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Part of A Ukrainian scholar in Poland: notes in the margins / Lud, 2016, t. 100

extracted text: Lud, t. 100, 2016

IULIIA BUYSKYKH
National Research Institute of Ukrainian Studies
Kyiv
Ukraine

A UKRAINIAN SCHOLAR IN POLAND:
NOTES IN THE MARGINS
Fieldnotes are liminal – betwixt and between –
because they are between reality and thesis, between
memory and publication, between training and
professional life
Jean E. Jackson (1990: 14)

The epigraph is not random; it reﬂects the current intention to write a text, which
would be partially a scientiﬁc interpretation based on my ﬁeldnotes, and partially
my reﬂections and subjective impressions obtained from ﬁeldwork in Poland. Reﬂexivity as a method of anthropology inspired me to write this report. I consider my
whole stay in Poland as ﬁeldwork which I conducted using participant observation.
Therefore, I rely on James Clifford’s approach to the ﬁeld as habitus, the aggregate
of embodied trends and practices, not just a physical place, as well as interpretation
of ﬁeld research as embodied spatial practice (Clifford 1997).
My research in Poland started in September 2014. The internship at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw (IEiAK
UW) was realized within the Polish Government Program for Young Scientists
(Program Stypendialny Rządu RP dla Młodych Naukowców), in 2014/2015.
I then continued my internship thanks to the ﬁnancial support of the V4EaP Scholarship Program, ﬁnanced by the International Visegrad Fund, where I was a research fellow during 2015/2016. I worked under the supervision of my colleagues
from IEiAK UW, Prof. Magdalena Zowczak and Dr. Magdalena Lubańska, as
a participant of two more projects focused on religious questions in Ukraine and
Poland, which were ﬁnanced by the National Centre of Science (Narodowe Centrum Nauki). I also cooperated closely with Dr. Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska
from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

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Iuliia Buyskykh

The biggest challenge for me was the ﬁeldwork, which had to be carried out
in a foreign country and in a foreign language (I started to learn Polish language
upon my arrival from Kyiv in Warsaw in September 2014). Previously, during my
M.A. and Ph.D. studies in Ukraine, I had conducted ﬁeld research working within
the group of 5-30 researchers. According to the Ukrainian tradition of ethnology and folklore studies, such group work in the ﬁeld is called an “ethnographic
expedition”, or, depending on the composition of the research team and research
goals, it is referred to as an historical or folklore expedition (Hrymych 2008:
147-149). The expeditions which I participated in lasted from one to three weeks.
Members of the research team would have a questionnaire and each scholar was
obliged to investigate particular cultural phenomena (for example, funeral rites,
wedding rites, folk medicine, etc.). Such expeditions made it possible to survey
relatively large areas (e.g. 20 villages in 10 days) and to undertake ethno-linguistic mapping of the studied phenomena. At the same time, this kind of work did
not allow for using participant observation or becoming involved in the life of
a local community.
In Poland I worked in the ﬁeld alone. I almost immediately felt the difference
between the ﬁeldwork done in a team and conducted individually. It meant not
only the opportunity to carry out participant observation in local communities, but
also to experience a huge responsibility for everything I did and said. Although
I met a lot of hospitable people who were willing to help during my ﬁeld trips,
there were a number of unpredictable and unpleasant situations. In the course of
my ﬁeldwork I became interested in the question of interaction with interlocutors while entering their environment, as well as various modiﬁcations of their
narrations due to the other national and confessional identity of the researcher1.
Thus, I aim to discuss whether a different nationality is a burden or an advantage,
and whether it has an effect on interaction with people when a Ukrainian scholar
conducts research in Poland.
My ﬁeld initiation in Poland started in Biały Bór in the Western Pomerania.
Following this I undertook research in Przeworsk and near Przemyśl, on the Polish-Ukrainian border, and ﬁnally, in Włodawa, a town on the Polish-Belarusian
border, on the River Bug. These are three different areas, in which I felt differently, had different relationships with the interlocutors, stirred different emotions and came to different research results. All of these regions are characterized
by a multi-cultural and multi-religious past: the presence of Jews before World
1
Here I would like to refer to Anna Wylegała’s article (2013), based on her research in Zhovkva
(Ukraine) and Krzyż (Poland). Through self-reﬂection as a Polish researcher in Ukraine, the author
raised the issue of the methodological aspects of research in a situation where a researcher has different
cultural and national identities to that of his/her interlocutors. Reading Wylegała’s reﬂections about her
ﬁeldwork in Ukraine, I was constantly thinking about my ﬁeldwork in Poland. In my opinion, we were
in different positions towards our interlocutors, despite the common sense of “otherness” in our ﬁelds,
being a scholar and a foreigner.

