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and head of the IBSN during the 1930s, believed that the lack of a fixed national consciousness had

increased the risk of statistical errors here, certainly in comparison with western Poland where people

22
allegedly had a clearer sense of the nation to which they belonged. Similarly, the head of the census
bureau conceded that local people had not fully comprehended the significance of the categories

provided on the 1921 census. Since many people read “nationality” as a synonym for citizenship, the

23
number of “Poles” had been artificially inflated. The category of self-declared nationality was even
changed on the 1931 census to “mother tongue,” in response to this problem. “For these people,

national differentiation is not yet fixed, [and] their consciousness of nationality is still in an

embryonal [sic] stage,” the head of the census bureau insisted, indicating his belief that

nationalization was a process by which people passed through various historical stages before

becoming fully conscious of their national identity. “To enquire after their nationality would be of no

24
avail,” he went on, since “their answers would often be quite accidental.”

If such observations can be read as indicative of the exasperation of state officials who

wanted to bring order to the borderlands through national taxonomies, they might also be interpreted

in another way: as the product of the active construction of borderland spaces and peoples as

amorphous. In contrast to the concept of national indifference—the idea that side-switching national

amphibians claimed different identities when it was politically expedient for them to do so and

therefore constituted a thorn in the side of modern nationalists—national indeterminacy allowed

Polish state officials in the kresy to deliberately downplay fixed national categories in order to push

25
for more aggressive policies of assimilation. In other words, rather than an admission of failure, the
category of the nationally indeterminate borderland inhabitant was part of a strategy for controlling

22 Wojciech Olszewski, Tożsamość kulturowa Kresów w humanistycznym nurcie polskiej myśli etnologicznej do
roku 1939: Studium z zakresu antropologii (Toruń, 2007), 149.
23 “The Polish and non-Polish populations of Poland,” Minority problems: English edition of nr. 1-2, 1932 of
“Questions minoritaires:” A quarterly review of research and information (Warsaw, 1932), 3.
24 Ibid., 3.
25 For a useful overview, see Zahra, “Imagined Non-Communities,” 93-119.

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