Presentations by Streams

This panel will explore outside imaginings of the Hutsuls, a highland people living in the Carpathian mountains in modern-day western Ukraine, in the first half of the twentieth century. Amongst highlanders inhabiting the Eastern Carpathians, the Hutsuls have been a magnet of particular ethnographic curiosity from lowlanders. Despite being a remote community, the Hutsuls have repeatedly found themselves at the crossroads of rival national and imperial projects (Polish, Ukrainian, Habsburg and Soviet) that have each sought to embrace the highlanders’ culture and appropriate it for their own state- and/or nation-building ambitions.
The panel focuses on the years 1918-1941, in which the Hutsul region was a contested tri-state area, fought over between Ukrainians and the titular nations of independent Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland, before ultimately being annexed by the USSR into Soviet Ukraine. In a wider range of interdisciplinary approaches to multiple scholarly and cultural discourses as manifested in different media, the papers will examine the political visions of the Hutsuls propagated by Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet figures. The papers seek to highlight both competing and common features between Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet efforts towards the highlanders and outline how rival state and non-state aspirations towards a peripheral region have impacted on wider understandings of national and imperial identities.