The Polish peasant on the sugar plantation: Bronisław Malinowski, Feliks Gross and Józef Obreȩbski in the new world

Abstract

This article explores how two of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski's Polish protegés, Feliks Gross (1906-2006) and Józef Obreȩbski (1905-67), sought to rebuild careers in the United States after the Second World War. Reading the scholars' correspondence of 1946 to 1948, exchanged while Gross was commuting between jobs in New York and Wyoming and Obreȩbski was conducting fieldwork in Jamaica, it examines the confidence, excitement and sense of discovery with which the two refugees sought to transplant theories and methods first cultivated in interwar Poland to new soil. Arguing that Gross and Obreȩbski approached exile as a chance to 'go global' with Polish social science, it emphasises the role of both place and displacement in intellectual history. In particular, it looks at how the scholars drew on pre-war experiences in East Central Europe to produce new ways of thinking about nationality, globalisation and decolonisation in the post-war world.