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emphasized that exclusions are always inherent in discourses of inclusion and tolerance, so the civic

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nationalism of interwar Poland was premised on creating situational boundaries and hierarchies.

THE ROOTS OF VOLHYNIAN REGIONALISM

While prewar ethnographic societies had focused on the folklore of particular regions under the

partitions, the advent of statehood created new possibilities for mobilizing regionalism. After the

1926 coup, in particular, programs to build up regional knowledge, which drew inspiration from

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other European schemes, began to take concrete shape on Polish soil. In the autumn of 1927, the

government formed provincial regional committees (wojewódzkie komitety regionalne), a process

instigated by Henryk Józewski who was then based at the Council of Ministers in Warsaw and would

shortly take up his ten-year tenure as the Volhynian governor. These regional committees offered

new solutions to persistent state problems, not least of which was the lack of basic knowledge among

officials about the areas that they were charged with governing. Volhynia’s committee was the first

to be created.

Even ten years after the declaration of Polish independence, state officials, teachers, and

other personnel in Volhynia found that they were woefully unfamiliar with local conditions, and they

frequently felt an unsettling combination of cultural superiority and quotidian ignorance. Officials,

for instance, viewed the results of Poland’s first national census in 1921 with suspicion, arguing that

some figures were so inaccurate as to be next to useless. Defective methodologies employed by

census-takers, along with the influx of people into the kresy after the data had been collected, led to

8 Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton, 2002),
particularly 65; Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, 2008);
Johannes Feichtinger and Gary B. Cohen, “Introduction,” in Feichtinger and Cohen, eds., Understanding
Multiculturalism: The Habsburg Central European Experience (New York, 2014), 9.
9 Władysław Deszczka, “Regionalizm,” Przegląd Geograficzny 10 (1930): 261-267. On European regionalism as it
emerged from the late nineteenth century, see Eric Storm, “Regionalism in History, 1890-1945: The Cultural
Approach,” European History Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2003): 251-265.

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