Ethnicity and Estate: The Galician Jacquerie and the Rwandan Genocide Compared

Tomasz Kamusella

doi:10.1017/nps.2021.12

Abstract

AbstractIn national historiography, estate (social) divisions are typically disregarded in favor of supposedly shared ethnicity, which is proposed to have united a given nation for centuries. Hence, the Polish national historiography is unable to account for the Galician Jacquerie (1846), when serfs were killing nobles, despite their (retroactively) assumed shared Polish ethnicity. On the other hand, the 1994 mass massacre of the Tutsis by Hutus is recognized as the Rwandan Genocide, though both groups share the same language, culture, and religion—or what is usually understood as ethnicity. What has sundered the Tutsis and the Hutus is the estate-like socioeconomic difference, or a memory thereof. It appears that under certain conditions estate (social, class) difference may become an ethnic boundary. In the case of the aforementioned jacquerie, the estate difference made the serfs and the nobles into two different de facto ethnic groups. Similarly, in Rwanda, estate (social) difference is implicitly posed as ethnicity, thus making the Hutus and the Tutsis into separate ethnic groups. However, the official definition of genocide as adopted by the United Nations explicitly excludes social groups (for instance, estates) from its purview, leading to terminological paradoxes.

Highlights

As a contribution to the history of ideas, methodology, and, more broadly, the “archeology of knowledge” (Foucault 1972), this article discusses the concepts of social and ethnic difference
The Convention states that any “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” constitute a genocide
The Polish national historiography is unable to account for the Galician Jacquerie (1846), when serfs were killing nobles, despite the anachronistically assumed shared Polish ethnicity of both groups

Summary

Introduction

As a contribution to the history of ideas, methodology, and, more broadly, the “archeology of knowledge” (Foucault 1972), this article discusses the concepts of social and ethnic difference. In light of the Polish national master narrative, as offered in history textbooks for schools in Poland, the proposed ethnic (ethnolinguistic, national) sameness retroactively (anachronistically) erases the social (estate) difference between western Galicia’s serfs and nobles, making it all but impossible to explain the causes and dynamics of the near-genocidal violence of the 1846 Jacquerie. Such political interference may even alter the social reality (for instance, most Tutsis and Hutus see themselves as belonging to different ethnic groups), yet it is incapable of changing the past.

Results

Conclusion