Ethnoculture in the Diaspora Between Regionalism and Americanisation

Ethnoculture in the Diaspora Between Regionalism and Americanisation - Anna Brzozowska-Krajka

Professor Anna Brzozowska-Krajka’s monograph significantly reinterprets and complements the image of the culture of Polish immigrants to the United States of America and initiates folkloristic studies of the culture of Polish diaspora in the USA, with Podhale regionalism in America as the basis of her research. This perspective is especially important given the fundamentally folk, rural character of Polish emigration, which has been studied so far within the frame established by W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki’s crucial work The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, though no substantial folkloristic commentary on this work has been published. Therefore, Ethnoculture in the Diaspora. Between Regionalism and Americanisation may be regarded as essential for increasingly more and more important folkloristic investigations of diasporic cultures with the application of methods of anthropology of culture and cultural studies.
Anna Brzozowska-Krajka presents a critical overview of both American and Polish studies, sometimes taking a polemical stance, and reinterprets the results of research in this field. Illuminating are those parts of her polemic where the methodology of folkloristic studies, consistently applied, leads to formulating new interpretative statements which change those which have been functioning so far, made in sociological and historical studies of Polish emigration to the USA.
The subject of study – Tatra highlander regionalism, folklore and folklorism in the USA – is delineated clearly in Ethnoculture in the Diaspora. Between Regionalism and Americanisation. It also has diagnostic value in the context of the explosion of ethnicity in the USA in the 1960’s. The fundamental questions posed and pondered in this monograph include articulations of ethnicity, regionalism and folklorism in American popular culture, how they determine its substance and style, how popular culture generates and stimulates manifestations of national folklorism and neoregionalism.