On the Polish side of the Bialowieza Forest a forest protection controversy intertwines with a border problem. „Europe’s last primeval low-land forest”, endangered by conservationists’ standards, lies on the border with „Europe’s last dictatorial regime”, where a border crossing opened between Poland and Belarus in April 2005. The border crossing facilitates tourist traffic to national parks in Poland and Belarus into a supposedly apolitical space of nature. Here the European Union’s new external border enables nature tourists, mostly urban Poles, to pass into that primeval forest zone dividing Belarus and Poland. The excursion is more an adventure into the Polish romantic past, of which Belarus figures prominently, than a site of dynamic creative exchange one comes to expect at border crossings with trade, both legal and illegal. Forest politics transmogrify into the politics of Belarus as the minority residents are stereotyped as ‘Belarusian,’ a loaded signifier given Poland’s new position in the EU. The highly political nature of conservation politics on the Polish side of the border has created a new meaning for things ‘Belarusian’ through contests over how to protect and use the forest.
The juxtaposition between relic nature and relic political system acts as an ‘imaginative geography’ (Said 1978) within Poland, one that simultaneously creates knowledge about the Polish side of the Bialowieza Forest, while casting the forest and its minority Belarusian” population as passive, unknowable entities to be acted upon. Making an us” and them” at the Polish Belarusian border is not just the result of long standing relations between two ethnic groups at a state boundary, this „othering” is actively created with the constitution of the forest by Poles in the activities of crossing at the forest border, a feature of ecotourism. The description that follows stems from my doctoral research in the village of Bialowieza from February 2005-June 2006 where I spent time discussing and participating in forest politics with scientists, NGO activists, foresters, farmers, loggers, tourists, and rural inhabitants.
As the „primeval” forest of conservationists’ discourse, the forest conjures a certain moral authority where the forest always represents an object of beauty and unrivaled uniqueness that demands protection from commercial logging. It is the primeval, not the commercial forest, that draws hundreds of thousands of tourists annually who come looking for a piece of European relic nature, and a way of showing their Polish identity as a European identity in the acts of travel and crossing.
Forest as a Boundary Object
Ambiguity at borders is both commonplace and unsettling, especially so for nations with shifting borders (Berdahl 1999, Krishna 1996). The reason for drawing the border is suspended in an anxiety about what might erupt from history. In Poland, like many nations of Central Europe, its current borders can only ever approximate an historical „original”. Defined against the Soviet annexation of a huge part of Poland’s newfound territory gained after WWI and lost in the Yalta negotiations, the pre-war borders symbolize Poland’s lost chance at a normal „western” modernity, and further reinforce the importance and status of its current position as the guardian of the external EU border. While it may not have regained lost territories Poland has returned, at least in official form, to its pre-WWII capitalist roots, with the East/West distinction still a salient one. In this context, The Bialowieza forest serves as a boundary object (Bowker and Star 2000) mediating historic social and class relations.
By boundary object I mean that foresters, tourists, and conservationists might argue over what kind of forest this is but the idea of a forest in the general sense is juggled by these groups in an association with things Belarusian. The forest inhabits multiple contexts yet still has a local and shared meaning so that all groups recognize it as the border space between Poland and Belarus.
Struggles over meaning for the border of Europe and Poland occur at the level of forest protection politics. Polish conservationists argue that current national park protection is not enough to stop the degradation of this rare and endangered ecosystem of European and worldwide significance. Commercial logging exploits eighty percent of the total area in the Polish forest, and this logging is discursively linked with the idea of Belarus for conservationists. Many activists fighting for the parks’ expansion suggest that undemocratic practices are at play on the part of some state forestry officials and at the level of local politics. And many foresters and some local people claim that nature activists are undemocratic as they wish to override the popular expression against further expansion of the national park. The area is also linked to Belarus because of the minority population, some of whom identify as Belarusians. Under this Polish imaginary of relic nature and relic dictatorship the constitution of the forest border and movement at the border suggests that a forest has become the object which is supposed to usher in a new type of normality for a European Union member country, a normality where some relics are treasured markers of continuity from the past and others as useless appendages better amputated for the sake of the body politic (Herzfeld 2004, 1987, Handler and Gable1997, Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983).
