Scale and ethnicity in Southeast Poland: tourism in the European periphery1

Abstract

This paper discusses the staging of Ukrainian ethnicity during the celebrations of Kupaly Night,an annual community ritual in Southeast Poland. The argument embarks from an analysis of changing nation state policies in Poland after state socialism and emphasises the growing influence of European Union (EU) policies on the public representation of ethnicity. These policies have moved ethnicity from the level of everyday practice, but also from an arena of political tensions, into an institutionalised and policy dominated form of identification. In the region of Przemýsl, where the events under scrutiny take place, tourism is another key factor facilitating the establishment of market forces in projects of heritage preservation, multiculturalism and the promotion of ethnic particularities. My analysis of how these factors have impeded on the region shows the emergence of a multicultural development project that does not have a unifying but an ambivalent effect. The paper investigates the way in which the Ukrainian minority in Przemýsl is subject to wider processes of re-scaling ethnic policies from the national to both the European and the regional level and is in this process turned into a commodifiable group valued by the EU, the state, tourists and locals for its distinctive culture. I thus demonstrate the ambivalent relationship between ritual practice, public representations of authenticity, ethno-tourism and social change influenced by EU policies and discourses. © CRIA.