Page 258 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

harness ornaments, and the products of their domestic art that their earliest culture must have been

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brought from the South.”

Like their British counterparts, Poles were also well-versed in connecting the temperament

and domestic conditions of populations to their national or ethnic identities. Polish military

descriptions of the area, for example, focused on the various types of material culture that

characterized villages in this transition zone, with experts suggesting that practical decisions about

where to quarter soldiers should be based on the civilizational qualities of peasant houses. A 1930

publication on geographical Polesie even featured illustrations of three different housing “types” that

indicated the living standards of their inhabitants and suggested a hierarchy that was projected onto

the internal Volhynian-Polesian borderlands (see Figure 7.1). The position of the illustrations on the

page mirrored their location on a north-south scale. The “Belarusian huts,” located in the most

northerly part of the region were wide but low, relatively well maintained, and the most favorable for

quartering the army, while the “Polesian huts” in the center were described as poor, smoke-filled,

dirty, small and the least favorable, in both summer and winter. The “Volhynian huts,” toward the

south, occupied an intermediate civilizational position—they were better maintained than the

Polesian houses but not as well maintained as those belonging to the Belarusians. These conditions

meant, according to the book’s author, that the Volhynian village was significantly more comfortable

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than the Polesian one, which lay right in the middle of the Pripet marshes. More important than the

actual recommendations, however, was the author’s acceptance of the very idea that the zone

represented a civilizational scale, one that was reflected in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people

and upon which the state should make practical (in this case, military) decisions.

36 “Polish Marches,” Times (London, England), July 31, 1930, 15.
37 Niezbrzycki, Polesie: opis wojskowo-geograficzny, 355.

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