"We Just Want to Live Normally": Intersecting Discourses of Public, Private, Poland, and the West

Abstract

In postcommunist Poland, discourse on "the normal life" provides a view into young Poles' identity as shaped by processes of democratization, marketization, and globalization. In this article, I compare uses of the term "normal" for a group of urban and rural youths during two periods in the 1990s. I show that normal, like public and private, is a "shifter"— because the same term is used in a variety of contexts to describe various situations, it helps to integrate new experiences in a way that maintains a sense of continuity with the past. This discourse reveals young Poles' simultaneous attraction and resistance to idealizations of the West, and it also reflects the different opportunities available to rural and urban residents. These factors, in turn, help to shape young Poles1 orientations toward the future within and beyond the borders of Poland.