Page 226 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

“native” dialect (gwara). In other words, the valorization of an imagined version of local life meant

that a certain type of Polishness—in this case, the use of the Polish language by non-Polish

villagers—could itself be seen as inauthentic if it was being done simply to appeal to an imagined

audience. While the regional project rested on the discourse of ethnic, national, and social inclusivity,

non-Polish groups were included only if they behaved according to particular elite scripts about what

constituted authentic behavior in the first place.

[INSERT FIGURE 6.3]

Figure 6.3: Participants in the Volhynian Regional Course, July-August 1929. Source: Antoni
Jackowski and Izabela Sołjan, Zarys Historii Geografii w Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim, published
online at: http://www.geo.uj.edu.pl/opracowania/historia/

If researchers argued that certain versions of Polishness were inauthentic, they clung to the

idea that the region remained, at its core, a fundamentally Polish place. What, then, did Polishness

mean to them? For all of their democratic emphasis on the importance of listening to ordinary people,

the answer to this question lay in the role of Polish elites who provided historical conduits for the

values of the early modern Commonwealth. Indeed, the average peasant remained the subject, rather

than the intended audience, of the Yearbook. It featured articles exclusively in Polish for its entire

publishing run and when it did include translated summaries, they appeared in the international

languages of academic exchange (French, German, or English), rather than in the local languages of

Yiddish or Ukrainian. Moreover, articles were written in a densely academic tone that would likely

have proved off-putting, even for the minority of Volhynian peasants who could technically read the

Polish language.

The historical narrative was also largely based on the idea that it was Poland’s noble

traditions, rather than those of the peasantry, that had sustained the region’s diversity over the

centuries. In the second issue of the Yearbook, the editors reproduced a call from Józewski in which

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