Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles by Eunice Blavascunas

Author:Eunice Blavascunas [Blavascunas, Eunice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Environmental Policy, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Physical
ISBN: 9780253049605
Google: UBcGzAEACAAJ
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2020-01-15T05:27:43+00:00

Newcomers and Changing Aesthetics for the Village

Leszek worked with and against this currency of the peasant image as he networked to create himself, for it was the reminder that a large group of tiny family-farmed subsistence plots meant underdevelopment in the region. This stigma moved many forest residents to appropriate the peasant image for new goals. They used underdevelopment to develop, or they used the peasant image to sell a leisure package to newfound consumers. The future all over Poland involved rural development, just as had happened throughout Europe following World War II.

A man who was opening up a bed-and-breakfast centered around the production of traditionally fermented bread asked me, “These newcomers say they like the village, but do you think the village likes them?” He referred to the influx of people from the cities who would purchase the land in Białowieża’s hamlets. Newcomers to Leszek’s village of Budy and nearby villages admired the forest in aesthetic ways. Dead trees in the forest were beautiful. Stumps and straight trunks were not. They tried to create or recreate some vestiges of village communal structures, such as starting theaters in old barns, but not like the “disco” where Leszek once played drums for all his friends during the socialist era. Often the new projects were didactic, meant to recruit villagers or educate villagers about the importance of their own past as a means to create a good future for the village. But villagers did not want to become that version of cosmopolitan, with its national park interests and views of wild nature. There were no common work projects that bonded newcomers with inhabitants who had been there longer, working and farming. Some newcomers mingled and others kept to themselves, but their presence and influence was felt nonetheless by people who had been peasants.

Adam and his Spanish wife, Nuria Selva, a wildlife biologist whom Leszek helped with her zoology doctorate on carcasses, lived in Leszek’s walkable universe of the Białowieża forest. A man from Switzerland perched an elegant multistoried wooden house nearby. The former chief of police from Hajnówka built a retirement home, and well-off pension owners resided there. In other words, there were postsocialist newcomers to the village who pulled their incomes from arts grants, online work, large tourist operations, or retirement. These were people with multiple connections to the intelligentsia of Warsaw, Białystok, and beyond. This gentrification and urbanization of the village allowed Leszek to craft his image through these people.

He did so in such a way to make everyone believe that he was a kind of superman of peasant origins who didn’t really like farming. His brother, Mirek spoke more often of the farm he and his brother had to work on with their mother throughout the 1980s and 1990s and how Mirek was the one to milk the cows and pasture them when Leszek went off to work in the Polish German borderlands for a tourist agency, then lived in Warsaw with a girlfriend, and joined a circus as

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