Aimee Joyce

Supervisors: Frances Pine; Emma Tarlo

Ways to be Catholic: Transmission of Material and Embodied Catholicism in a Small Polish Village.

This project addresses the question; how do people use bodily practice, material objects and personal historical memory to transmit specific forms of religious observance alongside institutionalised religious dogma?

This project grows out of the renewed anthropological interest in the persistent place of religion in contemporary society and culture. Recent research highlights the discipline's current concern with the often unexpected and unanticipated resurgence of religiosity in countries with vastly different histories and politics. It also reflects increased interest in the material and embodied processes central to the transmission of religion in different cultural contexts over time. The village where I conduct fieldwork is in eastern Poland and is a particularly interesting site for exploring these issues as it was situated in the former Russian territory where historically suppression of the Catholic Church was most acute. This project examines what facets of Polish Catholicism have enabled it to survive these repeated periods of state interference and repression. In particular it shifts the focus away from the study of formal institutions of the church towards everyday embodied practices manifested in displays of devotion at shrines, on pilgrimages, and in other non-institutional rituals in rural Poland (Thomas & Znaniecki, 1996; Bujak, 1989; Buzalka, 2008, Wedel, 1992). In urban areas too, much emphasis is placed on the material and bodily practices of ritual and religion (Galbraith, 2000). As religion is gaining an increasing presence in the postsocialist lands, it is an important juncture in social and political history to examine the significance of religious practices, and the ways in which they are transmitted and maintained. This combination of project and field also promises to be particularly fruitful in adding to our understanding of the role of religion in Europe, its connections with emerging nationalisms and the place it is occupying in the gaps left by the demise of the socialist state and its rituals (Kubik, 1994; Watson, 1994; Buzalka, 2008).

The village I research in is close to the north-eastern Polish border with Belarus; this is an area where the role of religion in politics, nationalism, and relations of unequal power, is acutely apparent (Hann, 2001; Buzalka, 2008). It is also a site where various different denominations, including Roman Catholicism, Greek Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and to a far lesser extent  Islam, all co-exist in what have been at times fraught or contested relationships and where until WWII was one of the largest and most vibrant Jewish communities in Europe. In other words this is a region where loss, memory and silence occupy a significant space. Hence questions about transmission are particularly critical. After the fall of socialism, in eastern Poland members of different ethnic groups and nationalities became involved in what were often quite bitter struggles over resources and power, with religion often providing the field of conflict; even among the younger generations religious affiliation and cultural history often lead to clashes (Hann, 2002). It is an area where addressing the ways in which religiosity is transmitted is particularly relevant and timely.

At the heart of this project lies the aim to interrogate the ways in which religious practices and religiosity itself are transmitted through bodily practices in spaces outside the formal institutions of the Catholic Church. The research site contains a miracle working Roman Catholic shrine and this adds to the significance of its selection. To local people the Shrine carries with it an elaborate history of suppression; it was removed from the town in the 19^th century and only returned long after the parish was re-established in the 1920’s. The return of the icon was celebrated with the building of a new Shrine and a Calvary. This history of repression and return inflects present-day and more formal practices. The Shrine therefore offers a particularly apt focus for the study of the transmission of religious practice and knowledge. The icon at once condenses memories of suppression, when informal practices prevailed, and of state Catholicism today, where formal practices are again more apparent.