The Graveyard and the Table

Front matter

POLISH STUDIES - TRANSDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES 38

Justyna Straczuk

The Graveyard and the Table

Part I: Concepts, Research Problems, the Field, and Method.. 17

The Borderland, Ethnicity, Multiculturalism ...0. eee 18 The Concept of Ethnicity in the Context of the “Cultural Distinctiveness of Ethnic Groups”... ceseseesessesseesesseeseeseesseesesneees 20 Multiculturalism on the Borderland 26 The Mythization of the Borderland World 0... eee eee 33 Establishing “Human” Relationships 200.0... scsssssssssesseseeseeseesneeeeenes 45 Conversation ed A W ovate aaa Giwi 48 Part II: The Cemetery and Forms of Memory: The Dynamics “There would be graves, and they would remember, yes...” — Or the Materiality of Memory |... 57 Collective: Memory” wi sRAW Ania 62

The Individualization of Memory |... 68

6 Table of Contents

“Uniformly, but we in our way and they in theirs” - Or the

Relativity of Differences 0... .cccesesssesseessessesesssesseessessessessessesneesees 73 Practicalism and Metaphysics: The Traditions of the Western and Eastern Churches |... 74 Peasant Death saa a O AO A a dA i 85 Denomination as a Family Trait |... eee 93

Prestige Asymmetry: Catholic Villages vs. Orthodox Villages .. 95

Binominality, Duality |... 128 Conclusions aw o AE W dE dd 132

Part III: The Community of the Table: The Integrative

Properties of Food aaa OO AA Akk GA 135 Food as a Topic of Conversation and an Element of The Earth Provider 6 sei ien in W 155 “Consumption Minimalism” 0.0... cceccssssecsesecseceesececeeeseenceeeneeneesees 158 Family: A Sharing Community eee 159

Table of Contents 7

The Family-Neighborhood Community |... 183 Food and Denominational Differences... 194 CONGIUSIONS z O R ad R O GA E ało A ia ates 207

Recapitulation: The Transitivity, Situationality and

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all of my interlocutors for their kindness, hospitality and wonderful stories, without whom this work could never have been completed, especially Maria Serafinowicz, Władysława Leonczyk and Zuzanna Kozłowska from Papiernia; Teresa and Dionizy Biernacki from Rouby; Walentyna Rychlicka, Wiera Nowicka and Walentyna Zajko from Radziwoniszki; Janina Uszko from Feliksowo; Felicja Skorupska, Eugenia Szkurynowa and Janina Skorupska from Topolany, and Irena Żerel from Białystok.

I am also indebted to my fellow researchers, my constant companions in the ups and downs of ethnography: Kasia Dąbek, Kasia Dolegowska-Urlich, Kasia Kolasa, Danka Życzyńska-Ciołek, Renata Banasińska, Małgosia Żerel and Małgosia Litwinowicz. In this book, I make great use of their experience and the fruits of their field work in general. I am particularly grateful to Anna Engelking for the research trips we have taken together and for our many discussions; it was from her that I learned the field researcher’s workshop. Many of the comments and conclusions contained in this book are, more or less consciously, borrowed or developed from her original insights and intuitions, which she has always generously and selflessly shared.

I would also like to express my gratitude to Professor Roch Sulima for his inspiring texts about peasant culture and more, and for his invaluable assistance in conceptualizing my work; to Professor Joanna Kurczewska for the substantive and spiritual support from this “understanding” sociologist; to Professor Elzbieta Smułkowa for the solid interdisciplinary training she provided me in borderland research; and to Professor Michał Buchowski for his thoughtful reading of this text and valuable comments from the perspective of an anthropologist.

Introduction to the English-Language Edition

Fifteen years have passed since the book first appeared in Polish in 2006. Much has changed since then, both in the theory and research methodology of the borderlands, and in the everyday life of the inhabitants of the Orthodox-Catholic borderland in Poland and Belarus.

