One of the common and schematic descriptions in the perspective of the 1989 breakthrough are two ways of dealing with it by people who are respectively called winners or losers of transformation. These stereotypical characteristics are not only the tool to draw the general image of effects of the transition, but are also based on the specific way of interpretation deeply rooted, for example, in neoliberal thinking. Yet, from the perspective of an individual-so-called Schütz’s man on the street-the categorization of winners and losers not only simplifies the description of social reality, but also it cannot be easily biographically justified because the etic categorization is not always relevant to the emic perspective. In other words, the life history of an individual, showing the main phases and events of biography, and life story-the way that one interprets his/her biographical experiences- may not correspond to each other. The analysis of these two aspects of biography (what is lived through and how it is interpreted) shows how people have dealt with the process of transformation. In the paper, it is presented on the basis of one case study.
The article focuses on the case study of the life history of Weronika, a person biographically experiencing the consequences of the transformation process in Poland. On the one hand, the text concentrates on showing the change in the status of the narrator’s family from a privileged position in the socialist period to the experience of unemployment and poverty after 1989. On the other hand, the text analyzes the necessity of the narrator’s mother’s emigration to Italy in the mid-1990s. Thus, the article focuses on the narrator’s experience in the context of being a migrant woman’s child. This experience is related to the time of socialization and education, which was difficult for the narrator, and the consequence of which is shown in the text in connection to the narrator’s persistence in trajectory. The text also presents the perspective of transnational motherhood within the framework of Polish women’s migrations after 1989. Also, an important perspective adapted in the article is the experience of migration by the narrator, who at the time of the interview has also been living in Italy for 10 years. Permanent emigration of the narrator is associated in her life history with high biographical costs. The article is, therefore, an attempt to present migration as a source of suffering in relation to the context of being a migrant’s child and being a migrant oneself. The analysis of Weronika’s case is also an attempt to show the relationship between the individual experience of the narrator and the mechanisms of collective influence. Thus, the text treats the analyzed life history as one of the biographical accounts reflecting the biographical and social processes assigned to a specific time frame. In this perspective, the text aims to reconstruct the complexity of these processes and to interpret the experienced social reality in an individual biography.
Artykuł skupia się na studium przypadku dotyczącym osoby biograficznie doświadczającej życia w dwóch kulturach, tym samym ukształtowanej przez życie i wychowanie w dwóch państwach, w wyniku migracji rodziców z PRL-u do Stanów Zjednoczonych na początku lat 80. Analiza oscyluje tutaj pomiędzy próbą wpisania narracji rozmówcy w refleksyjność bliską koncepcji człowieka marginalnego a kwestią poszukiwania, definiowania, konstruowania i rekonstruowania przez narratora jego tożsamości. Tekst ma także na celu dostarczenie kolejnego wglądu w problematykę złożonej tożsamości migrantów.
EN
The article is focused on the case study concerning the person biographically experiencing living in two cultures, in that process formed by living and bringing up in two countries, as a result of the migration of parents from the People’s Republic of Poland to the United States at the beginning of the 80s. The analysis oscillates here between an attempt to write down this narration into the reflectiveness close to the concept of marginal man and the issue of seeking, defining, constructing, and reconstructing the narrator’s identity. The text also aims to provide further insight into the complex issues migrants’ identity.
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