As far as the forest can act” to produce this confusion, the forest has a shape and form that is unlike a border at a river crossing, where you can see the other side, or a mountain pass with its demarcated” ridge. It is a tangled, overgrown barrier and enabler between Poland and Belarus, a space of dense cover. That shape and form though is never outside of deeply held cultural imaginings about the forest, many of them nationalist in origin (Schama 1995, Franklin 2001), such as the forest’s significance as the site of insurrectionist battles against Russians in the nineteenth century, and Herman Goering’s seizure of the forest for a Reichstag hunting preserve in WWII. Because the forest in Poland is a space of multiple representations, ranging from valuable timber source to the historico-mythological, it becomes a flexible idea across which Belarusian and Polish, as well as European relations, are imagined. Thus, its ambiguity within different interpretations lends the forest a kind of unruly power which debating sides consciously and/or unconsciously harness for their own ends and which refracts upon perceived differences between Poland and Belarus at the limits of the new Europe.
Which forest? Which people?
The Bialowieza Forest’s most frequently associated trait is it’s primeval character. Roots of alders reach their way out of rust colored bogs. Towering spruce grow to their upper height limit to create perches for eagle owls or three-toed woodpeckers, or splay as huge rootplates next to majestic oaks. The preeminent symbol of the forest, the European bison, belongs to this portrait of ancient woodland. Its restitution from near extinction created a reverential status for the ungulate and its „original” forest dwelling. Imagining this forest only as a non-human collaboration of „primeval” nature is not difficult in the present cultural climate.
To question whether the remaining forest is primeval for foresters administering this national resource (80 percent of the Polish forest) is to neglect their historical role in restoring what occupying forces and other foreign exploiters had destroyed. After 600 years of royal protection as a hunting ground by Polish and Lithuania Kings and following them Russian Czars, Germans systematically exploited the forest for the first time in its history, followed-up after the war by British Firm, The Century European Timber Corporation. In the years 1916-1922, foreign operators cut over 1/3 of the total forest area of what today is Poland and Belarus. For the forester, all forestry since has focused on recovery. The forest’s vital importance lies in volumes of healthy trees used as disposable wood. Today’s forest is part of a measured plan of total forest management aimed at human use where nature protection can be actively managed. Foresters during interviews spoke of the forest as old”, historical”, and a national treasure”.
This debate between use and preservation consumes most of the resident community’s attention, especially after several unsuccessful attempts in the last fifteen years to expand the national park over the whole forest. Through much of that campaign foresters organized a populist line of defense. They crafted the „local” as an extension of their agency’s timber activities, partly due to their long-standing role as representatives of the state who organized economic and social life for nearly 85 years. State timbering during the Socialist period resembled the company town” of many frontier capitalist areas in other parts of the world. Whole communities worked only for state timber with labor forces drawn from Central Poland in promises of good housing, an attractive incentive in the socialist era. Thus in the transition from a planned centralized economy to a free-market one, where a nature conservation movement gained 11 new national parks and attempted to expand the areas of several more, the idea of a national park competed with the resource extractive timber model as routes to proper European modernity. In this atmosphere conservationists vigorously attempted to expose the coercive” tactics of state forestry administrators, who were cast as hierarchical and communist-like. State forestry administrators emphasized the elite interests of conservationists, inferring that conservationists arrogantly thought of themselves as the new royalty who would have exclusive access to the forest while the locals were treated like serfs. State forestry administrators adopted a language of sustainable development” for the beleaguered ‘local,’ burdened by capitalist modernity, a point directly confounded with the meaning of things ‘Belarusian’ These debates for a proper modernity are at their core debates about defining the periphery and claiming its otherness” as a tameable element of the modern Polish nation.