When this book was written, Polish sociology was dominated by the research trend that conceptualized the cultural borderland as a neighborhood of ethnic groups. Each group was to be a carrier of a separate culture and the resulting separate group identity. In the first, theoretical chapter, I mainly argue against that dominant concept, which in no way corresponded to what, as an ethnographer, I was able to observe directly in the field. The inhabitants of mixed denominational villages in no way seemed to form two separate groups. On the contrary, what one could observe and deduce from numerous interviews showed that it was the local neighborhood community that remained the most important structure in everyday life. Within its framework, the boundaries that result from belonging to separate churches were constantly negated. The borderland turned out to be not so much a meeting place for separate ethnic groups, but a dynamic process of delimiting and sharing the space of everyday life.

The constructionist nature of the frontier is a fairly common concept today. When preparing the text for this English edition, I decided to retain this perhaps slightly outdated polemic. It is a record of a certain style of thinking based on the achievements of prewar Polish sociology and ethnology, including the works of Jézef Obrebski, Florian Znaniecki, and Stanistaw Ossowski, and on the convergent concepts put forth by individuals better-known in the West, including Fredrik Barth and Anthony Cohen. In view of the vast English-language literature on ethnicity, inspirations cited from the temporal and geographical periphery show that similar conclusions can be drawn in very different ways, derived from different premises and bearing different pedigrees and surnames. For me, however, the basis of the concept of the borderland presented here was primarily practical knowledge taken from the field, which made us look critically at contemporary theoretical positions on so-called “Ethnic relations” and to seek other theoretical justifications.

What I find most valuable about this work, however, and what prompted me to publish this book in English many years after its first edition, is its ethnographic material. Today it is basically a historical record: the research was carried

12 Introduction to the English-Language Edition out in 1993-2001, and many of our older interlocutors are no longer alive. The record of conversations with them is a picture of the still-existent world of a traditional rural community and its proper way of thinking and acting. It is also a testimony to the diversity of human experience. The generation of the oldest interlocutors, remembering the times before the Second World War, was burdened with a special historical experience. Its members witnessed a series of traumatic changes: from feudal structures imposed by the Polish state, through revolutionary and traumatic war experiences, the aggression of the Soviet Union and related political repression and deportations, shifting borders, repatriation and separation of families, the collectivization of villages and the difficult life on collective farms, to perestroika, the advent of an independent Belarusian state, Alexander Lukashenko’ victory and his rule in subsequent years. In the face of all these political and social changes, the inner world of the rural community, along with the principles of good-neighborly coexistence, remained virtually unchanged. Perhaps those traumatic experiences actually strengthened a conservative worldview and established a distance to the outside world by shaping resistance to various ideologies and leading to the continuation of life according to principles of cooperation developed over centuries. For us, the young ethnographers that we were then, our interactions with such a world and its people were an important and instructive experience. I hope that at least a part of this reality is recorded and remembered in this work.

The way we worked in the field also influenced the specific structure of this book, in which the main voice is given to the interlocutors themselves, allowing them to speak on their own behalf. It is also a kind of continuation of the Polish ethnographic school, derived from Malinowski and his predecessors, which placed special emphasis on the linguistic and semantic analysis of the respondents’ statements, in an attempt to understand different ways of thinking and functioning in the world. In times marked by numerous open conflicts on the religious, ethnic and national plane, our exhibition of a part of the world in which the social norm is dominated by the constant development of principles of harmonious coexistence over and above existing differences and divisions, may constitute an important message, indeed a lesson for the future.

