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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the transformation of wetland landscapes in postsocialist Poland, focusing on the shift from traditional agricultural practices to state-driven conservation efforts in the 1990s. Drawing on ethnographic research, it explores the tension between official and grassroots heritage narratives, highlighting the impact of these differing perspectives on preserving local taskscapes understood as cultural heritage.

Paper Abstract:

In postsocialist Poland of the 1990s, the state established three national parks to protect the wetland landscapes of the Biebrza, Narew, and Warta rivers. This period marked a radical transformation in local economies and agriculture. Land use methods essential for maintaining biodiversity (such as small-scale farming and hay harvesting) were rapidly disappearing. This shift and progressing symptoms of climate change have led to biopolitical interventions (Lorimer & Driessen, 2013) aimed at governing life, which has prompted a reevaluation of local heritage.

Official discourses reframed anthropogenic landscapes as “natural heritage,” positioning traditional practices as cultural relics—preserved in exhibits but increasingly detached from everyday life. This growing epistemological divide between “nature” and “culture” has reshaped heritage protection politics and supported narratives of a lost paradise where humans and non-human animals lived in harmonious interdependence.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the three national parks and surrounding areas, this paper examines official and grassroots heritage interpretation strategies and explores their connection to land use practices. The study will reveal alternative narratives that challenge authorized heritage discourses (Smith, 2012) by focusing on home museums as repositories of intergenerational, more-than-human riverine knowledge.

Ultimately, the study seeks to answer whether wetland landscapes can be preserved apart from local taskscapes (Ingold, 1993; Gruppuso & Whitehouse, 2020) and explores what it means to protect taskscapes as heritage in this context. The paper also aims to highlight the diverse ways in which the wetlands have been experienced and valued amid environmental and economic change.