Spanish), Scottish and Irish country dancing, and capoeira. It is not unusual for young, relatively affluent people’s time to wrap around the twin institutional poles with which the city is associated: academia (particularly through the Jagiellonian University) and the Roman Catholic Church. However, what many of the young people I meet in Kraków (who are, at the time, roughly my age and born in the 1980s) either speak of or demonstrate through these packed timetables is that they are a generation endowed with an unprecedented degree of opportunity. These choices of activity, so numerous as to sometimes seem pressurizing, offered in an era of intense competition for jobs, and leaving little time for ‘unproductive’ downtime – including sleep – are understood as unique to cities, especially bourgeois, international cities such as Kraków. As we set down our cups of coffee, Ula and I glance at the patrons on neighbouring tables. Two black-clad twenty-something bartenders, one of whom I recognize as a model from a recent photography exhibition, chat between sips of coffee as they lean against the bar. They click on an iPod, repeatedly playing the opening seconds of songs before shaking their heads vigorously in disapproval and skipping to the next, prompting raised eyebrows from patrons. A couple in their thirties, their two small children whose legs swing under chairs tied with parrot-shaped helium balloons, and an older woman sit together and drink thick hot chocolate. A middle-aged man and a younger woman sit across from each other, looking at a book. Ula, who it becomes clear enjoys musing (discreetly) about the respective lots of fellow patrons, says they could be ‘father and daughter, PhD supervisor and student, or on a date!’. ‘It’s none of my business,’ she says. Discordant with Cold War-era stereotypes of urban Poland as climatically and socially chilly, of cities with violent histories and, within living memory, a

4

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

state socialism that required secrecy and suspicion as apparatuses of getting by, in Kraków, private lives play out not only in homes, or indeed in workplaces, but in ‘semi-public spaces’ (Herzfeld 2009: 15) such as cafes, parks, churches, shops and – especially in a markedly pedestrian-friendly city laced with tramlines and fairly few cars – in the street itself. Nosiness in these locales is uncouth, impinging on the time one has to enjoy with friends and family or to keep busy with the varied productive activities of the sort in which Ula participates. This is why Ula cuts herself short when speculating about her fellow cafe patrons. A loop from the metre-long plaited strap of Ula’s tasselled and woven purple and yellow bag peeps out from under our table and narrowly misses lassoing a fellow patron’s foot. I suspect that she had bought the bag in Peru, where she had spent the most recent summer vacation volunteering in a clinic and then backpacking with her brother. She tells me that ‘yes, the bag’s from Peru’ but that ‘people can buy them here in Kraków too, just for the style’. Locals describe Krakowian style as ‘elegant’ and ‘classic’. I am told that this centres on ‘as high quality as one can afford’ (cf. Crăciun 2015) – that is, proportional to one’s income – usually dark-coloured, closely cut clothes, boots, coats and jeans suitable for both socializing and at least relatively casual workplaces. Some younger people critique this look for its conservatism and for the possibility that slim-cut clothes both enforce a need to have a slim-cut body and accentuate gendered difference. Some older women, in turn, express regret that their nieces, daughters and colleagues wear ‘boring’ or ‘serious’ clothes when they have easy access to ‘more exciting’ clothes than they did at their age. However, as Ula’s bag exemplifies, a default aesthetic austerity facilitates subtle touches of irreverence. Popular examples are accessories themed on ‘upcycling’ and ‘eco-fashion’. These include, say, a fine-chained necklace that has taken as its pendant a filed-down and mounted fragment of shattered crockery or, like Ula’s bag, manifestly ‘ethnic’ pieces, whether a minimalist Danish hat or a Vietnamese silk jacket. Ula continues, ‘So, Aneta told me about your project and that you are interested in migration and politics and social change and family and history in Poland.’ I nod, embarrassed by the glaring imprecision of my research question. ‘The thing about power in Poland’, says Ula, ‘is that even when Poland has a sort of liberal government, things still feel conservative because the old woman in the street wearing the fur coat who keeps the interest in that kind of politics, in that sort of atmosphere. She is where the power is in Poland.’ This relatively throwaway comment piques my interest because Ula’s words call to attention several key concerns in Polish society. I am familiar with media tropes about the ‘mohair

Introduction

5

berets’ (moherowe berety), a stereotype of right-wing older women, framed as trailing church potentates and stating their allegiance to Radio Maryja (tagline Katolicki glos Twoim domu or ‘A Catholic voice in your home’, see Kościańska 2008b). But Ula’s characterization of Polish politics is more distinctively Krakowian. The ‘mohair beret’ trope has class and regional connotations that are somewhat out of step with Krakowian demographics, referring as it does to those who live in small towns or in rural locales, and who have fairly elementary levels of formal education. The ‘woman in the fur coat’, in contrast, cuts across Krakowian class boundaries at the same time as illustrating the importance of material culture as a talking point in the city. In Kraków, fur does not evoke remarkable wealth in the manner it might in some parts of Western Europe or in the United States (see Barthes in Culler 1981; Emberley 1998; Wilson 1999). It symbolizes a markedly quotidian form of power situated neither in the luxury apartment nor in the parliament building but rather, as Ula suggests, ‘in the street’. Ula’s words call attention to a key concern in Polish society, whether in media discourses or in everyday conversation: the notion that Poland’s tumultuous history has created wide gaps between generations. Such an image gains momentum a couple of weeks later, when a junior academic with whom I am eating lunch begins with a critique of the relatively leisurely pace of food preparation at a wooden-benched restaurant in order to segue into a critique of Polish civic and civil society: ‘It’s the woman on the tram in the fur coat who demands a seat, who’s in the post office and doesn’t queue because “Poland owes her”.’ Aside from the apparent granularity fur provides to supplications such as this, what is striking here is the way in which a quite everyday occurrence (slow service at a restaurant) that, one assumes, is far from unique to Poland, nonetheless turns into a critique of Polish society, uttered through the evocation of a nameless, faceless older woman. As anthropologist of Poland, Jessica Robbins, puts it: The animosity towards the anonymous or unknown older person, or the elderly en masse, contrasts with the warmth that people feel for specific older people that they know. In these conversations with Poles of my own age, exactly which part of the past made older people problematic for the national future was not always clear. It was often their association with the nationalist far-right and its exclusionary policies and visions, as described above, but sometimes it was the very fact of their having come of age and worked during the socialist era, leading them to have a socialist-era mentalność, or mentality. Regardless, it was their association with the past that made their future inclusion suspect. (Robbins 2013: 160)

6

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Several questions spring to mind: in a country that celebrates ‘Grandma’s Day’ and ‘Grandpa’s Day’ with fervour and where the debt younger people owe to older people for their resilience during the twentieth century’s critical events is conceived of as impossible to repay (Magee 2015), why is generational difference perceived to segment the population not only along lines of age but along social and political views and lifestyles? How, in turn, do these apparently substantial generational gaps, the idea that to be born at a different historical moment from another person is to be different from them, factor into everyday relationships between people of different generations, whether relatives or not? Cities (in Kraków’s case, one of over 750,000 inhabitants) have specific ways of orienting kinship and relatedness. In Kraków, the divisions between ‘close friends’ (przyjaciele), ‘colleagues’ (koledzy) and ‘acquaintances’ (znajomi) remain sincere even if, these days, the weakest of these ties are not mobilized as I am told they were in the socialist-era shortage economy for provisioning goods but rather for winning an internship at a bank, or a discount on a car, or knowing to whom one can tell one’s secrets. Krakowians live in close proximity but are prevented from knowing many others by class-based social stratification that often maps onto districts, busy daily routines and of course, numbers: the ‘simple’ fact that, in Kraków as in many other places, intimacy is by definition exclusive: people only have the time – and, depending on the nature of the relationship, the love, the resources, the worry – to dedicate themselves to a few others. ‘Communism tours’ company Crazy Guides’ Trabants circle the Nowa Huta district (see Pozniak 2014). Sepia photographs are exhibited at museums and synagogues in Kazimierz, the Old Jewish Quarter (see Lehrer 2013). Kraków is a city where material culture and aesthetics transport those who regard them to other places – geographical, but as is often most poignant in Poland, historical (Tucker 2011). It is instructive, then, that even in such a context, clothing occupies an especially important role as a visible signifier of who someone is (Tarlo 2007). Clothing is a ‘response’ of sorts to how difficult it is to know others when one lives in a city. In its inherent publicness, in its work as a ‘social skin’ (Turner 1980), clothing offers a way of talking about difference and otherness that encompasses not only different people but different eras. It is both despite and because of clothing’s mundanity, its everydayness and the descriptive colour that it contributes to ‘the civic and the civil’ (Herzfeld 2009: 79), that it offers a powerful repertoire from which to draw when making a point about politics. Clothing is a touchstone for talking about contrasting points of view, generations and classes. Clothing’s ‘double-sided’ quality – the actuality that it looks both inwards (towards the person) and outwards (at society) – draws attention to the

Introduction

7

garment as a metonym for its wearer. Clothing ‘absorbs’ (Allerton 2007; Busby 2000) something of the person and something of situations, the epochs, in which the person experiences the world around them. It is these high stakes that cast clothing as a type of material that signifies class, gender, generation and often religious and national allegiances (Arkin 2009; Gaines 1985; Tarlo 2007); a huge, notoriously stratified, and often exploitative global industry (Prentice 2015); and a cross-culturally pervasive exemplification par excellence of the indivisibility of ‘the personal’ and the ‘the political’.

Fur I did not make fur – and fur and intergenerational relationships in particular – the focus of my project as a result of my conversations with Ula or with the academic. Or at least, not solely because of them. Rather, I was intrigued by fur’s cumulative appearances in local discourses. Having grown up in the UK, for me, to say fur is politicized is to say that it has been discussed in relation to animal rights, such as via PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). However, in Kraków at the time of my fieldwork, fur is politicized in a wider range of ways. Preliminary research in newspapers and websites told me that Kraków had a distinguished fur industry but also that the production of fur (or at least the official production of fur) had increased a great deal since Poland joined the EU in 2004. Fur was the focus of several recent articles in the socially liberal, centre-left newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza: controversy over university professors wearing fur-trimmed gowns at graduation ceremonies (Swoboda 2006; see also Pap 2011), a scandal in which soft toys imported from China were revealed to be crafted not from synthetic fur but from ‘real fur’, a back and forth between a Polish Fur Breeders’ Association official and a reader about what fur meant for ‘womanhood in Poland’ (Kujawski 2009). I knew from having seen the large number of furriers’ establishments in the centre of Kraków that there were tangible spaces in which I could begin to learn more about fur. As such, the appeal of fur for ethnographic research is quite similar to its appeal for Ula and the other younger people I meet who use it as a metonym for intergenerational tension in Poland: fur is a tangible, quotidian material to which particular shops, women’s wardrobes, farms and fashion blogs are dedicated and which appears in churches and parks, cafes and homes, but it also has a ‘life of its own’ at the level of discourse. When I tell acquaintances I am researching fur and intergenerational relationships, they are surprised but not very surprised.

8

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

In Kraków, away from the cafe-bar but still in the Old Town, streets are flanked by tramlines and stippled with bollards plastered with music festival posters. Men and women on their way to work weave through the clusters of lost tourists and exchange students taking in the beauty of the buildings that surround them. And fur’s presence is again both humdrum and provocative. In the popular ‘Momo’ vegan cafe on Ulica Jozefa, a pinboard hosts flyers and business cards for Gestalt therapies and yoga studios. It also displays the most ubiquitous and, friends and acquaintances reflect, ‘most Polish anti-fur poster’, Polish animal rights group Empatia’s Czy twoja mama ma futro? Moja je straciła … (‘Does your mama have fur? Mine lost hers … ’). In stark black and white, the poster depicts a fox cub, one that would probably be red ‘in real life’. Whiskers to lens, the fox faces the camera from the ground on which it stands and looks as if it wants to sniff the camera or the photographer who is taking its picture. The appraisal of the poster as ‘most Polish’ comes from the actuality that, in addition to evoking both fur’s animal origins and its association with older women, it situates the viewer in the vexed position of not knowing ‘what to do’ with elder kin. How, the poster asks, can you try to alter a person’s worldview while nonetheless fulfilling societal expectations that respect must travel upwards through generations? In Kraków, the resistance fur faces from animal rights advocates is passionate but not sizeable. Fur shops’ windows and doors are often striped with bars and pocked with multiple locks. The furrier who sits across from me at one interview twiddles a panic-button key ring (out of habit, I think, rather than because she thinks I pose a threat). However, such security measures are understood to warn less against aggression founded on fur’s ethical controversy than against robbery enticed by fur’s status as a ‘textile’ of unparalleled expense: soft gold. I just want to take your love and wear it like a fur coat Not that I condone the slaying of animals but, you know A metaphor to keep me warm, your love is nice, my soul’s on ice

While I am living in Kraków, Polish–Canadian recording artist and MTV television personality Anna Cyzon’s (born Anna Czyszczoń in Kraków in 1983) song ‘Love Me’ narrowly misses being selected as Poland’s entry to the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest. As the entry for a spectacle that plays upon national stereotypes, as Poland’s potential entry, fur is a calculated choice as a clichéd mainstay of both foreign observers’ and younger Poles’ imaginations of life before and during state socialism. Cyzon’s song plays upon images of Poland on the world stage, casting it as a young, glamorous, post-Soviet, distinctively Eastern European ‘other’. By using the condemnatory language of ‘slaying’, which

Introduction

9

evokes violence, Cyzon avows that it would jar with her persona, a cosmopolitan woman in her twenties, to wear fur.

‘I’m not from Poland, I’m from Kraków’ Both Krakowians and people from elsewhere in Poland point out Kraków’s distinctiveness among Polish cities. But sentiments such as ‘It’s Poland’s most beautiful city’ are occasionally tempered by queries such as ‘Don’t you find it a bit boring? Or a bit old-fashioned?’. No Krakowian would be surprised to hear such comments are particularly rife in Kraków’s fast-paced, high-tech, ‘rival’: Warsaw. (In 2011, Dana Dramowicz, the editor of warsaw-life.com, called Kraków, tongue-in-cheek, the ‘granny capital of Poland’.) ‘This is perfect,’ friends in their twenties say as they sit drinking beer, eating ice cream sundaes and sometimes smoking on crammed pavement bars in the surprisingly hot summer evenings. In the warm-weather incarnations of the cafe-bar I visited with Ula, tables and chairs have travelled outside, scraping pavements, bolstered by folded napkins. As young people, weary from the working day, reflect on such perfection, however, they don’t quite allow themselves to relax, instead meditating on their next move: ‘Perhaps I should send an email to the new HR firm that’s opened up on Bracka Street’; ‘It would be possible for me to study for an MBA but still get my current job back afterwards’; ‘Maybe I should try living abroad for a bit … or maybe I should go to Warsaw.’ Near the beginning of my fieldwork, I accompany a friend to a ‘language swap’ club, most attendees of which wish to improve their English. A man in his twenties asks me where I am from, and I return the question by saying ‘Are you Polish?’. To this he answered, ‘I’m not from Poland, I’m from Kraków’. I come to learn that Krakowian identity embodies many of the values (or stereotypes) that both Poles and non-Poles associate most trenchantly with Poland: erudition, piety, intensity and traditionalism. It is held locally that this distinctiveness derives in part from the seductiveness of the notion that living somewhere particularly thick with memory has a bearing on a person’s temperament. Kraków’s proximity to Wadowice, the birthplace of Jan Paweł Drugiego (Pope John Paul II), and to Oświęcim, the town where the Nazis built Auschwitz, intensifies this atmosphere. And yet Krakowians are also seen as quite different to other Poles: particularly intellectual, bourgeois and, compared to people in most other cities, especially devoutly Catholic; aesthetes, but without the ‘flashiness’ with which some Poles charge Warsovians. In a city overflowing

10

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

with university buildings and publishing houses, but also coffee-shop tables and park benches where men and women can be seen to write or design, notions resembling poet Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński’s quip that ‘everyone in Kraków is penniless and clever’ (Hopkin 2008) are echoed with equal parts self-deprecation and pride. Consonant with this emphasis on aesthetics and intellectualism, a common embarkation point for walks around town is the Main Square’s statue of nineteenth-century poet Adam Mickiewicz. Dramatically varied seasons, the profound influence of the Christian calendar and the plans of an imaginative city council dictate that what happens outdoors tells a story about how the year unfolds. In the Main Square, the Easter market that sells baskets of wooden eggs and jars of honey eventually rolls into the Christmas market where bundled-up vendors sit in cabins that look like giant barrels as they sell mulled wine next to vendors with the distinctive blue and white pottery and oily nuggets of smoky highland cheese (oscypek) with cranberry jam. This is not to say that only traditional seasonal events take place here. Walking across the Square on the way to interviews or to meet friends, I stumble upon events ranging in seriousness from the fundraising event ‘Kraków for Africa’ to the ‘World’s Biggest Ball of Wool Fight’. The latter is received with chagrin. Its irreverence is ‘very Kraków’, I think at the time, but its status as an ostentatious marketing event – it is hosted by a cat food brand – is not. These events are useful windows onto matters of class and taste and about how locals segment the society in which they live. When, for instance, I ask an acquaintance if he plans to go to the Christmas market held in the Main Square, he replies (not as sharply as it may appear when written down), ‘I am not, because this sort of thing is only really for children and foreigners.’ In the Planty, the ring of park around the Main Square and the central streets, grandparents make a scene of giving money for ice cream and balloons to their grandchildren while their parents playfully roll their eyes. When professional photographers accompany couples in full wedding regalia around town (sometimes in a horse-drawn cart), they are recording their allegiances not only to each other but to their native or adopted city. Tightly choreographed poses cast a wry eye on marriage. In one, the groom wears rubber gloves and holds aloft a broom. In another, a bride mimes talking into a mobile telephone while holding her hand up to her pantomimishly aghast husband as if to say ‘I’m too busy for you right now!’ British stag parties are allegedly ferried in limousines to Auschwitz by day, strip clubs by night, constituting ‘a point of debate and antagonism’ in the city (Thurnell-Read 2011: 981); young priests and monks walk four abreast in black,

Introduction

11

hooded sweatshirts with backs emblazoned not with the names of heavy metals bands but with a likeness of Jesus Christ. Attempts to relay in writing everyday life in Kraków risk turning out cartoonish. Plus, uncanny juxtapositions of histories and lifestyles surely characterize life in a great number of contemporary cities. However, I find it difficult to leave these things out because, rather than constituting mere ‘scene-setting’, there is something critical to Krakowian sociality about reflecting on the ways in which humdrum everyday routines are interrupted by irony, the uncanny and moments for reflection. These are times to exchange glances with strangers in a place where, I was told by several different friends, who in hindsight were perhaps offering me a caution, ‘smiling at someone you don’t know will make you look stupid or insincere’. With its cold climate and the ‘weak civil society’ (Howard 2002) with which postsocialist European countries are often (problematically) charged, Poland is not famed for sociality outside of the home in the way that are, say, some Mediterranean countries (cf. Herzfeld 2009). And yet – consonant with fur’s status as a mostly outdoor material – what happens in public and semi-public spaces makes a lasting impression. The focus on intergenerational relationships and generation gaps in Polish society (and in this book) should be viewed against a backdrop of many politically contentious ideas in Poland being perceived as a battle between ‘old and new’ or ‘traditional and modern’. Again, this is writ large in public spaces. Grażyna Kubica’s ‘A Rainbow Flag against the Kraków Dragon’ (2009), for example, discusses the student association Campaign against Homophobia’s 2004 preparation for, and realization of, a march through Kraków supporting LGBT rights as part of the ‘Festival of Culture for Tolerance’. Those who opposed the Campaign against Homophobia march by confronting it at the foot of the Wawel Hill, writes Kubica, were overwhelmingly members of Polish nationalist groups (2009: 145–146), supporting the idea that what was at stake in these conflicting groups’ respective claims to Kraków’s Old Town was a battle of ‘old Poland’ (nationalistic, homophobic) against ‘new’ or ‘modern Poland’ (‘international’ and LGBTQ friendly). The Main Square changes meaning again during my fieldwork when, in April 2010, following the death in an airplane crash over Smolensk of President Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria and around eighty other Polish dignitaries, a giant screen transmits the funeral service from the inside of St. Mary’s Church to thousands of onlookers. Kaczyński had been unpopular with many younger people in Kraków and, for some, a figure of fun. After his death, however, a common refrain is ‘I didn’t like him, but I can’t say bad things about people who’ve

12

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

died.’ What comes to the fore at the funeral transmission attended by people who position themselves at many different points on the political spectrum is the marked ‘Polishness’ of the tragedy. Standing in the blazingly hot sun, queuing in front of a makeshift stall that sells bottled mineral water and Polish flags, people whisper, ‘This could only happen in Poland.’ This is a response to the presumed ill-advisedness of so many potentates travelling together by airplane and a nod both to Poland’s violent history and the idea that, as one friend puts it, ‘things are just badly organised here’. Solidarność (Solidarity) men, among whom Kaczyński had risen to prominence in the 1980s, wear three-piece suits and hold aloft flags appliqued with the names of the towns and villages from which they have travelled. Nuns perch on collapsible gardening chairs. Such sights, in addition to the presence of conspiracy theorists who muse about ‘what it means that the airplane crashed over Russia’ (see also Murawski 2011), rather overdetermine the event as a time of brewing discussion about ‘what kind of place Poland is’. Rather than being cast either as a setting-up of Kaczyński as something of a martyr however or, alternatively, as a ‘watershed’ moment that gives rise to a more socially progressive Poland, attention is turned to the good fortune that such a catastrophe has taken place at, it is argued, an uncharacteristically calm juncture in Polish history. ‘If this had happened before we were in the EU, anything could have happened, but now we know things will be kept an eye on,’ a man whom I happen to interview the day after the funeral tells me. Kraków’s Old Town is also a traversal point. People skip down from the steps of trams and walk hurriedly from home to work and back, often elongating already packed working days with drinks with friends or with exercise classes. In ‘the city of a hundred churches’ (Kubica 2009: 133) sometimes one is walking through town and the person in front turns left or right for a lunchtime or early evening service or committee meeting. Bakeries are ducked into and boxes of cheesecake or cookies are carried under arms for office meetings or for after dinner, reminding me of how, as one radiographer put it to me, ‘there is no class system in Poland; all people are the same … but some people have much better biscuits at their houses than others’. People duck in and out of 24-hour supermarkets and, if they do not live in the centre of town, head onto trams and buses back to the suburbs, some of which comprise affluent, modern detached houses and multiple-car garages, others of more modest blocks of flats, built around children’s playgrounds and grocery shops and with balconies sparkling with strung-up CDs intended to scare off plant-hungry birds. In the centre of the Old Town, poignant snapshots from Poland’s twentieth century are signposted in a thought-provokingly literal manner. Kazimierz is

Introduction

13

in one direction; Nowa Huta, former site of the Leninist Steelworks, lies in another. Both are tourist destinations and also places where people live and work, and many people prefer Kazimierz to the Old Town as a place to eat and drink. Nowa Huta is remembered as having been built to ‘punish’ Krakowians for their bourgeoisness. Now it remains associated with the working class but is emerging as an increasingly attractive location for young, fashionable people. Frances Pine reflects that ‘as in other countries with long and complicated histories of partition, occupation, and opposing discourses of militant nationalism, Poland’s history is written on its land and its landscape, in all of its rather frightening complexity and contestation’ (Pine 2007: 105). This works on a number of registers, from the battles to stop Kaczyński being buried at Wawel Cathedral to the actuality, as Pine also notes, ‘If you walk through any urban space in Poland with a local inhabitant, you will be told not only what every building and every space is now, but also what it used to be, before the war, during the occupation, after the bombardments, during the communist times’ (Pine 2007: 105, original emphasis). The streets, cafes, churches and homes are not ‘only’ the backdrops to lives; they constitute them. A similar dynamic applies to movable property. On several occasions, when having been to a friend’s house for dinner, or in someone’s office following an interview, I am shown a YouTube video entitled ‘Born in the PRL [Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa- “Polish People’s Republic”]’. Wrocław rock band ‘Snake Charmer’ sing to the tune of Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 ‘Born in the U.S.A’. A series of photographs slide into view, including an ornamental fish made of glass, an object that friends claimed ‘everyone had’ in the 1980s, a thenubiquitous brand of toilet paper and some Relaks brand snow boots. In Kraków, the vitality of material culture is evidenced by the frequency with which it acts as a ‘placeholder’. Things can make absences palpable and, in doing so, make statements about the past. Consider, for example, the controversial ‘Lucky Jew’ figurines available in some shops and markets (Lehrer 2013). There is no longer an ‘official’ Polish nobility (szlachta), but its heirs are often identifiable by their names, stories and, sometimes, their bearings. They are also often identifiable by what is on their mantelpieces or in their cupboards. As Longina Jakubowska writes, in Poland, ‘Every object has a story, a family association; together they are like theater props that reveal the family’s position by situating it in its past, making history alive and relevant to the present. The meaning of things is inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories, and their life histories’ (2012: 14). In the city itself, elsewhere in Poland, and in the other places in the

14

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

world where Poles have moved in the last century and before, it is understood that Kraków is the site of a great deal of this ‘theater’. How has fur come to appear both frequently and poignantly in people’s narrations of their relationships with close kin? In a city where both Roman Catholicism and the fascination with material culture that comes after socialism means that things and feeling are entwined, how is it, nonetheless, that fur and family seem so tightly tied together?

Draped in history Fur’s continued presence on Kraków’s streets is visible in the ubiquity of furriers’ shops and, when seasonable, women in particular wearing fur garments. There are ‘traditional’ coats. There are also the trendier designs favoured by young women. Since the 2000s fur has experienced a renewed popularity in high-street stores (see Skov 2005). Some argue that second-hand fur is ethically admissible because it does not require the farming of new animals. Fur’s ubiquity does not go unnoticed by animal rights groups. To gauge the persistent framing of fur as an uncommonly ‘public’ animal rights issue, not to mention an affront to modernity, consider the following passage from Polish animal rights group Empatia’s website: In Poland you can still find fur shops on the main streets, and some celebrities associate fur with elegance, chic and prestige. What a parochial elite! [Coż za zaściankowość elit!] Perhaps such people want to feel appreciated in some way by dressing up in something that is sold for big money and refers to ‘the poorly understood nobility’, tradition, etc. People who come from abroad see natural fur in every second shop and boutique in the prestigious shopping malls and arcades and experience a shock! It’s a bit like being in a museum. (Empatia ‘Day without Fur’ webpage. http:// empatia.pl/str.php?dz=30. Accessed 12 July 2011. My translation.)

In contrast, organizations such as the International Fur Trade Federation and the European Fur Breeders’ Association praise fur as an expressly ‘modern’ commodity. Glossy pamphlets set out on the tables of trade exhibitions and available for download online praise the exemplary quality of European fur. They attribute this excellence to the long tradition and ethically sound rearing of their animals. Although the great majority of fur animals are farmed rather than trapped ‘in the wild’, industry images often depict glistening, whiskered noses peeping inquisitively from riverbank or hedgerow. Fur industry literature

Introduction

15

applauds its economic and employment benefits as ‘a key industry for new [EU] Member States’ (The European Fur Breeders’ Association. www.efba.eu/fact_ sheet.html. Last accessed 10 March 2013). I came to recognize this as a reference to Poland, a country marked out as the one of the biggest producers of fur in the world and home to 1,144 fur farms (Fur Europe 2017 reporting 2015 figures). During fieldwork I was told that fur’s growth in Poland has had a symbiotic relationship with its legal prohibition in many other European states. The legality of fur production in Poland, its bountiful agricultural land and the comparatively low cost of its labour mean that the fur industry is often cast as the embodiment of a post-Soviet, EU member ‘open’ Poland, eager to cooperate with international partners. I learn more about this dynamic when I visit Auction Week at Kopenhagen Fur Design Studio and Auction House. ‘There is a lot of Danish blood in Polish mink,’ says a jovial Danish fur agent. And yet both spoken and published discourses that push fur as a key industry in a ‘new’ Poland omit Poland’s historical connections to fur, ties that are especially poignant in Kraków. The Furriers’ Tower, which tops Brama Florianska (‘St Florian’s Gate’), was built in honour of members of the Kraków Guild of Furriers who manned the official point of entry to medieval Kraków. Kraków was situated at the heart of Galicia, on its most important trade route with Byzantium, Central Asia and Western Europe. Those involved in the trade, including a notable number of Jewish people, used the route to export furs, along with other commodities such as wax, to Western and Central Europe (Harmelin 1964; Martin 1978). Fur clothing might seem a stark contrast with the classic ‘stuff ’ of politics and social reproduction: land and homes. At least in ‘domestic’ as opposed to industrial quantities, its market value is certainly lower. It also seems a different sort of ‘thing’ from land and homes because of its ‘movability’ (Howell 2010), a contrast with the streets and houses markedly evocative of ‘kinship memory’ (Pine 2007) in Poland. And yet it is because of, rather than despite, fur’s connections to movement that there could scarcely be another object with a historical and symbolic repertoire that so evokes dominion over land. In the days before fur animals were farmed, to have access to fur was to be able to kill animals and to pelt them (or to have people who were obliged to undertake this work for you). And because fur animals live on land, to have fur was to have power over land. Furs have been used to denote power being passed (or grabbed) from nation to nation and power being passed down through lineages. There are enduring ways in which fur in Poland is a matter of relationships between nations. These relationships are rarely equal, even when they are

16

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

amicable. Eric Wolf ’s inclusion of a chapter about the fur trade in the ‘In Search of Wealth’ section of Europe and the People without History (1982) marked out fur as both a tool of and a reflection of European expansion and a touchstone for the development of ‘the nation’. Wolf ’s political economy approach lays out the ways in which Europeans sought out furs from the seventeenth century onwards. The fur trade was far from ‘simply’ a connection between Europeans and those living in the area called North America today; it was ‘an international phenomenon’ (1982: 159). Pertinent to this book: In what is today Russia … fur became ‘the most valuable single item of trade from the very earliest beginnings to the eighteenth century and beyond’ (Kerner 1942: 8). Indeed, the entire course of Russian expansion has been portrayed as one extended quest for ‘domination of successive river basins by the control of portage between them, the speed of expansion being determined by the exhaustion of fur-bearing animals in each successive basin’ (Kerner 1942: 30). The Russians … collected fur through tribute (iasak) imposed on native populations as a body, and through a tithe on all furs obtained by individuals. Indeed, furs so obtained later constituted a major item in the income of the Russian state, rising from 3.8 percent of all state revenues in 1589 to 10 percent in 1644. (Wolf 1982: 158–9)

It is interesting that, to begin with, fur was something people found while looking for other materials. To continue with Wolf, ‘In the European search for wealth, furs, were not items of highest priority: gold, silver, sugar, spices, and slaves were all more desirable and profitable’ (1982: 158). Suggestively, this secondary importance seems to mirror the place of fur within family inheritance in Poland as I found it to be during fieldwork: worthy of ‘passing on’ but often less esteemed than either precious metals or the most obviously individualized material culture such as letters, official documents, photographs and annotated bibles. When looking at fur as a section of the material world whose politicization far predates its ethical controversy via PETA and allied organizations in the 1980s, especially thought-provoking is Wolf ’s observation that ‘in contrast to the North American trade, which involved the exchange of commodities for fur, the Russian fur trade relied mainly on tribute – that is, payments in fur made as tokens of political subjugation’ (Wolf 1982: 183). How Russia establishes power is a point of interest among some of the younger people I meet in Kraków. ‘Traditional Russian culture’ (differentiated from stereotypical notions of the ‘new Russian’; see Patico 2000; Yurchak 2003) – literature, philosophy and architecture, and indeed the physicality of people (especially

Introduction

17

women) – are described as intriguing, majestic and beautiful. State politics is nonetheless the enduring focus of suspicion. Much later than the period written about by Wolf, fur was partially nationalized under Soviet governance. It appeared in the ‘vast public gift economy which socialist leaders … attracted’ (Ssorin-Chaikov 2006: 355; see also Ssorin-Chaikov & Sosnina 2004), even featuring in the Stalin’s Birthday Gifts Exhibition held at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow between 1949 and 1953. Djurdja Bartlett, in her highly original book Fashion East: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism (2010), tells of the ways in which fur clothing embodied Stalinist notions of how women should look and act: Although Stalinism rejected the concepts of gender that had developed during the 1920s, it used some aspects of them, including the glamour and femininity of the NEP [the New Economic Policy Novaya Ekonomicheskaya Politika], as raw materials for constructing its ideal of the female and imposing it on women. It rejected the angular constructivist body and reclaimed the curved female body, bringing about a return to conventional femininity. (2010: 63)

According to Bartlett, the marketing of fur played a palpable part in this initiative. When the 1936–7 Russian Ministry of Internal Trade published a deluxe catalogue for the Leningrad Rot Front fur company, Only the most luxurious fur coats, fur stoles, and fur hats could be found … this catalog informed only the most privileged about the new collection by Leningrad’s specialized fur company. Incredibly composed women were depicted in luxurious fur coats in the same way that Paris haute couture would present its most exclusive products to its richest and most sophisticated clientele. (Bartlett 2010: 82, emphasis added)

Fur was both an important Soviet industry and part of an idealized picture of womanhood under Soviet governance. It also exemplified, almost satirically, the inequalities manifest in Soviet society. With changes in Soviet policy, citizens altered their ways of provisioning. In 1964, some twenty-five years after the Leningrad Rot fur company catalogue, the Zagreb-based women’s magazine Svijet (‘world’/‘people’) featured an article on fur as part of its do-it-yourself clothing column which, in one issue, comprised ‘instructions for a self-made fur collar … with vivid advice about how to treat an animal skin prior to cutting it into the right shape’ (Bartlett 2010: 246; Svijet 1964: 15). In addition to reminding of the rapidity with which fur might be transformed from part of an animal to a textile of sorts, this example also raises questions about furriers’ professional identity as tradespeople whose work has, at various points in

18

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

history, been carried out on an amateur basis. Evidencing once more the ways in which fur and the past both have the quality in Kraków of catching people unawares, it is quite common for fur industry people who repair fur and people who worked in second-hand markets to discover inexpertly tanned jackets and stoles. Unattractive discolouration provokes grimaces but also wry smiles at the food this provides for the imagination. I was told during fieldwork that ‘fur is good to travel with’. This adage refers to fur’s high exchange value and to its warmth. But it also denotes how, at particular points in history, fur has variously been a profession perceived to provide relatively good prospects if one is to seek work in a different country and an occupation often held by those who have not so much travelled from their homes as escaped in the face of persecution. One apparent mark of this, one suggestion that for some members of the Polish diaspora fur is an evocative intergenerational leitmotif, is the recurrence of furrier ancestors on British and North American ancestry websites. Fur is related to Holocaust memory. A Polish diarist writes: December 31, 1941. Here in Szczebrzeszyn there is new action against the Jews. On December 26 it was announced that under penalty of death all Jews must surrender all fur coats, fur hats, fur collars, fur gloves, fur muffs, and any other clothing made of fur. Now most Jews are trying to hide all fur articles, but some are giving them away. (Klukowski 1993 in Piotroski 1998: 71)

After enduring Auschwitz and then a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, Solomon Radasky, a Warsovian furrier, moved in 1949 to New Orleans. He writes on the online resource holocaustsurvivors.org: I could not speak English. I went to a fur shop and they gave me fur and pointed to a sewing machine. I sewed. Then I pointed to a frame for stretching the skins and showed them I could do that. I also picked up a knife and showed them I could cut. The [sic] hired me at 50 cents an hour even though the going rate for beginners was 75 cents an hour. I bought a sewing machine for $50 and started taking in work. Then I was hired by the Haspel Brothers store where I was a foreman. I built myself up, and we raised and educated our two children. After 28 years Frieda and I went on our first vacation in 1978 to Israel. There we 375,000 Jews living in Warsaw before the war. I doubt that there are 5,000 living there today. It is very, very important for me to tell this story.

In 2005, Bronx-born Fred ‘the Furrier’ Schwartz, owner of the very successful ‘affordable’ fur brand the Fur Vault and ‘America’s first media furrier’ (Roberts

Introduction

19

2016), founded the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation. Although fourth-generation furrier Schwartz was Jewish, his Polish father had moved to the United States before Schwartz’s 1931 birth and Schwartz had ‘no direct Holocaust connection but visited the camp in 1993 and was struck by its facelessness’ (2016). As his New York Times obituary attests, Schwartz, who died in 2016, was acutely quotable: Defending his profession against allegations of cruelty by animal rights advocates, Mr. Schwartz reminded The Washington Post in 1986 that fur was ‘the original covering’ for primitive beings, the ‘first thing humans put on their bodies’. ‘You have to remember,’ he said, ‘in the beginning, we were all furriers.’ (Roberts 2016)

Referring to migration at a later point, a Calgary-based journalist recalls growing up in a Polish–Canadian household full of furs. Her grandfather, she explains, had been in charge of Krakowian fur production in the 1970s, when Kraków was the hub of fur manufacturing for the whole country … Through his ties to the fur industry, my grandfather had access to the political elite without being part of it, and those ties came in handy. When my parents wanted to leave the country during martial law, our passports were arranged through my grandfather’s contacts. (Gudowska 2010)

In each of these instances, fur has a pivotal role in individuals’ biographies and in their families’ perpetuations, while also indexing how many others in comparable situations experienced instead unthinkable tragedy. Fur’s haunting quality and its pervasiveness are also evidenced by the large number of alerts to its appearances in the news and in the arts I have received from helpful friends living in many different places in the world both during and since my time living in Kraków. These have often comprised either stories about fur’s controversial appearances on catwalks or postcards of Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure): a furry teacup, saucer and spoon that is a surrealist visual pun and, in some estimations, sexually suggestive. More unexpected have been the alerts I have received to the critically acclaimed ‘prestige TV’ series Mad Men’s (2007–17) creator, Matthew Weiner’s National Public Radio exegesis of how the fur coat’s history and symbolism inspired him to give it a recurrent role in the popular series. Weiner, the grandson of a New York furrier of Russian descent, had given Mad Men’s main protagonist and mysterious and dysfunctional anti-hero Don Draper a backstory as a fur retailer. Weiner explained:

20

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland I felt that Don worked in a fur company [before he was in advertising] because I love the fur business and it’s something that’s completely politically incorrect now and was a gigantic business and was something that you would give one fur to your wife and another to your mistress. It was literally like buying someone a home, so it is the ultimate symbol of luxury.

The connections drawn by Weiner speak to some of the main concerns of this book: the twentieth century’s political events, grandparents, Russia and its bearing on its neighbours, and gender, kinship and class more broadly. But I also quote Weiner here because he captures fur not only as a material that appears in histories and memories but as a material that is memorable. Fur relates particularly to the past, or perhaps the pasts, capturing how ‘the “big screen” of history’ (Weston 1991: 29) maps onto and is produced by people’s lives. It can be no coincidence that fur is principally an outdoor material when, as historian Leif Jerram argues in Streetlife: The Untold Story of Europe’s Twentieth Century (2010): If we want to find the ‘scene of the crime’ of the continent’s history in the twentieth century, we have to think about where we put our hide, and how we manage the stakeout. The best place to observe the encounter between big and small is the city, and the myriad nooks and crannies, back streets and thoroughfares, clubs and bars, living rooms and factories that make them up. Cities matter, because in the nineteenth century, mankind entered a period of transformation perhaps only equalled in significance by the transformation wrought when, 10,000 years ago, humans stopped wandering and settled down to farm. Beginning in Britain and Belgium in the 1830s, people began to move to cities in their thousands … By the end of the nineteenth century, this revolution was starting to transform large chunks of what we now call ‘the West’: the north and east of France; all of Belgium and the Netherlands; northern Italy; the west of the Habsburg Empire in present-day eastern Austria, the Czech Republic, parts of Hungary, and southern Poland; much of Germany; a corridor between St Petersburg and Moscow. (Jerram 2011: 1–2)

What follows asks in which situations histories appear in contemporary life. The book explores how family and material culture are very often the sites of such ‘appearances’. The particular connections fur holds to idioms of generation and inheritance are explored. I do this because these struck me as the apposite lenses through which people framed fur at the time of my fieldwork but also because these topics arose as questions across many different domains in Kraków: How do epochs, especially those involving upheaval, make persons? What can and cannot be passed on, through families, through societies?

Introduction

Figure I.1  An Old Town commercial street © Siobhan Magee.

21

22

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Generation and intergenerational relationships ‘I am using the notion “generation” merely as a heuristic device,’ John Borneman (1992: 47) writes in his ‘Cold War ethnography’, Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation, which details how citizens’ lives differed not only from official narratives assigned to them by the state but from those of compatriots born at different times. However, one of my aims in this book is to show that people use heuristic devices to generate meaning in their lives and to explain this meaning to others. Friends and acquaintances in Kraków agree with academic work that claims that the idea of generation is often most powerful in places that have known significant upheaval. Complex and often violent political events and disorienting economic turns mean that the experiences of those living within shared locales and even in the same families have varied so deeply as to have created them as unusually different persons from one another (Robbins 2013). While one of the meanings of generation, a ‘point in a lineage’, can suggest a fairly smooth flow of one age of family to the next, the other meaning, ‘age cohort’ (Kertzer 1983), shows how powerful is the idea that where and when one comes of age creates them as a person. In most places, it is expected that a woman will be in some ways different from her mother. But in some places these differences are sufficiently stark as to make them political issues that penetrate intimate lives and public discourses, such as state politics, alike. Feelings of familial togetherness may endure, but emphasis will also be placed on the relatedness between a person and other members of her age cohort as people who ‘understand each other’, even when they have never met. Certain cohorts wear labels that crystallize their supposed distinctiveness. And the idea of a generation with shared sociopolitical characteristics seduces the media. In the 1990s, Sherry Ortner drew attention to US ‘public culture’s’ saturation with images of ‘Generation X’ (1998). A not entirely flattering ‘ideal type’ (1998: 416) of ‘whiny’ (1998: 419) Americans born between the surprisingly extended period of 1961 to 1989 emerged (1998: 416; see also Howe & Strauss 1993: 12–13) and was often compared with the ‘baby boomer’ generation born after the Second World War. The sociopolitical and economic context in which these people had grown up took the blame: In addition to encountering difficult economic conditions [‘McJobs’], Generation X is described as encountering extremely problematic social conditions, including a soaring divorce rate, high rates of working mothers and latchkey children, ecological disaster, the AIDS epidemic, and so forth. (Ortner 1998: 418)

Introduction

23

Further east, political ‘caesurae’ (Feuchtwang 2005) create generations. Alexei Yurchak writes in Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006) about the relationships between ‘“the sixtiers” (shestidesiatniki), identified by the name of their formative decade, and a younger cohort called the “last Soviet generation”’ (Yurchak 2006: 31). Yurchak observes that ‘generations are not natural, they are produced through common experience and through discourse about it’ (Yurchak 2006: 30). Sharika Thiranagama agrees when she contrasts experiences of post-Civil War displacement of three generations of Sri Lankan Muslims: ‘The Elderly’, ‘The Young’ and the ‘In-Betweens’ (2007: 141–142). As Thiranagama puts it, ‘Fourteen years was long enough to create three distinct generations with different imaginings of the promise of return’ (2007: 141, my emphasis). Contrasting attitudes and practices can be the results of resilience, hope and ingenuity in the face of acute upheaval. However, these differences can be fertile grounds for misunderstanding, not to mention for governmental policies that answer the needs of one generation but not those of their successors.