Introduction

In this work, I will focus on issues related to the specific cultural and social situation of a denominational borderland, more specifically on the manifestations of cultural frontier in the everyday life of inhabitants of several villages in the Catholic-Orthodox border region shared by Poland and Belarus. When writing about this world and these people, I will deliberately use the fairly neutral term “denominational borderland” instead of other ambiguous and semantically dense terms — such as ethnic, national, or cultural borderlands — which are most often used when describing areas located on the two sides of Poland’s eastern frontier. The Catholic-Orthodox border, covering an area under the shared influence of the Western and Eastern Churches, is a concrete concept that can be determined both geographically and historically. However, it is neither a specific territorial area nor its historical conditions that will be the subject of this analysis. Rather, this study is an examination of the imaginary and mental borders at work in people’s minds, borders which are more symbolic than concrete and are subject to constant fluctuations, shifts and redefinitions.

Using the terms “Catholic” and “Orthodox,” I also intentionally avoid national qualifiers unless they are related to the particular issues at hand. I place great emphasis on the disproportionate nature of both denominational and linguistic criteria in the national or ethnic self-determination of the local inhabitants. After all, the issues of identification — understood as Antonina Kłoskowska! did as national self-determination as opposed to identity that encompasses a much wider range of consciousness — are not of direct or even indirect interest in my work. Here, even religious affiliation itself is an often unstable and ambiguous distinguishing feature. Despite the clear border that exists on a map, the personal border between Catholics and Orthodox can be just as fluid. Not only in the case of a mixed denominational village or a mixed family but also in the case of individual people, denominational distinctions can become blurred, such that religious indeterminacy or religious duality becomes possible. Each inhabitant of this area, with his/her individual origin, life experience and social environment, is the carrier of a separate borderline situation, one which can only be described idiosyncratically and not systematically.

1 See A. Ktoskowska, Kultury narodowe u korzeni (Warszawa: PWN, 1996).

14 Introduction

The place where everyday life “unfolds” at the borderland described in this study are several villages along the Catholic-Orthodox border where field ethnographic research was carried out in Belarus in 1993-2001 and in Poland in 2001-2003. Above all, I want to show how the key institution of peasant culture — the family-neighborhood structure — “works” in borderland conditions; how the community maintains bonds along and across denominational differences resulting from kinship and close contact. Due to the strong familial and neighborhood ties which constitute rural communities, cultural differences are most often neutralized by social interaction which involves crossing denominational boundaries. The common ground here is the socially recognized and respected values of peasant culture through which denominational divisions often lose their significance.

This work is divided into three parts. In Part I, I present a short overview of important issues related to the subject of the borderland and multiculturalism. I propose a departure from the paradigm by which the borderland is studied as “a neighborhood of ethnic groups” understood as separate cultural entities “colliding” on the borderland. Instead I propose the study of the borderland culture as an organic whole together with its manifestations, defined here as situational, transitive, indistinguishable. In this part, I also discuss selected problems from the historical and social context of the terrain under examination and present the applied research method.

The second and third parts of this work are devoted to detailed analyses of two areas of cultural life — death and food — which, though they have long been the subject of anthropological examination, have not yet been described in detail in the context of borderland culture. In this regard, I focus only on those aspects of dying and eating that allow me to show how cultural differences related to these universal spheres of life — in everyday behavior, ritual observances and their material manifestations — are organized within the local community of the denominational borderland.

In Part II, I analyze the space of rural cemeteries, which exhibit some important elements ofborderland reality as well as the characteristic features of peasant memory and how it has changed over the last century. A cemetery is a place that perfectly reflects the village social structure: organized in family clusters, it is at the same time an indication of the existence of denominational boundaries (divided into Catholic and Orthodox cemeteries) and the crossing of those boundaries (the burial of dissenters based not on denominational bonds but on family and local bonds, etc.). Analysis of the cemetery infrastructure — the nature of tombstones and inscriptions, the mixing of alphabets, bilingual versions of names and surnames — proves that cultural duality ( bivalence”), transitivity,

Introduction 15 and indistinguishability are features inherent in the borderland reality and the phenomenon known here as borderland culture.

