Abstract
This article explores the literary writing of ethnographers, a genre that has not yet been systematically researched in Polish sociocultural anthropology. The theoretical framework of the article is built on the concepts of reflexivity and auto-ethnography. Its main goal was to trace these issues in three texts of female Polish ethnographers in the first half of the twentieth century. These authors represent three different structural situations in the field: a European researcher in a colonial context (Maria Czaplicka), a member of the intelligentsia studying peasants (Kazimiera Zawistowicz-Adamska), and an amateur “native ethnographer” in her own community (Maria Pilchówna). One of the results of the analysis is inventing the concept of “emphatic hegemony” grasping the situation when an empathic and sympathetic observer can be also a dominant and patronizing writer, even if she is a woman. Another feature of the analyzed texts lies in their patriotic subtext.
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