A Ukrainian scholar in Poland: notes in the margins

155

War II, and the Holocaust at the time of the Nazi occupation, forcible resettlements of Ukrainians in 1944-1946 to the Soviet Union, repatriation of Poles from
Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine in the same period, and Operation “Wisła” in
1947, during which 150,000 Greek Catholics and Orthodox followers (Ukrainians, Lemkos and Boykos) were forcibly evicted from the south-eastern regions to
the north-west of Poland, to the so-called “Returned Lands” (Ziemie Odzyskane).
The subject of my research was the religious culture in local communities and
inter-confessional relations between Roman Catholics and Greek Catholics, as well
as between Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians. However, during my talks
with people about religious life there themes little related to religiousness came to
light. My status as a researcher from Ukraine and even more so, my being a young
single woman from Ukraine, gave rise to a number of curious situations in the ﬁeld.
It is worth noting that those most open to dialogue and assistance in my research were the representatives of the clergy, regardless of their confessions (Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic and Orthodox) and nationality (Polish and Ukrainian). In virtually every local community where I intended to conduct research,
priests provided support, asking their parishioners not to avoid conversations
with me, which was very important at the initial stage of research.
In Biały Bór my interviewees belonged to the ﬁrst generation of the Greek
Catholic Ukrainians displaced by Operation “Wisła” and, additionally, I spoke to
a small number of people from the second and third generation. In Włodawa and
the surrounding villages my research was not limited to the Ukrainian Orthodox
community and I also conducted interviews with Polish Roman Catholics. In
the Subcarpathian Region, near Przemyśl, I worked mainly with mixed Polish-Ukrainian local communities (Roman Catholics and Orthodox), but also with
the pilgrims who came there for odpust, connected with the Assumption of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, in August at the famous Roman Catholic sanctuary in Kalwaria Pacławska.
Another challenge I had to face as a Ukrainian ethnographer who worked in
Poland was history. It turned out that the collective memory of the people from
the borderlands was not only deeply rooted in the history of the 20th century, but
indeed in the whole historical context of the period before the partition of Poland.
Moreover, my research revealed that religion greatly inﬂuenced the perception of
history: the collective memory of Orthodox Christian and Roman Catholic neighbors (or Greek Catholics and Romean Catholics) in the same local community
was often different. In this regard, Polish-Ukrainian relations in the past, as well
as reciprocal postcolonial traumas2 left their mark on the strategies of communication between me and my interlocutors.
2

Using the term “postcolonial” towards mutual historical traumas of Ukrainians and Poles, I mean,
primarily, the historical domination of both Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, and later the USSR,
in the region where the current Polish-Ukrainian border lies. I also refer to the applications of Edward
Said’s Orientalism theory to the culture of Polish eastern borderlands (e.g. Ładykowski 2015).