The same applies to food, which will be analyzed in Part III. Food turns out to be one of the most open, “inclusive” elements of culture because it is easy to share and exchange. As such, food is an important instrument for creating social bonds. The community of the table, being a functional element of the system of communication, allows for the marking, organization and maintenance of social relations, and it thus directly indicates the limits of familiarity and strangeness. All of the rituals, etiquette, and scenarios of eating behaviors refer directly to the values held in a given community. Food, which has always played a role in important aspects of family and rural life, also serves as indicators of extraordinary moments in time. What is important here is the distinction between daily food, the same for the entire community, and ritual food, which differentiates the behavior of Orthodox Christians and Catholics. It is at this level that symptomatic situations arise in which a dynamic aspect of the sense of community comes into view, which manifests itself depending on, or independently of, cultural differences.

A few words about the spelling of oral statements and the use of abbreviations. This work contains a large number of quotes from conversations with borderland inhabitants. Conversations conducted in Polish, Belarusian or Russian, and often a mixture of the three, were written in part phonetically, as they were heard, without the use of standard transcription and without grammatical corrections.’ In this way, not wanting to lose any of their originality and uniqueness, I tried to keep the relatively “natural” linguistic forms of oral expression.

All quotes from the interviews are provided with brief information about the interlocutor, coded as follows: [country/locality/gender/denomination/date of birth], for example: [P.Top.k.pr.25] = [Poland/Topolany/female/Orthodox/ 1925]; [B.Pie.m.kat.20]=[Białoruś/Pieluńcy/male/Catholic/1920].

In the text, I also use abbreviations for the names of the most frequently quoted ethnographic sources:

[Feder., paragraph no.] - Michał Federowski, Lud białoruski na Rusi Litewskiej. Materiały do etnografii słowiańskiej zgromadzone w latach 1877-1891 [Belarusian people in Lithuanian Ruthenia. Materials for Slavic ethnography collected in the years 1877-1891], vol. 1: Wiara, wierzenia i przesądy ludu z okolic Wołkowyska, Słonimia, Lidy i Sokółki [Faith,

2 Unfortunately, in the English version it is difficult to maintain this dialectic and idiolectic differentiation, which is why all quoted statements have been translated into standard language.

Introduction beliefs and superstitions of people from the vicinity of Wołkowysk, Słonim, Lida and Sokółka] (Kraków, 1897).

[Kolb., page no.] - Oskar Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie [Collected works], vol. 52: Białoruś- Polesie [Belarus-Polesie] (Warszawa, 1984).

[Dworak., ZR, page no.] - Stanisław Dworakowski, Zwyczaje rodzinne w powiecie wysoko-mazowieckim [Family customs in the Wysokie Mazowieckie poviat] (Warszawa, 1935).

[Dworak., KS, page no.] — Stanisław Dworakowski, Kultura społeczna ludu wiejskiego na Mazowszu nad Narwią [The social culture of the rural people in Mazovia on the Narew] (Białystok, 1964).

Part I: Concepts, Research Problems, the Field, and Method

If we look at the titles of works devoted in particular to the eastern borderlands of Poland, what comes to the fore are the issues of identity and the most commonly used expression “ethnic and cultural borderland,” supplemented by the more specific terms “linguistic borderland” or “denominational borderland:” In the examination of these Polish borderlands, the words “ethnic” and “cultural” are practically inseparable, so intertwined with each other that they are sometimes used interchangeably. The very term “ethno-cultural” is a peculiar conceptual cluster that requires deeper analysis.

What is Culture on the Ethnic and Cultural Borderland?