The politics of generation and difference in Poland In the Kraków detailed in this book, newspaper headlines demonstrate the multitude of ways in which generations can be defined: ‘the Lost Generation’, Stracone Pokolenie, blighted by unemployment and degree inflation (e.g. Tokarz 2011) and the focus of an entire series of articles in Gazeta Wyborcza, ‘the Erasmus Generation’ (Makowski 2012), and the ‘Generation without fathers’, Pokolenie bez ojców, which first appears to be about single-parent families but actually refers to social reproduction and the Roman Catholic Church in Poland (Rys 2013). I lived in Kraków twenty years after 1989, and the National Museum put on a multimedia exhibition titled Pokolenie ’80 niezalezna twórczosc młodych w latach 1980–89 (‘The Generation of 80: The Independent Creativity of the Young in the Years 1980–89’). Generations can also be demarcated relationally and, at the time of my fieldwork, notions of belonging to ‘the young [generation]’ or the ‘old [generation]’ are powerful. Absolut Vodka put thick card advertisements on the tables of a trendy art gallery-cum-bar reading Absolut Pokolenie: Talenty, Zamilowanie, Indywidualnosc, Natchnienie (‘Absolut Generation: Talents, Passion, Individuality, Inspiration’), along with other signifiers of youth and modernity: ‘travel’, ‘dancing’ and ‘graffiti’. This fetishization of youth has

24

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

serious ramifications. Pine writes movingly of the Polish women who fail time and time again to win work on account of their age. One interlocutor tells Pine ‘they only want to employ young attractive women, women without children, women who are willing to do a striptease. There will be no work again for older women like us’ (1998: 114; see also Dunn 2004; Hardy 2009). Although I have no such strikingly put example of an interlocutor discussing the relationship between generation and work, this quotation resonates with many interlocutors strongly held beliefs that appearance and youthfulness matter more in the workplace under capitalism and that unemployment is not only a social and economic problem but a moral one. Being young is also often spoken of in the same breath as ‘being international’ and this virtue is sought out even in workplaces where it is unclear why much knowledge of foreign languages or of ‘other cultures’ would be particularly useful. This brings to mind the situation of a woman in her fifties I met in Kraków soon after she had lost her job working in a hotel. She told me how strange it felt, and how embarrassing, that she and her son, who was in his early twenties, were looking for work at the same time. How do this woman and her son talk about their respective searches for work, and, perhaps, what it means for the finances of their household (her son moved back home after attending technical college)? I ask these questions because this book is concerned not only with generation but with intergenerational relationships. Peter Loizos and Patrick Heady write of how kinship can be thought of in terms of moral obligations and rights. Some of the most important proceed downward from parent to child and, subsequently, upward from child to parent. Who must feed whom? Who has the right to whose labour? Who inherits what from whom? Who must care for whom in old age, and who must observe funeral rites at whose death? (Loizos & Heady 1999: 5)

This quotation demonstrates how intergenerational relationships can exemplify kinship’s entanglement with questions of morals and ethics, as well as making visible in emotive ways, the passage of time. The quotation also suggests the financial, emotional and temporal burdens of caring for kin of other generations. What it also provides is space for these situations to be fleshed out ethnographically. Relationships between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren and, for example, aunts and nieces are easy to cast as quite self-evident, if not rather ‘traditional’ types of connection. However, it is my contention that thought on kinship and relatedness inspired by relationships

Introduction

25

that can in some lights be cast as ‘innovative’ such as those involving adoption or LGBTQ kinship, or work that truly reflects the enduring nature of friendship, elucidates these relationships and shows the outdated nature of such distinctions. An added imperative to study not ‘only’ generational discourses but intergenerational relationships comes from the actuality that the former can whitewash the latter. ‘Il nonno fondo, i figli sviluppano, i nipoti distruggono’ or ‘The grandfather founded (the firm), the sons develop it, and the grandsons destroy’ (2002: 1), Sylvia Junko Yanagisako records in her ethnography of Lake Como silk industry capitalists. It is not that multigenerational renderings of ‘Western capitalism’ (2002: xi) necessarily paint their participants as awash with glory, despite the actuality that notions of ‘pedigree’ and ‘heritage’ (cf. Cassidy 2002) can be extremely profitable. However, the official stories of family firms sometimes blur the indispensable work to which a great deal of their perpetuation should be attributed: that of women. Stepping away from public scripts and into ‘cultural sentiments, meanings, and subjectivities’ (2002: xi), that is, away from multigenerational discourses as (often macho) success stories, gives rise therefore to a proper reflection on the ambiguities and ambivalences that characterize socialities both between family members of different generations and between ‘unrelated’ members of society of different generations. In Kraków, the notion of generational difference is politicized, but it is not taboo. The differences between people of contrasting generations are, usually regardless of whether they are kin or not, markedly normalized. Certain other differences between people, such as gender, faith, sexuality and class or social mobility, are often claimed to be unimportant, denied or else seen as novel challenges. The only type of difference that is comparably normalized is nationality. The differing habits, appearances, beliefs and temperaments of people from other places are a common topic of conversation. ‘Difference’ is a difficult topic in the anthropology of Poland. Anthropologists of Poland face a bind of wanting to reflect many interlocutors feelings that power in Poland is concentrated in particular institutions and moral-discursive domains (such as the Roman Catholic Church) while not wanting to hide the fact that, of course, Poland is diverse. Social scientific literature on ‘difference’ in Poland has in particular explored questions of how Polish Jews are commemorated (Kugelmass & Orla-Bukowska 1998; Lehrer 2013; cf. Tucker 2011; see also Boyarin & Kugelmass 1983) and experiences of being LGBTQ in Poland (e.g. Mizielińska 2001; Baer 2012; Mizielińska and Kulpa 2011). Echoing both Pine’s work on land and kinship and the recurrent motifs of space and exile, contemporary research on sexuality in Poland looks at spaces and boundaries, thresholds

26

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

and landscapes. I wrote earlier in this chapter of Kubica’s work on a Krakowian LGBTQ rights march and its fallout (1999), and, like Kubica, Joanna Mizielińska perceives homophobia as connected to Polish nationalism. She examines two ‘interwoven’ texts (2001: 282): the Polish Constitution and the Catholic Church’s Catechism, both of which reinforce ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (2001: 293) by excluding LGBTQ people from the nation state. The oppression of LGBTQ people in Poland is, Mizielińska writes, a problem of ‘silence’. At the time of my fieldwork, faith and sexuality are, along with gender, generation and nationality, forms of difference that are frequently evoked when people critique fur, regardless of whether they themselves are ‘card-carrying’ activists or just people who did not want to buy or wear it. And yet when people discuss fur with me, they tend to discuss difference through broad categories: ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, ‘mainstream’ and ‘countercultural’ or ‘alternative’ (see Magee 2016). While explored through what is ostensibly quite a different research topic, what I was told in Kraków resonates with Agnieszka Pasieka’s groundbreaking scholarship on a religiously heterogeneous part of rural Poland. Pasieka, who draws upon Bourdieu, writes of how, in Poland the hierarchy – of people, norms, and beliefs – is established through the naturalization of the arbitrary and the imposition of the existing social order as ‘normal.’ In the Polish context, doxa is the conviction that (a good or ‘true’) Pole is Catholic and that Catholicism is the ‘normal’ religion in Poland. (Pasieka 2015: 9)

Pasieka’s point here is not that Poland is homogeneous but rather that Roman Catholicism is commonly framed as the ‘default’ religion in Poland. What I believe many of my interlocutors in Kraków would say of this is that the existence of default, indeed, ‘normal’ identities or ‘lifestyles’ in Poland does not ‘only’ apply to religion.

What is fur? In Kraków, friends announce to me, ‘The other day, I was walking and I saw a woman wearing a fur coat and carrying a small dog and I wondered what you would say about this.’ This trope has been used for some time and in many places to articulate fur’s affordance to be a ‘coat’ to humans and non-humans alike and to draw attention to the distinctions some societies make between companion species and species suitable for use as clothing. (Consider, for example, Peter de Sève’s iconic 1994 New Yorker cover ‘Tailed’, which depicts an

Introduction

27

Upper East Side-style woman wearing a fur coat being followed by a raccoon who is both adorable and angry.) One of the things fur does, I argue in this book, is demonstrate how material culture shows ‘everyday life’ to be either punctuated by or consist of the reflections people make about the uncanny world around them: relationships, things, places, memories. In making this broad point, however, the book points out that fur is quite unusual in the ways in which it straddles many different taxonomical boundaries. Earlier in this introductory essay I reproduced a lengthy quotation of Wolf, which described in broad strokes the changes in the Russian fur trade. I was interested in fur’s status as a valuable that was noteworthy because it became precious while people were hunting for other riches, such as gold and, perhaps especially, land. But within that same paragraph was an important reference to the way that plundering new lands meant finding new fur-bearing animals. The species of animal being killed for fur have changed over time, an extremely apt example of the ways in which, according to Cassidy and Mullin, ‘the species distinction … is a perpetual problem of how to carve up the world that has been answered differently at different times and in different places’ (in the responses section of Alter 2007: 645). Anthropological thought on the boundaries between ‘wild’ and ‘domesticated’ animals (e.g. Cassidy & Mullin 2007; Shanklin 1985) is particularly relevant to this book because it not only describes the ways in which animals are classified, but it leaves space for discussing how animals fit into humans’ economic circumstances and decisions. The history of fur production in Poland calls into question the boundaries between animal husbandry and the kinds of human–animal relations seen in domestic spheres of life. Many Polish fur industry interviewees recall the small-scale breeding of fur animals in gardens and in działki (‘plots’) during the socialist era. This process fits one quite convincing definition of domesticated animals, which sees them as ‘bred in captivity for purposes of economic profit to a human community that maintains complete mastery over its breeding organization of territory and food supply’ (Clutton-Brock 1989: 7; cf. Cassidy and Mullin 2007: 5). However, while some of the people I meet during fieldwork distinguish both fur farming and the rearing of fur animals in homes and gardens as different from trapping ‘in the wild’, they say that the dynamics of rearing in farms and rearing in homes are really quite different. Not only was the boundary between the domesticated and ‘the wild’ blurred, but the line between home and work too – a difficult distinction to make in the social context of a particularly important second economy.

28

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Furriership is a difficult profession to categorize. It is comparable to artisanal crafts such as cobbling and lacemaking and, of course, to fashion design. But one might also look at it alongside other vocations that involve working with animals. The counterargument to this would be that, in contrast to work on the breeding of animals, which often does involve the killing of animals too (Grasseni 2004, 2009), contemporary furriership usually entails furriers receiving tanned pelts (pelts that are ‘not raw’, as some put it). One way of looking at the meaning of dealing with dead animals but not being the person killing the animals is through looking at commodity chain perspectives on meat. Theodore Bestor writes of Tokyo’s Tsukiji seafood market: ‘My research focuses on middlemen (and they are almost all men, in my experience) in this trade, on the Japanese, and Korean, American, Canadian, Spanish buyers, dealers, agents, and other intermediaries who articulate the connections between producers and markets (and through markets, eventually to distant consumers)’ (2001: 77). In this book, some people are male and markedly ‘international’: someone who comes to mind here is the thirty-something scion of a prosperous fur firm who was able to tell me in the same breath what he thought of Chinese fur, Greek fur, German fur, Russian fur; others who come to mind are the traders of corresponding nationalities who deal with fur – men who spend some of their year pacing around auction rooms. Beyond this, however, animal bodies are well situated to reflect inequality because their various parts are put to different uses from one another. Workers at the Hungarian meat plant where Laszlo Kürti carried out a portion of his research (2011) divide up a creature noteworthy for being one of the few animals which is both eaten and worn: the rabbit.1 In Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands (Gewertz & Errington 2010), the paths taken by different cuts of meat, some much tastier and more nutritious than others, of the same animals, highlight stark inequalities between people of different classes and nationalities. Rebecca Cassidy’s work on horse racing (2002) is a particularly successful exemplification of Lévi-Strauss’ statement that ‘animals [are] good to think with’ (1969), as her English interlocutors preoccupations with ‘pedigrees’ in horses sometimes extend to (or are extensions of) their ideas about humans. Sticky questions of class and ethnicity are also at the heart of Hoon Song’s 2010 monograph Pigeon Trouble: Bestiary Biopolitics in a Deindustrialized America. Self-proclaimed ‘birdphobic’ Song, whose ‘hair stands on end at the imagined feel of the cold, flinty beak materializing out of a soft, warm body’ (Song 2010: 1), delves into the world of the Pennsylvania pigeon shoot. In common Others include sheep, deer, caribou, reindeers, whales and seals.

1

Introduction

29

with work on fox hunting in Great Britain (Fukuda 1997; Howe 1981) and the countryside pursuits of Soviet ‘Nomenklatura with smoking guns’ in Hungary (Peteri 2010), Pigeon Trouble questions what it is about killing animals that fosters performances of masculinity. While fox hunting and Soviet shooting are affirmations of elite-class position, Soon’s interlocutors are marginalized working-class miners. Some of their conversations feature conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. Their politics’ conflict with ‘liberal America’ reaches its apex when they find themselves face-to-face with PETA representatives at a shoot. This stand-off pivots around access to land and, by proxy, access to the animals: the shooters’ opportunity to open fire on the birds versus the activists’ rubber-gloved hands (‘gloved love’) waiting to ‘save’ them (Song 2010: 39). It was my experience that some Polish animal rights activists and advocates considered such ‘[Western] Euro-American’ lines of argument irrelevant to Polish politics. At the time of my fieldwork, Polish animal rights discourses hinged instead on generational difference, on images of violence, including on occasion the Holocaust, and on the pervasiveness of the Roman Catholic Church’s power and influence. I was interested to read that Tracie Wilson recorded in her 1999 Anthropology of East Europe Review article: During the winter of 1995, while spending a year in Poland researching an unrelated topic, I arranged to meet the president of the Society for the Care of Animals (Towarzystwo Opieki nad Zwierzętami) at a cafe in Warsaw. The president, a young woman in her twenties, showed up wearing a fur coat – something I found a bit disconcerting. As we talked, she happened to mention that her coat was a fake. This intrigued me since it made me reflect on my own expectations about what an animal rights supporter should or should not wear. For example, many animal rights activists in the US choose not to wear coats that even resemble fur, especially if the fake is such that it could be mistaken for the real thing, as this might suggest that one supports the wearing of fur. (1999: 73)

The differences in size of following of animal rights organizations in different countries, and to which social issues they attach animal rights discourses, illuminate points of divergence in their respective histories. Animals can be a form of property, and so their various fates can be subject both to socio-economic change and state politics and to ownership within communities or within families. Animals are often conceptualized as ahistorical, despite the reality that their bodies are sites of both socio-economic change and scientific endeavour. This ‘ahistoricity’ makes animals apt foci for discussions about politics and history. In the fur industry, animals’ ahistoricity becomes one of fur’s most attractive qualities to consumers: its ‘classicness’.

30

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Figure I.2  Fur at the market © Siobhan Magee.

Postsocialist materialities In this book, I call upon Terence Turner’s work on the ‘social skin’ (1980) at several points. For Turner, clothing is both a barrier between the human body and ‘the outside world’ and a way of bringing the outside world (‘culture’) together with the body (‘nature’). Fur clothing constitutes an unusually literal example of clothes as ‘skin-like’. Consider Karen Tranberg Hansen’s exciting reading of Turner’s work: What is it about the dressed body that has prompted so much recent anthropological scholarship to approach it as a site of convergence for transnational, global, urban, and local forces? Because it touched the body and faces outwards toward others, dress has a dual quality, as Turner (1993 [1980]) noted when he coined the notion the social skin. This two sided-quality invites us to explore both the individual and collective identities that the dressed body enables. The subjective and social experiences of dress are not always mutually supportive but may contradict each other or collide. The contingent dynamic between these two experiences of dress gives rise to considerable ambiguity, ambivalence, and, therefore uncertainty and debate over dress. Dress readily becomes a flash point of conflicting values, fuelling contests in historical encounters, in interactions across class, between genders and generations, and in recent global cultural and economic exchanges. (Hansen 2004: 372)

Introduction

31

The potential for ‘conflict’ identified by Hansen in all clothing echoes the language of embattlement used by pre-eminent fur scholar Julia Emberley. To understand fur, Emberley argues, is to comprehend ‘the contest over the meanings and values of fur as a struggle between people: between, for example, consumers and producers of fur’ (1998: xiii). What appeals anthropologically is that clothing is a simultaneous ingress into self and society. According to Daniel Miller, social theorists have tended to approach clothing, like other ‘things’, semiotically (2009: 12). Indeed, Roland Barthes used fur, or more specifically ‘the fur coat’, to illustrate his arguments about signs and signifiers (1967; see Culler 1981). Miller cautions anthropologists from the UK (among other countries) not to fall prey, when considering clothes anthropologically, to what he sees as a local predilection for ‘depth ontology’ which sees clothes as ‘superficial’ for the reason that the ‘being – what we truly are – is located deep inside ourselves and is in direct opposition to the surface’ (Miller 2009: 15, original emphases; see also Strathern 1979). This fetishism of ‘what’s inside’ results in some anthropologists thinking that symbols are necessary in order to make clothing a ‘meaningful’ topic of study. Trinidadians, whom Miller offers as an example, believe that their ‘looks’ constitute their ‘real selves’. A question that might seem quite normal in the UK, ‘What do you do for a living?’, would come across as rude and rather pointless. ‘One works simply because one needs to earn money, so this is entirely the wrong source of selfdefinition’ (Miller 2009: 18). What differentiates clothing from other kinds of material culture? What particular questions does clothing pose in Poland and its neighbours? In recent years a number of pivotal texts have suggested there is something particularly poignant, uncanny even, about consumption, design and materiality in postsocialist contexts. Krisztina Fehérváry, for example, in her groundbreaking research on the Hungarian middle class, situates material culture and consumption as (among other things) reminders not to see only rupture between state socialism and early 1990s capitalism but something that was fostered during socialism: The moral, spiritual, and economic struggles of the postsocialist period crystallized a material aesthetic for a livable, normal, and respectable life for middle-class Hungarians. But clearly such an aesthetic did not arise overnight, emerging fully formed out of some supposed state socialist material wasteland. Rather, it was the product of everyday experience of the robust and politically charged material culture that developed over the four decades of the socialist period, much of it centered on the home. Qualities of things – colors like orange and gray, substances

32

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland like wood and concrete, shapes like right angles and organic curves – came – to provoke affective responses to the sociopolitical and economic ideologies with which they were aligned. The affective powers of such qualities outlived the regime that generated them, shaping the way a socialist-era middle class negotiated the postsocialist 1990s and constituted a new middle class. (2013: 3)

The importance of distinctions between public and private spaces during socialism and capitalism alike also piques the interests of academics and the people who helped them with their research, and in this book I am interested in both how fur is iconic because it colours conversations and how certain people are concerned with ‘actual garments’, pieces they own, sell or inherit. These issues of class, design and national memories do not matter ‘only’ in domestic contexts. Michał Murawski, in his work on architecture in Warsaw, has shown that, exemplified by the Palace of Culture and Science, people can in effect possess public art and institutions (2011). To boot, rather than signifying a state of perpetual ‘living in the past’, postsocialism is about new phenomena, and if anything unifies these phenomena, it is that they are surprising: Murawski writes, with important italicization, that ‘the Palace’s participation in the life of Warsaw has increased since 1989, the year in which Poland’s Soviet-backed “People’s Republic” – on behalf of which the Palace exercised its agency over Warsaw – ceased to exist’ (2011: 6; original emphasis). Work on socialist and postsocialist material culture shows the frequent power of material culture to cause frustration. Magdalena Crăciun (2014) describes how when people in Romania comment on the ‘quality’ of clothes they also critique their political circumstances. I got used to fur industry people talking about pelts (often from other countries or else DIY jobs) that had aged to ‘useless’ and ‘disgusting’ results because they had not been tanned properly. Nikolai SsorinChaikov points out that, under socialism, it was not only ordinary citizens who experienced problems with fur’s material properties. Even the very fine furs at Stalin’s birthday exhibition caused unforeseen stress: In contrast to the limitlessness of the love of the leader and to the socialist timelessness that the Exhibition displayed, its documentation reveals yet another temporal regime. Virtually immediately after it was opened ‘for good’, it became a constant, and often desperate task, patching up and retrofitting. After the displays were completed, its profusion of rugs, clothes, and furs immediately started to attract moths. (Ssorin-Chaikov 2006: 269)

The theme here of ‘unruly’ material culture speaks to a wider set of practices that situate ‘things’ at the centre of narratives, critiques, rumours and theories

Introduction

33

about what it is to live within a particular political context. Judd Stitziel, in Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics, and Consumer Culture in East Germany (2005), argues that, under Soviet governance, clothing was, at least in theory, a tool with which to ‘cultivate a “socialist personality” with new needs, habits, and values that would be in harmony with the needs of society as a whole and thus help to create a communist utopia’ (2005: 1). This book, alongside Bartlett’s Fashion East: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism (2010; see also Bartlett 2004, 2006) and some of the contributions to Crowley and Reid’s Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (2010), argues that there were, in essence, two ‘fashions’ during socialism. The first was the fashion put out by the government. The fur catalogues mentioned earlier in this chapter were one manifestation of this. The second fashion, however, amounted to how ‘ordinary citizens’ might buy, make, mend, covet, innovatively style and reject clothes. As such, labels such as ‘luxury’ and ‘fashion’ were just as if not more important under socialism as under capitalism. One of the things that made ‘the problem of what to wear’ (Tarlo 1991) particularly vital in this context is that, like food, the necessity of clothes made them particularly apt for reflecting and creating difference (cf. Bourdieu 1979).

Hairy materialities In spring 2016 I visited Utrecht’s Centraal Museum’s temporary exhibition Hair! Human Hair in Fashion and Art. Some of the exhibits destabilized the boundaries between human hair, fur and clothing, by inviting visitors to observe the merry-go-round of what have been taken as ‘normal’ uses and aesthetics of these materials in various times and places. The use of hair in mourning jewellery (see Batchen 2004) shows that while (or perhaps because) hair is for many one of the definitive aspects of a person’s public appearance, it is also an intimate part of their selfhood that can be kept close to body of those who miss them the most. The similarities between human hair and textiles were made apparent by an exhibit about celebrity hairdressers, whose artistry has as much signified the times as that of fashion designers. Of particular interest to me, of course, were clothes that were fashioned from human hair. Ninke Bloemberg, the exhibition’s curator, was quoted as saying of her inclusion of shoes, dresses and coats made from hair, ‘The reactions literally differ from gross to fantastic […] People wear fur coats but they would not put on a jacket made of human hair (Lawrence 2016).’ Here, Bloemberg’s intention is to point out the taxonomical

34

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

decisions commonly made about human hair. In doing so, however, she also draws attention to fur’s peculiarity. Until recently, the anthropological study of hair has overwhelmingly centred on Asian societies. In ‘Magical Hair’ (1958), Leach asks a question about hair that resembles (and pre-empts) Turner’s theory about ‘the social skin’: ‘Just what is the connection between the public and private sectors of the symbolic system?’ (1958: 148). In other words, how might anthropologists make sense of instances in which certain symbols seem to elicit curiously strong associations for both the minds of individuals ‘in private’ and in society? In a South Indian context, hair could be associated with sex, with death and with power. In Kraków, in contrast, friends point out the humour of stag parties for tourists being advertised using photographs of young female models wearing fur coats. To them, fur coats are a symbol of the older generations of Polish women, who are less commonly sexually objectified in the media and advertising than are young women. This also makes work on fur in the United States and the United Kingdom seem quite divorced from the meaning of fur in Kraków. Positioning herself between women’s studies and textile and design studies, UK-based academic Catherine Harper writes that fur is a meeting point between sex and death: ‘an extraordinary phenomenon in fashion in this time in human cultural history. It defines the wild complexity of human sexual perversion by combining apparently opposite psychic forces – the will to destroy and the desire to appreciate’ (2008: 312; also see Emberley 1998). The apparent inspiration for Leach’s ‘Magical Hair’ was psychoanalyst Charles Berg’s The Unconscious Significance of Hair (1951). Obeyesekere gives this breathtakingly damning synopsis of the ‘silly book’ (1981: 17): ‘the unconscious significance of hair for the individual: hair = penis. Thus cutting hair is symbolic castration’. Cut (or ‘castrated’) human hair and furs are comparable, I think, in that they both give themselves very naturally to being symbols ‘for something else’. In each case they imply the absence of what they were once attached to: a human head or an animal’s body. In the estimations of some of my interlocutors, the place of fur in Russia’s political and economic power at various points in history resonates with one aspect of Leach’s analysis of hair in particular: ‘Hair, as a separable part of the body, is not only a symbol of aggression but “a thing in itself ”, a material piece of aggression’ (1958: 160). Emma Tarlo’s work on hair has shown hair’s psychological and symbolic richness, but she also shows it to be a surprisingly global object (or subject?) that jumps back and forth between the deeply personal and the commodified. While, in Europe and the People without History (Wolf 1982) and in Susan

Introduction

35

Sleeper-Smith’s vital work on Native American women and the fur trade (e.g. 2010;  see  also Emberley 1997), fur appears as a central commodity in global history, in 2016’s Entanglement, Tarlo shows that hair can also be pursued as it travels from place to place, thus forming a thrilling multisited ethnographic fieldwork. The journeys that fur and hair make – whether they themselves are moving or ‘only’ ideas, talk, or images of them – make visible values and inequalities. These can concern constructions of ethnicity and nationality, they can involve class and gender. A new set of symbols has arisen in Europe as a result of the Holocaust, due to, firstly, the specific ways in which people were marked out as ‘minorities’ in a range of ways including those linked to physical appearances and imprisoned in Auschwitz and other concentration camps (Tarlo 2016: 275), and the imprints these atrocities have made upon personal, familial and national memories and, secondly, the often unexpected reappearances of these people’s (seized and stolen) personal possessions. In some lights, hair may well be such a symbol of these tragic absences. So too, in some of the contexts in which it appears, might fur.

The fieldwork In 2009, I flew from Edinburgh to Kraków on one of the low-cost, early morning flights that was so popular at the time due to UK-based holidaymakers’ passion for Krakowian ‘city breaks’ and because of the large number of Polish people who were living in Scotland and seeking trips to visit relatives in Poland or inviting them for a Scottish holiday. I made this journey with the intention of researching the ways in which large-scale emigration from Poland might have been reconfiguring kinship. I was interested in how kin of different generations related to one another through talking and spending time together and through material culture and inheritance. The rough correspondence between the number of years generally considered a generation and the momentous caesurae in twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Polish history: the Second World War, 1989 and EU accession in 2004 raised interesting questions about how these generations related to one another. I chose Kraków, a city I had visited previously on holiday, as my fieldsite because I could tell from the ways Polish friends in Edinburgh and books and articles alike commented on it, that it posed specific questions about ‘elite migration’. It also posed weighty questions about intergenerational relationships because it had once had a

36

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

particularly sizeable and well-established Jewish population and because many former Soviet nomenklatura were said to have based themselves and their families there after 1989. My change of focus to fur was not the dramatic summoning of a ‘plan B’ that some anthropologists face when, for example, their access to a high-security fieldsite is denied or revoked. What occurred instead was the result both of my becoming intrigued by ‘questions the field throws up’ and feeling that a material culture focus would help me to better plan my research and narrow down whom to contact in a large city. Prior to leaving Edinburgh I established that I would spend two months improving the knowledge of Polish I had worked on through a year and a half of evening classes by taking an intensive language course in Kraków. An unanticipated benefit of this was that it bought me time to really think about my project while ‘in the field’. For the first month of fieldwork, I stayed with a kind married couple in their fifties, while studying at language school five minutes away from their home in the suburbs. At the time, I did not really conceptualize this as ‘real fieldwork’, because I had yet to begin the kind of systematic research I thought I should be doing. I went to the language school from 8.00 am to 1.00 pm and then studied in cafes, working on the piles of worksheets assigned by my Polish teacher. In these unstructured afternoons in Kraków, I felt lucky to be in a place with so many museums and galleries to visit. As the weeks progressed, in the afternoons and evenings I met with people whom I knew through friends in the UK. I also did some very preliminary recorded interviews with people in their twenties and thirties. Some of these people were students of an English friend who worked as an English teacher at one of the many language schools on the streets leading out of the Rynek Główny (the Main Square). Initiating me at an early stage into the strange politics of exchange at work during ethnographic fieldwork, some of these students said that they would talk to me if we could do the interview in English. During these early days, weeks and months, I learned that people were very concerned with migration and intergenerational relationships but not in quite the way I had hypothesized in the research proposal I had crafted for my university. For example, and to pre-empt an argument in this book, I found that people conceptualized migration as part of ‘work’ (pracy) and of ‘experience’ (przygoda). Migration was so deeply embedded within these things that it needed to be looked at as part of a wider context of ideas about work, personhood, kinship and nationhood. It also occurred to me that it could be disquieting for interviewees talking about their experiences of ‘EU migration’ with someone

Introduction

37

who lived and worked in the UK. Would they worry that they would offend me if they were unfavourable about one aspect or another of life in the UK? More gravely, would they worry that such information could be used against them? Although ‘negotiating access’ is sometimes written or spoken of as a one-off challenge at the beginning, or even before the start, of research, I found that multisited research meant constantly negotiating and renegotiating access to sites. This was frequently an exhausting process. Friends advised me that it was better to go into shops and speak to furriers face-to-face rather than telephoning or emailing. I did this, wearing smarter clothes than I would ordinarily have worn, going into the many fur shops in my area with the wizytówka (business card) friends had advised me to order and an information sheet I typed out about my project. This was especially helpful because some people were quite understandably unsure of what anthropology was. At one point I stood waiting next to a Poznań furrier’s desk while he read Wikipedia’s entry on the subject. I was relieved and, as always, grateful, when this busy professional with whom I had no prior connections through either work or kinship ties smiled at me and said, ‘Okay, we can talk.’ In shops, I focused upon interviewing men and women about their careers in fur and watched how they repaired or made garments and how they talked with clients. The amounts of time I spent in each shop varied considerably. I often thought that training to be a furrier myself would have been the ‘most ethnographic’ method of learning about fur. I never quite felt, however, that trying to do this would have been feasible. Despite one or two of my new friends’ self-deprecating (and in my experience, untrue) declarations that ‘Poles are terrible at time-keeping’, Krakowians lived by appointments, meeting people on the hour or at half past the hour. My opportunities to ‘hang out’ were also restricted by the size of many of the fur shops: scarcely enough room for a furrier, and a client, and me – not to mention the considerable amount of space taken up by voluminous garments. I also reasoned that the aspects of fur I was interested in, areas pertaining to kinship such as ideas about inheritance, consumption and morality, to give three examples, were less well suited to using apprenticeship as a research method than, for example, projects in which researchers’ central interests are technology or skill (e.g. Lave 1977; Makovicky 2010; Marchand 2001). While this is a book about Kraków, some of my understanding of what fur is was constructed by trips I took away from the city during my fieldwork. I travelled to Wrocław and Poznań specifically because I had been given the details of people who had special links to the fur industry. However, I also found that I looked for

38

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

fur, or as it sometimes felt, fur looked for me, when I left Kraków to take breaks from my research. When planning trips to Warsaw and Zakopane, for example, I thought that I ‘might as well look up some fur businesses’. Comparably, a trip to visit my parents and have a rest ended up including an interview in London with a representative from a British fur organization. ‘Does what I’m doing now count as research?’ I asked myself quite frequently. Long-term fieldwork means that even when a person is researching a particular topic, they also learn about the place where they are living through activities that are quite different from interviewing and trips to ‘strategic’ sites such as (in my case) those to do with fur. Finding a place to live and navigating bureaucracies can be elucidating (which, is sometimes, but not always, a euphemism). I also spent my time making friends and maintaining relationships with people ‘back home’. One of my enduring impressions of Kraków was the kindness I was shown by new friends. This came to the fore in both of the Decembers in which I lived in Kraków: winters that were harsh even by Polish standards meant that, one year, it seemed doubtful that my partner would be able to visit me as planned, and the other, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to fly to the UK to visit relatives. Though in the end each of these planned visits was able to take place, in each case, friends invited me to spend the festive season with their families, whether in Kraków or elsewhere in Poland. Of course, I also learned about intergenerational relationships and appearance and, inevitability, class and gender, in this particular urban context by being at the time a young visitor to the city and experiencing dress and other ‘bodily techniques’ as some of the ways through which one’s insider and outsider statuses play out most readily. In hindsight, I can see that my appearance changed subtly when I was living in Poland. Fieldwork might very often involve a researcher changing their style of self-presentation, for example by wearing ‘modest’ dress because they believe this is a sign of respect for their informants. For me, doing research meant dressing in a more formal, and in some people’s estimations, ‘more feminine’, manner than usual. However, while it is probably quite obvious that someone would, for example, wear ‘real shoes’ as opposed to sneakers to an interview, I found that I also wore more formal clothes, more fitted, darker, in my ‘everyday life’ in Kraków. With some friends, socializing involved exercises classes, and so my appearance changed a little. My weight fluctuated during fieldwork, but when I looked slimmer, I looked, I was told by some friends, ‘more Polish’. How I looked changed subtly in line with local expectations in other ways too: the kindly owner of the local independent grocery store, a woman who was perhaps in her late forties, told me that it ‘looked bad’ when I tried to carry goods

Introduction

39

in my arms and that I should put them in a bag instead. I felt at the time and still feel now that this sort of advice and the handful of other similar situations (such as when I was gently admonished for walking down the street eating a pretzel) were telling because they always involved women who were older than I was. Although in a sense I was being told off (and friends of the same age as me rolled their eyes at such exchanges), I did not feel as much shamed as I did ‘initiated’ (a sentiment that, again, some friends may roll their eyes at). In addition to interviewing people about fur, I interviewed people who had ‘specialist knowledge’ about Kraków more generally or about kinship. I would make notes on things that had puzzled me or piqued my interest and try to follow them up. This is how, for example, I ended up interviewing funeral directors and booksellers. It is surely also always the case that in addition to engaging with the ‘big stories’ of a place’s historical, economic and political contexts as they unfold over centuries and decades on the one hand, and the much more focused topics that make up the heuristic through which these are explored, a period of fieldwork is also coloured a great deal by the event. People generously invited me to events that they thought they would be of interest to me, at churches, synagogues and lectures at the various universities. The political and social events my research happened to coincide with informed where I went and with whom I talked. As I mentioned previously, I went to many ‘twenty years of democracy’ events: a Solidarność meeting in the basement of a restaurant and countless exhibitions. In July 2011, I went to the Euro Pride event in Warsaw, which had been heavily publicized in the Polish media and internationally.

Plan of the book Chapter 1 discusses Krakowian sociality. I describe the great importance placed upon patronizing ‘semi-public spaces’ (see Herzfeld 2009) such as cafes and shops. Clothing practices in these places matter a great deal because they are connected to ideas about gender and class-based respectability. Rather than just ‘setting the scene’, I argue that these landscapes and the types of sociality they hosted are central to local understandings of power and relatedness. A person’s środowisko (‘social circle’/‘environment’) is a convergence of locality, personhood and descent. The connectedness of large numbers of people by ‘weak ties’, due to a shared środowisko, creates a context in which behaving and presenting oneself correctly in public are deemed to be concerns not only for the individual but for his or her family and wider social circle. The chapter looks at

40

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

inheritance of fur, focusing on the pre-mortem, alternate generation inheritance of fur from grandmothers to granddaughters. It begins by establishing that furs passed outside of a family were taken as indications of a family or an individuals’ ‘bad lot’. It also calls upon family resemblances through the body and looks at how pre-mortem inheritance of goods such as fur, which tended to be linked to taste and comportment, was experienced as marking points of the life course, womanhood and elderliness respectively rather than ‘life and death’. I argue that fur should be looked at as part of a network of things that can be inherited, unveiling a hierarchy of value but also two important distinctions: firstly, the differences between ideas about tangible and intangible inheritances; secondly, the contrasting categorizations that led some objects to be considered suitable for pre-mortem inheritance and others to be saved for after death. Chapter 2 moves from the street to the inside of the home, looking at furriers who work from home, I use, in particular, James Carrier’s work on the differences and similarities between shops and homes. Workshops are commonly demarcated from living areas by boundaries created by objects such as a furrier’s technical equipment. Space is also divided by practices that prevent different types of dirt moving from work space to living space or vice versa: shoes are left at certain points in line with the Polish custom of removing one’s shoes when entering a home. This chapter unpacks the relationship between furriers and patrons, building on the argument I make in the previous chapter about the absolute importance of patronage of businesses for Krakowian kinship. Patrons and furriers sometimes talk of fur’s material properties as dictating the furrier–client relationship. Its ‘demanding-ness’, a characteristic based on informants’ belief that, because fur was ‘natural’ it was also somewhat ‘wild’ and given to transforming itself by decay or by wear and tear if not repaired and remodelled by a professional with some regularity, mediated this relationship. Fur’s high monetary value, along with the sentimental values some inherited or gifted furs possessed, was used as rationale for the maintenance of furrier–client relationships. Chapter 3 focuses on family fur businesses, centring on my claim that the inheritance of businesses fundamentally contradicted the local understanding of work as the main pathway to adult personhood. Businesses’ ‘origin stories’ (Yanagisako 2002) commonly praised the founder’s entrepreneurial ingenuity, in particular, their ability to earn money under socialism. Younger people working in these businesses were required to have this kind of spirit and creativity and to think about their business, I argue, as if they were founding it for themselves. The local tenet that generations are fundamentally different from each other

Introduction

41

goes some way to facilitating this. A furrier’s generation made them ‘naturally’ mindful of the needs and desires of clients of their own generation and therefore a son or grandson can show his indispensability by using his kinship with or understanding of clients of his own generation, even when his elder relatives are still able to run a business for themselves. The depth at which entrepreneurial skill and spirit factor in adult personhood and the ways in which they are and are not considered ‘inheritable’ are further illustrated by the actuality that many young people speak proudly of their parents’ businesses that had failed. It was the drive to start the business that really mattered. Chapter 4 moves away from Krakow in order to discuss fur as a site of experimentation. In earlier chapters, fur elicits strong opinions on Poland’s place in the world as a former Soviet country and as a relatively new member of the EU. Fur industry people use the ways in which fur is produced, its public image and their perceptions of its contrasting degrees of popularity in other countries to channel concerns that were also commonplace among friends and acquaintances outside of the fur industry. It is in this section that some of the threads about similarity and difference that have run through my book converge. I discuss the kinds of phenotypic data scientists and farmers have collected from animals over the past 100 years and the ways in which they use selective breeding to farm profitable animals. Chapter 5 discusses the claims Polish animal rights activists make against fur. It starts from outside of the activist community, focusing on fur industry people’s very commonplace claim, which was not intuitive to me, that ‘greens’, zielony, were a nuisance specifically because ‘they were people who wanted to make a fuss’. This criticism tells us something about the ways in which class was often conceptualized in Krakowian society as a confrontation between those who were ‘normal’ normalne and those who were ‘alternative’ (kontrkultury/alternytywny). I look at how activists use ‘comprehensive veganism’ to eschew the eating and wearing of animal products and often also the keeping of pets. This philosophy was problematized by the actuality that many activists stopped protesting and following comprehensive veganism on becoming parents. I look at their claims for anti-fur work and veganism more generally. Polish animal rights groups did not want to ‘follow’ animal rights activism in ‘the West’. Not only were they critical of the sexist imagery used in PETA advertisements, they considered fur to have different political associations in Poland to North America and Western Europe. Fur symbolized, among other things, masculine power and the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.

42

1

Of grandmothers and gratitude: Inheriting fur, inheriting class

Shortly before finishing fieldwork, I set down a square metre of tarpaulin at the outdoor Hala Targowa (‘Market Hall’) hoping to sell some of the (functioning) electrical goods from my flat that my friends could not use. My friend Gosia joined me and we went to look at the furs for sale. She commented on the ‘sadness’ of this stock. ‘Why is this sad?’, I asked. ‘Because’, she replied, ‘something must have gone terribly wrong in these families for this stuff to be put up for sale’. I was unsurprised to hear second-hand fur framed in terms of familial misfortune, aware as I was of a preference for it to be kept in the family. I had first heard of the trend for grandmothers passing on fur to their granddaughters from furriers, some of whom described ‘the young woman having changes made to her grandmother’s coat’ as an archetypal customer for their ‘remodelling and renovation’ (remodelowane i renowacje) services. This chapter explores the ways in which this preference for ‘keeping fur in the family’ is embedded within members of the Krakowian bourgeoisie’s short-term and long-term initiatives to reproduce their standing. The ethnographic material speaks to Jack Goody’s description of inheritance as ‘the means by which the reproduction of the social system is carried out … [and] also the way in which interpersonal relationships are structured’ (1976: 1; see also Hann 2008). This chapter focuses upon ideas about grandmothers and granddaughters, arguing for the fundamental importance of exploring pre-mortem inheritance practices as embedded within the conventions of particular relationships. While doing this, it sets out the specificities of inheriting clothing and, in particular, fur as an unusually symbolically complex material. I discuss how these pre-mortem inheritances are consonant with the notions of gratitude, taste and spending time together central to grandmother–granddaughter relationships. I follow on by exploring how ideas about absorption, family resemblances and aptness for repurposing inform what sort of object of inheritance fur is understood to be.

44

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Unpacking these areas aids comprehension of why certain ‘things’ are supposed to be guided through families rather than recommodified.

What is inheritance? How families, nations and classes are reproduced through generations is a particular concern within the anthropology of Central and Eastern Europe (e.g. Borneman 1992; Hann 1998; Konrád & Szelényi 1979; Pine 1996a). Citizens’ experiences of inheritance practices, legally codified and otherwise (see Heady & Grandits 2003; Thelen 2003), pose questions about social reproduction because certain types of private property were nominally outlawed under Soviet governance. What follows situates fur inheritance within regionally diverse ethnographic examples of the complex ‘singularization’ (Kopytoff 1986) of goods, practices that maintain boundaries between kin and non-kin (Allerton 2007; Busby 2000; Weiner & Schneider 1989). In doing so, however, it corresponds to Central and Eastern European literature demonstrating that receiving or not receiving land, homes and money from kin makes a meaningful difference to personhood, gender and class, but so too do intergenerational conferrals of memories, jokes and sentiments (e.g. Borneman 1992; Pine 1996a, 2007; Yurchak 2006). As a place to research inheritance, Kraków poses particular questions, not least ‘inheritance of what?’ A number of influential texts emphasize Soviet and post-Soviet bourgeoisies’ and intelligentsias’ symbolism, variety and aptitude for changing over time while perpetuating their position (e.g. Buchowski 2008; Fehérváry 2013; Jakubowska 2012; Konrád & Szelényi 1979). And it is in a similar vein that the Krakowian bourgeoisie is fairly difficult to characterize. While overwhelmingly highly educated and well travelled, and often particularly interested in the arts, the bourgeoisie incorporates those who are considered locally to be devoutly religious and those who are atheists; those who are conservative and those who are quite fiercely anti-establishment. Krakowian class configurations are best understood in relation to środowisko, a term that can mean ‘social circle’ (Dunn 2004: 119; Wedel 1986: 104) or ‘social milieu[x]’ (Jakubowska 2012). A środowisko resembles a habitus (Bourdieu 1984 [1979]), emphasizing the inherent socialness of tastes and dispositions. Srodowisko, which also means ‘environment’, ‘merges descent with locality’ (Bloch & Parry 1982: 33) and, in a sense, one’s środowisko denotes both that ‘you are whom you know’ and you are ‘where you go’. While the latter of these qualities includes

Inheriting Fur, Inheriting Class

45

anticipatable institutions such as schools, universities and, for some, churches, I am also referring to a broader social logic: the marked ‘situatedness’ of Krakowian relationships, which struck me a great deal during fieldwork. Where Krakowians go together does not ‘just’ colour relationships, it helps constitute them. This quality is exemplified in this chapter by the tendency of grandmother– granddaughter meetings to take place in specially chosen kawiarni (cafe-bars). With this in mind, clothing is an important object of inheritance in Kraków for much the same reason that it is of anthropological interest: it is a remarkably ‘social’ category of thing; the sight, touch and wear of which can inspire insights into others’ subjectivities (Küchler & Miller 2005; Turner 1980). In Kraków, particular onus is placed upon clothing as a connection to the past, whether through talk or images of archaic designs (see Bartlett 2010; Stitziel 2005) or through actual proximity to garments that ‘existed in another time’. That clothes foster such empathy is key to comprehending pre-mortem inheritance and, in particular, the ways in which it does and does not create or reflect intergenerational similarity. According to the women written of here, inherited clothes are neither ‘secondhand’ (see Gregson & Crewe 2003; Hansen 2000) nor odzież używana (‘used clothes’), both of which suggest that a garment has been recommodified before being appropriated once more. Recently acquired inherited clothing is more fruitfully conceptualized as having been ‘divested’. Lucy Norris’s Indian research on divestment demonstrates the ways in which, when clothes are ‘second skins’ (Turner 1980) with the power to engender both selfhood and relatedness, any ‘act of riddance’ (Norris 2004: 60; see also Miller & Parrott 2009) pertaining to them has implications that are nothing short of ‘ontological’ (Norris 2004: 59) implications. The category of ‘divestment’, however, requires extension. I argue that Krakowian social logic emphasizes pre-mortem inheritance as the passing over of custodianship of family property, rather than as a succession of discrete owners. A garment does not cease to be an elder woman’s when she passes it on; neither can she specify what the younger woman does with it. While the sense in which the word ‘divestment’ signifies ‘to take away property’ is of course relevant here, also quite strikingly fitting are divestment’s etymological roots in Latin and Old French, denoting the removal of garments from the (individual’s) body rather than from their interests more comprehensively. In sum, I will argue in this chapter that young Krakowian women consider their indebtedness to their grandmothers for both their care and their fortitude during the political upheaval of the twentieth century to be non-reciprocable. Rather than attempting in vain to ‘repay’ grandmothers, affection and relatedness

46

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

are manifested in time spent together, in listening to advice, in sharing physical resemblances and sometimes tastes, and in assuming responsibility for highly valued family property, not least fur clothing. In the short term, as opposed to when we look at how class is produced over multiple generations, when similarities are sometimes plainer to see, this imbalance is a productive force within such relationships. As such, clothes’ power to kindle empathy is particularly well suited to the conventions of grandmother–granddaughter relationships. Empathy requires difference if it is to be empathy at all (see Willerslev 2004).