PROXIMITY OF BELARUS
When the border crossing to Belarus opened in spring 2005 conservationists feared two things: 1) that car traffic posed a threat to wildlife populations by further fragmenting the ecosystem, and 2) that local politicians tightly connected with foresters’ agenda were a little too accommodating to Belarusian officials, who exploited their side of the forest, the Belaveskaya Puszcza1 to a high degree despite its status as a National Park. The word ‘Belarusian’ acquired a coded meaning among conservationists. On the one hand, it referred to a a deep local culture that developed over centuries, but it also evoked Belarusian President Alaksandr Lukashenko’s Belarus visible in family resemblance on the Polish side of the border. Fears that Belarus’ regime might seep into Poland by way of a passive” minority echoed amongst conservationists. Bialowieza is a little Belarus in pill form”, one conservationist told me. According to him the alliance between foresters and the locals needed to be exposed and eliminated by progressive thinking in order to properly protect rare nature.
„Why don’t we just move to Belarus”, another conservationist joked to activist friend. They were referring to a now famous local action, orchestrated by foresters who bussed in dozens of uniformed employees to what was supposed to be a small meeting between an NGO and the mayor. The network on the Polish side of the forest was for conservationists tightly interconnected with the forest exploitation. Although fears of post-communist corruption existed everywhere in Poland, here in Bialowieza, post-communist power was discursively linked with the Belarusian character of the area. The effect of this language stereotyped local inhabitants as a beaten-down” and passive” people easily coerced by the foresters’ logic.
Foresters tended to use a similar rhetoric about the mild mannered minority in need of paternal care. When foresters protested against the conservationists’ plans for the forest they used the argument that an expanded national park would destroy the Belarusian minority’s chances for democratic development by locking them into a reservation like Indians”, an argument repeated by some Belarusian identity activists. Most foresters and activists moved to the Bialowieza region for jobs or to protect the forest. Very few were from the region, a pointed repeatedly emphasized by locals.
For ethnic Polish tourists, the local Belarusians served as an added attraction to the old forest. Two-hundred thousand tourists arrived by the year 2005, a gradual buildup clearly accredited to conservationists’ multiple campaigns to expand the national park and thereby produce a viable tourist economy to replace logging. I frequently heard remarks by tourists such as, „It really does feel exotic here, like I’m not in Poland, especially with the Orthodox Churches”. Guide books and tourist information pamphlets featured the Belarusian minority of the forested region. Folkloric Belarusian groups found costumes and traditions unmatched any historic originals for the locality and performed at bonfires and hotels.2
The „othering” was not without historical precedent, meaning that ethnic difference could be clearly marked. The Lithuania state of the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, of which Bialowieza Forest had belonged, used Belarusian as an official language (Woolhiser 1999, Sadowski 1995). And in the twentieth century a Belarusian nationalist movement arose in the labor movement in the sawmills of nearby Hajnowka in the early 1920s (Nikitiuk 2000), largely fading in the post-war period. But after 1989, Belarusian identity activists from urban areas in Poland seized a new political moment to make themselves seen and heard, which led to these activists claiming membership in the villages. However, Belarusian identity in Poland today is much more connected to the cities, especially the logging town of Hajnowka at the western edge of the forest, and the nearest metropolis, Bialystok. The vast majority of rural residents, most of them Russian Orthodox by religion (rather than Roman Catholic, the overwhelmingly dominant identification in contemporary Poland), did not choose to call themselves ‘Belarusian.’ They considered themselves tutejszy, meaning „from here”.
CROSSING BORDERS WITHOUT MOVING „FROM HERE”: TUTEJSZY
When residents call themselves tutejszy, they employed the term with the effect of resisting the idea of borders. As Adrian Ivakhiv (2006) has suggested, the term arose as armies and borders crossed people who remained in place. It is a proto-ethnic identity receptive to the ebbs and flows of borderlands. Yet Belarusian identity activists, along with some conservationists and foresters failed to embrace the creative potential of a hybridized subject, instead finding a dormant consciousness amongst the tutejszy.3
For Poles from the urban areas it is ironic that the most Belarusian” parts of Poland neglect to admonish the dictatorship in Belarus. Belarusian oppositionists found a base in Warsaw for their anti-Lukashenko campaign in 2006, but in the Bialowieza Forest, the Belarusian cultural center/museum of Hajnowka declined to show human rights films from Belarus in their auditorium fearing that it might make one of their employees who appeared in the film be seen in a bad light. Repeatedly, conservationists drew my attention to the parallels between the Bialowieza Forest region and Belarus, rooting forest exploitation with the undemocratic local ways.