As a rule, whenever the term “ethno-cultural” is used, only the first part is defined, while the second part — cultural — is left as self-explanatory. The emphasis is placed not so much on culture itself, but on cultural differences, which is one of the basic criteria used by sociologists when determining borderlands: “Borderland has been identified and analyzed mainly on the basis of cultural differences and the processes of mutual penetration or the clash of cultures,’ Grzegorz Babinski wrote. “The differences most frequently taken into account involve ethnicity, language, religion and awareness of belonging to a wider community - regional or ethnic”! However, though an interest in cultural issues is indicated here, most authors focus their attention on the issue of ethnic identification. The concept of “cultural diversity” is usually limited to linguistic and denominational differences, which are treated very narrowly in analyses as group emblems - that is, as signs of identity for members of the surveyed communities. In borderland sociology, language and denominational are therefore described unidimensionally as if they were separate and internally homogeneous categories, satisfying the conditions of a simple equation: language and/or denomination = belonging to a specific ethnic group. In this situation, the researcher's task is most often to check the extent to which this relationship is reflected in the respondents’ awareness.

Apart from the debatable matter of the assumed agreement between researcher and respondents regarding the phenomenon of ethnicity itself, about which more in a moment, the fact is that when we treat language or denomination as a one-dimensional emblem, almost an axiom of ethnic identification,

1 G. Babiński, Pogranicze polsko-ukraińskie. Etniczność, zróżnicowanie religijne, tożsamość (Kraków: Nomos, 1997), 52.

then we commit reductionism in situations that are central to and characterize the borderland. An example of which is the linguistic aspect — involving bilingualism or multilingualism - which often takes on a diglossic character, where two languages are used interchangeably on a daily basis depending on the social situation,” or linguistic interference leading to mixed dialects, where it is often difficult to tie a given user’s idiolect to only one language. In such situations, the user's language ceases to be an unambiguous ethnic determinant, unless we assume the possibility of dual or multiple ethnicity.” Ones denomination seems to be a less complex and “troublesome” criterion, although — as will be shown later in this work - here too we see a blurring of boundaries because there are those who profess a dual faith and feel connected with two religions. On the borderland, especially if it is “transitional, “open” borderland, unambiguous criteriaidentifiers can be extremely unreliable.

Apart from language and religion, which are usually only indicative, Polish borderland sociology rarely mentions other cultural features, which are most often mysteriously called “custom,” “cultural tradition” or “ethnic diversity”; it is not really known what lies behind these enigmatic expressions because they are almost never analyzed. Research into them is rather entrusted to ethnographers, who are supposedly “responsible” for this sphere of culture. But the voice of ethnographers on this issue has long since lost its strength. The cartographic method developed by them and popular back in the 1970s, which consisted of determining the geographical range of individual cultural elements, turned out to be useless in borderland research for at least two reasons. First — because there have always been problems with establishing the origins of these elements and assigning them to one of the interconnecting cultural areas; and second - in

2 C. A. Ferguson, 'Diglossia; Word (1959), no. 15; J. A. Fishman, “Bilingualism and Biculturism as Individual and Societal Phenomena,’ in The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity (Haga, 1985).

3 Such a proposal, based on the sociolinguistic model of bilingualism, was put forward by J. A. Fishman, who called the presented model di-ethnia, but who also stipulated that it is an extremely rare phenomenon (the examples he gave are the quite hermetic circles of American Hasidim and Amish). See J. A. Fishman, “Bilingualism...”

4 The distinction between “transitional” and “contact” borderlands (based on linguistic criteria) was introduced by J. Chlebowczyk in “Obszary pogranicza jezykowonarodowego we wschodniej Europie, in Z problemów integracji społeczno-politycznych na Górnym Śląsku, ed. Z. Zieliński (Kraków, 1980).

5 The classification “open” and “closed” borderlands was used by A. Kłoskowska, Kultury narodowe u korzeni.

reflection on culture itself, it is not treated as a set of independent elements, but as an internally coherent system of meanings. The geographic-cartographic method for delineating “objectively” existing cultural boundaries turned out to be inappropriate also because it omitted the important factor of the participation in culture of the borderland inhabitants themselves; the analyzed “cultural elements” were supposed to function somewhat independently of those inhabitants, as if people were completely passive in their stance toward culture. Thus, ethnicity — which after all was said to be based on cultural diversity - would apply not to people themselves but only to cultural products.

