Patrycja Trzeszczyńska

This article investigates links between religion and migration processes through a study of religious communities’ approaches towards migrants. Drawing from the religious economy perspective, the paper explores the under-researched topic of the role of migration in the dynamics of a religious field in the context of Central and Eastern Europe. The qualitative research performed in 2020 in Krakow – one of the key destinations for migrants in Poland – confirms the claims of religious economy that monopolists and quasi-monopolists are usually more reluctant to adapt to social changes. On the other hand, less-privileged but entrepreneurial religious communities are more aware of migrants’ situation, and respond to their needs in the following ways: 1) providing cosmopolitan “temporary homes”; 2) bridging cultures; 3) setting up ethno-cultural service hubs. We argue that these kinds of engagements have significant implications for the dynamics inside the religious market.

The basis for this article is ethnographic field research carried out in Canada in 2014-2016 among Ukrainians who emigrated from Poland in 1980s and met vibrant Ukrainian diaspora built by earlier generations of Ukrainian migrants. The author analyses the encounter of official, diasporic discourses of the Ukrainian past with the local history of Ukrainians from Poland, especially displacement of 1947, spaces of self-presentation, role and significance of images of Poland and Ukraine in their lives, their involvement in wider Ukrainian context in Canada, contacts with the local Polish diaspora, problems with explicit identity assignment and a specific group distinctiveness that is a challenge for the essentialistically understood diaspora. In return, she proposes to consider the part of the Ukrainian diaspora as a transnational imaginary community (the concept of M. Sökefeld), and to follow the attitudes, practices and ideas of both the diaspora and the native country.

The article concerns the problem of cultural memory in this particular case when the memory relates to the past, “belonging” to another person rather than the community of those who remember. It is in the Bieszczady Mountains, settled again after the Second World War and the displacements of the Boyko (Ukrainian) population, where one can now observe cultural practices used to reach for someone else’s past, a kind of “development” and adjustment of this past with contemporary needs of residents and tourists. The postwar and post-displacement Bieszczady region also has its new mytho-history, their own pioneering and hoodlum-like narratives of memory, which coexist with the memory of not-your past, still a little bit uncomfortable, but already recognised as a characteristic of the place. The author tries to show both the idea of the past as well as activities focused on memory, creating memory that is defined as practising memory. What is significant here is the transition from the ideas of the past to practising memory, which stems from the belief of the author that the ideas of the past of the Bieszczady have the potential to activate people.

The aim of the text is to reflect on the absence in Polish migration studies of research on the emigration of members of national / ethnic minorities from Poland in the 1980s, on the example of Ukrainians. The author presents the causes and course of emigration of Polish citizens of Ukrainian nationality in the last decade of the Polish People’s Republic, highlighting the consequences of this migration for the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, the Ukrainian national minority in Poland and for the migrants themselves. The author undertakes a discussion with literature which defines Polish emigrants of the 1980s to Canada and Western Europe as “Polish emigrants”, pointing out the differences between migration motivations and adaptation strategies of Polish and Ukrainian migrants in the 1980s. The article also discusses the attitudes of Ukrainian emigrants towards the country of origin, the impact of their minority condition in the People’s Republic of Poland on their new identity in their host country as well as lifestyle choices.

The paper is a report from anthropological fieldwork research carried out in Canada between March and September of 2014. My aim was to recognize the shape and content of social and cultural memory of Ukrainian Canadians, born in Poland, who emigrated to Canada in 1980s. They live in Edmonton and Toronto among other members of Ukrainian diaspora: descendants of Alberta pioneers, interwar period immigrants, displaced persons, Ukrainians from Ukraine and former Yugoslavia. Their memories concerning local Ukrainian history in Poland encounters institutionalized, well designed project of Ukrainian cultural memory in Canada. Actual situation in Ukraine (Euromaydan, Crimea annexation, civil war in the Donbas region) updates the memory and identity questions of Ukrainian diaspora in Canada in general and makes answers even more complicated for the Ukrainians born in Poland.