Prof. dr hab. Cezary Obracht-Prondzyński from the Department of Social Anthropology of the Institute of Sociology, University of Gdańsk talks about Christmas rituals and alienation areas with dr Beata Czechowska-Derkacz

We are talking during Christmas time and I would like to start with a question which, especially now, seems important to me. Christmas is a time of looking at the other person. In Poland today, we have a ‘stranger’ at the border, because that is how many of us see people who flee their homeland in search of a better life. What category is this and why do we as a collective react so badly to difference?

I don't at all get the impression that 'strangers' today are just those people at the border. This dramatic situation will soon be resolved there, and we, in Poland, will not be short of 'strangers'. It is worth asking a more general question: what is our attitude to someone other than ourselves? I believe that one of the key civic competencies is to be with another. With someone next to us, but who is someone else: with different beliefs, biography, experiences. It can be defined by different categories and characteristics, moreover, it is culturally, locally or by one's own experience. However, the definition of a stranger is also an effect of media discourse or the activity of authorities. Not only political but also power over our emotions - spiritual, moral, psychological. This is where the definition of ‘stranger’ takes place. A ‘stranger’ is a refugee, but also our neighbour who has different beliefs, flies a different flag or doesn't fly one at all; talks about someone differently to us; dresses differently, listens to different music, eats different food. The areas of strangeness are very diverse - this is the complexity of the world today.

Do Kashubians, not like 'strangers'?

There used to be a saying in Kashubia: ‘Nothing good, what's new’. Someone who came from outside was interesting, but at the same time we were afraid of him, we did not know what he brought - something positive or dangerous? Today the new, the unexpected, the unknown, the different, the difficult to accept does not have to come, because it is already here. Culture shock does not have to be caused by someone from far away. It can be someone who is right next door. Besides, there are quite a few people from very far away in Poland. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of immigrants, foreigners, who live among us. And that is why it is so important what attitude we have to them and what we think about them. Back in 2014, when Poles were surveyed and asked whether we should accept refugees, save people who are fleeing war, misfortune, three-quarters of Poles answered: ‘definitely yes’ or ‘yes’. A few months later, in 2015, as a result of the first crisis after a period of fierce political dispute, but also of atrocious, even disgusting, propaganda, the mood changed dramatically. Confronting a 'stranger' is confronting someone/something that is dangerous. If we present the stranger as dangerous, we present him as an enemy. We then go beyond the pragmatic-political-economic-legal dimension and enter the moral-ethical dimension with the question: ‘Do we have the right to deprive him of his humanity?’. The first step to hell is to deprive the other person of his humanity, to objectify him, to acknowledge, for example, that he spreads germs... It's a simple way to do whatever we want to another person. It's not very festive, but perhaps this time will be a moment of deeper reflection for us. Let us not allow ourselves to be infected by fear, which leads to hatred. Perhaps this is not possible socially, but for each of us individually - yes. And it is important because the Polish soul is pricked by the thorn of hatred. It has its consequences in relation not only to others but also to ourselves. If we allow ourselves to be infected with hatred, it will not be directed towards one goal. It will project itself on our entire functioning and we will find it very difficult to stand with ourselves and in our communities.

Does this ‘sting of hatred’ sometimes make it difficult for us to sit down together at the Christmas table with our families?

The deepest ditches, resentments, the most ‘crimes’ are committed in the family circle. This is the uniqueness of the family: it is the most important for us, the closest, it influences us the most. At the same time, autonomy is most difficult to achieve within it, and if conflicts do occur, they are strongest there. I find the fetishisation of the family suspicious. All totalitarian and other regimes, especially right-wing-conservative ones, have appealed to some invented model of the family. I once said, during an educational forum, that the absolutisation of the family's right to a child can lead to profound harm - also in an educational sense. I would ask the question: if we know that a child in a family is brought up in a spirit of hatred towards others, should we, as a society, agree to this?