People who might call themselves Tutejszy would not consider themselves passive. The word tutejszy referenced but did not directly correspond to Belarusian nationality for them. It’s use acknowledged that people could be Roman Catholic or Orthodox, Baptist, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, or otherwise, but that you came from a family that settled many generations back and that you spoke the local dialect. Also, it meant loyalty to place superseded loyalty to nation. Many of the rural locals avoided answering my direct questions about the forest conflict and often deferred the matter by saying that they were of a spokojny narod” (a mild mannered people).
In this suggestive self-description by way of redirecting my line of questioning a strong national identity and political position about the border and forest politics is not so much absent as it is implicit. There is a sense of encroachment in these claims so that tutejszy do not draw borders, perhaps do not possess the power to draw borders.
Might the stereotypically inscribed „passivity” of rural people in Bialowieza be partially explained by the way of historical relations of production in a forest now divided by the Polish Belarusian state border? If ‘Belarusians’ or ‘tutejszy’ were still poor in modern Poland, with the larger region marked as one of the most underdeveloped areas of Poland, perhaps that partially reflects upon a long standing differential treatment of people by the Polish state, stemming back to the Socialist era.
ROOTS OF FOREST CONFLICT
In the long period that Russians administered the forest from the end of the eighteenth century until the outbreak of WWI, the rights of the Polish gentry, which would have included the management of their large and forested estates in Podlasie, were increasingly encroached upon by Russians. Much of their lands were given over to Russian administrators, who converted the peasantry to Russian Orthodox Christianity (Kossak 2001: 311). Loyalties changed so much in the nineteenth century that an 1863 insurgency within the Bialowieza Forest could not count on the support of the local populace. Czar Alexander ordered shut the forestry school in Warsaw, known as a bastion of discontent and organizing for the Polish national cause.
The Polish foresters who arrived in Bialowieza in the 1920s brought a newfound sense of entitlement and a mission of Polonizing the Russified peasants, almost all of whom belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church at that time. This sense of historic destiny, of reclaiming the forest in the name of a newly established Poland, began a long chain of alliances among the forestry elite. Instead of relying solely on the local population, (the newly arrived Poles believed that locals were too strongly under the influence of Bolsheviks ideology) foresters hired labor from Central Poland. Worker colonies sprang up everywhere with make-shift housing for the newly arrived men and new Polish Catholic parishes to serve their spiritual needs.
The Soviets utilized their Belarusian” connections in WWII, calling upon their allies” to send the Polish forestry elite to work camps in Siberia. Yet the local Communists” were later in the war identified by the Nazis who murdered the supposed perpetrators in the woodland. Under the suspicion that the villages might harbor partisans, many hamlets were burned to the ground. Many historians speculate as to why to the border was drawn through the forest after WWII with few satisfactory explanations. The result on the Polish side was that ethnic differences were to be „officially” put aside. Those who felt Belarusian were given the opportunity to immigrate to the Soviet Union, as only a few of them did. But as most of the rural locals saw themselves as „from here”, rather than Belarusian, they stayed in place, and many converted to the Roman Catholic faith as they intermarried with the Polish workers or where Catholic catechism classes were frequently taught in village schools.
A rowdy protest in the year 2000 catalyzed a populist notion of Belarusian identity in connection with the forest, marking the first significant public association that local Belarusians supported a forestry agenda. When the environmental minister arrived in Bialowieza that spring to announce that the whole area would be protected as a national park, foresters held banners in both Polish and Belarusian accusing key conservationists of causing local poverty. They threw eggs at the minister to make clear their opposition. Shortly following the protest the minister quietly withdrew from plans to expand the park and the association of local Belarusians against the national park expansion circulated far and wide.
