Prisma Ukraïna
2017/ 2018

Iuliia Buyskykh

To the West of the Bug: Stories from the Borderlands

Iuliia Buyskykh received her PhD (Kandydat Nauk) in Ethnology from the History Department of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2010. Her background is in History (BA), Ethnology and Folkloristics (MA). From 2010-2014 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 Department 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 borderlands localities in Poland, which were financed by the Polish National Centre of Science (Narodowe Centrum Nauki). Since September 2016 Iuliia Buyskykh has been working at the National 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, Ukrainian studies. During her stay, Iuliia Buyskykh is affiliated at the Centre for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin.
 

To the West of the Bug: Stories from the Borderlands

Iulia Buyskykh is interested in how behavioural patterns of ‘borderland dwellers’ and their everyday practices (including religious ones) seem slow to respond to the changing administrative nature of state borders. Relying on Vincent Crapanzano’s notion of ‘frontiers as imaginative horizons’ and applying it to her own field research in Włodawa and Przemyśl in Eastern Poland, at the border to Ukraine, she argues that claiming an existing “European identity” and emphasizing the “European border” in public discourse (between the EU and the post-Soviet space) is an important step towards also creating imaginary borders between “us” and “them” in the local discourse of ethnically and religiously mixed borderland regions. These and other imaginary borders are furthermore strengthened by disparate memories of traumatic past events in different segments of the local population (e.g. of violence between Ukrainian and Polish neighbours in WW II). It is striking that nowadays these again materialize in religious practices and attacks against religious sites (like acts of vandalism on old abandoned cemeteries). As a main result of her research project, Buyskykh aims to put forth a popular-science book based on her fieldwork and the concept of ‘reflective anthropology’ (cf. Paul Rabinow, Kirsten Hastrup, Judith Okley, etc.).