Page 194 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

water. In all of these discussions, settlers emphasized that theirs was a version of a specifically rural

modernity, one situated not in the largely Jewish towns, but rather in small settlements dispersed

throughout the countryside. When Poland’s president visited Volhynia in 1929, the head of the

organization of military settlers reportedly greeted him with a typical statement about their role

within the rural landscape—they met him “not in a castle or a palace, but here under the open sky,

among green fields sown with wheat and rye.” 107 Despite the fact that the settlers “came here from all

corners of Poland and even from America,” their provenance in no way implied that they did not

connect deeply with the fertile—and fundamentally Polish—land on which they lived and worked.

Underlying such confident claims, however, was the ongoing sense that Poles continued to

face threats in the kresy, and deeper fears persisted about the slippage between the categories of

“Pole” and “Ukrainian,” which could be traced back to the arrival of the settlers in the early 1920s. In

contrast to the conditions in overseas European empires, where racial categories were mapped onto

quotidian living standards among the “natives”—and in comparison with Volhynia’s towns in which

Polish Catholics and Jews were more easily distinguishable—linguistic, religious, and social

characteristics in the countryside appeared to be worryingly fluid. 108 According to observers, it was

not simply that military settlements in northern Volhynia had failed to create the new type of settler

farmstead that had been promoted in the propaganda, but also that their “colonies” were sometimes

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indistinguishable from those of local peasants (surely the ultimate sign of failure). Rather than

admitting that they had failed, however, settlers blamed provincial authorities who seemed little

interested in their plight, and they mobilized the language of neglect instrumentally, particularly at

107 Report on the visit of Ignacy Mościcki to the region in the summer of 1929. DARO 30/18/1574/5.
108 This observation suggests the possibilities for comparison with the British in Ireland, rather than with European
encounters with extra-European colonial contexts in which racial distinctions were more “obvious.” As Anne
McClintock has argued, domestic degeneracy—a system by which people’s poor living standards marked them out
as different in the absence of visible distinctions of skin color—provided a way to categorize people as “backward.”
Anne McClintok, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York and London,
1995), 52-3.
109 Niebrzycki, Polesie: opis wojskowo-geograficzny, 360.

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