Conservationists, some of them scientists at the three well-established research institutes in the village of Bialowieza, would not accept a democracy equal to populism. They insisted that protesters came from Hajnowka and beyond, that locals would not have thrown eggs. Rational, participatory democracy” would solve both the social conflict and forest war, which implicitly referred to Polish culture as European culture. The biologists used their own science as an example of European rationalism, of what should be a proper European normality, connecting themselves and their cause in the direction of Brussels, where they could file complaints against the careless treatment of nature under the Natura 2000 accords, and the group promoted merit based work that could bring new voices into the forest to give a ‘factual’ reading of a politicized place. Yet for tutejszy the conservationist crusade frequently looked like a Polish national one rather than a universal ideal, further encouraging their avoidance in public debates and thus, their assumed support for the foresters’ agenda.
IMAGINED GEOGRAPHY OF THE KRESY AT THE BELARUSIAN BORDER
All along in the fight to protect the forest, conservationists proposed tourism as a mainstay to the logging economy. Naturally, most of those tourists were urban Poles taking advantage of new leisure time and disposable income when they visit the Puszcza. Polish tourists brought their Polish imaginations about the kresy, or the eastern province of what was once the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, a highly mythologized term that relegates Belarusians, (among others, such as Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Cossacks and Tartars) to colorful characters of Greater Poland in a uniformly ethno-Polish Poland.4 This kresy imaginary arises partly through 19th century romantic novelists, such as Henryk Sienkiewicz and Adam Mickiewicz, both native „sons” of the Polish east, who wrote about the forest as an idealized portrait of gentry/peasant relations. School children in Poland to this day are required to recite lines from Mickiewicz’s most famous epic poem, Pan Tadeusz. Mickiewicz’s story of feuding Polish landowning families who unite in a forest hunt on the eve of the Russian partitions of Polish lands inspired a themed hotel/restaurant, „Soplicowo” named after the manor in Mickiewicz’s work. It opened in 2003, not far from the new border crossing to Belarus. A subgroup of conservationists took considerable interest in protecting architectural heritage. They spoke of the building as a a disastrous „Disneyfication”. The building is a a two-story pillared construction with a thatched roof and plastic stork positioned near the entrance (expanding to several buildings). In a rotunda exhibit in the parking lot tourists can peer into a poacher’s cottage, with an unmade bed, snare traps, and jug of home-distilled vodka. If the locals ever feared being on display for tourists, this exhibit incarnated the lengths the Polish national imagination could go to in naming and ordering the local for its own colonizing purposes. The village with a Belarusian minority was fast becoming a stage to perform notions of historical class relations with the strong inference that the kresy of Mickiewicz’s work would remain an Eastern kresy in the ethnic Polish tourist’s imagination.
In his treatise Inventing Eastern Europe, Larry Wolff reminds us that Enlightenment era intellectual mastery over Eastern Europe rested in describing people of the East at the same time it mapped geography. The geographical domain Western Europe has exhibited over Eastern Europe arises in relational representation. It would be a mistake however, Wolff adds to think that imaginative inscriptions exist only in the minds of those inventing them. He writes, „The project of invention [of Eastern Europe] was not merely a matter of endowing those real lands with invented or mythological attributes. The work of invention lay in the synthetic association of lands, which drew upon both fact and fiction, to produce the general rubric of Eastern Europe. It is in that sense that Eastern Europe is a cultural construction, an intellectual invention, of the Enlightenment” (Wolff, 1996:356). Thus, I would argue that the people who engage in the fantasies of the Soplicowo hotel exercise a new-found yet historical entitlement to this heritage of othering.
The people who stay at Soplicowo, and I should add those who understand the cultural references embedded in this compound, consist of well-off urban Poles who can afford the high prices. Some of the guests I spoke to at Soplicowo’s attached tavern, named after Pan Tadeusz’s Jewish character, Jankiel, (loyal to the Polish national cause in Mickiewicz’s novel) had used the new border crossing in the spring of 2006.
In Belarus, all tours require a guide and lead along newly paved road in the forest. Thus, tourists can not wander and contemplate in their sampling of the Polish and Belarusian Puszcza. In a sense, there is no „free space” of „wild”, „primeval” nature for tourists, neither in Poland nor Belarus. In both countries one must be pay for a a guide to see the primeval nature. Crossing the forest border and entering the restricted space of nature occurs under supervision. Among the Polish tourists who participated in the tour to Belarus, they spoke of the experience in comedic terms laced with astonishment at the backwards behavior of Belarusians. All tours of the primeval forest consist of a visit to the home of Belarusian Santa Claus dzed moroz. For these tourists the capitalist” enterprising of the Belarusian government as it strictly polices and parades tourists through the forest to the Santa Claus site appears as a failure of European” modernity, a laughable imitation of capitalism within the draconian dictatorial state of Belarus.
