At the seminar, we will discuss the anthropological dimension of research on the Polish-Ukrainian border and Yuliia Buiskykh’s book West of the Bug: Diaries from the Borderland. This book is a form of anthropological reportage, emerging from the pages of the author’s field ethnographic diaries and travel notes in Poland between 2015 and 2018. Each part of the book presents a personal story from the daily life of people living in various types of borderlands—administrative (Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Belarusian), confessional, ethnic, imaginary, and even phantom. Together, these stories reveal that the everyday realities of local communities in the so-called periphery are far more complex than the official national histories of neighboring states suggest. The voices of (extra)ordinary people—their hints, emotions, undertones, and silences—form a fragile and often overlooked fabric of daily life. This book attempts to give them a voice and to shed light on the challenges they face, encouraging us to be more tolerant, more open to otherness, more willing to engage in difficult conversations about an unresolved past, and ultimately, more receptive to polyphony and reconciliation.
Link to the book on the publisher’s website:
https://www.books-xxi.com.ua/products/na-zahid-vid-bugu-schodenniki-z-pogranichchya
Yuliia Buiskykh is an anthropologist, translator, Candidate of Historical Sciences (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv), and co-founder of the NGO Center for Applied Anthropology (Kyiv, 2017). She has been a scholar in various academic programs at universities in Poland, Germany, and Ireland. In 2019–2020, she was a visiting researcher at Pennsylvania State University (USA) under the Fulbright academic exchange program. Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, memory studies, interfaith dialogue, pilgrimages, mythological beliefs and representations, borderlands and boundaries, empathy, and the ethics of qualitative research. She is the author of 111 Days of Maidan: Notes of a Kyiv Woman (Kyiv: Duliby, 2014) and Once Upon a Time Mermaids Walked the Earth… Female Images of Ukrainian Mythology (Kharkiv: KSD, 2018). She co-edited Anthropology of Religion: Comparative Studies from the Carpathian Basin to the Caucasus (Kyiv: Spirit and Letter, 2019) with Catherine Wanner and translated Wanner’s book The Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Kyiv: Spirit and Letter, 2023). She is currently pursuing her second Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology and Religious Studies at the University of Cork, Ireland.
Event Details
Date: April 18, 2024
Time: 19:00 (Kyiv time)
Language: Ukrainian
Details are here
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