We should not, but are we allowed to step into people's homes?

The family has a specific function in society, it has specific duties towards society. I will refer to the basic, although very 'hot', especially today, health issues. A child is an autonomous being and it is not only the parent who has the right to decide about its fate, whether to vaccinate it so that it can avoid incurable, serious illnesses or death in the future. A parent can decide for themselves, but their will cannot be dogma when it comes to their child. Society has a right to ask what happens to the child. There are many disputes about this - on the one side, we have those who build very high walls of privacy and on the other those who interfere in all decisions about raising children. We negotiate these boundaries because they are important.

Or maybe we don't want as a society to interfere: ‘one's home...’. In the same way, we shrug off our collective, social responsibility for what is happening at our border. Sometimes we donate to an NGO, sometimes we post on social media... How can we share Christmas Eve with images of hungry people freezing in the forest?

If we actually have those images before our eyes... We have the unique ability to turn into three monkeys - one cannot see, one cannot hear, one cannot speak. We prefer not to see things that are inconvenient for us, not to hear about them and not to talk about them. Because if we find out something, we will have to do something about it. And if we do nothing, we will be tormented by remorse. A common attitude is slactivism, a commitment that has no practical effect but clears our conscience. We like, sign online petitions, express our opinions on social media. But this can hardly be considered enough. Sometimes someone will go further and decide that social media posts are not enough and make a donation. But another person will say that a donation is also not enough and they need to go out and protest in the streets. For someone else, protesting in the streets is not enough because you can go back to your warm home, so you have to go looking for the needy at the border or the homeless in the streets to help them. Activism is therefore gradual, but it seems to me that it should be to each person's ability. However, I don't want to judge that. What matters to me is that there is no lack of people who show a minimum of commitment and acceptance. They can even smile at a 'stranger' walking down the street. These are such trivial gestures of sympathy, but they can mean a great deal. Let us not be afraid, not only during the holiday season, of such small gestures. When encouraging young people and senior citizens to become socially active, I stress that they should not start with big projects, because if something does not work out, there is a disappointment. I am a positivist patriot of small steps, according to the Pomeranian tradition.

How do you convince those who are afraid that ‘fear makes cowards of us all’?

We must distinguish between fear and anxiety. Fear concerns something concrete and can be mobilising. It is related to a challenge: I am afraid of an exam, so I mobilise myself to study. Anxiety is something completely different: we are afraid that someone will take our being away from us. I would expect that, in such difficult situations, public authorities would mobilise us and would be able to say clearly that we may be afraid of a wave of immigrants, but that the matter can be dealt with under procedures, which is a testimony to the efficiency of the state. I absolutely do not accept a situation in which everything is based on arousing fear, on frightening that in a moment some 'metaphysical' mass of people will enter Poland and Poland will cease to be Poland and Poles will cease to be Poles.

We have already reintroduced the metaphor of the Christian bulwark into public space.

It and others like it. For example, about the threat of a flood. Meanwhile, the use of this notion is to arouse fear and, consequently, make us helpless. This is a favourite figure of authoritarian power: to point out a threat, to paralyse people with fear, and then to act as a saviour who can provide security and stigmatise the ‘traitors’. The way things are with us, I fear that if we heard today that a public flogging of ‘traitors’ was going to take place in the town square, there would be no shortage of those who would want to watch it, applaud, and would not hesitate to throw stones. A responsible authority never mobilises people's fear and hatred towards someone else. In this way, it may be easier to gain electoral legitimacy, but it loses moral legitimacy. I have the impression that the Church, while in many other fields it agrees with the authorities, here it realised that we are dealing with a moral problem and this Rubicon must not be crossed.

In this case, the Church stood in opposition to the authorities, but it seems to me that it speaks of the Christian duty to feed the hungry and warm the cold too rarely and too quietly.

The question is, do these messages get through? In the past, a bishop's position would resonate, but today?