It might be argued that crossing the border for Polish tourists is an act of claiming their Polish identity as European. People on the move are the quintessential cosmopolitan citizens, a feature of the EU’s economic power, which belongs to being European.5 Taka bieda” (such poverty!)”, I heard from the tourists, „but what a beautiful forest. You just can’t see that kind of nature on the Polish side”. These tourists imaginative projections of Belarus as a not quite European space are confirmed through the tour of the Belarusian forest. After visiting either the Polish primeval forest or the Belarusian primeval forest, they return to the safety of their hotel to revel in their experiences and adventures. In their hotels (Soplicowo being only one of the themed hotels in the region), they continue with their mythic imaginations.
Both the Polish forest and the resident communities on the Polish side remain safe exoticisms brought closer to the idea of Europe through the practice of cultural/natural tours, which they boast, are delivering resident communities from rural poverty through the revenue tourism generates. The new economy enables the formerly rural inhabitants to obtain more exposure to people from Central Poland, a place more in tune with Western Europe, primarily in the practice of consuming” the other.
An important feature of this European identity for Poles is the ability to travel, not just as migrants looking for work, but as tourists. Literature of the kresy always provided its readers with the vantage point of gentry who traversed these lands in their visits to family manors or in military service for Poland’s „honor”. This point would have been especially valuable during the Socialist period when people read Mickiewicz’s and Sienkiewicz’s work to remember the Polish national cause of independence and to travel as a reader to far away lands.6 The new Polish leisure class is exercising its right to travel freely, beyond the borders of its own state, but this is also as an exercise in nation building, to the internal and unexplored frontiers of its own country. They are taming the ‘wild’ borderland, in effect. Ethnic Poles are replacing the peripheral status of this borderland by visting it to see the small patch of primeval nature” and to be in the Polish memory of the kresy. Those geographical imaginings are very much a part of the ambivalent project of Europe-making at Poland’s scale of the kresy, which wishes on the one hand to bring Belarus into the sphere of „democratic” Europe (Polish style), while wanting it to remain „other” so that urban Poles can occupy a positive identity by comparison.
CONCLUSION: UNMARKED PEOPLE AND NATURE
Early in the paper, I emphasized that the most frequently represented image of the forest was its primeval character and wish to return to this point for my conclusion. In many European cultural accounts the spaces of wild nature are depicted as free, redemptive, places for contemplation and leisure, a set of common idealizations (Harrison 1992, Arnold 1996, Berglund 1997, Oelschlaeger 1991). This is the apolitical notion of a forested and national park border area. The issue in regard to the Bialowieza Forest is how the imaginative geographies of the forest and its minority inhabitants overdetermines the meaning of the forest at the border at least in the official sense; how this happens as marginal rural residents (tutejszy) become more connected to the consumption habits of central Poland.
These are heterogeneous strategies and practices and it is clear that all actors are involved to a lesser or greater extent in reinscribing these imaginings upon inhabitants and the forest at the forest border. Forces beyond the state, beyond the national policing of the border at the border are creating new types of subjects on the Polish side of this borderland that keeps Belarus at a distance from Europe. Thus, the elusive tutejszy and the forest that visitors wish to know by keeping it unknown (primeval) can be ruled without breaching the purported autonomy of those things. Their imaginative meanings stay in place for tourists even if the locals might attend pro-conservation rock concert and/or throw eggs the environmental minister.
What is striking in the case of the Bialowieza Forest is the ability of things European and things Belarusian to command the present and future space of the borderland while neglecting explicit attention to the ethno-historical and class histories that constituted the current forest use/protection debate. When Polish tourists cross into the Belarusian forest, the forest symbolically transforms into an idealized space that only ever lives up to those expectations through the practice of tours, and thus tourism.