156

Iuliia Buyskykh

A key point in the study was the persistence of several stereotypes about
Ukrainians which often accompanied my ﬁrst attempts to become acquainted
with potential interviewees. From my Kyiv perspective I did not have any knowledge about those stereotypes or persistent notions and consequently I failed to
perceive many things.
The ﬁrst stereotype which I faced during my ﬁeldwork near Przemyśl was –
among the Poles – an unequivocally negative image of Ukrainians as banderivtsi.
The story about the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) and banderivtsi3 was often
the ﬁrst thing that potential informants would mention after identifying the “eastern” accent of my Polish. The ﬁrst questions that I could hear from them were:
“Will you ask about banderowcy?”, “Was your grandfather in the UPA?” or “I want
you to apologize to me for Volhynia, and then we will talk”. I felt confused because
I was asking about local sacred sites and pilgrimages, about mixed Polish-Ukrainian families and personal religiousness. Instead, I had to endure introductory talks
about the UPA. Sometimes the conversation took quite unpleasant turns.
I emphasize here the important issue, for me, namely the gender and age-speciﬁc features of these conversations. All the offensive words, all the tension, all
the demands made on me to apologize for the events of the past came from men
born in the ﬁrst two decades after WWII. I did not hear anything like this from an
older man or a woman, a teenager or a young person of my age. Previously I had
had no experience of transferring such stereotypes onto myself and an interpretation of Ukrainians as a homogeneous group that should bear collective responsibility for the past crimes committed by some representatives of the group. I will
give an example of one of the most intense situations I experienced. Once I went
to the house of a 57-year-old man, whom I had previously spoken to. However,
during the second meeting just at the doorway he said he hated the Ukrainians
and it was right that the Polish had tortured Ukrainians in Sahryń4. I was stunned
but then I realized he was drunk and turned to leave. In this very moment, the man
grabbed my arm, pulled me to him and told me to get out of Poland because there
were already too many Ukrainians there. I got scared and ran to his neighbor who
was also a Pole, a sweet older woman. When I described the situation, she was
choked with indignation. I stayed in her house till the evening and listened about
3
Banderivtsi (in Polish: banderowcy) is a term derived from the name of Stepan Bandera. Originally
it referred to his supporters, members of the radical OUN-B (The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Banderivtsi). The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) arose of the OUN-B in 1942. The UPA perpetrated
mass killings of the Polish civilian population of Volhynia and East Galicia in 1943-1944. It continued
its struggle against the Soviet authorities until the early 1950s. The UPA partisans were also called
banderivtsi, as well as Ukrainian civilians who supported them. In the communist post-war rhetoric this
term was extended to the persons of Ukrainian origin.
4
Sahryń is a village near Hrubieszów, Poland. It was one of Ukrainian villages which were burned
down by Polish partisans from the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) during the armed conﬂict with the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army. From the AK perspective, the Sahryń massacre was seen as revenge for
the Volhynian ”anti-Polish” operation by the UPA, and ”self-defense” by the Polish population.

A Ukrainian scholar in Poland: notes in the margins

157

how good neighborly relations were before the war; about a school in which they
all studied together – Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish children; about two Ukrainian girls her mother rescued during Operation “Wisła”; about Poles who, at the
instigation of local communists, destroyed Ukrainian churches, though they occasionally attended them. My hospitable interlocutor described a mosaic picture
of the perfect pre-war agrarian world on the margins of a former empire, a quiet
multicultural paradise, which was destroyed from the outside by the German occupation and the Soviet authorities, causing trouble between the people ab intra.
However, I found it hard to believe this world was really so perfect.
Due to such cases from daily life, gossip and insults, hints and lies, I ﬁnally
became aware of the reciprocal historical traumas of Poles and Ukrainians that
were incomprehensible and overwhelming to me. Neither living in Kyiv, nor
communicating in Warsaw academic circles, had I encountered anything similar.
After conducting my ﬁeldwork in Poland, I realize that there is still a long way to
coming to terms with the traumatic past in Polish-Ukrainian borderlands.
My nationality and gender induced the second widespread stereotype I had
to face during the ﬁeldwork. People often did not perceive me as a researcher.
Instead, they considered me to be a pretty young girl from Ukraine, who spoke
with a nice “eastern” accent and was looking for work as a cleaner, babysitter,
caretaker, or for some sort of seasonal work. Some of them also thought I had
come to ﬁnd a husband in Poland and thus escape the war and the economic crisis
in Ukraine. Some friendly women, particularly those who gave me shelter during my travels in the borderlands, made attempts to introduce me to older men or
widowers, explaining that my marriage to a Pole, accompanied by a work permit
and longer stay in Poland would give me a ticket to a better life.
Obviously, these persistent ideas also surfaced in communication with me because of their fear of a large inﬂux of Ukrainian workers, caused by the political
instability and economic crisis in Ukraine. All of my interlocutors asked me about
the source of money for my stay in Poland and my research, complaining that
evidently in the near future Ukrainians would take jobs from Poles. On the other
hand, people often expressed their condolences over the armed conﬂict which
continued to take place in Ukraine, and inquired about the course of events. Of
course, I could not answer all their questions because I was no expert on the topic
and I had never been to what the Ukrainian mass media call “the temporarily occupied territories” (parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions involved in the military
conﬂict). Nevertheless in the eyes of my informants I was a “local”, the Ukrainian
who had ran away from the troubles in her own country in search of a better life
in Poland. Sometimes, to convince the people that I had professional education,
a Ph.D. degree, and cooperated with Polish scientists, I showed them my invitation
letters from the Warsaw University or from the scholarship program.
My ﬁeldwork in Biały Bór deserves a separate story. In entering the community of the Greek Catholic Ukrainians displaced during Operation “Wisła” and