Has he lost his authority?

Of course. But there is also no consensus within the Church. Often what the vicar and parish priest say is completely different from the official position of the bishop. But sometimes it is also different. Here in ‘my area’, in one of the most conservative gminas in Poland, when the parish priest was asked to pray for the refugees, he agreed without hesitation and helped with the collection of donations that was organised there. But I also know that there are attitudes, issues that he will never agree to. This shows the tension within the Church between the universality of Christian ethics, the moral foundation, and the particularism of nationalistic thinking. This is perhaps one of the greatest tensions in the Church, and it carries over to us, at least some of us.

Most Poles understand the Christian roots of Europe in a very simple way.

While the thesis that it is difficult to imagine Europe's roots without Christianity is true, the thesis that Europe's roots are exclusively Christian is a misunderstanding. One would have to remove huge chunks of its history, shift its borders and erase its people. We should ask ourselves whether we believe that Europe also grows out of the Christian tradition, or whether we are rather convinced that this is the exclusive and most important heritage? The latter statement is obviously an ideological simplification, and consequently becomes a tool of power. One can also try to translate it into the Polish situation. Here we hear: ‘only under this cross, only under this sign, Poland is Poland and Pole is Pole’. If we say this, we are, by definition, excluding a not insignificant part of society! We forget that these crosses were and are different. And different things happened under them or in their name. It cannot be said that without Catholicism there is no Polishness. Of course, it is difficult to talk about our history and tradition without taking this aspect into account, but the thesis that Catholicism is the most important for our identity is false. And it also only serves ideological justification.

So it would be difficult for us to imagine us Europeans without the heritage of antiquity. Someone may say, of course, that Christianity grows out of antiquity. This is true, but antiquity cannot be reduced to it. Besides, what about the pagan heritage? All those people, their cultures and traditions that for hundreds, if not thousands, of years co-shaped our continent?

And what about the heritage of Islam?

Indeed! If we integrally consider Europe, we can say that, since the eighth century, Islam has had an uninterrupted presence in Europe, in Spain, the Balkans, Crimea or Sicily. Of course, Christians clashed with Muslims during the Reconquista or the Crusades. But were those wars worse, more dangerous, more terrible than the wars that the arch-Catholic, arch-Christian states fought internally, among themselves? Was the Franco-Habsburg rivalry idyllic? Was the first, as the world understood at the time, the Thirty Years' War, which dramatically ravaged Europe, nothing? It is estimated that in some areas, such as the Duchy of Pomerania, almost thirty per cent of the population died out at the time. Are we to conclude that war between Catholic and Protestant countries was better than war with Muslim countries?

Can we feel safer in our small homelands, finding identity through common rituals? For example, Kashubians among their own?

Once upon a time, a dozen years ago, an Arab, Lebanese and at the same time Christian writer Amin Maalouf wrote a book entitled Killing Identities. In it, he stated that we would do anything to protect our identity because it is the core, the backbone of our being. When people feel that their identity is threatened, they are inclined to behave in different ways, sometimes radically. This concerns both majority groups and migrants whom we want to assimilate. We tell them that they can be here, but they have to become like us, and therefore they have to give up their 'self' completely. It is hardly surprising that their reaction is all too often deeply reluctant and sometimes even radical. Playing with identity is dangerous. While we want to protect our identity, we can simultaneously exclude all those who are not like us. As always in the social sphere, it is a question of negotiating boundaries. For many years, research has been carried out in Poland on the criteria which would have to be met in order to be considered Polish. Is it enough to speak Polish? To have both parents Poles? Or maybe just one? Maybe it is enough for the grandfather to be Polish? Or maybe it is better to have a grandmother on the distaff side? Do you have to grow up in Poland? These questions are of course related to our migration experience and our difficult history. In the 1990s, the Germans had the idea that during the citizenship exam, in addition to a language test, there should also be a test on German culture. Journalists carried out an experiment and put questions from this test to German high school graduates. It was a disaster! Many of them were not fit to be German... Negotiating who belongs to a community, who has this right and who does not, is one of the most important issues. In anthropology or sociology, social boundaries are one of the most difficult, and today also - one of the hottest public topics. If we were to go down to our small communities, we would see that they can differ very significantly from each other: for example, the degree of inclusiveness and exclusiveness. In the United States, if you have American citizenship or even a green card, and on Independence Day you will wear American flag trousers and have a banner that says: ‘I love America’ or ‘God Bless America’, you can already be considered the truest American. In Europe, it is much more difficult. You can be the third generation born in Germany and still be seen as Turkish. It is the same in Poland. This is our European problem, for example concerning Jews, but not only.