This place making at the border is led by situated actors (Haraway 1997) who might seem to be mutually excluding one another, but they exclude each other through „othering”, through imagining the forest space that constitutes the border as a space of backwardness, some kept as a positive relic (primeval forest) and others (undemocratic practices) admonished as a relic that needs to move into history as Communism did. What I have attempted to show in this collage of forest and Belarusian imaginings is that the images most salient for determining the meaning of the border are a mixture of those circulated by conservationists and Polish tourists rather than those of foresters and the tutejszy. This is not because these tourists and conservationists have the most power at the local level. Rather tourists and conservationists possess the most vivid conceptualizations. These are conceptualizations that can travel outside the region, where they gain added potency. Tourists lured by the image of primeval nature do not care so much about the authenticity of that nature or getting to know something about Belarusian culture, as they do about being within the presence of the other. Much to the conservationists disappointment, this has not resulted in one large trans-boundary national park (covering all of the Polish forest) that would put nature protection above all other human uses. Instead the power of this nature imagination, when connected to the nationally powerful kresy image results in a borderland where the local people (their Belarusian”-like character) and the forest remain too unruly to know, which is the way that the kresy imagination might want them to be known. Keeping people and nature in this unknowable category consigns them to objects that can be acted upon, and has the effect of making the border a slippery object within the new socio-economic regime that also transforms nature, place, and borderlands.
LITERATURE
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Woolhiser, Curt. 1999. „Constructing National identities in the Polish-Belarusian borderlands”. conference paper presented at fourth annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Nationalities. Columbia University, New York. April 15, 1999.
STRESZCZENIE
Przejście graniczne otwarte w roku 2005 łączy obszar ostatniego pierwotnego lasu Europy, wokół którego ochrony trwają od lat kontrowersje, z obszarem ostatniej dyktatury europejskiej. To granica między Polską i Białorusią. Nie jest to jednak przejście graniczne tętniące życiem. Zestawienie koło siebie reliktów przyrody z reliktem systemu politycznego tworzy „geografię imaginacyjną” (Said 1978). „My” i „oni” nie są tu tylko rezultatem długich procesów zachodzących pomiędzy grupami etnicznymi — te naznaczenia tworzą się obecnie podczas turystyki, która motywowana jest zarówno poszukiwaniem pierwotnej przyrody, jak i romantycznej podróży w polską przeszłość. Puszcza Białowieska to obszar graniczny o bardzo różnorodnych znaczeniach kulturowych. To zarówno teren antyrosyjskiej insurekcji, jak i stworzone przez Hermana Goeringa łowisko dla Reichstagu. To ważne historycznie źródło surowca, a także miejsce polowań ruskich książąt, polskich królów i rosyjskich carów; to obszar o znaczeniu historyczno mitologicznym dla Białorusinów, Polaków i Europejczyków. Na przestrzeni ostatnich 15 lat podejmowane próby powiększenia parku narodowego (który w Polsce zajmuje mniej niż 20% puszczy) sprowadzały się do debaty między zwolennikami użytkowania a ochrony. Kiedy w roku 2005 otwierano przejście graniczne w środku puszczy przyrodnicy obawiali się dwóch rzeczy: 1) ruchu samochodowego, który zagrozi przyrodzie jeszcze mocniej fragmentując ekosystem 2) zapatrzenia się lokalnych polityków, silnie powiązanych z leśnikami, na sposób gospodarowania po stronie białoruskiej, który znacznie odbiega od tego, co kojarzy się z parkiem narodowym. Pojęcie „białoruskości” dla Polaków miało dwa znaczenia — tradycyjnej od wieków lokalnej kultury, ale także Białorusi