Page 225 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

approach to knowledge-creation. In addition to working with teachers on the regional course, he

drew up a program to educate regionalists in the skills of geography and encouraged teachers to write

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monographs about the areas in which they lived.
Like the museum, both the journal and the regional course highlighted broader tensions in a

regionalist project that remained driven by elites. While activists encouraged—even valorized—the

participation of diverse local people, they simultaneously policed the boundaries of the permissible

according to what they considered to be the state’s priorities, selecting that which was useful and

rejecting local behavior that challenged their agenda. Indeed, the articles in the Yearbook often told

the reader more about the author’s views of what was authentic (and what was not) than about life at

the level of the village. One article on peasant costumes in Zdołbunów county that appeared in 1934,

for instance, lamented that local people had begun to neglect their “native, beautiful, and work-

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intensive costumes” for “small town” fashions. It was only in the villages far from towns and train

stations, the author stated, that one could still find examples of embroidered shirts, sown by great-

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grandmothers, grandmothers, and mothers, but unfortunately not by their daughters.
The interactions between Wiktor Ormicki and local populations during an excursion to an

area near Luboml as part of the 1929 regional course well illustrate this ambivalent attitude toward

modernity. Ormicki, who aimed to use the opportunity to carry out research into local dialects, found

to his annoyance that peasants who attended a wedding party—and who were already reluctant to

talk to him—did not speak in their “native” tongue and instead “wanted to show off their knowledge

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of the Polish language, which they had learned from military service.” It was only after several
attempts that Ormicki and the course participants were able to coax people into speaking their

57 On his course, see Wiktor Ormicki, W sprawie Collegium Regionalnego (Warsaw, 1932).
58 Angielina Guzowska, “Stoje ludowe w powiecie zdołbunowskim na Wołyniu,” Rocznik Wołyński (1934): 443. On
this phenomenon among rural women across the state, see Mędrzecki, “Kobieta w rodzinie i społeczności wiejskiej
w Polsce w okresie międzywojennym,” in Równe prawa i nierówne szanse, 184.
59 On the decline in folk dress in the Volhynian countryside, see Garczyński, Wołyń naszą ojczyzną, 42.
60 Hoffman, “Sprawozdanie z Wołyńskiego Kursu Regjonalnego,” 50.

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