Paper Short Abstract:

The paper provides an insight into the Polish ethnographer Stefania Ulanowska's 1891 study on Latvians, focusing on the researcher's self-positioning, contextualizing historical conditions from the perspective of colonial and postcolonial studies, as well as describing the given examples of performative situations and traditions.

Paper Abstract:

Stefanije Uljanowska was a Polish ethnographer born in 1839 in Vitebsk province, now the eastern part of Latvia, where she spent the first part of her life, and later moved to Kraków. In 1891, she published her “ethnographic observations” of the Latvians living in the eastern part of Latvia, titled “Łotysze Inflant Polskich a w szczególności gminy wielońskiej, powiatu rzeżyckiego: obraz etnograficzny.” This work is the first comprehensive study of the Latvians living in the eastern part of Latvia, describing their language, traditional culture, religion, and beliefs, providing an important collection of Latvian folk songs, folk tales, and anecdotes.

Historically, since the midst of the 16th century, the eastern part of Latvia was a territorial unit of the Polish Commonwealth and later of Tsarist Russia, with the Roman Catholic Church being the dominant religion in recent centuries. Until the mid-19th century, the local community, or Latvian peasants, were subordinated to a higher class of society, represented mainly by the Polish nobility. The liberation of the peasantry and the abolition of serfdom in eastern Latvia took place only in 1861. In the second half of the 19th century, enlightenment ideas emerged and spread among the Polish nobility, leading to efforts to understand Latvian society more deeply. Uljanowska's ethnographic descriptions of Latvians fit into this frame.

This paper provides insight into Uljanowska’s research, focusing on the self-positioning of the researcher, contextualizing historical conditions from the perspective of coloniality and postcolonial studies, and characterizing given examples of performative situations and traditions.