Page 263 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Other academics were more sympathetic to the increasingly fashionable political project of

Polonization. Stanisław Dworakowski, an ethnographer from Warsaw who accompanied Obrębski on

his second trip to Polesie in 1935, conceptualized of what he called the “Polesian-Volhynian

borderlands” (rubież polesko-wołyńska) in ways that allowed him to make a case for Poland’s right to

simultaneously civilize and Polonize the region. In a 1938 article in Ethnic Affairs, Dworakowski

made the rather conventional argument that Volhynia was divided into two parts and that people who

lived in the northern areas were markedly different from their counterparts in the south. The people

in the north, he argued, belonged to “the ethnic groups of Polesie,” possessed “an uncrystallized

national consciousness,” and were hence “susceptible to civilizational influences”—in other words,

they were a far cry from the people in the south who were instead “an active type, socially complex,

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with a quickly crystallizing national consciousness.” But he also believed that this framing of the
province’s population carried profound implications for how the Polish state should behave.

Following on from his conclusion that the Polesian-Volhynian borderlands constituted a coherent

“anthropogeographical” unit within the state, he claimed that they needed to be Polonized.

Two particular features of Dworakowski’s work seemed more in step with prevailing ways of

organizing knowledge about liminal spaces. For one, Dworakowski’s article featured an appendix

with no fewer than 23 maps and charts, in marked contrast to Obrębski’s text, which was

accompanied by just one rather complex map. Eschewing Obrębski’s skepticism about measurable

and objective criteria and paying little attention to how local populations viewed their own place in

the world, Dworakowski sought to prove objectively that an incontestable border ran through the

Volhynian administrative province. Dworakowski’s analysis also introduced the kinds of biological

and racial ideas that had generally proved to be of little importance to Polish elites in the kresy.

People in the southern counties, such as Krzemieniec, Włodzimierz, Równe, Łuck, and Dubno, he

49 Stanisław Dworakowski, “Rubież Polesko-Wołyńska,” Sprawy Narodowościowe 3 (1938), 222.

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