Towards Silesians, Kashubians...

Anyone who is just a little bit different and breaks out does not fit into... Exactly, what? To a stereotype, a model, some invented type?

I don't think we give it any thought at all.

Can we imagine such a typical, model Pole? What does it mean for us? After all, most of us do not fit into this model of a typical Pole. The Kashubians, perhaps, a little, because they are Catholic. But the Mazurians? They did not have this ‘luxury’. It is enough to watch Wojciech Smarzowski's Rose to remember this. It really is a piece of dramatic storytelling. But this does not mean that there are no such exclusions in our own environment. Who is and who is not such a belny Kashëba? People often tell me that they are not Kashubian because they do not speak Kashubian. When I ask about their surname, their family name, everything clearly indicates that they are Kashubian. And yet it is difficult for them to identify themselves because they are afraid that someone will not recognise them as their own. So what should be the criterion of Kashubianness: language, knowledge of culture, genealogy, territory? Someone asks me: ‘Professor, I have lived here for fifty years. Can I be a Kashubian?’. I answer that it depends on him, on his choice. Because it is up to us whether we want to belong to a given community. This decision itself is important to me. For me, which does not mean that others will agree with me. We come back to the question of boundaries. Every community also negotiates its boundaries. They cannot be completely stretched, but the extent to which they are open is determined by history, tradition, memory, but also by law and upbringing. These are key issues: what attitudes will we teach future generations? Are we going to bring them up in a spirit of extreme nationalism, or a spirit of openness and mature patriotism? To what extent can we be critical of our own community?

Professor, after all ‘it's an ill bird that fouls its own nest’.

We have a whole series of such sayings that teach us not to be too critical. My grandmother, when we talked about the Church, used to say that whoever barks at a priest will not live to see him at the hour of death. Such sayings are a delusion of power and make it impossible to evaluate it. Today, we are discussing nationalism in a similar way. Anyone who speaks critically about Poland and the Polish people is an outcast, a traitor. It is all the worse when they speak critically abroad. This nationalistic, ethnocentric approach, which stems from an extraordinary strength and conviction in the superiority of our own community, is at the same time lined with a thick layer of insecurity. We are insecure about our values, about who we are. This complex triggers defensive reactions. Mature patriotism, on the other hand, means that I can afford to be critical of my own group because I am not afraid that my values will be negated. The importance of intellectual and spiritual opinion leaders in communities is that they show people that they should not be afraid of self-criticism because it is the best antidote to ethnocentric, inbred behaviour. This, of course, also requires courage. And at the same time, a sense of humour helps enormously with self-criticism. The ability to laugh at oneself. This is the eleventh Kashubian commandment: ‘Remember to check once a day if you can laugh at thyself’.

This conversation is not very festive... If we are talking about typical Poles, why don't we talk about typical holidays and rituals?

Let me start with the fact that we do a lot of things, but we don't know why. For example, we eat doughnuts on Fat Thursday, but why? Everyone knows when and what to do, but what is the reason and sense? The whole story about Shrovetide, the last week, is a complete abstraction.

Are these empty traditions without a spiritual dimension?

