05.10.2021

Postpeasant cosmopolitics: Man of the forest, lumpenproletariat, and authenticity,

There is a long tradition in anthropology, stemming back to the colonial era, of anthropologists questioning whether their informants are authentic enough for ethnographic description. In this talk, an American anthropologist will discuss her relationship with a daring informant who confused the politics in nature in the Białowieża Forest and threw into relief what it means to reinvent oneself in a postsocialist, neoliberal era. Certainly undisciplined, and yet working within her profession and role as the foreign anthropologist, Associate Professor Eunice Blavascunas unpacks why friendship – in this case, with a man who might have been a peasant, a superstar, or a prime example of a lumpenproletariat and a Man of the Forest – still matters in ethnographic field work. In so doing, she examines how to write through the paradoxical transformations that happened in the Puszcza Białowieska over research visits between 1995 and 2018.

Eunice Blavascunas is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She completed her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz and has taught at the University of Washington’s Program on the Environment, and held a Switzer Fellowship and Fulbright fellowship in addition to fellowships at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, and at the Leibniz Institute, GWZO in Leipzig. For more than 20 years she has been researching and writing about conservation politics in nature preserves in Poland. Her book, “Foresters, Borders and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Forest” is now published with Indiana University Press (2020). With filmmaker Jodie Baltazar she produced and directed a documentary film, ‘Black Stork White Stork’ (2014), found on the Rachel Carson Center’s portal.