SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 594 from here’; ‘Wałłbrzych is simply extermination’ (p. 102). Rakowski reads complaints about danger as being important for the expression of grief, rather than their carrying the hope that any kind of dialogue will ensue. The desire to engage in open aggressive action he interprets as a public demonstration of the diggers’ and scrap collectors’ externalized sense of shame. Protest is futile — ‘The social world is deaf to all their complaints and dismay’ (p. 107, original emphasis). The diggers, the scrap collectors, the gatherers, Rakowski concludes, ‘all indirectly speak of their attempts to understand a world that cannot be understood’ (p. 111). Finally, Rakowski presents an analysis of change in a deprived area in the environs of Bełchatów Brown Coal Mine. When brown coal reserves were discovered under Bełchatów in the 1970s, the area underwent rapid development, adversely affecting surrounding villages. The members of the households in Szamów, the settlement at the centre of the study in this area, collect scrap, post-industrial bits and pieces; they also forage in the forests and poach the game that lives on the local spoil heap. The home thus seems to Rakowski ‘to move outwards’, overlapping with the world outside (p. 215), which he compares with the pre-Neolithic hunter/gatherer reality of being in the environment, whereas here, the hunter/gatherer’s skill is transferred to managing post-industrial, ready-made resources. Rakowski presents his anthropological study as ‘an attempt to describe’. He tries to see a world beneath the surface to which Merleau-Ponty refers as the ‘practically imperceptible’. This is a study of social powerlessness, in which the sense of ‘what is real’ has been lost. It is, as Rokowski demonstrates, a critical moment when people are asking questions, when it is unclear to them what they should make of themselves. Nevertheless, Rakowski does not see his respondents as reduced by their circumstances, but discerns an internal dynamic, an ‘inner courage’. This is what it has taken for his subjects to make the huge effort required to hold their lives together and adapt in the face of catastrophe. Rakowski’s study does these people justice, and represents a significant intellectual achievement. Homerton College Peggy Watson University of Cambridge Fornäs, Johan (ed.). Europe Faces Europe: Narratives from Its Eastern Half. Intellect, Bristol and Chicago, IL, 2017. vii + 252 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. $52.00: £39.00 (paperback). The narratives of collective identity with which members of Central and East European nations construct their own national identities in relation to REVIEWS 595 ‘Europe’ are, in Slavonic and East European studies, an old question which always has the potential to produce new answers. Indeed, if one agrees with Johan Fornäs and the five other contributors to this volume that narratives do not just reflect but constitute identity, they are perhaps the very question which has given the discipline a reason to exist: the study of ‘Eastern Europe’, and its cognate regions has so often been preoccupied with asking how its borders have been delimited and how it relates to the other understandings of the ‘Europe’ it sits within or alongside, especially since the postcolonial turn of the early 1990s. The ‘East European narratives of Europe’ (p. 13) that Fornäs and his team set out to research in 2012–14 predominantly come from the Baltic States, Poland and Ukraine. The question of how East European voices have narrated their desired and perceived relationships to ‘Europe’, conscious of the peripheral status that voices at the structural ‘centre’ of Europe have ascribed them, has been tackled before; but the fast-changing geopolitics of the region nevertheless allow this volume to make a fresh contribution, both in ways the authors would have anticipated and also in ways they could not. The ‘Europe’ that Fornäs and his contributors would have expected to observe being narrated at the beginning of their research was firstly a Europe that had supposedly been symbolically enlarged over the past decade, with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland all among the post-socialist states that joined the European Union in 2004; it was also a ‘Europe’ where many of...