Cultivating gratitude and taste Gratitude is an ‘indispensable manifestation of virtue’ (Emmons 2004: 3) because it gives rise to a distinctive dynamic between oneself and whoever has evoked such a sentiment. In doing so, however, it crucially also amounts to a nourishing psychic and social change to one’s personhood. It is by this logic that, in Kraków, cultivating ‘gratitude’ (wdzięczność) is an important facet of coming of age. Within reason, children are allowed to be ungrateful or greedy by virtue of their being yet to develop gratitude, which, one friend’s mother told me, grows hand in hand with the ability to display affection. Perhaps because of the supposition that grandmothers aid this cultivation, young children are expected to make material demands of their grandparents. Suggestively, for example, an electrical goods shop’s advertising poster portrayed a little girl and her grandparents, surrounded by digital cameras and laptop computers. The blurb, either an insight into the girl’s psyche or an utterance, read Chciałabym … (I would like … ). Growing up also means developing ‘good taste’. That aesthetic tastes develop in young adulthood means that children were expected to favour garishly hued toys, often fashioned out of plastic. Bourgeois young women often describe their grandmothers as elegant, if conservative. Kamila, who works for a travel company, nicknamed her 75-year-old grandmother Roza ‘BCBG’: a French acronym meaning Bon chic, bon genre (‘good style, good class’). In both interviews and informal conversations, narratives telling of grandmothers’ influence upon gratitude and taste were premised chiefly upon their regular contact with their grandchildren during childhood, caring for them while their parents were at work. These memories strikingly often portray the city as a location par excellence for socializing children. Kamila, for example, described to me how

Inheriting Fur, Inheriting Class

47

her maternal grandmother would take her out ‘every day in a pram … feeding the pigeons or taking the tram together … And then when my sisters were born, she would teach me how to care for them’. Describing traversing the city while becoming both a granddaughter and a sister, Kamila’s words illustrate both the ‘situatedness’ of relationships and, particularly striking in relation to coming of age, the importance of place as a constituent of personhood. This is comparable to the local social logic that also positions non-humans as apt foci for describing both changes in oneself (such as growing older) and political change. As Kamila continued: A child likes anything they see, they want to eat leaves, they want a pigeon as a toy. But as you get older you start to be able to see little differences between things, quality – good quality, bad quality – this is an obsession in Poland because before ‘the [1989] changes’ (zmiany) we were used to having nasty-quality products but feeling quite helpless about it.

There is quite a clear connection here between political awareness, manifested through references to national ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs 1992), and gratitude. Both require burgeoning maturity, but there is also a marked sense in which the former inspires the latter. This time referring to life inside the home, the following example suggests that one remarkable aspect of gratitude as a sentiment and as a relation is that its reason and point of reference are the past. Sometimes the act of remembering ambivalence reframes incidents and relationships with admiration and indebtedness. Recounting snippets of time spent with an ‘intimidating’ grandmother, one woman told me: During socialist times, cartoons would be shown on television on Sunday morning, because that was when the government knew people went to church and if children were screaming ‘let me watch the cartoons, mama, grandma, dad’, making a real fuss, then going to church would be more difficult. Grandma was strict about us not watching these cartoons.

Recollections of strictness are relatively rare. Spoiling grandchildren is seen as a grandmother’s ‘right’, perhaps a reward for having raised her own children. However, this slight deviation from the norm makes the woman’s grandmother seem more virtuous, as she sacrificed the immediate pleasure of being a favourite relative for the greater import of cultivating good behaviour and, as recognized with hindsight, the importance of acts of resistance. The Krakowian women I know say that they would ‘always have something to learn from their grandmothers’. As they reached their late teens, this learning no longer involves spoiling. Nor is it based on disciplining, which is used to

48

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

teach children about the complexity of yet-to-be-achieved adulthood: that the hard work and reflection that make life wonderful are as such because of the short-term sacrifices they involve. In contrast, in adulthood a great deal of this learning is brought about through conversation and, central to the bourgeois habitus, by patronage.

From kawiarni (cafe-bars) to coats Wanda, a teacher of Spanish mentioned my project to Magda, a law student, after hearing her talk about her part in the fur remodelling process during an evening class. Magda describes to me how her pre-mortem inheritance came about: After I had been to the cinema with babcia [Zofia, Magda’s paternal grandmother] to see Rewers [The Reverse, a 2009 black-comedy about socialist-era Warsaw] we went for a coffee at a café on Ulica Bracka [Bracka Street]. We were chatting about the moda [‘style’ or ‘fashion’] of the other women in the café and I mentioned to grandma how many women were wearing these fur coats and stoles. And grandma said, ‘Well, I’ve got some things like that for you.’

It goes without saying that grandmother-granddaughter relationships vary. However, given that patronizing such spots is central to making and reproducing bourgeois środowiska, Magda’s situating of her relationship with Zofia in ‘semi-public spaces’ (Herzfeld 2009: 15) indicates the grandmother-granddaughter relationship’s special significance in Kraków. Cafe-bars were most central to this socializing. The ubiquity of these kawiarni, their long opening hours, and their options for alcohol (some serve flavoured vodkas in long-stemmed shot glasses), snacks and savoury meals facilitate clients’ embedding of them within their daily or weekly routines: before church for some, or after work. On weekdays, these are places for discussion but also for reading and writing, hence the considerable number of laptops placed beside coffee cups. Their proximity to the Stare Miasto (‘Old Town’) tourist attractions and to Kazimierz makes the bars popular with holidaymakers. ‘Na zdrowiej [cheers], Ryanair!’, a friend joked as twenty British men dressed as Smurfs entered a bar. But there are some bars that tourists miss: the entrances to several popular kawiarni are unmarked. Locales are used as shorthand for the ‘type of people’ they attract. The location of these intergenerational meetings (spotkanie, a word also used for business meetings) in kawiarni establishes the aesthetics valued by relatively affluent, intelligentsia families. They differentiate themselves from customers of, for

Inheriting Fur, Inheriting Class

49

example, the multiple alcohol-free and early closing locales of a Brussels-based chain, which boosted its international credentials by distributing a magazine which included a double-page spread called ‘For English Speakers!’ (see Piekut 2013). Both decorum and measured eccentricity are central to ways of being for families associated with the intelligentsia. On the one hand, these places embody these priorities because they are places for debate. On the other, they matter because it is important to maintain good relations with their proprietors and other customers alike, owing to the certainty that one would see them again in kawiarni but also at university, work or church. As illustrated above, kawiarni typify the spaces in which women discuss premortem inheritance. The particular expectation of the ‘middle generation’ that their daughters would spend time with their own parents and the presumption that this was expected to take place at certain sites do not detract from the tenet that the relationship should be enjoyable. Pre-mortem fur inheritance practices also balance more formal intergenerational obligations with playfulness and intimacy. It is not supposed to go without saying that a young woman would receive such a garment. This expectation would have challenged the antipathy to cliché and entitlement within these social circles. Many women finished telling me their story and exclaimed words to the effect of ‘but maybe that’s just what my family does!’ The absence of a prescribed time for pre-mortem inheritance supports the hope that granddaughters will show their grandmothers respect (poszanowanie or respekt) but also joyful amity. A retired teacher who was passing on a selection of furs and books to her granddaughter told me: ‘I want to do this while I’m alive so I can see [my granddaughter] enjoy them.’ Kath Weston’s (1991) San Franciscan informants described their friends as ‘families we choose’, making family a powerful idiom for describing close friendships (see also Baumann 1996). In contrast, Krakowian ‘blood relatives’ (krewniacy) – granddaughter-grandmother pairs – sometimes emphasize the intimacy of their relationship by saying that they are ‘like friends’, implying that reciprocity through giving of goods and equity in age and experience are less important to friendship than spending time together and getting along. That this time is frequently spent outside of the home accentuates the friend-like qualities of their kinship, leaving their familial relatedness both as given and as a bond associated with life in homes. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s term ‘the joking relationship’ (1940), used to describe alternate-generation relationships, resonates with this conviviality. ‘Good-humored’ teasing (1940: 195) features in most of the relationships of which I am aware. Testament to the importance of respecting older kin teasing

50

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

is, in Radcliffe-Brown’s words, ‘asymmetrical’ (1940: 195). Granddaughters accept more teasing than they would give back, lest they appear disrespectful (lekceważący). For their part, grandmothers tease their granddaughters less and less as their granddaughters grow older. Tangible pre-mortem inheritances such as furs are, then, conferred less in parallel with familial and class-centred traits such as patronizing places associated with conversation and the arts, and more as part of such nurturing. The cumulative value of this time spent together, some of which is taken up with the intergenerational management of remarkably meaningful ‘things’, constitutes how members of one generation can recognize themselves in kin born into acutely contrastive historical moments. This provides a vital context as I now turn to discuss some of the specificities of inheriting clothing and furs in particular.

Absorbing people and places Being a custodian of family clothing is a sizeable responsibility because the onus is placed upon the women in a family’s collective stake in such garments rather than on the proprietorship of individuals. Jadwiga, a 25-year-old working at an advertising firm, told me: Last summer, I got a beautiful blouse from my grandmother. It is very, very old. It was my great grandmother’s. It is handmade and I think it’s from before the Second World War. It’s embroidered with flowers. I think she embroidered it … [It was] either my great grandmother or another of the women in our family. I should check. And the material is very delicate, so I wash it by hand. And I really like this blouse so I wear it rarely.

At first sight counter-intuitive, Jadwiga’s reasoning that she wears the blouse ‘rarely’ because ‘she really likes it’ illustrates how paying heed to older clothes’ fragility perpetuated a distinction between ‘“going-out clothes” and “everyday clothes”’ (Tikhomirova 2010: 301), singling out ‘special clothing’ (Miller & Parrott 2009). Furthermore, when considering Jadwiga’s words, one gets the sense that the attribution of the flowers to the hands of a female ancestor is of greater import than their definitive ascription to a specific woman, echoing the prioritization in clothing inheritance of lines of families over individual kin. The condition of being inherited gives such garments a singularity (Kopytoff 1986) that is particularly valued at the time of my fieldwork. Ethical shopping

Inheriting Fur, Inheriting Class

51

is a popular topic of conversation among Jadwiga’s friends, who distinguish themselves from those who shopped at chain stores such as those housed by the Galeria Krakówska shopping mall. Women in their twenties are quick to say (unprompted by interview questions, for example) that they consider a virtue of the socialist era was that it was ‘a society of repair’ (Tikhomirova 2010: 303 quoting Gerasimova & Chuikina 2004; see also Gerasimova & Chuikina 2009). Jadwiga tells me that ‘less was wasted, that’s the first thing. But also, maybe the style was quirkier. Now [twenty years after the end of Soviet governance], no one forces us to look the same but we follow fashion and do it ourselves. It’s a shame’. Inherited clothing is endowed with the essences of both the era in which it is made and its previous wearers. However, Krakowian renderings of clothing inheritance also situate such garments as vessels for bringing oneself ‘closer’ to kin from whom one is geographically estranged. That this is the case does and does not differ from ethnographic accounts that foreground the importance of inherited clothing as a means for drawing nearer to lamented loved ones. Elia, a Londoner of Greek descent, told Daniel Miller and Fiona Parrott that wearing her deceased mother’s and aunt’s clothes to special events allowed her to feel their presence, if only for an evening. That ‘[she would] find ways to bring [her mother] into social and family events, giving a good time to her’ (Miller & Parrott 2009: 509), resonates with my informants’ ideas about methods of ‘respecting’ and ‘remembering’ their older family relatives. However, while Elia’s story exemplifies how shared clothes ‘bring the dead and the living into immediate proximity’ (Miller & Parrott 2009: 509), my informants reflect on the talismanic properties of living relatives’ clothing. Several Krakowian friends who had spent time working in Germany or the UK had been ‘loaned’ (indefinitely) the smartest pieces in mothers’, aunts’ and grandmothers’ wardrobes, not only because they were presumed to be of better quality than the younger woman’s things, but so that relatives ‘could be there [abroad]’. This was understood as a comfort not only to the borrower but also to the lender, which is congruent with the logic of the pre-mortem inheritance of clothes set out earlier in this book: Jadwiga, for example, said of the family heirloom that her grandmother had given her: ‘She wants me to wear the blouse, to see me wear her mother’s blouse, because it makes her happy.’ Cecilia Busby (2000; see also Allerton 2007) singles out clothing’s ‘absorbent’ quality as a reason for its potential to reflect or create relatedness between people. For Busby, writing about a South Indian fishing village, the intimacy of clothes is expressed through their maintenance of taboos: ‘The clothes become part of the person, and if another person wears them, they are always connected to them,

52

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

and if another person wears them, they are always aware of whom the clothes ultimately belong to’ (2000: 133). In Kraków, while all ‘special clothes’ are liable to absorb the qualities of persons, fur’s materiality sparks in informants a feeling that it absorbed place too. For this reason, it is uncommonly resonant with the notion of the środowisko, the term that evokes being ‘at home’ with particular people from one’s social circle and which Elizabeth Dunn persuasively connects to the high value of feeling u siebie (‘amongst ourselves’, but more figuratively ‘at home’: 2004: 135). Collecting the smells of places around the city between its hairs, a fur garment could embody the ways in which bourgeois Krakowians lived out środowisko: by observing the tenet that ‘you are where you patronize’. Given the fusion of locality, personhood and descent in Krakowian relatedness, I would be hard-pressed to say where the absorption of people ends and the absorption of places begins. Fur coats, as noted, are most readily associated with older women, a demographic strongly linked with regular church attendance. Young heirs often told me that they could sense ‘the church’s presence’ on a coat. Furs soaked up the thick fragrance of incense burned in a purification ritual that, according to the Book of Revelation, symbolized ‘the prayers of the saints’ (Ozanne 1965: 6). In contrast, one acquaintance, an advertising executive in his twenties, told me: ‘What I always think of in relation to fur is flaring my nostrils at the weird “farm smell” you would get in church [when I was a child] if it had been raining and the women from the parish came in with these wet dogs on their backs.’ Furs can also provoke their wearer to associate sensuality with social position. Anna Tikhomirova writes of fur in Brezhnev-era Russia: [Women] verbaliz[ed] the desire to have a fur coat in terms of sensual perception (to touch the fur coat, the feeling of being ‘dressed in a fur coat’) … [S]uch perceptions varied from negative emotions such as complaints about the slight odour produced by a fur coat, to ecstatic ones … [T]he possession of a fur coat was, for ordinary intelligentsia women – particularly of the older generations – a sign of upward mobility from the working or peasant class. (2010: 289)

Analyses such as this suggest the potential of fur to become both part of the body and part of the self, reflecting or bolstering the class position of the women who wear it. In other contexts this sensual connection has been linked to fur’s beginnings on animal bodies. Those who hunt fur-bearing animals can put on pelts in a ‘mimetic practice’ (Taussig 1993; Willerslev 2004: 638; see also Hugh-Jones 1996) that enables them to ‘empathize’ (Willerslev 2004: 638) with prey. To animal

Inheriting Fur, Inheriting Class

53

rights campaigners, the layering of non-human animal skin on human skin is illustration par excellence of the hypocrisy and grotesqueness of fur clothing (see Emberley 1998; cf. Turner 1980). Evoking work on hair as phallic imagery (e.g. Berg 1951; Leach 1958; Obeyesekere 1981), literature on textiles and fetish draws parallels between furs and female pubic hair (Harper 2008). While the significance of the body in pre-mortem inheritances has lingered persistently throughout this chapter, I now pull it into the foreground by telling of how inheriting clothing elicits beliefs about physical inheritances.

Family resemblances When I explained my project to one woman, she told me of how her mother had found a reddish-brown fox-fur stole when clearing out the family home. The woman’s mother had said, ‘I should give this to Lidia,’ the youngest daughter of my informant, because of the similarity between the hue of the stole and Lidia’s hair – she was a redhead with two brunette sisters. Anecdotes such as this are testament to fur’s place within a constellation of precious goods worth passing on to younger kin: objects that had apparently been forgotten and yet are worth bestowing upon a recipient based on her appearance. The connection between kin and garment that is pivotal to the story is also a rather innocuous manifestation of the complicated relationship between furs and human hair. I was told that, traditionally, it had been uncouth for a woman to wear her hair loose while wearing a fur coat, which was why new fur coats often came with a matching headband. I am also told that, during the twentieth century, women tended to choose, or have chosen for them, colours and lengths of fur thought to ‘best flatter’ their colouring: dark brown coats for those with dark hair, cream-coloured or grey coats for women with blonde hair and reddish coats for women with red hair. At the time of my fieldwork, this was translated into decisions about who would receive their grandmothers’ fur, and the granddaughters who benefit the most from pre-mortem inheritance (assuming they want a fur, that is) are those who most resembled their grandmothers in looks. Body shape influences inheritance too. Discussing the redistribution of furs in her family, Magda reasoned, ‘My sister is very similar to my grandmother, in the body [shape] and in height. I’m taller than my sister and my grandmother and the fur would be too short for me in the sleeves or in length.’ But while it is preferable for a garment to already fit a granddaughter’s body, newly inherited

54

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

garments still commonly require alteration. Often, generations of a family stick with trusted furriers, who, in turn, generate a significant proportion of their income by tailoring inherited garments, often detailed on shop signs or websites as ‘renovations, repairs, and remodelling’ (renowacje, reperacje i remodeling). Endeavouring to alter fur oneself is practically unheard of despite, or perhaps in reaction to, non-specialists’ tanning and cutting of pelts under socialism. Body shape, and weight in particular, is a political issue in Kraków. Friends talk about their weight in relation to that of their female relatives, conceptualizing body shape as in part a genetic inheritance. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that variations in different classes’ ‘tastes’ in foods are ‘embodied’ (1984 [1979]: 190, original emphasis) is applicable here, except that, in Kraków, the onus is placed upon weight as a reflection of how one spends one’s time. When long hours of ‘hard work’ (ciężka praca; see also Mayblin 2010: 52) and ‘constructive’ or ‘improving’ leisure time outside of the home, coupled with a discerning diet, are fundamental to adult personhood and bourgeois belonging, having a slim and healthy body is less about ‘looking good’ than it is about being discerning. Fat is also a visible manifestation of political epochs. Stefania corrected her granddaughter Wanda’s perception of ‘the socialist female body’. While Wanda said that she always imagined Polish women in the socialist era as, in her words, ‘plump and without makeup’, Stefania replied that Wanda should not be swayed by propaganda posters because, as she remembered it first-hand, ‘like her sisters and most of her workmates, she didn’t eat much, so that she could look fashionable’. In this vein, it is sometimes said that because food and fur both provide warmth, the two are not necessarily ‘needed’ at the same time. One woman tells me, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that she wore her fur coat when she was dieting because it stopped her from eating to keep warm. A woman inheriting a coat from a grandmother smaller than herself can present challenges. ‘It’s easier to make a coat smaller than it is to make it bigger,’ a furrier told me while she pointed to garments in for alterations, laid out on a wooden worktable. ‘If the person who inherits a coat is fatter than the last person who owned it, it’s a pain because we have to make another panel by adding a bit of another pelt.’ Sometimes favourably contrasted with plastic surgery, which is growing increasingly popular in Poland, dieting was described to me by a lawyer friend as ‘the most democratic way of looking good, because it costs nothing’. Although this reference to democracy was probably inadvertent, the care with which many young Krakowian women monitor their eating makes it fodder for political jokes. Feeling overweight after enjoying a week-long holiday in Morocco, a friend in her twenties told me, ‘No more messing about: I’m going

Inheriting Fur, Inheriting Class

55

Plana Balcerowicza [“the Balcerowicz Plan”] and cutting out carbohydrates and sugar for three days.’ The ‘Balcerowicz’ in question was Polish economist Leszek Balcerowicz, who had been charged with jolting Poland’s economy from communist and centrally planned to privatized and part of the capitalist free market in 1989 with an agenda nicknamed ‘shock therapy’. The actuality that, to borrow Goody’s phrase once more, inheritance ‘reproduces the social system’ does not mean that the perpetuation of families and classes hinges upon multigenerational ‘sameness’. Inheriting fur clothing encourages affectionate reflection upon shared – indeed, ‘inherited’ – physical traits such as hair colour. But this is secondary in importance to bodies’ statuses as units by which changing political circumstances are measured. Belonging to a social milieu that defines itself by heritage and endurance (Jakubowska 2012), those I write about perceive the bodies of kin as partly constituted by their experiences: not only a product of genes but also composed of socio-economic and political climates. Bearing in mind, too, the depiction of ‘gratitude’ earlier in this book, generational difference is not the adversary of social reproduction, but, in certain ethnographic contexts, that which constitutes it. Profoundly significant for social reproduction is the possibility that a portion of the non-reciprocable debt felt towards older kin might be productively redirected into ‘long range cycles of exchange interaction’ (Weiner 1980: 73): nurturing relationships with younger members of one’s family, perhaps even including those who are yet to be born.

Clothing? Decor? Artefact? Inherited furs are not necessarily used as clothing, sometimes either being remodelled into soft furnishings or, retaining their form but not their function, displayed in homes. One woman, for example, tells me that she had chosen to hang up her grandmother’s mink stole and coat, in her sitting room, ‘like pictures. I like them because they’re heirlooms … they’re interesting. I don’t want to wear them’. The actuality that, in a range of locations and at various points in history, furs have suggested specific things about gender and class (Barthes 1967 [1964]; Culler 1981; Emberley 1998; Skov 2005) makes it tempting to designate these altered or reframed things as tangible embodiments of social change. As I experience it, however, weight is placed upon how (as one woman put it) these garments have ‘survived’ social change. Salient to this survival is fur’s power to be understood both as a garment and as a material.

56

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Take, for example, Ola, a 27-year-old graphic designer, who commissioned two cushions for her flat made from her grandmother’s pale grey mink coat. Although not identifying as particularly zielony (literally, ‘green’), Ola was not keen on wearing fur when ‘there are plenty of other warm fabrics’. She wanted cushions, however, ‘as a keepsake’ (pamiątka). Ola had originally planned to make a 1-square-metre cushion from the coat, which seemed like a sensible size when she laid the knee-length coat out on her table. However, after consulting a furrier named Agata, who, unusually, is not the furrier patronized by Ola’s family, but rather the proprietor of a shop she can easily visit during her lunch break, Ola decided to make not one but two cushions. ‘You should make two cushions. Each with one mink side and one velvet side, to make it last longer,’ Agata had told her. Hair can break or shed when rubbed against another material; hence furriers advise their clients to remove coats before sitting down. The thorough naturalization of generational difference in Kraków, in taste in clothes, for example, is contextually important here. I was often told during fieldwork that the twentieth century’s ‘historical disruptions’ (Feuchtwang 2007; Yurchak 2006) had created pathologically pronounced generational divides in Poland and its neighbours. However, it is also held that some difference between generations was ‘natural’ and ‘normal’. It is consonant with this, then, that family furs’ provocation of different meanings and functions for kin of different ages is self-evident. Ola’s remodelling of the fur into a different object meant that she was ‘keeping the fur’ yet ‘getting rid of the coat’. It strikes me that James G. Carrier’s assertion that ‘[t]he link between person and object is most visible in gift relations when giving goes wrong, when a present is rejected’ (1995: 27), is apt both for illustrating gifts’ and inheritances’ respective ramifications for intergenerational relations and posing the question of how things’ material affordances inform the inter-human relationships of which they are apart. Ola and her grandmother agree that the ‘present’, to use Carrier’s word, was the fur rather than the fur coat. I also suspect that non-monetary gifts are less accommodating to changes of form and use than non-monetary inheritances. Receiving the furs as inheritance rather than as, say, a Christmas present accentuated Ola’s right to choose what she wanted to do with her endowment, underlining her coming of age. This is despite the case that, as I argued earlier in this book, in the inheritance of fur emphasis is placed upon a change in custodianship of familial property. While these two things appear paradoxical, Ola’s commissioning of a furrier signified her investment in the garment’s specialness to the women in her family.

Inheriting Fur, Inheriting Class

57

Ola told me that her grandfather had been taken aback by her sentimentality, joking that, in commissioning the cushions, she was making a shrine to his wife. ‘Such idolatry!’, he quipped. Although the softness of fur makes it suitable for home furnishing, while used as decor in Ola’s studio flat, fur’s function as a shield against outdoor weather conditions is obsolete. Ola replied to her grandfather that it was funny that fur clothing, so commonly treated as a valuable family heirloom for bourgeois women, was, in such teasing, valued for its practicality rather than for its prestige. Catherine Allerton questions whether anthropologists are better placed to study garments as clothing or as textiles. She chooses the former, reasoning: It is this ‘everyday’ approach that leads me to speak of ‘sarongs’ rather than, as inmost of the literature, textiles or cloth, since in daily life in southern Manggarai, woven textiles are meant to be worn. As such, sarongs are distinctly three-dimensional objects, animated by the shape and movements of human bodies, rather than the two-dimensional panels displayed in museums or printed in the pages of glossy art books. (Allerton 2007: 5)

In this chapter I describe a context in which the ‘everyday use’ of certain clothes is ornamental. Houses and human bodies share much symbolically when it comes to the reproduction of families and classes (Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1995). I suggest that the symbolic breach between clothes and home furnishings is also materially and symbolically rather slight. Furthermore, the ‘artistic’ reframing of clothes that Allerton describes incidentally evokes important points of identification for many bourgeois young women: prioritizing a ‘vintage’, irreverent and sometimes ‘ethnic’ aesthetic, over mass-produced goods or high-street clothes; perceiving reuse and recycling not only as thrifty and environmentally responsible but also as design opportunities. Describing the homes of ‘the Polish gentry’, Longina Jakubowska writes: Every object has a story, a family association; together they are like theater props that reveal the family’s position by situating it in its past, making history alive and relevant to the present. The meaning of things is inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories, and their life histories. (2012: 14)

The phrase ‘family’s position’ is instructive here, used in relation to things such as fur, and recapitulating the social logic by which, for example, clothes become cushions while retaining their meaning as ciphers of continuity. Such a phrase makes it known that it is no paradox that these furs can at once be owned by the young woman and by her family, but rather that this is what constitutes inheritance.

58

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Conclusion I have shown that the actuality that fur is passed through generations of families with relative informality does not detract from the sense that this custodial continuity matters a great deal. The contrasting ages of the women written of here prescribed the proximity they felt to the twentieth-century political events with which fur is often associated. Inherited furs have been presented as ‘continua’: the courses custodianship takes through generations illustrate the ways in which some kin are experientially and affectively closer to certain pivotal political eras than others. What is meaningful to informants, I have argued, is that such continua exist. These singular objects constitute threads between pasts and presents, between the tangible and the intangible, and between kin. Clothes, I have shown, are apt and complex objects of inheritance. They are linked to observable class-based respectability in public and semi-public spaces. Furs embody this quality particularly strongly because they are worn principally outside of the home. Among informants, fashion and design are understood as particularly observable manifestations of political epochs (see Bartlett 2010). Locals also consider fur as intimate objects, the passing on of which underlined closeness between kin. Allied to this, the ways in which clothes fit bodies is a political issue that comes to the fore during these inheritance practices. Those who help with this research consider weight and body shape to be derived partly from genes but also partly from the foods and the fashions prevailing when one is coming of age. Perhaps more unexpectedly, fur’s animality, its hairiness, sometimes enhances its readiness for identifying resemblances between human kin. Above all, because clothes are portable and can be fashioned into new garments, or into different categories of object entirely, they afford intergenerational differences while still constituting essential familial and class-based relatedness. During fieldwork, acquaintances sometimes spoke of ‘hidden’ poverty as a particular concern in relation to the elderly bourgeoisie. There had been many waves of public evictions of elderly people from rented property, with rents raised so high and at such short notice that those tenants who were, technically speaking, able to pay their landlords could no longer afford food or heating. The restitution of property to the kin of those from whom it had been seized by Nazi or Soviet forces was perceived as a more complex moral issue but one that affected bourgeois property owners and renters alike. While the relatively affluent people written of here were not in the same situation as some other, worse-off citizens, poverty challenged their personhood in specific ways, bound up as it was in patronizing local businesses and situating

Inheriting Fur, Inheriting Class

59

oneself within a specific aesthetic, when it came to places, clothes, books and foods. Furriers acquired particular insights into this when remodelling or repairing garments. Because of their comprehensive knowledge of the ways of fur, such as how it decayed when tanned inadequately and the comparative speeds with which furs from different species of creature became bare if worn regularly, on receiving garments, they read the uneven distribution of wear and tear on different parts of the body, unusual discolouration and strange smells as windows into clients’ lives. A garment might suggest, for example, that its owner had been wearing it indoors. These ‘diagnoses’ reflected the widely felt anxiety about older people at the time of my fieldwork but also questions concerning the perpetuation of the bourgeois intelligentsia with whom the centre of Kraków in particular was deeply associated. The image of a bourgeois woman budgeting to afford a furrier’s services while scrimping on heating or worrying about rent is in keeping with the public-private (Wedel 1986) or home-not home (Dunn 2004) divides written of in some literature on Poland. It is a logic by which one is most oneself ‘in private’ or ‘when at home with family’ (see Pine 2007). When considered according to the argument of this book, however, such an image says something different about civil society and the embeddedness of personhood in descent and place in the notion of the środowisko. Patronizing furriers, kawiarni, and even particular churches signified bonds between members of the bourgeoisie. Recommending the services of skilled tradespeople such as furriers was a way of displaying amity to those with whom one had ‘weak ties’. Furthermore, patronage produced intra-class familiarity, as clients came to know those who worked in these spaces, over the years, and through generations of families. Perhaps this was particularly pronounced with furriers, patrons’ engagement with whom cycled through the seasons – refreshing garments in the early autumn, sometimes storing them in the summer – as well as through the sequence of generations described here. In their centrality to personhood, their perpetuation of families and classes, and their tying together of persons and things, these spaces and services echoed accounts of Polish homes (e.g. Dunn 2004; Jakubowska 2012; Pine 1996a). And yet through the logic of the środowisko described here, these spaces and this patronage constituted their own realm of relatedness, sufficiently deeply rooted as to be significant both in their evocations of homes and also in keeping with Michael Herzfeld’s Roman ethnography, which emphasizes urban ‘semi-public spaces’ (2009: 15) as distinctive sites for reproducing discourses of power and morality. The practices surrounding fur in this book illustrate that living within one’s środowisko involves solidifying ties both with kin of alternate

60

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

generations (see Radcliffe-Brown 1940: 201) and with those in quite different professions, such as cafe proprietors and furriers. Furs’ trajectories through generations provide a somewhat ‘experience-distant’ (Geertz 1974) picture of Krakowian class reproduction, creating and illustrating similarity between female relatives more palpable over quite long periods of time than in the relationship between a woman and her granddaughter. Inheritance actually underscored the generational differences between grandmothers and granddaughters. Moreover, it added to the younger woman’s indebtedness to the older, an inequity that, according to local kinship logic, granddaughters should focus attention upon rather than attempt to balance. And then there was class, which brings to mind E. P. Thompson’s argument that ‘far too much theoretical attention (much of it plainly ahistorical) has been paid to “class” and far too little to “class-struggle” … [C]lasses do not exist as separate entities, lookaround, find an enemy class, and then start to struggle’ (1978: 149). This is not contradicted but instead modulated by this book’s argument – that families are conduits through which class and class difference are experienced. In kawiarni it was quite common to hear younger men and women discuss the question, ‘What’s the right way to live?’ Musing on this theme, Ania, an interviewee in her mid-twenties, told me, ‘If you care for your family, the rest will fall into place.’ The unease Gosia expressed at seeing coats for sale, which I noted at the beginning of this chapter, was not precipitated by her scorn of others’ desire for a family’s valuable objects per se but rather by the second-hand furs’ suggestion of familial misfortune. Indeed, Ania’s and Gosia’s comments underline how class is in this case transmitted more through acknowledged intergenerational differences and asymmetries, often in contexts of complex historical shifts, than it is through a seamless onwards flow of capital and similarities from one age of a family to the next.

2

Working at home

Let us now move away from streets and cafes and into more private spaces: furriers’ apartments and houses that are used not only for archetypically ‘domestic’ activities but also for work, crafting garments and meeting with clients. People who work where they live invite ethnographic explorations of the place of business within kinship (see also Cannell & McKinnon 2013; Yanagisako 2002). This chapter speaks to literature that unpacks the historical trajectory of shops as kinship artefacts in Europe and beyond. How, asks Carrier (1995), did people come to consider production as distinct from the household? In eighteenth-century England, Carrier’s chosen historical reference point, local people experienced the ascendancy of ‘lock-up shop[s] and … non-resident shopkeeper[s]’ (1995: 77). This new way of trading affected not ‘only’ citizens’ consumption strategies but how they conceptualized their relationships with other people and with commodities. In shops that were not part of homes, customers were anonymous. These customers were, by then, ‘the market’ (1995: 78). The advent of shops of this kind is an unusually concrete example of ‘the economy [becoming] progressively disembedded from society, [an instance in which] economic relations become increasingly differentiated from other types of social relationships’ (Parry 1986: 466; also cited in Carrier 1995: 106; see also Schneider 1980; Bohannan 1955). And so it is intriguing that far from being a one-way process, according to the people who helped me with my research, the history of fur production and furriership in Poland has composed of the locations of these services ricocheting from home to shop and back again multiple times. When I asked the director of a large fur production and retail company about the history of fur in Poland, he told me: In the past, it was like this: you didn’t go to the shop, you found the guy who measured you, who checked everything, and he found the skins and made the coat exactly for you. Now there are more places that are more like [typical

62

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland commercial] shops [away from homes]. But there are still these [small fur businesses] because women [customers] want to make something shorter, change something. A lot of women have something in their wardrobe and they take it out and ask ‘What can I change?’ Maybe I’ll add a collar, I’ll refresh it, renew it in some way, to make it more fashionable.

But these enterprises were, at the time of my fieldwork, far from ‘in the past’, and what follows details the situations of small-scale furriers, the majority of whose work involves repairing and remodelling fur garments in need of professional care. Several of the people written of in this chapter had previously worked in commercial shops situated outside of their homes. Along with most of these furriers’ formal training, their experience in more conventional workplaces doubtless played a part in the way that neither they nor their clients conceptualized this labour as ‘piecework’ (White 2004), nor as ‘cottage industry’ (cf. Pine 1996a, b). Furriers divided their flats or houses into workspaces and domestic spaces. At least since Mary Douglas’s scholarship, anthropologists have accepted that context and culture drive what people consider as ‘dirty’. Within the spaces I discuss, even the most delicious food smells or pleasing perfumes had to be prevented from coming into contact with clients’ furs. Equally, furriers cut and sew garments in designated rooms rather than in sitting rooms or kitchens because they do not want sliced hairs to attach themselves to sofas or clothes. When I say that furriers separate their workspaces from their living spaces I do not mean that they treat business as discrete from kinship. Patronage of skilled tradespeople, which I suggest is, in a Krakowian context, sometimes considered a form of kinship, is one of the ways in which the day-to-day workings of the środowiska described in the previous chapter were ethnographically observable. This is not exclusive to the patronage of home-based stores but to a range of businesses considered reliable, skilled and as providing good value. The worth of knowing from which bakery one could commission the birthday cake which was both tasty and tasteful, which Internet cafe printed Master’s theses most cheaply or which haberdashery shop had the same range of coloured glass beads as the Empik store in the Main Square but at half the price was significant. The custom brought to these businesses created ties between clients and patrons, while also reinforcing ties between clients. Mention of famed, highly visible establishments in the centre of town poses the question of how tucked-away home-based shops in usually unsignposted residential buildings without thoroughfare managed to garner customers. As such, the local fondness for recommending businesses was a bourgeois way of consolidating belonging with acquaintances but was also how furriers found

Working at Home

63

many of their clients. It strikes me as surprising that anthropological literature on businesses often focuses either on relationships within businesses, such as the perpetuation of businesses through generations (e.g. Yanagisako 2002), or as is the case in work on consumption, on relationships between businesses and customers, such as how individuals and families choose where to shop (e.g. Miller 1998). Fur exemplifies how a commodity’s materiality connects professional and client, also constituting a window onto a wider context of attachments to kin, class and economies.

A workshop in a home My journeys to ‘Krakowian’ businesses sometimes took me halfway to Warsaw in one direction or within twenty minutes of Zakopane in the other. The gulf between images on websites and physical locations themselves can be considerable. A 4-square-metre studio, is represented online by an alpine scene of mountains jutting into blue skies. This frigid imaginary evoked fur’s ‘naturalness’ plus the prestige associated with skiing abroad. I now want to detail the setting of a furrier named Jolanta’s pracownia futer (fur workshop/atelier), unpacking how such a business came to be situated within a nominally residential locale. Following instructions published on the website and confirmed by Jolanta on the telephone, I found her building within a well-kept 1970s blokowisko (housing estate). Only a short walk (or a shorter tram ride) away from Kraków’s town centre, the estate had not been designed to provide a complete social and consumer life for its inhabitants. However, it had sufficient amenities for residents to be content within the confines of the estate for at least a short while. At the entrance to the estate were a 24-hour minisupermarket and a second-hand clothes shop, a children’s playground, a VHS and DVD rental store, a solarium and a hair salon. The circumstances under which Jolanta had, in the 1970s, become a furrier struck me as unusual. When studying at the prestigious University of Economics in Kraków she had vague plans to become an accountant. Her husband’s parents had owned a fur business near to Lublin since ‘before World War Two’. As they grew older, they wanted another person, preferably a member of the family, to work with them. Jolanta told me that her husband was unsuitable because he was training to be an engineer. His siblings had moved abroad. Jolanta told me matter-of-factly that she had then come to work for her mother-in-law and father-in-law in Lublin. She had a couple of times a week studied ‘furriership’

64

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

(kuśnierstwo) at a ‘craft centre’, an accomplishment she reflected on modestly. Around the time of her father-in-law’s death, she had moved to Kraków with her husband and two daughters and opened a shop. The home-based workshop that I visited had been Jolanta’s place of work since 2005. Visitors to Jolanta’s website, which had been designed by her niece, were met with elaborately designed ‘split screen’ effects. Energetic jazz was the soundtrack to listed services: - Fur garments, from patterns and made to measure - coats, scarves, collars, hats and stoles. - Renovations and repairs, remodelling and fur processing, replacement of linings. - All kinds of repairs. - We care about high-quality raw materials and about the selection of the very best trimmings. - We provide professional advice. - The realisation of the customer’s unusual and individual projects. With one more click, visitors to the website find a ‘contacts’ page with instructions on how to find the workshop. A further click and visitors arrive at a brief ‘history’ page, which omitted Jolanta’s in-laws’ work in the industry and focused, modestly, on Jolanta’s individual skills and experience. It states that Jolanta had founded her workshop in the 1970s, since when she had worked ‘without a break’ (nieprzerwanie). Having arranged by telephone to interview Jolanta at her workshop, I pressed the intercom buzzer at the communal door of her block and was admitted to a stairwell. A real estate agent would probably have advertised the property as having three bedrooms. While Jolanta had the flat, however, it had two bedrooms and a workshop. The workshop’s focal point was a table probably sized two metres by three metres. It had been a fiftieth birthday present from her cousin, a carpenter. It was taller than the average worktable and was therefore a comfort to her back in which she had previously experienced severe pain. The table was topped by a knife made from a single piece of steel, as well as other superficially less masterly instruments: felt-tip pens, cardboard stencils and a small ice pick. That fur requires special tools but a standard household would own only some thin sewing needles and thread emphasizes the specificity of fur care. Some speak of the state-of-the-art machines that used diamond-tipped needle to pierce fur’s leathery underside. Some more cynical furriers dismiss this as advertising rhetoric and say that any sharp knife was fine. In either case, diamonds’ luxuriousness no doubt generates an aura of specialness around fur repair.

Working at Home

65

A furrier’s wealth impacts how they created spatial divides between home and work. Iwona, in contrast with Jolanta, lived in a suburban three-storey, detached house sufficiently large for her to work in a converted garage, a workshop she could enter either through her house or by a separate door from the driveway. Like many entrepreneurs who lived in the modern homes on the route from the Old Town to the Jan Paweł II Airport, Iwona had fastened to the front of her home an advertising tarpaulin, big enough to be visible from passing cars and buses. It is revealing that furriers, who tended to be in their forties and up at the time of my fieldwork, living in buildings of varying sizes, nonetheless agreed that there ought to be divisions between work and domestic spaces. My friends in their twenties and thirties and who worked in other industries or professions often conceptualized ‘ideal jobs’ to be those which did not involve a separation from other more personal domains. Here, claims about work and identity, that one wanted ‘a job which really reflected who you were’, coalesced with a marked absence of spatial divisions: ‘Ideally I’d like to have a job where I can just sit in bed with my laptop or in a coffee shop.’ Although acknowledged even by the most optimistic of informants as rather ‘pie in the sky’, the best state of affairs was to make money from doing something one wanted to do even if they were not being paid for it.

Dividing a space The couple with whom I lived for my first month in Kraków sent me a letter a fortnight prior to my arrival, requesting that I bring a pair of slippers with me. Although the reason given in the letter was to protect new parquet floors, I soon found this to be practised by people of all ages and in homes of a range of styles and values. It was customary to remove your shoes when entering a home and place them either in a shoe rack or on a sheet of newspaper. I was impressed by the range of sizes and styles of slipper next to some friends’ doormats. Visitors to flats without such amenities walk in socks, an embarrassing realization that prompted an overdue trip to a hosiery shop in Galeria Krakowska. As I suspect is often the case during fieldwork, collecting ‘native exegeses’ about the provenance of certain rituals elicits in equal measure bemused ‘common sense’ explanations and philosophical conjecture. I would suggest, however, that curbing the dirtying of floors and, in snowy winter, keeping watery sludge outside is no more of a ‘mundane’ exegeses than explanations in which

66

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

shoes are removed in order to make gladly received visitors feel comfortable, encouraging them to stay longer than just to deliver a cursory piece of news. According to the most classic of anthropological ‘dirt’ literature, local tenets about matter are a key to understanding wider concerns about kinship and about ritual. Either explanation underlines the importance of venerating homes, whether one’s own home or those of others. That inviting people into one’s home might be interpreted as an act of ‘incorporation’ (see Carsten 1997) is concordant with the argument I made in the previous chapter about group identity/individual belonging (środowisko) merging personhood and descent with locality. While visitors to solely residential homes place their shoes immediately inside the front door, Jolanta set her shoe rack at the entrance to the kitchen. This gives the hallway an equivalence to a 2-metre-long stretch of pavement. The ‘home’ section of her flat began after the part of the metre-wide hallway in which, if you looked to the left, you saw the open door of her workshop. Jolanta explains that it was best for clients visiting the flat, and for herself and her husband, to know that in her home shoes should be removed before entering the residential rooms in the flat rather than on immediately entering the front door. Jolanta wears hard-soled, relatively formal slippers with a slight heel while in her workshop; clients kept their shoes on. This must have been in part a safety measure to protect their feet from pins that might have rolled off her worktable. But an equally convincing explanation was that it was a continuation of the code of behaviour that had been in place when Jolanta had worked from a shop rather than from her home. Dirt’s manipulation as a divider of professional and domestic spaces plays out in a number of surprising ways. Aga pays a elderly neighbour to wash, dust and brush the flat in which she lives but not her workshop. She reasons that cleaning one’s workspace at the end of the day was a valuable part of a craftsperson’s role. This was especially the case as she, in common with some but not all furriers, owned valuable German-produced specialist knives and sewing machines that she did not want anyone other than herself to handle lest they be cut or pricked, or the tools be mishandled and broken. When I went inside the residential part of Jolanta and her husband’s home, I took my shoes off because this was what was expected in order to stop bits of fur from the workshop being transferred into the home, sullying furniture and floors and, as Jolanta’s husband put it, ‘giving the strange impression that we own a pet mink’. Jerzy was joking of course, but that furriers, as opposed to other artisans who work at home, would pay particular attention to keeping bits of evidence

Working at Home

67

of their labour out of their living quarters is intriguing and concordant with anthropological work on a material (of sorts) especially interwoven with ideas of pollution, dirt and boundaries: hair. In Purity and Danger, ‘hair clippings’ feature alongside ‘spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces, tears … body parings, skin, nail … and sweat’ (Douglas 1966: 150) in a list of ‘matter … [that is] marginal stuff of the most obvious kind’ (1966). According to Douglas, the movement of this kind of ‘stuff ’, some of which might be considered ‘substance’ (see Carsten 2011), marks out certain points on the body as especially ‘vulnerable’ and ‘marginal’ (Douglas 1966: 150). This poses the question of what we might make of these substances originating from animal rather than human bodies. More immediately pertinent, however, is how resonant Douglas’s discussion of bodily matter is when we are thinking about furriers’ homes. Consider a point about which Douglas seems particularly forceful: that where dangerous and/or sacred ‘marginal’ bodily matter lies, other types of elucidating margin are sure to be close by. ‘The mistake’, writes Douglas, ‘is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins’ (Douglas 1966). This space-hair consonance demonstrates why fur became a symbol of conquest and statecraft in the first place: that killing animals means owning animals, which in turn means reigning over the land on which the animals live (see Wolf 1982; Ssorin-Chaikov 2006). Fur, particularly in the history of Russia (and Poland by proxy), symbolizes the potential for power and danger to be innate to borders. The less grandiose context in which Jolanta and Jerzy balk at the idea of a guest finding a hair too coarse to be human transfer itself from the sofa to her tights shows not only the ‘dirty’ evidence of other bodies but the infringement of work onto domestic space. The anthropological record tells us that rigid dichotomies between work and family might hold in the discourses business people put out about their enterprises, but that alternative narratives tell a more complex story (Yanagisako 2002). This is especially true of Poland where historical circumstances have blurred distinctions between social networks and ‘the market’, publics and privates, black, ‘grey’ and official markets (Pine 2002). However, at the time of my fieldwork, ‘balancing’ work and private life was a concern of many of the people I knew, and space was one idiom through which this desire was related. The presence of hair in the domestic part of the flat therefore signifies work’s infringement upon domestic, or familial, space and time. Finding hairs in a domestic space can also symbolize money lost in the work area. Although pelts inevitably shed a small number of hairs ‘naturally’, furriers prioritized the avoidance of slicing hairs while knifing through pelts’ leathery underside.

