Different Times, Different Places, Different Standpoints

Abstract

I was born in communist Poland five years after the end of World War II and I grew up in a home with an open-to-the-world, cosmopolitan orientation, untypical for the inward, ethno-particularist orientation prevalent in Poland. My studies at Warsaw University specialized in sociology (history of social ideas, staffed by teachers of the Weberian persuasion with a Durkheimian twist) and history (early modern East European history, under a strong influence of the French Annales school). In particular, my participation in the so-called Flying University or the informal seminars conducted in our professors' homes, taught me the different traditions of Western social theory on the one hand and, on the other, an appreciation of the inherent multi-dimensionality and Zusammenhang or interlocking of historical processes—approaches that attractively contrasted with the official Marxist doctrine. For the same reason—I should mention here that I was also actively involved in the student dissident movement which we saw as a fight against the intrinsically evil Marxism-Leninism and the oppressive system it created – I was particularly drawn to Florian Znaniecki's view of the social world as permeated with culture and always pulsating with change. In the mid-1970s I defected to the United States where I asked for and received political asylum. I did my doctoral studies in Boston, specializing in the sociology of immigration and ethnicity and urban studies and, on the side, American social history. In the few years that followed, supported by postdoctoral fellowships, I read intensely in several disciplines at once- sociology, cultural anthropology, and social history -American and European, especially French and British. Particularly important for my then (re)developing intellectual orientation and research agenda - I investigated modes of integration into the receiver, American society of the immigrants who occupied the lowest echelons in its socio-economic and civic-political systems—was the social theorizing of David Lockwood, appealingly eclectic and nicely grounded in empirical evidence; John Goldthorpe's insightful analyses of class schema; and the brilliant cultural-historical studies of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. Somewhat ironically considering where I came from (but how we hated official Marxism!), the works of Western neo-Marxist and marxisant thinkers have gradually turned me, a committed culturalist with an idealist bent upon arrival, into a resolute structuralist-culturalist, with a keen eye on social structures.