Katarzyna Kubat
Prace Etnograficzne, Tom 38, 2010, s. 139 - 146
The issue of social exclusion in the context of European Union funds
The article is based on Polish strategic governmental documents pointing at the main social problems needed to be solved immediately, which is considered as a crucial issue to economic growth and development supported by European Found. The presented anthropological perspective puts pressure on bureaucratic language used for description of the groups regarded as „threatened by social exclusion”. According to the authoress, who refers to assumptions founded by theorists such as Bourdieu, Berger and Luckman, mentioned documents do not describe but rather construct the representation of exclusion and that mechanism based on symbolic violence refl ects values of the dominant group. Indeed, it creates the difference between two positions: the experts who have power to define reality and the people reduced to failure, inadequacy, disability and defect. These circumstances consolidate the division which allows us to conclude that social exclusion is a complex process – an interaction involving as well the „excluded” as the authority who excludes.