318 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures Volume 28 Number 2 May 2014 318-340 © 2013 SAGE Publications 10.1177/0888325413511662 http://eeps.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com “The Survey of the Ghetto” in the Time of Anti-Semitism: Feliks Gross and His Unfinished Fieldwork on the Jewish Quarters of Krakow and Vilna, 1938–1940 Grażyna Kubica Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland This paper aims to recall one of the first pieces of anthropological fieldwork carried out in Europe. It was supervised by Bronisław Malinowski and carried out by Feliks Gross (1906–2006). He had been a young Cracovian lawyer of Jewish descent and socialist activist interested in sociology and anthropology, who was preparing for an academic career. This turned out to be impossible because of the growing wave of anti-Semitism in Europe. Gross became a student and collaborator of his Cracovian compatriot, then a London professor, Bronisław Malinowski, who advised him to make a “survey of the ghetto” in their hometown. The research progressed promisingly, but was halted by the outbreak of the Second World War. Gross managed to escape to Vilna, where he tried to continue his research. He finally landed safely in the United States, where he met his mentor and encouraged him to engage in political activity. The Cracovian project is described using the correspondence between Malinowski and Gross, as well as other archival material. It is shown against the political and academic background, together with the important theoretical and methodological frameworks of the time. Thus, the unsuccessful project becomes a very informative case of the working of the academic “field,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term. There are also other examples of European research supervised by Malinowski, who, therefore, deserves the title of a predecessor of the “anthropology at home.” Keywords: Bronislaw Malinowski; Feliks Gross; Jewish ghetto; fieldwork; anti-Semitism T he interest of anthropologists in studying Europe is relatively recent. The nine- teenth century’s “division of labor” within social sciences appointed anthropology to study “primitive societies.” Also later, “legitimate” fieldwork was to be done “far away” and deal with “savage people.” And when anthropologists finally started to do research in Europe, it was mainly “backward” and marginal peoples that they studied, but not dominant societies. 1 European Volkskunde, or British folk-lore, which dealt with local cultures, was at the time not regarded as social or cultural anthropology. The first anthropological community studies in Europe started to be conducted in the 1930s. These sparse endeavors were carried out by Americans: Conrad Arensberg at WESTERN OREGON UNIVERSITY on May 26, 2015 eep.sagepub.com Downloaded from