Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

The Ukrainian highland population in the southeastern Carpathians—which mostly lives in the valleys of the rivers Prut, White and Black Cheremosh, and White and Black Tysa and belongs politically to eastern Galicia, Bukovina, and Hungary—is called Hutsuls in the vernacular [po narodn´omu] and now even in the scholarly literature.¹

—Fedir Vovk, 1908

The Hutsul region (Ukr. Hutsul´shchyna, Pol. Huculszczyzna) was a vaguely defined ethnographic space of the Habsburg Empire in which myths and uncertainty regarding its national belonging supported ethnographic interest in the eponymous population. This produced a range of theories as to where Hutsuls and their name originated, whether they were Slavs or perhaps descendants of Mongols.² The Ukrainian anthropologist Fedir Vovk (1847–1918) [End Page 773] argued for their Ukrainian identity, but he inferred that the term Hutsul was a relatively new invention. Before a colleague corrected him, he claimed that "even Hutsuls don't use [the name] in reference to themselves," although it was common usage among, for example, Poles and Ukrainians (Ruthenians).³ As Patrice Dabrowski highlights, the "discovery" of the Hutsul region was closely linked to the question of their nationality and triggered Polish as well as Ukrainian national activism.⁴ As a result, these activities also inspired quite an extensive body of both literary and scholarly works.⁵ Polish-Ruthenian cultural debates on the eastern Carpathians and their inhabitants originated from folklore studies during the first half of the 19th century and continued for more than a century. In the Habsburg monarchy, the dialect of all these groups was called Ruthenian, which was slowly but surely transformed into Ukrainian during the early 20th century and integrated the speakers in national imaginations. Theories about the origin of the Hutsuls, in turn, challenged Ukrainian narratives about the Hutsul region.

In the late 19th century, the task of ethnographers, anthropologists, and dialectologists was to research and define this people, its customs, and its specific dialects. The recurring transdisciplinary—and political—discussion of where exactly the region began and where it ended continued during the interwar period.⁶ This article focuses on the approach to the Hutsul region taken by Ukrainian "national science," which drew on new technologies provided by physical anthropology.⁷ To illustrate this approach, I use the example of an anthropological map (fig. 2) that Vovk produced in [End Page 774] cooperation with the Shevchenko Scientific Society (Naukove tovarystvo im. Shevchenka, NTSh). Vovk was the preeminent Ukrainian anthropologist of the prewar period, earning him the name of the founder of Ukrainian anthropology.⁸ The NTSh became the main contemporary Ukrainian center for science and scholarship during the 1890s, which is exactly when Vovk was invited to join the society and contribute to its profile by improving the NTSh's research methodology in the fields of folkloristics, ethnology, and anthropology.⁹ The anthropometric map of the Hutsul region was also the first physical-anthropological map Vovk produced, which indicates the relevance of this mountainous borderland for the national project.

In recent years the history of physical anthropology has been studied from various angles, drawing attention to the biologized understanding of nations and to links with (radical) nationalism, other ideological projects, and eugenics.¹⁰ This wide array of approaches makes it possible to consider physical anthropology in a European and global context. Richard McMahon demonstrates that the definition of racial classifications was a pan-European undertaking, involving many national and regional cultures of knowledge.¹¹ The critical historicization of the discipline took place in several national and transnational settings, but in the case of Ukraine the topic remains understudied. Vovk's biography and several highlights of his (scholarly) biography have been researched,¹² and his activities in the Russian Empire in particular.¹³ [End Page 775] His take on the Hutsuls was important for his involvement in the Galician scholarly community and early Ukrainian physical anthropology in general, but Vovk was in turn influenced by Galician works on the region, as this article demonstrates.

Studies by Maciej Górny and Steven Seegel concentrate on the transnational remaking of East-Central Europe through multivocal territorial discourse...