Page 166 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

fringes. Emphasizing the rationalization of agricultural practices and middle-class approaches to

domesticity, sanitation, and health care, they offered themselves up as the bearers of progress in

localities that had already embarked upon the inevitable, yet treacherous, path toward modern life.

By tracing the ways in which these groups tried to create particular civilizing sites in the

countryside—whether in the schoolhouse, model rural settlements, or the “female” space of the

home—we can see how relations between “the state” and the multiethnic citizenry of Volhynia were

shaped as much by these local brokers as by official laws and policies emanating from the corridors

of power in Warsaw. As it turned out, the Sanacja’s project to simultaneously civilize, modernize,

and depoliticize the Volhynian countryside was itself fraught with political conflicts, as various state

and semi-state actors utilized the language of rural backwardness to assert their own positions of

authority. Indeed, exploring local dynamics shows how the traditional division between the “political

sphere” and “everyday life,” which social historians have long sought to erode, made little sense in

the Volhynian countryside.

ON THE CUSP OF MODERNITY

Just as the concept of the Volhynian town needed to be historicized, so too does that of the

Volhynian village. The Polish noun wieś can be translated into English as village or countryside; it

can refer, in other words, to either a geographically defined settlement, featuring buildings, people,

and animals, or any space that is not urban. In interwar Volhynia, it was certainly not a uniform

space, with commentators frequently remarking upon the vast differences that existed between types

6
of rural locales. According to a list published by Poland’s National Statistics Office in the early
1920s, the province was home to an array of rural settlements, which included, but were not limited

to, villages, colonies, large manorial estates, military settlements, and clusters of buildings related to

6 “Charakterystyka wsi wołyńskiej,” 21. BUW Manuscript Collection, Rękopis nr. 1773, Akta 270-a.

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