2018, No. (11), Cultural History of Knowledge

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Piotr Filipkowski
Shipyard - transformation - spoken stories. Or the meaning-making power of Gdynia's ships

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Keywords: shipbuilding industry, transformation, work, life/work meaning, oral history, biographical analysis

Abstract:
This essay tells the story of a very specific experience of labor in the Polish shipyard industry, which faced radical economic, social and, here particularly important, cultural transformations. Analyzing biographical narrative interviews with shipyard workers and engineers, and referring to visual historical sources (pictures, movies), I am showing decomposition of the ethos of shipyard work. That ethos was built, on one hand, upon feeling of participation in a complex social drama, whose main actor was – imagined and (becoming) real – huge vessel (“the biggest movable think created by man). On the other hand – on proudness of doing very sophisticated, intricate, craft. This anthropological analysis of working experience, is not avoiding confrontation with “socialist propaganda”, very strong in this field, as well as with participation in “Solidarność carnival”, which was experiences of the most of my interviewees. Both these historical contexts do not weaken, but rather strengthen, meaningfulness of the shipyard labour for their work (and lives). But what strengthen this feeling is radical decomposition of shipyard work sense, which took place in the last years – though there are modern vessels and other sophisticated sea constructions produced in Gdynia today.

About Author:
Piotr Filipkowski – sociologist, oral historian, researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. E-mail: pfilipkowski@ifispan.waw.pl. ORCID: 0000-0001-8258-8167