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policies, and land reform that continued to plague local politics. Regionalists also believed that their

project would work only if they listened to the voices of ordinary people (lud). The outright revulsion

that many Polish officials, border guards, and health workers experienced when they visited—or

simply imagined—unhygienic and backward villages was therefore matched by a positive attitude

toward the peasant as a repository of premodern folk traditions (a tension that was common in other

7
modernizing states across contemporary Europe too).

[INSERT FIGURE 6.1]

Figure 6.1: Postcard from the Volhynian exhibition, Łuck (September 1928). Source: CBN (Eastern
Borderlands Collection). Poczt.16305.

Regionalism was, therefore, to be an inclusive, participatory movement, one that rejected the

forced assimilation of non-Polish populations advocated by those on the right and attempted instead

to encourage a sense of shared regional identity among men and women who were, at heart, all

Volhynians. And yet a closer look at the photograph of peeping crowds, which was distributed on

postcards and on the pages of the local press, suggests an altogether more complicated story, one that

challenges the assumption of an unequivocally inclusive regionalist project. There were, to be sure,

people within the boundaries of the fence that ran around the exhibition’s perimeter. But there were

also those men and women who stood on the sidelines looking in, and even those (we might assume)

who both ignored the exhibition entirely and were ignored by its organizers in turn. Reflecting the

multiple ways in which the photograph can be read, this chapter traces how the guardians of

Volhynian regionalism created an inclusive regional image, while simultaneously policing the

borders of what was permissible. Just as anthropologists, political theorists, and historians have

7 On Italy, see Moe, The View From Vesuvius, 3.

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