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In Europe's last primeval forest, at Poland's easternmost border with Belarus, the deep past of ancient oaks, woodland bison, and thousands of species of insects and fungi collides with authoritarian and communist histories.
Foresters, biologists, environmentalists, and locals project the ancient Bialowieza Forest as a series of competing icons in struggles over memory, land, and economy, which are also struggles about whether to log or preserve the woodland; whether and how to celebrate the mixed ethnic Polish/Belarusian peasant past; and whether to align this eastern outpost with ultraright Polish political parties, neighboring Belarus, or the European Union. Eunice Blavascunas provides an intimate ethnographic account, gathered in more than 20 years of research, to untangle complex forest conflicts between protection and use. She looks at which pasts are celebrated, which fester, and which are altered in the tumultuous decades following the collapse of communism.
Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles is a timely and fascinating work of cultural analysis and storytelling that textures its ethnographic reading of people with the agency of the forest itself and its bark beetle outbreaks, which threaten to alter the very composition of the forest in the age of the Anthropocene.
Show moreIn Europe's last primeval forest, at Poland's easternmost border with Belarus, the deep past of ancient oaks, woodland bison, and thousands of species of insects and fungi collides with authoritarian and communist histories.
Foresters, biologists, environmentalists, and locals project the ancient Bialowieza Forest as a series of competing icons in struggles over memory, land, and economy, which are also struggles about whether to log or preserve the woodland; whether and how to celebrate the mixed ethnic Polish/Belarusian peasant past; and whether to align this eastern outpost with ultraright Polish political parties, neighboring Belarus, or the European Union. Eunice Blavascunas provides an intimate ethnographic account, gathered in more than 20 years of research, to untangle complex forest conflicts between protection and use. She looks at which pasts are celebrated, which fester, and which are altered in the tumultuous decades following the collapse of communism.
Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles is a timely and fascinating work of cultural analysis and storytelling that textures its ethnographic reading of people with the agency of the forest itself and its bark beetle outbreaks, which threaten to alter the very composition of the forest in the age of the Anthropocene.
Show more1. Puszcza: Of Forests and Time
2. The Forester
3. Scientists and the Communist Past: Syndromes, Disorders, and a
Proper Elite
4. Post-peasant Cosmopolitics: Man of the Forest
5. Borderline Engagements: Relict Forest, Relict Communism
6. Resurgence: Outbreaks of Bark Beetle and Right-wing
Nationalism
7. Temporal Dimensions: The Past is not Safe at all
Eunice Blavascunas is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.
The three environmental policy positions and their exemplary
representatives would be enough to turn the study into a cutting
edge look at the recent past and present of one of the world's most
controversial and at the same time most vulnerable ecosystems.
Blavascunas can and wants to do more, namely not only to write
ethnographically, but also to convince. It expressly does not
absolutize the Kossaks, Szumarskis and Korbels, as would
contemporary historical approaches, whose narratives cannot do
without heroes and a simple conclusion: for or against the jungle
and its preservation or deforestation. But it sets other accents;
it is about a mapping of what would be possible outside of this
pro-contra dichotomy. . . . Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles .
. . dares a partisan intervention for the not so human actors in an
ancient forest.
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