Joanna Tokarska-Bakir

Joanna Sabina Tokarska-Bakir (born 1958) is a Polish cultural anthropologist, literary scholar, and religious studies scholar. She is a full professor and chair of the ethnic and national relations study at the Polish Academy of Sciences's Institute of Slavic Studies.[1][2][3] She specializes in blood libel, historical anthropology and in particular violence, and Holocaust ethnography.[3]

Tokarska-Bakir in 2013

Career

In 1983, Tokarska-Bakir received her MA in Ethnology from the University of Warsaw in 1983, and her doctorate in 1993 also from Warsaw. She completed her habilitation at Warsaw in 2001. In 2010 she was appointed full professor.[1]

Research and writing

In Żydzi u Kolberga, Tokarska-Bakir rejects the view that pre-modern folk antisemitism was benign, asserting that these notions assigned to Jews a "dangerous place" which could lead to destruction at any moment. Tokarska-Bakir argued that this "common sense" persists to the modern-day with explosions of hatred being latent phenomena.[4]

In her essay Poland as the sick man of Europe?,[5] she describes the public debate in Poland following the publication of Jan T. Gross's Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland on the Jedwabne pogrom as the revelation of what had been in effect a "public secret" in Poland since the massacre took place. Tokarska-Bakir's describes the debate as "an explosion of post-traumatic psychosis" in which some historians attempted to maintain Poland's identity as a victim and not as a perpetrator by discrediting the research.[6] Tokarska-Bakir asserts that empathy is the needed cure to "dispel the stupor" and "impart some critical awareness" in regards to the Jedwabne debate.[7]

Her 2008 study Legends about blood: The anthropology of prejudice is about folk legends in southeastern Poland that justified antisemitism as well as their form in modern society.[8]

Awards

References
  1. Curriculum vitae, http://pan-pl.academia.edu
  2. Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna (2017-03-15). "The Polish underground organization Wolność i Niezawisłość and anti-Jewish pogroms, 1945–6". Patterns of Prejudice. 51 (2): 111–136. doi:10.1080/0031322X.2017.1304689. ISSN 0031-322X. S2CID 151462389.
  3. Prof. dr hab. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, ispan.waw.pl
  4. Diaspora and Memory: "Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature Arts, and Politics, chapter by Karolina Szmagalska, Rodopi, 2007, pages 132-133
  5. Poland as the sick man of Europe?, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, 30 May 2003, Eurozine
  6. Boundaries of Jewish Identity, chapter by Erica lehrer, University of Washington Press, page 182
  7. Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions, mcGill-Queen's University Press, page 300
  8. Milerski, Bogusław (2010-03-01). "Holocaust education in Polish public schools: Between remembrance and civic education". Prospects. 40 (1): 115–132. doi:10.1007/s11125-010-9141-y. ISSN 1573-9090. S2CID 144753611.
  9. 2007 Jan Karski & Pola Nirenska Prize at YIVO Awarded to Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, YIVO News, number 204, Winter 2008
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