Making an Ethnic Group

Author(s)

Agnieszka Pasieka

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic and archival materials, this paper examines the ethnic politics of the Second Polish Republic by taking into account the experiences of the Lemko-Rusyn population, a minority East Slavic group inhabiting the peripheral mountainous area in southern Poland. It illustrates the changing policies towards Lemko-Rusyns and discusses the different responses of the local population to these policies, demonstrating the inadequacy of categories imposed from above as well as manifold motivations behind people's political views, choices of national identification, and religious conversions. In so doing, the article has three main objectives. First, in line with recent critical scholarship on nationalism in the Second Polish Republic, it attempts to problematize the - frequently exaggerated - difference between 'federational' and 'assimilationist' conceptions, exposing the discriminatory nature of interwar minority politics, as experienced locally. Second, moving beyond the interwar period, the article presents the long-term consequences of the interwar policies and the events of the Second World War, including a series of ethnic cleansings that took place in the aftermath of the war as well as present-day discourses on and policies towards ethnic and national minorities. And third, in discussing state actors' agency in the domain of minority policies, it calls for a more thorough recognition of the agency of the people who are the target of those policies. The article considers all these issues by presenting a history of a Lemko-Rusyn locality and its inhabitants, as recorded in school records, state reports, and oral histories.

Organisation(s)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Journal

European History Quarterly

Volume

51

Pages

386-410

No. of pages

25

ISSN

0265-6914

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914211027121

Publication date

07-2021

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

504010 European ethnology

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Cultural Studies, History

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/f1a1fffd-b538-4278-be40-a8e29f45881c