In and against the System. Research Conducted by the Chair of Slavic Ethnography of the Jagiellonian University in Spisz (Spiš) in the Light of Archival Documentation

The limited research on the political involvement of ethnographers, ethnologists and anthropologists during the Polish People's Republic [PRL] makes it difficult to have a balanced and thoughtful discussion about the relationship between policy and our discipline during that period. This underscores the need for anthropologists to engage in systematic, archival studies into the post-war history of their discipline, shaped by the challenging circumstances of a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. Such studies can help us better understand the context in which anthropologists worked, and how they positioned themselves both scientifically and politically within the system. The example of research conducted by the Chair of Slavic Ethnography at Jagiellonian University in Spisz (in Slovak Spiš) - region very important both to scholars and authorities - reveals the diversity among the anthropologists at that time. The academic biographies of Zbigniew Biały and Czesław Robotycki show how they balanced shifting ideological expectation, the rules of political life at the University, and a changing political situation. Their political differences shaped not only their choices of research topics and methods, but also led one of them to undergo a major shift in scientific interests in response to the political crises of the 1980s.