68

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Shops like homes and homes like shops Some furriers combine narratives of working at home with narratives of how their routines changed once their children came of age. When Beata, a sixty-year-old furrier whose current workshop is in a comfortable converted garage in a suburb slightly west of the town centre, worked in a shop she shared with a friend in Kazimierz, she was ‘forced’ to leave the shop at the official close of business at six in the evening. However, by the time her daughter and son were adults the shop had gone out of business and she was working from home. Ambiguously, either because it was the capitalist era or because she did not need to exercise childcare skills, there was little to stop her from sometimes working into the evening. Several anthropologists have written about temporal phenomena associated with socialism and postsocialism. These have included accounts of the ways in which families unable to depend on the state draw upon houses and landscapes for both literal and metaphysical nourishment in the face of change (e.g. Pine 1996a). Other lines of enquiry confront temporality as a specific ontological challenge of regime change. The evocative title of Alexei Yurchak’s excellent ethnography, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More (2006), is one window onto such a question. However, the time-change in the ethnographic context called upon in the book cannot, I believe, be attributed ‘only’ to postsocialism. It is working at home that makes a difference, along with the low in number but relatively high price per item work of repairing or remodelling fur. Proprietors of home-based businesses could not work with ‘walk ins’ the way that those who worked in commercial areas could; time in home-based businesses consisted of appointments. Home-based workshops possess stylistic features common to workshops on more traditional commercial premises. Sometimes this is because a furrier has carried over the paraphernalia of a commercial-area-based shop to their home-based premises. I saw, for example, headed notepaper from a shop where a furrier had worked previously. However, a necessary piece of context here is that, from what I witnessed in commercial area shops, it was quite usual for there to be a flow of goods between homes and shops. That is, commercial shops were sometimes ‘home-like’. One woman had a comfortable chair for a client to sit in while she (or less often he) discussed which repairs or changes she wanted to make to the garment; a kettle and a small sink; a crucifix on the wall next to the window; and a framed photograph of her granddaughter. In a retail fur shop, one can often spot an area that had been cordoned off, for example, with

Working at Home

69

a slack curtain only partially concealing an area with a sink and kettle. One can see food, maybe powder-filled sachets of a sweet and sour soup, zurek, or some chocolates. Family photographs and religious paraphernalia seem the preserve of those in their forties or older. These touches contrast with a strikingly different ‘home-like’ aesthetic that I witnessed in several fur shops in cities other than Kraków and which were owned by younger men. Rather than the relatively humble touches of an armchair, or visual allusions to the furrier’s faith and family, these bolder shops evoked palatial homes. On marble-effect floors stood baroque-style furniture bearing silver bowls of wrapped candy. Coffee tables display fur industry catalogues but also art and fashion books: Mark Rothko, Yves Saint Laurent.

Time Jolanta’s business does not have ‘opening hours’. Nor can potential clients look through windows to see if they might go in, as they presumably would with businesses on high street-situated commercial buildings. When running a business from home, the consequences of potential clients thinking that you are either always open or always closed are both calamitous. Furriers therefore use appointment systems, a mode of objectifying time that also determined how I carried out most of my interviews in Kraków. Prior to appointments, furriers profile garments that were due to be brought in. They cradle the telephone between ear and shoulder, jotting down details on a notepad, nodding at their invisible interlocutor. One furrier has word-processed paper grids for the name of the client, the date they had called and what they wanted to be done. When some callers asked how much these pieces of work would cost, the furrier was hesitant to provide a figure. Jolanta said that the description given on the phone could be of something much less serious and expensive than the reality. Jolanta did not take this as evidence that the client was trying to swindle her. Rather, she saw this as a sign that clients seldom realized the severity of their garment’s condition and how expensive the materials and labour needed to fix the problem were. Appointments constitute the face-to-face time a furrier spends talking to his or her clients: merely one aspect of the work. ‘It depends,’ interviewees responded to my query about how many hours they worked each week. The seasons govern busyness. In September 2010, sitting on a high wooden stool in her suburban workshop, Barbara, a furrier in her fifties, told me that she was anticipating her

70

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

busiest time of year. Barbara’s work was focused on fur repairs and remodelling, only rarely cutting and sewing new coats. September and October were extremely busy because the ‘most popular season for fur is between All Saints’ and All Souls’ [1 and 2 November] and Easter Sunday’. I found it surprising that she referred to the religious festivals rather than to the seasons, especially in the case of All Souls’ Day which, falling at the end of October, precedes a period of already frosty weather in most years. ‘But people picture themselves in public on these święta [holy days or feasts] and know they’ll see people, and they don’t want to look a mess in front of others,’ Barbara explained. Furriers’ contrasting levels of popularity are clearly also influential here. But perhaps my question was misdirected as, on the whole, labour is measured in terms of garments rather than hours. It takes neither ‘fifteen hours’ nor ‘two working days’ to mend or refashion a coat and two hats; it took a coat and two hats. Some of those who helped me with my research added helpful caveats: ‘a coat in bad condition and two hats in a moderate state’. Dunn (2004) describes the transition which workers at a newly privatized Poland-based, US-owned baby-food factory made from measuring their labour in ‘natural units’ (2004: 42) (such as jars of baby food or bottles of juice) to measuring their labour by monetary value or by hours spent at the assembly belt. Furriership is a different type of work from factory labour, involving specialist training. In the cases I describe in this chapter, furriers are self-employed rather than ‘employees’. Furthermore, the early 1990s when Dunn did her research were a specifically challenging time for Poles, my informants told me. In any case, it was over twenty years ago. Nonetheless, Dunn’s example is important because it differs from retrospective accounts of labour under socialism, which present workers as disinterested in the commodities they produce. The US management team who arrived in Rzeszow in 1990 wanted to shape these workers into ‘employees’ whose engagement with the materiality of the product they made was secondary by far to their readiness to be present and ready to labour (their product) at times and places prescribed by their superiors. Being owned already, a coat that requires repair is inalienable (Weiner 1992) from a consumer in a way that a jar of baby food freshly packed into a cardboard box is not. When I ask furriers what they were working on when I came to interview them, they point to the various ‘jobs’ visible around their workshops and describe them in such a way as to coalesce the identity of the garment and its owner. A rail runs around the top of the walls of Jolanta’s workshop, close to the ceiling, from which hang about ten coats, and a smaller number of accessories such as hats and stoles. These are predominantly brown, although I could

Working at Home

71

sometimes see items in the lurid and controversial pinks and greens that have been sold in the fur markets and roadside stalls in Zakopane in recent years. Among them was a waist-length jacket in orange fur. ‘An art student brought it in. [The jacket is] quite pretentious!’ Pointing to another coat, a mink, she said, ‘That’s a really fine one.’ And to another, ‘That one is one hundred years old. The owner has really looked after it well. Would you believe it’s that old?’

How do you find a shop within a home? Making conversation, I remarked that it must have been quite difficult to contact new clients before having a website. ‘Not really’, Jolanta replied, ‘because if people want to contact you, they contact you. If they want to find you, they find you. And people could just recommend you to a friend, give their friend your phone number’. Jolanta had set up an Internet connection in 2007. She said that she did not have and did not want an email address. She did not like the idea of having to keep going to the desktop PC in her sitting room while working in order to speak to clients and to suppliers of materials. Her website had a similar function to the billboards advertising fur businesses on the road from Kraków to Zakopane. By providing a telephone number, she could keep the cordless phone in her workshop during the day and return it to the main part of the flat in the evenings. There is an apparent ill-fit between Jolanta’s remark that ‘if [clients] want you, they find you’ and her creation of a website advertising her business. However, her tentative use of the Internet reflected common practice. Individuals and businesses perceived as pinning great hopes on the opportunities the Internet could bring them were seen as injudicious. The mid-2000s, the time of Poland’s accession to the EU, were remembered as a time of particularly frenzied Internet use. The story of a Krakowian baker creating a website was related to me on several occasions as the embodiment of a pointless website. ‘It wasn’t even as if he was doing online orders,’ one woman exclaimed, to which I replied that it did not seem that shocking that the baker thought people would be more likely to buy from his shop if they were familiar with his name. The woman’s point was that bread was a staple that did not need advertising and that people would walk past his shop anyway. There were some similarities between the Internet and the street, in that they were places where businesses were visible and also that they both made plain the riskiness of enterprise: the fronts of short-lived businesses papered with likwidacja (liquidation) signs mirrored abandoned websites.

72

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Worse still, the Internet was a convenient tool for those interested in corruption, scamming and even espionage. Some of the people I knew suggested that these were particular concerns of Krakowians because of Poland’s history. The notion that the Internet allowed malicious strangers to meddle with one’s reputation was epitomized by a small number of furriers’ reports that their websites had been ‘invaded’ and ‘graffitied’ with pornographic images which popped up when a potential customer clicked on links to their businesses. The suspected perpetrators were zielony (‘greens’, but denoting animal rights activists rather than people interested in environmental issues more generally). In the Kraków in which I did fieldwork, as, I am sure, in many places, the Internet is seen as a useful modern technology and a morally ambiguous protagonist in contemporary life, the presence of which is so ubiquitous that it frequently went unquestioned. But it had an additional significance as challenging to Krakowian renderings of kinship and class affiliation. Because patronage and the personal recommendation of businesses were modes of strengthening and valorizing ties with those external to one’s group of family and friends but within one’s środowisko, seeking out information from advertising could suggest a deficiency in one’s social circle. For bourgeois Krakowians, recommending services is an important element of appropriate behaviour. Recommending services such as those provided by furriers was also a way of reproducing a środowisko as a group, while simultaneously consolidating one’s membership of it. Knowing and maintaining ties with tradespeople and artisans fit in with a Krakowian preference for astuteness regarding the provenance of commodities and, for some of the people I know, a certain wariness of being tricked by businesses’ efforts to obscure the steps involved in production from the eyes of the consumer. I suspect that this is attributable in no small part to Kraków’s strong ties to its rural surroundings. Even outside of the world of fur, references to political – economic changes often involve animals. ‘Until recently, no one would have owned a dog just for fun,’ I was told. ‘That would have been a waste of money when we [Poles] didn’t have much, and it would have been considered unhygienic too.’ Talk of animal products proves no exception. I have a particularly vivid memory of a Polish fur agent telling of ‘the days when it would be normal to see cows walking around the centre of Kraków [whereas today] people don’t even know that milk comes from cows, just that it comes from the supermarket’. The transformations required for meat and dairy products, and indeed fur, to be sufficiently ‘clean’ or ‘safe’ for consumers made the number of junctures at which a producer could fox an imprudent customer multiple and baffling. Rhetoric

Working at Home

73

around cows and milk is effective because to forget these basic precepts of the ‘the natural world’ by being an injudicious consumer indicated an individual’s estrangement from the most fundamental understanding of life. While patronage and the recommendation of businesses are a way of practising class-based respectability and solidarity, I want to emphasize that, according to my interpretation of a środowisko (cf. Dunn 2004), these acts of provisioning also contribute to the constitution of the person. The patronage of the same businesses by successive generations of families is testament to this. So too is the special attention paid to how food was provisioned, as illustrated by the scorn directed at the fabled online bakery. Food constitutes people in the most literal of ways (see Carsten 1995) and, in doing so, produces and reproduces generations but also classes.

Furriers and their clients: The hairy materiality of patronage I asked Magda how she found new customers. ‘People know each other, lots of the clients know each other’, she said ‘and when someone in your group goes to a certain place, a certain person, you trust them’. Recurrent are claims that people’s mothers ‘have a woman’ or ‘have a man’ to whom they go when they want work done on their fur clothing. Few know how their mother had made such an acquaintance. What was important was the embeddedness of every relationship within a wider network of relations that could be disturbed by a change affecting just one person. Because of this prioritization of trustworthy tradespeople, if furriers move from commercial building or shop to home-based workshop, there was little question, it seemed to me, that their clients would follow. The overlap between furriers’ clientele and their social circles is illustrated by a number of practices that could be interpreted as either exceptional customer service or the fulfilment of obligations to friends. The annual dispatching of Christmas cards was not conceptualized as good marketing practice but as an action propelled by sentiment: ‘Because we like [our clients].’ More exceptionally, Magda sent an arrangement of flowers to a client’s husband’s funeral. She explained to me that she did this because she had known the client and her husband socially, although not well, and that she would not have done this for a ‘new’ client, someone whom she did not know through her social network. Furriers are sometimes raconteurs, as well as businesspeople and skilled tradespeople. The unusualness of dealing with animal parts provides material

74

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

for jokes. I particularly remember one furrier in his fifties bidding one of his clients goodbye and joking that it was best to have any repairs done at his shop because he had pelts from ‘the same family’ as the animals who comprised the coat, ready and waiting to replace worn-out panels. Apparently trifling moments of surrealism (in which many Krakowians take great pleasure) such as these amounted to minutiae that made quotidian life interesting. With this in mind, it is surprising how little has been written about the ways in which commodities’ material and sensory repertoires impact upon the social relations surrounding them. This shortfall is more pronounced in ‘EuroAmerican’ contexts than it is in literature on some other regions, from which inspiration can be drawn and commonalities discerned. To give a particularly evocative example, Allerton (2007) is struck by Manggarai sarongs’ ‘absorption’ not only of bodily substances such as blood and sweat but, concordantly, of the person. In contrast, Busby (2000: 134) observes that men and women in Southern India adhere to guidelines, dictating whose clothes they are permitted to borrow without breaking adultery and incest taboos. Busby explains: The clothes become part of the person, and if another person wears them, they are always connected to them, and if another person wears them, they are always aware of whom the clothes ultimately belong to. Cloth, being absorbent, takes up the substance of its wearer. Like sharing food, then, sharing clothes which have been worn by another is a powerful expression of intimacy. Thus although clothes are borrowed and shared frequently within the household, they will never be borrowed, for example, between a man and his sister-in-law. (2000: 133)

The connection Busby makes between food and clothing resonates with what I found to be the case in Kraków, except that I found fur to be linked to food in ways that garments fashioned from other textiles were not. What these commodities have in common, of course, is that they are all textiles of sorts. Reading Weiner and Schneider’s (1989) edited collection, I get the strong sense that cloth provides the archetypal instance of an object with multifaceted meanings, which has influenced the work of Daniel Miller among others. Cloth has had a role in various forms of statecraft in a manner similar to that described in Wolf ’s (1982) chapter on fur in his own book (e.g. Cohn 1989; Tarlo 1996). Cloth is unusual in its resonance across a wide range of societies, which is mirrored by its continued use, making it ripe for both historical and synchronic analyses. Perhaps this perpetual significance makes the textile industry a particularly apt focus for studies of family businesses (e.g. Yanagisako 2002). Save for very new materials (see O’Connor 2011), there is surely more

Working at Home

75

potential for the intergenerational transmission of businesses or skills within textile industries than within those producing faddish commodities, which may become obsolete within a single generation. The imagery surrounding cloth, ‘how readily its appearance and that of its constituent fibres can evoke ideas of connectedness or tying’ (Schneider and Weiner 1989: 2), also immediately lends itself to the study of relationships, such as those between generations. The intangible stuff of kinship and economics – sentiments, debts, obligations and class identity – is intertwined with the quite minute details of fur’s material properties. Schneider (1989) gives a very brief example of this. She comments on Ruth Bottigheimer’s 1981 miscellany of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century folktales featuring spinning, tales which ‘present spinning as a form of subjugation or punishment for women’ (1989: 177). Schneider, like Bottigheimer, situates this subjugation within a broader framework of the double injustices faced when one is both poor and female. She touches upon an irony embedded within the histories of production of each and every ‘luxury’ commodity: that those who spend long hours labouring with valuable materials have no means of owning them. But what also interests me about Schneider’s understanding of these tales is the apparently almost fortuitous engagement by the spinner with the materials involved in spinning. Schneider writes, ‘The tales … suggest that malevolent spirits can heighten the perils of spinning. For example, in the Briar Rose and Sleeping Beauty stories, spinning implements or rough flax fibers are the instrument of a curse: A mere scratch puts whole kingdoms to sleep for a hundred years’ (1989). I do not think the point Schneider intends to make is that the way these materials were, their likeliness to scratch and tear human skin, plays a large part in why a spinner’s lot was an onerous one. And yet, having been given these details, I wonder how the specific materiality of a commodity could ever be seen as peripheral to the experience of working with it. In this sense, Bourdieu’s work on class (e.g. 1979) is just as much about materials and materiality as are the respective bodies of work of, for example, Ingold (2007) and Miller (2005). What springs to mind here is not so much his work on the French bourgeoisie (Bourdieu 1979) but that which considers the bodies of unmarried middle-aged men, ‘peasants’ from Bourdieu’s native Béarn (Bourdieu 2004). What emerges is an example of people using their understanding of materials’ physical properties to create for themselves a picture of others that makes sense. In Béarn, locals and ‘urbanites’ (2004: 582) alike characterized the farmer-bachelors’ ‘body techniques’ (cf. Mauss 1934/1979) as imprinted with their engagement with their working materials. Onlookers, writes Bourdieu, ‘[put] the emphasis on the slowness and heaviness of his gait:

76

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

for the dweller of the bourg, the man from the brane [“uplands”] is one who, even when he treads the tarmac of the carrére [the main street], always walks on uneven, difficult, and muddy ground’ (1935/1979: 582). These farmers put their labour into soil or ‘the land’. Soil’s propensity to become slippery and easy to sink into when it rains necessitates that farmers condition themselves to walk in a certain manner if they are to stay upright. At dances and at church, those who are not farmers evaluate this distinctive gait as an embodiment of a class position. A farmer is not only a farmer when he is tending his land. The bearing the material has on the person goes much deeper than for this to be the case. Occupations that involve making things that pose particular risk of illness or injury illustrate the extremes of the relationship between workers and the materials with which they work. A rather disparate collection of articles published in journals during the twentieth century marks out the fur industry as the site of a range of dreadful ailments. Tanning, which by the time I did my research was largely carried out on farms and in factories rather than by furriers, appears particularly dangerous. In the 1930s, a group of US biomedical researchers working in ‘industrial hygiene’ published articles about ‘mercurialism’ among fur-hat factory employees (Neal et al. 1937, 1938, 1941). Paul Neal and his colleagues believed that the circulation of mercury-infused dust particles around insufficiently ventilated factories gave rise to maladies including ‘such psychic troubles as irritability, timidity, and irascibility; headaches; drowsiness or insomnia; weakness; readiness to blush; excessive perspiration; increased reflexes; gingivitis; underweight and increased blood pressure’ (Neal et al. 1941). ‘The incidence of syphilis in the fur-cutting industry was found to be lower than in other industries’ (Neal 1937), the research team noted, which must be attributable to the use of mercury in curing the disease (see Lomholt 1920; Padget 1940). Later emerged an asthma-like condition named ‘Furrier’s lung’ (Pimental 1970), and the longer-term impacts of working with these materials were detailed in accounts of ‘mortality among retired fur workers’ (Sweeney et al. 1985). Some of the ill effects of working in the fur industry do not present themselves for some time. A study exploring ‘Occupational cancer mortality among urban women in the former USSR’ (Bulbulyan et al. 1992) names furriership as a notably high-risk line of work. Furriers establish relationships with clients when they buy garments, offering advice on how to care for them. Fur’s demanding nature, the need to treat it differently each season (according to some), can create loyal customers. Its costliness as a raw material ensures that consumers often repaired or altered it rather than throwing it away and buying it anew. The manner in which

Working at Home

77

information about care was dispensed depended heavily on the personality of the furrier. To quote one memorable example: Madam must be careful not to spray perfume near her new coat, or else the skin will dry out and the hairs will drop like leaves off a tree. Beware of metal coat hangers that will hurt your fur and do not, please Madam, ever store your purchase in a plastic bag because it needs to breathe. Paper bags let the coat breathe, plastic bags do not!

In 2010, Piotr, a fast-talking second-generation furrier was running a ‘by appointment only’ workshop. The above spiel was reeled off quickly with dramatic gesticulation. The tendency to describe fur in language usually reserved for living things also prevailed at some other sites central to the fur industry. Sojuzpushnina, the main St. Petersburg fur company, for example, recommends that consumers store their coats in furriers’ specialist ‘fur-refrigerators’ during the warmer months, by exclaiming ‘send your furs on summer vacation’ (www. sojuzpushnina.ru). Anthropomorphism is not to the taste of everyone in the fur industry and is especially contingent upon the position of animal rights lobbies in respective states. An acquaintance linked to Danish fur told me of her objective ‘to make fur seem like any other fabric … not make a big deal out of the fact that it is animal skin, to make the design and the quality the main things’. Opinions around fur refrigerators illustrated furriers’ differing levels of readiness to use fur’s material characteristics to exploit clients. While in Warsaw for a few days’ break, I decided to interview a couple of furriers to see if meeting them might give me some insight into what made Kraków furriers distinctive. ‘Poor [in terms of wealth] and traditional’, was one man’s idea of Krakowian businesses. This particular furrier had recently created a fur storage room in his industrial estate-based shop, specifically for refrigerators to house furs during the summer months, for a considerable cost. On returning to Kraków and chatting to Jolanta, I showed off my new insight that furs need to be refrigerated in the summer months. ‘Bajki!’, responded Jolanta, which means ‘fairytales’. The variation between different furriers’ ideas of how far they could, or should, push money-making innovations tells only part of the story. Such a line of enquiry makes the incorrect assumption that furriers conceptualized themselves as being in a position to influence ‘the market’, an entity about which informants quite often seemed to contradict themselves and which was usually referred to as biznes. On the one hand, relatively young fur industry employees in their forties would tell me that the Polish fur industry was in decline due to competition ‘from China’ or ‘from places [high street chains] like Zara’. On the other hand, however, a memorable phrase once related to me by a couple

78

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

in their forties who worked as a team summed up a contrasting viewpoint: fur będę zawsze ‘will be around always/forever’. Timelessness, importantly, is taken to mean ‘naturalness’. The perfect ‘design’ not of a garment but of fur itself, I was told repeatedly, meant that fur was evidences by how it was ‘breathable’, warming its wearer without making him or her sweaty. That fur came ‘from the land’, because animals grazed on the land, evidenced its ‘timelessness’. Its naturalness, the ‘obviousness’ of wearing something that was warm while living in a country that was cold a great deal of the time, meant that furriers’ plans meant little. This could be interpreted as complacency about the future of their trade. It could also mean that these people felt that fur operated outside of capitalism, and furriers felt that there was little they could or should do to influence consumers’ ideas about it.

‘The real poor are at home, shivering’: The material markers of bourgeois poverty Terence S. Turner’s work on clothing as ‘social skin’ (1980) resonates in a strikingly literal manner with the practices and ideas related to fur. One reason why clothing is an elucidating topic of study, posits Turner, is that it is ‘double-sided’. Touching both the wearer’s skin and her environment, clothing merges personhood with sociality. This is ethnographically applicable to instances in which some furriers alluded to the routines and social lives of their clients when discussing how specific activities would impact upon the look and feel of a garment. I recorded one that went as follows: When Madam goes to church, get those grandchildren to carry your bag because, please allow me to say Madam, a bag put over the shoulder murders a mink and makes it irreparable, save for perhaps the addition of an over-size fox item, the stole with a head. And do not pin even the most beautiful corsage to the coat, even on the occasion of a święto (special religious day). And beware, dear Client, that after church should you go to a café for dessert you need to let the waiter do as he should and place the coat on the hat stand in a place visible so Madam is not at risk of being the victim of theft of this fine, fine article. The reason I tell you this is because if Madam sits on the coat, friction will occur and then the hairs will break.

Speeches such as this, probably quite easily identifiable as the words of Piotr whom I quoted earlier, evoke images of Krakowian respectability, of the importance of church within social lives, of patronizing cafes that were in

Working at Home

79

correspondingly good taste to the client’s choice of furrier. They also allude to the client’s position as a grandmother, something that Piotr would have known, and therefore not a careless assumption. A more startling facet of bourgeois respectability, of the insights that tradespeople such as furriers gleaned into the lives of patrons, and of the ways in which people revealed and concealed information about their lifestyles, was hinted at during the repair process. Furriers could tell when a client had not been following their suggestions. The kinds of things that could go wrong with a fur garment – the unequal distribution of wear and tear on different parts of the body, discolouration and strange smells – constituted windows into the lives of clients. Jolanta told me, when I asked her to identify the ethical responsibilities and challenges faced by furriers, that she on occasion became privy to ‘life being lived as it shouldn’t be’. A few of the furriers with whom I spoke reported, as they showed me the coats they were repairing at the time, that they suspected that a number of their elderly female customers were wearing their coats ‘all of the time, indoors, maybe even in bed’. These ‘diagnoses’ reflected the widely felt anxiety about older people at the time of my fieldwork. In addition to very few people having adequate pensions, the large-scale emigration to Western Europe was used by the further right parties such as the League of Polish Families, and the Law and Justice Party, as evidence of the demise of ‘the Polish family’ and of the younger generation’s gratitude towards, and willingness to care for, older kin. There had been many waves of public evictions of elderly people from rented property, with rents raised so high and at such short notice, that those tenants who were, technically speaking, able to pay their landlords could no longer afford food or heating. Heating was a particularly politicized issue. The first winter I spent in Kraków was one of the coldest on record. During those agonizing four or five months, stories abounded, both in conversation and in the press, of people who had been sleeping rough (many of whom were elderly) or who had slipped on ice with no one around to come to their aid, being found dead under inches of glistening snow. I remember reading at this time a newspaper article about how Poland had the most expensive electricity within the EU. The idea that older women might be wearing their furs inside their homes to keep warm appeals to a particular model of dignified suffering. The fur coat, a symbol not so much of luxury, but of being ‘put together’ and both ‘respectable’ and ‘respectful’ (especially of the church, of Poland’s history and of the institution of the family) becoming secretly utilitarian, stirred strong emotions in furriers.

80

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

The ‘private suffering’ of the bourgeois elderly was contrasted with the ‘shameless’ begging associated with the young homeless, as well as with Roma people, who are denigrated by some people of seemingly varied ages and political persuasions. ‘The poorest people’, Basia told me, ‘are not on the streets accosting American tourists, they are inside their homes with the shutters closed. Shivering.’ As a type of capital worthy of being passed between generations of families, and as a textile of sorts that people spoke of idiomatically as a commodity that could be sold should its owner fall on hard times, fur is often spoken of in the same breath as gold and diamonds. However, fur differentiates itself from these two precious hard commodities with its relative fragility and its susceptibility to wear, looking and feeling appreciably different over time. This property, combined with fur’s use value for keeping warm during Poland’s cold winters, resulted in the potential for those who wore it to imprint onto it something of their lifestyle or even, as it was interpreted by furriers, their poverty. The fact that people, and here I am really referring to women, who were struggling to pay for heating nonetheless paid for the services of a furrier might seem surprising. However, it fitted in with local ideas of class-based respectability and dignity: on the one hand, not complaining about one’s bad lot, and on the other hand, placing a high value on an extended social circle which incorporated skilled tradespeople such as furriers.

Collaborative remodelling with clients Furriers such as Jolanta offered not only ‘repair’ (reparacje) but ‘remodelling’ (remodelowane), which involved fulfilling clients’ sometimes outlandish requests, changing the form of the garment practically beyond recognition while keeping the valuable textile from which it had originally been fashioned. On a Tuesday morning in October 2010, a lecturer named Małgorzata brought Jolanta a coat, on her way to work. One benefit of having a workshop at home, said Jolanta, was that it enabled the furrier to accommodate clients’ working hours without having either to leave home very early in the morning or to stay in a shop in town until late at night. Małgorzata unzipped a black nylon suit bag and emptied out a fox coat onto the 2-square-metre worktable. ‘Ok,’ said Jolanta, ‘let’s take a look.’ Despite appearing below new projects on the list of services offered on her website, ‘repair and remodelling’ made up the bulk of Jolanta’s work. The bottom inch of the coat was noticeably scanter in fur than the rest. Aside from this, the light-brown lining had come apart under the right

Working at Home

81

armpit, creating an unwanted extra pocket each time Małgorzata went to put her hand into the sleeve. Jolanta and Małgorzata both looked at the knee-length coat and decided that it should be made shorter to get rid of the worn area. But the way this was talked about was interesting. ‘Should we make it waist-length instead?,’ Jolanta asked. She suggested this because a slightly higher than knee-length coat could be awkward to wear as it would not cover a knee-length skirt. Małgorzata was wearing trousers at the time, but I guess that Jolanta assumed she wore skirts sometimes and that these skirts were not miniskirts. In the case of Małgorzata’s coat, for example, Jolanta suggested they take up the sleeves by an inch. ‘Why’s that?,’ asked Małgorzata. ‘It just looks more in proportion with a shorter jacket,’ she said. While, as has just been illustrated, clients knew what kind of aesthetic a certain animal might provide, the furrier would often see it as their role to ‘bring them down to earth’ (as one furrier put it) by giving advice about the practicality of using fur from a particular species of animal. Expert knowledge was especially important when, as often seemed to be the case, clients wished to remodel a jacket by adding to it an animal of a different species to that forming the bulk of the existing garment. A client asked a furrier who worked from her flat above a letting agent’s office, Jadwiga, how much it would cost to affix a chinchilla fur to the collar of a sable jacket. She liked the idea of the contrast between the sable’s relatively short hairs and the chinchilla’s fluffier fur. Having fur close to the face was flattering in much the same way that hair in a colour and style that suited its wearer’s complexion was considered to be. On hearing this idea, Jaga pursed her lips slightly and said, ‘That does sound pretty. However, before we go ahead with this, I should inform you that chinchilla tends to go yellow after only five or six years. It’s not a practical creature. But of course we can go ahead if that’s what you would like,’ smiling. Jaga uses ‘we’ to describe the proposed remodelling. Rather than privileging either the client or the furrier’s opinion, she tries to collate their views before giving the client, who is after all the person paying for the work, the choice of what to do, a relationship of patronage that incorporates emotions and processes resembling friendship.

Conclusion What does the social life unfolding within the walls of home-based businesses reveal about local views of patronage? In many places, fur is associated with class difference and feminine respectability. To what extent is this attributable

82

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

to its propensity to display plainly marks of inexpert labour? The fur workshops based in homes described here say something about fur’s look, smell and feel, and characteristics that are both constructed in line with distinctly Krakowian concerns and that doubtlessly also map fairly easily onto some other cultural contexts where fur exists. These workshops also provide an ingress into kinship, work and social stratification in Kraków. From fur’s proneness to soak up smells and for its hairs to drop and affix themselves to furniture, to the memories of bath-reared rodents that evidence fur’s animal origins, its materiality seemed inalienable from its role in relationships. Fur’s high monetary and sentimental values, along with the unsalvageability of an injudiciously short sleeve or hem, made it important to patronize only the most trustworthy and skilled of furriers. Recommending a furrier to friends and acquaintances coalesced the aspects of belonging to a środowisko that emphasized personhood with those that emphasized locality. I have posited that furriers had an important role as consolidators of ties between acquaintances of similar social positions or, to put it in analytical rather than local terms, the same class. The connections and disconnections between workplaces and domestic spaces are unusually culturally loaded in Poland. Frances Pine’s 2002 essay ‘Retreat to the household? Gendered domains in postsocialist Poland’ tells of women living in Łódź’s ‘bereavement’ following becoming unemployed in the years immediately following 1989. The women missed their work colleagues, and they drew sharp distinctions between work and home, at the former of which they could ‘act as individuals’ (2002: 96). The connections between work, personhood and kinship in postsocialist ethnography such as Pine’s showed that it is misguided to conceptualize ‘private’ and ‘public’ as discrete domains. There are strikingly varied situations of people whose working lives are understood as central to who they are, from Pine’s informants to, in contrast, Alexei Yurchak’s more glamorous Russian entrepreneurs (2003). And yet while the furriers written of here cast their changing work and workplaces as a story of Poland’s changing economic systems, they also attribute these changes to developments in their personal circumstances: inheriting businesses from parents or from in-laws can change where one does their work; so too can whether one has to look after children. Approaching houses as sites of ‘reproduction in both its biological and social meanings’ (Stivens 2005: 325; see also Chodorow 1999; Meillassoux 1981) brings up pictures of quite traditional kinship that focuses on nuclear family units on the one hand and the passing down of capital between generations on the other. But in emphasizing the meaningfulness of ‘weak ties’ within Krakowian society, my account of the furrier–client relationship has shown the ways in

Working at Home

83

which patronage can be a kinship category that, over time, incorporates care and friendship. Fur, as a material that, like hair, is often engaged in boundary work, and home-based workshops, in the questions they pose about the delineations between kinship and economy, were well placed to expose situations that challenged local expectations. This chapter has outlined how interactions between furriers and clients shed light on local anxieties about ‘hidden’ poverty, especially among older women from bourgeois backgrounds. Furriers’ suspicions about and sympathies towards these clients stem from the fur’s strange position as a commodity with high exchange or monetary value and a high use value for keeping warm. Images of a woman who has fallen upon hard times, firstly, wearing a coat inside the home as a substitute for gas or electric heating, and secondly, paying for a furrier’s services when she is otherwise struggling for money, both tell of reluctance to ask for financial help from outside of the home. Ethnographic evidence suggests that material culture bears an uncommonly pronounced significance for kinship in Poland. Some of the richest work here tells of people’s links between humdrum objects because of the ingenious ways in which people had provisioned during the twentieth century in particular (e.g. Dunn 2004; Burrell 2003). Tangible objects have constituted idioms for profound social upheavals such as large-scale migrations. Pine mentions Górale people’s expression of emigration to the United States as being ‘za chlebem (“in search of bread”)’ (Pine 1996a: 444). Kinship, rather than ‘official’ markets, has informed how citizens provision for goods and how people ascertain the value of commodities. Polish Jewish memory exemplifies the complicated ways in which objects remind us of absences, whether of the dead or of émigrés. This applies not only to monuments and memorials but to photographs, household items and heirlooms left behind, not to mention the many books, pictures and figures which were being sold in Kazimierz at the time of my fieldwork. In focusing on small businesses, this chapter has given one side of the fur business. In the next chapter, I focus on bigger businesses. Whereas I have looked at fur as a material in this chapter, and also at the relationships between clients and furriers, the next chapter approaches a question that this chapter has touched upon but not yet confronted in depth: ‘What is work?’. I argue that, in a Krakowian context, this question is quite indivisible from others of, firstly, how adult personhood is achieved and, secondly, the nature of the ideal parent–child relationship.

84

3

Fur families

Stating that a business is run by kin or is inherited is not just a description but a qualitative judgement. This appraisal can be positive, elevating the business – both the premises and the people who work there – as inevitably endowed with ‘stories to tell’ and suggesting perseverance through difficulties. However, according to local lore, some family firms provide high-quality services but sluggish or disinterested customer service. The Krakowian propensity for walking around town and commenting on one’s surroundings meant that I often found myself privy to friends’ and acquaintances’ expositions of certain businesses’ merits and failures. One Tuesday afternoon, my neighbour and I were walking past a fur business near to the town centre. ‘Look!’ she said, ‘everything locked and bars over the doors at this time of day, and on a weekday!’ No doubt she had pointed out this particular shop because of its relevance to my research. But I found it intriguing that this sort of criticism was levelled at businesses considered to be family businesses on a fairly regular basis. It was said that such businesses housed ‘bad workers’ who, as my neighbour put it, ‘could only get jobs from their mothers and fathers’. Anxieties of this sort are mentioned in business theory written about family firms from a number of different geographical locations. ‘When kinship position takes priority over experience and capability, a certain cost is a breach in the link between performance and rewards,’ writes Stewart (2003; see Belshaw 1955; Ram & Holliday 1993). In Kraków, the importance of patronage to civic and civil life and to the perpetuation of class position means that the weight of kinship is perceived to have a dual significance in the case of family businesses. Firstly, kin of different generations are tied to one another within a family firm. Secondly, those with kinship ties (‘by blood’ or otherwise) to a family who owned a business were expected to patronize it before any other. In the Polish media, however, family businesses possess a distinctive moral currency. Between 2009 and 2010 Newsweek Polska assembled a list of Poland’s ‘best’ firmy rodzinne (family firms). An unnamed Newsweek Polska journalist writes, ‘Family businesses account for more than 10% of

86

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Polish GDP and provide employment for nearly 1.3 million people … We aim to promote companies in which a friendly atmosphere, the stability of the company and the employees, are placed higher than pure profit.’ Stylish monochrome photographs of models posing as ‘fathers and sons’ and ‘grandfathers and grandsons’ illustrate the online version of the magazine feature. Other expensive-looking graphics accentuate the aura of friendliness and stability attributed by the magazine to the notion of the family business. Another ‘Family Firm of the Year’ competition’s logo is a tree, perhaps an oak, in a graphic style reminiscent of the insignia of companies such as IBM. This futuristic-looking oak is easy to imagine heading thick, high-quality notepaper or embossed onto the steely surface of a computer. In this context, an image as innocuous as a tree silhouette is surprisingly subversive, even a symbol of resistance. Needless to say, the design plays upon the idea of a ‘family tree’. But the aesthetic allusion to the corporate world invites the viewer to compare the positive, nourishing ‘local’ values associated with family businesses with the anonymous attributes of large, often transnational ‘big businesses’. This is particularly poignant in a city where it is often said that capitalism is preferable to socialism but capitalism is still shocking in its harshness. Other elements of trees’ symbolic repertoire (see Bouquet 1996; Parkin & Bouquet 1997) also seem poignant in a Polish context. Roots and branches signify longevity. This durability contrasted with the ‘here today gone tomorrow’ businesses that sprung up on Krakowian streets, with little time between their costly opening parties and leafleted introductory promotions and their lamentation through signs reading likwidacja (‘liquidation’). Official discourses often frame family businesses as new to Poland. The post-‘transition’ government had encouraged the development of family businesses as a means of fostering interest in – and competition between – workers in market economy-era Poland (EEDRI 2008: 1). I was therefore unsurprised to find several reports about family businesses in Poland online, the most informative of which was partly inspired by the creation of ‘the special parliamentary commission “Przyjazne Państwo” (“Friendly State”) [which] postulated the need and will to introduce the definition of the family business’ (2008). What struck me about these reports was their common claim that the family business was not a familiar concept in Poland. The principal ways in which this was observable were argued to be the absence of an ‘official definition of Polish origin referring to them’ (2008: 2; see also Popczyk 1999) on the one hand and family business-specific legal regulations (1999) on the other. The reasons for these cultural and

Fur Families

87

bureaucratic lacunae, it is posited, are historical. ‘There are no traditions of family entrepreneurship in Poland due to historical and economic factors, most family companies were created after 1989,’ explains the report (EEDRI 2008: 2; Sułkowski 2004). It continues, ‘Family businesses during the period of centrally-planned economy were not perceived as an important part of it and due to the communist ideology they were treated unfavourably’ (EEDRI 2008: 3). My aim in this chapter is not to refute these claims but rather to consider the ways in which both the workings of and ideas concerning family businesses in Poland fit in with broader social logics of work and kinship, some of which might predate socialism and postsocialism. Informants gave a definition of a family business that was intriguingly loose. Namely, the Krakowians I know often attribute their current work situation to their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences of work, even when they worked in very different industries or professions. Traits such as being ‘hard working’ (pracowity) are conceptualized as having been inherited even when businesses themselves have not. What is emphasized, therefore, is professional continuity between generations even when either individuals’ trajectories or the conditions stipulated by state socialism had essentially made following elder kin’s work trajectories impossible. As Olivia Harris writes, ‘The question of what makes people work is a central feature of the way that human existence is understood within different cultural and historical repertoires’ (2007: 137). Here, I discuss work as I found it to be in Kraków: a component of both personhood and kinship. Adding to Harris, I argue that ‘the question of what makes people work is a central feature of that way that’ (2007) adult children foster their own personhood while simultaneously acknowledging their relatedness to elder kin. In Kraków, the notion of the family business sometimes sits uncomfortably with the belief that finding oneself a job using one’s own skills was a most important step on the path to adulthood (cf. Mayblin 2010). As a topic, work sheds light on one of this book’s central themes: inheritance. In turn, thinking about inheritance helps us to think about the relationship between work and kinship. Men and women frequently talk about elements of their working lives by referring to their parents and grandparents, partially attributing to them their current working circumstances. While doing this, however, they also emphasize the absolute necessity of adults doing their own work and earning their own money. As such, local ideas about work illustrate the complexity of inheritance and how it necessarily involves carrying with oneself something of the past but also quite purposefully leaving something behind.

88

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

It is neither assumed nor particularly desired by furriers that their children would follow them into their line of work. This differs somewhat from the picture of succession and inheritance presented in contrasting anthropological accounts of family businesses. A significant number of Yanagisako’s Lake Como silk industry capitalists, for example, include as a central trope in their firms’ ‘origin narratives’ their grandfathers’ or fathers’ achievement of their ‘social destiny’ (2002) through ceasing to be someone else’s employee and instead establishing their own firm. This foundation becomes a prized inherited memory for generations to come. In Kraków, however, the onus instead is on each person to make his or her own adult personhood regardless of the kind of successes his or her parents might have achieved. In short, work, and the establishment of adult personhood, cannot be inherited.

Working to become a person In the church nearest to my flat’s online ‘intention book’ (księga intencji), supplications themed on career success outnumber prayers for sisters to receive the self-control to stop drinking excessively and for grandchildren to stay safe when travelling abroad. These prayers take a similar form whether they are asking for a nervous teenager to do well in her high school finishing exam or for a long-unemployed son to show the best of himself at a job interview the following day. That family members, and mothers in particular, authored these prayer requests on behalf of their kin demonstrates how unemployment is not an individual’s problem but a worry for the entire family. Paid employment is equated in importance only with having children in achieving adulthood (see Mayblin 2010). However, while infertility or not finding a partner with whom to have children is perceived as tragedy, and choosing not to have children is considered rather unusual, yet an increasingly familiar part of ‘modern life’, unemployment is almost unspeakably terrible. ‘Whatever the problems with socialism,’ I was told over and over again by people of a range of ages and levels of financial stability, ‘no one was unemployed’ (also see Pine 1998). Being unable to find a job is a challenge to one’s personhood, and people working in the fur business and those I knew in my neighbourhood felt deep pity for the unemployed. Tropes surrounding emigration from Poland exemplify the ways in which some of the men and women I knew considered unemployed people to be both lacking in skills and knowledge of how to behave respectably in public.