158

Iuliia Buyskykh

their descendants, I was assisted by the rector of the local Greek Catholic parish.
For him I became one of their “own”, not an “alien” because I was also the Ukrainian, conducting research on the Ukrainian minority in Poland. He introduced
me to the members of the parish and took me in his car to distant villages, to the
elderly people – my potential informants. I had four visits to Biały Bór and during
the last one a girl invited me to her wedding, which I eagerly accepted. Despite
the hospitality and comfort of communication, in this community of the Ukrainians I always felt as a “different” Ukrainian, not one of them. My otherness was
deﬁned by the fact that I was not baptized in the Greek Catholic but in the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless I sometimes attended services at the Greek Catholic
church, because the most important thing for me was the Ukrainian language of
the liturgy and the Eastern rites. My position was somewhat surprising for the
interlocutors because for them the institution of the Orthodox Church was associated with the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, which they perceived
as a threat to the Greek Catholic Church. In addition, it was difﬁcult to me to
explain the church division in Ukraine and the number of Orthodox institutions,
which signiﬁcantly differ from each other.
My ﬁrst visit to this community took place a year after the annexation of
Crimea by Russia and the beginning of the armed conﬂict in Eastern Ukraine.
Before I started asking the people about the topics that interested me, we would
chat for an hour or so about everything that was happening in Ukraine. I was
touched by the fact that this community of Ukrainians was not indifferent to the
tragic events in my country and expressed their strong ties with Ukraine. The
local Greek Catholic parish collected money to treat the wounded, transferred
medicines to Ukraine, and even sent an ambulance. During all these conversations people repeatedly raised the issue of the functioning of two languages in
Ukraine: Ukrainian and Russian. I was often asked how I could personally succeed in reconciling my Russian and Ukrainian origin (my father is Russian, living in Ukraine since 1959, and my mother is Ukrainian), adoption of Russian
as the second native language and a distinct Ukrainian identity. I was able to
explain this only as a mirror comparing myself and my own bilingualism with
their bilingualism and preservation of the Ukrainian identity in the functioning of
two languages – Ukrainian and Polish, or only Polish in the next generations. As
a Ukrainian from Kyiv, I was asked about a variety of things, for which I simply
had no answer, but, according to the interlocutors, I had to have as a resident of
the Ukrainian capital. For example, two elderly people (from the ﬁrst generation,
evicted under Operation “Wisła”) once asked me if Ukraine gave representatives
of national minorities (the Ukrainians of diaspora) the “Ukrainian Card”, similar
to the “Polish Card” issued by the Polish government to citizens of Ukraine of
Polish descent. To my somewhat confused response that the Ukrainian state did
not practice this, they commented that it would have been nice to get such a card
as a proof of their belonging, though at present they were far from Ukraine.