Thus, in borderland research we are dealing with a situation in which, on the one hand, while attention is directed primarily toward issues of ethnic and national identification, culture is reified and treated in a “utilitarian” manner, serving to confirm or deny identity determinants; and, on the other hand, through a focus on the products of culture alone, culture is treated impersonally, without taking into account the perspective of people who actually create a given culture, and who are thus mechanically assigned to the cultural elements under examination, while the fact is that culture is not just “something” to which people belong, or merely “something” that belongs to people, but rather simultaneously activates itself in all human relationships and gives these relationships meaning. Both positions thus reduce culture to handy fetishes that are intended to validate the researcher's adopted assumptions and research methods.

The Concept of Ethnicity in the Context of the “Cultural Distinctiveness of Ethnic Groups”

In the Polish sociological tradition, the phenomenon of ethnicity is almost always associated with the notion of an ethnic group, and the cultural borderland is most often described as a neighborhood of ethnic groups. Ethnic groups are generally treated as carriers of separate cultural wholes, in fact of ethnic cultures. The boundaries of these units are most often drawn along linguistic and denominational lines, which also confirm the existence of ethnic groups in history.

The definition of an ethnic group cited by many authors, proposed by Andrzej Sadowski in the 1970s and repeated in his work from 1995, states that an ethnic group includes:

[...] all permanent forms of social integration that result from an objective historical process on the basis of language (of either an authentic or alleged origin), religion and other factors, and that are marked by a sense of separation from other communities.®

As we see, when distinguishing an ethnic group, certain constant cultural features — language and religion, and undefined “other factors” - come to the fore as the basic determinants of its members' sense of separateness. Language and religion are treated here as “objective” and permanently assigned properties of ethnic groups which automatically make members of an ethnic group who identify with those properties aware of their distinctiveness from others. What is extremely important here, in Sadowski: view, is that the ethnic group would be a fixed-in-time phenomenon that arose spontaneously as a result of an “objective historical process.” Thus, it is not so much an imagined community as a physically existing, “natural” unit of social life.

One of the significant limitations of this type of definition is the temptation to match these “objective” cultural features to its users’ sense of group belonging. The researcher usurps the right to estimate the level of ethnic self-awareness of representatives of the studied communities and to assess the level of agreement between subjective reality and “actual” reality. Thus, the researcher examines the identity of members of ethnic groups based not on their own criteria but on the researcher's own “scientific” criteria even though what has ethnic connotations for researchers may not necessarily have ethnic connotations for the research subjects.

In a heroic attempt to grasp various meanings related to ethnicity, Grzegorz Babinski formulated the following definition, significantly different than Sadowski's:

Despite all the discrepancies and controversies, ethnicity can be defined as a set of group features. These features are certainly a kind of bond, although not reducible to a primordial bond. It is also the awareness of a common origin and cultural community and - based on this awareness — a sense of “we,” separating a given group from other ethnic groups and, on certain levels, from the rest of the world.”

What Babinski was talking about here is not so much an “objectively” existing cultural community, but rather the awareness of its existence, quite apart from the “real” state of affairs and its historical basis. Babinski believes that the most

6 A. Sadowski, "Pojęcie grupy etnicznej w socjologii,” Studia Socjologiczne 4 (1973), no. 4: 186, re-published in his, Pogranicze polsko-białoruskie. Tożsamość mieszkańców. 7 G. Babinski, Etniczność, 194.

important feature of the ethnic group is its internal bonds, and thus it refers directly to subjective reality - to what mentally connects members of the ethnic group.

Characterizing changes in the contemporary sociological study of borderlands, Babiński mentions such factors as:

[...] the move from a primarily geographical space to a social space delineated symbolically” and “[...] the move from the point of contact and permeation of cultural and economic differences to the point of contact for group identities demarcated above all symbolically.$

In the end, however, he posed a question that demonstrates his feeling of uncertainty in connection with the loss of the “material” foundation for research: “The borderland becomes more of a cultural space, directly symbolic rather than physical. So, is it still a borderland?”® Reality that is “only symbolic” is therefore perceived here as, to some extent, unreal.

