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    Published: 2018-06-29
    Vol. 38 (2017)

    Postmemory of Killings in the Woods at Dębrzyna (1945–46): A Postsecular Anthropological Perspective

    Magdalena Lubańska

    Abstract

    This article applies a methodology developed within the framework of postsecular anthropology to a case study based on field material collected in 2015–2017 in and around Przeworsk, a town in the region of Subcarpathia in south-eastern Poland. The collected material documents the current post-memory of atrocities committed in the Dębrzyna forest in 1945–46. The killings were perpetrated in a turbulent period that followed World War II, which can be described, following Zaremba, as a time of “Great Fear”, or Agamben’s term “state of exception”. At the time, some members of the local population formed gangs to commit assaults and robberies against forced labourers returning to their homeland from Germany (or from the West generally). According to my respondents, many such assaults resulted in deaths. Homeless, socially unmoored and unprotected by law, the victims were reduced to the status of a purely biological “bare life”. My article will show how the victims of those events are commemorated, and how the post-memory of those events finds its expression today. My interpretive tools are based primarily on selected postsecular theories. In this context I apply the categories of ontological penumbra and counterpoint to identify those instances where religion finds itself compelled to rely on secular diction out of a sense of powerlessness and inability to use the religious idiom for articulating problematic ideas related to suffering.

    Keywords:

    Postsecular anthropology, ontological penumbra, contaminated landscape, Great Fear, Subcarpathia
    Crosses commemorating the anonymous victims in the woods at Dębrzyna. 03.03.2018. Photo: M. Lubańska.

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    Citation rules

    Lubańska, M. (2018). Postmemory of Killings in the Woods at Dębrzyna (1945–46): A Postsecular Anthropological Perspective. Ethnologia Polona, 38, 15–46. Retrieved from https://journals.iaepan.pl/ethp/article/view/42

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