Інстытут палітычных даследаванняў "Палiтычная сфера"
We are publishing the PDF version of the Belarusian translation of Hanna Engelking’s monograph Collective Farmers: An Anthropological Study of the Identity of Belarusian Village Residents at the Turn of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.
The book is the result of many years of ethnographic field research conducted between 1993 and 2011. It is based on hundreds of conversations between Polish ethnographers and residents of villages in Western and Eastern Belarus.
By analysing narratives about the traumatic experience of collectivisation, war, and atheisation, the author reconstructs the key components of the identity of Belarusian collective farmers: work on the land and faith in God. The study reveals the cognitive and axiological categories of the longue durée characteristic of the premodern peasant ethos.
This book is not a study of post-communist mentality. The collective self-portrait it presents makes it possible to understand who Belarusian collective farmers are in their own eyes.
The first edition of the monograph was published in 2012 in the “FNP Monographs” series, with the support of the Foundation for Polish Science (Fundacja na rzecz Nauki Polskiej), by the Nicolaus Copernicus University Press in Toruń.
The Belarusian edition was made possible thanks to the kind support of the Institute for Political Studies “Political Sphere”.
