Page 216 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

The natural question was this: to whom were these objects “interesting and enlightening”?

Or, to put it more simply, who did Volhynian elites imagine as the museum’s principal visitors? In

their discussions about the production of regional knowledge, they certainly argued that ordinary

people needed to be included in the process. This emphasis on the lud was in keeping with the social

and political leveling that had occurred, on an official level at least, with both the creation of a

democratic Poland in 1918 and the promulgation of the state’s first constitution in 1921. If

knowledge about the province had previously been the preserve of Volhynia’s noblemen and

landowning classes, whose collections were looted or badly damaged during the long years of

conflict and revolution, the new museum sought to connect ordinary people both with one another

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and with the Polish state through a shared connection to Volhynia’s history and traditions. It is
worth remembering that the process of expanding the idea of the nation to include those people on

the lower rungs of the social stratum was not anything new. National entrepreneurs in the nineteenth

century had already begun to use folklore as a way of connecting the lud to the nationalizing project

and had expanded the definition of the nation vertically in order to include the mass of peasants who

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had been excluded from elite conceptions of the nobles’ democracy. But while the National

Democrats celebrated the lud as a nationally “pure” population (at the expense of what they saw as

non-Polish groups, such as Jews), regionalists shunned the idea that ethnic Poles constituted the sole

members of the lud and instead exhibited materials that celebrated the region’s multiethnic

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diversity.

Instead of simply relying on the historical and ethnographic artifacts that had been part of the

1928 Volhynian exhibition, then, the museum’s curators periodically sought information from local

populations. In the run-up to the hundred-year anniversary of the November 1830 Uprising, an armed

26 Jakub Hoffman, “Dzieje ‘Rocznika Wołyńskiego,’” PISMA KOL 18/12/13.
27 Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village; Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate.
28 Mędrzecki, Województwo wołyńskie, 145.

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