Fur Families

89

Informants belonging to relatively elite strata of Krakowian society, not particularly wealthy but respectable and bourgeois, drew class-based distinctions between young people who ‘wanted’ to work abroad and those who ‘must’ work abroad. Those who wanted to work abroad in order to improve their knowledge of foreign languages, to become worthy of promotion on their return to Poland or to experience travelling for leisure were sometimes considered especially hard working because of their intrepidness. Bourgeois fur industry people spoke of these people with familiarity. If they were not their sons and daughters, then they were their nieces and nephews. In some cases, fur industry people were prompted to talk about ‘work trips’ they had made to fur auction houses and of visits to Chicago or London in the 1970s before the imposition of Martial Law. This type of ‘elite migration’ was conceptualized as ‘working abroad’ (praca za granicą), denoting that such an arrangement would end when the person in question wanted to come home. Those who ‘had to’ move away were more often described as having emigrated, implying that there would never be jobs for them in the competitive working environment of contemporary Poland. I sometimes heard comparisons of people of different classes’ behaviour in the form of memories of life in public. ‘When I was on a London bus, I would hear people speaking Polish but they were swearing so much, they sounded so stupid … these were the kinds of people who have to go there [to Western Europe],’ I was told by several informants. For the relatively affluent people who had ‘worked abroad’, living abroad ‘because one was unemployable in Poland’ carried with it embarrassing moral and social implications for individuals but also for Poles in general. People in conjugal relationships tend to frame caring for children as a pleasure but housework as labour. Housework such as cooking (which was also sometimes seen as a pleasurable, high-status leisure activity) and cleaning seemed to be shared equally between men and women, at least among younger, relatively affluent couples. People I knew generally explained household division of labour in terms of likes and dislikes: ‘I like cooking so I do that most nights, my wife says she finds ironing therapeutic, so she does that.’ At other points, people who lived together talked about the work they carried out in terms of time, often referring to paid employment outside of the home in order to make sense of the work done in the home: ‘Now that I’m working at home but my husband is still working in the shop, it makes sense for me to do more of the cleaning.’ This equality did not preclude the image of men doing housework being the subject of mirth. Marzenka and Laszlo, IT workers in their early thirties, shared their housework. And yet their professional wedding photos, taken several days before

90

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

their wedding (as was the custom) included, in addition to some more serious shots of them gazing at each other and walking through the Planty, humorous photographs of Laszlo holding a mop and looking aghast while Marzenka pointed at him ironically, giving the camera a knowing look. Prestigious work is desirable both as a means of obtaining money and as an end in itself, a social position. The desire to work can be motivated by people with whom one had only the weakest of ties or who were strangers. A Polish fur trader told me, ‘We have a saying in Poland, “You see something and then you want it.”’ Unsurprisingly, some furriers said that this facet of Krakowian sociality was advantageous for their business. Customers wanted to work in order to be able to afford to wear fur, which was usually outerwear and as such was worn in public, visible to strangers and acquaintances as well as close kin. Rather than wanting to acquire goods such as fur out of ‘envy’ (Douglas 1979), however, such pressures to own high-quality goods were borne out of ideas about respectability. Good taste in understatedly expensive objects showed that a person was able to contribute to society by working to prove that they were not ‘lazy’, but it also showed that they appreciated interesting aesthetics. Work’s centrality to personhood was demonstrated by the profound upset many friends and acquaintances suffered at the hands of a villain pervasive in afterwork and weekend conversations: the ‘bad boss’ (zły szef ). The ubiquity of dissatisfaction with management culture manifested itself in ostensibly trifling minutiae of Krakowian life: the name of a cocktail, for example, and management-related queries in magazine problem pages. But bad management was so intensely distressing because, day by day, it corroded employees’ belief in two components of workplace life of paramount importance to bourgeois perceptions of personhood: their ability to form friendships at work (Pine 2002) and their being sufficiently skilled to be employed and keep a job. Poor management often intertwined these slights. My friend Kasia disliked her manager intensely, saying he held ‘a reign of terror’ in her office. He was an ‘old-school’ manager who made up his lack of ‘management skills’ by threatening Kasia and her colleagues with humiliation. Once every couple of weeks, Kasia said, he would call each of his employees’ telephone extensions beckoning them all to a meeting in his office. He told them that the topic of meeting was the need to discuss ‘one of the team whose work had not been up to standard of late’. He did not specify who this team member was. Kasia said this made people have low confidence in their own abilities, but it also, and seemingly more upsettingly, created ‘bitchiness’ in the office, as colleagues whispered to each about who was most likely to be the below-par worker. Sometimes she was the one in trouble, other times not, which

Fur Families

91

pointed to the ridiculousness of this method of management. Joining her firm, Kasia had been impressed by the list of unpaid training opportunities she was able to take; now, she thought it ironic that she was being mocked and put down by some as patently out of touch with ‘modern’ leadership styles. She had an awkward relationship with her boss too because her English was better than his.

‘Work makes work’ Work’s centrality to adult personhood had ramifications both for how individuals spent their time and for tenets about the parents’ role in helping their children to adulthood. I asked one fur industry worker what it meant to work properly, and he replied that it was ‘fitting as much into a day as is possible’. The ideal was, as one woman put it, ‘to do worthwhile things before and after work too – as well as at work, obviously’. The irregular hours I kept during fieldwork probably prompted the kind but somewhat embarrassing gift given to me by a cashier at the local supermarket: a palm of the hand-sized ‘to-do’ list backed with a magnet to attach to a refrigerator, printed with the words Każdy dzień należy do Ciebie (‘Every day is yours!’). The exercise and language-learning classes in which many relatively affluent young people, and perhaps especially women, participate are considered worthwhile because they are enjoyable (at least for some people) and because they give people the sense that they were ‘improving themselves’. But more than this, doing these activities outside working hours is an ‘investment’ in one’s employability, as employers are seen to want staff who were good-looking and ‘international’. Parents’ ways of helping their children played upon what I found to be a particularly strongly felt and pervasive principle: ‘work makes work’. This cryptic adage bears some unpacking. A Wrocław furrier put it in these terms when I met her in 2010. She was telling me what was special about being a furrier. She explained that the high price of garments, and the sentimental attachments people had to fur, meant that one ‘had clients, not customers’, who often returned time after time after buying a coat in order to get the garment repaired, to buy more items or to have it remodelled. In other words, her good work brought in more business. Yanagisako (2002) points out how the Italian capitalists whom she interviewed frequently used idioms more widely associated with procreation to discuss the ‘birth’ of their businesses. Men ‘fathered’ firms just as they fathered children.

92

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

In contrast, the connections between parenthood and businesses were, as I experienced it, comparatively modest. Men were particularly likely to say that their father’s firm but patient style of parenting and their drive had also made them good businessmen. A ‘good businessman’ neither necessarily possessed a long-lasting business nor notable wealth but rather the will to take risks, as was a common refrain ‘follow his dreams’, and of course, ‘work hard’. In particular, being hardworking was an attribute necessary in a parent if she or he were to produce hardworking children. I often got the impression that a person’s description of his or her parents as ‘hardworking’ indicated their desire to be considered as such themselves.

Możliwości (‘possibilities’/‘opportunities’) The best way for a parent to help a child’s career was not, it was often put to me, by ‘hand-outs’ but by creating opportunities for work. Put differently, young bourgeois people expected that their parents would help them financially by giving them enough money to gain opportunities but not enough to stop them from working. As such, the furrier’s declaration that ‘work makes work’ might be interpreted as ‘hard work in one generation creates the opportunity for hard work in the next’. Money earned by parents can be used to help children cultivate ‘employable’ skills. Young people whose forebears had worked with fur, as they put it, ‘long ago’ linked their own working opportunities to capital and stories garnered by their great-grandparents, grandparents or parents. On hearing about my research, several friends and acquaintances told me comparable stories of ascendants trading fur. This chapter is concerned primarily with official fur businesses of the kind that had their own premises – headed notepaper emblazoned with line drawings either of unrealistically tall and slender women wearing full-length coats or of smiling fur animals – and quite often their own websites too. However, people from a range of connections to fur seemed to consider the unofficial trading of fur an important aspect of ‘what fur is’. This extended to the mechanics of trading: ‘The thing about fur is that because it’s soft and flexible you could just stuff it under your normal coat to transport it across a border,’ one young woman whose grandmother had smuggled fur pointed out. Such thoughts were in keeping with expectations about what older relatives should teach children and young people because they showed quick-wittedness and readiness to take dangerous measures in order to provide for their families.

Fur Families

93

But people who were in their twenties and thirties at the time of my fieldwork also traced a line back from their current employment situation to their relatives’ work with fur in the past in a number of perhaps more imaginative ways. Roza, a journalist, speculated about the ways in which her great-grandfather’s fur smuggling had set his family on the path to specific careers. ‘I bet my grandmother was inspired to become an accountant at least partly by the kinds of sums and exchanges her father did with the fur,’ said Roza. ‘And then you can see the link between my grandmother and my mother because they’re both teachers, and then from my mum being a teacher to me working in journalism it’s not a big leap.’ This shows the somewhat unexpected ways in which people who worked in industries not necessarily associated with entrepreneurship still conceptualize entrepreneurialism as a positive family trait. Furthermore, Roza told me, the ‘fur money’ had gone on to help her with her own studies. I asked her what she meant by this and she said: For example, I don’t wear fur really and most of my friends disagree with it. I was discussing it with my roommate and she said she can’t stand fur because it’s cruel to animals, but I would feel ungrateful saying that sort of thing because all of the opportunities I have had will have been paid for in some way by fur … my education and so on.

One way in which some middle-class parents and grandparents strive to provide their children with możliwości (opportunities/possibilities) is through the gifting of money for study or travel. Though these opportunities are often costly, it is stressed that the amounts of money they required were definitely not enough for the son or daughter to be so rich as not to need to work. That parents should help their children but, in doing so, help them to find their own work rather than helping them so much that they did not need to work was proven, I believe, by that actuality that providing young people with work experience also constituted możliwości. Some furriers gave younger kin work opportunities, despite knowing that these children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and sometimes godchildren, were not going to enter into furriership or fur retailing. A furrier’s niece might model some of her hats for a catalogue or website or, as was the case in one of the shops I visited near to Poznań, and in a couple of the shops in Kraków, a son or daughter had designed the shop’s website. These jobs, which were carried out without payment, were couched not only in terms of the younger person helping his or her older relative by saving them money but in terms of the older person helping his or her younger relative by giving them możliwości, the opportunity to work. This was especially the case for

94

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

young people who wanted to start a career in an industry considered particularly competitive, creative and enjoyable. One retail furrier I met let her nephew, an aspiring photographer, take the pictures for her advertisements. It was hoped that this would lead to more work – paid work – from outside of the family. Both the principle that work makes more work and możliwości rested on the idea that the correct method of raising children was to give them access to opportunities and to encourage them to desire work rather than proffering capital alone – the provision of which might make a child lazy, ‘weak’ (bezsilny), spoilt and shy. These ideas about work and personhood exemplify instances in which informants expressed sentiments and concerns about the role of kin coming of age. Many social scientists have written about the paramount importance of ‘the family’ within Polish society (e.g. Zielińska 2000; GolanskaRyan 2008), especially in relation to the Roman Catholic Church (e.g. Pasieka 2015) and to women’s and reproductive rights (e.g. Mishtal 2010). This echoes so much of what my informants said about life in Poland, sometimes with chagrin. Concurrent with constant recognition of the primacy of the family, however, was the emphasis that people of all ages placed upon the importance of being ‘an individual’ and particularly of having a ‘strong personality’. Being able to care for oneself, being independent, seemed as important a facet of ‘Polishness’ as did belonging to a family. It was not similarity between members of a family that made them a family but rather their dedication to one another, especially during difficult times. This grit fit in with ‘having character’ as a central facet of accounts of wartime hardship, resistance to Soviet governance, the challenges of living abroad, and the more quotidian grind of going to work and managing money and relationships.

The personality for the job? ‘Why do some sons and daughters of furriers work in fur and others not?’ This was a question I put to several interviewees. One woman told me, ‘It depends on their choice, and their parents’ choice … and on what they’re like, their personality.’ Choice and personality are central to an understanding of inheritance and division of labour with fur businesses. They are also crucial to understanding kinship and personhood more generally. It was very common for relatively privileged young people in Kraków to talk about their work with reference to their personalities. I sat in on an English class in a language school where a secretary friend worked. I was partnered with a woman in her late

Fur Families

95

twenties, Marya, who sat, chin sleepily rested on fist, and wearing red spectacles, as she scanned a worksheet entitled ‘What’s Your Ideal Job?’, designed to help learners of English practice using vocabulary for personal characteristics on the one hand and vocations on the other. I was struck by attendees’ knowledge of specialist language. Asked about his ‘main skills’, a perfume and aftershave salesman spoke of his adeptness with ‘a multi-platform approach’. In this context as well as more informal settings, men and women sometimes spoke of their jobs using half-joking ‘romantic’ language. When a friend told me she had applied for a job but only got to the final round, I said I was sorry to hear that and hoped she was not too disappointed. She shook her head, smiling stoically and said, ‘It’s ok. I’m ok. I wanted it but it wasn’t the perfect job for me. It wasn’t my soulmate.’ It was usually around their early twenties that it was decided if a family member would work at a parent’s (or parents’) firm. The point was that it was neither assumed nor particularly desired that a child would do this. Bourgeois Krakowians want to have, and for their children to have, jobs that ‘suit them’. In this sense, career trajectories were planned outside of the immediate domestic domain and in the schoolroom or, if applicable, the university lecture theatre. In some cases, people sought guidance from priests. Sometimes there were blurred boundaries between furriers’ children’s personalities being unsuited to furriership on the one hand and, on the other, parents and children alike believing that the fur industry had changed since the older generation had entered into it, creating a situation in which it was hardly feasible for a young person to embark on such a career. I was told that in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and even the early 2000s, many fur businesses had had the prerogative of dyeing, cutting and fashioning fur into garments. However, by the time of my fieldwork these stages of production often took place not only in different businesses but in different countries. One upshot of this, one furrier in her seventies told me, was that there were more and more fur shops that were ‘retail only’, selling fur and often also leather jackets and handbags, but owned and staffed by people who did not have the training (or perhaps the inclination) to cut, sew or design. There was also a very significant level of anxiety among the many fur industry people who said, with an air of resignation, that there was no way that Poland could compete for fur sales with comparable businesses in China. A common complaint of some friends in their twenties and thirties was that their requests to their parents for advice about careers were often greeted with silence. These could be significant questions such as whether they thought it would be a good idea for them to study abroad or else more mundane questions

96

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

such as what they should wear to work when starting a new job in an industry in which they had not worked before. Strikingly, though, these parents apparently often said that they felt unable to help because they had started work in ‘a different time’ and so felt inadequately informed to help their children, even worrying that they would give ‘bad advice’ and do harm to their children’s careers. What this shows, I think, is a particular precept of how generation and work mix in a postsocialist context. It shows, too, the limitations of możliwości when parents feel, because of social change, unable to help their children work, seeing their own career beginnings as incommensurable with those of their children. Under socialism, I was told by one man in his mid-twenties, whose uncle was a furrier in Poznań, ‘One didn’t apply for jobs, they were thrust upon you; now, it’s a problem finding a job. Ironic.’

The morality of entrepreneurship The belief that family businesses sheltered poor workers was prevalent in Kraków. The obligations felt among families meant that members had to continue to employ people who were unskilled or not pulling their weight. This would imply that these parents had not been providing możliwości but damaging their children by essentially stopping them from working. On the one hand, older firm owners might give jobs to sons, daughters, nieces and nephews ‘not good enough to get a job from their skills’, as one teacher put it when we talked about family businesses. On the other hand, young people were likely to either ‘take pity’ on older relatives and not want to stop them working there or, alternatively, be ‘too scared’ to get rid of older relatives who made companies undesirably ‘old fashioned’. Jola, a 25-year-old tour organizer, told me that she doubted those companies ‘ever made any profit because they just give stuff to their friends, exchange “things for things” (rzeczy na rzeczy) rather than handling money’. It was assumed that even young people working for such businesses would be ‘backward looking’, as one male first-generation furrier from Warsaw in his fifties put it, as he spoke quite disparagingly of Krakowian furriers’ ‘old fashioned’ businesses and ‘poor’ customers. It does not go without saying that being associated with the past in European contexts is grounds for denigration. Other ethnographic examples demonstrate the ways in which ‘heritage’, which is in a sense a genteelism for ‘old’, can be strongly associated with prestige (e.g. Cassidy 2002; Yanagisako 2002). Nor should the denigration of family fur businesses in Poland on the grounds of

Fur Families

97

them being ‘old fashioned’ be taken to mean that Krakowians felt themselves to favour newfangled things over old. In fact, if you asked a Krakowian of any age what they believed to be the defining characteristics of Polish society, they were likely to say that people worked very hard and that Polish people were very concerned with their past (see Jakubowska 2012). It is therefore all the more suggestive that entrepreneurship and innovation are so central to younger fur industry people’s sense of self. Several social scientists have pinpointed an interest in entrepreneurship as a ‘symptom’ of postsocialism (Buchowski 2008), but entrepreneurship by other names has also long been considered an important aspect of ‘Polishness’. Pine (1998) mentions the Górale people, who lived a couple of hours by bus away from Kraków, as being known for their illegal deals and indeed for priding themselves on them. This was not the same for Krakowians, whose identity within Poland centred on piety and comparatively ‘establishment’ values. Nonetheless, innovative, ‘clever’ methods of provisioning, especially during times of hardship, were felt to be not regional but Polish traits, of which entrepreneurship was considered the modern manifestation. Writing about the Polish middle class, Buchowski (2008) quotes a second Polish sociologist, Krzysztof Jasiecki, who argues, ‘In the Polish context, an entrepreneur is simply “a person who owns or co-owns a company and carries out an economic activity in the non-agricultural private sector”’ (Jasiecki 1996: 116). In my experience, Jasiecki’s description of entrepreneurship in Poland downplays the perception held by large sections of Polish society that entrepreneurs influenced not only the Polish economy but moral and social change. Small businesses were encouraged to play a central role in the early 1990s’ ‘shock therapy’ (Hardy & Rainnie 1996) by constituting a type of business in which it was especially within workers’ best interests to be concerned with the ‘healthiness’ (zdrowotność), as one furrier put it, of the free market economy. Those who identified themselves as entrepreneurs no doubt perpetuated their representations as pioneers of sorts. Consider Przedsiebiorczy Kraków’s (‘Enterprising Kraków’) choice of quotation with which to head their website: a Polish translation of US steel magnate Charles M. Schwab’s adage, ‘When a man has put a limit on what he will do, he has put a limit on what he can do’ (Gdy człowiek stawia sobie granicę tego co zrobi, stawia sobie też granicę tego, co może zrobić) (www.przedsiebiorczykrakow.pl/. Last accessed 6 January 2013). People from a range of professional backgrounds described entrepreneurship not as a job description but as a mentality (mentalność). The occupations in which workers were expected to ‘be entrepreneurial’ struck me as rather surprising,

98

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

such as was the case with teachers who taught in schools during the days and then took private students in the evenings, a mode of provisioning which was no doubt also a response to the low salaries received by even well-qualified professionals. This context is important for understanding the dynamics of family businesses and, in particular, the imperative that those working for a family business exercised entrepreneurial initiative on a par to that which would be exercised by those starting new businesses. As clothing is a ‘social skin’ (Turner 1980), a mediating site between person and body and society, I wonder if fur is an industry particularly influenced by the moral significance placed upon entrepreneurs. According to recent research in Poland, ‘family businesses are concentrated mostly in the traditional sectors of economy: services, small production, textile industry, construction services’ (EEDRI 2008: 6). The explanation for this given in the report is that ‘their share in high-tech sectors is low due to the fact that family businesses in most cases are unwilling to take risks and often they lack the capital needed for investments’ (2008; Popczyk 2008). But it seemed that people liked the idea of going to family businesses both to have things mended and to purchase new garments. Kraków-based furriers had clever methods for distinguishing themselves from ‘lower-class’ competitors and judiciously sidestepping the sexualized implications of fur as ‘second skin’. ‘Obciach (embarrassing). Proste, (straightforward) embarrassing’, proclaimed Agnieszka, a forty-something furrier from the second generation of a business outside of Kraków when discussing fur advertisement billboards on the road to Zakopane. Opening up her laptop and showing me the images she had meticulously chosen for her shop’s website, Agnieszka explained that she had managed to sidestep the ‘cheap’-looking ‘nothing on but a fur coat’ aesthetic with the use of pantyhose. A keen amateur photographer, when her business went online in 2007, Agnieszka called upon the thirty-year-old daughter of a friend as a model. One of the ‘looks’ she wanted to capture was of a klasyczny (classic) mink coat that fell to mid-calf. Agnieszka was unsure how to accessorize it because we want to make this stuff look wearable so that our ladies are not intimidated but at the same time desire the items. So having other [non-fur] clothes in the images gives suggestions. These days, lots of ladies like to wear jeans with their fur and although a lot of the older generation disagree, I think this is nice, it’s super because this is how we carry on in the future. But anyway, this one day I didn’t want jeans in the shot because I was feeling that this was a night time look so that even if the woman owning the coat liked to wear jeans at the weekend in the day, in the evening she would wear a nice dress or smart skirt. But when our

Fur Families

99

model for the day put on a dress it looked like she had nothing on underneath because we had to do up the coat to expose the buttons which were pearl-effect and therefore, you could say, ‘the whole point’ of this coat. When we did this it obviously looked like she wasn’t wearing any clothes under the garment. She was wearing a dress but how does the person visiting the website know this? So, we got her some subtly blue tights and this changed everything dark blue court shoes – not stilettos – and this changed everything.

As I have argued elsewhere in this book, appropriate dress is an important moral issue in Kraków, perceived failures in which are considered by some to signify a lack of respect both for others and for oneself. Consequently, furriers have an unusual place in society as people who could influence clients’ comportment and the ways in which they communicate visually messages about their gender, age and nationality. Agnieszka relied upon ideas about potential clients to make decisions about what would sell well but also about what was ‘correct’ to sell. When talking to furriers of this generation in particular, it was common for them to express in the exact words or in words equivalent to this, tak jest, which literally meant ‘yes it is’, but as a phrase this denoted something equivalent to ‘that’s the way things are’. What this shows, I believe, is the role Polish entrepreneurs played in critiquing society, selling things based on moral judgements, and also possessing the adeptness to imagine what could be sold and to take advantages of opportunities. This kind of entrepreneurship seemed to me to be present in conceptualizations of family fur businesses, not only in the changes made to businesses by the current young generation but in the constantly remembered entrepreneurial techniques used by their parents and grandparents in the twentieth century.

Making changes and pokolenie (generation) I now wish to explore the high value placed upon the inclusion of people of different generations in family fur businesses. Divergences in taste, formal education and social circles external to the family can endow such businesses with special insight into which products and services might appeal to clients and potential clients of their respective generations. This business philosophy speaks to a broader social logic that sees people of the same generational cohort share an innate understanding of the world around them. In Kraków, the differences between people of different generations are highly normalized. They are

100

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

generally spoken of without the potential to offend by being ‘inappropriately political’ in the way that comments about religion, class or sexuality might. The word pokolenie, which means ‘generation’, is understood locally more as ‘generation as cohort’ than as ‘generation as a stage in descent’ (cf. Yurchak 2006; see Kertzer 1993). People emphasize how being born in a particular historical epoch, or under a certain form of governance, conditions one’s emotions, relationships and tastes as an adult. In what follows, I will show the ways in which the ‘caesurae’ (see Feuchtwang 2007) between kin of successive generations informs younger people’s perceptions of working within ‘family businesses’. Young people joining such firms did no feel that their role consisted of the seamless takeovers of operations founded by elder kin. Instead, the accepted incommensurabilities between people of different generations led to these younger people engaging in a process of taking what their parents and grandparents had begun and reconfiguring it for new generations of clients. Walking into the building where I had made plans by email to interview Dariusz, the chairman of a fairly large fur company, I saw to my right a uniformed security guard, probably in his fifties, reading a newspaper at a desk. ‘What can I do for you, Miss?’ He smiled, showing that he was unconcerned about the threat I posed to the staircase behind him. ‘I’ve arranged to see Mister Zabski,’ I told the security guard. ‘Which Mister Zabski?’ he replied. Dariusz, who I think was in his early thirties, was the third in a line of Zabski men to work in the firm. Dariusz’s grandfather was dead, whereas, as the security guard signalled, both Dariusz and his father worked at the firm. I later realized that he was the exception within businesses. Whereas some furriers of his father’s generation had moved into small workshops in homes (as discussed in the previous chapter), Dariusz’s company had transitioned into a wholesale business that did dyeing and cutting on site. Perhaps equally pivotal to their continuance, the firm had ceased to produce full coats and jackets in favour of making fur accessories. Dariusz’s firm was run by himself and his father, he said. His father had started it in ‘the 1970s’. He did not know the exact year, he said, ‘because I was so young’. This differed from the businesses formed in the postsocialist era, which often proudly displayed their year of foundation on the canopy of their shop. The business had flourished, he had been told by his mother and father, by sending furs to London. They had had shops in Wrocław, Poznań and on the outskirts of Kraków, including a place on a very prestigious and central Kraków street, which had done dyeing too. This had been bought by an Italian firm in 2000 and had since shut.

Fur Families

101

It had been Dariusz’s decision that the firm commit to producing accessories. He told me: It was about finances. There are not so many opportunities to wear [fur these days.] Ok, last winter [2009, people wore fur because it was especially cold] but the last 7 or 8 winters weren’t so cold so we [Poles] had no need to buy fur coats. We do our own production and, at the moment, we have only collars, scarves, linings, some small additions to the cashmere and this is more popular. Fur coats are for a small group of people who are richer. This is the situation in Poland. People are [still] looking for full coats but from the cheaper animals like the rabbit. Or short styles [jackets].

This trope is that it did not explicitly refer to Dariusz himself but to the ‘we’ of himself and his father, the firm. However, the idea was that younger people, younger members of the family, sons and daughters and less commonly nieces and nephews, would make these changes ‘naturally’. Such reasoning was deeply ingrained within the day-to-day ways in which people I met conceived of pokolenie identification. Within the fur industry, it was thought that different people could bring different business ideas or style ideas based on their nationality, age and gender. Dariusz was thought to have a better understanding than his father of what younger people wanted because, being younger, these potential clients were the people with whom he socialized, with whom he empathized. Earlier in this chapter I argued that, contrary to some accounts which see ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘business’ in Poland as merely bland descriptors of how men and women spend their time and earn their money, many of the people I knew in Kraków believed such people to have a specific moral role within Polish society. Dariusz’s exegesis of why his firm had moved from producing full fur coats to accessories exemplifies the component of this position within society, which saw business people possess the analytical perspective with which to ascertain zeitgeists attributable not ‘only’ to fashion but to the environment on the one hand and social stratification on the other. Dariusz perceived changes in women’s lives to have impacted upon his business. The full fur coat in particular constituted a register through which to comment upon social change and technology and also upon the apparently increasing pressure to be slim: I’m not expert on full length coats because we only make accessories now, but I can see that coats are lighter, not so heavy. Some time ago, people made the coat from foxes, now there are not so many fox coats because women look huge in them, now everyone is looking for something soft, something light, shorter,

102

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

which makes it easier to go in the car, go shopping, you don’t have to fight with this [motions to bulk around waist]. Different lifestyles …

Dariusz expanded on this, saying that women these days preferred to have a lot of choice in their wardrobes, to own many garments with which to ‘surprise’ their friends. They were less interested than their mothers had been in dressing in a small number of more expensive items. Dariusz also said, echoing other furriers, that the 1970s had been a time when some Polish men had liked to wear full fur coats, but since then they had favoured subtler touches such as fur hoods and instead might buy a wife a full coat as a generous present. Dariusz continued to explain why his firm made accessories rather than fur coats by referring to how full furs were still popular in nearby states regularly spoken of as ‘less developed’ than Poland, particularly Bulgaria and Ukraine. This implied that people from these countries were in the economic and political situation in which they ‘needed’ to wear ostentatious capital to make up for their lack of social capital: From the beginning of time fur has been practical. Poland was very cold and fur was natural. Have you ever worn something made from fur? It’s very comfortable and even in strong winters you feel very comfortable. You don’t sweat. So it started from this. Then people tried to make something new, something better than what other people were making, they competed.

Throughout the sections of the fur industry where I carried out research, in a number of cities and rural settings in Poland, workers repeatedly praised fur’s capacity to keep its wearer warm without making him or her sweat. Fur’s ‘naturalness’ made it, to use the industry word, ‘breathable’. Industry workers and customers alike were prone to comparing fur to commodities such as diamonds and gold for their beauty, their value as raw materials, and perhaps for the high monetary but also high moral prices, their extraction involved. Yet the comparison made by another furrier about ten years Dariusz’s senior is more instructive for understanding discussions about how fur companies competed with one another. He analogized fur to water, saying that ‘you look at the bottles of water for sale in supermarkets and you see shelves and shelves of different brands. They all get sold, different people buy different brands, and it’s fine until one of the brands really doesn’t get customers so they have to shut down. They’re bankrupt’. The point being made here is that when something is ‘natural’ such as water or, in my informants’ estimations, such as fur, it is on the one hand an ‘easy sell’ because of its desirability to clients. But on the other hand, it is a difficult commodity from which to prosper because its naturalness makes many

Fur Families

103

competitors also deem it a good product to sell and one which can be taken from the ‘natural environment’ rather than being ‘owned’ by the person who originally harnessed it. Dariusz also commented on fur’s symbolic properties. He thought women wanted fur less and less for its practical properties and more for its symbolic value. As he put it, ‘Today, people make something else [some other textiles] but ladies still want something small, like a flower, made from fur.’ The symbolic prestige of fur made it especially suitable for passing through families. The upshot of this was that people would not buy it anew, especially not in full coat length. Not everyone I interviewed held this view. Indeed, many retailers and furriers sat or stood in front of rail upon rail of full-length coats telling me that people would always buy fur accessories and full fur coats. It is only when reflecting on interviews with Dariusz that I recognize that his story about how he changed his family’s business from a producer of full fur coats to accessories was, in the beginning at least, a story of decline: his firm’s product’s obsolescence in the marketplace. The reason I was taken aback by this is that Dariusz deftly, in both narrative and in business decisions, managed to turn what sounded to me rather like a crisis into an opportunity for the business. Dariusz’s trajectory fit well with what Danilyn Rutherford marks out as a distinctly interesting and cross-culturally aspect of family business: ‘[That] what looks like a threat [to a business] could be an opportunity’ (2010: 280; see also Yanagisako 2002; Brenner 1998). Apparent decline within an industry can spark opportunities for younger individuals to mark their place within a company through innovation. In a business context, therefore, the differences between generations could actually create complementariness rather than conflict. Mayblin (2011) follows Strathern (1988) in questioning whether the existence of difference between kin necessitates the presence of hierarchical relations, of inequality. The form of difference called upon in these instances is gender rather than generation. The divergences between these two forms of difference, and accordingly, what it means to be different from another person within one’s society in relation to either of these categories, are instructive for unpacking the ramifications of what I have described so far. The differences between people of different pokolenie, which, as I stated before, I have chosen to take as ‘generation as cohort’ (Parkin 1997), were, unlike gender differences, not equivalent to the differences between people of ‘generation as descent’, that is for example between mothers and daughters. Such a difference as this can be seen as an ongoing tension (even if it is a complementary one) between people in a given society.

104

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

What is specific about intergenerational difference as opposed to the other forms of difference people might conceptualize as existing between themselves and others? Mayblin (2011) writes of the ways in which men and women in the Brazilian village of Santa Lucia create themselves in relation to each other, experiencing relationships of complementarity even when troubled by misunderstanding and conflict. ‘Both husbands and wives must live with the fact that each represents the other’s “Fall” from grace,’ Mayblin writes (2011: 150). But in relationships between people of different generational cohorts, there is no equivalent (religious or otherwise) for the ‘fall’ that Mayblin gives as an example. In other words, there is no focus for an ongoing project in which people define themselves against each other. Instead, each generation is bonded to the era and, in particular, the political epoch in which its constituent members were born and came of age (Robbins 2013). There is ethnographic evidence, in countries other than Poland, of instances in which both those external to a generation and those belonging to it mark out its distinctiveness. Ortner’s US ethnography on ‘Generation X’ (1998) exemplifies the use of names to mark out one ‘generation as cohort’ from the next. In Kraków, the ubiquity of this kind of discourse in public spheres was evident in events such as the Muzeum Narodowe (National Museum’s) Pokolenie ’80 exhibition, which focused on Solidarność activity in Kraków, and in media tropes such as the newspaper and magazine articles on the ‘Lost Generation’, the people who were in their twenties and experiencing unemployment and the emigration of many of their peers, at the time. It was my impression that businesses embodied a more harmonious, less hierarchical understanding of pokolenie difference than did society as a whole. On a day-to-day basis, some friends and acquaintances in their twenties and thirties spoke about older people by which they meant not their own relatives but people they saw on the street, for example, in a seemingly contradictory manner. In the same breath, ‘ordinary’ older people, often spoken of rhetorically as women (politicians and clergy were a different story, see Chapter 5), were ‘extremely brave’, ‘full of so much knowledge’, ‘full of solidarity’ and yet ‘the reason why Poland doesn’t move forward’, ‘bigoted’ and ‘entitled’ (see also Robbins 2013). Multigenerational businesses, however, were based on a model of difference to which hierarchy was fairly irrelevant, making them comparable to the systems discussed by Mayblin, that is, different but more or less equal. An older person might have more experience crafting a material, the perspective that comes with observing, over a period of decades, fluctuations in markets and trends. A younger person, in contrast, was perceived to know how to appeal to younger

Fur Families

105

clients and might have had university-level business and marketing training in addition to, or instead of, instruction in the practicalities of furriership. Multigenerational businesses called upon understandings of generations both as cohort and as descent, albeit with emphasis upon the former. Being related was the reason why these people had come to work together in the first place. However, the strong emphasis placed upon furrier–client relationships, even in big companies such as that run by Dariusz, meant that the opportunity to ‘understand’ (for it was usually put in these terms) potential clients of different generations by incorporating in the company workers of different generations was valued highly. This logic might go some way to explaining why, as I detail in the following section, working with siblings was considered less prudent. In intra-generational relations, as in intergenerational relations, the social and political contexts in which others had grown up were important resources when it came to making sense of their tastes, habits and beliefs. When I asked people both inside and outside the fur industry what they thought about different configurations of family members working together, I was greeted with a fairly strong consensus that siblings who worked together were liable to fall out. Sisters Paulina (aged 35) and Agata (46) ran a business on the outskirts of the city. I gathered that their father had died, but their mother, Małgorzata, visited the shop nearly every day but ‘to oversee things’ (as Paulina put it) rather than to work. Very quickly, I learned that the sisters differed in their views about customers from overseas. This might seem a strange topic to arise quite naturally early on in an acquaintance, yet it was a starting point common to many of my first encounters with people whom I hoped to interview. My foreignness elicited long, interesting and overwhelmingly affable discussions about why people of some nationalities ‘loved fur’ while others ‘hated fur’. And so it was that I learned one of the ways in which Paulina and Agata discussed the differences between themselves, differences they attributed to their difference in age, centred on feelings about doing business with ‘foreigners’ (cudzoziemcy). Paulina said that she and her sister had discussed foreign customers at particular length after a hotel and block of self-catering holiday apartments were built minutes away from their shop. She said that she was, being a bit younger, ‘more able’ to see them as ‘business opportunities’ rather than sources of vexation or even cause for ‘paranoia’. Paulina told me that people of her age understood what foreign fur clients wanted, having met the stream of tourists who had started visiting Kraków in considerable numbers in the late 1990s. The late teens and very early twenties, when Paulina had come of age, were understood as a time at which young people, beginning to work, were particularly willing

106

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

and able to absorb new ideas about labour but also about wider truths about the world around them. Many furriers, including a retail furrier in her early forties told me, ‘Since the late 90s I’ve seen this weird thing where Germans, British people wear leather, love leather, but hate fur. It doesn’t make sense.’ The point was, according to Paulina, that being slightly younger and ‘more influenced by Unii (the EU)’ made it easier to know foreigners and to know how to sell to them. Social and political changes had happened sufficiently quickly to create gaps in understanding not only between people of different generations, those who were maybe thirty years older or younger than one another, but in siblings who had five or ten years’ age difference.

Conclusion Newsweek Polska’s praise of family businesses does not constitute a critique of capitalism but rather a belief in its potential to do good. The onus placed on using the contrasting skills of each member of a family productively is in fact highly capitalistic, an ideological stance which puts a more positive spin on worrying aspects of Polish working life such as the increasingly advanced ages to which men and women are required to work in order to survive. Family businesses are organizational units which incorporate difference in a manner comparable to Lévi-Strauss’s rendering of ‘the house’: ‘a corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name, its goods and its titles down a real or imaginary line’ (1983: 174 in Hann 2008: 148). While day-to-day talk in Kraków often stressed the konflikt pokolen (generational conflict) between Poles of different age cohorts, in a fur business context, these differences have the potential to be sites of cooperation and even of profit. At the time of my fieldwork, fur industry entrepreneurs felt anxious about the threats developing markets posed to Polish fur production. Emphasizing the ties between businesspeople and clients, possibly over extended periods of time, one of the corollaries (or perhaps even objectives) of the promotion of family businesses was the shutting out of overseas companies. Individuals’ attraction to entrepreneurship, either through a new business or through innovating in a family business, was partly the product of ‘pushes’ away from employment in large companies, exemplified by the phenomenon of the ‘bad boss’. Few of those I knew in Kraków, like few anthropologists (cf. Peletz 2001), would claim that families are a priori units of amicability, and yet I cannot

Fur Families

107

think of a single informant, working for a family business or otherwise, praising family businesses or mocking them, who did not express the assumption that kin who worked together were kinder to one another than their unrelated counterparts. The question of, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, ‘perpetuation’ is ambiguous in relation to what I have described in this chapter. Not wanting to assume that a child would grow up to be a furrier like his or her parent was at least partially attributable to the local belief that, while identifying with a family unit was very important if one is to live a moral life, individuality and strength of personality were also indispensable virtues. Personhood was not formed only by one’s parents but by institutions such as schools, universities and churches. The naturalization of striking differences between kin of successive generations and the reality that furriers seldom planned for their child to follow them into work conformed with a deeper social logic that both family life and political life were deeply unpredictable. At least in the explanations of ‘Polishness’ related to an outsider such as myself, people of all ages said that they had learned to think this way from knowing Poland’s unsettled history.

108

4

Experiments in fur

To some of my informants’ surprise, I wasn’t initially very interested in fur animal breeding or in visiting a fur farm. This was less, as some friends had queried teasingly, because the prospect of such a trip made me squeamish than because I felt it to be quite ‘another project’ from the one I was carrying out (a belief which I largely continued to hold, hence my much shorter engagements with such sites). Knowing how best to focus my research in Kraków and deciding where to go and whom to contact already sometimes felt overwhelming. Plus, the longer I was in the field, the more I sensed that my coming from the UK, a place with a reputation for its strong animal rights lobby, might negatively influence the responses I would receive should I make any efforts to access a fur farm. Media attention to fur production has often taken the form of the exposé. The very thought of fur farms conjured imagery not only of cruelty and squalor but of deception and actual or symbolic trespass: that of people who had either got into places they shouldn’t through ‘actual violence’ or by pretending to be someone they were not. Spending time with people in Kraków, however, I found that the question of how fur animals are bred was of interest to some consumers of fur, and some retailers, in part because ‘fur farming’ was perceived as a relatively recent development. It was my impression, in fact, that ‘the story of fur’ was similar to that which people perceived as the story not only of the production of goods and people’s consumption habits but of sociality more generally: ‘contemporary life’ was in some senses defined by the growth of spaces between people. I traced fur ‘to its beginnings’ (although consumers, markets, can also of course be seen as the actors who drive fur’s production) because of the interest some fur retailers took in fur farming and fur auction houses and because of the interest certain consumers, historians and fashion bloggers took in the design processes involved in fur. This chapter tells the story of what fur is and what people do with it in places that seem, if not particularly far away from Kraków in terms of

110

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

geographical distance, then quite strikingly different culturally. This is not an effort to provide a definitive ‘commodity chain’ account of fur (cf. Skov 2005; see also Roseberry 1996). What I am more concerned with is the fur industry – and fur itself – as markedly social entities. Talking to one person about fur I would receive recommendations for additional people and places to visit, sometimes in the form of a piece of headed notepaper with a name and a telephone number. This chapter outlines some of the questions an animal product studied in an urban context poses about production and nature. In the Kraków in which I did fieldwork, fur’s animalness was sometimes praised and sometimes obfuscated. Similarly, while the transformations that fur undergoes at farms and tanneries before it reaches furriers and then consumers was sometimes central to people’s understandings of what fur is, at other points, these transformations, these pasts, were a moot point. When opportunities arose for me to leave Kraków and visit some of these sites, I took them. The role of this chapter is to describe something, although necessarily partial, of the ‘bigger picture’ of fur’s production and symbolic resonances.

A textile like any other? KOPENHAGEN STUDIO Kopenhagen Studio – the creative house and marketing department of Kopenhagen Fur – is a centre of inspiration, innovation and creativity for the international fur and fashion industries. Designers, fashion houses and other creative industry figures from around the world come to Kopenhagen Studio to work with the highly skilled in-house furriers and to develop new ideas and techniques for the use of fur. Committed to bringing innovation to the fur trade, Kopenhagen Studio offers access to the finest and most extraordinary fur types in the world as well as multiple design and technique samples. (Kopenhagen Fur promotional booklet, 2010)

Twinned with Kopenhagen Studio Beijing, the Kopenhagen locale of Kopenhagen Studio was situated in a smart area of the city centre. Rails of blue, green, pink and patterned mink pelts, cut into rectangles, were in keeping with an ambience of expensive-looking, ‘contemporary’ informality. One floor of the studio was used for experimenting with fur clothing; the other was for ‘more

Experiments in Fur

111

untraditional usages of fur’ (Kopenhagen Fur website, accessed 13 October 2011). As I arrived at the workshop, one of the technicians pointed at a woman probably in her thirties flicking through a book of fur samples on the other side of the hall. ‘She’s a famous Chinese fashion designer,’ he told me. I was beckoned to look at a pair of furry stilettos. And next, at a USB stick decorated with fur, a hairy accent to a practical piece of technology. There was a pale mink baby carrier, a duplicate of a gift from Kopenhagen Fur to the Crown Prince and Princess of Denmark on the birth of their daughter in 2007, and subsequently featured I was told in several photographs of the couple in the media. These items were kept at the Studio to help visitors ‘open their minds to fur’, to ‘see beyond the fur coat’. To this end, Kopenhagen Fur invited certain fashion students to ‘play’ with fur for free. The company was aware that the cost of fur made it unsuitable for the experimentation in which fashion students are expected to engage. I examined pieces of fur that did not look like fur. One had a ‘lattice’ effect, allowing me to pull the mink fur apart to reveal diamond-shaped apertures. Others were spotted or sheared so as to occasion a zigzag veneer. The styling of these swatches of mink in ‘unnatural’ colours (‘hot’ pink or blue and black-and-white check) illustrates what Danish anthropologist Lise Skov has described as the objective of ‘treating fur as fabric, that is as any other material used in fashion by processing and surface treating it in order to achieve novel visual and tactile effects’ (2005: 13). A woman in her twenties sat embellishing one of the pelts with red, furry Chinese characters. The presence of these pelts showed that fur’s possibilities were endless when placed in the palms of creatives from around the world. The perfectly squared corners of these rectangular pelts contrasted with the oblong shape in which pelts were more commonly circulated. This made the pelts appear less ‘animal’. In this form, one could almost picture a stack of the pelts in a craft shop with squares of felt to one side and sugar paper and glue-guns to the other.

Fashionable farmers On several of my days at Kopenhagen Fur, I was told ‘where the farmers had been today’: the auction floor, the elaborately catered dining halls, the Sorting Hall, where pelts were examined with magnifying glasses and then bundled into groups, and indeed, the design studio. ‘We invite farmers to Kopenhagen Fur every year now. They have to learn about fashion. They have to learn what

112

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

sells,’ I was told. Fur industry people identifying as uninvolved with farming commented enthusiastically on the farmers’ presence at the auction house and at Kopenhagen Studio. ‘Bless them, they looked so lost,’ says one porter sitting in the workers’ canteen, the place I was told to go if I wanted to learn ‘what’s really go on’. ‘They looked pretty bored to me,’ said another porter. Not meant unkindly, these comments portray fashion and agriculture as opposite kinds of industry, a humorous juxtaposition no doubt ripe for a Hollywood ‘fish out of water’ story. The atmosphere of the auction house was in keeping with the media image of international markets being run by suited men making urgent international calls on mobile phones. This was quite different to most peoples’ pictures of agricultural milieux, farmers being imagined as working at the ‘opposite end’ of fur’s ‘commodity chain’ to fashion stylists, marketing teams and even furriers. But at the time of my fieldwork, however, this chain was tangled in such a manner as to encourage those working in these professions within the fur industry to converge at sites such as Kopenhagen Fur in order to share ideas about how to achieve their common goal of producing high-quality, ‘ethical’ and profitable fur. The possibility of ever-increasing contact between workers from nominally ‘separate’ stages of fur production is significant because of its ramifications for fur as an industry that has historically been thronged with ‘middle-men’, whether smuggling na lewo (lit. ‘on the left’, meaning ‘black market’) in Sovietoccupied Poland or, more recently, as fur industry professionals who have had to act as intermediaries involved in more official kinds of trade. But at the time of my fieldwork, some of my interlocutors believed that these middlemen were beginning to be ‘cut out’. I was told that Poland’s accession to the EU made it easier for international traders to access Polish fur. Reflecting on the changes that have befallen the Polish fur industry since Poland joined the EU in 2004, a retail furrier told me: On the one hand, it makes it easier to work with our customers from other European countries: documents, everything. It’s much easier, we don’t have to queue at the border for many hours. From the other side, our competitors from the other countries, from Germany, it’s easier for them to go to the farms [in Poland]. The other thing is we [Polish fur agents] would collect the skins from the farms, and we would sell them. Before the EU, it was very difficult for foreign fur agents to go from farm to farm themselves. They came here [to my business] and they would buy from us. Now everything is open and very easy, they can do it themselves, they don’t need us. So it’s changed but on the one side, it’s better, on the other side it’s worse.

