The article is an attempt to reconstruct the views of the outstanding Polish sociologist on the role of peasants in the latest Polish history, i.e. after World War II. It is based mostly on the following works: 'Chlopi i kultura chlopska w spoleczenstwie polskim' (1988) (Peasants and the Peasant Culture in Polish Society), 'Rola chlopów w rozwoju spoleczenstwa polskiego' (1966) (The Role of Peasants in the Development of Polish Society) and 'Zmiany spoleczenstwa polskiego w procesie uprzemyslowienia' (1973) (Changes in the Polish Society in the Process of Industrialization). Although all the theses were made by Professor Szczepanski in the communist period, they have not lost their validity nowadays.
Author claims that peasant character of Polish pre-war society (1918-1939) was preserved throughout the Second World War and turbulent immediate post-war years, and until the 1980s had been a major factor accounting for economic and social development of Polish society. Peasants, and more general rural dwellers, were the only class of Polish pre-war society which did not disintegrated in result of the World War Two, and became a recruitment base of a new working class and a new intelligentsia. They transferred their peasant-rooted value systems and their mentality shaped by a permanent poverty of Polish rural areas into their new environments, mostly urban and industrial, and in this way contributed to the
The article refers to Weber's distinction of human activity into the one inspired by formal rationality on the one hand, and real one on the other, which cannot be presented as calculation of sources, costs and profits. It is a kind of social-cultural rationality which cannot be counted and which used to be a background of the peasant way of living, an axiomatic-normative system, perfectly integrated and able to meet various human needs at the same time. Penetration of formal rationality (money and market) in the peasant life and culture has led to moral-behavioral anomy of contemporary country with all its negative results.
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Dostęp do pełnego tekstu na zewnętrznej witrynie WWW
Jozef Obrebski investigated the family in Polesie as ethnologist and sociologist and he described the problem in both diachronic and synchronic approaches. He emphasized the ethnic aspect in connection with the processes of modernization of the traditional society and cultural system in this territory. Obrebski was particularly interested in the transformations in the Polesie traditional family. He analyzed the problem in his works 'Polesie archaiczne' and 'Panska szkola i muzyckie dzieci', both written on the basis of his ethnosociological expeditions to Polesie in 1934-37. J. Obrebski analyzed the big traditional family and its patriarchal structure as the basis of economic and social life in the traditional peasant society and main resource of its traditional culture. His works are very valuable for modern investigations of the Polesie family, due to rich factual material which the author obtained from his respondents, and cited in detail. His description of the system of big traditional family became the excellent example of the functional analysis in the investigation of such problems, especially some processes of the disintegration of the traditional family.
The cultural heritage of the Polish rural community constitutes a specific type of capital with which the Polish society is entering the integrated Europe. The author of the article draws attention to the possibility of formulating a different than the often expressed extremely critical opinion about that heritage. She also emphasises the significance of the society's positive or negative attitude towards its own tradition. The article's conclusions, which find confirmation in the results of surveys conducted in various parts of Poland in 2003, suggest that a positive attitude towards the rural heritage displayed by the society described by sociologists as a peasant society is more conducive to pro-European attitudes and creation of a new system than criticism, full of complexes vis-a-vis the West, which, at best, may lead to the creation of an imitative capitalism and peripheral democracy.
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