The Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences kindly invites you to the upcoming talk of its seminar series:

Rafał Smoczynski

"The impact of gentry heritage on Polish citizenship model"

Date and Venue of the lecture: 16th September 2014, 3.00 pm (special start time!), Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 30. Országház Street, 2. floor, "Pepita" room.

The presentation is concerned with the gentry legacy that has been actively used by the Polish intelligentsia since 19th century in their collective identity strategies as well as in nation-building policies. It will be argued that modern intelligentsia has naturalized several elements of the gentry ethos what is visible for instance while analyzing the role of cultural assets in sustaining the social stratification in Poland. One of specific features of this legacy lies in “culturalization” of social hierarchies and blurring of the actual economic hierarchy, namely, intelligentsia tends to minimize the role of the economic status in the definition of the overall Polish social hierarchy. The presentation will argue that this specific system of Polish symbolic stratification proved to be very stable and lies at the basis of the Polish social order until today despite radical social change of the communist post-second World War period, which did not challenge the structurally defined dominant role of the cultural elite.