Experiments in Fur

113

Lise Skov describes the rebalancing of power and influence within the fur industry that took place at the end of the twentieth century: Until the 1980s, skin dealers had considerable leeway in determining prices since their customers were manufacturers who had no way of knowing at which prices the skins had been traded at auction, and even if they did, had no alternative route for obtaining skins. Auction houses and wholesalers, for their part, were buying skins from trappers and farmers who had no alternative sales channels and little information about prices of the end product. Since then, the distance – in terms of social connections, knowledge and price- between different steps in the production process has increasingly been closed. (Skov 2005: 21. Emphasis added)

Animals made from data I interviewed a man who had analysed the sales figures from an international fur auction. He explored how value was linked to correlations in traits such as fertility, fur colour and pelt size. The more animals about which a researcher possessed data, the greater the accuracy they could reach. Talking about his relationship with these records, he told me: It takes time of course. You have to collect as many records as possible. Thousands, millions – millions are even better. The more the better. This is better because the more observation, the higher accuracy of genetic merit estimation. So sometimes you start at the beginning [looking at records and] it takes 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 years [to analyse them].

I was told that Polish fur farmers’ records go back to the mid-twentieth century. The socialist era was described by some Polish people working in the fur industry as a ‘golden age’ in Polish fur farming. Being a nationalized industry meant that fur farmers were financially ‘taken care of ’ (as one furrier in his sixties remembered it). It had also meant the government demanded handwritten records of the animals being produced and of the pelts being sold abroad. Talk of these records sparked scepticism in one Krakowian friend: ‘But if they’re socialist records, they’re going to be made up, right?’. More recent records were, however, extremely serviceable to certain researchers. I was told, for example, ‘I am lucky [because] in Poland we have farms, there are farmers who have computer databases where they have recorded observations since the beginning of the 1990s so I have quite a big database … almost twenty years … so we have a lot of them so we can use the data for this

114

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

kind of study.’ His self-proclaimed ‘luck’ reminds us of his own objective of being able to get access to animals, both in actual and data form, in order to carry out the analyses he needed to publish in academic journals. The ‘observations’ he mentioned were phenotypes or ‘observable features’. He explained his rationale for studying phenotypes in fur animals thus: There is no direct way to measure the genetic merit … I am not able to do it, at least for fur … maybe in the future, but not now. For furs you have to record the phenotypes … ‘observable traits’ and put them into the computer database and then you can use the statistical methods in order to transform, in order to recalculate the observations into, well, those genetic merits because there are some statistical methods because you know what part of those characters is determined by genes, what part is determined by the environment because there are usually both environment and genes, both are influenced by the phenotype.

Phenotypic evaluation enables scientists to rank animals without genetic evaluation. The phenotypes observable in a fur animal also dictated the price the pelts stripped from these animals got at auction. Rebecca Cassidy’s Newmarket racehorses are also judged by their physical traits, notably their ‘hocks [which are] … sort of knees in reverse’ (2002: 151). A resemblance here between a young horse and, if it were successful, its sire increases the former’s value. Cassidy points out, ‘It is not the appearance of the yearling that is being praised … the resemblance is desirable because it is treated as evidence of the sharing of something far more significant: ability, but equally as important, it is evidence of heredity itself ’ (2002). Phenotypes’ significances in these two examples differ, therefore, in so far as racehorses’ phenotypes are the key to something else that is prioritized over appearance, ability, while appearance is significant in itself in fur animal breeding.

Evaluation of traits and selective breeding Here is the process in a second scientist’s words: At the end of the season, the animals are evaluated, they have to be assessed. So there are classifiers, some kind of judge, who comes to the farm and evaluates each animal – traits that are the most important and valuable for the farmers. They do the point scale from 1 to 5. One is the worst, five is the best and each trait is evaluated. For example the fur density can be evaluated and if the animal gets 5 it means the density is perfect, if it gets one then the density is very, very

Experiments in Fur

115

poor. And two or three, middle. Let’s say you evaluated five traits. Each trait can be evaluated on the scale from one to five, so altogether the maximum an animal can get is 25. So each trait is evaluated and after that, after evaluating 100 animals, let’s say. You can prepare the ranking list, depending on the number of points the given animals scored. So the highest number of points, the best animal. The lowest, the worst one.

Farmers also tried to breed some ‘negative traits’ out of the population. Correlation between certain aesthetic and behavioural traits was a cause of concern. Arguably, the most interesting correlation was between poor fur quality, poor fertility and ‘aggressiveness’. Unsurprisingly, aggressive animals were undesirable because ‘when you have to do the veterinary treatments, injections, it’s hard to catch aggressive animals, especially foxes, and they can bite you’. Furthermore, aggression made an animal more likely to damage its pelt, by scratching itself on a cage’s bar, for example. Less predictable was data hypothesizing that aggressive animals had poor quality fur, low density of hair, and only small pelts and poor fertility. As one scientist put it, ‘The [aggressive] females, they have lower mothering ability and they produce smaller litter sizes, so that’s the reason why aggressive animals are usually eliminated from breeding.’ The introduction of computer databases in Polish fur farms in the early 1990s had been preceded by the pioneering use of the programmes in Scandinavian states. The scientist continued by linking the Scandinavian states’ statuses as leaders in the fur production world with their wealth and with their pioneering use of computers and farming programmes. He said: Finland is the leading country for [fur] farming. Those Scandinavians are wealthy, they are rich so they started to record in the computer databases a little bit earlier than in Poland. Because of our communist past we are poorer … we are not as rich as Scandinavian countries so they started to record [earlier than us]. Of course, the information was recorded [pre early 1990s] but not in computer databases, just on paper. So it was difficult to use this information. It took a lot of time to transfer the information from paper to computer database.

He attributed these technological advances to the official breakdown of the socialist system of governance: In the beginning of the 1990s the Iron Curtain fell down so the new technology came to Poland, so the computers are now available for everybody, so they were also installed in farms and farmers started to record the information, putting the information on the animals for example into databases.

116

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

It was common for people to talk about access to computers in national terms and as a material and perhaps ideological emblem of nominal political and economic transformation. Software, however, was much more of a symbol of institutional identity. ‘This kind of software is not available everywhere like Windows,’ he said. He continued, ‘You need a special license so you have to order it.’ The software for recording fur traits was designed by research scientists. ‘And at the beginning of the 1990s there was as a group of people involved in this type of research so they started to programme the software for recording the data and that’s why this recording started in the 90s. Because the technology, the computers, were freely available, and because the software for this appeared on the market.’ He added as a caveat, ‘I’m talking about Poland all the time, of course. Because in Denmark, in Norway, in Finland for example the computer databases were introduced in the 80s, 10 years earlier than in Poland.’ This discussion of fur animal genetics technology illustrates the exaltation of Scandinavia within the fur world. It also exemplifies the belief found in every sector of the Polish fur industry (in my experience) that socialism had ‘slowed down’ the Polish industry. This contrasts with an influential fur retailer’s contention, recorded earlier in this book, that Poland’s accession to the EU had cut out the Polish fur industry’s middlemen, ‘speeding up’ the processes by which foreign clients, usually rhetorically painted as either Germans or people from non-specified Scandinavian countries, could acquire Polish fur to sell outside of Poland.

Relatedness and farming ability Danes, I was told, had farmed mink for longer than Poles, giving them more time to develop a particularly strong reputation. While ‘good genes’ were the necessary foundation for good fur animals, the extent to which geneticists could help farmers was limited. The outcome of the people described in this chapter’s labour was accordingly dependent upon a mixture of luck and farmers’ skill managing the environmental factors to which the fur animals were subjected. Farmers who ‘loved their animals’ produced the ‘best fur’. A fur agent with a knowledge of the Polish industry told me:

Experiments in Fur

117

If you really have a good farm you can make a lot more money. Fur is the best business at this moment. I cannot imagine another business where you can make 100 per cent profit. That’s what’s happening in Poland: a lot of people who see these profits, go and enter into the business. But you have to have a background, a connection and you must like to work with animals. I’ve never seen anyone be successful who didn’t like to work with animals. You have to observe them and to look at them and take care of them and if you want just to make money out of it, it doesn’t work. It’s a lot of feeling. You can buy the genetics, you can buy the cages … but then you have to work with it, that’s where your profit is.

Note the weight placed on the idea that successful farmers ‘liked working with animals’. In other instances, people would talk about how fur farmers had to love animals. When they said this, they would look me in the eye and raise their voices so as to emphasize what they were saying and to show that they were countering what they felt to be my expectation that fur farmers in fact ‘hated’ animals, as evidenced by their rearing of animals they planned to kill. One man told me that most fur farms in Poland had been running for ‘a few generations … it’s inherited. Usually the father is the farmer and then the son, and so on’. Several anthropologists, notably Rebecca Cassidy (2002), have argued compellingly that one can learn about local beliefs about human kinship through delving into ideas about heredity in animals. The idiom of family is particularly apt because ‘love’ is seen as a skill. And this precludes ‘being in it for the money’. Consider the fur agent’s words about father-to-son inheritance: Last year I met a Polish fur farmer who was seventy-six years old. And he stopped [farming] because he said ‘ok, I like it, it’s a nice job, I’m earning money with it but I’m going to stop because I’ve had enough’. And that’s a bit of a problem. If you don’t have a new generation, the next generation, it’s going to stop. Some families take it over but generally there is a decrease in farmers, and more mass production of skins.

For an older man, leaving a business without an heir constituted ‘quitting’ but passing on the business to a son did not. I got the sense that older men carried on farming if their sons wanted to inherit the business one day. As one industry worker put it, ‘Many people go on if the sons want them to. On the other hand you see that highly educated people, the sons, doctors for example, they say “I can go to Norway or to Holland or to England and then I earn more money [than farming in Poland]”.’ This culture of farmers feeling obligated to their descendants contrasted with ethnographic examples from elsewhere of rural families’ youngest sons, caricatured as being ‘forced’ by obligation to remain with their ageing

118

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

parents while sisters and elder brothers are allowed to pursue a range of careers and to emigrate (e.g. Scheper-Hughes 1979). Ideas about age and descent also coloured projections for developments in fur breeding. I was told that those working with fur had reached an impressive level of accuracy in their selective breeding practices. Their next objective was to quicken the selective breeding process, being able to identify good animals earlier. A scientist explained: [At the moment] you have to wait until the animal is older, until the fur is mature and then you can evaluate the traits. But now people would like to know if a given animal is good or not during embryonic development. So you can take the sample or one cell of animal and in each cell you have a nucleus and DNA and you can take the DNA from the nucleus and find the genetic marker and the genetic marker can be correlated with the high quality of fur. So now we have the biotechnology era. The 21st century, well it’s going to be the biotechnology era, at least people say that.

Geneticists were careful to talk in terms of ‘estimation’ rather than of ‘certainty’. The possibility of breeding success was increased by the presence of a ‘good environment’, which was perhaps a tactful way of saying a ‘skilled farmer’. I can see a parallel, then, with how fur industry people talked about the inheritance of the qualities required in good fur farmers. Being from a family of fur farmers gave a man (for it was always talked of in terms of men) a ‘feeling’ for the animals. This made the son less likely to have entered into the industry for ‘a quick buck’, as one agent put it. But at the same time, it was considered dangerous to assume that sons would inherit their father’s skill or indeed desire to farm.

Pelting season I started following fur production after it became clear that the beginning of fur’s commodity chain was central to some of my informants in Kraków’s understandings of what fur was. I emailed a past interviewee who had mentioned he had loose connections to a farm and asked if he knew how I could visit one. He told me that some of his colleagues were planning a visit and that I could go with them. Many of the industry people I met used the banner of ‘early winter’ to denote when pelting took place on farms. Fur animals were generally born in March or April. Their first coat, the coat that reached maturity in the summer months,

Experiments in Fur

119

was light, fine-haired and somewhat fluffy. With a few exceptions, this was not the kind of fur fashion designers and furriers wanted for their garments. At the Kopenhagen Fur auction in 2010, few lots were labelled ‘summercoats’. In contrast, an animal’s winter coat was thick and dense, almost to the point of coarseness. It was, as several fur industry people put it, ‘better quality’. In November, then, I took a train from Kraków to the city nearest to the farm. I asked the hostel receptionist to book me a taxi from the hostel to a supermarket car park just outside of town for 4.00 am. I had been emailed me these instructions by my contact’s contacts, who would pick me up on their way to the farm. The receptionist looked at me with suspicion as he telephoned the local taxi firm. When our party of four arrived at the farm, we were greeted by the farmer. We sat in an outhouse; we drank coffee and ate breakfast. Over the next three hours in a concrete barn, I watched, and dodged awkwardly, two teams of workers. The first were researching the animals; the second were the seasonal workers employed to help with the pelting season. Both worked with pauses, in time with their fellow ‘team members’, but also rhythmically so as to neither slow down nor rush the other team. I did not get the opportunity to talk at length with the workers and so the description I give of them is a partial one. My understanding of their situation is based largely on the researchers and breeders whom I accompanied’s interpretations of their positions. The group I was with went first, weighing and measuring the dead (‘euthanized’, as it was put to me) animals. They heaved one animal onto a plastic table that looked like garden furniture. They numbered each animal with pieces of laminated card the size of postage stamps. They then weighed the animal with a set of metal scales and measured the length of its ears, back legs and front legs. They noted these figures on A4 paper-sized tables made with a word processing programme. When, at the end of the day, I saw that they had some spare printouts and asked if I could have one, I was told, ‘Ok! But remember it’s just rough!’ The phenotypic features they had planned to record included length of back legs and length of ears. After measuring each animal, they took it in turns to pick up the animal by its hind legs and set it back down on the floor to be pelted. Having gently deposited the creatures, they would sometimes shake their wrists so as to relieve stiffness, puffing a little breath into the cold barn to signal fatigue. Two middle-aged men and an older woman made up the second team to handle the animals. Their job was to skin, or ‘pelt’, the animals. The first man ran a knife down the stomach from the muzzle, using sawdust to loosen the skin.

120

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

The skin peeled away quickly, needing extra attention at the paws, where a knife was sometimes used again. The next man in line wore a navy blue, woollen hat pulled down over his ears. He collected each pelt from his colleague and fed it through a press engineered to remove flesh. This machine, powered by a metre-high turbine, generated a roaring that meant the scientists had to raise their voices when recording the animals’ measurements and sex. It was only apparent that the radio was playing when the man paused his machine in order to make a joke with his male colleague or to sweep the floor. The sound of the machine removing meat was punctuated by a discussion program detailing conspiracy theories about the death of the Polish president Lech Kaczyński in a freak airplane accident over Smolensk six months earlier in one break and by the sound of Motown the next. The final member of the team was a woman who was perhaps in her late fifties, who sat on a plastic garden chair facing the wall while cutting the pelt more delicately, making it the necessary thinness for tanning. Wearing a long apron over some warm sports clothes and a strength band around her wrists, she pulled each raw pelt over an upright metre-long wooden post, a foot-long, inch-thick brass needle protruding from its tip. The place on the pelt that previously surrounded the muzzle was fixed around the needle, which now resembled a metal tongue. Working with a knife the length of her hand, the woman picked at the bits of the pelt with greater precision than the machine could allow. On completing each pelt, she laid her work in a pile on the floor to be tanned in an upstairs room in the farm building. The weighing, measuring and recording of the animals’ phenotypes left no time to chat. The researchers worked quickly, speaking in a mixture of figures and short exclamatory sentences. Break time, when we snacked in the kitchen next to the tannery, and the long car journey each way, and the dinner we ate on the way back to the city were, however, full of comments. Animal welfare, apprenticeship, species and comparison with domestic animals stood out as recurrent topics. Sitting in the farm kitchen situated next to the tannery, sipping on thick coffee and eating paluszki, one of our party, a man with experience both in science and in commercial breeding, told me about the workers we had been with in the pelting shed. They were seasonal workers from an employment agency from the nearest town, brought in solely for the pelting season. He told me that they were paid 10 zloty per hour. From this, our conversation segued into exegesis of why no one wanted to work in agriculture ‘these days’, why the people

Experiments in Fur

121

pelting the animals were seasonal workers and why they were past middle age. ‘These days’, said the breeder, ‘young people just want to work in shopping malls. They’re not interested in farms.’

Learning to look at animals Cristina Grasseni’s (2004) work on dairy breeders in the Italian Alps uses ‘skilled vision’ (inspired by Ingold’s ‘enskillment’ 1993) to explain the local belief that prowess is passed from generation to generation through ‘apprenticeship’ about what makes a good cow. The notable aspect of this type of processual skill transfer (as opposed to knowledge-transfer) is that ‘among cattle breeders, vision certainly plays a paramount part: not as a disembodied “overview” from nowhere, but as a capacity to look in a certain way as a result of training’ (2004: 41). Understanding this ‘skilled vision’, writes Grasseni, is essential to comprehending ‘how breed experts inscribe their judgment onto paper of electronic forms for cattle evaluation’ (2004: 42). I found this dynamic similarly observable in farmers’ and scientists’ processes of recording fur animal phenotypes. Particularly suggestive, then, was the prominence of observing and judging phenotypes within enactments of professional hierarchies. Conducting fieldwork in a clinic – with humans – Shaw witnessed junior registrars’ eager ‘diagnostic performances’ (2003: 39). Perhaps surprisingly, given the contrast in these scenes’ respective contexts, this phrase springs to mind too when I remember breeders’ and scientists’ discussion at the farm. After finishing collecting data, two of our party stretched their legs by going to walk through the rows of caged foxes on the land next to the barn. Doing this, they shared their opinions on the animals’ appearances. ‘Take a look at this one, Sir. This one’s a really vivid shade of red,’ said a younger man, gesturing to one of the animals. But his senior colleague replied, ‘Not compared with this beautiful one over here. This one is red like fire. A bunch of pelts like this sold at auction for a crazy amount last month.’ This example is important because it demonstrates the manner in which hierarchy is factored into ability to judge phenotypes. The senior man’s allusion to fire is one example of when other things in ‘the natural world’ provided the vocabulary for deciding on the merits of an animal’s traits. Money too constituted an important genre of language deployed for talking about the animals. White animals were particularly valuable because they were easy to dye unusual ‘fashion colors’ such as pink. When walking past

122

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

a white fox, the same man exclaimed, ‘A snow-white one of these fetched a huge amount at auction a while ago!’. I view this partially as the upshot of the emphasis on ‘working backwards’ through a commodity chain in fur farming, from consumption to production. Remember that some research seeks to discover which traits make animals valuable at international auction. Grasseni perceives farmers’ working backwards from auction figures to have a profound impact on local judgements of appearances. Quite momentously, ‘international standards and market trends eventually have an impact on local views of what makes a beautiful cow’ (2004: 43). In both the cases of fur animals and cattle, breeders work by example. While they may not have the champion pedigree ideas of, say, racehorses (see Cassidy 2002), colours and prices individualize exceptional animals, lodging them in farmers’ and researchers’ memories.

‘I don’t deal with that’ One researcher conceptualized fur production as partly a form of animal population control. ‘What people don’t realize’, he said, ‘is that if foxes aren’t killed, they will travel further and further into the cities, which the public will hate’. This was especially the case because Poland’s foxes were healthy. ‘If you have a rabies epidemic, you don’t need to worry about controlling the population through killing,’ he said. ‘But we don’t have rabies at the moment.’ He was of course talking about arguments relevant to wild animals rather than to the farmed animals he studied. The British pro-fox hunting lobby uses a similar argument, one that pleads ‘animal population management’ (Fukuda 1997; Howe 1981). The scientists with whom I spoke identified as neither ‘for’ nor ‘against’ fur. Instead, they focused on the particularities of their involvement. Describing the data collection process, one scientist told me, ‘Foxes, mink, raccoon dogs, etc., etc. … they are killed, usually electricity is used, because it must be a humane way of killing animals, you cannot do it a cruel way … well I don’t deal with that [anyway].’ On one occasion when I met with people ‘at the breeding end’ of fur, however, they did talk about fur in relation to vegetarianism and veganism. In doing so, they highlighted inconsistencies in the ethical and consumer choices of some of those without the professional involvement in fur that they had themselves. As well as making the commonplace argument that people objected to fur clothing but not to leather because fur animals were ‘cuter’ than

Experiments in Fur

123

leather-producing creatures, some of the scientists smiled wryly at the mention of the bean cutlets sold in vegetarian restaurants, patties shaped so that they vaguely resembled the pork cutlets that were a popular, if rather ‘traditional’, dish in Poland at the time of my fieldwork.

Nutria and dogs: The changing category of ‘fur animal’ The issue of consistency influenced another topic of conversation commonplace in all quarters of the fur industry: the differences between species of fur animal. I was told about raccoon dogs, which had ‘originated from China’, although other sources state that this particular creature had been introduced to the wilderness of USSR territories (Cherkasskiy 1988; cf. Roth and Merz 1996: 192). But the animal most fervently associated with socialist-era provisioning was the nutria, a river rat apparently native to South America. A scientist told me about how the nutria triggered memories of how it was bred in socialist Poland – namely, of people breeding them in their homes, of the bathtubs turned into waterholes for the creature that needs a marshy habitat; of the large amounts of vegetables they consumed. This scientist’s views echoed those of a furrier who had begun his business through home-based breeding, tanning and modelling of fur in the 1960s: the nutria was far from an ideal fur animal because its coarse fur meant that one had to pluck the top layer to get to a softer, silkier, underfur suitable for clothing. On top of this, nutria were ‘badtempered’ creatures, a dangerous trait given that they had notably sharp teeth. As the scientist put it, ‘Once their jaw clamped down, there was no way of getting them to let go.’ These attributes no doubt contributed to the fact that nutria were seldom used in Poland when I was doing fieldwork. They were associated with the socialist era, a relic. The ways in which sociopolitical and economic changes influence which creatures inhabit the category of ‘fur animal’ resonate with existing anthropological work on species, notably Cassidy and Mullin’s thesis that ‘[how people distinguish between species of animal] is a perpetual problem of how to carve up the world that has been answered differently at different times and in different places’ (Cassidy and Mullin in Alter 2007). Consonant with this line of thought, a notable proportion of anthropological literature tackling ‘human-animal relations’ unpacks the concept of anthropomorphism (e.g. Candea 2010). Anthropomorphism did not frame the scientists’ observations about the kind of thing fur is as much as what might be called ‘domestimorphism’: the attribution

124

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

of  pet-like or domesticated  qualities to farmed fur animals. On five or six occasions during my fieldwork, friends told me in person, by text message or email, ‘Today/yesterday/the other week, I saw an old woman wearing a fur coat while walking a dog and I wondered what you would think of that!’ These were pieces of chit-chat, but they exposed the similarity between fur animals and pet dogs. ‘How did you get involved with working with fur animals in particular?’, I asked one scientist. ‘Well’, he said, ‘I had wanted to work with dogs, you know domestic dogs, but their owners are very protective of them. They don’t like having them take part in research …’

Conclusion Fur clothing’s animal origins rendered it ‘natural’ and ‘classic’ because animals are themselves ‘natural’. One question that arises from the situations described in this chapter concerns what the people who helped me with my research made specifically of the farming of fur animals. Those supportive of the fur industry and, indeed, those who were part of it conceptualized farmed animals as equally ‘natural’ as ‘wild’ animals, of the sort that would originally have been trapped prior to, and at the beginning of, fur’s industrialization (see Wolf 1982). The collective remembering of a bygone era of wild fur animals being trapped was sufficient for fur animals to be considered as a natural resource for humans to mine. Allied to this way of thinking was, as illustrated at multiple points in this interlude – my geographic and thematic departure from Kraków – the important tenet that men who farmed fur ‘loved’ the creatures they cultivated, a dynamic understood to incorporate respect and knowledge rather than cruelty and opportunistic commerce. While the data in this chapter has shown ideas of genealogy, masculinity and nationality to matter in fur farming (see also Cassidy 2002), and for fur industry people to chart Polish history through developments in the business, I suggest that the strangeness of the ‘fur animal’ category lies in its status as an umbrella term for many different species of animals and its historical contingency. The fur animals in this chapter are homologous not only to humans but to fur animals’ ‘cousins’ (as one scientist put it to me) – domestic dogs and cats – and to data, figures and money. Farmers, scientists who work with animals and some fur retailers alike had it in their best interest for ‘beautiful’ and valuable fur to be produced. At the time

Experiments in Fur

125

of my fieldwork, this shared prerogative had resulted in collaboration between the members of these professions. This, along with the double significance of fur phenotypes as indicators of both genetic material and the actual value of the animal’s pelt, gave fur a commodity chain that did not so much resemble a chain as it did a knot.

126

5

An excess of the normal

In Kraków, I often heard those who disapproved of fur – whether ‘card-carrying’ animal rights advocates or minimally invested friends imparting off-the-cuff remarks – condemn it as a ‘luxury’. I was intrigued to learn that fur’s luxury status was not diminished by its mundanity: a material seen all over shops, streets, squares, churches and cafes during the cold months and rarely seen as the preserve of the very rich. When discussing this apparent contradiction with friends and interviewees who were critical of fur, however, I learned that it was this very mingling of the opulent and the routine that had led fur to embody what some saw as a ‘problem’ with Krakowian or even Polish society.1 Pulling up an etymological root of luxury – ‘excess’ – I came to interpret this complaint as referencing a perceived ‘excess of the normal’. ‘Fur as scandalous luxury’ hardly constitutes an emergent genre. From Polish animal rights organizations’ webpages where, at the time of my fieldwork, the emboldened phrase ‘the price of luxury’ expounded photographs of caged mink, to the subgenre of 1980s UK anti-fur posters in which a woman who wore fur was a ‘rich bitch’ (see Emberley 1998: 31), the poisonous combination of the unethical and the elite is by now a familiar anti-fur trope in many places where fur is controversial. In Kraków, charges of luxury levelled at fur were often themed upon the question ‘What’s the need for fur in this day and age?’ These rhetorical queries were sometimes expressed with bitterness, at other times with a gentle curiosity about the ethical and aesthetic subjectivities of others. Either way, these denouncements presented luxury as a matter of time, as an innately ‘transient’ category (see Berry 1994: 17; Crowley & Reid 2010) whose membership is dictated by the socio-economic and political context of the moment. As many anthropologists have pointed out, to talk of Poland as if it were a homogenous entity clear of regional, urban–rural or class-based difference would be both misleading and blind to the actuality that, as sometimes arises in discussions about ‘Polska A’ and ‘Polska B’, the ways of life and opportunities present in different parts of the country are strikingly different. However, as is shown in this chapter, ‘Poland’ was a powerful political and moral idea for many of my informants and one spoken of particularly often when they were critiquing what they saw as unfair distributions of power in both national politics and in ‘everyday life’.

1

128

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

I have already stated that the etymological nuance of luxury found in the notion of ‘excess’ was particularly poignant in Krakowian admonishments of fur. What I wish to claim now is that the nature of this excess was two fold. Firstly, it denoted fur’s status as a commodity that has transitioned from ‘needed thing’ to ‘thing of desire’. To covet fur, in other words, had ceased to be ‘understandable’ or ‘practical’ at a certain point in the past. After this point, humans’ inclination for fur had prevailed for too long: it was excessive. This threshold was often spoken of as having been navigated after state socialism, a period that young people often associated with both fur clothing and restrictions in consumer choice. But also, and without contradicting this association with socialism, the end of fur’s permissibility was located as much more distant than the late twentieth century, prompting the author of one Polish animal rights organization’s anti-fur webpage to point out by way of appeal to common sense: ‘We no longer live in caves!’ Secondly, fur symbolized an ‘excess of the normal’ by exemplifying what many young people saw as a preference in Polish everyday life for ‘normality’. This was writ large as dependence upon institutions such as ‘the family’ and the Roman Catholic Church (see Mandes & Rogaczewska 2013; Pasieka 2015). This chapter has two main aims. Firstly, it is an attempt to understand the grounds on which fur possesses ‘resonances’ (Tarlo 2007) with Polish concerns about power and difference. Secondly, it seeks to open up discussions about ‘luxury’ as a point of convergence for material culture, politics, kinship and relatedness. Contrary to the easily made assumption that luxury is above all else a cipher for the influence of minuscule elites, ‘the 1%’, what emerges in this chapter is the depth of feeling affected by the power of ‘the ordinary’ (Miller & Woodward 2010), which, it is argued, is, in a Polish context, materialized in fur. Anthropologies of Poland that explore what it means to belong to faith or sexuality-based minorities necessarily often address them as standalone issues (e.g. Mizielińska 2001; Kościańska 2008a). At the time of the fieldwork on which this book is based, faith and sexuality were, along with gender, generation and nationality, forms of difference that were frequently evoked in fur critiques. And yet what came across particularly strongly when people discussed fur with me in Poland was their tendency to discuss difference through broad categories: ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, ‘mainstream’ and ‘countercultural’ or ‘alternative’. One of the things that material culture does is connote difference. Clothing (fur or otherwise) was a material facade that one assumed in order to encounter

An Excess of the Normal

129

and be encountered by others, most of whom were strangers in the way that is usually the case in urban areas. What one wore was no less than a visible manifestation of personhood. In Kraków, people’s social and psychic allegiances centred not only on their homes but, in ‘a city of a hundred churches’ (Kubica 2009: 133), on places of worship, cafes and bars, and outdoor spaces such as parks and squares (Magee 2015). The everyday political importance of observing ‘ways of being’ (sposób bycia) came to the fore when friends and acquaintances spoke of a particularly evocative and oft-mentioned idiom for discussing difference in Kraków: street life. ‘Walking down the street’, several people in their twenties and thirties told me, ‘in other places [i.e. in some other countries] there are four, five, six ways of being; in Poland, there is only one’. That ‘normality’ finds a persistent dialectic in ‘luxury’ is a recurrent theme in work on Central and Eastern Europe. Krisztina Fehérváry, in her arresting work on material culture in middle-class postsocialist Hungary, discusses how, in the 1990s, consumption practices played a key role in the ‘discourses of the normal’ (2002), that men and women deployed in order to establish themselves as citizens of a material world of European, bourgeois, ‘modernity’. When speaking with Fehérváry, homeowners demurred from acknowledging the glamour of commodities such as their state-of-the-art ‘American-style’ kitchens (2002: 370; see also Gronow 2003). They insisted that they could scarcely even imagine a humbler alternative to these fittings and fixtures, that they were not luxurious but merely ‘normal’. Some scholars provide historical rationales for this normality–luxury dialectic. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, in their evocatively titled edited volume Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (2010), puncture stereotypes of life under socialism as materially and psychically ‘grey’. Pertinent to this chapter, Crowley and Reid pick out fur as a commodity which, alongside ‘champagne, palaces, and hunting [was a] persistent motif in communist discourse throughout the history of Eastern European socialism’ (2010: 18). In the same volume, Anna Tikhomirova discusses the practices that surrounded fur for women of different classes in Brezhnev-era Russia. Tikhomirova’s postscript detailing fur’s place in a postsocialist rather than Soviet context particularly resonates with my argument that fur critique in Kraków often situated luxury as ‘an excess of the normal’. She writes: ‘As one respondent – a Moscow resident born in 1961 – recalled “Nowadays everybody wears fur coats, and, to stand out from the masses, you need not to wear one”’ (2010: 305). Influential studies of clothing practices are often notable for their insights into intimate affective and tactile engagements with clothes (e.g. Tarlo 1996; Clarke

130

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

& Miller 2002; Crăciun 2014 a,b; Allerton 2007). This chapter, in contrast, is about people’s relationships with clothing that they neither wear nor approve of. What follows describes how fur can be connected to personal, familial and political experience in a manner that is intimate but not tactile. As Emma Tarlo’s (2007) analysis of the hijab in multicultural London exemplifies, clothing and dress practices possess various and complex meanings both to those who wear them and to those who do not.

Luxury in context The eighth annual Kraków ‘Day without Fur’ (Dzien bez Futra) was held on 25 November 2010, centring, as lamp post-affixed posters had advertised in the preceding week, on a demonstration beginning at Mały Rynek (‘The Small Square’) at 5.00 pm. Darkness had already descended over this spot set apart from the Rynek Głowny (‘The Main Square’) by twenty metres or so of cobbled paving; a kebab shop; a large building housing the entertainment megastore Empik; a branch of the French cosmetics chain, Sephora; a shop selling customized teddy bears; and stalls selling various pretzels, boiled sweetcorn and magazines. Protestors, mainly in their twenties and thirties, held up banners displaying anti-fur messages. A few drummed or performed ‘poi’, a performance art originating from the Maori, during which flaming tethered weights were swung from ropes around either side of the performer’s head. Other supporters handed out leaflets. ‘VICTIMS OF LUXURY!’ read one felt-tipped placard. This victimhood possessed religious overtones. Znicz, the vividly coloured candles used to commemorate the dead on All Souls’ Day (see Kubica 1986) were placed on the ground. The feeling that fur animals were killed only for their pelts, with much onus placed on ‘only’, is crucial to understanding why both anti-fur activists and people who wore fur alike saw fur as ‘a luxury’. Not only had the animals been ‘martyred’ or ‘victimised’ in the name of human consumer desires, the substantive part of their bodies, comprising organs, flesh and blood, ‘the interior’, had been ‘sacrificed’ for the pelt, ‘the exterior’. Empatia was one of many interest groups to protest in and around Kraków’s Old Town over the course of the year. However, the notable number of fur-wearing passers-by proved the particular aptness of the frigid November street setting for their particular cause. Anti-fur campaigns also seemed especially well suited to the public protest genre when compared with Empatia’s other ‘single issue

An Excess of the Normal

131

campaigns’. ‘They [Empatia] do an annual “Fish Day” too,’ one woman told me. ‘But obviously, in Kraków, fish aren’t really a “public” issue like fur is. Fish aren’t, you know, on the street.’ In everyday life in Kraków fur was seldom associated with celebrity or utmost exclusivity. Tracie Wilson’s observation from 1990s Poland rang true when I carried out my fieldwork many years later: ‘Fur is not seen necessarily as a luxury or as a sign of decadence [to most], but as a practical solution to cold weather. For most Poles – as for many people throughout the world – the use of animals as resources for human utility goes unquestioned’ (1999: 73). Poland’s history of political and economic unrest seems relevant here. Memories and practices in a range of places that have known significant upheaval often testify to the attractiveness of the ‘normal’, the ‘ordinary’ and even the ‘boring’ (see Kelly 2008). Kraków-based historian Jan Marian Małecki draws an example that features fur from the diary entry of ‘one man from Lwow’ (2008: 249): 10 March 1945. We are in Kraków. We finally made it here the day before yesterday. When we left the station in the early morning and looked out over the streets, we were literally struck dumb. A living city! All along the pavements tenements with windows gleaming, doors and gates intact, high above snow on the roofs. Here and there normal people flitted around, in decent coats with fur collars, in shoes, galoshes, and washed. (2008: 249–250; emphasis added)

Fur, in this estimation, is conspicuous when it is absent, illustrating how ‘normal life’ is suspended during wartime. If fur is luxurious here then luxury is a matter not of abundance and superiority but rather of the absence of pathology. Instances in which consumers estimate that they ‘need’ (rather than ‘desire’ [see Berry 1994]) luxury commodities map across a provocatively broad range of sites. Consider, for example, cosmetic surgery. Dutch patients ‘do not have cosmetic surgery because they want to be more beautiful, but to become ordinary, normal, or just like everyone else’ (Davis 1995: 161 in Edmonds 2007: 374). Alexander Edmonds begins an article on Brazilian plastica with carnival director Joãosinho Trinta’s pithy statement that ‘Only intellectuals like misery. The poor prefer luxury’ (2007: 363). Reading about Edmonds’s informants, one sees that ‘the poor’ usually remain poor after receiving plastica and that it provides short-term succour from their circumstances rather than elevating them to positions of wealth or status. Poverty plus luxury does not seem to equal luxury but rather a coveted – albeit fleeting – membership of the mainstream.

132

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Noising up the normal I now wish to describe why speaking out against fur was often taken to mean speaking out against ‘the normal’. ‘You’re not a “green” (zielona) are you?’ asked a furrier whom I will call Marek. This seemed to be the potentially ‘deal-breaking’ question that could overwhelm answers to the other questions he used to gauge my harmlessness as an interviewer: Did I support animal rights? Did I own any fur? What mattered to Marek, and indeed other people with whom I found myself in similar situations, was if I was a ‘card-carrying’ activist. In urban Poland at the time of my fieldwork, all sorts of businesses (and many private homes) paid for protection from the Justus or Solid private security agencies. However, some fur businesses appeared to take extra measures to protect stock and personnel. Shop fronts were fitted with iron bars. I noticed that one furrier carried a key ring with a square centimetre-sized panic button. The degree of threat posed by activist ‘trouble’ was usually couched in terms of having a friend, or perhaps a friend of a friend, who had been ‘targeted’. These two, three or four ‘degrees of separation’ suggested that activism was creeping closer and closer to each business. Jarek, who supplied fur trim and accessories to retail businesses, told me in 2010: It started maybe 10 years ago, that’s when they [anti-fur activists] started. In my opinion they are not as active as in England, for example, and in some other countries, but of course we do hear about action from them. So some people need to scream about something. As a company we haven’t had problems but we can hear about it from other businesses. And it will happen more and more.

Indeed, many fur industry workers said that Polish animal rights activists sought to emulate North American and Western European counterparts. British people, in particular, were often said to possess an amusing tendency to anthropomorphize. This sentimentality regarding who or what was fit to be worn, who or what was fit to be a companion was, it was sometimes pointed out to me, inconsistent. How curious it was, how ironic, I was asked to consider, that ‘Brits and Germans’ took issue with fur but came on holiday to chilly Kraków swaddled in leather jackets, boots and bags. Wilson also speaks to the intermingling of fur and national identity when she describes charges that anti-fur sentiment is ‘un-Polish’: In the early nineties, older and middle-aged Poles sometimes reacted with hostility when confronted with anti-fur demonstrations. Some onlookers even doubted

An Excess of the Normal

133

that the demonstrators could be Polish. There were shouts to the young protestors to ‘Go back to studying!’ and suggestions that they ought to try working for a change. Some older Poles were angered by what they saw as the squandering of resources on a frivolous cause (Chicago Tribune, January 29, 1992). This strong reaction was likely compounded by the fact that many Poles, especially in the early 1990s, were struggling to survive in the new market economy. Some critics do not see this concern for animals as a worthwhile cause when many humans are living substandard lives. (Wilson 1999: 74, emphasis added)

In Wilson’s account, the noise made by animal rights advocates refers to the genre in general, with the subtext that those who were young in the 1990s had little to complain about compared with their elder compatriots. Jarek’s comment that ‘some people need to scream about something’ sought to undermine anti-fur thought by implying that it reveals more about its proponents’ characters than it did about the cause’s validity. Another fur industry worker explained why he did not worry about being ‘targeted’ by animal rights activists: ‘the dog that barks doesn’t bite’ (Pies, który szczeka, nie gryzie). The pervasiveness of ‘noisiness’ as an insult levelled at anti-fur protestors in these accounts is intriguing because ‘silence’ is a dominant theme in accounts of what it is like to live outside of the mainstream in Poland. Joanna Mizielińska, writing of gay men and lesbians, asserts that [the existence of] silence makes lesbian existence even more invisible. The process of coming out usually results in being stigmatized, and therefore lesbians prefer to stay in the closet … Silence strengthens silence. It seems that this vicious circle of invisibility and exclusion will never end. (2001: 293)

Agnieszka Kościańska, however, addresses ‘silence’ and difference in Poland from a contrasting angle. It is instructive, writes Kościańska, that both ‘pious Catholic women’ (2008a: 66) and Polish female members of the Brahma Kumaris group, ‘converts to a new religious movement rooted in Hinduism’ (2008a: 56), can be said to be possessed of ‘the power of silence’. Kościańska writes that this concept challenges assumptions made by Western liberal feminist discourses that conflate silence with powerlessness and therefore are ill-equipped to consider nuances such as the role attributed to silence in postsocialist contexts (see also Aretxaga 1997). In Kraków, animal rights was sometimes problematically framed as a ‘women’s issue’. Aneta, a member of an animal rights organization, said to me of resistance to animal rights discourses: Having empathy [for animals] is nothing to be ashamed of, to be afraid of. It’s also again a gender thing. Because when you think about values, the things that

134

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

are popular and praised, they’re often qualities that are associated with men. In Poland, we have an expression męska decyzja, ‘a man’s decision’, and it means ‘serious, to be made quickly without delay’ and so on. And you have babski badanie, ‘women’s work’ and it means that it’s stupid and it’s about nothing and you know … and that’s why a lot of women have problems getting into politics. And I think that these issues also influence animal issues … Animal issues seem to be connected with women, children, and so on.

The image (or sound) of women who spoke against fur and therefore spoke against ‘normal’ (and normalizing) Poland was provocative because, in Kraków, women were frequently conceptualized as possessing a pointedly quotidian form of power. I was told many times, for example, that it was women who ‘kept things going without making a fuss’. This referred, in relation to younger women, to their mastery of modern languages, working hard inside and outside of the home, as well as paying attention to their health and appearance (see also Marody & GizaPoleszczuk 2000). I was frequently told too that older women were powerful because of their experience and memories, from the gratitude owed to them by younger kin (see Magee 2015). It was sometimes stated that older women sustained the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland by planning weekend activities with kin that involved the attendance of a church service. Far from being perceived as ecclesiastical pawns, onus was placed on these women’s achievement of living in the manner they desired – morally and socially – while creating favourable circumstances for future generations to do so, too. Renderings of masculine power contrasted as strikingly ‘exceptional’, drawing on the images of supremely public figures such as Pope John Paul II, who was born Karol Wojtyła near to Kraków, Lech Wałęsa, and Jerzy Popiełuszko, an anti-communist Polish priest murdered by the Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1984 and beatified in 2010. In this section, I have cast the relationship between gender, silence and marginality as a prerequisite area for comprehending the grounds on which anti-fur activism was seen by some to challenge certain notions of ‘Polishness’. I now move from analysing verbal expressions of fur criticism to unpacking the financial and somatic meanings of eschewing animal products.

Comprehensive veganism Our main aim is to advocate a respectful approach towards other beings, which translates into a comprehensive veganism (not limited to diet). We do not forget humans, who, after all, also belong to the Animal Kingdom. Our activities include

An Excess of the Normal

135

creative and non-violent education and providing information regarding these issues. (Empatia website. Emphasis added. Accessed 12 July 2011)

‘Remembering that humans are animals too’ was an indispensable position from which to criticize fur for what it symbolized of humans’ maltreatment. Anti-fur critique sometimes segued into advocates’ statements that their aims were difficult to achieve for the same reasons that progress in LGBT rights and women’s rights was hard to actualize. However, ‘comprehensive veganism’ involved action that took the form of demonstration and education but also of consumption. This meant not purchasing fur, but it also meant synchronizing body, money and speech. Consider as an example Aneta’s account of becoming an animal rights advocate: I got involved through the Internet. I got some ideas from a story I read, and I watched television programmes about animal rights-related topics. And I decided I wanted to face this issue, the animal issue. I started looking on the Internet for this and I researched it to the extent that I thought ‘I can’t eat meat anymore’. This was in 2004 and then I researched some more and I went vegan and then I thought I wanted to do more than this ‘personal lifestyle’ and I don’t know exactly how I found a group but I joined a couple of their events here in Kraków and then I met with one of their members to learn what it’s like to be a member, blah blah blah, and then we had a meeting and I said, you know ‘I would like to join, do you want me?’ and they said yes.

