ABSTRACT

This chapter intends to reflect on the project of anthropological fieldwork through the lens of the less travelled road of ethnographic research. After engaging in a long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Bedouin in the Negev Desert of Israel, it undertook research in native country of Poland. The chapter attention was caught by Polish nobility, which at the time made a powerful come back on the national scene. Beginning in the 1980s, the shift to 'anthropology at home' brought a growing number of anthropologists to engage in the study of their own society. Anthropological literature concerning elites concentrates on the power that elites exert in a given society, and subsequently the power they might exert on the researcher and the research outcome. The socialist structures of interdependency might have diluted the gentry's distinctiveness if it were not for their conscious resistance to the social mixing of classes.