Twilight Zone Anthropology provides an engaging and multifaceted picture of anthropology in Poland, Bronisław Malinowski’s motherland, with a comprehensive introduction describing the discipline’s history thus far, and thematic contributions detailing diverse and innovative contemporary practices that foreshadow rich possibilities for its future. It makes the compelling argument that Polish anthropology should be seen to have developed within a twilight zone of contact between `imperial’ discourses of a French-Anglo-US disciplinary hegemony and an Eastern European intellectual and political heritage.Initially deriving from a conference hosted by the Royal Anthropological Institute, Twilight Zone Anthropology provides a palpably vibrant sampling of a `cosmopolitan Polish national anthropology’, with discussions of a wide-range of disciplinary issues, such as gender, memory, engagement, activism, health and politics. Offering many insights as to how anthropology may be practised so as to evolve original conceptions and contributions to world anthropologies from a decentred context, in response to global trends, this work represents a significant step forward in the ongoing redefinition of global hierarchies of knowledge and the creation of a pluriversal anthropology.

Rooted in anthropological and ethnological traditions, this volume offers analytical insights into the workings of agency in late industrialism revealed in interactions between a coal power plant and a local community in Opole Silesia, in southwestern Poland. In this context, the authors show by the use of the ethnographic method, how variables and forces of various scales shape political events centered around the power plant; grassroots economic dynamics and entrepreneurship; the local semiosphere uniting the divided social group; affective dimensions of a social protest; (un)doing gender in the industrial workplace; and the mobile livelihoods of migrant industrial workers. By doing so, they concretize in different ways both the concept of late modernity and agency.