Aneta’s description of her decision ‘to do more than this personal lifestyle’ is an interesting starting point for looking at how activists’ ideas about their diets and consumer habits intersected with their political activity. The fact that she refers to her ‘personal lifestyle’ including veganism rather bashfully is surprising given that many Polish animal rights discourses at the time placed the control of ‘individual choices’ at the very centre of organizations’ remits. The Empatia website, for example, stated that ‘the first thing we do is try to live our everyday lives in accordance with our principles. Work should each time be started from the beginning and the beginning is after all within ourselves’ (www.empatia.pl. Accessed 26 May 2011). Some of Kraków’s popular self-service vegetarian cafes held animal rights advocacy information evenings or displayed posters promoting Day without Fur. Their main social worth, one woman told me, was to ‘de-normalise animal products … stopping people from going for them without thinking’. Pertinent here is Asianist food scholars’ care when choosing whether to write of ‘vegetarianism’ or, instead, of ‘meat avoidance’ (e.g. Klein 2008). Friends and acquaintances frequently reminded me that although these locales served Nepalese momos rather than bigos, carrot and raisin salad rather than chicken with cabbage and

136

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

potatoes, consumption provides fickle insights into ethical positions: How could I tell the difference between vegans or vegetarians and those who patronized such cafes because of proximity to work or because of a taste for particular animal product-free dishes that punctuated an overwhelmingly meaty regimen? It was frequently asserted that older people might be ‘accidentally green’ because they were more frugal than younger Poles, consuming less meat because of insufficient pensions and because of what was referred to as a ‘socialist mentality’ which denoted people provisioning ‘as if they were rationing’. And yet being a vegetarian or a vegan could also be very expensive. Some ingredients popular in vegetarian cooking could only be purchased from pricey specialist health food shops. During an interview with an animal rights advocate I mentioned that I liked the city’s vegetarian restaurants because they provided tasty food and because they were ‘good value’ and she agreed, although without particular ardour. When, however, we walked across the Main Square after our interview had ended, she said to me, ‘You know what you were saying before about how the vegetarian cafes are affordable: they are, but maybe only for treats.’ Using ‘comprehensive veganism’ as a starting point, the preceding section has drawn attention to two distinctive facets of the animal rights argument as it was understood by some of the people I knew in Kraków. Firstly, it described how some discourses emphasized the ethical imperative of using animal rights messages to meditate on how humans treat other humans. Secondly, it drew attention to informants’ musings regarding the actuality that one of the ways in which people might ‘live’ their beliefs in animal rights is through abstaining from buying or eating meat products. In doing so, however, it drew attention to the idea that eschewal of meat was not an inherently political act, containing as it did the possibility of being vegan or vegetarian for reasons other than those proposed by animal rights movements. Such concerns with Polish national collective memory, generation and the body travel to fore in the next section, which discusses Krakowian opinions on North American animal rights organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Central to this chapter’s focus on fur, luxury and normality, these connections show fur’s complicated cross-cultural associations with women.

Fur and female bodies, or ‘late to the party’ ‘When you protest against one thing, you need to be really, really careful you do not advertise another bad thing in its place,’ Kasia told me as she flicked through

An Excess of the Normal

137

a stapled booklet composed of ten or so pieces of white A4-sized paper. She pointed at a photocopied image of a fashion model next to the words ‘I’d rather go naked than wear fur’. The fact that PETA had been founded over thirty years ago (in 1980) had given them, as it was put to me, ‘a head start’ in defining the animal rights genre. PETA was well known among young Krakowians due to the frequent use of the ‘I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur’ campaigns in fashion and celebrity magazines to illustrate stories about the female models, actors and reality television personalities starring in the advertisements. No one minded that is was a North American organization that held such sway. Rather, comments such as ‘I feel like we [anti-fur Poles] “came late to the [anti-fur] party”, and now are being made to suffer the consequences’ referenced the manner in which PETA promoted the anti-fur issue by ‘objectifying’ female bodies. Hoon Song designates PETA’s anti-fur advertisements animal rights’ ‘dominant genre’ (2010: 42): The persuasiveness of the ‘I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur’ campaign can be understood from the mutually reinforcing, multiple layers of paralleling figures: the models’ undressing, the consecrated model of PETA’s signature exposéstyle, and the photo effect of the animal icon … a fashion model rejects her clothes. The campaign is scandalous in the sense of seemingly rejecting a public persona, prestige, and power and revealing what it claims to be the hidden and unglamorous side of the personal, ‘real’ self. So even when the model in question had not been in any way linked to the fur industry in the past, her participation in the campaign is portrayed as though it were a major ‘change of heart’. (Song 2010: 50)

And yet in contrast with Song’s tableaux of consumer regret, many Krakowian friends and acquaintances thought the advertisements aimed to accentuate similarities between humans and animals, highlighting the parity between fur and human hair and testifying that to kill animals is cruel but also taxonomically illogical: a ‘category error’. The naked human’s vulnerability declares the defencelessness of animals, bare (of rights and property, of ‘a voice’) even when furry. PETA’s images were sometimes difficult to take seriously. One woman reflected on a PETA advertisement condemning fur trim, a fur-styling often subtle and ‘modern’ enough to pass without censure: ‘There was this PETA ad that showed panties and fur around them. Like, fur trim is unattractive like pubic hair is unattractive. Ewww ’scuse me!,’ she laughed. ‘I know these pictures are meant to be a bit “camp” right? But the thing I wonder is, how many people “get” [understand] camp?’

138

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

Analogous to this concern about the manner in which viewers interpret PETA’s more tongue-in-cheek outputs was apprehension about those who had been swayed by the motivations behind these images. Aneta said, ‘It’s like [PETA] are pushing this model that you’re supposed to fit into … some kind of standard. There is this message that goes along with it. You know, “go vegetarian and be beautiful, young and shapely”, like a model right? And it’s not about being a model, it’s about an attitude towards ethics.’ The buttressing of mainstream female beauty ideals was part of the same sexual and material economy as that which perpetuated the disproportionate influence of men within household provisioning decisions. Aneta told me: It is sort of like PETA are trying to address the heterosexual male like ‘he is the one who is going to be persuaded. If he is persuaded, he is going to persuade his family’. He is not necessarily the one who does the shopping, but he is the one who has the wallet, who controls the bank account, etcetera.

At the centre not ‘only’ of individual but societal and international ‘problem[s] of what to wear’ (Tarlo 1996), fur was a matter of both ethics and consumption. However, in the eyes of informants, commitment to animal rights advocacy was no excuse for the sloppy handling of another important issue: gender equality, which was generally phrased locally as ‘women’s rights’. Images of women with ‘model looks’ naked threatened this by presenting women to the viewer as ‘sex objects’ and, by extension, suggesting that it would be straight men rather than women who had the financial command to buy or to eschew fur. This might be seen as part of the larger, complex set of discourses about gendered power in Kraków to which I referred earlier in this chapter. The power that highly qualified, hardworking ‘ordinary’ women were idealized as possessing was not reflected in equal pay. The associations between luxury and sex evoked in this section are not limited to particular epochs and locations. Berry reminds readers of ‘luxury’ and ‘lechery’s’ one-time interchangeability (1994: 87). Maxine Berg, in Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain, writes of how, in the London of that time, ‘the mistress, who even more than a wife was an object of conspicuous consumption, won with “fine buckles and beautiful china”, might take the “harlot’s progress”, trading her trappings for the Bridewell jail’ (Berg 2005: 6 citing Brewer 2004: 143). Germane to this chapter, Julia Emberley argues in her 1997 monograph that, in addition to being ‘a luxury good’, in the European or North American context, fur, in its various symbolic and material forms, circulates within libidinal as well as political economies. In other words, the symbolic production of fur cannot be separated from questions of

An Excess of the Normal

139

desire such as the libidinal codification attributed to fur as a sexual fetish or the rise of the fur coat in the twentieth century as essentially a feminine fashion commodity. (1997: 4)

When I lived in Poland, fur particularly connoted neither exclusive (as opposed to ‘normal’) luxury nor sexuality, two ‘economies’ that are entwined in Emberley’s thinking. More pertinent to my argument is Emberley’s questioning of what it means for a commodity to be overwhelmingly associated with women. Fur, in the estimations of many who opposed it in Poland, was a tricky material because it symbolized the excessive pressure on women to ‘be normal’, but its most visible critics, such as PETA, often buttressed ideas about men being more financially and libidinally potent than women.

Fur and generation, or ‘the best way to communicate’ ‘No, no no no no no’, said Aneta when I asked her if many older people were involved with animal rights advocacy. She continued, ‘Here in Poland, no. I think [this is] because of the historic … the social setting, the poverty, that sort of thing. These [older] people didn’t have the opportunity to be exposed to these ideas when they were younger and then generally speaking the tendency is to think that the older you get, the less flexible you become.’ The consumption habits and tastes of older people were not uniformly conceptualized as unchanging. One young woman, for example, told me enthusiastically that she felt experiences of being older in at least more affluent areas and milieux of Poland were changing rapidly, presenting as an example her boyfriend’s grandparents’ recent trip to Asia. Nonetheless, it seemed quite widely held that the tastes one develops in their twenties and thirties – whether in food and clothes, pastimes or friends – were formative. Older women were therefore not criticized for having fur in the manner that young women were. Instead, their perceived dependence upon animal products was often described, with notable empathy, as a result of past state politics. Aneta said: When you think about the empty shelves in shops [during state socialism] and people finding a piece of ham or oranges, a sign of Christmas time or something, to a lot of people the idea of going vegetarian would be depriving yourself of something that you could get from time to time, so meat, or specialties like ham were considered to be a luxury. The associations were entirely different. So only when the shelves became full then you could change the perspective because you could choose to do it or not to do it, to buy it or not to buy it and you also

140

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

have the choice of a great variety of other things, it wasn’t meat or nothing. So I think the social … the material situation changes the perspective. [In times of shortage] you pay attention to feed your family and to take care of yourself and if you have satisfied these needs, basic needs, then you can think about others [such as non-humans]. I think it also has an impact on how vegetarians could have evolved or could not have evolved in Poland.

Aneta uses ham to exemplify how products that were, at the time of this interview, readily accessible to middle-class consumers were ‘luxury’ goods for parts of the twentieth century. Aneta implies that, historically, not halting to consider the meaning of eating animals was a consequence of working to provide for one’s family. The presumption of ‘the normal family’ (glossed as gender-normative and heteronormative) in Polish socio-economic life rankled with many of those who were critical of fur. However, for some, families and, in particular, the intergenerational bonds that constituted both families’ skeletal structures and, as affect, fleshed them out offered the best chance of redefining fur as an unacceptable luxury as opposed to a ‘normal’ material. Aneta said: The only way you can try [to de-normalize the use of animal products] is through some emotional link, like a grandson talks to his grandmother and asks the grandmother to cook something without meat and he praises her and says ‘I like it!’ You can try to make a connection right? You don’t change the situation, grandma keeps cooking but she cooks something different. Another way is to try to find something universal. So look at [animals’] suffering, ‘you know what it was like to suffer when you were younger … you lived in difficult times right?’

This form of thinking evokes the memories of suffering and sacrifice of men and women who were in their senior years around the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also speaks to the pervasive idea that making food for kin is a prime facet of Polish kinship (see Dunn 2004). The ‘emotional link’ between grandmother and grandchild refers in the first place to the desire and obligation to please kin (see Magee 2015). But it is hoped that this love is also productive, cultivating and spreading empathy and respect for condemned non-humans and calling into question their edibility. Aneta recounted how, during the 2010 presidential campaign, Polish President Bronisław Komorowski’s fondness for hunting had come under scrutiny, not only from animal rights activists but from a more general section of society who considered hunting an elitist and antiquated pastime. Subsequently, Komorowski publically agreed to give up hunting ‘at the request of his grandchildren’. However, although Aneta was happy that the Komorowski campaign had publicized anti-hunting arguments, she was hesitant to interpret this success as a sign of a

An Excess of the Normal

141

deep-seated change in attitudes towards animals. To Aneta, the actuality that it could be taken as a given that one would go to great lengths to avoid upsetting one’s grandchildren had permitted Komorowski to stop hunting without ‘stopping looking manly!’ I was told several times in various situations, ‘hunting is just such “a thing” [for elite men like Komorowski]’. György Péteri (2010), in his chapter in Reid and Crowley’s Pleasures in Socialism, discusses hunting’s embeddedness within political influence and masculine power in Hungary. Some of the men and women I knew saw a parity between hunting and fur-wearing. Hunting for sport and wearing fur were actions that were once essential but that were, to some people I met during fieldwork, now luxurious because they were no longer necessary. While it would be overreaching to argue that ‘hunting was to masculine power as fur ownership was to feminine power’, such a pattern nonetheless chimes with the observation made earlier in this chapter that, in the case of older people in Poland, power was often located with elite and perhaps famous men on the one hand and familiar and ‘everyday’ women on the other. However, fur, when spoken of in relation to luxury, was not ‘just’ an issue of twentieth-century material culture but a matter of, as one man put it to me, ‘big history … natural history’. Just as some people working in the fur business told me how criticizing fur was senseless because it had been worn ‘since the dawn of time’, those critiquing fur wondered why fur continued to be an object of desire after the advent of warm and fetching synthetic materials. Empatia, for example, sought to show that fur was no longer ‘the natural choice’ for outdoor wear. A quotation from the British mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington featured in the ‘Day without Fur’ website as evidence. Under a bold-type subheading reading ‘We no longer live in caves!’, Bonington states, ‘When someone goes on expeditions, like mine, ensuring heat is very important. I never use fur. There are many more suitable, practical and warm man-made alternatives.’ Ideas of modernity and archaism were also at the centre of anti-fur opinion and pro-fur responses. An instructive example was a 2009 controversy in the letters page of Wysokie Obcasy (‘High Heels’), the glossy pullout ‘women’s section’ of Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. After the magazine included fur garments in a fashion feature, a reader wrote a letter under the name ‘Ana’, lambasting the magazine’s editor for authorizing such an article, asking if he was aware of the methods used in the acquisition of fur. Hubert Kujawski, the president of the Polish Association of Animal Breeders and Fur Producers, saw ‘Ana’s’ letter and wrote a response. One of the reasons why Kujawski’s letter was notable was that it situated the fur production debate not only within animal rights discourses but within a discussion of sustainability. Kujawski wrote, ‘This

142

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

pseudo-ecological approach means that instead of natural, healthy fur garments for man, these supposedly modern women choose clothes from artificial production that consumes thousands of tons of petroleum products, which will never biodegrade’ (Kujawski 2009. My translation). Until quite recently, it would have been difficult to imagine fur’s promotion as an ethical product, an emergence that seems to be the result of a growing concern with sustainability. The pro-fur sustainability argument’s focus upon long-term ecological well-being contrasts with the immediacy of anti-fur supplications depicting wide-eyed caged animals. A 2012 article states that one understanding of sustainability is as a position of ‘meeting a current generation’s needs without compromising those of future generations’ (Joy et al. 2012 citing Fletcher 2008; Partridge 2011; Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). This idea is particularly thought-provoking because of fur’s Polish generational resonances. The recasting of ‘luxury goods’ as ‘anticonsumer[ist]’ (2012: 277) was, I would expect, equally unanticipated. To some, unusually expensive garments are ‘ethical’ because they are ‘higher quality’ than the ‘fast fashion’ (2012; see also Crăciun 2014) provided by the high street, withstanding wear better over time and thus precluding the need for regular shopping. This begs the question: What does it mean that only some people can ‘afford to be ethical’? Clothing once again demonstrates the difficulty of materializing one’s ethics and aesthetics: what one wears is not only a matter of taste but also of access and wealth.

An excess of the normal Fur is frequently associated with clannish elites. Lise Skov writes of how: In December 2003, the CEO of Saga Furs of Scandinavia was invited as a keynote speaker at the International Herald Tribune conference for luxury industries, which brought together a star panel of influential fashion people including Giorgio Armani, Luca and Rosita Missoni, Ferruccio Ferragamo and Santo Versace, as well as Bernard Arnault of LVMH and François Pinault of the Gucci Group. (2005: 10)

In this chapter, as in this book, in contrast, I have framed fur as sometimes signifying an ‘excess of the normal’, embodying less standing out than fitting in. The actuality that even some people in Kraków who were deeply critical of fur empathized with older people’s wearing of fur speaks to local ideas about coming of age and about the bearing of history on taste and consumption.

An Excess of the Normal

143

Luxury emerged at an intersection between morality and temporality. In the eyes of some of those who disagreed with fur, its normality was the very reason why it continued to be produced and consumed. I wish now to attend to the onus placed upon the ways in which fur was a product of Polish society in a surprisingly literal sense. Institutions, I was told, ‘scaffolded’ it. The Roman Catholic Church in Poland exemplified this. Many people, both those who were troubled by fur and those who were not, described it as typical church attire. More than this, however, dismayed exegeses of how it was that fur continued to be consumed ‘even’ in modernity sometimes segued into critiques of the local clergy’s attitude towards animal welfare. Mishtal and Dannefer (2010) write of the kolęda ritual in which Polish priests visit local homes each January in relation to some priests’ alleged interference with female parishioners’ contraceptive choices. In my research, in contrast, kolęda struck one animal rights advocate as a prime example of a missed opportunity for clergy to demonstrate a commitment to animal welfare: These priests could effect, not to a revolutionary extent, but to some extent, the welfare of these animals during the parish visits after Christmas. If they are in the country, they could see that a certain dog doesn’t have a kennel or they could see something’s wrong with the other animals, they could speak to these people about it. They wouldn’t have to make this the main subject of the conversation, but just to mention it and I think that already this would be a different atmosphere. You know, they could pay a little more attention.

Fur, framed in this way, is ‘the fault’ neither of the clergy nor of the devout laity. What is at stake instead is the clergy’s maintenance of a status quo regarding how humans conceptualize non-humans. This was why, to its critics, fur’s excessiveness was located in its normality. Its outrageousness stemmed not from the outré but from the failure of those who consumed it to question their consumption habits and to challenge a material that, I was often told, became progressively less defensible as one era rolled into the next. Luxury is surely always a marker of difference; it is ‘exclusive’ not just in the sense that might appear in marketing spiels but in the ‘truest’ sense of the word. Fur, in a Krakowian context, illustrated how luxury is not just a matter of elites but a matter of normativity. This chimes with the meaning of luxury in other, quite different ethnographic contexts. A prime example here is Julian Brash’s ethnography of ‘CEO mayor’ Michael Bloomberg’s quest to brand New York as ‘a luxury city’. Brash describes how lavish urban development projects and the attempted beguilement of elite incomers intensify a class politics in which

144

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

the concept of luxury itself is a highly charged one, with by no means unambiguously positive connotations. For many New Yorkers struggling with the high costs of housing, food, and other necessities, the city’s luxuriousness was exactly the problem. Moreover, for many New Yorkers the decidedly nonluxurious qualities of the city – its grittiness, embrace of radical difference, and status as a fount of alternatives to the cultural mainstream – constituted its appeal. (Brash 2011: 128)

In addition to having to rise to the fiscal dictates of ferocious gentrification, for Brash’s New Yorkers, an agenda of luxury is also a pathway for unwanted homogenization: it signified, as it did for some Krakowians, an erasure of alternatives.

Conclusion In this chapter I have sought to show the ways in which a specific charge levelled against fur – luxury – indexes local concerns about the sometimes suffocating power of institutions over individuals’ power to actualize ways of being that fall outside of the ‘mainstream’. I have explored a type of clothing’s ‘resonances’ (following Tarlo 2007) or the ways in which certain clothes ‘mean something’ not only to those who buy and wear them but to those who observe them being bought and worn. Advertising copy frequently evokes images of the power of luxury goods to sensually overwhelm, the idea that one can ‘lose themselves’ while enveloped in commodities that are sumptuous and even ‘orgasmic’. In this chapter, in contrast, I have presented fur as a ‘social skin’ (Turner 1980) that invites certain inferences from those who perceive it. Luxury materials (however luxury is defined locally) are never ‘only’ about their owner. Their existence also indexes the position of those who do not have them. For those in and around Kraków who objected to fur on ethical grounds, this was not a matter of wealth-based class position but of allegiances with a particular moral–material standpoint, coupled with imaginative projections of a different sort of Polish society. It has been asserted in this chapter that the fur clothing dotted about the Krakowian streets that were illuminated by znicz (memorial candles) during the Day without Fur march sparked charges of luxury not because of their associations with and continued consumption by a famous or particularly wealthy elite but by a milieu with a ‘normal’ way of life. They were perceived to have worked hard to perpetuate such a lifestyle through turbulent times (see Jakubowska 2012). History, it was frequently asserted, best explained contemporary life. There was little puzzling about the potency of institutions in Poland (see Kubik 1994;

An Excess of the Normal

145

Marody & Giza-Poleszczuk 2000). What was at stake for informants critical of the bias towards the ‘normal’ in Polish life was a matter of scale – hence my focus on ‘excess’. The Roman Catholic Church should ‘have power’ but maybe not so much power. A critic of fur could lambaste it as ‘absolutely’ wrong yet not contradict themselves when they added that fur was more defensible when worn by older people than by members of younger generations. What fur made clear was that it was not avant-garde, outlandish or offbeat materials that said something about difference but those which were set securely in historical precedents, those which were ubiquitous and those which were the norm.

146

Conclusion

In this book I have approached as interconnected the questions ‘What is fur?’ and ‘How do Krakowian kinship and society work?’ The contrasting settings in which fur has appeared make clear that kinship and relatedness are central not ‘only’ to the workings of families and relationships but to states and nations, organizations and businesses (see MacKinnon & Cannell 2013). Fur’s tangibility, its visibility (cf. Tarlo 2010), makes this apparent in memorable and often uncanny ways. Both the history of fur in Kraków and the ways in which fur is used to reflect, generate or reject types of kinship and relatedness have led me to argue that fur occupies a thought-provoking place in Krakowian kinship. As a topic of anthropological enquiry, fur is ripe for comparison with evocative material culture from places and times quite different from late 2000s Poland. I want to use this concluding chapter to draw out some of the particular concerns underlying this book: the significance of ‘generation’, how class and inheritance work in Kraków, and what fur, as a ‘textile’ with a complicated symbolic repertoire, tells us about the meanings assigned to materials within kinship practice. In Chapter 1, I looked at inheritance in relation to fur by focusing on the pre-mortem passing of fur from grandmothers to granddaughters. I began by establishing that furs passed outside of a family were taken as indications of a family or an individual’s bad lot. I called upon family resemblances through the body and looked at how pre-mortem inheritance of goods such as fur, which tended to be linked to taste and comportment, were experienced as marking points of the life course, womanhood and elderliness, respectively. Within many of the bourgeois families with whom I was acquainted, older women were expected to play a specific role in the moral and social education of their younger counterparts. I argued that the moral and the social are intimately linked in Kraków. Those who helped me with my research deemed the expectations of the kinds of lifestyle that older people could and should have to be in transition. Asking about inheritance was a fruitful way in which to learn that many people, from a cross-section of generations, liked the idea that relatively comfortable older

148

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

people could use their money and property to travel rather than to necessarily dedicate their time and capital to younger kin. However, as I have highlighted throughout this book, older people were frequently deemed to be among those most affected by poverty and inequality in Kraków. Life in semi-public spaces, especially eating and drinking, constituted an important element of processual kinship. Recommending places to patronize was a key mode of sociality between those with weak ties. Even, or perhaps especially, relatively affluent men and women emphasized their decisions to eat at humble cafes such as milk bars. Eating outside of the home possessed comparable symbolic meaning to ethnographic examples from other cultures of eating in the home creating or consolidating relatedness between people not necessarily related ‘by blood’ (Carsten 1995, 1997). The podobieństwo (‘similarity’) between these people was not intended to exclude others but to emphasize how correct behaviour in public ensures adherence to accepted moral codes. The idea of a środowisko was more meaningful than ‘class’, as it coalesced with descent, personhood and locality and therefore took into account both visceral feelings of attachment to one’s place in society (see Bourdieu 1979) and the places and people one patronized. Whereas, in Chapter 1, I juxtaposed homes with semi-public spaces such as churches and cafes, and even the street, in Chapter 2, I focused upon an unexpected combination of domestic and professional domains: home-based furrier businesses. I added to the argument made in Chapter 1 about the importance of patronage to Krakowian constructions of personhood and group identity by questioning what it means to patronize a tradesperson who works in their home as opposed to in a more expected workspace. Fur’s physical properties conditioned both the dynamics of furrier–patron relationship and furriers’ efforts to separate workspaces from domestic spaces within their homes. In Chapter 3, I addressed the topic of inheritance explicitly by focusing on the trajectories of family fur businesses. The question of how inheritance works in Kraków had been raised implicitly in the previous two chapters, prompted by my observations about the importance of descent locally and, for example, the emphasis placed upon horizontal ties suggested by informants’ strong opinions concerning patronage. These questions foregrounded the perpetually pressing questions of how inheritance (of things or of ideas) works in a place that has experienced such rapid and profound socio-economic and political change. The chapter pivoted around the claim that inheritance of businesses fundamentally contradicted the local understanding of work as the main factor in the achievement of adult personhood. It explained how a furrier’s generation made him or her ‘naturally’ mindful of the needs and desires of clients of their

Conclusion

149

own generation and marked out generation as a type of difference normalized within Krakowian society. In Chapter 5 I discussed the opinions of another group unusually interested in fur: animal rights activists. Activists used ‘comprehensive veganism’ as an example of how their political and personal lives were drawn together by their commitment to animal rights. Activists followed a striking level of historical relativism in their understanding of how and why older people, in particular, made different provisioning choices to them (i.e. those involving meat and fur), arguing that Poland’s history has included several periods in which consumers had little choice about the products that they bought. They were frustrated, however, by how seemingly uncritical some of their fellow citizens were of the church power that was deeply ingrained in Polish society. While these activists were often from very similar places and followed similar professions to the informants I wrote about earlier in the book, their political views marked them out in such a way that demonstrates an important aspect of the Polish ‘class system’ that to some extent goes beyond wealth and education-based hierarchies: the difference between being ‘mainstream’ or ‘normal’ and being ‘alternative’ or ‘countercultural’.

What is fur? I have set out the ways in which respondents with varying degrees of interest in fur, ranging from professional or political involvement to it being, as is differently but I would argue equally significant, something ‘they had not thought about much until they were asked about it’, conceptualized fur as an object that was once extremely quotidian and intriguingly weighty in its symbolic stock. That fur has been a fruitful lens through which to learn about kinship in a city with over 750,000 inhabitants is testament to the kinds of ‘streamlining’ that needs to be done in order to carry out urban ethnography. However, rather than a contrivance I imposed on respondents, lenses, metaphors, heuristics and idioms were extremely important features of how the people I knew made sense of the world around them. The young man who told me ‘I’m not from Poland, I’m from Kraków’ wanted to distinguish Kraków – and himself – from the rest of Poland, as (even) more artistic, (even) more cerebral, as – it was often put – ‘the religious and historical hub of Poland’. In Kraków, people routinely and openly ask ‘big questions’ (see Astuti et al. 2007) about the nature of materials, time and relationships. It interested me that I did not have to go far to find local metaphors and symbols in fur.

150

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

To what extent does fur’s meaning depend on its animalness? In Kraków, how do imaginations of the animal from which a pelt had been extracted coexist with an heir’s connections to the person who had given it to her? Fur is not only considered ripe for inheritance because of its monetary value but because it strongly evokes its previous wearers. This was not necessarily just that when it had been worn, it had ‘absorbed’ (Allerton 2007) the person. Being hidden in drawers or wardrobes in homes endowed pelts with a specific type of inalienability. But while these inherited items have ‘past lives’ rooted in different decades and in other people’s ownership, fur is also a confusing and, for some, a morally dubious object because it had a past life in a literal sense: as an animal. Fur reveals much about postsocialism, prompting me to picture a Venn diagram in which fur brings together a number of concerns which have come to the fore following 1989: gender, property, morality, nationality, provisioning and temporality, to name but a few. At the time of my fieldwork, animals had a particular symbolic resonance as emblems of social change, power and gender – from the belief that the keeping of pets epitomized the frivolity and irrationality of late capitalism, to the frequency with which hunting arose as a key activity for consolidating ties between nominally disenfranchised Polish aristocracy and church potentates. I have also intended this book to contribute to ‘everyday’ understandings of the human body in Poland. While fur does not, by most anthropological estimations, count as ‘substance’ (see Carsten 2011), some of the ways in which it is spoken of and used in Kraków evoke substance-like characteristics. Comparative ethnographic examples of what people think about and do with textiles and clothing elucidate what fur is, and yet some thought on food and on fat resonated just as strongly.

Generation: A normalized difference I have proposed that generational difference is normalized in Kraków. By claiming this, I am using language deployed by anthropologists in relation to gender (Yanagisako & Delaney 1995). Gender, as written about anthropologically in recent decades, is a useful point of contrast with generation. The ethnographic record tells of contexts in which men and women conceptualize themselves as ‘different’ but equal to one another rather than as at different points on a hierarchy (e.g. Strathern 1988; Mayblin 2011). This resonates with the day-to-day experience of generation in Kraków as a profound difference between persons

Conclusion

151

and groups but one that played upon contrasting generation’s respective strengths and weaknesses, or advantages and disadvantages. Generation was the productive difference within Krakowian society that served to underpin all other types of kinship relationship. Cecilia Busby describes how, in Marianad, India, ‘gender is “fixed” in the relations between siblings, and their consequent relationships with each other’s children’ (Busby 2000: 220). As I wrote in Chapter 3 when emphasizing polokenie (generations) as distinct from one another, generations are fixed not only in relations between close kin, lineages of families, but they are fixed to particular years, periods of time, political epochs, and by extension, to the other people in Poland who were born in these years.

Class As an unusually symbolically loaded object, fur brings together the opinions of people who would probably not have mixed with each other, the most striking example being fur industry people and animal rights activists. Within the bracket of relatively affluent, ‘bourgeois’ Krakowians existed several meaningful and sometimes overlapping categories of people who were defined not so much by their wealth but by the extent to which they aligned themselves with specific ideals and ideologies, such as ‘traditional’ (as many of the furriers would have been described) and ‘alternative’ or ‘countercultural’ (like the animal rights activists but also some of the young women who inherit fur). Entrepreneurs, best exemplified by the concerns of some of the second- and third-generation furriers, or by the sons and daughters of furriers who have not entered into the business, as mentioned in Chapter 3, occupied a particularly interesting class position in that they often saw their role as using commerce to critique society, especially ‘traditional’ aspects of Krakowian culture that they judged as out of sync with ‘modern life’. At the same time, however, entrepreneurship was rather ironically a particular skill associated with older generations of Krakowians who, even when working in professions not commonly associated with trade such as teaching, had partaken, often very successfully, in the ‘black market’ exchange of goods. Many of the people who talked to me about inheritance and fur belonged to what was still considered to be the intelligentsia. These people were not labelled ‘rich’ but rather had a special niche in Kraków as a group who had suffered specific oppression under socialism and who also bolstered Kraków’s reputation as a place where civic and civil life rested in no small part on the

152

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

arts and on academia. Along with some members of the clergy, they embodied the national imagination of Krakowians: learned and with a strong investment in history (see Jakubowska 2012). In common with the clergy but also with the left wing of the political classes with whom they sometimes overlapped, the intelligentsia were marked out by their wildly different locations on the spectrum between, on the one hand, conformist and perhaps conservative and on the other hand deeply progressive oppositional and pioneering resistance figures. As I argued in Chapter 1 in relation to the środowisko, locality is a popular mode of discussing difference. Not only the church or churches a person frequented (if they are a practising Catholic) but the cafes and bars they choose to eat and drink in revealed something about the way they are. The difficult fit between money and taste as two indicators of social position was illustrated by the example of the animal rights activist who could not afford, she said, to eat in vegan restaurants as often as she would like. This was important because, as I argued before, eating out was something people expected to do rather than a luxury. This also fits within the argument I made about the centrality of work to adult personhood. She said she would begin to earn more as she got older and then she would be able to eat at such places more. Working (and earning money) allowed people to be ‘more themselves’. This also clearly links to ideas about democracy giving people the opportunity to buy things that support the identity they want and, in this case, be what they want to be in a quite literal sense – through substance and through food. The merging of locality with personhood and descent was, however, also relevant to ideas about sameness and difference on a global scale. Whether in remembrances of sending furs to London auctions during socialism or to auctions in Copenhagen or Helsinki at the time of my fieldwork, in the less official beliefs about what furs people from different parts of Europe wanted to buy (if at all) or in discussing the stupidity of expecting that Polish animal rights discourses would follow Western models, fur’s international quality meant that it showed what people thought about relatedness between nations. Fur constituted a surprising microcosm of some of the bigger concerns at work in Kraków. Scandinavian countries’ dominance of the fur market was shown by the constant talk about them in shops and among the breeders whom I met. The starkest example of the inferiority some Polish fur people felt about their product and the product of other Central and East European countries was found in the omission of these pelts from international fur auction booklets. But in Kraków too, some friends disclosed that they felt ‘embarrassed’ by the ‘Norway Grants’

Conclusion

153

signs affixed to many of the symbolically important buildings being refurbished. It would be going too far to say that the way in which Scandinavia invested in Poland was responsible for this dynamic, but it does show the way in which talk of animals and of breeding lends itself in a pronounced manner to talk of inequality among humans (see Cassidy 2002). The EU’s apparent encouragement for Poland to become one of the biggest producers of fur in the world was viewed with some irony since Poland had produced a lot of fur before and during socialism. Again, the movement of fur among international organizations made it valuable for learning about international agreements and networks. The EU was treated with ambivalence. On the one hand, it allowed people to trade internationally, but on the other hand it took away the roles that many industry men had had before 2004 – travelling to Russia, Germany, and the Netherlands to trade, and, earlier in the twentieth century, smuggling across borders. Many people felt that they had always been very internationally minded in their work and that, ironically, given that they were now living in a democracy, they were in some ways more constrained than they had been under socialism or pre-EU accession. Such critiques of the EU seemed fairly common at the time of my fieldwork, when people felt they had yet to see what difference it had made to their lives in the long term, though it had lost the novelty it had held a few years previously. When, however, President Kaczyński was killed, people reflected ironically, ‘Only in Poland!’ and, as they did this, said they felt that because they were now in the EU ‘nothing crazy would be allowed to happen’, for example, a coup. This context meant that sometimes when talking about fur, class seemed like a moot point because nationality was in some ways more relevant to people’s lives. Although startlingly different from each other, older generations’ experiences of the violence and drudgery of colonization and younger generations’ experiences of working abroad shared some things in common symbolically because in both cases nationality was combined with class. ‘Poles [abroad] are the British working class now,’ one friend reflected to me when remembering her time as a biscuit factory worker in Glasgow. Generation and nationality were both differences people were happy to point out – normalized differences – and differences that were less taboo than diversity in sexuality and religion. But it is interesting too to consider the ways in which viewing people, particularly women, as customers led furriers to attach certain values to clients’ ‘multiple identities’, describing how ‘German women’ were

154

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

compared with ‘Polish women’, for example. Furthermore, when people spoke about power and ritual within society on a broader level, they often talked of ‘old women’ or ‘young men’. Reflecting above on this book’s substantive chapters, I pointed out that most respondents tended to deny differences between men and women. Yet, throughout the book, the same people show themselves to be more comfortable with talking about gender in such a manner that referenced either nationality or generation – the two main ‘normalized’ or ‘comfortable’ differences.

Inheritance The specific poignancy of inheritance in relation to Poland and postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe has been pointed out by Longina Jakubowska, Michał Buchowski, Frances Pine and Chris Hann, to name just four anthropologists whose work has been useful for conceptualizing what I learned while on fieldwork. However, on closer inspection the types of inheritance I address are quite different in focus from those addressed by these scholars. This is not least because most of what I have written is an ethnography of urban life. The final subsection of the introduction to Grandits and Heady’s 2003 edited collection Distinct Inheritances: Property, Family and Community in a Changing Europe reads: Most of the chapters in this book focus on agricultural communities. This is a natural outcome of the professional preoccupations of historians and anthropologists. In the past the overwhelming majority of Europe’s inhabitants worked on the land, and, even today, most anthropological research is carried out in small, rural communities. How far can conclusions developed in these research environments be applied in the economically complex, mainly urban communities of today’s Europe? (2003: 21)

‘Inheritance’ provides an apposite focus with which to do this, as I have suggested that this term should not only focus on, as Grandits and Heady put it, ‘the land’ and how it changes hands through political epochs and down lines of descent, but at what tangible and intangible, bodily and ideological possessions, families and nations feel that they can and cannot produce and reproduce within a society through generations. As inheritance has the potential to reproduce inequalities generation after generation, it is inextricable from the question of class. I have made the argument for looking at the ways in which ideas of inheritance and intergenerational transmission appear in places in, according to some estimations, less conventional settings than disputes about land. As

Conclusion

155

a valuable type of clothing, the processes and opinions elicited by fur told us simultaneously of ideas about how the body changes between generations and about the significances of property seemingly less consequential than buildings and land and precious ‘movables’ such as jewellery, but which is the focus of many people’s feelings of connection to kin, class and Kraków. The picture of fur production I have presented in this book, its use within families and instances of both its wear and its rejection in civic and civil life are in many ways specific to Krakowian life. In unpacking what is said about and what is done with fur, I have developed ideas about how personhood and certain aspects of kinship are formulated locally. Through comparing what I came to understand Krakowian kinship to be during my fieldwork with ethnographic examples from other continents, I found some aspects of Krakowian relatedness to resonate with accounts of places that might seem far away both in terms of geography and in the ways in which social scientists come to categorize societies. At the same time, reading work on rural Poland showed me the specificity of urban Polish life and the specificity of Kraków as a city with particularly strong associations with religious power and with tradition. As a ‘traditional’ material, but one that was still very popular at the time of my fieldwork, fur elicited a considerable range of associations with ‘generation as cohort’. I have argued that this is the central productive difference within Krakowian society. Differences of opinion between kin of different ages could usually be overcome with time spent together and by empathizing with each other in the knowledge that coming of age in contrasting eras, and under different political systems, created strikingly different persons. The discussions of fur in the preceding chapters posed fundamental questions about how people deal with those whom they perceive to be different from themselves. I have written that generation functioned as an ‘acceptable’ difference between persons and suggested that this might be interpreted as part of a larger logic of emphasis upon sameness. The emphasis placed upon sameness and on equality within the middle class (i.e. accepting both entrepreneurs and intelligentsia) was sometimes used as rationale for berating those who spoke out against the status quo of Krakowian life. Animal rights activists were accused by furriers, but also by some individuals with no formal involvement with fur, of being ‘people who like to make a fuss’, indicating the ways in which ideas about difference and sameness and about decorum and morality, and about a multitude of ways in which people can be connected or disconnected from one another, fused in ideas about this unusual material. This argument has far-reaching implications for the anthropology of Poland because by identifying

156

Material Culture and Kinship in Poland

generation as a normalized difference that people are comfortable talking about on a quotidian basis it prompts questions about forms of perceived difference that are, at least in some social circles, taboo such as sexuality and religion. Is fur a symbolic site of confluence for all of these discourses? The introductory chapter described fur as ‘good to travel with’. This final chapter asks, ‘What if this is not only literally but figuratively true?’

Bibliography Allerton, C. (2007), ‘The Secret Life of Sarongs Manggarai Textiles as Super-skins’, Journal of Material Culture, 12 (1): 22–46. Alter, J. S. (2007), ‘The Once and Future “Apeman” Chimeras, Human Evolution, and Disciplinary Coherence’, Current Anthropology, 48 (5): 637–652. Aretxaga, B. (1997), Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Arkin, K. (2009), ‘Rhinestone Aesthetics and Religious Essence: Looking Jewish in Paris’, American Ethnologist, 36 (4): 722–734. Astuti, R. et al. (2007), Questions of Anthropology, edited by Rita Astuti, Jonathan Parry, and Charles Stafford, London: Berg. Baer, M. (2012), ‘“Let Them Hear Us!” The Politics of Same-sex Transgression Contemporary Poland’, in H. Donnan and F. Magowan (eds), Transgressive Sex: Subversion and Control in Erotic Encounters, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Barthes, R. (1967), Elements of Semiology, London: Cape. Bartlett, D. (2004), ‘Let Them Wear Beige: The Petit-bourgeois World of Official Socialist Dress’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 8 (12): 127–164. Bartlett, D. (2006), ‘In Russia, At Last and Forever: The First Seven Years of Russian Vogue’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 10: 175–203. Bartlett, D. (2010), FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Batchen, G. (2004), ‘Ere the Substance Fade: Photography and Hair Jewellery’, in E. Edwards and J. Hart (eds), Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, 32–46, London: Routledge. Baumann, G. (1996), Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Belshaw, C. S. (1955), ‘The Cultural Milieu of the Entrepreneur’, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History (first series), 7: 146–163. Berdahl, D. (2010), On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Berg, G. C. (1951), The Unconscious Significance of Hair, London: Allen and Unwin. Berg, M. (2005), Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-century Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berry, C. (1994), The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

158

Bibliography

Bestor, T. C. (2001), ‘Supply-side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City’, American Anthropologist, 103 (1): 76–95. Bloch, M., and J. Parry (1982), Death and the Regeneration of Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bohannan, P. (1955), ‘Some Principles of Exchange and Investment among the Tiv 2’, American Anthropologist, 57: 60–70. Borneman, J. (1992), Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bottigheimer, R. B. (1982), ‘Tale Spinners: Submerged Voices in Grimms’ Fairy Tales’, New German Critique, 27: 141–150. Bouquet, M. (1996), ‘Family Trees and Their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2: 43–66. Bourdieu, P. (1979), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1999), The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2004), ‘The Peasant and His Body’, Ethnography, 5: 579–599. Brash, J. (2011), Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Brenner, S. A. (1998), The Domestication of Desire: Women, Wealth, and Modernity in Java, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brewer, J. (2004), Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century, London: HarperCollins. Bridger, S., and F. Pine, eds (1997), Surviving Post-socialism: Local Strategies and Regional Responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, London: Routledge. Buchowski, M. (1996), ‘The Shifting Meanings of Civic and Civil Society in Poland’, in C. M. Hann and E. C. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models, London and New York: Routledge. Buchowski, M. (2004), ‘Hierarchies of Knowledge in Central-Eastern European Anthropology’, Anthropology of East Europe Review, 22: 5–14. Buchowski, M. (2008), ‘The Enigma of the Middle-class: A Case Study of Entrepreneurs in Poland’, in I Schröder and A. Vonderau (eds), Changing Economies and Changing Identities in Postsocialist Eastern Europe, Münster: LIT Verlag. Bulbulyan, M., S. H. Zahm and D. G. Zaridze (1992), ‘Occupational Cancer Mortality among Urban Women in the Former USSR’, Cancer Causes & Control, 3: 299–307. Burrell, K. (2003), ‘The Political and Social Life of Food in Socialist Poland’, Anthropology of East Europe Review, 21: 189–195. Busby, C. (2000), The Performance of Gender: An Anthropology of Everyday Life in a South Indian Fishing Village, Oxford and New York: Berg. Candea, M. (2010), ‘“I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat”: Engagement and Detachment in Human–Animal Relations’, American Ethnologist, 37 (2): 241–258.

Bibliography

159

Carrier, J. G. (1994), ‘Alienating Objects: The Emergence of Alienation in Retail Trade’, Man, 29: 359–380. Carrier, J. G. (1995), Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700, London: Routledge. Carrier, J. G., ed. (1997), Meanings of the Market: The Free Market in Western Culture, Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers. Carsten, J. (1995), ‘The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi’, American Ethnologist, 22: 223–241. Carsten, J. (1997), The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carsten, J. (2000), Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carsten, J. (2004), After Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carsten, J. (2011), ‘Substance and Relationality: Blood in Contexts’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 40: 19–35. Carsten, J., and S. Hugh-Jones (1995), About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassidy, R. (2002), The Sport of Kings: Kinship, Class and Thoroughbred Breeding in Newmarket, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassidy, R., and M. Mullin (2007), Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered, Oxford and New York: Berg. Cherkasskiy, B. L. (1988), ‘Roles of the Wolf and the Raccoon Dog in the Ecology and Epidemiology of Rabies in the USSR’, Reviews of Infectious Diseases, 10 (4): S634– S636. Chodorow, N. (1999), The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press. Clarke, A., and D. Miller (2002), ‘Fashion and Anxiety’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 6: 191–213. Clutton-Brock, J., ed. (1989), The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism, and Predation, London: Unwin Hyman. Cohn, B. S. (1989), ‘Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century’, in A. B. Weiner and J. Schneider (eds), Cloth and Human Experience, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Collier, J. F., and S. Yanagisako, eds (1987), Gender and Kinship: Essays towards a Unified Analysis, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Collier, S. J. (2011), Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crăciun, M. (2014), Material Culture and Authenticity: Fake Branded Fashion in Europe, London: Bloomsbury. Crăciun, M. (2015), ‘Bobbles and Values: An Ethnography of De-bobbling Garments in Postsocialist Urban Romania’, Journal of Material Culture, 20 (1): 3–20.

