Iuliia Buyskykh: The Polyphony of Coexistence

The Polyphony of Coexistence: Local Communities on Polish-Ukrainian Boderland (Case of Podkarpacie)

Iuliia Buyskykh’s current field of research is located in Eastern Poland (Przemyśl and surrounding area), mostly the borderland area with Ukraine. This study covers the “everyday diplomacy” (Marsden, Ibañez-Tirado, Henig 2016) relationships in religiously mixed local communities who coexist under the burden of contested memories of the WW II. Here “everyday diplomacy” refers to the local practices that enable diverse confessional (and/or ethnic) groups to coexist through shared sacred spaces and common rituals, including pilgrimages. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Przemyśl and several surrounding villages in 2015-2017. While conducting her research on a set of religious practices and pilgrimages in confessionally and ethnically mixed localities, Iuliia faced many challenges that changed the main course of my initial research plan. During her interaction with people there themes came to light that seemed little related to religiousness. One of the most important themes in these conversations was the Polish-Ukrainian relations in the interwar period, during WW II and after it and discussions about reciprocal traumas and the bloodiest pages in Polish-Ukrainian history like the ethnic cleansings and forcible resettlements of 1944-1947.

Iuliia Buyskykh

Iuliia Buyskykh received her PhD in Ethnology from the History Department at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Her background is in History (BA), Ethnology and Folkloristics (MA). From 2010 to 2014 she worked at the M.T. Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore, and Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In 2014/2015 she completed an internship at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw (IEiAK UW), participating in the Polish Government Program for Young Scientists (Program Stypendialny Rządu RP dla Młodych Naukowców). IN 2015/2016, she was a research fellow at the V4EaP Scholarship Program. She has conducted field research in Poland since 2015, and in addition to her own research, has been involved in two more research projects focusing on religious culture in borderland localities in Poland, which were financed by Polish National Centre of Science (Narodowe Centrum Nauki). Since September 2016 Iuliia Buyskykh has been working at the Research Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. Her current research interests include anthropology of religion, neighborhood relationships, contested memories, border studies with a focus on Eastern Europe.