This Thursday (April 25th, 6 PM Kyiv), we’re going to organize another important event via Fulbright Ukraine’s virtual platform On the People and Histories of Borderlands: Polish-Ukrainian Palimpsest. This time, we’ll talk about Julia Buyskykh’s recent book. Also, Catherine Wanner will join us for giving her expert comments.

Please see the posters with details here.

Registration 

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Brief description:

Julia Buyskykh, an anthropologist and Fulbright alumna, will share her research on lived religious experience in Polish-Ukrainian borderlands and present her book To the West from The Bug River: Diaries from the Borderlands (Publisher 21, 2023). This book can be described as anthropological reportage, deriving from the author’s ethnographic fieldnotes and travel diaries written during her research in Poland between 2015 and 2018. Each chapter is a true story taken from the everyday life of people living in the administrative, confessional, ethnic, imagined, phantom borderlands. These stories reveal that the reality of daily life in local communities on the periphery is significantly more complicated than the official visions of national histories in neighboring states. The local inhabitants’ multilayered and ambiguous memories of the Second World War and its aftermath often contradict official, state-produced national narratives of Ukraine and Poland. These memories reveal the asymmetries of power between these two states: their local intellectual elites and the clergy of various denominations on the one hand, and people living in local communities on the other. The voices of those people, their feelings, subtle hints, shades of emotions, memories, and silences constitute a thin, fragile fabric which encompasses their everyday life, often unseen from distant Kyiv and Warsaw. This makes the inhabitants of borderlands feel forgotten, marginalized and undervalued regardless of their ethnic, religious or national self-identification. This is a book about homecoming, reconciliation, healing, belonging, finding oneself, and learning to approach the perspective of others. The presentation will be accompanied by Fulbright Alumna Catherine Wanner’s commentary (Professor of History, Anthropology and Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University).