A Ukrainian scholar in Poland: notes in the margins

159

In Włodawa, Lublin Province, the situation is different. The identity of the
Orthodox community which I studied is based on post-memory of the events of
1938, when, within the framework of the paciﬁcation and Polonization policy in
Chełmszczyzna and South Podlasie, the Polish authorities issued orders to destroy
the Orthodox churches and conﬁscate Church property. For the Orthodox community of Włodawa this was the most traumatic and most important event, around
which the memory of Orthodox believers was formed. Their confessional identity
plays a greater role than the national one. Members of this community rarely deﬁned themselves as “Ukrainians”. Most of them called themselves prawosławni
(“Orthodox”) or tutejsi (locals), stressing that they spoke in chachłacki language,
“in their own way”5. For them the word chachłacki was completely neutral, while
not for me. Moreover, people were proud that they could talk to me, a Ukrainian,
in this dialect, which had been used in their families for generations and was considered to be the language of religious experience. The trauma caused by Operation
“Wisła” is also palpable in this community, but more among the second generation.
However, the post-memory of another trauma, caused by demolition of Orthodox
churches and persecution of the Orthodox Christians in 1938, is much stronger. In
Włodawa I also came in contact with Roman Catholics, most of whom originated
from confessionally mixed or Orthodox families. It was very interesting to observe
so many Roman Catholic Poles, originating from Orthodox families (descendants
of Orthodox grandparents), who felt connected with that tradition and occasionally
visited the Orthodox church or went to the Orthodox monastery in Jabłeczna.
During my research in Włodawa I was never treated as a Ukrainian who has to
apologize to Poles for the UPA massacres of Polish civilians in Volhynia in 1943.
Yes, this issue was raised in the talks as well as in a discussion about Polish underground military activities against Belarusian and Ukrainian civilians on these
territories. However, all of these conversations were relatively polite. Moreover,
it seemed to me that people in Lublin Province looked at me not as a Ukrainian
from Kyiv, but as a citizen of the former Soviet Union, someone from the East.
For example, I was shown the old Soviet “Minsk” refrigerators, or “Rubin” and
“Sapphire” TV sets with the words: “This one was brought from your eastern
sites” or “My husband brought this TV set from Kyiv when he was in the Soviet
Union with a Friendship Train”6. People also recalled their tourist trips to the
Soviet Union in the 1970s, referring to the cultural and physical space beyond
the River Bug as the East. And similarly I was, for them, “a person from the East”
who was an object of interest. After ﬁnishing my ﬁeldwork in Włodawa I stood
on the bank of the River Bug, staring at the border posts – Polish and Belarusian,
5
Gwara chachłacka is a local dialect characterized by the mixture of Ukrainian, Polish and
Belarusian languages.
6
The “Friendship Trains” (in Polish: pociągi przyjaźni) was a widespread form of Soviet and
socialistic tourism between the member countries of the Warsaw Pact. That movement arose at the
end of 1960s and ﬂourished in 1970s, as a part of the USSR communist propaganda.

160

Iuliia Buyskykh

and thought: What is this border: the boundary between Poland and Belarus, between the EU and post-Soviet world, or the mental-cultural gap, or the boundary
between two civilization models? I still cannot answer these questions...
I realize how little time for a proper research I had. Each of these three cases
should be given more time since they left me with more questions than answers.
In each of the three territories in Poland where I conducted my research, the situation of being an “alien” not only because of my status as a scholar, but because
of my otherness as a foreigner from an unstable neighboring state whose citizens
come to Poland en masse to study and to work, had an impact on the progress
and results of my research. Topics related to religiousness remained in the background, because on ﬁnding out that I was Ukrainian, my interlocutors wanted to
discuss the traumatic moments of Polish-Ukrainian history and current economic
and political issues with me. However, I believe that my emotions and notes in
the margins of the main study can be helpful for treating the reciprocal postcolonial traumas of Poles and Ukrainians as an important source of understanding and
ﬁnding ways of coming to terms with our traumatic past and conﬂicts of memory.

REFERENCES
Clifford J.
1997

Spatial Practices: Fieldwork, Travel, and the Disciplining of Anthropology, in: A. Gupta, J. Ferguson (eds.), Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Berkeley: University of California
Press, pp. 185-222.

Hrymych M.
2008
Practical Methods of Folklore and Ethnographic Research in Ukraine,
“Folklorica. Journal of Slavic and East European Folklore Association” 13,
pp. 145-153.
Jackson J.E.
1990
“I Am a Fieldnote”: Fieldnotes as a Symbol of Professional Identity, in:
R. Sanjek (ed.), Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, Ithaca, London:
Cornell University Press, pp. 3-33.
Ładykowski P.
2015
Poland and Its Eastern Neighbours: A Postcolonial Case Study, “Baltic
Journal of European Studies” 5: 1, pp. 109-132.
Wylegała A.
2013
Badacz z Polski na Ukrainie: problemy metodologiczne „Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej” 9: 4, pp. 140-151, www.przegladsocjologiijakosciowej.
org (28.08.2016).

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