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Paper short abstract:

In this paper I wish to discuss how the concept of the borderland, as place and a mode of existence, shaped the relationship between people, histories of conflict and the landscape in a small town in the East of Poland.

Paper long abstract:

One of the contradictions of Poland's eastern border is that it has been simultaneously mythologised and disparaged. Those living on the eastern borders are burdened with a nationally resonant identity, as people at the edge of Polish belonging, and a history of inequality, displacement and dispossession. This conflict is managed through the idea of the frontier, a particularly potent local archetype and reality. During my fieldwork in a small town on the Polish Belarusian border, people spoke often of 'pogranciza' the borderland: a sense of belonging that embraces the double bind of valuing and minimising difference. In this paper I discuss how the concept of the borderland shaped the relationship between people and the landscape. The borderland is a place and a mode of existence.

I want to pay particular attention to how struggles over historical knowledge are materialised in specific spaces and in the response to the empty places throughout this region. People's movements in graveyards, churches and abandoned - once Jewish - property offer an analysis of the past embedded in the land. The local concept of the borderland, undoes taken for granted analytical categories of natural and manmade landscape, and the differentiations of place and mode of belonging. Instead by embracing the ideal of the agora, the gathering place, and the 'throwntogetherness' of landscape (Massey, 2005) it's a concept that offers a way to understand the environing world. An understanding which acknowledges both the determining role histories of conflict have, and the necessity of minimising this role, in borderlands.