Reflexive ethnography of Poland’s non-memory about Jews and the Holocaust: Revisiting fieldwork, revising assumptions

Abstract

The authors present their experience of revisiting the in-depth interviews collected in 1988–1993 in the context of new research on Poland’s memories of Jews and the Holocaust conducted by them in 2013–2017. The revisit, carried out in a radically different intellectual and socio-political context, helped the authors: (1) to change their focus from the past to the present in which the interviews were conducted and in which the respondents constructed their remembrance; (2) to understand memory as a contingent and contextual image of the past, functional in relation to the identity-management of the remembering subjects; (3) to discover the previously neglected importance of the non-discursive attitudes to the past, located between amnesia and remembrance, which the authors have called non-memory.