160

Bibliography

Crowley, D. (1992), National Style and Nation-State: Design in Poland from the Vernacular Revival to the International Style, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Crowley, D., and S. Reid, eds (2000), Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-war Eastern Europe, London: Berg. Crowley, D., and S. Reid, eds (2010), Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Culler, J. (1981), ‘Semiotics of Tourism’, American Journal of Semiotics, 1: 127–140. Davis, K. (1995), Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery, New York: Routledge. Detailed Discussion of Fur Animals and Fur Production (n.d.). Available online: http:// www.animallaw.info/articles/ddusfur.htm (accessed 18 September 2012). Douglas, M. (1966), Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge. Douglas, M. (1970), Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, London: Barrie and Rockliff the Cresset Press. Douglas, M., and B. C. Isherwood (1979), The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption, London: Allen Lane. Dramowicz, D., and J. Stokes (7 April 2011), ‘Warsaw, Krakow … Which Is in Pole Position?’, The Guardian. Available online: www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/apr/09/ krakow-warsaw-how-to-choose (accessed 26 March 2013). Dunn, E. C. (2004), Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dunn, E., and C. M. Hann (1996), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models, London: Routledge. Edmonds, A. (2007), ‘“The Poor Have the Right to Be Beautiful”: Cosmetic Surgery in Neoliberal Brazil’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13 (2): 363–381. Edwards, E. (2004), Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, London: Routledge. EEDRI (2008), ‘Overview of Family Business Relevant Issues: Country Fiche Poland’. Available online: www.ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/sme/files/craft/family_business/ doc/familybusines_country_fiche_poland_en.pdf (accessed 12 February 2013). Emberley, J. (1998), Venus and Furs: Cultural Politics of Fur, London: I. B. Tauris. Emberley, J. (1997), The Cultural Politics of Fur, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Emmons, R. A. (2004), ‘The Psychology of Gratitude: An Introduction’, in R. A. Emmons and M. E. McCulloch (eds), The Psychology of Gratitude, 3–18. Oxford: University Press. European Fur Breeders’ Association (EFBA), ‘The European Fur Breeder’s Association – Fact Sheet’. Available online: http://www.efba.eu/fact_sheet.html (accessed 18 September 2012). Fehérváry, K. (2002), ‘American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms and the Search for “Normal” Life in Post-socialist Hungary’, Ethnos, 67 (3): 369–400. Fehérváry, K. (2013), Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary, 1950–2000, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Bibliography

161

Feuchtwang, S. (2005), ‘Mythical Moments in National and Other Family Histories’, History Workshop Journal, 59: 179–193. Feuchtwang, S. (2007), ‘Belonging to What? Jewish Mixed Kinship and Historical Disruption in Twentieth-century Europe’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Ghosts of Memory, Oxford: Blackwell. Firmy Rodzinne (n.d.), Available online: http://www.firmyrodzinneroku.pl/ (accessed 28 November 2012). Fletcher, K. (2008), Sustainable Fashion & Textiles: Design Journeys, Oxford: Earthscan. Fox, R. (1967), Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective, London: Penguin. Fukuda, K. (1997), ‘Different Views of Animals and Cruelty to Animals: Cases in Fox-hunting and Pet-keeping in Britain’, Anthropology Today, 13: 2–6. Gaines, A. D. (1985), ‘Faith, Fashion and Family: Religion, Aesthetics, Identity and Social Organization in Strasbourg’, Anthropological Quarterly, 58 (2): 47–62. Gazeta Wyborcza (no author) (18 March 2011), ‘Stracone Pokolenie’, wyborcza.pl. Available online: http://wyborcza.pl/8,75402,9282538.html (accessed 9 February 2013). Geertz, C. (1974), ‘“From the Native’s Point of View”: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28 (1): 26–45. Gerasimova, E. & S. Chuikina (2004), Obshchestvo remonta, Neprikosnovennyi Zapas: Debaty o Politike i Kul’ture 34, 70–77. Gerasimova, E., and S. Chuikina (2009), ‘The Repair Society’, Russian Studies in History, 48: 58–74. Gewertz, D., and F. Errington (2010), Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Glowacka, D., and J. Zylinska (2007), Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Golanska-Ryan, J. (2008), ‘Strategies of Resistance in the Polish Campaign against EU Membership’, in M. Svašek (ed.), Postsocialism: Politics and Emotion in Central and Eastern Europe, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Goody, J. (1975), The Character of Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J. (1976), Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J. (2003), ‘Sorcery and Socialism’, in H. Grandits and P. Heady (eds), Distinct Inheritances: Property, Family and Community in a Changing Europe, Münster: LIT Verlag. Grandits, H., and P. Heady (2003), Distinct Inheritances: Property, Family and Community in a Changing Europe, Münster: LIT Verlag. Grasseni, C. (2004), ‘Skilled Vision: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics’, Social Anthropology, 12: 41–55. Grasseni, C. (2007), Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Grasseni, C. (2009), Developing Skill, Developing Vision: Practices of Locality at the Foot of the Alps, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

162

Bibliography

Greenhalgh, S. (1994), ‘De-orientalizing the Chinese Family Firm’, American Ethnologist, 21: 746–775. Gregson, N., and L. Crewe (2003), Second-hand Cultures, Oxford: Berg. Gronow, J. (2003), Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia, Oxford and New York: Berg. Gudowska, M. (17 December 2010), ‘Is The Fur Still Flying? (Not Here, It Would Seem)’, The Calgary Herald. Available online: www.canada.com/calgaryherald/ news/swerve/story.html?id=50b8fb8b-f372-4692-b37e-2a2d1e4822f3 (accessed 3 February 2013). Gudowska, M. (23 August 2012), ‘Caught between Cultures, Malwina Gudowska’, The Calgary Herald. Available online: www.calgaryherald.com/news/story. html?id=7134131 (accessed 11 March 2013). Halbwachs, M. (1992), On Collective Memory, Chicago: University Press. Hann, C. M., ed. (1993), Socialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Local Practice, London: Routledge. Hann, C. M. (1998), Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hann, C. M. (2008), ‘Reproduction and Inheritance: Goody Revisited’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 37: 145–158. Hansen, K. T. (2000), Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothes and Zambia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hansen, K. T. (2004), ‘The World in Dress: Anthropological Perspectives on Clothing, Fashion, and Culture’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33: 369–392. Hardy, J. (2009), Poland’s New Capitalism, London: Pluto Press. Hardy, J., and A. Rainnie (1996), Restructuring Krakow: Desperately Seeking Capitalism, London: Mansell. Harmelin, W. (1964), ‘Jews in the Leipzig Fur Industry’, The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 9: 239–266. Harper, C. (2008), ‘I Found Myself Inside Her Fur’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 6: 300–313. Harris, O. (2007), ‘What Makes People Work?’, in R. Astuti, J. P. Parry and C. Stafford (eds), Questions of Anthropology, Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers. Herzfeld, M. (2009), Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hiltebeitel, A., and B. D. Miller (1998), Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hopkin, J. (27 October 2008), ‘Being There: Living in Krakow’. Available online: http:// moreintelligentlife.co.uk/story/being-there-living-in-krakow (accessed 8 February 2013). Howard, M. M. (2002), The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howe, J. (1981), ‘Fox Hunting as Ritual’, American Ethnologist, 8: 278–300.

Bibliography

163

Howe, N., and W. Strauss (1993), 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?, London: Vintage Books. Howell, M. (2010), Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600, Cambridge: University Press. Hugh-Jones, S. (1996), ‘Bonnes Raisons ou mauvaise Conscience?’, Terrain, 26: 123–148. Ingold, T. (1993), ‘The Art of Translation in a Continuous World’, in G. Palsson (ed.), Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse, Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers. Ingold, T. (2007), ‘Materials against Materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues, 14: 1–16. International Fur Trade Federation (2009), IFTF Fur in Focus, issue 27. Available online: http://www.iftf.com/publctns/FurInFocus27-4.pdf (accessed 12 November 2012). Jakubowska, L. (2012), Patrons of History: Nobility, Capital and Political Transitions in Poland, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Jasiecki, K. (1996), ‘Przedsiebiorcy jako aktor transformacji’, Studia Socjologiczne, 1: 140. Jerram, L. (2011), Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jeżak, J., W. Popczyk and A. Winnicka-Popczyk (2004), Przedsiębiorstwo rodzinne: funkcjonowanie i rozwój, Warsaw: Difin. Joy, A., and J. Sherry, A. Venkatesh, J. Wang and R. Chan (2012), ‘Fast Fashion, Sustainability, and the Ethical Appeal of Luxury Brands’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 16 (3): 273–296. Kelly, T. (2008), ‘The Attractions of Accountancy: Living an Ordinary Life during the Second Palestinian Intifada’, Ethnography, 9 (3): 351–376. Kerner, R. J. (1942), The Urge to the Sea: The Course of Russian History. The Role of Rivers, Portages, Ostrogs, Monasteries and Furs, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kertzer, D. I. (1983), ‘Generation as a Sociological Problem’, Annual Review of Sociology, 9: 125–149. Klein, J. A. (2008), ‘Afterword: Comparing Vegetarianisms’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31 (1): 199–112. Klukowski, Z. (1993), Diary From the Years of Occupation, 1939–1944, trans. George Klukowski, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Konrád, G., and I. Szelényi (1979), The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, trans. A. Arato and R. E. Allen, Brighton: Harvester. Kopytoff, I. (1986), ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kościańska, A. (2008a), ‘On Celibate Marriages: Conversion to the Brahma Kumaris in Poland’, in F. Pine and J. de P. Cabral (eds), On the Margins of Religion, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Kościańska, A. (2008b), ‘Mohair Berets: The Development of Fundamentalism within the Catholic in Poland’, in G. Lundsknow (ed.), The Sociology of Religion: A Substantive and Transdisciplinary Approach, 363–365, Los Angeles, CA: Pine Forge Press.

164

Bibliography

Kriesberg, L. (1950), The Relationship between the Business Situation and the Conceptions of Security and Success among Chicago Retail Furriers (PhD thesis), University of Chicago Sociology Department. Kriesberg, L. (1952), ‘The Retail Furrier: Concepts of Security and Success’, American Journal of Sociology, 57: 478–485. Kubica, G. (1986), ‘All Souls' Day in Polish Culture: Sacred or Secular?’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford. XVII, nr. 2, s.110–125. Kubica, G. (2009), ‘A Rainbow Flag against the Polish Dragon: Polish Responses to the Gay and Lesbian Movement’, in L. Kurti and P. Skalnik (eds), Postsocialist Europe: Perspectives from Home, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Kubik, J. (1994), The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland, Pennsylvania, PA: Penn State Press. Küchler, S., and D. Miller (2005), Clothing as Material Culture, Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers. Kugelmass, J., and J. Boyarin (1983), From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kugelmass, J., and A. Orla–Bukowska (1998), ‘“If You Build It They Will Come”: Recreating an Historic Jewish District in Post-Communist Kraków’, City & Society, 10: 315–353. Kujawski, H. (2009), ‘Futra – głos w sprawie’, wysokieobcasy.pl Available online: http:// www.wysokieobcasy.pl/wysokieobcasy/1,96856,7128705,Futra___glos_w_sprawie. html (accessed 10 February 2013). Kulpa, R., and J. Mizielińska (2011), De-centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives, Aldershot: Ashgate. Kürti, L. (2011), ‘Olivia’s Story: Capitalism and Rabbit Farming in Hungary’, in L. Kürti and P. Skalnik (eds), Postsocialist Europe: Anthropological Perspectives from Home, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Lave, J. (1977), ‘Cognitive Consequences of Traditional Apprenticeship Training in West Africa’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 8: 177–180. Lawrence, Anya (2016), ‘Hair! Human Hair in Fashion and Art’, Disegno. Available online https://www.disegnodaily.com/article/hair-human-hair-in-fashion-and-art (accessed 6 March 2019). Leach, E. R. (1958), ‘Magical Hair’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 88: 147–164. Lehrer, E. (2013), Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Levi-Strauss, C. (1983), The Way of the Masks, London: Cape. Loizos, P., and P. Heady (1999), Conceiving Persons: Ethnographies of Procreation, Fertility and Growth, London: Berg. Lomholt, S. (1920), ‘Absorption and Elimtnation of Mercury in the Different Methods Used in the Treatment of Syphilis’, British Journal of Dermatology, 32: 353–374. Magee, S. (2015), ‘Of Love and Fur: Grandmothers, Class, and Inheritance in a Southern Polish City’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21 (1): 66–85.

Bibliography

165

Magee, S. (2016), ‘An “Excess of the Normal”: Luxury and Difference in Polish Fur Critique’, Journal of Material Culture, 21 (3): 277–295. Magee, S. (2017), ‘Catholic in Kraków? Fur, the Ethic of Attribution, and When Non-religious Things Conform to Religious Aesthetics’, in M. Crăciun (ed.), World Art, special issue ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives’, 7 (2): 307–327. Makovicky, N. (2010), ‘“Something to Talk About”: Notation and Knowledge-Making among Central Slovak Lace-makers’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16: S80–S99. Makowski, J. (19 October 2012), ‘Pokolenie Erasmusa. Teraz Wy!, wyborcza.pl, Gazeta Wyborcza. Available online: www.wyborcza.pl/magazyn/1,128599,12704515,Pokolen ie_Erasmusa__Teraz_Wy_.html (accessed 9 February 2013). Małecki, J. M. (2008), A History of Kraków for Everyone, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Mandes, S., and M. Rogaczewska (2013), ‘“I Don’t Reject the Catholic Church – The Catholic Church Rejects Me”: How Twenty- and Thirty-somethings in Poland Reevaluate Their Religion’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 28 (2): 259–276. Marchand, T. H. J. (2001), Minaret Building and Apprenticeship in Yemen, Richmond: Curzon. Marody, M., and A. Giza-Poleszczuk (2000), ‘Changing Images of Identity in Poland: From the Self-sacrificing to the Self-investing Woman?’, in S. Gal and G. Kligman (eds), Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics and Everyday Life after Socialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Martin, J. (1978), ‘The Land of Darkness and the Golden Horde’, Cahiers du monde russe et Soviétique, 19: 401–421. Mauss, M. (1934), ‘Les techniques du corps’, Journal de Psychologie, 32: 363–386. Mayblin, M. (2010), Gender, Catholicism, and Morality in Brazil: Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mayblin, M. (2011), ‘Death by Marriage: Power, Pride, and Morality in Northeast Brazil’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17: 135–153. McKinnon, S., and F. Cannell (2013), ‘The Difference Kinship Makes’, in F. Cannell and S. McKinnon (eds), Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistence Life of Kinship, Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press. Meillassoux, C. (1981), Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Metodologia rankingu – Firmy Rodzinne (n.d.), Available online: http://www. firmyrodzinneroku.pl/metodologia-rankingu (accessed 4 January 2013). Miller, D. (1998), Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, London: University College of London Press. Miller, D., ed. (2005), Materiality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miller, D. (2009), Stuff, Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, D., and F. Parrott (2009), ‘Loss and Material Culture in South London’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15: 502–519.

166

Bibliography

Miller, D., and S. Woodward (2007), ‘Manifesto for a Study of Denim’, Social Anthropology, 15: 335–351. Miller, D., and S. Woodward, eds (2010), Global Denim, Oxford and New York: Berg. Mintz, S. W. (1985), Sweetness and Power the Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York and London: Sifton. Mishtal, J. (2015), The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Mishtal, J., and R. Dannefer (2010), ‘Reconciling Religious Identity and Reproductive Practices: The Church and Contraception in Poland’, The European Journal of Contraception and Reproductive Health Care, 15: 232–242. Mizielińska, J. (2001), ‘The Rest is Silence … Polish Nationalism and the Question of Lesbian Existence’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 8: 281–297. Mullin, M. H. (1999), ‘Mirrors and Windows: Sociocultural Studies of Human-Animal Relationships’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 28: 201–224. Murawski, M. (2011), ‘Inappropriate Object: Warsaw and the Stalin-era Palace of Culture after the Smolensk Disaster’, Anthropology Today, 27: 5–10. Neal, P. A., R. H. Flinn, T. H. Edwards, and W. H. Reinhart et al. (1941), Mercurialism and Its Control in the Felt-hat Industry, bulletin 264. U.S. Public Health Service. Neal, P. A., and R. R. Jones (1938), ‘Chronic Mercurialism in the Hatters’ Fur-cutting Industry’, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 110: 337–343. Neal, P. A., R. R. Jones, J. J. Bloomfield, J. M. Dallavalle and T. I. Edwards (1937), A Study of Chronic Mercurialism in the Hatter’s Fur-cutting Industry, U.S. Government Printing Office. Norris, L. (2004), ‘Shedding Skins: The Materiality of Divestment in India’, Journal of Material Culture, 9: 59–71. O’Connor, K. (2011), Lycra: How a Fiber Shaped America, London: Routledge. Obeyesekere, G. (1981), Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. OECD Better Life Index (n.d.), OECD Better Life Index. Available online: http:// oecdbetterlifeindex.org/ (accessed 21 January 2013). Ortner, S. B. (1998), ‘Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-saturated World’, Cultural Anthropology, 13: 414–440. Ozanne, C. G. (1965), ‘The Language of the Apocalypse’, Tyndale Bulletin, 16: 3–9. Padget, P. (1940), ‘Long-term Results in the Treatment of Early Syphilis’, American Journal of Syphilis, 24: 692–731. Pap, D. (5 October 2011), ‘Rektor bez futra na Uniwersytecie Śląskim’, Gazeta Wyborcza. Available online: www.wyborcza.pl/1,76842,10410325,Rektor_bez_futra_na_ Uniwersytecie_Slaskim.html (accessed 10 February 2013). Parkin, D. (1997), Kinship: An Introduction to Basic Concepts, Oxford: Blackwell. Parkin, R., and M. Bouquet (1997), ‘Kinship with Trees’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 3: 374–376. Parry, J. (1986), ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift”’, Man, 21: 453.

Bibliography

167

Parry, J., and M. Bloch (1989), Money and the Morality of Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Partridge, D. J. (2011), ‘Activist Capitalism and Supply Chain Citizenship: Producing Ethical Regimes and Ready-to-wear Clothes’, Current Anthropology, 52 (S3): S97–S111. Pasieka, A. (2015), Hierarchy and Pluralism: Living Religious Difference in Catholic Poland, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Patico, J. (2000), ‘“New Russian” Sightings and the Question of Social Difference in St. Petersburg’, Anthropology of East Europe Review, 18 (2): 73–77. Peletz, M. G. (2001), ‘Ambivalence in Kinship since the 1940s’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Peteri, G. (2010), ‘Nomenklatura with Smoking Guns: Hunting in Communist Hungary’s Party-state Elite’, in S. E. Reid and D. Crowley (eds), Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Piekut, A. (2013), ‘“You’ve Got Starbucks and Coffee Heaven … I Can Do This!” Spaces of Social Adaptation of Highly Skilled Migrants in Warsaw’, Central and Eastern European Migration Review, 2 (1): 113–134. Pimentel, J. C. (1970), ‘Furrier’s Lung’, Thorax, 25: 387–398. Pine, F. (1996a), ‘Naming the House and Naming the Land: Kinship and Social Groups in Highland Poland’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2: 443–459. Pine, F. (1996b), ‘Redefining Women’s Work in Rural Poland’, in R. Abrahams (ed.), After Socialism: Land Reform and Rural Social Change in Eastern Europe, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Pine, F. (1998), ‘Dealing with Fragmentation: The Consequences of Privatisation for Rural Women in Central and Southern Poland’, in S. Bridger and F. Pine (eds), Surviving Post-Socialism, London and New York: Routledge. Pine, F. (1999), ‘Incorporation and Exclusion in the Podhale’, in S. Day, E. Papataxiarchis and M. Stewart (eds), Lilies of the Field: Comparative Essays on Marginality and Autonomy, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Pine, F. (2002), ‘Retreat to the Household? Gendered Domains in Postsocialist Poland’, in C. M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, London: Routledge. Pine, F. (2007), ‘Memories of Movement and the Stillness of Place: Kinship Memory in the Polish Highlands’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness, Oxford: Blackwell. Pine, F., and J. de Pina-Cabral (2008), On the Margins of Religion, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Pine, F., D. Kaneff and I. Haukanes (2004), Memory, Politics and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Europe, Münster: LIT Verlag. Piotroski, T. (1998), Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

168

Bibliography

Popczyk, W., and A. Winnicka-Popczyk (1999), Przedsiębiorstwo rodzinne – Determinant dalszego rozwoju w gospodarce polskiej, Łódź: University of Łódź. Popczyk, W. (2008), ‘Przedsiębiorczość globalna a wzrost firmy’, in S. Lachiewicz (ed.), Teoria i praktyka zarządzania rozwojem organizacji., 35–42, Łódź: Wydawnictwo Politechniki Łódzkiej. Pozniak, K. (2014), Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town, Pittsburgh, PA: University Press. Prentice, R. (2015), Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad, Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1940), On Joking Relationships. Africa 13, 195–210. Ram, M., and R. Holliday (1993), ‘Relative Merits: Family Culture and Kinship in Small Firms’, Sociology, 27: 629–648. Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), Our Common Future. The Brundtland Commission to the United Nations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robbins, J. C. (2009), ‘Aging, Memory and Personhood in Poland’, Anthropology News, 50: 15–16. Robbins, J. (2013), ‘Challenging Marginalization at the Universities of the Third Age in Poland’, Anthropology & Aging Quarterly, 34 (2): 157–169. Roberts, Sam (9 August 2016), Fred Schwartz, 84, Furrier, Philanthropist and Television Pitchman, Dies. New York Times. Roseberry, W. (1996), ‘The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States’, American Anthropologist, 98: 762–775. Roth, H. H., and G. Merz (1996), Wildlife Resources: A Global Account of Economic Use, Berlin: Springer. Rutherford, D. (2010), ‘Kinship, Capital, and the Unsettling of Assumptions: Contemporary Anthropology and the Study of Family Enterprise and Entrepreneurship’, Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth, 277–283. Rys, G. (18 January 2013), ‘Pokolenie bez ojców’, wyborcza.pl. Available online: http:// wyborcza.pl/magazyn/1,130290,13256598,Pokolenie_bez_ojcow.html (accessed 9 February 2013). Scheper-Hughes, N. (1979), Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland, Berkeley: University of California Press. Schneider, D. M. (1980), American Kinship: A Cultural Account, 2nd edn, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, J. (1987), ‘The Anthropology of Cloth’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 16: 409–448. Schneider, J. (1989), ‘Rumpelstiltskin’s Bargain: Folklore and the Merchant Capitalist Intensification of Linen Manufacture in Early Modern Europe’, in A. B. Weiner and J. Schneider (eds), Cloth and Human Experience, Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Bibliography

169

Schneider, J. (1994), ‘In and Out of Polyester: Desire, Disdain and Global Fibre Competitions’, Anthropology Today, 10: 2–10. Schneider, J., and A. B. Weiner (1986), ‘Cloth and the Organization of Human Experience’, Current Anthropology, 27: 178–184. Shanklin, E. (1985), ‘Sustenance and Symbol: Anthropological Studies of Domesticated Animals’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 14: 375–403. Shaw, A. (2003), ‘Interpreting Images: Diagnostic Skill in the Genetics Clinic’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9: 39–55. Skov, L. (2005), ‘The Return of the Fur Coat: A Commodity Chain Perspective’, Current Sociology, 53: 9–32. Sleeper-Smith, S. (2000), ‘Women, Kin, and Catholicism: New Perspectives on the Fur Trade’, Ethnohistory, 47: 423–452. Sleeper-Smith, S. (2001), Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes, Amherst: Massachusetts University Press. Sleeper-Smith, S. (2010), Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Song, H. (2010), Pigeon Trouble: Bestiary Biopolitics in a Deindustrialized America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ssorin-Chaikov, N. (2006), ‘On Heterochrony: Birthday Gifts to Stalin, 1949’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12: 355–375. Ssorin-Chaikov, N., and O. Sosnina (2004), ‘The Faculty of Useless Things: Gifts to Soviet Leaders’, in Personenkulte Im Stalinismus, Göttingen: V&R Unipress. Stewart, A. (2003), ‘Help One Another, Use One Another: Toward an Anthropology of Family Business’, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 27: 383–396. Stitziel, J. (2005), Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics and Consumer Culture in East Germany, Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers. Stivens, M. (2005), ‘Gender’, in J. G. Carrier (ed.), A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Strathern, M. (1979), ‘The Self in Self-decoration’, Oceania, 49: 241–257. Strathern, M. (1988), The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Sułkowski, Ł. (2004), Organizacja a rodzina: więzi rodzinne w życiu gospodarczym, TNOiK ‘Dom Organizatora’. Svijet (Author unknown) (1964), Krzneni ovratnik koji moze obnoviti vas kostim (Fur collar which can rejuvenate your suit), Svijet, 15. Sweeney, M. H., J. Walrath, and R. J. Waxreiler (1985), ‘Mortality among Retired Fur Workers: Dyers, Dressers (tanners) and Service Workers’, Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 11: 257–264. Swoboda, A. (16 February 2006), ‘Rektorzy, zdejmijcie futra!’, wyborcza.pl. Available online: http://wyborcza.pl/1,76842,3166593.html (accessed 10 February 2013). Tambiah, S. J. (1969), ‘Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit’, Ethnology, 8: 423–459.

170

Bibliography

Tarlo, E. (1991), ‘The Problem of What to Wear: The Politics of Khadi in Late Colonial India’, South Asia Research, 11 (2): 134–157. Tarlo, E. (1996), Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, Chicago: Chicago of University Press. Tarlo, E. (2007), ‘Hijab in London Metamorphosis, Resonance and Effects’, Journal of Material Culture, 12: 131–156. Tarlo, E. (2010), Visibly Muslim: Bodies of Faith, Oxford and New York: Berg. Tarlo, E. (2016), Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair, London: Oneworld. Taussig, M. (1993), Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York: Routledge. Thelen, T. (2003), ‘The New Power of Old Men: Privatization and Family Relations in Mesterszallas (Hungary)’, The Anthropology of East Europe Review: Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Eurasia, 21 (2): 15–23. Thiranagama, S. (2007), ‘Moving On? Generating Homes in the Future for Displaced Northern Muslims in Sri Lanka’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Ghosts of Memory, Oxford: Blackwell. Thomas, W. I. and F. Znanieckd (1918), The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, vol. 1, Boston: Gorham Press. Thomas, W. I., F. Znaniecki and E. Zaretsky [1918] (1996), The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Thompson, E. P. (1978), ‘Eighteenth‐century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?’, Social History, 3: 133–165. Thurnell-Read, T. (2011), ‘Off the Leash and Out of Control: Masculinities and Embodiment in Eastern European Stag Tourism’, Sociology, 45: 977–991. Tikhomirova, A. (2010), ‘Soviet Women and Fur Consumption in the Brezhnev Era’, in D. Crowley and S. E. Reid (eds), Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Bloc, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Tokarz, B. (25 March 2011), ‘Stracone pokolenie: Bezrobotni z dyplomami’. gorzow.gazeta.pl. Available online: http://gorzow.gazeta.pl/ gorzow/1,35211,9319336,Stracone_pokolenie__Bezrobotni_z_dyplomami.html (accessed 9 February 2013). Tucker, E. L. (2011), Remembering Occupied Warsaw: Polish Narratives of World War II, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Turner, T. [1980] (1993), ‘The Social Skin’, in C. B. Burroughs and J. D. Ehrenreich (eds), Reading the Social Body, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Wedel, J. (1986), The Private Poland, Oxford: Facts on File. Weiner, A. B. (1980), ‘Reproduction: A Replacement for Reciprocity’, American Ethnologist, 7: 71–85. Weiner, A. B. (1992), Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-while-giving, Berkeley, CA and Oxford: University of California Press.

Bibliography

171

Weiner, A. B., and J. Schneider (1989), ‘Introduction’, in A. B. Weiner and J. Schneider (eds), Cloth and Human Experience, Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Weston, K. (1991), Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, New York: Columbia University Press. White, J. B. (2004), Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey, Oxford: Routledge. Willerslev, R. (2004), ‘Not Animal, Not Not-animal: Hunting, Imitation and Empathetic Knowledge among the Siberian Yukaghirs’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10: 629–652. Wilson, T. L. (1999), ‘Where the Bison Still Roam: Wildlife Preservation and Animal Welfare Issues in Poland and Beyond’, Anthropology of East Europe Review, 17: 73–80. Wolf, E. R. (1982), Europe and the People without History, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Yanagisako, S. J. (2002), Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yanagisako, S. J., and C. Delaney (1995), Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, Oxford: Routledge. Yurchak, A. (2000), ‘Privatize Your Name: Symbolic Work in a Post-Soviet Linguistic Market’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4: 406–434. Yurchak, A. (2003), ‘“Russian Neoliberal”: The Entrepreneurial Ethic and the Spirit of New Careerism’, Russian Review, 62 (1). Yurchak, A. (2006), Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Zielińska, E. (2000), ‘Between Ideology, Politics, and Common Sense: The Discourse of Reproductive Rights in Poland’, in S. Gal and G. Kligman (eds), Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Index accessories 4, 70, 98, 100–1, 102, 103, 133 advertising 20, 23, 34, 41, 46, 50, 52, 64, 65, 71, 72, 94, 98, 130, 137–40, 145 aesthetics 6, 10, 31, 33, 46, 48, 57, 59, 69, 81, 86, 90, 98, 115, 127, 143 animal rights 1, 7, 8, 14, 19, 29, 41, 72, 77, 109, 127–45, 151, 152, 155–6 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) 7, 16, 29, 41, 137–40 Anthropology of East Europe Review 29 anthropomorphism 77, 123–4, 133 anti-European Union factions 2 anti-fur campaigns 127–45, 149 comprehensive veganism 135–7 generational resonances 140–3 notion of luxury as ‘excess of the normal’ 127–32, 143–5 PETA’s advertisements 137–40 against ‘the normal’ 132–5 anti-Semitism 29 atelier. See home-based furrier businesses auction houses 15, 41, 89, 109–10, 112, 113 Auschwitz 9, 10, 18, 35 Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation 19 baby boomers 22 Balcerowicz, Leszek 55 Balcerowicz Plan (‘shock therapy’) 55, 97 Barthes, Roland 5, 31, 55 Bartlett, Djurdja 17, 33, 45, 58 Belonging in the Two Berlins (Borneman) 22 Berg, Charles 34, 53 Berg, Maxine 139 Bestor, Theodore 28 black market. See smuggling Bloemberg, Ninke 33–4 Bloomberg, Michael 144

body PETA’s advertisements/models 137–40 postsocialist notion 30–3 shape/family resemblances 53–5, 58, 59, 147 and society 98 Bonington, Chris 142 Borneman, John 22, 44 ‘Born in the PRL’ (video) 13 ‘Born in the U.S.A’ (song; Springsteen) 13 Bottigheimer, Ruth 75 Bourdieu, Pierre 26, 33, 44, 54, 55, 75, 128, 148 Boy-Żeleński, Tadeusz 10 Brash, Julian 144–5 Campaign against Homophobia 11 capitalism 24, 25, 31–2, 33, 55, 68, 78, 86, 88, 91, 106, 150 Carrier, James G. 40, 56, 61, 111 Cassidy, Rebecca 25, 27, 28, 96, 114, 117, 122, 123, 124, 153 catalogues 17, 33, 69, 93 Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands (Gewertz and Errington) 28 chinchilla fur 81 class affiliation 72–3, 75, 82 boundaries 5, 76 bourgeois 3, 9, 13, 43, 44, 46, 48, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 62, 72, 75, 76, 78–80, 83, 89, 90, 92, 95, 129, 147, 151 and class differences 25, 60, 153–4 elite 14, 19, 29, 35, 89, 127, 128, 131, 142, 143–145 ‘embodied’ tastes 54 and gender 30, 35, 38, 39, 44, 55 generations and 6–7, 30, 46, 151–4 and inheritance 43–60, 147 middle 3, 31–2, 93, 97, 129, 141, 155

Index and nationalities 28 overlapping categories 6, 44, 151–4 politics 1, 143–5 respectability and dignity 73, 78–80 and środowisko relationship 44–5, 52 working 13, 29, 52, 75, 153 clothing. See also fur clothing ‘absorbent’ quality 51–2 do-it-yourself (DIY) 17, 32 “going-out clothes” vs. “everyday clothes” 50 second-hand 14, 18, 43, 60, 63 as ‘social skin’ 78–80 special 50–2 collective memory 47, 137 conservatism 4 conspiracy theories 12, 29, 120 Crăciun, Magdalena 4, 32, 130, 143 Crazy Communist Tour Company 6 Crowley, David 33, 127, 129, 142 Cyzon, Anna 8–9 Dannefer, R. 144 ‘Day without Fur’ website 14, 130, 131, 136, 142, 145 de Sève, Peter 26–7 Displaced Persons camp 18 divestment 45 division of labour 89, 94 do-it-yourself (DIY) clothing 17, 32 Douglas, Mary 62, 67, 90 Dunn, Elizabeth 24, 44, 52, 59, 70, 73, 83, 141 dyeing 95, 100, 121 Edmonds, Alexander 132 embeddedness 59, 73, 142 Emberley, Julia 1, 5, 31, 34–5, 53, 55, 127, 139–40 empathy 45, 46, 52, 101, 134, 140, 141, 143, 155 Empatia 8, 14, 131, 135, 136, 142 Europe and the People without History (Wolf) 16, 34 European Fur Breeders’ Association 14, 15 European Union 2, 7, 12, 15, 35, 36–7, 41, 71, 79, 86, 102, 106, 112, 116, 153 Eurovision Song Contest 8

173

Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (Yurchak) 23, 68 exhibitions 3, 14, 17, 23, 32, 33, 39, 104 family firms 85–107, 148–9 career choice and personality 94–6 entrepreneurial dynamics 96–9 GDP 85–6 intergenerational differences 99–106 moral issue 98–9 parental support 91–2 personhood and career success 88–91 possibilities/opportunities 92–4 post-transition development 86–7 website 92, 93, 97, 98, 99 ‘work makes work’ 91–2 fashion blogs 7, 109 Fashion East: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism (Bartlett) 17, 33 Fashioning Socialism (Stitziel) 33 Fehérváry, Krisztina 31, 44, 129 ‘Festival of Culture for Tolerance’ 11 fetishism 31, 53, 139 fetishization 23–4 First Nations people 1, 34–5 fox fur 28–9, 53, 78, 80–1, 101–2, 115, 121–2 free market 55, 97 fur defined 26–9, 147, 149–50 distinctions 26–9 generation and intergenerational relationships 7–9, 22–6 high exchange value 18 and human hair, distinctions between 33–5, 53 naturalness 63, 78, 102–3 popular culture 19–20 quality 14, 19 sexualized implications 96–9 symbolic prestige 14, 15, 20, 31, 103, 110 timelessness 78 ubiquity 14 fur clothing alterations 53–5 and bodies 1–2, 52–5 discolouration 18, 59, 79 do-it-yourself clothing 17 eco-fashion 4

174

Index generation types 23 ‘Generation without fathers’ 23 Generation X 22, 104 naturalized 150–1 Pokolenie ’89 exhibition 23, 104 Goody, Jack 43, 55 Grandits, H. 44, 154 grandmother–granddaughter relationships 43–60, 79, 92, 93, 141, 147. See also inherited fur Grandparents’ Day 6 gratitude 43–60, 79, 135

history 14–21 inherited 43–60 and material culture 30–3 postsocialist context 30–3 remodelled as home furnishings 55–7 second-hand 14, 18, 43, 60, 63 sensual connection 52–3 shared 51 special 50–2 as unusually expensive 1, 8 fur coats 4, 5, 8, 14, 17, 18, 19, 26–7, 29, 31, 33–4, 43, 48–50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61–2, 64, 70–1, 74, 77–81, 83, 91–2, 98–9, 100, 101–2, 103, 111, 118–19, 124, 130, 132, 139 fur farming 7, 14, 15, 20, 27–8, 41, 52, 75–6, 109–10, 111–13, 114–22, 124 fur industry employment benefits 15 European Fur Breeders’ Association 14 fashion 111–13 growth 15 innovation 110–11 international trade 112–13, 153 legality of production 15 production stages 95 repair work 18 fur production 19 animal population control 122–3 data of farmed animals 113–14 evaluation of animal traits and selective breeding 114–16 farmed sources 7, 14, 15, 27, 109–10 ‘fur animal’ category: nutria and dogs 123–4 media attention 109 pelting season 118–21 relatedness and farming ability 116–18 stages of 95, 112 wild sources 14, 15, 27 fur-refrigerators 77 furriership 28, 61, 63–4, 70, 76, 93, 95, 105 Furriers’ Tower 15 Fur Vault 18–19

habitus 3, 44, 48 Hair! Human Hair in Fashion and Art exhibition 33–4 Hansen, Karen Tranberg 30, 31, 45 Harper, Catherine 34, 53 Harris, Olivia 87 Heady, Patrick 24, 44, 154 heirlooms 51, 55, 57, 83 Herzfeld, Michael 4, 6, 11, 39, 48, 59 heterosexuality 26, 139 high-street stores 14, 57 hijab 130 Holocaust memory 18–19, 29, 35 holocaustsurvivors.org 18 home-based furrier businesses 61–83, 148 collaborative remodelling 80–1 commercial premises 68–9 spatial divides (‘home’ and ‘work’ section) 65–7 special tools 64 stylistic features 68–9 unfolding of social life via furrier– client interactions 78–80 website 63–4 work timing 69–71, 80 home furnishing 55–7 homophobia 26 hoods 102 human hair vs. fur, parallels between 33–5, 53, 67, 138 hunting 27, 28–9, 52, 122, 129, 141–2, 150

Gazeta Wyborcza 7, 23, 142 generation and generational gaps/ differences (pokolenie) 1, 5–9, 11, 22–6, 99–106 ‘Erasmus Generation’ 23

‘I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur’ campaign 137–8 inherited fur 43–60, 154–6 absorption 50–3 cafe-bars 48–50

Index as clothing/decor/artefact 55–7 as divested 45 family resemblances 53–5 as passing over of custodianship 45 as recommodified 45 intellectualism 9, 10, 44, 132 International Fur Trade Federation 14 jackets 4, 18, 33, 71, 81, 95, 100, 101, 133 Jakubowska, Longina 13, 44, 55, 57, 59, 97, 131, 145, 152, 154 Jerram, Leif 20 John Paul II 9, 135 Joy, A. 143 Kaczyński, Lech 11–12, 13, 153 Kaczyński, Maria 11–12 Kazimierz 6, 12–13, 48, 68, 83 kolęda ritual 144 Kopenhagen Fur Design Studio and Auction House 15, 109–10 Kopenhagen Studio 110–11, 112 Kraków Guild of Furriers 15 Kraków/Krakowian fieldwork 35–9 identity/everyday life 9–14 social stratification 6 style 4 urban space 3–4, 13, 155 Kubica, Grażyna 11, 12, 26, 129, 130 Kujawski, Hubert 7, 142 Kürti, Laszlo 28 labour 15, 24, 62, 67, 69, 70, 75, 76, 82, 89, 94, 106, 116 “last Soviet generation” 23 Leningrad Rot Front fur company 17 Lévi-Strauss, C. 107 LGBT/Q rights 11, 25, 26, 135 Loizos, Peter 24 ‘Lost Generation’ 23, 104 ‘Love Me’ (song; Cyzon) 8–9 Mad Men (TV series) 19–20 ‘Magical Hair’ (Leach) 34 Małecki, Jan Marian 132 material culture 1, 5, 6, 13, 16, 20, 27, 31, 32, 35, 83, 128, 129, 142, 147

175

Mickiewicz, Adam 10 Miller, Daniel 31, 45, 50, 51, 63, 74, 75, 128, 130 mink fur 15, 55, 56, 66, 71, 78, 98, 110, 111, 116, 119, 122, 127 Mishtal, J. 94, 144 misogyny 1 Mizielińska, Joanna 25, 26, 128, 134 mohair berets 4–5 money, as gift 93 Mullin, M. 27, 123 Murawski, Michał 12, 32 nationalism 5, 11, 13, 26 National Museum 23, 104 National Public Radio 19 Neal, Paul 76 NEP (New Economic Policy) 17 Newsweek Polska 85–6, 106 New Yorker 26–7 New York Times 19 Norris, Lucy 45 nutria fur 123–4 Obeyesekere, G. 34, 53 Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) (Oppenheim) 19 Oppenheim, Meret 19 Ortner, Sherry 22, 104 Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw 32 pamphlets 14 Parrott, Fiona 45, 50, 51 Pasieka, Agnieszka 26, 94, 128–9 pelts/pelting 15, 28, 32, 52, 54, 67, 74, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 118–21, 125, 130, 150, 152 pigeon shoot, Pennsylvania 28 Pigeon Trouble (Song) 28–9 Pine, Frances 2, 13, 15, 24, 25, 44, 59, 62, 67, 68, 82, 83, 88, 90, 97, 154 Piotroski, T. 18 Pleasures in Socialism (Crowley and Reid) 33, 129, 142 Poland accession to European Union 2, 35, 71, 112, 116, 153 Cold War-era stereotypes 3–4

176 Constitution 26 generational gaps/differences 1, 5–9, 11, 22–6 migration 2–3, 36–7 post-Civil War displacement 23 urban–rural divide 1, 102, 157 urban space 3–4, 133 Polish Association of Animal Breeders and Fur Producers 142 Polishness 12, 94, 97, 107, 135 postsocialism 11, 30–3, 68, 82, 87, 96, 97, 100, 129–30, 134, 150, 154 Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts 17 Radasky, Solomon 18 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 49–50, 60 Radio Maryja 5 Reid, Susan E. 33, 127, 129, 142 ‘renovations, repairs, and remodelling’ services 18, 37, 40, 43, 48, 51, 53–4, 55–7, 59, 61–83, 91 Robbins, Jessica 5, 22, 104 Roman Catholic Church/Roman Catholicism 3, 5, 9, 14, 25, 29, 41, 94, 128–9, 134, 135, 144, 145, 152 Catechism 26 Rothko, Mark 69 Russian fur trade 16–17, 19, 20, 27, 28, 34, 52, 67, 82, 129, 153 sable fur 81 Schneider, J. 44, 55, 70, 74, 75 Schwab, Charles M. 97 Schwartz, Fred ‘the Furrier’ 18–19 second-hand clothing 14, 18, 43, 60, 63 Second World War 22, 35, 50 secularism 23 sexism 1, 41 sexuality 25–6, 100, 128, 139, 153, 156 ‘shock therapy.’ See Balcerowicz Plan “sixtiers, the” 23 Skov, Lise 14, 55, 110, 111, 113, 143 Sleeper-Smith, Susan 34–5 smuggling 92, 93, 112, 153 Snake Charmer (rock band) 13

Index socialism 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, 27, 30–3, 54, 68, 70, 82, 86, 87, 88, 96, 97, 100, 113, 115, 116, 123, 128, 129, 134, 136, 140, 142, 150, 152, 153, 154 Song, Hoon 28, 29, 138 Springsteen, Bruce 13 środowisko, notion of 39, 44–5, 52, 59–60, 66, 72, 73, 82, 148, 152 Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai 17, 32, 67 Stalin, Joseph 32 Stalinism 17 Stalin’s Birthday Gifts Exhibition 17 Steelworks, Nowa Huta 13 Stitziel, Judd 33, 45 stoles 17, 18, 35, 48, 53, 55, 64, 70, 78 Streetlife: The Untold Story of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Jerram) 20 Svijet (magazine) 17 Tambiah, S. J. 28 Tarlo, Emma 1, 6, 7, 33, 34, 35, 74, 128, 130, 139, 145, 147 Thiranagama, Sharika 23 Thompson, E. P. 60 Tikhomirova, Anna 50, 51, 52, 129–30 Trinta, Joãosinho 132 Tsukiji seafood market, Tokyo 28 Turner, Terence S. 6, 30, 34, 45, 53, 78, 98, 145 Unconscious Significance of Hair, The (Berg) 34 unemployment 23, 24, 82, 88, 89, 104 upcycling 4 Weiner, A. B. 44, 55, 70, 74, 75 Weiner, Matthew 19–20 Wilson, Tracie 5, 29, 131, 133 Wolf, Eric 16, 17, 27, 34, 67, 74, 124 worldview 8 Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko 25, 40, 61, 63, 67, 74, 88, 91, 96, 103, 150 YouTube 13 Yurchak, Alexei 16, 23, 44, 56, 68, 82, 100 Yves Saint Laurent 69