prezydenta Łukaszenki, której podobieństwa odnajdywali także po stronie polskiej w działaniach lub pasywności lokalnych władz. Dla polskich turystów Białorusini są natomiast dodatkową atrakcją do starego lasu. Wielokrotnie słyszałam z ust turystów zdania w rodzaju: „Czuję się tutaj egzotycznie, zupełnie jakbym nie był w Polsce, szczególnie widząc tyle cerkwi dookoła”. Przy hotelach i miejscach ogniskowych występują białoruskie grupy folklorystyczne w strojach ludowych, lecz wielu turystów komentuje, że przypominają im one bardziej radziecką wersję folkloru niż folklor autentyczny integrujący ludzi z lokalną kosmologią miejsca. Mieszkańcy regionu (Białorusini, Ukraińcy, Polacy) często nazywają siebie terminem „tutejszy”. Określenie takie — identyfikacja proto-etniczna — rodzi się gdy ponad głowami mieszkańców przesuwają się armie i granice (A. Ivakhiv 2006). Dla Polaków z ośrodków wielkomiejskich jest niezrozumiałe, że najbardziej „białoruska” część Polski nie sympatyzuje z białoruskimi opozycjonistami, którzy na wsparcie mogą liczyć bardziej w Warszawie podczas gdy ośrodek i muzeum kultury białoruskiej w Hajnówce odmawia pokazania filmów dokumentalnych nt. praw człowieka z Białorusi. Określenie „tutejszy” odnosi się raczej do lojalności wobec miejsca niż narodu. Pytani przeze mnie ludzie nie chcieli odpowiadać na trudne pytania wymagające zajęcia stanowiska, komentując, że są „spokojnymi ludźmi”. Dzisiaj do tych „spokojnych ludzi” przyjeżdża fala turystów z miast i ludzie ci przywożą ze sobą polski mit „kresów”, jako wschodniej prowincji dawnego królestwa obojga narodów. Białorusini są dla nich takimi samymi barwnymi postaciami dawnej etnicznej Polski jak Ukraińcy, Litwini, Kozacy czy Tatarzy, którzy zamieszkiwali wyidealizowany świat stworzony przez 19-wiecznych polskich romantyków — Sienkiewicza i Mickiewicza, nieodrodnych synów polskiego Wschodu. Dlatego w 2003 roku otworzono w Białowieży, tuż przy granicy z Białorusią wielki hotel i restaurację „Soplicowo”. Białoruska mniejszość zostaje sprowadzona do odgrywania roli w historyzującym spektaklu dla turystów. Bogaci mieszkańcy tego hotelu wyjeżdżają na stronę białoruską, utwierdzając się w swojej europejskości gdy potem mówią: „Taka tam bieda! Ale las ładny”. W złożonej sytuacji tego obszaru granicznego nie wygrywa spojrzenie leśników i tutejszych, lecz spojrzenie przyrodników i turystów. Nie dlatego, że są u władzy ale, że zapotrzebowanie jest na ich propozycje. Ich perspektywa jest szeroko rozumiana, także poza regionem i dlatego posiada odpowiedni potencjał. Na nieszczęście dla przyrodników natura niekoniecznie musi być naprawdę dzika, a lokalna kultura prawdziwą kulturą lokalną — takie są obecnie społeczno ekonomiczne reguły gry. I one przekształcają przyrodę, miejsca i obszary przygraniczne, które ze swej istoty zachowują coś atrakcyjnego, bo tajemniczego.
Dr Eunice Blavascunas, Program Środowiskowy University of Washington. Autorka — antropolog kultury — kilkanaście lat spędziła badając region Puszczy Białowieskiej. W latach 2005-2006 przeprowadziła wywiady wśród mieszkańców, turystów, rolników, drwali, leśników, naukowców, lokalnych polityków i organizacji pozarządowych, które były podstawą jej pracy doktorskiej.
2 Many people I interviewed pointed out that the folkloric customs resembled the Soviet versions of folklore more than an authentic original as once integrated in local people’s cosmology of place.
3 Tutejszy is used by a vast number of rural inhabitants of the Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusian borderlands.
4 In official counts minorities make up less than 3% in Poland, but many minority activists claim that actual numbers are much higher.
5 See Carol Nagengast’s Reluctant Socialist, Rural Entrepreneurs (1999) for a discussion of class relations that lingered from the pre-communist period.
6 Both Mickiewicz’ Pan Tadeusz, and Sienkiewicz’ Ogien i Mieczem were made into major motion pictures in the early part of the twenty first century, breaking box-office records.