Between the late 1920s and the mid-1930s, the Volhynian authorities drew on broader ideas of European regionalism in an attempt to attach the province’s multiethnic populations to the Polish state project. The message put forward at museums and provincial fairs and in regionalist journals focused on national inclusivity. But the elite-led fetishizing of local folklore by regionalists like Jakub Hoffman naturally led to other types of exclusion—or, at least, to conditional inclusion. Ukrainian-speaking populations were permitted only as vestiges of premodern diversity, while a focus on synagogues and the tiny Jewish sect of the Karaites allowed regionalists to write Jews into narratives of rootedness that always emphasized Polish tolerance. Supporters of tourism, which offered another way of navigating the relationship between Volhynia and Poland, undertook the tricky balancing act of claiming the province’s status in the modern world and simultaneously repackaging backwardness as a series of desirable characteristics, such as primitiveness and exoticism.
Aphasia management in growing multiethnic populations
