As a recipient of funding from the Margaret Wray French Fund during the summer of 2006, I was able to lay the groundwork for my dissertation research in sociocultural anthropology on aging and memory in Poland. I spent a total of ten weeks in Poland and was able to secure research affiliations as well as to begin to gain a sense of the experiences of the elderly in Poland. Additionally, I spent six weeks at an intensive language program, where I greatly improved my language skills. The combination of the support for my research from the Margaret Wray French Fund as well as the FLAS support for the language program prepared me to write grant applications in the fall of 2007 and to carry out my dissertation research beginning in the fall of 2007. Memory stood out to me as particularly crucial during my time in Poznan. I attended an exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the events of June 1956 in Poznan. In June 1956, the violent suppression of an uprising of thousands in the streets of Poznan against the Polish Communist party resulted in the deaths of almost one hundred. Many Poles believe this was the first step in the eventual formation of Solidarnosc and the fall of state socialism. As part of the current Polish trend of memorializing events which were suppressed under state socialism, the federal and local government sponsored this exhibit in Poznan in June 2006 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of this event. I visited the exhibit several times, and noticed that it was remarkably popular among local residents, including many elderly people who had personal recollections of 1956. This exhibit is being turned into a larger permanent museum to commemorate this event. Because of this event’s national and local importance, I plan to compare the way that this event is officially commemorated with the ways that it matters in the lives of the elderly in Poznan. Visiting this exhibit demonstrated for me the vibrancy that certain historical events and their remembrance can have in creating meaning in contemporary lives.
I will be able to accomplish this research by means of the contacts I made during my research this summer, for I have secured research affiliations with a variety of institutions that interact with seniors. In Wroclaw, these include a rehabilitation home for seniors and a Dom Pomocy Spolecznej (“Social Help House,” analogous to a public nursing home), where I will be conducting semi-structured interviews with residents as well as medical and non-medical staff. I have also made contact with the Uniwersytet Trzeciego Wieku (“Third Age University,” particularly for seniors), and plan to attend classes and conduct interviews with students. Finally, I have also met with representatives from the nursing and medical academies, where I will be able to have access to screening programs for Alzheimer’s disease, in order to interview their participants, as well as to nursing and medical students themselves. In Poznan, I have been invited by the director of a senior center to conduct ethnographic research at her institution. This will provide me a local site to research personal experiences of June 1956 in Poznan, as well as to conduct the same semi-structured interviews as in Wroclaw. I have also secured official affiliation with the Department of Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, which will provide me with a local academic base for my research.
It is through the support received from the Margaret Wray French Fund that I was able to secure these contacts and to have productive interviews that continue to lead me to think critically about my research. I am deeply grateful for this support, and look forward to undertaking in more depth a systematic anthropological analysis of aging in Poland, which I am convinced is both necessary and important for understanding contemporary Polish life, the new European Union, and how life is given or denied meaning.