The events of 1914 initiated the redrawing of many boundaries, both geopolitical and intellectual. At the outbreak of the war the London-based anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski was at a professional meeting in Australia. Technically an ‘enemy alien’ (a Pole of Austro-Hungarian citizenship), he was barred from returning to Britain; stranded in Australia, under surveillance by authorities and with insecure finances, Malinowski began fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands that would result in his groundbreakingArgonauts of the Western Pacific(1922).1Argonauts’ influence rested on its compelling portrait of the anthropologist as ‘participant-observer’, the insider/outsider uniquely poised to decode and recode cultures and meanings.2Malinowski thus adeptly retooled his own ambiguous status into a paradigm of the ethnographer’s optimal subject-position – quipping that he himself was particularly suited to this role, as ‘the Slavonic nature is more plastic and more naturally savage than that of Western Europeans’.3
This book brings together a team of scholars representing a broad range of interests and new approaches in medieval studies to explore the interactions of secular power and sacral authority in central and southeastern Europe in the period. Contributors present new research on the region's political and legal history, nobility and government institutions, war and diplomacy, literature and literacy, sacred and secular art, archaeological research, heritage studies, and much more.
The large dissatisfaction of citizens with post-communist democracy in Central and Eastern Europe favors populist and anti-systemic parties and movements. These parties accuse their rivals of various forms of corruption and prescribe anti-systemic cures, including the discretionary exclusion of their rivals from political life. Analyzing the situations in Poland, Romania, and Hungary more closely, we reveal a risk of the development of “selective democracy,” in which key elites and their supporters redefine the borders of the polity in an exclusionary way, denying various groups of “enemies” legitimate access and representation and thereby undermining basic democratic principles.
"The Higher the Satellite, the Lower the Culture"? African American Studies in East-Central and Southeastern Europe: The Case of Poland