No, these are important rituals. They often have pagan roots. We repeat them, although we have no idea where they come from. Christmas Eve, for example, provides us with many magical rituals that are encased in old customs. It is the time of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, and all solstices were very important in pagan rituals. Maybe someone will associate the Roman Saturnalia celebrated between December 17 and 23, and link it to Christmas, but where did the small plate come from?

What do you mean, where did it come from? It is for a wanderer who comes.

What wanderer? Who will come? Research carried out a few years ago showed clearly that almost no one will let a stranger into their home on Christmas Eve in Poland. There was even an experiment carried out once: during Christmas Eve, a woman went from door to door. She said she was a Muslim and had nothing to do with herself on Christmas Eve, and asked whether they would receive her. She was Polish. It happened that people called the emergency services to ask them to take her away because she was crazy and was bothering people.

Do you think that plate was still there?

Er... certainly. To introduce the tradition of the empty plate, I will refer to The Lion King. There's a scene in there where Mufasa goes out on a rock with Simba, shows him the stars and says that these are all the generations that have gone before us. It is a humorous, but also a sad story. At Yad Vashem, the most poignant is the children's museum. You walk down a dilapidated corridor into a blackened dome, where only the stars flash and a monotonous voice reads out names. But why? In the Jewish tradition we have adopted, family is a chain of generations. On Christmas Eve, we place this plate for all our ancestors. It is an invitation to their wandering souls at the solstice. It is not for the wanderer who knocks on the door, it is a symbolic, once magical, invitation to those who are not with us physically. In Yad Vashem, these names are read out, because not only was this child murdered, but also all his descendants, this chain was broken. This is why I say that the death of one child is the death of the whole world. So we don't know how deep the custom of putting an empty plate is... But I also want to stress that it is good that we cultivate these customs and traditions. Rituals allow us to be together, at least for a moment, they remind us of who we are. Maybe that is why they are so cherished by all exiles from their homeland.

To conclude: using your vast knowledge, I would like to ask you: which of these Christmas Eve rituals should we know more about?

I think it is worth remembering that the Christmas tree is a German custom. Just like mistletoe with its evergreen colour, it is supposed to remind us of the permanence of life. It is a symbol of life, even if today we decorate the Christmas tree in other colours. Just like hanging lights, they are a symbol of hope. Also, very Polish is the Christmas Eve supper, which has no other meaning outside Poland, or at least in Europe, and which is connected with the tradition of giving presents. Today, they have become a very consuming element, but once upon a time, a gift was the giving a part of oneself. Marcel Mauss described it: the gift is the very core of the human world because someone gives, someone accepts, the acceptance creates an obligation and someone reciprocates. This is perfectly visible during birthdays, name days, weddings. A gift can also be embarrassing, awkward, if we do not know how to, or are not able to, reciprocate it. When I give something to someone, I recognise that they are worthy of it. When that person accepts the gift, he or she recognises that I am worthy of accepting a gift from me. Christmas Eve dinner is just such a gift, a recognition of another person's worthiness; we share what we can. An aunt, a grandmother, a mother, when we come on Christmas Eve, does not ask for anything - she gives us food. To not accept that gift is to take away dignity. It would be very painful.

What else, apart from the gift of heart, food and the symbolic communion wafer, can we share at this Christmas table?

Let us vaccinate ourselves and share our health. If I could choose such a common universal gift for Poles, it would be this. I would like everyone who sits down at the Christmas table to give others the gift of safety. We have talked about responsibility. Today, by getting vaccinated, we are taking responsibility for the health of others. The very low level of vaccination in our society and the huge reluctance to vaccinate at such a dramatic time of a pandemic, when hundreds of people in Poland are dying every day, shows what a huge crisis of social responsibility and solidarity we are going through. We do not vaccinate for our own sake, but, above all, we vaccinate for the sake of others, and they very much need us today.

I would like to join this beautiful wish and thank you for the interview.

December 14, 2021.