REVIEWS 593 Rakowski, Tomasz. Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness: An Ethnography of the Degraded in Postsocialist Poland. Translated by Søren Gauger. European Anthropology in Translation, 6. Berghahn, New York and Oxford, 2016. xiii + 312pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $130.00: £92.00. While Western media were confidently relaying stories of Poland’s successful transition to capitalism, the lives of a broad swathe of the country’s population were being shattered as industrial shut-down, mass unemployment and the cancellation of welfare left large numbers of people to fend for themselves. This book captures the ambivalences, ironies and the humanity intrinsic to social change after Communism where what was billed as modernization and ‘freedom’ meant degradation and a fast track to ‘unmodernity’ for people who had no choice but to scrape together a minimum existence by mobilizing whatever they could. Tomasz Rakowski presents a theoretically reflective and empirically rich ethnographic study of ‘the degraded’ in three geographical locales in Poland which were ravaged by change. One is a rural community in the Świętokrzyskie Foothills where most households had had at least one member employed in industry, but that industry had since been wound up. Here, farming had broken down and people had become immobile, living a life centred on their streets and in their houses, wheeling and dealing and cadging the odd job. The quality of psychic life had also been spoiled — shame was now attached to the very meaning of being in the village and near the house. What Rakowski describes as ‘the ever-present transparency of being dispensible’ (p. 49) generated a sense among the villagers of being at risk, of being caught up in a recurring state of both chaos and standstill (p. 55). Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Rakowski shows the idiom to be one of physicality and ecology — the unhappiness of not working is understood organically (p. 55). Only one small step up from unemployment in the eyes of the villagers are the ‘private guys’, people who offer bits of work on bad terms: ‘(private) factories, middlemen — they’ll do us in’ (p. 59). Although inherently shameful, gathering wild herbs and undergrowth and wood from the forest were now universal money-making activities. Here, as Rakowski describes it, the meaning of the environment and what counts as local knowledge is in a constant process of change. In contrast to this rural setting, Wałbrzych is a former site of mining and a place that has gone through some of the most difficult changes after 1989. As mines were liquidated, illegal coal extraction took over in the coal basin, along with the dismantling of buildings and the collection of all kinds of scrap. Despite prior problems, the destruction of the coal basin was seen entirely in terms of current events: ‘Wałbrzych is a ruin, even the birds are turning away 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...