DYSFUNKCYJNA NOSTALGIA? MIKROŚWIAT BAZARU NA WARSZAWSKIM KOLE
DYSFUNCTIONAL NOSTALGIA? THE MICRO-WORLD OF WARSAW'S KOŁO FLEA MARKET

Summary/Abstract: The study that the author conducted with his students was based on in-depth interviews and participant observation. It posed a series of questions concerning place, people, objects and interactions within the space of Warsaw's flea market in the city's Koło neighborhood. The goals of this research were (1) to capture the social specificity of this place and (2) to identify the functions that the market fulfills in the lives of the community that sustains it. A thesis that emerged during the study is that the more the vendor community idealizes its past, the less effectively it performs its integrative functions in the present. In other words, the more it is "imagined"and "suspended"in a lost past, the more detrimental this becomes for the community. The study focuses on the issue of nostalgia, which, although it partly unites the vendor community, is fundamentally dysfunctional for it.

• Details
• Contents