The imaginative nature of ethnic groups is not an entirely new concept. Józef Obrebski drew attention to the conscious dimension of ethnicity long ago. Back in the 1930s, in an article entitled “Problem grup etnicznych w etnologii i jego socjologiczne ujecie” (The Problem of Ethnic Groups in Ethnology and its Sociological Conceptualization),!° he wrote:

Like any social formation - and this is precisely what an ethnic group is — an ethnic group exists only insofar as it exists in the consciousness of those who belong to it, and of those who belong to other similar groups but exclude themselves from it. Like any social group, an ethnic group is an imaginary, not concrete, creation.!!

Obrebski was critical of arguments that ethnic diversity could be determined based on “real” cultural differences. He emphasized that only those cultural elements that are relevant to members of ethnic groups are used for their self-characterization. And the most important factor here is not so much cultural as social.

Only certain aspects of cultural distinctiveness are of significance: only those, namely, that can have a bearing on the formation of those very casual and transitory relations

8 G. Babinski, “Pogranicza etniczne i kulturowe, 21-22.

10 J. Obrebski, “Problem grup etnicznych w etnologii i jego socjologiczne ujęcie, Przegląd Socjologiczny 4 (1936).

11 Ibid., reprinted in Sto lat socjologii polskiej: od Supińskiego do Szczepańskiego, ed. J. Szacki (Warszawa 1995), 689.

which occur between members of separate groups. Only those, therefore, that have their own social significance. "?

Obrebski also drew attention to the dynamic aspect of ethnicity, to the fact that ethnic groups are not permanent and unchangeable creations: “The division into individual ethnic groups is not a static phenomenon. Ethnic diversity is in a constant state of change and fluctuation, and we may encounter different phases of this transformation in individual cases. !3

However, what is most important in Obrębskis thinking, and what brings him closer to contemporary ethnic currents in social anthropology, is the attention he paid to the "negative" face of ethnic groups: in their self-characterization, it is not the groups own characteristics that are important, but what distinguishes that group from other groups. The awareness of being separate from others is an essential feature organizing an ethnic group.

An ethnic group thus does not have an extensive, crystallized and integrated ethnic consciousness — that is, a set of systematized and mutually agreed on concepts that captures its own group reality in a certain imaginative scheme. [...] In conceptions of an ethnic group, the image of an alien group comes to the fore constantly and invariably. 4

This position differs, for example, from Babińskis definition of ethnicity, according to which it is primarily the inner feeling of the “we” that shapes the awareness of its difference in relation to others. For Obrebski, the most important thing is the ethnic group in relation to other groups: “[...] an ethnic group cannot be considered something independent, something to be studied in isolation from other ethnic groups?!

This position is close to views put forth by Frederik Barth, editor of the well-known collection of essays published under the title Ethnic Groups and Boundaries.'$ Barth was opposed to the reification of ethnic groups as social wholes with certain fixed cultural and organizational features, where ethnic cultures are seen as permanent and closed systems. He pointed out that it is not certain specific cultural features characteristic of individual ethnic groups that constitute the core of ethnicity, but rather the very ideas about these differences at work within the minds of group members. “The critical focus of investigation from

12 J. Obrębski, “Problem grup etnicznych,” 692.

16 F. Barth, “Introduction, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, ed. F. Barth (Oslo: Universitetforlaget, 1969).

this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses?!” Ethnic boundaries are organized around cultural difference, but the status of this difference is purely intellectual: what matters is whether group members themselves perceive a particular cultural characteristic as being different, not how it is “in reality” The postulated cultural difference is the criterion by which boundaries between groups are determined. Attention is therefore shifted from the characteristics of groups to the description of a certain social process in which what is most important is the communication of cultural differences and the ways they are socially ordered.