The article brings to light the relationship between politics and social sciences in interwar Poland in its local and transnational dimensions. It explores the beginnings of expertise in ethnology and the evolution of the discipline’s tools and methods as closely linked to the political goals of the interwar Polish state, and the post-coup Sanacja [Sanation] regime in particular. Ethnologists carried out fieldwork focused on multiethnic territories, such as Eastern Galicia, which were subjected to international territorial disputes. The collaboration with politicians and the administration – developed mostly in the framework of research institutes – was a source of inspiration and, at the same time, stiff competition between scientific schools. To illustrate some consequences of this collaboration, the article traces an argument over scientific approaches to the ‘ethnic question’ which involved ethnologists and empirical sociologists, and the connection of this argument to the objectivity principle in science. These different approaches reflect international theoretical and epistemological divisions at the time as much as they show the direct and indirect exchange of ideas within the European scholarship.
The nationality issues of interwar Poland’s eastern borderlands (Kresy) have been a popular theme in post-war Polish historiography. A considerable part of this historiography has continued the debates of interwar experts and political activists, which revolved around the two interwar censuses and the question of ethnic identity. For this reason, scholars have given priority to statistical evidence in order to determine the national belonging and categorize the inhabitants of the eastern borderlands into particular ethnic and national groups. What is more, they have drawn their conclusions on the assumption that identity is objectively definable by blood ties. I argue that peasant identity in these borderlands was driven by ‘localness’, that is, a specific symbolic universe, set of values and conventions typical of peasant culture. Thus, identity cannot be comprehensively described through ethnic categories alone. In the article, I explore some practices of localness such as the malleable roles people ascribed to others in everyday life. For large groups of peasants, they were of vital importance in the reception of nationbuilding projects.
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