Seminar “The Historical Memory of Belarusian Poles: Between Official Narratives and Family Memory”

Dear colleagues!
../wp-content/uploads/2010/11/poland.gifOn 24 November at 18:00, the next meeting of the research seminar of the Political Sphere Institute will take place in the CSI courtyard.

Topic of the presentation: “The Historical Memory of Belarusian Poles: Between Official Narratives and Family Memory”.

Speaker: Aliaksei Lastouski, Candidate of Sociological Sciences, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Belarus.

All interested persons are invited to take part in the seminar.

Registration is by email: [email protected] ([email protected])
Presentation plan:
1.

Research context (theory, methodology, implementation).
2.

The interconnections between historical memory and collective identity,
the problems of preserving the historical memory of an ethnic group in a national
state.
3.

Basic characteristics of the historical memory of Belarusian Poles:
a) sources of historical knowledge;
b) interest in the history of Poland as a symbolic resource;
c) subjective assessment of knowledge of the history of Poland.
4.

The intersection of grand narratives: the Polish national, Soviet,
Belarusian national, and Belarusian state grand narratives and the place of
Belarusian Poles within them.

Escape from grand narratives and the technique of bricolage.
5.

The canon of the historical memory of Belarusian Poles: cultural and
historical figures.
6.

Assessment of the events of 17 September 1939 as a point of conflictual
interaction among grand narratives; the role of family memory in interpreting
the past.
7.

Summary.

Theses:
1.

In the historical memory of Belarusian Poles, ideas from
different state traditions and historical periods are layered upon one another.

The Polish historical
narrative is only one of the sources shaping the historical
memory of Belarusian Poles, and it coexists with ideas about the past
borrowed from other grand narratives.
2.

For Belarusian Poles, the history of Poland functions as an important
symbol to which outward loyalty is shown, but actual knowledge
of Polish history is not particularly extensive.

Although the Polish
historical canon (events and persons) is quite coherent, which helps
its successful transmission, a large share of Belarusian Poles either know it
poorly or do not know it at all.
3.

The Polish national narrative is not used as the foundation
of the ethnic group.

Although this narrative rather strictly defines
who Poles are (including who Poles in Belarus are), and it
could quite easily be adopted as a “counter-memory” for constructing
one’s own politics of identity.

The historical memory of Belarusian Poles
contains fragments of various “grand” narratives, allowing them
to avoid conflicts of memory with other ethnic groups, above all
Belarusians.
4.

Family memory plays a special role for Belarusian Poles,
preserving and transmitting knowledge about the past that
has special significance at the kinship and local levels (the greatest
importance is attached to the history immediately before, during, and after the Second
World War).

Many plots from this set of events and their
interpretations differ substantially, and sometimes irreconcilably,
from official narratives.

But family stories and
state history do not enter into dialogic
relations with one another, continuing to exist at different levels of awareness and
articulation.